To Cure The Wounds Of The Soul
Healing
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
D H Lawrence
To Cure The Wounds Of The Soul
So what’s the mistake? What wounds to the soul make us so sick? It’s easy to say, but our world’s been sick for a long time - so long that sickness is the way we live in the world - for most people it’s just the way things are.
We can trace our world’s particular sickness from its origins in the fifteenth century to these Western areas of Europe bordering on the Atlantic. In this region, advances in technology and information transmission enabled the aggressive expansion of a small number of maritime nation-states. Travelling in small wooden ships, from the early 16th century onwards they colonised lands across the globe, subjugating and enslaving indigenous peoples wherever they found them. In themselves, these conquistadors were probably no more no less ruthless and avaricious than for instance, the Romans. The difference was that these mercenaries and their backers had access to a nascent banking system which enabled wealth to be abstracted by entry into ledgers. This allowed for a system in which money could be deposited, accumulated, invested, transferred, loaned, hypothesised, transposed and transmuted into many different forms and, in turn, this became the unique driver of retentive capitalist greed; compound interest became a way of life.
The growth in the number of financial houses and the subsequent accumulation of capital generated through conquest, colonisation and enslavement, instigated a feedback loop of ever increasing financial returns, enabling more investment, ever quickening the pace of innovation and communication. Of course, this reinforced the dominant positions these Atlantic nations already enjoyed, but also provided a model of imitation for other emergent states developing across the world.
At some stage it was inevitable that there would both be serious conflicts of interest between the growing number of countries vying to control access to the world’s limited resources and that advanced technologies applied to weapons development would lead to wars that were increasingly destructive to human life and the world’s environments. It was also a consequence that at some time in the mid nineteenth century as wars became total, involving whole populations in zero sum nationalistic conflict, that these peoples came to invest heavily in their nationalistic identity, their right to be able to continue to lead what they regarded as an entitled way of life. Emerging out of the valley of death, flush with poppies, they did not want collectively to look back on it - the mortal field from whence they rode. Post 1918 and 1945 the drive to return to “normal life” became a uni-dimensional psychic engine; the driver for the idea of recovery. Death was something people wanted to leave behind.
The Bomb
After the cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century, conflict between the USA and USSR reached its climax in the 1950’s when nuclear weapons systems developed by these countries became capable of wiping out most of life on earth.
I remember attending 10 o’clock Mass on Sunday 21st October 1962. It was a Catholic Irish Church in Paddington, London, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, situated just off the Edgware Rd in London. The place was packed to the rafters. Sinners like me. I had to squeeze into a space on the upstairs balcony. But my head wasn’t really at the service. My ears were squeezed, listening out for the sound of a siren or the roar of an incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead that would hurl me and all of us all into oblivion. The priest lead the congregation in a prayer for peace: Amen. There was one moment in my suppressed hysteria where I thought the end was coming - from somewhere outside the church my heightened imagination picked out a roar in the background, and as the sound became a crescendo I was sure it was a missile. The pit of my stomach cracked... then... nothing. The sound dissolved. The father priest was still at work; the Mass ended. Outside, the church people gathered in small groups to chat. I don’t know what they were saying. I walked home. Life resumed. The Cuban crisis ended. Mass Death remained on hold. I went on a couple of the Easter Protest marches organised by CND, joining in the London section which ended in Trafalgar Square. The marchers cared passionately about abolishing nuclear weapons - it never felt like anyone else did. Ultimately, protesters were marginalised by the establishment media who daubed them “peaceniks” and treated them as a spectacle for mockery and marginalisation.
Devourers
It was remarkable to me how after the Cuban Crisis the world changed. Instead of the affected countries and their peoples pausing to reflect on how close they had come to annihilation, the response in the West was to party hard. The post war recovery flipped us into the “Economic Miracle”. At this moment, leveraged by banks and their sophisticated fiscal and financial devices the capitalist machine made possible new levels of unimaginable personal acquisition and individual wealth. Acquisition became the default compulsive cultural mode. We turbo charged into a frenzy of material consumption: cars, travel, TV’s - whatever we wanted, most of us could get it. Money was no barrier as there was always credit from the Money Machine. As developments in medical and biological sciences innovated treatments interventions and therapies that enabled the radical postponement of physical death, death itself became commodified.
As corporal mortality has become something that can be infinitely postponed, it is the certainty, our “only certainty”, that no longer must be reckoned, that is to say: we believe that if we pay, it can be ignored. Some hope to postpone death indefinitely - the use of cryogenics holds out to others the prospect of regeneration and immortality. We aspire to be deified beings, to live the lifestyle of the gods, and like them, we hope through our offerings and transactions, to become “immortal”.
Yet unlike the Gods of Greek mythology who were sustained by ambrosia, we believe we are kept alive by our possessions. During the twilight years of the twentieth century, intensified by globalisation of industry and just-in-time production, we came to live by means of ever greater material accumulations. Shielded by our hospitals from the nevertheless blunt terminus of of life, we live through objects, while consciousness of death, which in itself affirms the fact of being alive, was banished to the shadows where fear and monsters lurk. Yet we also want very much to know that we are alive for how else could we enjoy “having it so good”?
Object Junkies
We’re addicted to stuff. We’ve driven ourselves to devour the world and its resources at a rate which is unsustainable. It’s a situation that creates a predictable, and familiar, competitive response: those countries, those peoples, unable to get to the feeding trough, push hard to push their snouts in before there’s nothing left. As countries adopt policies to promote fast track rapid industrialisation and consumerisation, the “long run” of unsustainability contracts - it became the short run, it becomes now.
It is now that everyone can see that the party is coming to an end. We enter an era of catastrophic global warming destroying the small comfortable climatic niche into which the process of natural selection have guided our development. And everyone knows that the consumption imperatives of our daily life prevent us from doing anything about it. This difficulty in seeing the ultimate logic of our lifestyle is further impaired and distorted by a series of technologically driven changes that transforms our interaction with the world and other people. The pursuit of objects is overlaid, overtaken by the pursuit of images. We start to live through virtual experiences rather than actual.
To Die By The Image
At the start of 21st century a series of digital technologies based on the practical exploitation of particle physics reached a point of maturity. Most of our interactions with the world before the late 20th century had been in the form of a direct tactility with surfaces, through face to face contact. First TV’s, but finally and decisively computers began to radically transform our nature of being in and engaging with the world. Interaction between people now often takes place through screens. Our fingers manipulate keys and buttons which facilitate the transmission of information and engagement in dialogue. With the advent of smart phones, screens and keys became highly portable and personalised, allowing access the world of images, whenever wherever and for whatever. These devices are now extensions of ourselves, a prosthetic glove in the hand.
When we look at our screens we think we see surfaces and depth, yet the technical reality is that we see a constantly changing, unstable, fluctuating series of molecular patterns created by pixels. The linkage of the pixels that connect us to the screen are opaque, one image leads to another ad infinitum, engendering a different relationship to our being in the world - the world through screens keys and buttons becomes a non-surface that is totally malleable and therefore subject to distortions. The screen provokes a restless series of distractions and agitations that create a world in which we are the centre of our own universe, where everything emanates out from the vortex of our insatiable desires in which we become increasingly imprisoned. It feels like a world without soul, it is a world as delusional trap, a world without stillness, a world without darkness. It is world in which nothing dies or grows old. The technical images stay the same forever - they don’t yellow, fade, wrinkle or crinkle. Yet this is what now accompanies and guide us through our lives.
The screen world, which is now our domicile, completes the notional deification of humankind, bestowing the immanence of control to the user of the smart phone. We transcend space and time as a daily experience as this device burrows into our psyches, becoming part of us, ever-present. Time becomes a plastic experience as we can shift and shuffle images instantaneously so the past becomes present and the present becomes past. The future becomes seamlessly incorporated into this stream, woven in. But in the life lived with and through the screen, as a physical presence, as a phenomenological possibility, death is vanished, absent and therefore, so is life.
Healing
We are in the final phase of the “endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.” The mistake being the failure of human kind to understand that death is endemic to life. The sense of mortality, to live at one with mortality, lies at the root of the experience of being alive - in myth, in ancestors, in the breath. Our cultural matrix rooted in mass slaughter and genocide has fled from the horror of its actions but has only succeeded in running into ever greater more comprehensive slaughter and destruction, exteriorising death as separate from ourselves. We have sanctified this nightmare through the distractions of possessing the material world and escaping from death into the realm of images, trying all the time to live outside death. The irony is that we have now run straight into the jaws of our own extinction: a collective death wish; a global suicide.
Death does not go away. It is always present. We have to create conditions in which we can regain consciousness of who we are. We live in a world that has almost banished darkness. Seen from space planet earth is a ball of light. We need to re-fold our lives into darkness and death by becoming aware of the forces we have unleashed that now control us. It betokens a strange psychic discipline, a “long difficult repentance…to cure the wounds of the soul”. And it is through this repentance, in which we come to accept that we do not possess anything, that we are not in control of anything, that it is a blessing that we are vulnerable and mortal and that we can approach ourselves through mythic resonance - and only when we awake to death in ourselves, will we be able to understand our place in the world and how we might continue to live in it.
Adrin Neatrour
November 2021
