Emptied of Majesty

 

“Why was light given to man, whose way is hid, whom God hath hedged in?” Job 3:23

 

To begin to deconstruct the myth, I would suggest we explore the drama which at the beginning to this inquiry we have called The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. In our imagination, step on stage, become the protagonist and listen to Inspiration. Inspiration might first direct us to take the role of Saturn. That’s called role-reversing, taking the Titan’s point of view, speaking from that position. Let’s see what more we can learn directly from this demoralized character about his perception of himself and his details, his age, his past, his childhood, his hopes and dreams, his fears.

Let’s imagine we learn, through open inquiry, that Saturn is alcoholic. And he’s arrogantly dismissive of 12-step programs and of treatment in general. He doesn’t trust therapy. He scorns any higher power. “I am my own higher power.” He insists he is not so weak as to need help, or to surrender to anything. Rigid in his beliefs, and proud because he has always been a hard worker, he boasts that he had once been important, though at this moment he sobs pitifully in his despair.

Important? Why is he so significant? Because the drug-addicted member often looks larger-than-life to the family? Enormous. Because of the drugged state of mind, with all its irrationality and unpredictability. Compulsive energies force family members to adapt and restructure their lives around the addict. But it’s not the person who is that powerful, it’s the addiction. To depict his current condition, we might imagine him standing on a chair, then watch him slink to the floor. Over and over until we get beyond his defensive self-deception.

Eventually, reluctantly, he tells us that “fallen” is a familiar place for him. This displaced giant has hit bottom before.

Saturn, next, spontaneously explains that Apollo is his youngest son, a new generation that never seemed interested in working hard. “He flamed out early. He got good grades in school, but I told my wife that was meaningless. Book smart and being able to argue—he loves to debate, that’s what he calls it. Thinks he’s so intelligent. Fucking disrespectful. A Mommy’s boy. Always an embarrassment, a problem from the moment he was born, a loser. He got that gene from his mother, obviously.”

Moneta

Next, we step out of this personified Saturn and introduce Moneta on stage.

In a Heart-drama, we will want to hear her point of view too. We step into her, embody her. Moneta tells us she is a goddess of wisdom. A little ego-centric? Ok.

Asked about her relationship with Saturn, we learn that Moneta is Saturn’s ex-wife, mother to Apollo. Saturn and Moneta had been married once married, a couple. That’s important to know. It clarifies some things, though it completely mucks up the structure of the Hellenic myth. In a Heart-drama, those grandiose stories—where we start—always fall apart when the realities are explored.

Spending more time with Moneta, interviewing her about other Titans in her life, we learn that her father was just like Saturn. “What a cliché, huh? I married my father, angry and arrogant!” She continues, almost can’t help herself from telling this long and miserable tale.

“Being married to that beast Saturn, I felt like I was living out my childhood again. My father, what a joke to call him that. Everybody worships him around here, or maybe they are just afraid of him and his family, his brothers, my uncles, and for good reasons. They are all nuts, racist, sexist, and so I go and marry Saturn who is just as violent, carrying his guns around everywhere he goes, just daring someone to get in his way. I thought he was strong because he was in this local militia. You know, the local boys are always raising hell. Little boys running round trying to look tough, I see it now. But I was just a kid when we met. I don’t know what I was thinking. But what an absolute jerk he is.”

Moneta continues—hard to stop her at this point. “To keep sane, I cheated on Saturn. It was a wild thing. The guy was Bipolar. We partied a lot, and then the shit hit the fan. I got a DUI trying to drive him home one night.”

She was immediately disowned by her family. Threatened by the extended Titan family.

Her son, Apollo, still won’t talk to her because of her fling with Bipolar. All this adds to her heartbreak.

“I think he also blames me for his brother’s death. Tom was the oldest boy, the absolute opposite of his worthless father. But he got into the wrong crowd, too many drugs. He overdosed. It was awful. Awful.”

We are definitely not in the Greek mythic tragedy anymore, but a family tragedy.

“Tom. Tom. Tom, he was my hero. He could have been anything he wanted to be. A doctor, a lawyer. A great salesman. But was always pressuring himself, thinking he wasn’t ever good enough.”

Saturn’s Family

As we arrange this family in the spotlight, forming them into a sculpture, we see them anew. Observing them from a distance, what more can we discern?

Maybe there’s an aha moment. Maybe not yet.

The father, Saturn, looks disgusted and threatening, peering beyond everyone, staring into the distance trying to figure out where the alcohol is stashed, or where the next fight will pop up. Moneta, the mother, has her arms crossed, anxiously looking at the floor, seemingly all out of wisdom and patience. Apollo stands a few feet from his parents, turned away from both, his middle finger raised. The deceased brother, Tom, lies motionless on a couch, which is a prop for his deathbed.

Is there more?

We might wonder, whose story is this? Who is warmed up enough to explore courageously and to seek what has been hidden? Who is yearning to unveil what has been beneath the surface, to move us from the myth further into this family drama?

In response, in Inspiration, we choose to playact a character calls Keats who speaks a line of dialogue which sounds like existential cri de Coeur, “There’s so much pain, but no one to trust.”

Growing tearful, Keats (now as a character in the drama) spontaneously tells us the memory of his brother’s illness. Keats blames a demon called Consumption for Tom’s slow deterioration, but we—as witness—recognize this is Tom’s addiction and likely tuberculosis. During this painful period Keats felt utterly alone, overcome with fear and the panic of grief.

We now consider the role of Keats on stage by stepping away again, backing up to gain some better perspective.

From a distance, from this more objective position, we integrate Keats into the family sculpture. Keats now sits in front of Apollo, bent over, sobbing, hands on his face. The character named Consumption looms over Tom, and scowls at Keats the way any addiction and fatal illness looms over the people we love.

From this vantage point, we can understand the drama with more clarity. Both Keats and Apollo are two parts of one character. Keats is the broken heart. Apollo is the self-sabotaging defensiveness. The adolescent, “Fuck you.”

Impromptu, we might decide that The Fall of Saturn is no longer a sufficient title. Through this intuitive work, we have deconstructed the myth that had kept the family—our family—in trance. It is no longer sufficient narrative to convey the realities of this life, to be the only story. The very structure of it cannot express the Truth and Beauty that we are inspired to convey. At this point we can consider (reimagine) the power of this archetypal story that has kept these characters from healing and growing. We can begin the process of finding a more conscious alternative to the narrative that was wired into our psyche by the father-as-Saturn who terrorized and demeaned and could not be questioned. The father, as a fallen Titan, held everyone in his orbit until his grieving son summoned enough courage and curiosity to question.

From Myth to Humanity

These tragic myths we deconstruct are communications from another world. From where? Of course, Carl Jung would call this other place the unconscious. Jung’s theory of the archetypal basis of mind describes a place that holds foundational patterns, and images that shape the human psyche. A basin that is filled with primal themes and symbols and motifs passed down from generation to generation. When we are living dissociated from our own Inspiration, then the more destructive energy forms and archetypes and Big Stories can influence us without our knowledge, shaping our inner and outer world and creating characters in us and in our Upside-down, personalities with limited insight into their own thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

                                                                       Carl Jung

Through an act of imagination, we move with more intention. We see what has been dissociated. The myth is our family. Moneta is not wisdom but a wounded daughter, wife and mother. Saturn is not a fallen god. He is a sadistic SOB. And, so, we can retitle the structure, maybe to I have my own Life, Leave Me Alone. Now we understand that we have been enacting—embodying—the self-protective role of Apollo, a defiant teenager-like part of us. And that has brought more chaos. Especially in intimate relationships. In this particular drama, we see that when Apollo takes center stage and hogs the spotlight, we are blended with his defensive part of us, to use ego-therapy terms. We gain the insight to see that we have detached callously from our recent girlfriend. We have been manipulative, abrasive. We once claimed to love her, yet our inner defiant teen ego-state, Apollo, has moved within us and pushed us to avoid her and to stay in our head where we can play the blame game. We now have the insight to see that Apollo’s singular purpose in the drama is to stay frighteningly angry, distracting from the pain of our brother’s death, keeping the vulnerable heart (called Keats) compartmentalized, exiled in the theatre’s green room.

Reflecting on the Heart-drama, we know in a manner we had not known before that open defiance (Apollo, a milder introjected form of his father Saturn) keeps people at a distance and allows us to disown our despair, focusing on flaws of others instead of truly feeling the grief that Keats holds.

In later work, for example, we could return to that moment in time when Keats got stuck at his beloved brother’s bedside. We could move further toward resolution, seek a way—spontaneous and creative—to help release more of these projections and parts of us from the tragedy in which we have been stuck.

“O aching time! O moments big as years!”  Keats

The Heart-dramas with the greatest potency are always myth-like. They inhabit our body, our emotional memories and are imagistic—sometimes are clearly metaphoric or reverberate with a Surplus. The most riveting performances have a depth and an associative web of connections that pull in listeners (those who still can listen), and what is experienced cannot be made into the “point of it.”

I sometimes feel like a commoner very much aware of a dynasties’ power. But we can only find the way to healing and growth by encountering respectfully these forces and the archetypal patterns, while maintaining some space, so we do not get sucked in completely. When we maintain dual awareness, entering the flow of Negative Capability, establishing Attunement that lights up with the energies of Powerful-work—being here while traveling there.

It is often that after the Work, the mythic archetypal story has shifted and now seems like a recognizable family tale. It’s worthy of various human-sized interpretations. It seems we have moved from talking about life in some magnificent but frozen realm to seeing how we are living life (or not). We can see that where we started, the “myth of the fall,” was the intellect’s reinterpretation of a life lived in the trenches of a family tragedy, a constructed story that allowed little resolution, a grand static and disembodied abstract. Somehow in this absurd role-playing we have been reintegrated and re-embodied. We have come closer to coherence, to holding the lived experience of shame and loss, rather than acting out. We comprehend it differently, as if, in the enactment, a bullshit detector set off inside us and reintegrated us back into the mysteries of reality.

 Now, if we can, we debrief.

Whenever we share our deepest Work, we find that many people in our life (let’s call them witnesses or friends with the capacity to be vulnerable) find a way to resonate with us. One witness, a middle-aged attorney who has a well-developed and hardened persona, unveils what resonates for her. The grief on stage represented by Keats reminds her of her own inner child, (the abandoned one, she calls it) largely ignored by the family. She was an outcast in her family drama, left alone in to her misery. Every witness has a different point of view. They resonate with some aspects, or none, or few.

Afterward, more of the protagonist’s reflections may surface in hours or days or decades, we may wonder, after the enactment, how can we be more loving toward this boy, Keats, the most vulnerable part of us, the wounded heart?

As I write this, I wonder if I can better understand my own Apollo—a defensive posture, armored in the face of a family unable to support each other when they needed to most. Cruel to each other in a cruel world where loved ones die unexpectedly. Through my own dramas, I have been able to remove a carefully crafted mask. I feel less imprisoned in some tragic myth—and more part of a creative energy. Perhaps I have even accessed an Inspired state that in Greek mythology would have been attributed as a blessing from the sun god.