Musicmaking and
Healing the Breach

by Clement Jewitt

I - Mythmaking

In the eons long life of the world soul, each great revolution on the axis mundi corresponds to an age in the slow working out of the destiny of our own ancient but still young species. And we find ourselves now at the edge of a new circum-vivification, mythos, noumenon, world view, opening up to our as yet uncertain gaze.

In this upcoming age we hope to find a healing of that great psychic rift, collective as well as individual, which has reached its greatest expression in the European culture which now threatens to dominate the world. I refer to the tremendous split in our culture which was given clear expression in the pact tacitly formed between the Church on the one hand, as self perceived guardians of learning during the long night of the middle ages, and Descartes on the other hand, as representative of the new urge towards secular intellectual exploration.

The new scientific paradigm would be allowed to examine, analyse, all matters material, leaving everything non-material in the hands of the religious authorities. From this separation there developed the denial by science of all that could not be measured, and from the dominance of that world view, the marginalization of the unseen world, the spiritual. This sundering of what is at root indivisible, wholly interconnected, appears as much in us, in our individual psyches, as in our collective culture.

It is a deep sickness at the heart of all of us, now, though, becoming more commonly visible, as personal and also cultural wound. Since there is no sharp division between the ages, no clear cusp, developing strands of the new manifest like tender roots of the about-to-be world tree, young but strong, interlaced with the old crabbed woody anchors of the soon-to-be superseded. The last century has manifested, first isolated, then more and more examples, of individual strivings towards that healing, in the arts and practices of inner care of Self and Soul, outer care for Mother Gaia.

It is all one: as above, so below, as the saying runs, means that each act or happening of connecting, re-joining, the formerly split within us has its parallel in the outer world. The workings of homeopathic medicines exactly illustrate this, pointing to the fact that every energetic function or disfunction within us has its precise parallel somewhere else in the world, in other living beings or in non-living materials. (Whitmont 1992)

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Can we explore further the meaning of that rift, which we feel to be connected to our deep sensitivities? Where does it come from? Can we find its essence in the world as it is? Or in the privacy of our psyches?

One route towards understanding is through mythology. But first we must clarify the meaning. There is a common usage of the term 'myth' which is pejorative. Myth is, in the media and in unconsidered speech, that which is unreal, perverse. I am refusing that definition, which I consider to be an outcome of the split, the breach, we are considering. Myth here is the process by which '... men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the wonder of existence', (Campbel 1968) a vision of the divinity in which we live. This is as true for the small boy deifying his football hero as it is for the acknowledged spiritual master, whose myths may be beyond our ordinary comprehension.

Joseph Campbell delineated the homogeneous mythology of the ancient, oriental and early occidental worlds, where

Millenniums have rolled by with only minor variations played on themes derived from God-knows-when. Not so, however, in our recent West where ... an accelerating disintegration has been undoing the formidable orthodox tradition, and with its fall, the released creative powers of a great company of towering individuals have broken forth: so that not one, or even two or three, but a galaxy of mythologies ... must be taken into account in any study of the spectacle of our own titanic age. (op cit)

In modern Western civilization we pursue 'the centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity'. We create our own individual variations on the themes of life's journey. The formerly dominant sphere of theology has been supplanted by 'a totally new type of non-theological revelation' which has come from literature, secular philosophy and the arts, and has become 'the actual spiritual guide and structuring force of the civilization.' (op cit) Here are the sources of our myths: the poetic imagination as prophetic utterance; music as the art nearest to the divine; literature as descriptor of cultural possibilities and scrutiniser of the soul.

And so the great literary heritage of the Western world shines in our collective consciousness as illuminations of who we are, what we believe to be the essence of how our lives are lived at some more than mundane level. From Arthur's court and the Grail legend; through the unconscious chivalry of Don Quixote; the anguished stasis of Hamlet's self doubt; the Faustian legend of possible transcendence of avaricious self absorption through punitively costly bargains; the penetrating psychological perceptions embodied, particularly, in the works of the great nineteenth century Russian novelists; to the Joycean streams of consciousness and whatever coming after him will also capture the mythic imagination.

In music, great cathedrals of sound have been erected within the western polyphonic tradition representing the spirit of each age. Bach's soaring aspirations towards a transcendent Christianity; Handel's confrontation of newly becoming aware audiences with the power of his invention, the oratorio; Mozart the master of kaleidoscopic half shades of emotion, prefiguring the following century when man the all-possible was delineated by Promethean Beethoven. And on into the twentieth, the century of fragmentation, full of differential leadings, perhaps, as Rudolph Steiner thought, the prelude to a new synthesis. All represent aspects of the western psyche at the edge of the humanly possible. All the strands that make up the western collective soul are represented and reinforced by performances of the great musical works.

Another function of myth is in the prescription of a moral order:

In Christian Europe, already in the twelfth century, beliefs no longer universally held were universally enforced. The result was a dissociation of professed from actual existence and that consequent spiritual disaster which, in the imagery of the Grail legend, is symbolized in the Waste Land theme. (op cit)

The common experience of many in the modern Western world, of growing up with an anguish of alienation from the universe, attests to this split.

Leonard Shlain in a recent book (Hunt 1996) argues persuasively that the invention of writing in general, and the abstraction of that into the alphabet in particular, was instrumental in encouraging the development of left brain thinking. He points to this as a major factor in the rise of the masculine dominated culture we now feel is in process of supplantation, or augmentation. Alphabetic writing is linear and abstract, requiring the left brain skills of precise visual focus and the analytical mode of thinking. We had split ourselves in two, given honour to the new and powerful tool, and relegated to the darkness, the shadow side of our culture, and our psyches, all that was holistic, non-linear, intuitive. We projected that onto those who most readily manifested those qualities, punitively: women.

So we have been living a lie, and also denying the source of our nourishment. Double jeopardy.

But these fractures enabled by their very presence possibilities of intellectual development, of knowledge which can be symbolically expressed, embodied in the scientific world view. As is well known, this has at its core a fundamental dissociation between observer and observed. Much of great value has come from this, but nevertheless the attitude exemplifies humanity in the great divorce of spirit and soul from materiality we are here contemplating.

And so arise the modern arts and therapies of psychology and psychiatry, needed to help heal this breach in the fabric of our being. And now at the beginning of a new century and millennium, there is a rapidly growing perception of the value of sound, and music, as energies wonderfully proficient in the task of bringing into connection and harmony that which has been torn asunder. When we talk, there is division: the speaker of the message, and the auditor. Words define boundaries, separate. There are two directions, from and to. When we collectively sing, or sound instruments, there is no 'message' in the verbal sense, there is 'only' the sound, produced by all, heard equally by all, tones transporting the verbal meaning into the inner-ness of what the word alone merely delineated. There is only one attitude: the duality of from and to is transcended by the unity of all the group in the sounding moment. (Zuckerkandl 1998)

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If myth defines the boundaries of what is truly human, a mirror which shows us where we are, and therefore where we may strive towards, then the nature of our own myths will be contingent on our own inner, psychological / spiritual growth, Jung's individuation process.

Under the old Sumerian /Anatolian originated stasis, consequent on the invention of agriculture, where life was lived collectively under received certainties, the idea of individuation could not exist. People were homo sapiens sapiens indeed, but remaining harmoniously attuned to what we now, divisively, analytically, call 'nature', mentally separating off ourselves.

But in this Western world, where the idea of individuation has now its time, we perceive, and strive to come to terms with, the fact of differential growth among us. This means that my current mythology may be your clear vision, or the reverse. As we continue to grow, our perceptual boundaries widen. At those widened boundaries are fresh mysteries, requiring fresh mythmaking to provide something to grasp where rational thought cannot yet apply, and to re-create the Grail vision, the attractor towards the new goal for our spiritual journey. For feeling, not thought, is primary: we need imagery, not abstractions, to impel us on in our whole being.

That path of individuation, untrodden for each of us who set out along it, has its own excruciating rites of passage, expressed in legions of literary works (Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and more recently William Golding, Robert Pirsig, to mention but a few), in music (Berlioz comes to mind, and Stravinsky), and in the visions of generations of painters and poets striving to elevate personal angst into the universal.

The following poem was conceived more than a decade ago, a time when I was woken up to the terrible rent in the fabric of my being, and beginning to perceive that that was (and is) not just my own tragedy, but endemic in the culture:

I weary of lonely light years voyaging
To the far edge of imagination
In search of reality in truths
Which did not touch me.

In payment is the price
Of re-entry to the human race;
For all the loss of shared experience
And the ways of touching 'strangers' - all our kin.

Ask then shall we, from these unlooked for crossings
Of our orbits in this, life's galaxy
(Each high parabola overcharged)
Careen away, decay?

Or, greatly fearing,
Suffer the sliding turning moment,
The terrible slingshot seizing us fast
Which hurls us to ourselves, and to each other?

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This article is about one of the modalities in which, in small groups, concerted action springing from positive mutual regard leads to collective experience of the numinous, communal touching of the divinity which is in us, and in which we are. These are reflections on that form in which (o miraculous day!) I encountered the shared experience of the divine: group musical improvisation, a microcosm of life, and therefore a therapeutic environment for change.

Effort is required to achieve the depth of mutuality and trust wherein the numinous can appear, riding on the sounds and silences communally created: only sufficient time spent together, working to truly hear each other, can work this miracle. And the rightness of place, as well as time, also plays it's part.

Such music making has nothing to do with virtuosity: all of us are innately musical, whether 'trained' or not. The purpose in such groups is to transcend or bypass the ego in order to find the soul's purposes, a tender flower each one of us has in the recesses of our hearts. The yearnings there may be so sensitive that there are no words soft enough to express them. But deep longings can be expressed musically, wordlessly, within the holding crucible of a trusting group.

So if we can accept that we are our own myth-makers, that myth-making is the process by which we define ourselves, then when we are gathered in the developed improvisation group we are myth-making via the collective engagement with sound actions, which are simultaneously within the structure and part of it, the container and what is contained. We redefine ourselves, or in James Hillman's phrase, we are soul making.

The myth involved here, I suggest, is precisely the view from each and every pair of eyes, the hearing in every pair of ears, and the feelings both given and received in every heart. And that sensing, feeling, is of ourselves as and in the group, in full flow of sound and balancing stillness of silence, perceived and contained in an aura of numinosity. We are not our ordinary selves. We have found connections between us which we have not experienced before. Not love in the common sense, but something more impersonal, though as profoundly moving, as deeply felt, and unobstructed by the projections of ego. Is this the true divine unconditional love?

When such work gels in this way we achieve what Mircea Eliade describes as an irruption of the sacred into the profane: that point of irruption is the hierophany. (Eliade 1959) We become that hierophany. We are, temporarily, a pantheon: we embody our own collective mythical event. This at it's fullest expression is something so profoundly meaningful in the deepest, most embodied sense, that us ordinary mortals can bear it only briefly. We must, shortly, leave it: there is no appeal. But when we leave and return to 'ordinary' profane life, we nevertheless carry the memory of where we have been, what has touched us in those small but infinitely large hours. This is our myth, our defining marker: we want to go there again: it points to where we wish to be.

Whitmont. The alchemy of healing. 1992.
Campbell. The masks of God: creative mythology. 1968
Shlain. The alphabet versus the Goddess: male words and female images. 1998
Zuckerkandl. Man the musician. 1973 (Sound & symbol, Vol 2)
Eliade. The sacred and the profane. 1959.

Continue to part II