Trauma & Art

Part six

“The separation of “private speaking” from “public speaking” is a man-made construct. It stripped the emotional from the rational, the heart from the head. It elevated individuality over connectivity instead of honoring both.” Elizabeth Lesser

For this final myth related post I will draw on Elizabeth Lesser’s book, Cassandra Speaks. It also includes a new drawing and some non-myth related resources.

More and more women and people in general are becoming aware of feelings of constriction, grief and oppression and of ways of doing things differently, of a need to change some of the old stories.  Lesser writes at the beginning of her book: “All I know is that in my early thirties I became acutely aware of the feelings of constriction, heartache, and anger that had been brewing in me since I was a girl. Slowly, the desire to do something to change the story became stronger than my fear of speaking up.” She speculates that this waking up was probably the result of the wave of women gathering their strength all around the world, her meditation practice, which was giving her a strong backbone and a way of regarding herself and others with calm curiosity, and her first attempts at being in therapy that were helping her unravel the stories that had shaped her. Through these processes she realised that “just the way it is” was actually just a story with ancient roots; a story that begged to be revisited and revamped.

The book is comprised of three parts: origin stories, power stories and a brave new ending. In the first part of the book Lesser explores the origin tales that have shaped our Western thinking and beyond. She goes back to Adam and Eve and other Bible parables, the Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and other well known stories. Many of these stories have endured and have been passed on from one generation to the next, often unexamined. We’re often oblivious to how these old stories shape us and how entrenched they are in our contemporary cultures.  Lesser describes how she had absorbed those stories as if they were about humankind, but of course, stories created only by men are really stories about men, not the whole human race. She goes on to explore what could have been and what could change now if women are also the story tellers. She points out how becoming familiar with our culture’s origin stories and tracing their influence is a good way to take stock of our own lives and personal narratives and claim our own voice.

In the book Lesser focuses on stories from Western cultures, including Adam and Eve, and Pandora and Cassandra from Greek myths. She describes how when she started tracing their influence she felt their tentacles everywhere. Another thing she realised was that many of the stories impart the same themes of men as superior and morally pure and women as the ones to bring about suffering. If we didn’t know that these stories uphold the status quo, then the blaming of women for all the strife and pain in the world would seem irrational or our desperate attempt to make meaning of our human experience and existential fears through simplistic explanations. Referring to Adam and Eve she writes: “God curses them. He curses the woman with painful childbirth and subservience to her husband. He curses the husband with constant toil. He curses both of them with illness, old age, and death, and he exiles them from the Garden of Eden. Everything after that goes downhill. All because of Eve’s curiosity and defiance, and Adam’s submission to Eve’s sin. The Fall.|”

However, Lesser mentions that other readings of the story suggest that the death God spoke of was not literal death, but rather the death of the child-self, the unconscious self, the fearful self who chooses the safe status quo and never fulfills his or her potential. Lesser writes: “The way I see it, Eve is humankind’s first grown-up. The “temptation” she succumbs to is the most fundamental human yearning— to know oneself, to find one’s own path, and to courageously engage with the big world beyond the garden of childhood. To grow up is to admit that life is challenging and that we are responsible for our own behavior and for the well-being of one another. In psychological terms, the urge to grow up is called individuation, and in mythological terms it is called the hero’s journey— the inner calling to push off from the shore of mother and father, to test limits, to know your worth, to speak your truth, to claim authentic selfhood.”

The origin story from ancient Greece by the poet Hesiod seems to have definitely informed the Adam and Eve story. According to Hesiod, (cited in Lesser) Zeus, the king of the gods, said to Prometheus: “You stole the fire and outwitted my thinking; but it will be a great sorrow to you, and to men who come after. As the price of fire, I will give them an evil, and all men shall fondle this, their evil, close to their hearts, and take delight in it.” This evil was Pandora, the first woman. One of the many gifts she received from the Gods was curiosity. Zeus married Pandora off to Prometheus’s brother and as a wedding gift, gave her a large storage jar with the warning that she must never open it. But like Eve her curiosity got the better of her, and Pandora lifted the lid. Zeus had trapped in the jar the spirit of every kind of suffering that released would plague mankind forever: toil, sickness, famine, jealousy, hatred, war, and the cycle of birth and death. And because of Pandora’s curiosity suffering was humankind’s fate. So, curiosity is viewed as something dangerous that brings about all kinds of bad things. This message is pervasive in our society and often in educational contexts. We are all inquisitive and eager to learn about the world as young children, and then slowly and steadily this is dampened or crushed.

These myths still affect our modern consciousness despite the knowledge we have accumulated and the advances we have made in so many areas. Lesser claims that those who tell the tales are human beings with all sorts of motivations, strong opinions, an ego to stoke, a system to uphold.  Hesiod she writes: “interpreted old myths and folk tales from the oral tradition, changing many of them to reflect the issues of his times and to protect the privilege of the ruling, patriarchal class.” She notes that in versions that predate Hesiod’s storytelling, Pandora was not a punishment but rather a gift. Pandora means “all-giving.” Earlier versions of the spoken myth, pieced together from the artwork on pottery,  paint Pandora as an embodiment of the fertility of the earth, a healer and life giver. Also, there are other versions of the story that suggest that Pandora discovered the opened jar and she held back Elpis, which means hope in Greek, to help humans withstand the trials of mortal existence. Lesser writes: “it’s time to tell stories where no one is to blame for the human predicament and all of us are responsible for forging a hopeful path forward.”

Another Greek myth examined in the book is the story of Cassandra because her story resonates with our times. Cassandra could see clearly, but she was disbelieved, disregarded and gaslighted. Lesser writes: “Gaslight is one of my favorite new verbs to enter the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The word also was one of the winners of the American Dialect Society’s 2016 Word of the Year. I like the simplicity of their definition – “Gaslight: to psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity….. Cassandra’s curse is an ancient example of gaslighting, and it is relived on a daily basis by women around the world….  You can go all the way back to texts from ancient Egypt, Persia, and Greece for the earliest examples of gaslighting….. Millions of women throughout time have been discredited, ignored, disrespected, and made to suffer for telling uncomfortable, inconvenient truths. But this time, under the words of pain, I could sense a new wind gathering strength.”

In the book there is a chapter about the writer’s trip to France, where she had the opportunity to visit sites with cave paintings. Up until recently it was assumed that the artists were men, but research conducted by Dean Snow, the archaeologist who analyzed the handprints of the Cro-Magnon artists, suggests that many of the handprints in caves belong to women. That means that at least some of the first story tellers were women. Lesser writes that in those caves she got a visceral experience of how history is often a distorted window into the past, the perspective of those with the power to tell it, and was reminded of the opportunity we have to participate in changing the narrative. Snow (cited in Lesser) says that the question he gets most often is why these ancient artists left handprints at all. “a pretty good hypothesis is that this is somebody saying, ‘This is mine, I did this.” Lesser concludes “It is time for women to change that story, to leave our handprints, to say, “This is mine, I did this.”

She also wonders why the fullness of our ancestors’ consciousness stayed behind in the caves and asks questions like:

Why has the focus been on our inherited violent and warlike nature? What about the stories of the earliest human urge to care for each other, to parent, to cook and nurse, to love and create? Why were those so-called soft storylines overlooked and not told alongside the warrior stories? Why were they not held up as critical aspects of the human journey through time? Why have those stories stayed in the caves— and not just those prehistoric caves but in the forgotten rooms of every era?

The second part of the book discusses power and women. Lesser says that as time went by she realised that to change the story of power in her world she had to dredge up her personal power, her inner strength, inherent dignity, and self-worth, but layers of self-doubt, unexplored and unexpressed anger, and a slew of other problems like the problem of likability – being nice, agreeable, and likable all the time – were covering her authentic power. She writes: “Women and power . . . what a conundrum. This is what I was thinking about sitting in the quiet house, bunching together the socks. Somewhere in the back of my mind I sensed the presence of millions of other women who were experiencing similar issues and were equally unsettled by those two words. Women and power. The words were like the socks: mismatched. They were a koan looking for an answer.”

She describes her own Pandora’s moment when she opened a box of books from her sons’ college years while cleaning out. As she read through the box she says she encountered the DNA of patriarchal power. From The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, who championed leadership that shunned morality and empathy and Sun Tzu, who In The Art of War, claims that fear, deception, arrogance, attack, annihilation are the strategies of power to Aristotle, the Selected Essays by Karl Marx; The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Plato, Plutarch, Augustine and Saint Paul, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and many others.  She writes: “Talk about Pandora’s Box, I said to myself. This was the dangerous box! I pulled out another book. It was a big one, with a bold red cover. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene….That was the end of my cleaning project and the beginning of a deep dive into the story of power.…..”

Throughout the book she explores how if women had also been the protagonists and narrators of societies’ teaching tales “swords in stones and bombs bursting in air would have been no more laudatory than educating children and tending the garden. Acts like rape and pillage, violence and brute force would have never been associated with the “hero’s journey.” The culture would not only revere the strong and silent type; it would also be cool to be talkative, brave to cry, noble to feel and relate.” This single story of power and the excess of one value system and the exclusion of others have created a lot of suffering and injustice, and as Lesser says, we do not only need stories empowering all those who have been left out of the story, but also stories with different values and new ways of being and dealing with problems.

Lesser also reminds us that even though women have not being part of this story it doesn’t mean that they have not often colluded with the story line, and also, even though experience and research show that women have honed more caring and collaborative instincts; nurture relationships and connectivity;  are less likely to use violence to deal with conflict, all people harbor within them a full range of human impulses and reactions, urges to manipulate or dominate, to be selfish and unkind, to unfairly blame or shame, to walk over others to get what they want. That’s why she believes it is critical to be self-aware and this brings me to the last part of the book where there is a chapter in which she introduces a term she has come up with –‘innervism’. She defines innervism as “love of oneself. It is the realization that healing the self and healing the world go hand in hand…. Sometimes the very evils we want to fight in the world, the broken behaviors we blame on others, are also alive in us and in need of our attention, our kindness, our understanding, our healing.”

She believes that when examining women and power both innervism and activism need to be taken into account. Innervism because women as a collective carry oppression and pain in their bodies and psyches so healing within is necessary, and activism because there is so much that needs to be addressed out in the world. Lesser explains why she uses these terms: “I use the word activism to describe ….. anything you do to serve a cause greater than yourself. Your activism might look like joining a political campaign, a social-justice movement, the school board, the local fire department. Or being a foster parent, or a therapist, or someone who picks up litter on the side of a road. Activism is “love made visible,” as Kahlil Gibran wrote. Love of people, animals, trees, community, country, land, planet.” She says that what inspires her about Pauli Murray is her insistence that anyone can be a change agent in the sense that one does not have to join an organization or proclaim allegiance to a party or a philosophy because any person with a typewriter constitutes a movement. Lesser writes: “I say that one person with her own voice— written, spoken, cried, yelled, sung— can change the story. Every day, in big and small ways, we can do this….” She also adds that there is not only power in knowing the old stories and becoming aware of what we value and what we don’t, but also offering alternatives and creating new scripts to replace the ones holding us all back.

Resources:

1. Two brief TED talks by Steven Hayes, PhD, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is summarily about acceptance of unwanted experiences that are out of our control and the commitment to live a life according to our values. The purpose of ACT is to increase our psychological flexibility, developing mindfulness, with a full focus on the present and acting according to our value system. It distinguishes six basic processes of psychological inflexibility: cognitive attachment, experiential avoidance, obsession with the past or the future, hyper self-identification as content, loss of contact with our values ​​and lack of action, and six processes of psychological flexibility: acceptance, cognitive detachment, contact with the present moment, self as a framework, values ​​and committed action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79_gmO5ppg     &        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSHpBRLJrQ

2. A recent episode of the Being Well podcast where Rick and Forest Hanson define scarcity and abundance, the reasons we are predisposed towards scarcity from an evolutionary perspective, and also, scarcity at the cultural level. The fact that they included a critique of promoting an “abundance mindset” was refreshing. They talked about how and when to relax, expand and orient to a sense of abundance, abundance in objectively difficult times, abundance of future time, and the sense of wonder in considering the abundance of the universe and the awe this can arise in us.

https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-creating-an-abundance-mindset/