Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
The Chase and the Hiding
The Death nature has an odd habit of surfacing in love affairs just at the time we feel we have won over a lover, just as we feel we have landed “a big fish.” That’s when the Life/Death/Life nature surfaces and scares everyone sideways. That is when more contortions go on about why love cannot, will not, should not “work” for either party concerned. That is where all the diving into the burrow is done. It is an effort to become invisible. Invisible to the lover? No. Invisible to the Skeleton Woman. That is what all the running and hiding is about. But, as we see, there is nowhere to hide.
Rational psyche goes fishing for something deep and not only lands it but is so shocked it can barely stand it. Lovers have a sense that something is chasing them. Sometimes they think it is the other who is doing the chasing. In reality, it is Skeleton Woman. At first, when we learn to truly love, we misunderstand many things. We think the other is chasing us, when in fact our intention to relate to another human being in a special way is what hooks Skeleton Woman so she cannot escape from us. Wherever love is nascent, the Life/Death/Life force will always surface. Always.
So here are the fisherman and the Skeleton Woman, all tangled up with each other. As Skeleton Woman bumps along behind the terrified fisherman, she begins a primitive participation in life; she becomes hungry and eats dried fish. Later, as she comes even more to life, she will quench her thirst with the fisherman’s tear.
We see this odd phenomenon in all love affairs: the faster he runs, the more she picks up speed. When one or the other lover attempts to run from the relationship, the relationship is paradoxically invested with more life. And the more life that is created, the more frightened the fisherman becomes. And the more he runs, the more life is created. This phenomenon is one of life’s central tragi-comedies.
One person in such a situation dreamed of meeting a woman/lover whose soft body opened like a cabinet. Inside her body cavity were embryos shining and throbbing, daggers on shelves dripping with blood, and bags packed with the first green color of
spring. The dreamer was given great pause, for this was a dream about the Life/Death/Life nature.
These glimpses into the interiority of Skeleton Woman cause the lovers-in-training to seize their fishing sticks and hide across the land at breakneck speed in an effort to put as much distance as possible between themselves and her. Skeleton Woman is great and mysterious, she is dazzlingly numinous. Psychically, she stretches from horizon to horizon and from heaven to hell. She is much to embrace. Yet, it is no wonder people run to embrace her. What one fears can strengthen, can heal.
The running-and-hiding phase is the time during which lovers try to rationalize their fear of the Life/Death/Life cycles of love. They say, “I can do better with someone else,” or “I don’t want to give up my (fill in the blank
)
or “I don’t want to change my life,” or “I don’t want to face my wounds or anyone else’s,” or “I’m not ready yet,” or “I don’t want to be transformed without first knowing in absolute detail what I will look like/feel like afterward.”
It is a time when thoughts are all jumbled together, when one makes a desperate dive for shelter, and the heart beats, not from cherishing and being cherished as much as from abject terror. To be trapped by Lady Death! Ai! The horror of meeting the Life/Death/Life force face-to-face! Double Ai!
Some make the mistake of thinking they are running away from a relationship with the lover. They are not. They are not running away from love, or the pressures of the relationship. They are trying to outrun the mysterious Life/Death/Life force. Psychology diagnoses this as “fear of intimacy, fear of commitment.” But those are only symptoms. The deeper issue is one of misbelief and distrust Those who ran away forever fear to truly live according to the cycles of the wild and integral nature.
So here the Death Woman chases the man across water, across the boundary of the unconscious to the conscious land mass of the mind. The conscious psyche becomes aware of what it has caught and tries desperately to outran it. We do this constantly in our lives. Something fearsome raises its head. We aren’t paying attention and keep pulling it up, thinking it is some booty. It is a trove, but not the kind we’ve imagined. It is a treasure we’ve unfortunately
been taught to fear, So we attempt to run away or throw it back, or prettify it and make it what it is not. But this will not work. Eventually, we all have to kiss the hag.
The same process follows in love. We want only beauty but wind up facing the “baddie” instead. We push Skeleton Woman away, but she proceeds. We run. She follows. She is the great teacher we have been saying we want. “No, not this teacher!” we shriek when she arrives. We want a different one. Too bad. This is the teacher everyone gets.
There is a saying that when the student is ready the teacher appears. This means the interior teacher surfaces when the soul, not the ego, is ready. This teacher comes whenever the soul calls—and thank goodness, for the ego is never fully ready. If it were solely up to the ego’s readiness to draw this teacher to us, we would remain essentially teacherless for life. We are blessed, since the soul continues transmitting its desire regardless of the ever-changing opinions of our egos.
People fear that when things become tangled and frightening in love relationships that the end is near, but this is not so. Because this is an archetypal matter and because Skeleton Woman does the work of Fate, the hero
is supposed to
take off across the horizon, the Death Woman
is supposed to
come right along behind, the lover-in-training
is supposed to
dive into his little hut and gasp and choke and hope he is safe. And Skeleton Woman
is supposed to
follow him right into his safe haven. He
is supposed to
untangle her, and so forth.
For modem lovers the idea of “taking space” is like the fisherman’s little snowhouse, where he thinks he is safe. Sometimes this fear of confronting the death nature is distorted into “begging off,” trying to keep only the pleasurable sides of the relationship going without dealing with Skeleton Woman. That will never work.
It causes lovers who are not “taking space” immense anxiety, for they themselves are willing to meet Skeleton Woman. They have primed themselves, they have reinforced themselves, they are attempting to keep their fears balanced. And now, just as they are ready to untangle this mystery, just as one or the other is
about to drum on the heart and sing up a life together, one lover cries “Not yet, not yet” or “No, not ever.”
There is a vast difference between the need for solitude and renewal, and the desire to “take space” to avoid the inevitable intercourse with Skeleton Woman. But intercourse, meaning exchange with and acceptance of the Life/Death/Life nature,
is
the next step in order to strengthen one’s ability to love. Those who enter into relationship with her will gain an enduring skill for love. Those who won’t, won’t. There is no way around it.
4
All the “not readies,” all the “I need times,” are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a “completely ready,” there is never a really “right time.'” As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one’s nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words
heroine
,
hero,
or
courage.
The work of learning the Life/Death/Life nature has to be done. Put off, Skeleton Woman sinks beneath the water, but will rise again and again and give chase again and again. It is her work to do this. It is our work to learn. If one wishes to love, there is no getting around it. The work of embracing her is a
task.
Without a task that challenges, there can be no transformation. Without a task there is no real sense of satisfaction. To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.
Granted, many, many people come to this “escape-and-hide” stage. Some unfortunately arrive here over and over again. The entrance to this burrow is rutted with all the scrambling. But those who care to love emulate the fisherman. They strive to light the fire and face the Life/Death/Life nature. They contemplate what they fear, and paradoxically, respond with both conviction and wonder.
Untangling the Skeleton
The Skeleton Woman tale contains a “suitor test” theme. In a suitor test, lovers must prove their rightful intentions and powers, these usually demonstrating that they have the
cojones
or
ovarios
to face a powerful and fearsome numinosity of some sort ...
though here we call it the Life/Death/Life nature, others might call it an aspect of the Self, or the spirit of Love, yet others might say God or
Gracia
, a spirit of energy, or any number of appellations.
The fisherman shows his rightful intent, his powers, and his increasing involvement with Skeleton Woman by untangling her. He looks at her all bent this way and that and he sees in her a glimmer of something, he knows not what. He had run from her, panting and sobbing. Now he thinks to touch her. She is touching his heart in some way just by being. When we comprehend the loneliness of the Life/Death/Life nature within the psyche, that one, who through no fault of her own, is constantly thrown away ... then perhaps we too can be touched by her travail.
If it is love we are making, even though we are apprehensive or frightened, we are willing to untangle the bones of the Death nature. We are willing to see how it all goes together. We are willing to touch the not-beautiful
5
in another, and in ourselves. Behind this challenge is a cunning test from the Self. It is found even more clearly in tales where the beautiful appears ugly in order to test someone’s character.
In the tale “Diamonds, Rubies, and Pearls,” a good but reviled stepdaughter draws water for a wealthy stranger and is rewarded by having diamonds, rubies, and pearls spill from her mouth when she speaks. The stepmother orders her own lazy daughters to stand at the same well and wait upon the wealthy stranger. But this time a stranger in rags approaches. When she begs for a dipper of water the evil daughters haughtily refuse. The stranger rewards them by causing snakes, toads, and lizards to fall from their mouths ever after.
In fairy-tale justice, as in the deep psyche, kindness to that which seems less, is rewarded by good, and refusal to do good for one who is not beautiful, is reviled and punished. It is the same in the great feeling states such as love. When we enlarge or extend ourselves to touch the not-beautiful, we are rewarded. If we spurn the not-beautiful, we are severed from real life and left out in the cold.
For some, it is easier to think higher, more beautiful thoughts and to touch those things that positively transcend us than to touch, help, and assist the not-so-positive. Even more so, as the
story illustrates, it is easy to turn away the not-beautiful and feel falsely righteous about it. This is the love problem of dealing with Skeleton Woman.
What is the not-beautiful? Our own secret hunger to be loved is the not-beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is the not- beautiful. Our dereliction in loyalty and devotion is unlovely, our sense of soul-separateness is homely, our psychological warts, inadequacies, misunderstandings, and infantile fantasies are the not-beautiful. Additionally, the Life/Death/Life nature, which births, destroys, incubates, and births again, is considered by our
cultures
the not-beautiful.
To untangle Skeleton Woman is to understand that conceptual error and to set it aright. To untangle Skeleton Woman is to understand that love does not mean all glimmering candles and increase. To untangle Skeleton Woman means that one finds heartening rather than fear in the darkness of regeneration. It means balm for old wounds. It means changing our ways of seeing and being to reflect the health rather than dearth of soul.
To love, we touch the basic and not-so-lovely bony woman, untangling the sense of this nature for ourselves, bringing her back to order, letting her live again. It is not enough to haul the unconscious to the surface, not even enough to accidentally drag her home. It stops the progression of love to be afeared or disdainful of her for very long.
Untangling the mystery of the Skeleton Woman begins to break the spell—that is, the fear that one will be consumed, made dead forever. Archetypally, to untangle something requires a descent, the following of a labyrinth down into the underworld or to the place where matters are revealed in entirely new ways. One must follow what at first appears to be a convoluted process, but in effect is a profound pattern for renewal. In fairy tales, to loosen the girdle, undo the knot, untie, and untangle means to begin to understand something previously closed to us, to understand its applications and uses, to become mage-like, a knowing soul.
When the fisherman untangles Skeleton Woman, he begins to have “hands-on” knowledge of Life’s and Death’s articulations. The skeleton is an excellent image for the Life/Death/Life nature. As a psychic image, the skeleton is composed of hundreds of
small and large odd-shaped sucks and knobs in continuous harmonious relationship to one another. When one bone turns, the rest turn, even if imperceptibly. The Life/Death/Life cycles are like that exactly. When Life moves, the bones of Death move sympathetically. When Death moves, the bones of Life begin to turn too.
Also, when one tiny bone is out of place, chipped, spurred, subluxed, it hurts the integrity of the whole. When the Life/Death/Life nature in oneself or in a relationship is suppressed, the same occurs. One’s life limps along, catches, hobbles, protects movement. When there is hurt to these structures and cycles, there is always interruption of libido. Love is not possible then. We lie under the water; just bones, drifting back and forth.
To untangle this nature means to learn her attenuations, habits, movements. It means to learn the cycles of life and death, to memorize them and so to see how they all go together, how they are all a single organism, just as the skeleton is a single organism.
Fear is a poor excuse for not doing the work. We are all afraid. It is nothing new. If you are alive, you are fearful. Among the Inuit, Raven is the trickster. In his undeveloped side, he is a creature of appetite. He likes pleasure only, attempts to avoid all uncertainty and the fears that uncertainty brings. He is a good deal cautious and a good deal greedy, both. He is fearful if something does not immediately look fulfilling. He pounces when it does.
He likes bright abalone shell, silver beads, endless vittles, gossip, and warm sleeps over the smoke hole. The lover-to-be may be like Raven who wants “a sure thing.” Like Raven, the ego is afraid passion will end, and tries to avoid the end of the meal, the end of the fire, the end of the day, and an end to pleasure. Raven, like ego, becomes wily, and always to his detriment, for when he forgets his soul, he loses his power.
The ego fears that if we admit the Life/Death/Life nature into our lives, we will never be happy again. Have we been so very perfectly happy all along, ai? No. But the undeveloped ego is very simple, like an unsocialized child, and not particularly a happy- go-lucky child either; rather more like a child who is watching all the time to see which slice is the biggest, which bed the softest, which lover the most handsome.
Three things differentiate living from the soul versus living from ego only. They are: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time. The ego, however, has a penchant and a proclivity to avoid learning. Patience is not ego’s strong suit. Enduring in relationship is not Raven’s forte. So it is not from the ever- changing ego that we love another, but rather from the wild soul.
“A wild patience,” as poet Adrienne Rich
6
puts it, is required in order to untangle the bones, to learn the meaning of Lady Death, to have the tenacity to stay with her. It would be a mistake to think that it takes a muscle-bound hero to accomplish this. It does not. It takes a heart that is willing to die and be born and die and be born again and again.
The untangling of Skeleton Woman reveals that she is ancient, and old beyond discriminate time. It is she, Lady Death, who measures energy versus distance, she who weighs time versus libido, she who hefts spirit versus survival. She meditates on it, she studies it, she considers, and then she moves to invest it with a spark or two, or a sudden blaze of wildfire, or to tamp it down a bit, bank it down, or put out its life altogether. She knows what is required. She knows when it is time.
In untangling her we acquire the ability to sense what comes next, to better comprehend how all the aspects of nature’s psyche interrelate, how we can participate. To untangle her means to gain articulate knowledge of self and other. It means to strengthen our ability to follow the phases, projects, eras of incubation, birthing, and transformations peaceably and with as much grace as we can marshal.
So in this sense, a lover who once was rather artless about love becomes far better at it through having observed this Skeleton Woman, and from having sorted her bones. As one begins to ascertain the patterns of Life/Death/Life, one can anticipate the cycles of the relationship in terms of increase following deficit and attrition following abundance.
A person who has untangled Skeleton Woman knows patience, knows better how to wait. He is not shocked or afraid of spareness. He is not overwhelmed by fruition. His needs to attain, to “have right now,” are transformed into a finer craft of finding all facets
of relationship, observing how cycles of relationship work together. He is not afraid to relate to the beauty of fierceness, the beauty of the unknown, the beauty of the not-beautiful. And in learning and working at all these, he becomes the quintessential wild lover.
How does a man learn these things? How does anyone learn them? Enter into direct .dialogue with the Life/Death/Life nature by listening to the inner voice that is not ego. Learn by asking the Life/Death/Life nature direct questions about love and loving and then listen to her answers. Through all, we learn to not be misled by the nagging voice at the back of the mind that says, “This is silly ... I’m just making this all up.” We learn to ignore that voice and listen to what is heard beyond that. We learn to follow what we hear—all those things that bring us closer to acute awareness, the love of devotion, and a clear view of the soul.
It is good to make a meditative and daily practice of untangling the Life/Death/Life nature over and over again. The fisherman sings a little one-line song over and over to aid the untangling. It is a song to help awareness, to help untangle the Skeleton Woman nature. We do not know what he is singing. We can only guess. When we are untangling this nature, it would be good for us to sing something like this: What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when?
If we sing the song of consciousness till we feel the bum of truth, we throw a burst of fire into the darkness of psyche so we can see what we’re
doing...
what we’re truly doing, not what we wish to think we’re doing. This is the untangling of one’s feelings and the beginning of understanding why love and life are to be lived by the bones.
To face Skeleton Woman, one need not take on the role of the solar hero, nor do armed battle, nor risk one’s life in the wilderness. One need only care to untangle her. This power in knowing the Life/Death/Life nature awaits lovers who go beyond running away, who push beyond a desire to find themselves safe.