Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
For others, it is a crushing loss of some sort in life or in love. One young man suffered loss of his first love and had no support from anyone, and no understanding about how to heal from it. For years he had wandered broken, yet protesting that he was not injured. One man was a rookie player for a pro ball team. He accidentally but permanently injured his leg so that his lifelong dream disappeared overnight. The stinking wound was not only the tragedy, not only the injury, but for twenty years' time the only medicine he poured into the wound was bitterness, substance abuse, carousing. When men have wounds like these, you can smell them coming. No woman, no love, no attention heals such a wound, only self-compassion, only attendance to one's own wounded state.
When the man cries the tear, he has come upon his pain, and he knows it when he touches it. He sees how his life has been lived protectively because of the wound. He sees what of life he has missed because of it. He sees how he hamstrings his love for life, for himself, and for another.
In fairy tales, tears change people, remind them of what is important, and save their very souls. Only a hardness of heart inhibits weeping and union. There is a saying I translated from the Sufi long ago, a prayer really, asking God to break one’s heart: “Shatter my heart so a new room can be created for a Limitless Love.”
The internal feeling of tenderness that moves the fisherman to untangle Skeleton Woman also allows him to feel other forgotten longings, to resurrect his self-compassion. Because he is in a state of innocence, that is, thinking all things are possible, he is unafraid to say his soul desires. He is unafraid to wish, for he believes his need will be met. It is a great relief for him to believe his soul will be fulfilled. When the fisherman cries his true feeling, the reunion with the Life/Death/Life nature is furthered.
The fisherman’s tear draws Skeleton Woman to him; causes her to thirst, causes her to desire further participation with him. As in fairy tales, tears call things to us, they correct things, provide the missing part or piece. In the African tale “Golden Falls,” a magician shelters a runaway slave girl by crying so many tears he creates a waterfall under which she takes refuge. In the African
tale “Bone Rattle,” souls of dead healers are summoned by the sprinkling of children’s tears upon the earth. We are reminded again and again of the power of this great feeling. There is drawing power in tears, and within the tear itself, powerful images that guide us. Tears not only represent feeling but are also lenses through which we gain an alternative vision, another point of view.
In the story, the fisherman is letting his heart break—not break down, but break open. It is not the love of
la teta
, the breast milk mother, he wants; not the love of lucre, not the love of power or fame or sexuality. It is a love that comes upon him, a love he has always carried within him but has never acknowledged before.
A man’s soul is seated more deeply and more clearly as he apprehends this relationship. The tear comes. She drinks. Now something else will develop and be reborn within him, something he can give to her a vast and oceanic heart.
The Later Phases of Love
Heart as Drum, and Singing Up
It is told that the skin or body of a drum determines who and what will be called into being. Some drums are believed to be journeying drums transporting the drummer and listeners (also called “passengers” in certain traditions) to various and sundry places. Other kinds of drums are powerful in other ways.
It is said that drums made of human bone call the dead. Drums made of the hide of certain animals call those specific animal spirits. Drums that are particularly beautiful call Beauty. Drums with bells attached call child-spirits and weather. Drums that are low in voice call the spirits who can hear that tone. Drums high in voice call spirits who can hear that tone, and so on.
A drum made of heart will call the spirits that are concerned with the human heart. The heart symbolizes essence. The heart is one of the few essential organs humans and animals must have to live. Remove one kidney, the human lives. Additionally, take both legs, the gallbladder, one lung, one arm, and the spleen; the human lives—not well perhaps, but there is life. Take away certain brain functions and the human still lives. Take the heart, the person is gone instantly.
The psychological and physiological center is the heart. In Hindu
Lauras
, which are instructions from the Gods to humans, the heart is the
Anãhata
chakra
, the nerve center that encompasses feeling for another human, feeling for oneself, feeling for the earth, and feeling for God. It is the heart that enables us to love as a child loves: fully, without reservation, and with no hull of sarcasm. depreciation, or protectionism.
When Skeleton Woman uses the fisherman’s heart, she uses the central motor of the entire psyche, the only thing that really matters now. the only thing capable of creating pure and innocent feeling. They say it is the mind that thinks and creates. This story says otherwise. It suggests that it is the heart that thinks and calls the molecules, atoms, feelings, yearnings, and whatever else need be. into one place to create the matter that fulfills Skeleton Woman's creation.
The story contains this promise: allow Skeleton Woman to become more palpable in your life, and she will make your life larger in return. When you free her from her tangled and misunderstood state and realize her as both teacher and lover, she becomes ally and partner.
Giving one’s heart for new creation, for new life, for the forces of Life/Death/Life, is a descent into the feeling realm. It may be difficult for us, especially if we have been wounded by disappointment or by sorrow. But it is meant to be drummed through, to bring to full life the Skeleton Woman, to come close to the one who has always been close to us.
When a man gives his whole heart, he becomes an amazing force—he becomes an inspiratrice, a role that in the past was reserved for women only. When Skeleton Woman sleeps with him, he becomes fertile, he is invested with feminine powers in a masculine milieu. He carries the seeds of new life and of necessary deaths. He inspires new works within himself, but also in those near him.
Over the years I have seen this in others and experienced it myself. It is a profound occasion when you create something of value through your lover’s belief in you, through his heartfelt
feeling about your work, your project, your subject. It is an amazing phenomenon. And it is not necessarily limited to a lover; it can occur through anyone who gives his or her heart to you in a deep manner.
So, the man’s bond with the Life/Death/Life nature will eventually give him ideas by the dozens and life plots and situations and musical scores and colors and images without parallel—for the Life/Death/Life nature as related to the Wild Woman archetype, has at its disposal all that ever was and all that ever will be. When Skeleton Woman creates, sings flesh onto herself, the person whose heart she uses feels it, is filled with creation themselves, bursts with it, brims over from it.
The story illustrates also a power that originates in the psyche and is represented by the symbols of drumming and singing. In mythos, songs heal wounds and are used to bring game closer. Persons are summoned by the singing of their names. Pain is relieved, magic breaths restore the body. The dead are called or resurrected through song.
It is told that all creation was accompanied by a sound or word said aloud, a sound or word whispered or spoken on the breath. In mythos, singing is considered to issue from a mysterious source, one that enwisens the whole of creation, all the animals and the humans and the trees and plants and all who hear it. In storytelling it is said that anything that has “sap” has singing.
The creation hymn produces psychic change. The tradition of such is vast: there are love-producing songs in Iceland, and among the Wichita and the Micmac. In Ireland, magic power is called down by magic song. In one Icelandic story, a person falls on the ice crags and severs a limb, but it is regenerated through the singing of song.
hi almost all cultures, at the creation the Gods give the people songs, telling them that to use them will call the Gods back at any time, that song will bring to them the things they need as well as transform or banish those things they do not want. In this manner the giving of song is a compassionate act that enables humans to call the Gods and the great forces into human circles. Song is a special kind of language that accomplishes this in a way the spoken voice cannot.
Since time out of mind, the song, like the drum, has been used to create a non-ordinary consciousness, a trance state, a prayer state. All humans and many animals are susceptible to having their consciousness altered by sound. Certain sounds, like a dripping faucet or an insistent car horn, can make us anxious, even angry. Other sounds, like the ocean’s roar or the wind in the trees, can fill us with good feeling. The sound of thudding—as in footsteps—causes a snake to feel a negative tension. But being softly sung to can cause a snake to dance.
The word
pneuma
(breath) shares its origins with the word
psyche
; they are both considered words for soul. So when there is song in a tale or mythos, we know that the gods are being called upon to breathe their wisdom and power into the matter at hand. We know then that the forces are at work in the spirit world, busy crafting soul.
So the singing of song and using the heart as drum are both mystical acts awakening layers of the psyche not much used or seen. The breath or pneuma flowing over us . shakes open certain apertures, rouses certain otherwise inaccessible faculties. We cannot say for each person what will be sung up, drummed up, because these open such odd and unusual apertures in the human who participates thusly. However, one can be assured that whatever is enacted will be numinous and arresting.
The Dance of Body and Soul
Through their bodies, women live very close to the Life/ Death/Life nature. When women are in their right instinctual minds, their ideas and impulses to love, to creat
e, to believe, to desire are born
, have their time, fade and die, and are reborn again. One might say that women consciously or unconsciously practice this knowledge every moon cycle of their lives. For some this moon that tells the cycles is up in the sky. For others it is a Skeleton Woman who lives in their own psyches.
From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of filling and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by
inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be reconceived again in full glory. As you can see, the cycles of Skeleton Woman run throughout and under and in the entire woman. It cannot be otherwise.
Sometimes men who are still running away from the Life/ Death/Life nature are afraid of such a woman, for they sense she is a natural ally of Skeleton Woman. But it was not always this way. The symbol of death as spiritual transformer is a remnant of a time when Lady Death was welcomed as a close relative, as one’s own sister, brother, father, mother, or lover. In feminine imagery, the Death Woman, Death Mother, or Death Maiden always was understood as the carrier of destiny, the maker, the harvest maiden, the mother, the river-walker, and the re-creator, all of these in cycle.
Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many many endings, and many many beginnings—all in the same relationship.
The process is complicated by the fact that much of our overcivilized culture has a difficult time tolerating
thé
transformative. But there are better attitudes with which to embrace the Life/Death/Life nature. Throughout the world, though it is called by different names, many see this nature as
un baile
con La
Muerte
, a dance with death; Death as a dancer, with Life as its dance partner.
Way up in the Great Lakes dune country where I grew up, people lived who still spoke in the biblical dialect of
thee
and
hast
and
thus.
My childhood friend, Mrs.
Arle
Scheffeler, a silver- haired mother who had lost her only son in World War II, still kept to this archaic prose. One summer night I dared ask her if she still missed her son, and she gently explained her sense of life and death in terms a child could understand.- The story she cryptically called, “Dead Bolt,”
8
went, in part, like this: A woman welcomes a traveler named Death to her fire. The old woman is not afraid.
She seems to know Death as a life-giver as well as a death-dealer. She is certain Death is the cause of all tears and all laughter.
She tells Death he is welcome at her health, that she has loved him through ‘'all my crops bursting, and all my fields falling, through my children borning, my children dying.” She tells him she knows him and that he is her friend: “Thou hast caused me great weeping and dancing, Death. So call out the rounds now! I do know the steps!”