I’m just spitballing here— but listen to the voiceover to read along with me…
In a time when nothing seems to make sense and fascism is on the rise, the last thing I need to do is exhaust my mind with over-examination and rumination on things that do not serve me. The last thing I need is to misunderstand my self and be impatient when seeking “answers”.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in his letters to a young poet, put it like this:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
In Rilke’s words to a young poet I think about the “ordinary”; yes ordinary can refer to something prosaic and thus lacking interesting qualities. The book The Culture of Ethics highlights Stanley Cavell’s re-interpretation of the ordinary as a celebration of experience and filters “ordinary” through the impossibility of reducing experience to thought formulas. Must everything have a poetic quality to it, or is it that some things just are and that alone should be embraced and celebrated? The idea of “‘what we ordinarily say’ take[s] on a different emphasis...the emphasis is less on the ordinariness of an expression... than the fact that they are being said (or of course, written) by human beings to human beings”1.
Everything is something but not everything is THE THING.
The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Henry David Thoreau
I was reading “Allegories for Psychotherapy, Teaching, and Supervision: Windows, Landscapes, and Questions for the Traveler” by Mark A. Kunkel, I was moved specifically by Chapter 9: Living Below The Neck and Our Imminent Fall From Grace.
By “living below the neck” I took it to mean listening to our bodies and not our heads. Freud’s discovery of the psyche was revolutionary for psychoanalysis, yes, but the psyche is always engaged through our unconscious actions, and when we continue to live above the neck our conscious actions have the possibility of disrupting the unconscious work that our bodies do. Simply put, we don’t need to think so much all the time. And I don’t mean critical thinking, for the love of god please think critically, if that’s all you do. But holding onto anxieties, fears, and feelings made up by the projections of those fears and anxieties, is unnecessary.
Everything holds a duality, what is precious and secure, can also be insecure with the capacity to be shattered and destroyed. Everyone and everything has the ability to fall from grace, so knowing that all things have the capacity to fall we might not hold things so preciously and put people or ideals on a pedestal. “The fall from grace can be a long journey down or it can be a quick tumble, it might be a permanent denouncing of grace or a quick sojourn.” But “shattering and going to pieces are sometimes necessary prerequisites to integration”2. There are pieces of ourselves or our ideals that we must leave behind when they fall from grace. What you can do when you’re at the bottom is figure out what pieces are worth saving— this, in my opinion, is a part of the journey towards the death of the ego (no LSD required).
“Perhaps the difference between competence and ineptitude is the extent to which we have allowed ourselves to hear illusions shatter,” and perhaps after the shattering comes a rebuilding.3
To try and stop change and avoid the inevitable shattering of illusions is to “live in the head”. It is hard to work below the neck, to get out of our heads, and to understand distal change. But our bodies are changing all the time without our conscious consent. Additionally, our bodies are always speaking to us, but living above the neck keeps you from hearing... My roommate once said that our emotions live in our stomachs, I believe that...
If you had listened to what your body was telling you, what would be different in your life?
“James Taylor has a wonderful paean to the project of working below the neck in which he muses, ‘If I had stopped to listen once or twice, if I had closed my mouth and opened my eyes, if had cooled my head and warmed my heart, I’d not be on this road tonight.’”
When I listen to my body I feel closer to my aligned self —a self who knows that everything will and must shatter and is not afraid of the piercing sound of its shattering.
When you are aware of the potential fall, perhaps you might look at things with discernment. You might notice the teetering of the object you hold dearly on its elevated platform. You might rethink what you put on a pedestal, or perhaps you might not put it up there at all.
Franco La Cecla and Piero Zanini, The Culture of Ethics. Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013. Page 32
Allegories for Psychotherapy, Teaching, and Supervision: Windows, Landscapes, and Questions for the Traveler” by Mark A. Kunkel. Page 171
Allegories for Psychotherapy, Teaching, and Supervision: Windows, Landscapes, and Questions for the Traveler” by Mark A. Kunkel. Page 171