“In coming to need something that only another can provide…to what extent can we distinguish between what is up to the world and what is up to us when assessing a human life… If it is true that a lot about us is messy, needy, uncontrolled, rooted in the dirt, and standing helplessly in the rain, it is also true that there is something about us that is pure and purely active, something we could think of as ‘divine, immortal, intelligible, unitary, indissoluble, ever self-consistent and invariable,’ wrote Plato….The question of life saving becomes a delicate and complicated one for any thinker of depth. It becomes the question of the human good, how can it be reliably good and still be beautifully human?”
I laid down Martha Nussbaum because something else was moving in the room. The presence of another. Another separated in parts, swirling around the small room, not cohered into a single thing. It had no small amount of angst, seeking and not finding, searching and not resting. Unable to stay in one place long enough to look deeply. It was dark in the room and the sound of waves on the lakeshore, a different pulse than the sea, was all that was heard.
Thats where your brother slept, said his soul sister, but it felt like Dad to me, an unsatisfied entity looking without knowing what for.
My brother was a warrior and he died a warriors death in mortal combat with a wild animal. My dad was no slouch either. He fought on his own terms his own battles for the sake of righteousness and his own clean conscience. He was worthy of admiration as a citizen and servant of the people. His children knew where they stood, or shrank, within his hierarchy of value. His self importance loomed far and wide over his childrens puny lives.
Are we two sides of one pitfall, in contract to each other, exchanging roles as the circumstances dictate? This may be new age thinking. We get the lessons we need for our souls to evolve from those we relate to? It may be classified in the DSM-5 somewhere. It comes to mind because,
Someone in the field of psychiatry pointed to Folie à Deux, folly of two. It is described as a delusional disorder of two or more individuals, living in proximity while they are isolated from the rest of society. They share a delusional belief, born of the psychosis in a dominant person. John may be a living example of the dominating person, enraged should anyone doubt his place on the top of the heap.
Delusional beliefs are imposed on the receivers during vulnerable times of stress. During war, for example. Delusions are infused into their culture, embedded in their bodies. Usually the delusion fades as soon as the receiver is removed from the delusional field of beliefs that were imposed by the dominant person. A good reason to kill your television, or the Buddha.
There is a wonderful sense of freedom and release that occurs upon leaving the cult because the delusion resolves pretty fast and usually without medication. Thats in the beginning.
John took on the mantle of the Beloved, visibly soft and open and yielding to whatever came his way. It seemed he was as in love with us as we were with him. He was our love. He conformed to the fantasies of the father many of us never had and sometimes he could seem as nurturing as a mother, an Ephesian Artemis, a breast for everyone he meets.
It shocked me when a close friend said, He wasnt very nice to you. It woke me up because I didnt know that was entirely true but when I heard it, I knew it was mostly true. She said she had seven years of therapy during a relationship with a very good man who was so nice to her she couldnt handle it. She had never received kindness from her father. She didnt know how to be with a kind man. Nor did I.
If I narrow this inquiry down to the specifics of my own case, I may get through this sooner than later. In the beginning, I had an inordinate identification with tigers, a symbol of what can be meek and mild because it is so strong and solitary and fearsome. It had been infused in me from Shambhala trainings, and I meant to integrate what I had heard there, resting in simplicity, being uncomplicated and approachable, being kind to myself and merciful to others.
These spiritual aspirations played me into Johns hands, along with the longing for a nurturing parent, someone who would cover for the loss of not knowing a good relationship with a man.
You need to give, he told me.
You need to gentle your power, he told me.
You need to return to innocence, he told me.
You need to have no protection, he told me.
Dont heal, he told everybody.
I was but one of many he harangued with countless to-dos, each one sounding more divine and golden than the last admonishment. Harder to measure. Meaner to accept. It went on and on and on and still more women came and gave and came and gave. Beautiful women, powerful women, wild women, so many women.
For someone I had too quickly come to admire, there being similarities to previous fatal attractions, I was believing his folie imposée. I showed up vulnerable and fragile but my questions to him seemed unworthy of his response and he dismissed them out of hand. So similar to my dad, as if I had conjured the sequel to my childhood.
G-D!
All of a sudden,
A loved one has been killed in Israel.
She died protecting children.
Her partner killed.
The children alive.
She was one of the beautiful women,
so young and pure and innocent.
She is everywhere now.
Except for the sirens it is quiet. The sun is going down. The houses remain dark. Nothing moves inside or out but in the quiet stillness feelings expand through the body and begin to take over. That clutch in the throat. Weeping. There is no safe place in the world. There is no protection from outside anywhere. Now we are the protectors.
I listened to the intimate details from some of his women. Not the complainants, mind you. Not all of his women and not always to the depth that the bravest and weakest would go. They didnt speak about him. That was forbidden. They spoke of their lives before him and their childhoods, many so very much worse than my own, if comparison has any place in the traumas of women. Violence and cruelty may sound worse than it actually was, or it may not express to the degree it can be felt, the body remembering what happened before there were words.
The stories were horrific yet these women rejected victimhood. They were relating to their power and beauty, moving their light and holding their sexuality aloft. They did not, for most of them, demand attention for their wounds.
It was the promise of redemption that captivated our souls. We had all been manhandled but we were not out for revenge or retribution. We were given to transformation, to being lifted up into higher unseen realms of divine goodness.
Someone said that almost any kind of childhood trauma is apt to become eroticized as it sinks deeper into the body, burrowing until buried in the psyche and the libido. That possibility seems relevant to Johns folly. Sexuality is our greatest human engine, he said. His own sexuality radiant and saturating wherever his gaze lingered long. Magnetizing. Seductive. Hypnotic.
Having used my sexuality as I liked before meeting John, the anxiety of conscience that troubled my promiscuous ways before might be absolved in his unabashed exhibition of polygyny. A return to innocence indeed! I could move freely without holding back if I wished. It was relaxing. The room so quiet, the lights so strong. Wings might shimmer and bodies glow. Effervescent halos of eros radiant. Even in the elderly. It was all allowed and it did show. Beautifully.
The shadow side was also available if anyone was susceptible to jealousy, competition, intimidation and subjugation. It must be much worse now, in the dark shadows of the accused, his suspicions trickling down upon the rag tag group of survivors slowly sinking with his ship. Who can be trusted? Who can you safely talk to? Who dares to question the narrative, the prophecy!? for gods sake! What if what you are seeing doesnt match the narrative? Who can you depend on to discuss any doubts? Top of the heap might hear. As always, you risk being thrown out of the gauntlet. Better keep your mouth shut. For what?
Not to feel.
I imagine there is still drug and alcohol use in the group, same as there ever was. Heartache and trauma are quickly drowned or floated beyond the self. The addictions may be sadly worse now. Who can relax in a folie a deux?
Best not to feel.
My chest is hurting. The place of givenness torn from my hearts desires and poured into a man I hardly knew. Just a man, pretending preternatural powers. Who am I to say? Im nobody. Im just writing here to sort things out. I have not seen the studies that show how women seek out men, like the men theyve known since childhood, believing this time will be different. I dont need an academic study to tell me that intimacy doesnt come with a beating but sometimes it does. That attachment doesnt come with forced sex but that happens. That atonement isnt at the behest of a guru but I hoped it would be.
Intimacy with my father came when he was hitting me. It was the closest he ever came to me physically. It came when he spoke to me with reticence of my dear aunts suicide. Intimacy with my first husband came with painful sex and jokes about what hurts so badly you think yourself into the comedy of it and laugh at the tragedy of it.
To feel. To not numb out with drink and smoke and comedy. To feel what stokes a womans fire, to burn out shame, to stand in spirits purity. What are the feelings? What sensations and passions have coppiced the damage thats been done? What has become rooted deep down into a womans sexuality, so it is a psychopaths sexuality that resonates, compulsive and addicting, a resonance that woos so many beautiful women?
What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What is beyond the self?
Intimacy, said the beast.
FIRE ! 🔥