Shrink-wrap Sunday 6.12.22
Return & Re-union... Rupture & Repair…(Repeat): A Week of Oaths in the Month of Vows
Welcome and newShrink greetings, this first June news-week of echoing oaths across a wide national stage in our politics.
It’s been a literal, at times even audible, opener for a month more associated with the imaginal and archetypal: Commencements and endings, separations and connections — with all of the various vow-taking those entail.
On the personal front effects from these elements of timing and symbol are magnified, of course, by last weekend’s high-school reunion events.
And this edition’s news-focus on the state of our politics is largely consumed by the intensified public concern and high-profile U.S. Senate and House hearings on mass-shooting gun violence and the January 6 Insurrection at the Capitol.
connecting themes…
First a few notes on terms used in those title themes to be reading, watching or listening for:
return-&-reunion… rupture-&-repair… (repeat)
The title’s R-words draw from both the archetypal concepts of depth/soul psychology and from the clinical psychotherapist’s consulting room.
🌀From the archetypal dimensions of depth psychology we have the images and language of returns and re-unions — which also carry the implicit rifts and ruptures of separation, absence, ordeal, or journey across time or space.
🌀From psychotherapy the paradoxical rupture-and-repair (the latter similar to return) is how individuals, relationships and even groups and countries become stronger, resilient, more deeply connected and awake: Only through risking, fully facing and by having navigated both ruptures/departures and repairs/returns together.
🌀Inherent in the repair or return in this sense is healing, making whole, at the deeply psychological, even sacred, level.
🌀These concepts apply to news events and issues at the community or national level when we ponder such questions as the state, health, viability and resilience of our democracy, its institutions and our relationships that form and define them. We can even raise “therapy-type” questions like, “Can — or, as some today seem to be asking, should — this union be saved?”
🌀And the (repeat) in the title is stated to emphasize both the cyclical, many-phased-nature and the perpetual, ever deepening challenges inherent in the healing of deep fissures. Just one historic example is our intense struggle today with effects of Civil War a century and a half ago. It remains a deep rupture after a poorly papered-over Reconstruction, exacerbated by generations of Jim Crow backlash, and now systematically denied as possible.
oaths vs vows: are they different?
By writing time I was curious about this…
🌀 A consensus of dictionaries has oath and vow as first-listed synonyms for each other, both defined as: A solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness or deity regarding one’s future actions or behavior.
🌀Vow in an old-fashioned sense can additionally suggest dedication and devotion to another, usually invoking a deity — hence the common use of the term, instead of oath, for weddings and religious vocations.
🌀In Jung’s depth/soul-focused psychology a vow is also associated with both vocation and the implicit felt phenomenon calling: The erotically charged pull of energy from archetypes of the collective unconscious. (One example of such phenomena in religious traditions is the Annunciation of Mary in Christianity.)
🌀In one departure the word oath has unique additional definition that’s interesting from a depth-psychological perspective. In addition to a sacred vow, oath can have the opposite negative/shadow-version meaning: An oath — but not a vow — can be: “a profane or offensive term used to express anger or other strong negative emotion.”
🌀In this sense of shadow oath’s negative — not merely unknown — aspects it’s fitting that we have Oath Keepers, along with the Proud Boys, increasingly connected and charged with the planned January 6 Insurrection. (And once again events involving the former President present wide contrasts, as described in the Sacred and the Profane, Sunday Shrink-wrap of 1.9.22 with that title.)
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… with stories
Today’s Shrink-wrap has four sections from the visual images above and followed in the same order below by selected news headlines, quotes and commentary.
🔷 First, images and quote at the center column are from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, the nearly 3,000-year-old expression of the archetypal ordeal or rupture of a decades-long absence for war and grueling process of return and consciously re-uniting.
🔷 Illustrated in the far-left column: news coverage and commentary on political hearings and effort on gun responsibility and safety in the aftermath of the tragic Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings amid what has become a near-daily nationwide epidemic of them.
🔷Images at the top of the far-right column depict coverage that began Thursday night with the dramatic first televised public House Committee hearings investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection;
🔷 And finally at bottom right are text and visual examples exploring the question of which and what kind of oaths and vows we take — from the perspective of depth psychological and soul-focused dimensions such as shadow.
The usual navigating details for accessing all links and references on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments.
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#1. Odysseus’ Return, Slaying of the False-Suitors and Reunion With Penelope
(Syrian gold intaglio, vase detail and terra cotta plaque from the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Depicted is the culmination of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, estimated by scholars to have been written about 725-675 BCE and intended for oral audiences. At focus here is the archetypal return and re-union of King Odysseus of Ithaca, with his wife Queen Penelope — first from fighting in 10-year Trojan War and then various travails of an additional 10-year struggle to make his way home. It’s a rupture so long and difficult the poem’s title has become a lower-case English synonym for such arduous separations and homeward treks.
Two new discoveries on revisiting the epic (which somehow weren’t obvious in Ms. Maggie Parker’s 10th grade English-class reading!):
🌀Both Odysseus and Penelope are guided throughout their ordeals by Athena, goddess of strategy and weaving — and every phase of the story, including the return and re-union, poses challenges each must meet with increased awareness and a lot of hard work. Psychologically no party, it’s a rupture-&-repair.
🌀And Penelope is much more complex than the familiar image of her as passive paragon of patience and boundless loyalty to Odysseus (who btw is no one-dimensional paragon, either). As Queen of Ithaca guided by Athena, it is Penelope’s weaving plot and her strategic management of the 108 other island-leaders competing for her hand in marriage that effectively set up Odysseus’ successful return, revealing himself as still the king, and their ultimate reunion. (Some sources here in addition to the poem: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Odyssey-epic-by-Homer and https://www.britannica.com/topic/Penelope-Greek-mythology.)
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Starting now from top far left, the next several items are from coverage of intensely emotional Senate and House hearings with survivors, families of victims, response workers and other community members from the recent Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings.
#2. "Those mothers’ cries I will never get out of my head.”
(From CNN, story plus pediatrician Dr. Guerro’s full remarks excerpted here)
My name is Dr. Roy Guerrero. I am a board certified pediatrician and I was present at Uvalde Memorial Hospital the day of the massacre on May 24th, 2022 at Robb Elementary School. I was called here today as a witness. But I showed up because I am a doctor. Because how many years ago I swore an oath — An oath to do no harm.
After witnessing first hand the carnage in my hometown of Uvalde, to stay silent would have betrayed that oath. Inaction is harm. Passivity is harm. Delay is harm. So here I am. Not to plead, not to beg or to convince you of anything. But to do my job. And hope that by doing so it inspires the members of this House to do theirs.
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#3. "The green Converse on her feet turned out to be the only clear evidence that could identify her after the shooting.”
(From NPR. AP Photo by Susan Walsh.)
A pair of green Converse shoes, drawings and personal pictures are just some of the remaining artifacts of the victims of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. Actor and Uvalde native Matthew McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, discussed some of these items during an at times emotional news conference on Tuesday at the White House.
Matthew McConaughey was in Washington, D.C., to call on lawmakers to address gun control and to share details of the 21 victims who died in the shooting.
One of those victims was 10-year-old Maite Rodriguez. A lover of animals and the environment, she dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. She often wore a pair of green (her favorite color) high-top Converse shoes with a heart drawn in marker over her right toes.
Camila Alves McConaughey held up a pair of green Converse shoes during her husband's news conference.
“It’s Time To Act on Gun Responsibility”
(Matthew McConaughey op-ed in the Austin-American Statesman. AP photo by Evan Vucci.)
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#4. Uvalde victim’s parents and a student who survived testify before Congress
(from NBC News)
Among the speakers was Miah Cerrillo, a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School who smeared a dead classmate’s blood on herself and pretended to be dead.
Both the House and Senate held hearings this week on gun violence and responsibility — and the House took action.
House Passes Gun Control Legislation
(The New York Times’ several stories under this link include studies on what gun safety measures work best — in both text and embedded video forms.)
After a morning of emotional testimony from survivors of recent gun violence and experts, lawmakers voted on measures that would curb access to firearms, largely along party lines.
The House passes a gun control bill in response to the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings (From NPR)
Tillis works with bipartisan group on gun laws (From McClatchyDC in The Charlotte Observer)
Opinions | No, Republicans, prairie dogs don’t matter more than murdered children.
The GOP needs to rediscover its moral clarity and common sense on guns.
(Opinion by Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post)
Shifting now to far top-right in the visual are images depicting coverage of Thursday night’s first televised public presentation of the House Committee findings in its investigation of the January 6 Insurrection plot to overthrow the 2020 Presidential election. The hearings were televised on all major national news and cable news networks — but not Fox Channel, which aired its usual hosted programming entirely without commercial breaks in which viewers might be tempted to flip to the news.
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#5. Live Updates: Trump ‘Lit the Flame’ for Riot, Cheney Says
(From The New York Times, this first link includes both a complete range of story coverage in text and embedded video form. NYT photos by Kenny Holston. )
The bipartisan House panel investigating the attack, led by Representatives Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, opened its landmark series of public hearings by making the case for a methodical conspiracy led by former President Donald J. Trump.
The committee’s first witnesses helped depict chaos and violence on the ground.
(NYT)
Dishonor, Trump’s and his party’s, is the real January 6th Takeaway
(From The New Yorker)
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Here is another figure emerging on the national stage of these intensely important issues, this one increasingly a profile in courage to me — regardless of the fact I have never knowingly agreed with or liked a political position or issue she has supported.
#6. Liz Cheney: Vice Chairwoman Has Become a G.O.P. Outcast for Condemning Trump
(NYT. Staff photo by Doug Mills. )
WASHINGTON — Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, had just matter-of-factly rattled off a string of damning revelations illustrating how former President Trump had stoked the mob who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when she paused to address the members of her own party who she said were “defending the indefensible.”
“There will come a day when President Trump is gone,” Ms. Cheney said. “But your dishonor will remain.”
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The Lillian Hellman quote in the visual struck me as in kindred spirit with Cheney. (The vocal socialist playwright — who supported the brutal Stalin in the ‘30s but later stood up to Joe McCarthy’s congressional witch-hunts for “communist ideas” in the ‘50s — did differ from the Congresswoman in most every other imaginable way!)
This profile from The Guardian presents a balance of the good-bad-and-ugly of the talented late writer: The Scandalous Lillian Hellman.
I have had a tender spot for Hellman and the book Julia ever since the 1977 title-portrait film with Jane Fonda as Hellman, Vanessa Redgrave as Julia. Jason Robards played Hellman’s longtime love Dashiell Hammett, the writer McCarthy’s team blacklisted from his craft for 10 years.
Julia is the source of another favorite Hellman quote, and a concept that echoes today’s soul-themes of return, revisiting, re-union: Pentimento:
Pentimento has the Greek root penthos, and is also linked to Latin, Italian and English words such as repent. It’s associated with bittersweet feelings of looking back with nostalgia, an effort to integrate the past forward. So, of pentimento I would add that in addition to “seeing, and seeing again” it is a way also “of feeling, and then feeling again.”
As over the course of a soul-engaged life, the painting doesn’t remain static. Nor does it fade or disappear. It deepens. Moves. Grows multi-dimensional. It, above all, surprises with a life of its own.
(I love that.)
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6 takeaways from the Jan. 6 committee’s first prime-time hearing
(The Washington Post)
Compelling for me while watching this well-spelled-out factual case in real time were the videotaped timing and other elements that make clear the Insurrection was not a protest or even riot “that got out of hand” but an advance-planned conspiracy involving Trump himself and close associates. Also convincing was videotaped testimony from Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr, affirmed on tape by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and others of his inner circle, that Trump had been told and knew that he lost the election, there was no fraud that would have changed the outcome, and his claim of a stolen election was, in Barr’s words, “nonsense” and “bullshit.”
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This final section on coverage of the January 6 Committee Investigation also marks my transition to broader and deeper questions around oaths and vows. I’ll say more about those in final section #7 below.
First this, from political-historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. (The complete piece from Friday, June 10, is at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com.) Bold emphasis here is mine.
Part of the crisis in which we find ourselves today is that many people don’t understand what is at stake in the hearings, in part because commentators have turned the attempt of Trump and his supporters to overturn our democracy into a mud-wrestling fight between Democrats and Republicans rather than showing it as an existential fight for rule of law. Today in his Presswatchers publication, Dan Froomkin explored how U.S. news organizations have failed to communicate to readers that we are on a knife edge between democracy and authoritarianism.
Froomkin notes that journalists have framed the January 6 hearings as a test for the Democrats or as a waste of time because they will not change anyone’s mind or perhaps because no one cares. He begged journalists not to downplay the hearings and present them as a horse race, but to frame the events of January 6 in the larger context of Republican attempts to overturn our democracy.
I read this HCR piece after having read, re-read and saved with dismay this Wednesday column in which The New York Times’ long self-identified moderate-conservative columnist David Brooks seems to have done just that:
The Jan. 6 Committee Has Already Blown It
(The first Neilson ratings data from the Thursday night prime-time hearing suggest otherwise, per The Washington Post.)
With more time and space in a future edition soon, and with several of Brooks’ recent columns along with this one, I want to revisit and try to track where he seems to be coming from — and from what voice and “vows” he is speaking — these days.
Which brings me to broader, deeper questions that are showing up as today’s closing thoughts for this week of oaths in the month of vows.
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#7. What oaths? Which vows?
To try and illustrate what I am getting at here I turn to what is surely the first and only time I’ve cited a Facebook entry. It’s from David Whyte, the first and only poet I’ve ever followed there, other than ones who are friends. (I highly recommend his full version of poem he excerpts here, along with about any other random selection in his entire book pictured above at bottom-right, The House of Belonging.)
I chose to spotlight this Facebook page, even with the flawed though beautiful photo, for his application of the poem’s themes not only to personal, internal contemplations but also to momentous career- and calling crossroads such as that of Catholic Priest John O’Donohue that he describes here.
My dear friend and reader, author and depth psychology professor Dr. Elizabeth Nelson, has a take on this in her blog that I particularly like (bold emphasis is mine):
The shadowy valleys, deep and still, are full of our unconscious, unvoiced commitments. I call them shadow vows. They’re formed from the assumptions, beliefs, and fantasies we bring... Sometimes without knowing it…
Here she’s talking about profoundly conscious one-on-one relationship between individuals. I find her concepts, and the questions she poses, can apply to all of our levels of relationship — with plural others, with community, with nation… even our relationship with democracy.
Like many Jungians, I have discovered that exploring my shadow—the footfalls that “echo on the vaults below” — gives shape and substance to conscious life… Exploring the shadowy areas of any profound relationship throws our conscious, spoken commitments into high relief.
Just what, exactly, have I vowed? and Am I living up to or into my vows—or were they empty of meaning then and now?
Joining hers, and those of Whyte, some additional questions come to my mind:
🌀Whether, and how, have one’s vows or oaths evolved, later revealed previously unknown dimensions, or changed entirely over time?
🌀Whether, and how, are one’s said-aloud oaths or vows and the private soul-level ones the same — or are they different?
🌀If different, has that been conscious (ie. lying), or was it heretofore unconscious (so now poses a necessary moral choice and action?)
These days watching the hearings, seeing politicians in action, reading and watching and listening to various stuff from journalists and pundits, and day-to-day life all seem to keep bringing the distilled question to mind:
What oaths, what true vows, are being served here?
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I’ll leave you now with a few first-takes on this year’s favorite, true-blue glory. (The bottom-right photo is from a year ago, exactly — taken June 11, 2021.) I like this year’s color better, but last year’s cooler, wetter spring brought more flowers and ultimately larger ones.
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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