growing your wings on the way down
by Chaise Levy
“If we're already so close to death, why should we complain?
Robert, you've climbed so many trees to reach the nests.
It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down.”
Robert Bly
We have been taught that a myth is a lie, and that a story is either a psychologized interpretation of events, or a narrative meant to keep us entertained.
But a myth is not a lie, and stories do much more than entertain.
They are not clever subterfuge by some ruling elite to keep us placated, but something else entirely. A myth is “ a truth told without the use of facts” as the late-great myth singer Daniel Deardorff said, myths to me have been both life rafts in the tempest, and provocations to endeavor to ask ever more beautiful questions about this world.
Last year when sitting in yet another state mandated presentation on suicidality in our youth my stomach turned over. On the screen flashed the title “Myths and Facts about Suicide,” one column a series of misconceptions about suicidality, and the other “facts” intended to lay the myths bare leading us out of the mire of confusion to some proposed truth.
As a person who has lived with suicidality, and a storyteller it was nearly more than I could handle to sit there and not scream. I watched what was happening in the bodies and eyes of my students as they sat there bombarded by statistics and step by step plans. Hollow language scripts to speak to their friends about suicide and self-harm. Like a wave those closest to the trouble began to hunch, and fold over becoming smaller and smaller. Looking furtively toward the door, itching for an escape from the clinical and dry dissection of their life long trouble.
What would happen if myth and story, poetry and beauty came parading into the room. What if these young people were given a feast of soul, and grief. Not a rebellion that exiles the life saving work of these clinical professionals, but compliments, deepens, amplifies, and makes space.
What I am calling for is a dance-partner to these “psychological” ways of meeting the trouble. Calling back to James Hillman who railed that we needed to put the psyche back in psychology. Making a way of courting these experiences of intensity and crisis. Being supported to delve into them skillfully.
Ultimately I have found growing up in a culture where I am constantly urged to hide the pain, and put on my prettiest face, that my truth cannot be told. Even writing these words now I halt and fear the outcome of your reading.
Learning to hold the old myths on my tongue has become a way to tell the truth even against the overwhelming urge to sew the mouth closed. So I quest to find the image that allows us to wrestle the daemon, looking not to win, but to be defeated and find a new life.
There is liberation in the moving toward the image, being able to give face to the harsh and terrible longings that drag us away from this life. Recontextualizing the suffering with a mythic eye, can allow for space and a keen attention to arise.
in Suicide’s Untarnished Twin by Daniel Deardorff (Yet unpublished) he suggests that the urge to suicide is provoked by the arrival of something new and challenging in the psyche, what he calls a “twin.” The twin’s arrival causes disturbance and a kind of wrestling match through the very “otherness” of the twin’s appearance. The twin brings transformation. ”
Maybe the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, was writing of this twin when he wrote about the duende. This duende is not a struggle or an affectation that the master of a craft can artifice into their work, but instead “a spirit of the earth,” that rises up through the soles and souls of a performer when they are caught in the true unfolding of the present. Like Deardorff’s twin the duende brings new forms, and breaks old molds. It brings with it a freshness and a transformative expectancy, it comes following this fragrance of death. “The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house.” (Lorca, 58)
According to Lorca an imagination sourced only from congress with the muse and the angel runs dry in the territory of death, and speaks volumes to the deficit of imagination that we meet the suicide with. These rising spirits, these ascending energies lose the posture of soul, which is ultimately the descent. In a death-phobic society, we are so defended against death that the duende is held at a distance. It is no wonder then that in the when death comes to roost so intimately, throughs of the personal wrestle with death of the suicide, and the cultural wrestling with death in the eco-cide of the earth that this deficit of imagination becomes so stark.
The Old Stories give us a magical stone to peer at the “twin” through, making that shape encounterable. When we hold an Old Story to our ear the ragged voice of the duende may translate into a song. The shadowy urge may approach us as Odinn hanging himself from the world tree in pursuit of knowledge, swinging out over ginnungagap and screaming or icarus plummeting into the sea, all melted wax and ruffled feathers.
These images can give us a sense of mythic ground, or become skins we move into where we find solace, power, and integration. But there is a danger too, in this identification with the image. When the stories become so integrated that we can see nothing but our Odinnic self, we lose the access to that lateral capacity of self to hold multitudes. The identification with the “twin” becomes so absolute that we still lose a part of the self. A sort of possession can take place from the other side.
The amplification that myth offers can get so hot, that the image can become a prison. A skin we need to push out into something else, like in sorcery when we allow the spell to be surrendered to earth we are called to hold these images of power lightly and allow them to fall from our hand when they become static. Letting go willingly of the ring of power, is the only way to be free.
Ultimately, in the end we can’t go at this alone. The magnetism of the descent, and the power of the ascent are too strong to weather alone. It will take building community, a posture of ritual care, and an actual commitment to holding space for the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” learning to say yes to the terrible beauty of the wrestling of our beloveds instead of tamping it down, or pushing them away. This kind of practice of beholding, and loving the soil of integration.
Fresh out of the furnace of our podcast episode, Living your legend: a myth might save your life, Chaise and Audrey are hosting this event to call in that “loving soil of integration.” We invite all that are called to join us:
Join storyteller/psychopomp Audrey Nova di Mola and storyteller/sorcerer Chaise Levy for an intentionally held space to mythically explore suicidality and madness as they each approach the 9 year anniversary of their initial Descents.
September is designated as Suicide Prevention Month and our approaches– carried out completely unbeknownst to each other, on opposite coasts– have been to lean into the particular kind of amplification and spaciousness that a mythic and ritual context provides, meeting the generativity and the danger of such experiences and states.
Weaving both personal and mythic stories, Audrey and Chaise will explore alternatives to a singular model of ‘prevention’ and more ‘traditional’ ways of receiving mental health crises, an ever-evolving pathway that encompasses community and being witnessed, images, magic, Seeing and Re-membering new and ancient ways to be with the trouble.
The space will be held online on Zoom 11am-2pm EST / 8am-11am PST with sensitivity to integration and breaks, and time for Q&A.
Chaise is a father, husband and storytelling sorcerer based in Northern California on the lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people. His love of language, and story have been the fuel for his study of trolldom, animal tracking, fire-by-friction, and herblore. Chaise is deeply convinced that the mythic gives us a door into the dreaming of the earth, and that if we imbibe the blood of dragons we will one day understand the voices of the birds.
Freaking fantastic writing and work Chaise (and Audrey too!). I'm excitedly and exhaustedly looking forward to ongoing conversations about this and am grateful for how these aligned perspectives are deepening my own work.
I currently work in a system in which we have outgrown our infrastructure and so one of the most crushing collateral tragedies is the many ways we fail those that arrive in a state of suicidality. I work in an emergency department where all manner of medical emergencies are 'managed' in one unit. That in itself is a type of madness. But I am writing because I would love to have a brave new conversation about it.