The Moon Palace Chapter 3 The talking Heads.

The Moon Palace.

Chapter 3   The Talking Head

• The daughter’s love affair with the Head.
• The rejection of the daughter’s suitor by the father.
• The violence against the daughter’s suitor by the father.
• The wounding of the father/daughter relationship.
• The daughter’s search for her beloved and where that leads her.
• The conversation with the Head at the bottom of the ocean.

The narrative tells us One day the young girl was walking along the tundra and what did she find on the ground but a Head.  She was amazed to see a Head lying there on the ground obviously alive and so she began a conversation with the Head. 

One of our difficulties in unpacking this story is that it is very close to home and our personal relationships. The formation of our Egos separated us from our Soul and our natural child-like ability to relate. As Ego is formed, we are taught how to relate and with whom.  Worst of all, we are taught whom and what to hate. The story exposes many of our shadows and assumptions across genders. At the same time, in dealing with personal relationships, it also deals with our collective relationship with the huge forces that govern our society, the Status-quo and its handmaiden, our mother. The mother of necessity.

The strange thing was that the daughter never introduced the man to the mother and father and so the sounds of conversation came out of their daughter’s bedroom, but they never saw the man, and the daughter never mentioned him.

The Daughter’s Love affair with the Head. To understand the daughter’s deep love for the Head we need only to go back to our own love affairs and remember our feelings associated with that. Finding a disembodied Head to talk to is a sort of relief for the daughter. Here is a man, not her father, that she can talk to. The Head does not have any of the off-putting qualities of the young boys from the village. Remember she found them “Quite stupid and generally unattractive”.  The Head does not violate the fears fathers have for their daughters with other males.

Between a man and a woman, there can be a world of conversation to be had, as both explore how the other finds the world and their place in it. When you find the right person for this conversation, all other judgments can be suspended (love is blind). This conversation can be intense and very intimate. This conversational intimacy can equal the physical intimacy of sex. The daughter falls in love with the Head, and with the inspiring and enlivening conversation, they are having. But at some level, she feels uncomfortable with the relationship and so does share the identity of the Head with her parents.

This conversation can be a beautiful thing. The one person you can say anything to, the one who does not judge you or your most intimate thoughts, the one who can take your thoughts and compare them with their own. From the two strains of thought new and exciting understandings of the world around us can emerge. Both parties leave the conversation uplifted and acknowledged. Both speak to each other’s Soul. This is a rare and beautiful conversation. It is also very addictive because we know that it’s so right and even necessary.

Here is a poem by David Whyte that speaks to Soul directly, which like cupids’ arrows, goes right through the stone heart of the Ego to Soul.

Just beyond yourself by David Whyte

The first step is to stop having the conversation we are having now. (Which we? – our Ego.)

Fall still and listen.

To turn our head to the side and look from another point of view.

To be invitational in that moment and wait to be informed.

Then to be powerfully and authentically vulnerable.

It’s where you need to be.

Half a step into self-forgetting
and the rest restored by what
you’ll meet.

There is a road always beckoning.

When you see the two sides of it
closing together at that far horizon
and deep in the foundations
of your own heart at exactly
the same time,

that’s how you know it’s the road
you have to follow.

That’s how you know it’s where
you have to go.

That’s how you know you have
to go.

That’s how you know.

Just beyond yourself,
it’s where you need to be.

 

Love

When two Souls meet.

(The world is hungry for this conversation and so am I).

Love and intimacy – sometimes the same thing.

Love is an anathema to the Status-quo. In the first place, it is a category error to compare them. Love is deeply personal at a Soul level and the Status-quo is an aggregation of collective ideologies and beliefs about itself, a construct of thinking at the very top of the collective. The Status-quo would offer us endless promises of this intimate conversation as it sees itself, not only as a substitute for Soul, but the creator of the manifest universe. The Status-quo has no difficulty in its creator role, offering a substitute for Soul through the endless distractions of the mass media to keep us away from the real conversations. Intimacy and real conversation are an anathema to the Ego and the Ego’s master, the Status-quo.

Often when this happens, we say “I have fallen in love” There is a connection between the Souls of the two lovers. The impact of the two Shadows is suspended as we make ourselves vulnerable to each other. They say love is blind. Love is blind because both agree not to trigger the other’s shadow – a trust is formed. Indeed, part of this deep and long conversation is the back story of these Shadows and how, when, and where they were formed. While others may see the lovers’ Shadows very clearly and see trouble ahead, the lovers are oblivious while the conversation around shadows continues. Our divorce courts are the battleground where the conversational cease-fire is lifted and the two who were so deeply in love before are now scrabbling for more and more firepower to annihilate each other’s Shadows.

Our hunger for intimacy. Young children have this intimacy naturally with their surroundings, or rather they haven’t lost it yet. It is our connection to Soul. As adults, we are very attracted to this facet of children. We find their energy for life enlivening and disturbing at the same time. We shut down exuberance in our own children as ours was shut down as we grew up, learning that exuberance was not appreciated. Through this process of shutting down we cut off our natural connection to Soul … eventually deny its very existence. It is hard to write about Soul in this context because we don’t use the word in everyday language, so the word itself has lost meaning and understanding. This is the extent to which the Status-quo has been successful in eliminating Soul’s existence.

There is an aspect to this story we have mostly ignored, which is the physical body with its own feelings and its own consciousness.

We accepted the idea of a talking Head most readily. I did. Heads do all the talking anyway and so we assume that the seat of consciousness is in or around the Head and that thought originates in the “grey matter” of the brain. In our western culture, there is a Cartesian split (I think therefore I am) between the Head and the body. We have head offices, head mechanics, with head always referring to the top or the leading position. Our experience of love is not, however, limited to the head, despite the deep conversations that pass through our heads. Where is memory held? Much of memory is held in the body, especially trauma.

• The rejection of the daughter’s suitor by the father.
  • The violence against the daughter’s suitor by the father.
  • The wounding of the father/daughter relationship.

 

The narrative tells us. After a short time or a long time or however long time that takes, the father became so curious that one day when the daughter was out, he went into the bedroom so he could meet this man.  Can you imagine his surprise when on the pillow of her bed all he saw was a Head?  He became so enraged at what he saw that he went outside and got his ice axe, came back into the bedroom, and struck the Head in the eye with his axe. 

We can see there are some taboos around private space in the household. The daughter was out, and the father chose that time to go into the bedroom. This tells us something about the father/daughter relationship and the expectations that are assumed in that relationship. It tells us that the father trusted the daughter not to break the agreement between them. That he, the father, would always fill the role of ideals, thoughts, and intellectual philosophies – his Ego’s concept of the head space anyway.

He became so enraged at what he saw that he went outside and got his ice axe, came back into the bedroom, and struck the Head in the eye with his axe. 

In relationships there are unspoken agreements upon which the relationship is grounded. We as parents often ask our children to carry parts of ourselves. If those agreements are broken, it is seen as a betrayal. The trust is broken.

Only a parent or a lover can understand the depths of this betrayal and the inner rage it can cause. The destruction we can perpetrate on others as we try to dump our rage on those lower down in the pecking order. Just look at how parents will use their children as weapons in child custody and divorce cases. All behaviours and lies are justified by this hurt, this betrayal.

While all this is self-explanatory, there is a deeper part which our Shadow plays in this rage, we should know about. Remember that all the characters in the story are parts of ourselves.

I’m going to use a little story to explain this inner rage. Once there was a Monk who was trying to meditate, but he kept getting interrupted by this and that. Despite telling the whole monastery not to interrupt him, it kept happening. So, he decided to take a boat out into the middle of a large lake and meditate there. All good – yes? Well, after a while he felt a bump of another boat hitting his boat. He woke up from his meditation in a rage and was about to explode, when he opened his eyes. He saw an empty boat drifting past in the wind. At that moment he realised the rage was inside himself.

So too, the father’s rage was inside him and he struck out, hitting the offending Head in the eye with his ice axe.

In a way, the father’s action was premeditated. He had to go outside to retrieve his weapon of choice. He had a short time to reconsider, but he didn’t. He went back with the ice axe and hit the Head – where? In the eye.

We could say that the choice of weapon and target was unconscious, but it tells us a lot about the relationship between father-daughter and the Shadows they project on each other. The ice axe is a tool to enable one to traverse frozen ground by giving a grip on the ice, which would otherwise be unobtainable. The eye is the part that sees, but what does it see? The psychically incestuous relationship between the father and the daughter. The father immediately understands that he has been seen and blinds that sight as best he can, in the hope that he can protect the father/daughter relationship. However, the “cat is out of the bag” and will not go back in.

• The wounding of the father/daughter relationship.
• The daughter’s search for her beloved and where that leads her.
• The conversation with the head at the bottom of the ocean.
• The absent mother.

In stories of these types whoever is mentioned first in the story is the relationship the story is going to deal with. In this case Father, mother, daughter, and the frozen land. We have covered some of the territories of the father/daughter relationship but not all of it.

The mother is absent in the narrative, the feminine aspect, the balancing aspect of the family is missing, we can say it is missing or excluded by the special relationship between the father and the daughter. The daughter becomes a Princess to the father and the mother is relegated to a household servant. Perhaps it’s dangerous to infer things from what the narrative does not tell us. At the end of the story, we will see it is the feeling function that is missing, the very function needed to become fully human again the function that should be modeled by the mother. In this case, perhaps the special father/daughter relationship did not allow it.

For the Head and the father, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. I wonder how many fathers reading this, approved of the first guys their daughters brought home? I know I didn’t.

The narrative continues: When the daughter came home, she went into her bedroom to talk to her head.  When she got there the Head was missing, but a trail of blood told her what had happened, she raced out of the house following the trail of blood across the ice until she reached the ocean. She saw that the trail of blood went down into the depths of the ocean. 

Without hesitation, she dived into the water and swam down to the bottom of the ocean following the trail of blood.  When she got to the bottom of the ocean, she found a house and inside that house, she saw her head sitting on the table.  Also sitting on the table were the Head’s mother and father, sisters and brothers. They were all Heads.  She went inside and asked her Head why he had left.  He said, “your father hit me with an ice axe so I thought it was best I leave”. She asked him to please come back with her.  He replied, “I don’t think your father likes me very much, so I don’t think that that’s a good idea.” 

Without hesitation, the daughter followed the blood trail across the tundra and down into the depths of the ocean to find her beloved Head. She has a conversation with the Head. The Head explains the problem with the father and that for a continued conversation between them she needs to sort out her issues with her father.

In stories of this sort, we know that geography tells us where within the psyche the story takes place. We are at the bottom of the ocean and the ocean of?   What is the nature of this ocean?    

 

From here there are only two roads to take from here. Back to the father or go to the Moon Palace.………………Chapter 4