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Title: Macrocosm: the Surface Creatures Author: anonymous Language: en Topics: Return Fire, psychiatry, madness, colonialism, story-telling, anti-civilization, healing, Calvinism, rationalism, self-help, grief, paganism, New Thought Notes: Taken from Return Fire vol.5 chap.1, autumn 2017. PDFs of Return Fire and related publications can be read, downloaded and printed by visiting returnfire.noblogs.org or emailing returnfire@riseup.net
Once upon a time an old country was scraped down to its bones while a
new country was fashioned from the scraps of other ones from across the
seas. Square fields and then square lawns held everything anyone could
possibly want, and much more. Within only a few hundred years, vast
stretches of artificial lighting would make the night sky safe: Nothing
slithers, nothing crawls under here!
And yet not everyone handled the transition well, then or now. What was
the meaning of a life spent in squares? Some fell ill, in various ways,
and called out for help.
But the medicine people were long gone by then. Called alternately or
overlappingly traditional healers, shamans, wortcunners (knowers of
herbs), midwives, wise women, witches and other things depending on
language and tradition, these were the wild ones who dwelt beyond
village and hedgerow, at the edges of jungles and mountain hollows.
Their conceptions of the world included nuanced sound and odor,
creatures above and below, portals inner and outer. Their medicines came
from stone and root and flower and meal and touch and prayer.
Naturally the medicine people were some of the first to be suppressed,
as always, no matter the continent.
And so new kinds of medicine people had to be developed in the new
country, the kind who could think in squares, to stitch together the
people’s minds and hearts. The first psychologists formed an abstract
mental medicine they called New Thought. Inharmonious thoughts, they
said, were the source of all disease. This was in line with the dominant
religious sects of the time, so New Thought looked a lot like old
Calvinism [ed. – see Return Fire vol.4 pg23]. In either case, emotional
spontaneity of any kind was extremely suspect.
The people themselves, then, were the source of their problems, not
living in squares. To have healthy minds, they must think better
thoughts. They must make their hearts small and predictable and
ladylike.
The New Thought fad passed, but not its main features, which soon enough
formed the backbone of what became known as the self-help and mental
health fields . Herein one constantly examines one’s inner life for
incorrect or negative thoughts and hedonistic emotional excesses,
especially in the case of positive and cognitive-behavioral psychologies
[ed. – see Return Fire vol.1 pg14]. In the popular culture, even cruder
New Age-type tenets, in which bad things such as disease happen due to
incorrect personal vision, still reign.
Chemically and/or mechanically suppressing negative thoughts and
feelings has become almost a national religion, thus returning us full
circle back to Calvinism. The poor are poor, for instance, because
poverty is all they strive for. In this land every negative thought,
feeling or circumstance is ultimately one’s own fault.
And so the people never did learn to fully touch or see their own grief,
their anger over living in squares. There is no cultural container for a
longing for the wild within and without. Strong emotions are supposed to
play out on screens, not through bodies, unless they are bodies shown on
screens.
This Imbolc[1] season let us begin to reclaim our wild interiors, our
sadness, our anger, our irritability, our depression and disease and
dis-ease. Let us start here in the long reclamation of the wilds
without, knowing that refusal of grief and death refuses also sensuality
and rebirth.
[1] ed. – Part of the Wheel of the Year annual cycle of festivals
observed by some modern Celtic-inspired pagans; the first cross-quarter
day following Midwinter (varying considerably in name and date depending
on the group celebrating it).