I often feel when talking to your "average" Australian ( there probably isn't such a thing but I mean the kind of robotic persona you get on the other end when
you phone a call centre, or deal with an estate agent or sales person at KMart), or just having a chat over the fence with a passing
neighbour, that the conversation has to run down invisible rails that
the thought of deviating from is too terrifying for either of us to
contemplate, because of the dark depths that might lie in wait...
I
recently found confirmation of this invisible script in a book of essays
a therapist friend who lives in Gordon on the distant north shore lent
me. Here is an extract from this essay which is titled
“The Australian Resistance to Individuation: Patrick’s White Knotted Mandala ” by David Tacey, in a book called “Placing Psyche, Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia”, which seems to be a Jungian influenced collection of essays.
Its a bit dense but persist because by the time you get to the
middle bit a smile of recognition should start twitching the corner(s)
of your mouth(s) upwards...
“
Our fear of yet longing for obliteration
is repetitive, autonomous and resists consciousness. Not many of us are aware
of it, apart from artists, sensitive individuals and psychotherapists. In daily life we support
an adherence to reason and logic which is fanatical in its dogmatism, yet in
the unconscious we harbour desires to abandon reason, overturn our plans,
destroy our logic and sink into annihilation.
I have written about this before in my book
on Australian culture, Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche, Earth. There, in a
section called “The Degraded Sacred and Alcoholism in white and black society”,
I explore the conundrum of Australian society: on the one hand a commitment to
democratic values and social order; on the other hand a barely disguised desire
to obliterate self in one or more of the favoured rituals of destruction: binge
drinking, excessive eating, abuse of drugs, [betting and gambolling, my addition] , consumerism, inertia, zoning out. ...
The fierce [ white Christian Anglo-Celtic Australian????] longing
for sacrifice originates from the realisation that the colonial consciousness
is not authentic. It did not emerge from this ground and needs to be sacrificed
so that something new can appear. ...These stories of national sacrifice are taught
as history in our schools, and our favourite novels, such as Patrick White's Voss,
are fictional accounts of early explorers who sought ecstatic self-mutilation
in the desert. Our favourite national films are about sacrifice: Picnic at
Hanging Rock, in which a group of school girls are drawn by magnetic force to a
volcanic mountain and sacrificed to it; Evil Angels, in which an innocent baby
is seized and eaten by a wild dog; Gallipoli, in which innocent teenagers are
sacrificed to the war machine and British military incompetence. The poet
Judith Wright was the first to sense a psychological meaning to these deaths
and sacrifices:
Are all these dead men in our literature,
then, a kind of ritual sacrifice? And just what is being sacrificed? Is it perhaps
the European consciousness-dominating, puritanical, analytical? ...
Reconciliation, then, is a matter of death-the death of the European mind, its
absorption into the soil it has struggled against.'
But we don't say we have a problem with
involuntary sacrifice; we just say
"this is our history". We don't view our plight psychologically, we
say we are recording events as they present themselves. To quote Singer again: the cultural complex "collects
experiences that confirms its historical point of view". We resist
consciousness when it comes to our favoured national past-times: compulsive
sacrifice and a longing for obliteration.
In 1971 Melbourne psychologist Ronald
Conway rose to prominence in Australia when he wrote The Great Australian
Stupor: An Interpretation of the Australian Way of Life. 10 In this book, part
humorous and part serious, Conway outlined
the ways in which Australians seek self-oblivion and mental destruction. It
achieved instant fame because so many Australians recognised themselves in
his descriptions of the local way of life, and in our predilection for inertia,
stasis, conventionality, resistance to culture, and reflection. For a
while, Conway was even given his own television show, in which he held a mirror
tip to the nation. But then we forgot about the novelty of self-reflection and
went back to sleep.
To live in Australia is to live in a
negative social climate. Americans who visit or live here find the place
baffling. If the credo of America is "Yes, we can", that of
Australia Is "No, we can't." This makes for an odd social
environment. Things are achieved in spite of the current toward inertia and
resistance. The humour, temperament, and spirit of Australia are ironic,
downbeat, self-deprecating, anti-heroic, often depressing. Yet individuation
forces itself upon us, even with all this negativity. Even Down Under, where
everything is upside down, where the seasons are reversed, and even the
Southern Cross hangs upside down in the night sky, we have our own version of
individuation, which is via negativa, a way of resisting what the
unconscious is forcing upon us."
______
PS. When a writer or artist or poet says they're "exploring" something isn’t
this word often just code for shying away from the commitment of unequivocal
assertions, like when an artist says they are “exploring” – just by way of
example – ‘ the interstitial experience of people with bi-polar disorder’ ....surely
the exploration happens during the process that leads to the art work, but
cannot be the art work itself – or at least, not satisfyingly so for this witness.
