The Museum of the Mothers

Ah – Welcome.

So glad you could make it.

Come this way.

Follow me.

Through the revolving doors at the end of this corridor.

You have been expected: most people make their way here in the end.

We keep the lighting deliberately low. Too much and the exhibits begin to fade, as we wouldn't want that, would we?

Now, who was it you wanted to see?

Ah – I see. You are not really too sure whether you want to do this or not.

I know: it is hard, very hard.

Most people find on their first trip that it is, how can I put this – challenging?

I mean, it is the answer, well, a sort of answer to some of those very dark questions, isn't it, and if the answers are not quite what you expected, well, that is disturbing - I do understand that.

I have seen some very strange and very distressing reactions to what we have in here; but that can't be helped. We only have the exhibits in the condition in which they were deposited, and then time does take its toll.

The more we expose the exhibits to the light, the more they deteriorate. Come in quite complete they do, but then, visit after visit, they get exposed, more stripped away. Some are really quite tatty, you know. Viewing, after viewing. What is to be expected? What was it that the visitor wanted to see? They do not seem to realise that with each seeing they take something away. After all, that is why you all come, isn't it?

Mind the steps.

I know that the lighting is dim, so please be careful. You really wouldn't want to crash into someone else’s cabinets would you?

Now – here we are.

Gather round.

Are you a party or have you all just arrived at the same time?

It is important to know. You see, if you are all together it is so much simpler - we don't need a separate guide for each of you then as you all have some interest in seeing each others exhibits. But if you are all separate, then I must ask you to wait here until we can get enough guides: one each I am afraid - unless you are in groups that is?

Much simpler if you are in groups.

So are you a party?

Ah – some of you are.

Oh good.

If you are part of a party would like to stand together so we can see what groups you are in - then we can assign you to an escort.

Now - what about the rest of you?

Are you all positive that you want to do this alone? Some people do find it very hard.

A little support? A bit of company?

We do find that people who do this in groups or pairs stay a lot longer. I like to think they get more out of it. Besides, seeing other people's exhibits does give some sense of perspective to seeing your own: So much more balanced.

We do find that sole viewers often leave in a very distressed state, and, judging by the ware on the exhibits, they have taken very little away with them.

Hardly worth it for all of that distress I would have thought. I don't know. Perhaps we all need the insight that viewing with others gives us - makes it possible for us to take more away; to benefit more. But who knows? It is not for me to say what you should get out of this visit, now is it?

So I shall let you decide - do you want to view on your own, or would you like to pair up, or even, perhaps, make up a small group?

I shall let you deicide what you want to do whilst I sort out those three big groups we have got; I do need to go through the preliminaries with them before they set off with their guides; meanwhile you can decide what how you would like to do this. I does help us if you are in groups, but that is only incidental - it really is up to you. What you want will dictate what we will do - but it will all take so much longer to organise if you all want to have solo viewings. Anyway – I shall be back in a while, when I have sorted out the others.

Ah – sorry to have been so long; was not quite as simple as I thought; they were groups, but not groups of relatives. So much easier to organise when it is relatives; then at least they all have known the people they are seeing. No need to go into all that background, you see, well, not as much anyway. Relatives should all know the history of the deceased, at least in broad outline if not in fine detail.

Surprising how much extra comes pouring out when they start the viewing with relatives though; each one seems to remind the other of this or that.

Women especially seem to want to tell each other some much more detail, as if they have to work out a whole web of family history before they are free to go.

Dreadfully superficial some of it. That is the down side with family groups.

Superficial!

So much that cannot be said, you see: so many little family taboos and fictions. Some times it take lots of visits before they can even being to look at the obvious features of the exhibits. Sort of unsayable so much of the time.

Then very often, they have to sneak back, one at a time, to look at the bits they dared not mention when the others were there.

Non-family friends are so much more forthright about the exhibits. Get through it all so much quicker. And everyone seems to take away so much more.

So. Have you decided whether you would like to view on your own, or would you like to go in groups?

AH – groups. Oh good. So much simpler – and I am sure you will get so much more out of it this way.

Now. Mixed groups or single sex?

We do find that women work very well together, but men tend to be a little reluctant if they are in an all male group. Some groups of men are almost impossible. They just freeze up and will not look at what they are seeing.

Others are not too bad. But if they have been to boarding school, or have been in the forces, it is more or less pointless. Nothing happens. They could come a thousand times, and nothing has changed. It is as if they want to turn the exhibits into shrines or something: too holy to be even looked at. Mostly men on their own do that.

And Man who has been to boarding school and then in the forces, they are the worst. When they die the exhibit is still here, just as pristine as when it came in, then what are we to do with it? There might be other relatives, in which case there is hope. Someone might do all the viewing necessary – but is is only a hope.

But women - now that is different. Dissection! Especially if they come with close friends. They really go at it. They really won't let the other not see what they are seeing. They will just keep on and on at it until the other gives in and looks fully. Close friends are good, as they feel that they just have to tell them everything, every last detail, no mater how intimate. Nothing is left unsaid eventually. Works wonderfully. In not too many trips the exhibit is quite used up.

Ah good – you have all decided.

OK. If you are five groups – that it, two or three together does work well!

Not quite so sure about you seven though; always get the feeling that some get left out a bit when the number is that big; too easy for the quiet ones not to say what they need to say, and then they only find they have to come back so much more often. But if you are happy with such a big group? - OK – your choise.

The other guides are on their way. They will be with you in a minute. If you would all just stay in the groups you have chosen.

And you sir, if you would stand over there, a guide for solos will find you.

You are sure, sir, that you want to do this on your own?

Ah well!

I have arranged for a special guide for you. They are fully trained in shock recovery. Some people just are not prepared for what comes out of the experience, and we wouldn't want you permanently injured, now would we?

Some people, men in particular, do not handle the emotional recoil well. They do not know what has hit them and are left either totally confused or in compete denial. Either way they have not benefited as they might, and it may take months, no, even years of remedial work for them to recover the ground they have lost. Such a shame. After all, the point is to dissolve the exhibit over time. And that is never going to happen if they are covered with an extra layer of hubris each time, now will it.

OK. If you two would like to come with me. I shall take you through the initial briefing before we proceed to the viewing hall where your exhibits are.

First, you must understand what the exhibits are.

When people die they not only leave a body, but they also leave a extra-personam. It is a bit like the skin a snake leaves when it sheds its skin, only it is made up of all they ever did or said ossified into a shell. A sort cast of what they were.

It looks like them. It sounds like them. It speaks like them – only it is frozen in place, stopped in time the moment they died. We get these extra-personam brought here and we put them into display cases.

Far better than having ghosts drifting around all over the place, with the advantage that they can be viewed whenever relatives or friends want.

Ghosts are just so unpredictable and unreliable. Besides people are usually so disconcerted by ghosts turning up at random, that they do not make the most of the opportunity. What we found was that there was a real need for more orderly viewings – hence this museum was established.

We decided to focus on mother's first as they seem to be the one's that people most want to see – hence the name of the museum – but we are expanding the collection to include other relatives and acquaintances. Should cover the entire range in time. I believe copies of our museum are springing up all over the world.

We do discourage vicarious viewing - preferring only people with whom the exhibit was actually acquainted in real life to view them; or friends of those people if accompanied by the acquaintance. We do find that viewing with a friend, or at least a mentor, is far more fruitful – a soul guardian ad litem is quite a good idea if a good friend is not available – very professional they are.

You may find the exhibits look a little strange at first. You must understand what you are seeing is a condensate of all that that person was, so it contains all the visual images that they were, from babyhood to death. Many people find this rather difficult to focus on at first, but, if you stick with it you will find that the swirling of images stabilises, and the one that you are most used to will emerge as the dominant one. It should be quite recognisable as the deceased at one or other times of their life – usually that stage that the viewer most wants to understand about.

Occasionally some exhibits are more unstable, but we find that is often to do with the agitation of the views; although there are some that are simply utterly unstable; we wonder if they might have been like that in life?

It is a good idea when viewing to have clearly in mind what it is you need to know or what it is you want to show about the exhibit to the people you have come with. It is not ever possible to get a fully rounded view of the exhibit, so it is better to focus on just a few things. If each visit you make you choose a few different things to deal with, then in no time you will have got though the whole process of decomposing the exhibit, and all we will have is a nice empty display case ready for the next occupant.

Sadly, there are not that many visitors who manage a complete decomposition, who reach a point of resolution for each point they they needed to examine about the relationship they had with the deceased. Many give up the process and leave us stuck with a part decomposed extra personam. Most unfortunate.

But we cannot make peole come can we? Shame really, but there you are.

Now, I do hope you have a clear mind as to what you want to discover today - what aspect of the exhibit it is that you want to deal with. You will find a number of buttons on the front of the display case that should help. They each activate some aspect of the exhibit – anger, laughter, sadness, happiness and so on.

We do advise uttomost caution when using the lust botton.

Finally, I do have to warn you that you will be entirely responsible for any damage you do to the case. Please, no matter how enraged you may feel about the exhibit, remember that it is only an image in there, an extra personam, not the real person any more. It cannot respond to you in any way.

All that you are doing is carrying out a process of slow exorcism. When you have taken away all that you came for then they will be completely decomposed and we can reuse the case.

And now, if you would like to follow me I will take you to meet your deceased's extra personam.

Jung & I

Pretentious of me, but, well, why not? Am I not also just a human-being attempting at being? Stumbling and fumbling, tripping and falling, and mostly failing – or is that last point my labelling myself with negative spin? I don't know. And perhaps that is the point. We cannot know, not in some deep, organised final, absolute, truth from all points of view, ultimate frame sense. In a relativistic universe all we can aspire to is some sort of truce of understanding – a partiality that functions – a survival map.

The very paradox of life, at its core, is that we must believe in the world we inhabit, believe the fiction that we impose, take that mind-trick as reality. If we do not believe whole-heartedly then we tear ourselves apart. We deny the reality of reality - or at least of the only reality we can have: none other is on offer. We must have absolute conviction that the ground under our feet is indeed ground under our feet, that the sky over our heads is indeed sky over our heads, that what we touch and feel is as we perceive it to be. We must not step outside of that illusion. Yet at depth we know it to be an illusion; know it cognitively; know it logically; know it scientifically: but if we dare to know it with our whole being then we walk the path of madness.

Such a place is a place of gut wrenching fear, or numbness, or terror. To dissociate from the reality of reality is to enter a very dark hell. The longing that you have for reality to be real once more, to walk and talk, to wake and sleep, to feel and touch, to hear and see once more as when you were a child, when reality was truly real and sharp and pressed upon you with a keenness, that longing is unbearable. So we live the paradox, no, more, we embrace it, oh how we must embrace it.

It is as if we were passengers upon a ship at sea, a ship with no windows or door to the outside. A ship that contains all that we know and all that we can know. It furnishing and light, its rooms and spaces are the sum total of our world. They are the limits of our being. Yet it is but a ship tossed on a vast sea. A vast sea with deeps and shallows, with storms and calms, with unending skies and dark nights. A sea in which lurks who-knows-what monsters and apparitions, for it is a sea which we will never glimpse.

At times we may get intimations of the sea's existence. Our world is tossed by its storms and we are thrown about by its tumults – but yet we have no way of referencing it. It is the outside that we can never access. We can, by act of imagination, by picturing, by turning down the volume of the rush-a-day life of the inboard, of what we take to be the totality of our reality - this dance of life - and just for a time sense the dark sea on which we travel. Then we will understand that all that we see, all that we know is but the inside of an ocean tossed ship.

Like Jung I suffered, as do many, perhaps most even, a mid-life crisis. Perhaps it is no more than the shedding of a younger skin, something that we must all do, so that we may grow old usefully and not trapped in our youthful follies. There is something sad about older people who are still try to be no more than their younger selves. The Peter Pans of this world, be they male or female. The older women dressing the same as their daughters and going out clubbing, competing together for the same men. The older men still trying to be seen as young and vital, with flash cars, gold chains and designer watches. A face-lifted society forever pretending to be what they once were.

To survive we often feel that we need to devise a map of this existence we are in – to help us come to terms with it, to help us to regain a sense of sanity. To put the “reality” that we know it into place. To understand it in a wider context. To see the life-ship upon the sea as it were. For Jung it was the mandala, the recurrent pattern of the quaternion and the circle that provided him with a key. With it he built his map - the cross sectional view of the levels of the self. For me it was the pentagon emerging from a scattering of rune stones.

The insight inspiration, the leap of imagination that produced my map was, when it happened, overwhelming. It poured into me and swamped all other thoughts and activity. It was a knowing of a deeper understanding, a wordless understanding, an emergent eureka. I felt so much at peace – a feeling of a great mental battle won - and yet I had not been aware of the battle, just the angst, just the nausea, just the perplexity, the grinding sense of unease. Worse, a sense of a world pattern in which I could no longer live arranged as it was. I felt the sharp edge of the paradox. I knew reality to be an illusion within an illusion, and it made no deep sense.

My world had crashed. I was no longer fit for purpose. My occupation had gone. My house had gone, carried away on a tide of debts that were not of my making but on a whirlpool of chaos generated by the flounderings of my wife under which we were sinking. My daughter had tried to kill herself, the opening salvo of a creeping guerilla war that was her own struggle for sanity and her own attempt to survive her own life-pain.

All this left my emotions mind-wrenched. I had an unvoiced deep fear that at bottom all of these were due to my inadequacy, my falling short of being a proper man, of my being a halfling, a biological error, a freak. Being a man was outwardly an illusion, and inwardly a delusion. In the end the double subterfuge had been shown for what it was – a mockery of adulthood. I was simply a non-real person, a botched attempt of biology that was so dreadful that it could not even be named. A hermaphrodite masquerading as a human. I knew with absolute certainty that I was only tolerated if I hid under a cloak of shame, that inner truth of what I was utterly unmentionable – the masquerade to be preserved at all costs. And in my shame and because of the shame I colluded with this – struggling to maintain the pretence.

Jung built his map. Four diamond quaternios stacked one on the other, reaching from the fuzz of the “Rotundum” to the purity of the “Anthropos”. It was his ladder to sanity, his map of the soul.

Mine was the pentangle. Each point an aspect of being, united in the middle in a pentagon.

Each aspect of reality was necessary as a part of the map of what it is to be human and the realisation of the internal truth of each aspect of reality was essential to gaining a balanced view of being.

The Material world was the description of the world that might be given by science – at bottom little more than an energy fuzz knotting into ever more complex field and forms.

The Raw world: the experienced reality without human language constructs projected upon it. The world of things-in-themselves. The world touched on by Zen. A world without purposefulness, without intent; the very ground of being through which life flows by accident as no more than a temporary phenomena. 

The Word world: the projected world of human intention and meaning – a shared illusion, an artefact of language; the place we inhabit once we are inducted into the shared mythology of its existence; a children's game made real – a lets pretend played for high stakes. 

The Life force: that which burns through each living thing starting from that first spark aeons ago, and which will burn through each of us and on beyond. We are but fuel to its passage. 

The Vital world: that which charges each and every place, each and every thing, each and every moment with emotional richness, with love and wonder, with its own energy of person and place, of timeliness and potential. It is what enchants or alienates, petrifies or enthrals, chills, stagnates, enlivens, deadens, bores or enwraps. It is that by which we engage with the world. It calls us forth to wed it with our being. It is, if you will, the spiritual reality, that vitalisation that is the very magic sparkle which can intoxicate us with the mere act of living by its burning presence.

Some sort of map. A little temporary sense, or semblance of sense. I am not about to suggest that it is in anyway a good or useful map. It helped me for a while, that is perhaps why it emerged. But in truth little more than some rickety scaffolding that was helpful in rebuilding an illusion of sanity – something that could be hung onto as I attempted to crawl back into life. My compromise of understanding held against the prospect of its all being swept away: my survival map.

It still helps.