Day 22 - Jan 22nd
SEXTON
Controlled collapse
everyone sinks down.
I stay swaying.
ring finger bobbing on pew
a collective, sigh
of air shooting out the long ends of the kneeler
a wee ‘wooosh’
like a tired old lady’s fart.
no joke in it.
And now the same head spot
becomes a headshot.
the offside trap sprung
the vantage now rarified
and deadly for it.
But yet I stay standing
after everything
stupidity and timidity. insouciance and curiosity
pure boyish bloody-mindedness
No time to cower into thoughts
the sexton is on my shoulder now
not quite Beatrice
but a good enough mother
face encased in golden trim
I am brought to heel and pulpit
she flails ahead
as solemn thurifer
the air pregnant
with the stink of incense
I am to celebrate.
I want to cry all the same
(I want to try all the same)
3 foot long
1 foot wide
a board with my symbols laid out for me to decipher and divine.
No one to turn to,
nowhere to hide
Largo begins.
Niall Campbell
My good friend gifted me a book that meant a lot to me—Rick Rubin's book about creativity. Rubin had a tactic he would use with artists when they were struggling or stuck, especially lyrically. He would have them randomly open a book and then work with that. Some of the most memorable lines of System of a Down's "Chop Suey" were borne of such a prompt.
Far from being an act of abandonment, randomness, laziness, or plagiarism, this is actually a very clever tactic because it seems to do a couple of things:
It takes the pressure off the creator (and gets them out of their own way from an ego perspective) by having them surrender to the fact that there is actually nothing new under the sun. All ideas are, in some sense, derivative, so the prima facie of your creation will always be someone else’s—this way, you just expedite that fact. It humbles the creator to give up the ghost that they are in charge of the creative act.
Paradoxically, it emboldens the creator to take control - to show them that almost instantly they will weave, craft and modulate the material they randomly find through their own being, their own prism. The source material—Schrödinger’s cat—won’t be alive or dead upon them looking on it, but a dog. It won’t collapse into a wave or into a particle but into some third element that never existed before.
This outlet of reasoning doesn’t even need the third, more spiky strand of metaphysical synchronicity—you can stay squarely in the material world and accept that going direct to the source of other great art will inspire you to create new stuff when you are stuck.
As a newly minted father for the second time, working also and with family staying, it’s not exactly a time choc-a-bloc with Instagrammable new experiences for me on a daily basis, so the experiential stock in my head is a bit dry. For the remainder of January, I’m therefore taking Rubin’s advice and randomly opening books of great art that line my shelves - to see what falls out of my head.
Maybe it’s meant to be, maybe some divine hand guides me to select certain passages, maybe it’s just a way to interface with any good piece of source material and stretch yourself to produce something new with it or use it as a jumping-off pad—or maybe it’s a bit of both. It doesn’t matter.
Today, I chose Man and His Symbols, by C.G. Jung which was in my office, and randomly opened it to page 193. It was a passage about a man having a dream.
Here’s the passage I read:
“Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the anima’s role in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening a way into more profound inner depths. It is as if the inner radio becomes tuned to a certain wavelength that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the great man to be heard.
In establishing this inner radio reception, the anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier; this is the role of Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius, the famous author of The Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life.
The dream of a 45-year-old psychotherapist may help to make clear how the anima can be an inner guide. As he was going to bed on the evening before he had this dream, he thought to himself that it was hard to stand alone in life, lacking the support of a church. He found himself envying people who are protected by the maternal embrace of an organisation. (He had been born a Protestant but no longer had any religious affiliation.) This was his dream:
*I am in the aisle of an old church filled with people. Together with my mother and my wife, I sit at the end of the aisle in what seem to be extra seats.
I am to celebrate the Mass as a priest, and I have a big Mass book in my hands, or, rather, a prayer book or an anthology of poems. This book is not familiar to me, and I cannot find the right text. I am very excited because I have to begin soon, and, to add to my troubles, my mother and wife disturb me by chattering about unimportant trifles. Now the organ stops, and everybody is waiting for me, so I get up in a determined way and ask one of the nuns who is kneeling behind me to hand me her Mass book and point out the right place, which she does in an obliging manner. Now, like a sort of sexton, this same nun precedes me to the altar, which is somewhere behind me and to the left, as if we are approaching it from a side aisle. The Mass book is like a sheet of pictures, a sort of board, three feet long and a foot wide, and on it is the text with ancient pictures in columns, one beside the other.
First the nun has to read a part of the liturgy before I begin, and I have still not found the right place in the text. She has told me that it is Number 15, but the numbers are not clear, and I cannot find it. With determination, however, I turn toward the congregation, and now I have found Number 15 (the next to the last on the board), although I do not yet know if I shall be able to decipher it. I want to try all the same. I wake up.*
This resonated deeply with me. There is no roadmap or straightforward way to acquire the knowledge to do what I want to do. I really must stop waiting for some external saviour to rescue me from a dreary mess and instead accept that I am the priest of my own house. Far from being narcissistic or indulgent, this is actually a deeply responsible and liberating realisation.
In my experience as a psychotherapist, even when clients achieve change within mainstream mental health paradigms, the pivotal and essential shift has always stemmed from some form of psychospiritual transformation. This isn’t to suggest they abandon conventional approaches like medication or therapy—these can be invaluable for symptom management and stabilisation. However, medications are ultimately palliative; they address the surface but don’t reach the core. Real healing and the true transcendence of challenges rarely arise in a purely secular framework.
Clients often don’t openly discuss these transformative experiences with their wider circle, but they do confide in their therapist. If you really pay attention—listen with all your senses—it becomes clear that the turning point, the moment that truly moves the needle, is when they tap into something beyond the material or conventional. This process is subtle but profound, forming a foundation for every other positive change that follows.
Anima dreams, or the realisation that you are in charge and possess deep autonomy, are terrifying yet exhilarating. Psychotherapists might describe this as shifting to an internal locus of control—making decisions that are intrinsically motivated and aligned with the deepest parts of oneself. But this shift is rarely cut-and-dried. It often reveals itself through pivotal moments: a dream, a profound insight, or an external inflection point, a kind of crunch time when the person steps up for themselves. Whether these moments occur in waking life or dreams, they should be celebrated and noted.
Another story came to mind as I read this passage in Jung’s book: Steven Pressfield’s tale of Largo in The War of Art.
In the book, Pressfield dreams of being on a ship with a sea-worn crew. Among them is Largo—the tough, steady, and fearless one the crew relies on amidst turbulent seas and a damaged hull. During a deadly storm, the captain, visibly worried, talks to Pressfield about what to do. Suddenly, the captain turns to him and asks, “What are we going to do about it, Largo?”
In that moment of utter surprise, Pressfield realises: he is Largo.
You are your own Largo. Tune out all other stations except for the still, silent voice cutting through the noise. You may feel alarmed, saddened, or exhilarated as you begin to slough off what no longer serves you. But this inner radio—this shipping forecast—is the only station you can truly navigate by without, sooner or later, running aground.