Grotesque
and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work
with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day
for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes
: they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But
when you give the student permission to explore this material he very
soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is
no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in
this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle
Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.
Johnstone,
Keith. Impro,
Improvisation
and the Theatre
(Eyre
Methuen, 1981)
Why would surrendering to the free
operation of the imagination lead us through “sick" or
disturbing ideas to a rediscovery of our capacity for love?
There is within us a natural pull
towards wholeness and healing. What impedes this tendency is fear. We
began as unconditionally loving beings. This was a state of faith in
love. But at some stage we lost our faith. We gave in to fear and a
divide opened up between ourself and others and our own psyche became
split. This was the infliction of our defining wound. This is
sometimes referred to as The Fisher King Wound after one of the
characters from Arthurian legend.
When I was a young child I had an
irrational fear which was the cause of much amusement among my
family. I was afraid that, if the bath plug was pulled out while I
was in the bath, the force of the circling water might suck me down
the plughole.
If we cling to dogmatic ways of
thinking or in any other way resist the uncensored and unimpeded
operation of our own imagination or that of others it is because we
can sense that we are being sucked towards the black hole of our
defining wound. We fear immolation.
And yet the improvisers in
Johnstone's example found unexpected tenderness beyond the
cannibalistic fantasies. What lies on the other side of the black
hole is our original unconditionally loving self, our inner child.
Why might cannibalism be a key
concept surrounding the defining wound? To understand this we have to
imagine ourselves in the position of a child who is unconditionally
loving and has not yet become wounded and thus selfish. Selfishness
is the natural self-directedness of the wounded. If we hit our thumb
with a hammer, all we can think about is our sore thumb. And if we
are wounded, much of our attention will be focused on our wounded
self. But how does this look to the unselfish child. The world of
adults, as we come to know it more intimately as we get older, must seem to us like a world of cannibals, in which the
selfishness of each individual eats away at the life and needs of the
others. The free operation of the imagination leads us back through
the acknowledgement that we are spiritual cannibals to the point
before we acquired the wound which made us such. The door to Paradise
looks like the door to Hell, that is why we have been so reluctant to
go there. But Johnstone shows how easy it is to negotiate this trip
back down the black hole as long as we are in an environment in which
we feel safe.
In Homer's Odyssey there is
a very famous passage in which the sailors have to steer a course
through a narrow body of water which lies between two terrible
dangers – the Scylla and the Charybdis. The Scylla is a monster
with four eyes and six long necks with frightful heads each equipped
with three rows of sharp teeth. Charybdis was once the beautiful
daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, but she has become a monster – a
giant bladder with a huge mouth which swallows huge quantities of
water three times a day and then belches them out again. Later
Charybdis came to be viewed simply as as a whirlpool.
This myth is a very succinct
description of how we live our lives, caught between fear of the
black hole or Charybdis within and the battle against external
threats (the Scylla). Often the two threats mirror each other. The
need to deny some aspect of ourselves, the acknowledgement of which
might lead us down the black hole, can drive us to obsessively fight
against the expression of that very quality in others. An example
might be a very conservative individual who is obsessed with the
defence of freedom by military means but who also is in favour of
censorship. Unable to acknowledge to ourselves that we fear the
freedom which might lead us down the black hole, we project our
internal struggle onto those who express opposition to freedoms we do
believe in and fight against them. Our fear of the Charybdis drives
us onto the fangs of the Scylla. And yet the way to end the
injustices of the world is to lead the way down that black hole and
show that it leads not to Hell but to Paradise.
This is not just a personal
phenomena. Culturally we are in the midst of an improvisation similar
to that described by Johnstone. Censorship of artistic expression was
one form of cultural armouring we used to keep ourselves from being
sucked down that black hole. Fifty years after the banning of Lady
Chatterley's Lover was overturned in Great Britain and the United
States, 50 Shades of Grey has taken the world by storm. And in
the cinema we have moved from a time when all films in countries like
the United States, Great Britain and Australia had to meet a
restrictive code in which the length of a kiss had to not exceed a
certain length to a time in which films depicting extended scenes of
graphic torture and dismemberment are considered acceptable
entertainment at the local multiplex. Allow artistic freedom and at
least some of the expressions will tend to circle down to the most
primal of material, that which leads through the black hole to
Paradise. And what are the obsessions of our time? Flesh-eathing
zombies. Vampires. Incest. Acknowledgement that our wound turns us
into a living dead creature which sucks the life out of others.
Zombies and vampires don't begin as zombies and vampires. They have
to be bitten by someone who has already turned. They have to receive their wound. And, as Freud pointed
out, the unavoidable rejection of our initial incestuous desires is
one of the most common forms of psychic wound. Hence, in the world of
erotica, pseudo-incest, and in some cases genuine incest, are all the
rage. Allow freedom and we go back to our origins.
Fear is an important factor in how
we view this collective improvisation. There are some who become very
fearful and view it all as some dark Satanic conspiracy. Such
individuals may claim that the Illuminati have conspired to create
popular television characters who are homosexuals to brainwash us
into accepting homosexuality, etc. It is easy enough to understand
how a frightened individual can fall into this manner of thinking,
because an improvisation is much like a conspiracy, but it is an
unconscious one. It is an expression of what Carl Jung called “the
collective unconscious" – a kind of group mind which exists
beneath the level of consciousness, joining us all together. In an
improvisation this group mind manifests itself externally. Feel a
part of it and it seems magical, but feel isolated and frightened and
it is the very stuff of paranoia.
It is important to remember that
Johnstone's students didn't actually become cannibals and eat
each other. They acted out scenes in which they were cannibals
pretending to eat each other. Some are afraid that if we allow
depictions of depravity and sadism in our books and movies then we
are encouraging people to become depraved and sadistic. But going
down the black hole requires only that we remove the impasse in our
thinking and feeling which originates in fear of re-experiencing our
defining wound. Our culture is a place to collectively renegotiate
this passage and realising that we have nothing to fear will make
this easier.
I know a good deal about this
process because I've experienced what is now called bipolar disorder.
It used to be described as manic depression. Bipolar disorder, in its
more extreme manifestations, is a tendency to be repeatedly sucked
down the black hole of one's defining wound and then spat out again.
And, as with most forms of psychological disorder, fear is the key
problem. In the manic phase one touches Heaven, one reunites with the
inner child and the inhibitions of adult neurosis are abandoned. But
there are two problems. One is that losing one's inhibitions and
behaving like a child leads to trouble. Just because the neurotic
adult state may be unhealthy in a way we may identify with
cannibalistic zombies, doesn't mean that a grown man running around
naked in a hospital emergency room were people have serious problems
that need attending to is not just as, if not more, of an unhealthy
manifestation within the social system. The other problem is fear.
The descent into the child state is generally precipitated by a
serious crisis – often some kind of double bind situation in which
we are damned if we do something and equally damned if we do not (see
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972). What we
are looking for is reassurance. Simply being dumped back into our
childlike state does not provide that reassurance. It happens too
quickly. And we have to remember that when we were a child we were
particularly prone to fears. We might feel the need to check under
our bed for monsters. And because the process of being sucked down
the black hole is one of cycling through opposites – yin, yang,
yin, yang, yin, yang – a prediction of that which is desired is
likely to quickly be followed by a prediction of that which is to be
feared. A classic example from my own major episode was when I was in
the emergency room. I thought a bunch of sexy female nurses were
going to drag me off into some shower room for an orgy. But that was
immediately followed by a sense of terror that, when they were
finished having sex with me, they would eat me alive, beginning by
biting my fingers off one by one.
 |
| Gregory Bateson |
So highs can be scary and the
disruption they cause to our lives can be extreme. For this reason
there is a tendency to pull back from them to an extremely repressed
state – that of depression. At some stage though, for our own
healing, we have to return to the creative maelstrom of mania. What
I've come to realise over time is that the key to managing this
process is to replace fear with understanding and acceptance of the
process. There are four things which can lead to problems for a
person in a manic state – fear, reckless behaviour, taking thoughts
too literally and talking too freely. Fear drives the excitement
level and makes it hard to get enough sleep or to restrain one's
reckless behaviour. The thoughts of the manic state are prophetic,
but not to be taken literally. They have to be interpreted. The
thought that we should be naked should not be seen as a rationale for
shedding our clothes in public but rather as an inducement to shed
our neurotic armouring. And it is not necessary to talk about our
experiences if we think that those around us will interpret what we
say as a reason to impose unwanted psychiatric care upon us.
I once read about a man who
believed himself to have a fish in his jaw. (The case was reported in
New Society.) This fish moved around, and caused him a lot of
discomfort. When he tried to tell people about the fish, they thought
him ‘crazy', which led to violent arguments. After he'd been
hospitalised several times – with no effect on the fish – it was
suggested that perhaps he shouldn't tell anyone. After all it was the
quarrels that were getting him put away, rather than the delusion.
Once he'd agreed to keep his problem secret, he was able to lead a
normal life. His sanity is like our sanity. We may not have a fish in
our jaw, but we all have its equivalent.
Johnstone,
Keith. Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre
(Eyre Methuen, 1981)
By
understanding the process of going back to that childlike state, I
now find that I don't suffer from depression any more and that I go
to that state more often and find it a less volatile place to be. The
process of improvisation is the best way to understand that place –
one of openness in which we see that those who are closed off are
closed off because they are fearful and long only for us to give them
permission to be free. What keeps us from Paradise is the feeling
that we don't really deserve to go there, and there is no more
powerful way to have this false belief challenged than to have the
door opened for us by someone who is already on the inside.
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