8 March 2022 • By Gabriel Hartley
A big part of me wants to avoid this topic like the plague. And yet, I still feel urged on to explore a disturbing dimension of myself that I sometimes find myself in during the early waking hours. I will call this dimension the SCREAM.
On some mornings, in those moments just before full waking consciousness, the Scream serves as my base, my foundation. It draws itself up into view from out of some hazy repressed constancy. What I see in that waking moment, as if watching a movie laying out that particular dimension of my inner being, is myself—in an endless, monotonous, hysterical scream into the cosmic space around me. It is a moment of pure, unadulterated horror.
And in those moments it is purely me.
To acknowledge this dimension of my being almost makes me want to scream. Especially in the context of my self-presentation as a silent Buddha-type seeking wisdom and planetary cooperation, I more often portray myself as one who is at peace on an inner level, one who seeks ultimate harmony and collective energetic synthesis. And to a certain degree, that dimension of my being is true. I am that. I am that, too.
And yet I still wake up every so often within this plane of utter trauma.
I don’t think the word “trauma” really does justice to the depths of horror that I experience on this plane. Trauma seems to come after the fact, whereas in these moments the horror is very much in the present tense, in the tense present the unending still moment of horror. Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream seems safely outside of the depths of this Scream I find myself in some mornings. The image of Alan Bates playing the screaming character in the 1978 film The Shout seems too deliberate and goal oriented in its destructiveness. There is no intentionality behind my Scream.
The only objective correlative I can find as an actual experience of this state, some explanatory moment in reality, is the memory of my utter loss of grounding on the day my first son, Dylan, died. I had gone through the motions of calling the hospice care worker and then the hearse driver and seeing the hearse pull out of the driveway and disappear as it traveled up the road into oblivion. I helped write his obituary. But when I went back into the house and saw Dylan’s now-empty wheelchair, the material sign of his sixteen-month fight with brain cancer, I fell to my knees, wrapping my arms around that wheelchair, now forever empty, as I slipped into the long, inner distance of the Scream. That Scream was and is infinite, without beginning or end. And when, less than three months later, I then held the lifeless body of my second son, Jesse, in my arms, I felt myself falling down into a well as if in a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo.
That feels like a likely cause, and yet this experience of the Scream when I awaken feels completely devoid of such constructs as cause and effect, of wound and remedy. I imagine it’s a continuum that many of us who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder feel rising up to the surface of our consciousness from time to time. This level of my being is real. To say that it originates in the deaths of my sons feels too pat. It’s not an explanation for a state of being beyond explanation.
This level of my being wants and needs expression, or at least acknowledgement and exploration. My continual repression and denial of this dimension of who I am, it now seems, will only strengthen the fires of this raging distress, this cosmic outrage, this endless tone of horror mimicking the ceaseless tone of that 1960s television channel retired for the night. As we in the West slide as if for the first time—as if innocently—through economic crashes and pandemics and the blossoming fires of war closer to home, this substrate dimension of Scream—perhaps even calling it the Scream is too domesticating—seems to be the most authentic step out of and into this time beyond time.
Speaking of tones of horror, I also awaken in this moment with a low-level machinic tone, a kind of monotonic soundtrack that I imagine most people describe as tinnitus. I’m not sure that I really know what tinnitus is (or even if I pronounce it correctly). What I know about this tone in my ears is that its constancy feels like a resonant strand in the fabric of the universe. But it’s not a maddening tone, as I’ve always imagined actual tinnitus to be but, rather, the soundtrack of horror frozen in time. It feels more like the natural soundscape of this perpetual plane of Screamscape.
I’m tempted to call this experience, this substrate plane of existence, the Shadow, as in C.G. Jung’s notion of the Shadow. Jung writes:
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
— “Psychology and Religion” (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East (131)
One curious aspect of Jung’s notion of the Shadow, as the previous passage suggests, is that it is by definition hidden, repressed, in the dark regions—in other words, the Shadow exists in our Unconscious. In repressing our Shadow Being, we end up projecting our own worst fears about ourselves outward onto others. Our enemies are literally ourselves, those aspects of our Selves that we simply cannot acknowledge.
I say that the Shadow is curious in that Jung’s description of it as our-repressed-self-projected-onto-others suggests that our job—if we ever hope to achieve some kind of psychic equilibrium—is to recognize it, call it back home and into the light.
But if the Shadow is truly in the darkness of our Unconscious, then how are we ever to achieve this kind of unifying inner illumination? Jung’s notion of projection gives us the key to solving this mystery in reverse. If Jung is right in saying that we project our worst aspects of ourselves out onto others—who in that moment become our enemies, those completely and utterly unlike us, all the more unlike us to the extent that we have fully severed those aspects of our inner being from ourselves and pasted the world over with these scraps of psychic film—then our first gesture towards wholeness is to ask ourselves, “What do I most hate about my enemy?” For in that resonant nugget of hatred is where our salvation lies.
But now that I have gotten this far into unearthing this notion of the Shadow, I can see that even this does not quite match my experience in the Screamscape. It feels like it might fit because this Scream dimension is an aspect of myself that I want to avoid owning up to, of acknowledging as my own. It feels like a guilty part of myself that I as some kind of Light Worker would need to suppress. My own engagement with Theosophy makes me ill at ease when I pay close attention to this darker dimension of my being. Jung himself points out this discomfort for those on the path of light:
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
— “The Philosophical Tree” (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies, (335)
And yet this sense of the light worker’s guilt doesn’t feel any more accurate than the terms “trauma,” “despair,” “angst,” “sadness,” or any of the other common designators of similar yet distinct emotions. I’m not even sure if the word “emotion” is accurate here, given the ceaseless driving state of this Scream. Freud’s notion of the drive would probably prove more accurate, except that this is a drive forever frozen, a forward motion forever stuck in mid-scream.
The distinguishing feature here that makes me doubt the Scream’s true Shadow nature is that this experience cannot be displaced through projection. There is no enemy out there who can make me feel comfortable in my own skin again because he or she embodies my own sins. The Scream cannot be displaced in such a way. It is intimately, infinitely there as one substrate dimension of my being. And that is all. It does not present itself as something to be worked through, to be called back home, although I am certain that denying its existence, of repressing its nature as part of my own psyche, would have devastating consequences. I would be blinded by my own light—my rejection of my own dark materials.
So what does this mean? What is to be done? In terms of ultimate destinations, I have none. At this moment, I find some sort of relief and release simply in bringing this darkness into the light as that which denies the simplicity of the light. And that feels good enough for me now. ———
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