Offering: July 2022

A thief has crossed the threshold

Image description: A swamp in Western Pennsylvania that is very green in early summer. There are cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Justice, Ten of Wands, The World and The Devil.

Dear Friends,

I’d just finished recording this month’s Offering when I heard that the Supreme Court has officially ruled to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. The news finds me in a process of trying to better understand the complex relationship between psychology and capitalism, which is a lot of what this month’s Offering is about.

I feel like all of the Offerings are in some way or another about being human, what it means and what it’s for and how we do it. I’ve been learning about how, with the rise of capitalism in the late 1600s, the meaning of human life and relationships underwent a radical transition. Humans became “raw materials, workers and breeders for the state” and families “given a new importance as the key institution for…the reproduction of the work-force” (Federici, 2004).

Through the lens of what a human is and is for in the context of capitalism—a worker, here to work and to reproduce workers— it makes sense that with fewer working-age people due in part to half a century of low birth rates, and 4 million more jobs than there are workers to do them, the state is doing all it can to control birthing bodies and what constitutes a family.

Though I often feel pressure to speak to things in step with the rapid news cycle the fact is it takes me a long time to process things. I do hope that the Offering will have something useful and that you’re taking care as best you can. Thank you so much for being here and for reading.

Onward,

Jessica

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

In the early stages of the pandemic I got super into Martin Shaw’s storytelling and writing and the first book of his that I read was called Courting the Wild Twin. My copy is a small purple book that includes stunning tellings of two Norwegian tales: The Lindworm and Tatterhood.

Shaw introduces the wild twin visual by saying there’s an old idea that each and every one of us was born with a twin, who was cast into the forest at birth. And that the consequence of this early exile is that we spend the rest our lives seeking out that twin; doing elaborate things that look all kinds of ways but that are each variations on trying to come into relationship with the long lost, outcast sibling. 

So then sometimes what we see as dysfunction is an expression of yearning, a way of seeking, trying to reconnect with a cast-off part of our selves. For me it was choosing ill-fitting, painful romantic relationships for years as a way to get in touch with my twin who was just fine alone thanks, and couldn’t care less what a man thought. 

It was only after an especially harrowing run-in with a wizard and a wild woman in occupied Ohlone territory—and reading Shaw’s book—that I finally came face-to-face with my own twin.

She taunted everything about me, but especially my gait. I was always on tip-toe with lovers, she said, terrified to wind up alone in the woods, where she’d lived her whole life. And before she slunk back into the redwoods she noted, rudely, how a lot of good it did me, playing small, given every autumn I’d still wake up on the first frosty morning, alone. 

Even after the encounter with my twin and our gradual warming up to one another, I haven’t stopped caring what lovers think or believing on some level that being big and being loved are mutually exclusive.

But this is okay, because to my mind the quest for the twin isn't about fixing anything or getting rid of anyone. I did start standing more on the whole of my feet after her. Learned to distribute my weight a bit differently. And I do find that it’s easier to keep my balance this way, so that’s good.

In the Lindworm story, the wild twin is a tiny snake who grows into a large one. There’s a line in Shaw’s telling on jealousy, and how the outcast snake peers in from the woods at the lucky brother, the one who got to stay in the home with the hearth and the good foods and the hugs. 

Shaw asks something like, were you happy to watch, cold and alone from outside, as your privileged twin enjoyed all the spoils? And he admits, “I know I wasn’t.” As someone who’s struggled with jealousy myself I’ve thought about this a lot since reading it. 

I’m a person who’s done Google scholar searches for articles about therapeutic interventions for jealousy. I’ve sought the hidden value and benefits and even virtues involved—when it’s virtue I’m convinced that I need—of being happy for or inspired by others, instead of insecure. I’ve thought and written, for instance, about the value of sympathetic joy, which is the capacity to experience other people’s triumphs as if they were one’s own.  

But lately, when I find myself jealous or threatened or feeling a way about something someone else has or does or is, I’m trying to be a little less quick to take the blame for it. Rather than jump to bear the weight of every insecurity and hard feeling (Ten of Wands), I’ve been challenging myself to wonder about the kind of home that divides; that would cast me or someone else into the woods on the day of our births in the first place. When I can look at it this way I often find that some space opens up. I start to see something.

We are undeniably entangled and embedded beings living inside of a world (The World). This means that hard feelings are not conceived immaculately in one’s belly, as if the human body were a hermetically-sealed container. But there is a great deal of confusion about this, I think, for a lot of reasons, and when there’s too much confusion about the root of a thing it can be hard to tend in a way that is fruitful. 

Sometimes, when I’m confused or at a loss I remember the Cornish lovers Tristan and Isolde, but especially Tristan. Having sustained a wound that will not heal, he sits in a boat with a harp and asks the river to carry him to the source of his poison. 

I’ve been wrestling with a wound of my own, which weeps a kind of anger that has me more than I have it. The kind I apologize for in complete earnest over coffee, while at the same time knowing in the back of my mind that in some way it is justified. That something large and scaly owes me a confession, and a sorry and a game plan for restoring what’s been lost. Things I’m never going to get.

Still, careful not to play the victim or make excuses, I’ve been in the boat, plucking the strings of my own little harp, seeking reasons. 

To mythologize is to seek the currents and patterns that one is a part of beyond the particulars of the self. And in this way it is, or at least has the potential to be, a technology for liberation. I like Toni Morrison’s definition of freedom as the ability to choose your responsibilities. “It’s not having no responsibilities,” she says, “it’s choosing the ones you want.” 

I want to be responsible to the eggplant plants in the front garden and my next door neighbors and the summer heat. To the school kids in my neighborhood and my puppy and my aging parents and my lover.

But I’m angry because a thief has crossed the threshold of my home and private life: Implanted artificial desires outside my bedroom window who howl every night into morning crying I’m meant to care about them. I’m mad because what should be sacred moments are now commodities to sell ads against on social media; the miracle of my body is a brand, and my humanity reduced to a veneer of sparkling charisma, to the point it seems that everything I do now is, or should be, “for work.”

To give a bit of context for those who haven’t been following along this summer, I’ve been studying capitalism more closely. I’ve been listening to Janet Kent and Dave Meesters’ Book on Fire podcast in which they're reading Slyvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch chapter by chapter.

They’ve been highlighting the ways in which, with the creation of capitalism, humans required all manner of forcing, rearranging and manipulating to adopt a new way of seeing not only society but what it meant to be human. Life was not about work, but if this new economic system was going to pan out, the masses would need to believe that it was. 

We would also need to believe that the self is defined by consumption. In early Offerings I’ve shared some of what I’ve been reading in Philip Cushman’s Constructing the self, constructing America, which presents a “cultural history of psychotherapy.” Cushman tracks and details the making of an American self that is defined by what it consumes. 

We all know that the family of origin impacts our sense of self, often extremely and adversely. But just as no individual comes up in a vacuum, no family does either. And if you live with chronic resentment or encompassing anger or insecure jealousy that just won’t quit, what you probably won’t find if you do a Google scholar search for evidence-based interventions to address these things is that you live in a culture that defines the self by what it owns. Possessions, of course, have nothing to do with what it means to be human and so of course there’s disturbance. 

In the Offering on September 4 in 2021 I wrote about Rachel Pollack’s interpretation of The Devil paired with Paulo Freire’s critique of a materialist understanding of life. Pollack writes, “Denying any spiritual component to life, the materialist pursues only personal desires…The Devil’s power rests in the illusion that nothing else exists.” 

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that this way of understanding life is a symptom of having internalized the consciousness of the oppressor, for whom, “apart from direct, concrete, material possession of the world and of people…could not understand itself—could not even exist.” 

Sometimes when I am suffering I can see that such a deep investment in having things I don’t really need makes it hard to believe in anything else as substantial enough to sustain me. Then freedom becomes an impossible task. But Freire writes, freedom “must be pursued constantly and responsibly.” 

So, I’m trying to stand—with my small Offerings—at the point on the map where I say I’m angry and an invisible, pervasive force says, “well, don’t look at us!” Tells me to look only inward, at myself, or at all the others down here in the trenches. At my parents, my boss. 

Take it up with your rotten, spoiled twin, says the force. Sure, she was just a newborn when it happened that you were cast ruthlessly into the forest, but she was complicit nonetheless. It was she who chose to leave you out there all winter. When you were so tender, left to fend for yourself. How dare she. Don’t look at us.

The thing about refusing accountability—whether it’s individuals or institutions or whole systems—is that refusal doesn’t rectify the need for adjustment (Justice). If I’m not responsible for my actions, the people close to me will be forced to bear the brunt, or opt out altogether. And when opting out doesn’t feel possible, that anger has no place to go but back on itself, and inward. 

If you were thrown into the forest at birth, you’ve likely been told in every way possible that whatever you do you are not to blame the house for it. Do: Change your thoughts, control your self, get your own skills up for othering. Don’t: refuse the projection, look at the culture that created the archaic custom to begin with, or question the philosophies that said home and forest were at odds to begin with. 

One of the things I often hear people say (and have definitely said, myself) about jealousy is that you can transmute it in order to tap your own latent potentials. Just take that jealousy and turn it inward, ask what does this want from me, call me to claim in myself, and so on. And honestly, I think it’s true that you can do good work this way. I feel like I have. 

But I still think about the twin in the woods. In the lindworm story, the twin is a giant snake who eats people and who has every right be mad. A lot of people in this world, including you and me, have every right to be mad. Not only do we not have to be happy for others, if there’s anger there it matters.

I’ve found that for me, it’s often a lot easier to squint my eyes from my perch in the woods at the lucky twin who got to stay in the home and enjoy the spoils, rather than interrogate the home itself, or the village it sits in.

So there’s a third option, I guess, between being either jealous or mad, or being happy for others when it’s hard. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Tarot and old stories and psychology and life, it’s to look, always, for that third option.

What about keeping our anger. Taking it up into our arms and plucking it like a harp, for a lullaby. Singing and playing and joining a rage choir of billions belting out to the forces who have ensured our continued confusion. Not only about the source of the poison, but at the most basic level about what it means to be human. 

I want to be really clear, too, that I believe deeply in the legitimacy of interpersonal anger and resentment. I don’t believe naming collective experiences in any way negates the validity of the individual. It’s just that I, like many, have spent a lot of time thinking about the individual as the final frontier in healing.

And it’s brought me to a place where I want to know more about the family who cast the twin into the woods to begin with, and who that benefits. And I especially want to know who benefits when I take on the burdens of a sick society and call them personal pathologies, problems to be solved solely through self-care or self-development or self-help.  

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

You’re reading the monthly Offering for July 2022. I make these Offerings in both text and audio formats both monthly, for free, and weekly, for those interested in supporting the effort with a contribution of $5 a month or $50 a year. If you’d like to sign up or upgrade your existing subscription, hit the subscribe button below. And, as always, if you feel moved to share please do. 

Thanks so much for being here, see you next time. 

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Sources 

Cushman, P. (1996). Constructing the self, constructing America: A cultural history of psychotherapy. Da Capo.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Woman, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. 

Pollack, R. (1998). Seventy-eight degrees of wisdom: A book of tarot. Thorsons. 

Shaw, M. (2020). Courting the wild twin. Chelsea Green Publishing. 

The Book on Fire Podcast