From Here to Somewhere
An unpsychological conversation for breaking times — Part 1
Introduction
As editors of Unpsychology Magazine, we decided to take a pause, this year, from publishing a magazine. This would have been our 11th issue since we began back in 2014. Instead of a magazine we conjured up some ‘nubs’ — small projects that each of us would facilitate and encourage — A Lattice of Letters, coordinated by Lesley. A Writers’ Playgroup, hosted by Julia. A Small Forms pamphlet project, facilitated by Steve. These are all ongoing, and the results of some or all of these may (or may not!) appear here on Substack in due course.
This post is the first one in a series around one of the pamphlet themes — a conversation between members of the Unpsychology community around the title From Here To Somewhere — A Conversation for Breaking Times. The idea is to hold a series of online dialogues around this theme; a way, perhaps, of resetting this unpsychological inquiry after a decade of curation and practice, and setting out some tentative directions for the future.
We’ve used the dialogic approach on this Substack in the past and its worked well. This first dialogue — between Steve and Julia — will be followed by others over coming weeks, and these will also be published here. An edited version of the whole thing may then be published as a printed pamphlet and/or digital download. As always, we’d welcome your comments and feedback, and hope that this will contribute something other than the wider conversation around ‘world’ and ‘mind’ in these troubled times.
JuliaMacintosh , Lesley Maclean & Steve Thorp - Unpsychology editors
From Here to Somewhere: conversation 1: Steve & Julia
Steve
Dear Julia. I’m starting with grief, because that’s what I am sitting with right now — and I know I am not alone. Grief has a complicated dynamic, but when the causes are so clearly in our faces then the avoidance it can bring becomes a visceral thing.
My grief-filled avoidance feels visceral — embodied, even. In the face of the horrors I see, my body tries to preemptively calm itself. As a new story comes down the line, my body starts to calm itself. My mind and body begin to turn away. This is a problem, because when we who have privilege and cultural dominance turn away, calm and numb ourselves with our visceral avoidance, we put ourselves in step with those whose more considered, deliberate avoidance will someday break our world completely.
Here is a world in which grief and avoidance are visceral:
News; hardly watchable. Information: overloaded and untrustworthy. Truth: subjective. Normality: a state emerging from avoidance and a growing civilisational fear of difference. The results are what we see. A heating world; racism, discrimination, othering; justified genocides; drone warfare, missiles raining.
The ‘troubled mind’ — the pathological, mad, neurodiverse mind — emerges from how these things, literally, drive people mad. Injustice. Unfairness. Cruelty. The fear we feel at accumulated consequences of all these troubles for ourselves, our families and the wider global community of humans and non-humans.
The premise we’ve held in relation to what we have called unpsychology is that ‘mind’ is contextual. And ecological. In psychotherapy, we (psychotherapists) work with individuals — sometimes groups. The focus is usually the individual’s distress, dysfunction and development. The contexts are family, identity, experience. They might be cultural. They are seldom civilisational.
During my years as a psychotherapist, I worked with people whose ‘trouble’ was centred on the ungraspable hyperobjects of climate and ecological breakdown. People have cried with me over burning tar sands, the plight of an injured bird, their desperation at worsening climate change, the tick tick tick countdown to something catastrophic that they could see coming and felt helpless to prevent.
Often their anger and despair was at the wider political and economic contexts and with the people who are in positions to make decisions and make changes, but who have refused and/or are too tied into transactional politics and commercial interests to do so.
Somewhere is where we might be heading — for better or worse. This might be a starting point for our inquiry here, I think. What do you think?
Julia
Dear Steve. When I think of ‘Somewhere’, I hear Judy Garland’s poignant voice calling out in her signature song about a ‘Somewhere’ without troubles, without pain and grief and cruelty and misery and without even trivial discomforts and annoyances. The Somewhere she evokes is just out of reach, just beyond the rainbow which we can see but cannot touch. It is of course an imaginary place, unreal and unreachable — even Oz had slavery, bureaucracy and a humbug behind a hubristic curtain at its helm.
But this yearning for relief from our world’s troubles, this has been a part of the human experience since the very beginning. So my first response to you, my dear friend, is to reassure you that the instinct to numb yourself from the sharp pains you encounter, this is not a failing. It is as natural a part of our inherent self-protection as the blood’s ability to form a clot, or the immune system to produce anti-bodies, or indeed the mind’s ability to dissociate during a traumatic event.
I often think of this famous invocation by Julian of Norwich:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
How on earth do we reconcile the suffering of the world with a faith in the ultimate goodness of things? And how can we feel comforted by this reassurance when the state of things is so badly skewed with inequity, exploitation and violence?
Walt Whitman considered this conundrum in his poem, O Me! O Life!:
O Me! O Life!
O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring — What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here — that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
‘We’ are many, many voices here in this world we share together. Our most valuable contribution is to offer our truth, our one note to the harmony. For some, that note will be a joyful carefree laugh. For others, it will be a sobbing cry of despair. The point is to meet one another wherever we’re at, with compassion and with love.
We create ‘Somewhere’ with every note, every breath in and out.
Steve
Hi Julia… Yesterday, I was sitting in the garden on a very windy and changeably sunny afternoon. I had been playing tennis and so my body was tired but that, and the tumultuous landscape around me, felt viscerally joyful — almost ecstatic. Everything felt ‘in the now’ — entirely phenomenological — and I felt the temporary nature of things — of everything, including myself — and was ok with it…
So despair is not the only thing that is embodied — and I know that you’re right (and Julian of Norwich and Walt Whitman too) when you remind me of this. I also know that I’m not personally responsible for the conditions of despair, but the point is that it sometimes feels like I am, if only as part of a whole in which these conditions have been created and are playing out in our daily lives.
This might be the point on which the world balances, or tips. There is a psychological struggle and many of us humans “vainly crave the light”, as Whitman put it. There is a cultural expectation that there needs to be meaning, purpose or some kind of direction in our individual lives, but experience often tells us otherwise. Either the meaning or purpose seem out of reach, or the world just seems too brutal and imbalanced to hold any kind of direction for us, as individuals or collectively. So we retreat to the knowable and mundane.
It seems to me that living with the contexts of crisis has always held characteristics and consequences: The crisis builds, becomes real in our human minds; then people suffer, or try to avoid suffering in various ways; then try to make a new type of meaning out of it — or a combination of all these.
One difference from, say, a crisis the world might have faced in the days of Julian of Norwich (The Black Death), or Walt Whitman (the American Civil War), or the 20th Century crises of World and Cold Wars, and today’s ‘metacrisis’, is that social media magnifies everything. It makes the suffering and the awareness of suffering seem close in. It magnifies the immediate and makes every drama a crisis. It makes the personal and collective traumas of our world inescapable.
They should be, I guess. Inescapable, I mean. We should be caring about climate breakdown and genocide and ecological collapse and fascism. We should be talking and thinking about what these mean, but sometimes the clamour of mis- and dis-information overwhelms us, and avoidance seems the only sensible way for a body and mind to respond.
Until the drone bombs find us too… sitting in a garden, listening to the birds, watching the clouds racing…
As Anohni sings on her harrowing song Drone Bomb Me:
“So, drone bomb me, drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains, and into the sea
Blow me from the side of the mountain…
…Let me be the first. I’m not so innocent.
Let me be the one. The one that you choose from above.
After all, I’m partly to blame”
And writing out those lines, I realise both that this is the grief I’m sitting with, and I should be sitting with it. Just as I should be sitting with the everyday life that exists for me in my garden too…
Julia
Dear Steve. It has been some weeks now and I’m finally replying. The world’s crises have cranked up a notch, with Israel now planning to occupy Gaza City — what is left of it, after bombing and starving its people into obliteration. The invasion of Ukraine continues, while further afield there are civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar. Conflict and discord exist all over the world. The USA is descending into fascism, and in the UK the right to civil protest is being dismantled. And of course, I’m picking and choosing — the suffering continues unabated for those all over the world who are being abused, raped, murdered, trafficked, exploited and bullied in all sorts of contexts. Violence persists. We persist in engaging violence. You are right to understand our entangled complicity, and to grieve accordingly.
You are also right to sit in your garden in peace, safety and quiet reflection. Because life is large enough to hold the grief and the peace together; both real, both valid.
Steve, we’ve been sharing dialogues for nine years now, and from the first we concerned ourselves with the concept of paradox. In my own work, I’ve explored the idea that madness is an unfiltered perception of paradox — what I call the both/andnature of ‘madreality’. And in the pages of Unpsychology, over and over again we have invited our contributors and readers to explore questions that tease out the paradoxical aspects of life, to embrace contradictions as contextual iterations of something beyond our prescriptive and binary habits. Paradox is a compelling and demanding idea — perhaps never fully understood — and it deserves respectful and persistent inquiry.
We tend to think of paradox as an abstract, a theoretical way of framing things. But we’ve got it the wrong way round: we theorise reality as singular and discrete, in order to navigate our way through a bewildering blur. We’ve theorised this way for hundreds of generations, and now we mistake this practical lens for the way reality is.
But the nature of reality itself is complex, relational, contextual, and yes, paradoxical. Paradox is embedded in our every breath which keeps us alive but takes us that bit closer to our death. It is in the beauty of the fluttering zigzag flight of a butterfly which is snatched in the air by a swooping bird and cruelly devoured. It is found in every bite of a delicious meal, which gives us the energy that was stored within the cells of the deceased plants and animals consumed. Reality assures us that life is death — the ultimate paradox.
And that too is the gift of paradox: we grieve for death and for loss, and at the same time we find comfort in life and in love. They are not either/or, they are both/and. (This is what the madfolk have been trying to tell us, all along…)
Now I think it’s time to open up this dialogue to others, to see where it leads…
The next part of this conversation will follow soon… when it’s ready… In the meantime, please let us know what you think about this question. What does From Here To Somewhere mean to you in these breaking times?
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