There is something Marc talks about in the work he calls dying. That is the metaphor for spiritual growth from many traditions. Metaphors are one thing- but dying hurts like hell. Who wants it?
Sometimes I think Marc is like a happy funeral director for pathology. He's kind of cheerful about it though -- more like a hunter who sees the pathology is on the run & he's helping you chase it down.
But no matter what, the dying hurts. Because make no mistake about it- pathology is not a scab to flick off -- well anyway, mine isn't. It's a deeply rooted organism, a second skin.
So for me the dying has been in many stages. You don't want to rip off that skin all at once. I began the work with a great deal of pride & condescension. I didn't even think I was seeing Marc as a therapist. I told him & myself, I was investigating what Marc was doing with dreams out of curiosity. I had in mind doing a book about dreams and was on my way to see a Tibetan teacher to interview him. Then a friend told me about Marc.
I was a published writer with some fame & fortune, he was what I thought he was - I'm ashamed to say even what I thought he was, but I thought I had the upper hand in every way. What could he possibly teach me? And very quickly within the first hour of our meeting, he had knocked me off my props and he'd nailed me. I was lacking passion, I was supercilious and slick, I was a practiced liar. It was all there in the dreams I brought with me, plain and clear and incontrovertible. But it took a very long time to peel away the layers of lying and the layers of deception. Because I was good at it, or as Marc said, my pathology was "marbled". It meant simply that my pathology was successful in the world, I had learned how to please others very well even at the cost of my soul..
So many layers had to die. My pride in my writing. My pride in my success. The whole big lie called "the Rodger show." Well after 3 years in the work, the Rodger show has been canceled.
Sometimes to me the work is like digging up a poisonous plant that has many roots in the soil. (Or it's like removing a cancer that has many roots in a vital organ.) You can't just yank the cancer out, or you might destroy the vital organ. You have to dig carefully around the roots, loosen them here then there. The dreams are very gentle that way. Gradually the soil gets loosened, the roots begin to be freed.
For me, one little root that needed to be loosened had to do with food. I was raised as a reform Jew and we ate ham and bacon in the house when I was a kid, not to mention steamed crabs and shrimp. But at a certain point I had decided about 8 years ago, long before I met Marc, I would be a better man if I didn't eat non-kosher food. Now it appears to me a stupid vanity but at the time I believed it kept me from doing worse things, that it was like a fence around me to protect me from other violations. And the dreams -- with Marc's help, completely exposed that root and showed it was a phony religious gesture and meaningless, and that for me at least -- being closer to God had nothing to do with whether I was a vegetarian or ate lobster. The animus kept appearing as a waiter, as a chef, again and again and invited me to eat what he offered: a piece of bacon, a shrimp -- it was hilarious in a way how many times I refused, and how persistent he was. And finally after a great deal of work, I did give in to the animus and ate that shrimp. It's ridiculous now to think that this was a big deal but it was at the time, a real power struggle within me. And the poisonous plant of pride in self-control loosened its grip on a vital organ -- my appetite. And I began to eat & relish food in a way that was delightful.
Then there were a whole series of dreams where I'd walk into a classroom -- and think I was the teacher. And I'd say to Marc of course I think I'm the teacher I've been teaching for 25 years, what else? But that was a typical confusion of inside and outside. Dreams don't refer to the outside at all, except to make symbols of inner intent. Outside I may have had all the trappings of a teacher, but inside I needed to be play a different role in the classroom of dreams. For how could I find a teacher if I thought I was the one?
The figures in the dream, the animus and the other students, had ways of letting me know I wasn't a teacher, and soon that idea also died in me. That somehow when I walked into a room I was supposed to be in charge or that I had authority, or that what I had to say would be authoritative or magisterial or even important. And so a root loosened, an ego root. I realized the joy, the great freshness of being a student in life, of being the student so I could be close to the animus figure, and maybe eventually taste one drop of infinity.
Recently I went through a major death - I almost lost everything I hold dear in my life, I saw what it would look like to lose it, I felt the weight of all the lies I'd ever told, I felt how I had lost so much of my life and how I'd betrayed those who'd loved me.
The pain of that experience is what it's like to be on your deathbed and to look back on your life and realize all the mistakes you've made, and the people you've hurt, and to know there's nothing, absolutely nothing you can do about it but feel the regret. Except somehow I was still alive. So I had died but I still had the chance to live. And this was a great tearing of roots, not around my appetites or my ego but around my soul.
During that period of dying I wrote the poem above. It's not an actual dream. (When I first started the work I wrote poems based on dreams but found they didn't work very well. That's because, for me at least, writing a poem is a parallel activity to dreaming, it is an openness to images that arise directly. I did not always believe this about my poetry but see it working now. In fact there's a whole shift and change in how I write poetry. It is a shift from a poetry of objective experience, of facts, to a poetry of inner exploration.)
It's awkward a little to interpret my own poem. Perhaps for those who read the language of poetry - not everyone reads the language of poetry any more than they read the language of images -- the meaning will be clear enough. The speaker seems to be in a torture session in hell. At the end of the process his heart is frozen and he's pronounced fit for a normal life. Then he swears himself to the outward trappings of a normal life and he's released. To marry your obloquy is to marry your resistance, your stubbornness - and to do that is to marry only your diseased mind. What we call normal is often just such a marriage -- not only to a spouse, but to a career, a way of life. We have not met the other, we have only married the disease in ourselves. In the same way we might have a fake religion in so called normal life, tie our knot to heaven, and make a nice elaborate bow for all the world to see and the truth is we have no connection whatsoever to heaven or anything else.
The poem appears to be in hell but it isn't really about hell. It's about all the torture & pain we go through everyday as the beautiful souls we actually are -- because we have allowed pathology to bedevil our lives. It is exposing the actual pain covered up in so-called normal life, the pain of maintaining the multiple deceptions of the so-called normal personality in the so-called normal world.
I am surprised myself at the imagery in the poem, with devils and heavens because that's not at all the way I write usually. I now see my poetry working in a very different language. I used to write in an objectivist way, an objective way -- I made poems from what was "out there" - I thought truth was "out there" (as they say on the X files) but the truth is not "out there" , it is "in here". William Blake says quite beautifully, the eye sees what the heart knows. Which means the external eye, the eye of flesh, can't really see anything by itself, can only see as directed by the heart. So I turn my eye inward and see these images
The first time I laid myself out open to an outside physician
There was an appointment book in hell
All the devils were laid out like smoke
Thousands of them seething like foam on the gums
When I heard my name called it was a syllable not a word
The harmony of my adventure was a thread of color
Something like red, something like the promises that were never to be broken
The arguments about the diagnosis raged in a black cloud
The devil himself had a mustache of red fire
He smiled delightfully, his teeth were frost and gold
I rued all my lost rhythms, my body left me in a whiff
No more were my memories mine, they were bits of foreign paper
They were foreign animals hitched to a rolling iron cage
The famous devil with his laser scalpel
Tore into my eyes' delicate gelatin
The anguish poured out of them in tears of glazed piety
I wept on the long black board they laid me out on
Splinters dug into my scalp
For 100 hours or days they thought of a name to call me
T he old names were no good in the transformations of history
They decided wisely but I couldn't hear it
My ears were already lead and the freezing was extending down
When it reached my heart, the common element was an alloy of lead and ice
This was called normal and a normal life
Now Profess your new religion they said and I recited gibberish and Greek
Tie your knot to heaven and I tied an elaborate bow
Marry your obloquy they said and I married my diseased mind
Turn three times around and you'll be cured
I turned once and twice and heard their laughter in my teeth
I was on my own, I was getting along already
[And heard their murder in my horizontal smiles]