Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
resignation, they put down their pens, closed up their words, turned off their singing, rolled up their artwork, and vowed never to touch them ever again. A woman in such a condition has inadvertently entered into the oven along with her handmade life. Her life becomes ashes.
A woman’s life may die away in the fire of self-hatred for complexes can bite hard and, at least for a time, successfully frighten her away from coming too near the work or life that matters to her. Many years are spent in
not
going,
not
moving,
not
learning,
not
finding out,
not
obtaining,
not
taking on,
not
becoming.
The vision a woman has for her own life can also be decimated in the flames of someone else’s jealousy or someone’s plain-out destructiveness toward her. Family, mentors, teachers, and friends are not supposed to be destructive if and when they feel envy, but some decidedly are, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. No woman can afford to let her creative life hang by a thread while she serves an antagonistic love relationship, parent, teacher, or friend.
When the personal soul-life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to act dry-boned as Death. In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods, and eventually staggers to its feet and takes over, ferocious and famished.
To be in the state of
hambre
del alma
, a starved soul, is to be made relentlessly hungry. Then a woman bums with a hunger for anything that will make her feel alive again. A woman who has been captured knows no better, and will take something, anything, that
seems similar
to the original treasure, good or not. A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look “cleaned up and combed” on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty
mouths.
In this state, she will take any food regardless of its condition or its effect, for she is trying to make up for past losses. Yet even though this is a terrible situation, the wild Self will try over and over again to save us. It wh
ispers, whimpers, calls, drags o
ur fleshless carcasses around in our nightdreams until we become conscious of our condition and take steps to reclaim the treasure.
We can better understand the woman who dives into excesses-
the most common being drugs, alcohol, and bad love—and who is driven by soul-hunger by noting the behavior of the starved and ravening animal. L
ike
the starved soul, the wolf has been portrayed as vicious, ravenous, preying upon the innocent
and
the unguarded, killing to kill, never
knowing
when enough is enough. As you can see, the wolf has a very bad and unearned fairy-tale and real-life reputation. In actuality, wolves are dedicated social creatures. The entire pack is
instinctively
organized so healthy
wolves
kill only what is needed for survival. Only
when
there is trauma to an individual wolf
or to the
pack does this normal pattern loosen or change.
There are two instances in which a wolf kills excessively, in both, the wolf is not well. A wolf may kill
indiscriminately
when it is ill with rabies or distemper. A wolf may kill excessively after a
period
of famine. The idea that famine can alter the behavior of creatures is quite a significant
metaphor
for the soul-starved
woman.
Nine times out of ten a woman with
a
spiritual/psychological
problem
that causes her to fall into traps and be badly hurt is a
woman
who is currently being starved or who has been critically soul-starved in the past.
Among
wolves, famine occurs when snows are high and
game
is impossible to reach. Deer
and
caribou act as
snowplows;
wolves
follow
their paths through the high snow.
When the
deer
are
stranded by high snowfalls, no plowing occurs; then the
wolves
are
stranded
too. Famine ensues.
For
wolves the
most dangerous
time for famine is winter. For woman, a famine may
occur
at any time, and can
come from
anywhere, including her own culture.
For the
wolf,
famine usually ends in springtime when the
snows
begin to melt Following a famine,
the
pack may throw itself into a killing frenzy. Its members won't eat most of the game they kill, and they won’t cache it They leave it They kill much more than they
could
ever eat much more than they could ever
need
.
5
A similar process occurs when a woman's been captured and starved. Suddenly free to go, to do, to be, she is in danger of going on a rampage of
excesses too ... and feels justified
about it
The girl in the fairy tale, too, feels justified in gaining access
to
the poisonous red shoes at any cost There is something about
famine
that causes judgment to be blighted.
So when the treasure of a woman’s most soulful life has been burned to ashes, instead of being driven by anticipation, a woman is possessed by voraciousness. So, for instance, if a woman wasn’t permitted to sculpt, she may suddenly begin to sculpt day and night, lose sleep
, deprive her innocent body of nutrition, impair her health, and who knows what else. Maybe she cannot stay awake a moment longer, ah, reach for the drugs... for who knows how long she will be free.
Hambre
del alma
is also about starvation of the soul’s attributes: creativity, sensory awareness, and other instinctual gifts. If a woman is supposed to be a lady who sits with her knees kissing only each other, if she was raised to keel over in the presence of rough language, if she was never allowed anything to drink but pasteurized milk ... then when she is freed, look out! Suddenly she may not be able to drink enough of those sloe-gin fizzes, she may sprawl like a drunken sailor, and her language will peel the paint off the walls. After famine, there is a fear one will again be captured someday. So one gets while the getting is good.
4
Overkill through excesses, or excessive behaviors, is acted out by women who are famished for a life that has meaning and makes sense for them. When a woman has gone without her cycles or creative needs for long periods of time, she begins a rampage of— you name it—alcohol, drugs, anger, spirituality, oppression of others, promiscuity, pregnancy, study, creation, control, education, orderliness, body fitness, junk food, to name a few areas of common excess. When women do this, they are compensating for the loss of regular cycles of self-expression, soul-expression, soul- satiation.
The starving woman endures famine after famine. She may plan her escape, yet believe that the cost of fleeing is too high, that it will cost her too much libido, too much energy. She may be ill- prepared in other ways too, such as educationally, economically, spiritually. Unfortunately, the loss of treasure and the deep memory of famine may cause us to rationalize that excesses are desirable. And it is, of course, such a relief and a pleasure to finally be able to enjoy sensation... any sensation.
A woman newly free from famine just wants to enjoy life for a change. Her dulled perceptions about the emotional, rational,
physical, spiritual, and financial boundaries required for survival endanger her instead. For her there is a pair of poisonous red shoes glowing out there somewhere. She will take them wherever she finds them. That is the trouble with famine. If something looks like it will fill the yearning, a woman will seize it, no questions asked.
Trap
#4:
Injury to Basic Instinct
,
the Consequence of Capture
Instinct is a difficult thing to define, for its configurations are invisible, and though we sense they have been part of human nature since the beginning of time, no one knows quite where they might be housed neurologically, or precisely how they act upon us. Psychologically, Jung speculated that the instincts derived from the psychoid unconscious, that layer of psyche where biology and spirit might touch. I am of a considered same mind, and would go further to venture that the creative instinct in particular is as much the lyrical language of the Self as is the symbology of dreams.
Etymologically, the word
instinct
derives from the Latin
instinguere,
meaning “impulse,” also
instinctus
, meaning “instigation,” to incite or impel via an innate prompting. The idea of instinct can be valued positively as an inner something that when blended with forethought and consciousness guides humans to i
ntegral behavior. A woman is born
with all instinct intact.
Although we could say that the child in the tale has been swept into a new environment, one in which her roughness is smoothed down and her difficult life is removed, in reality her individuation ceases, her striving to develop stops. And when the old woman, a stultifying presence, sees the works of the creative spirit as refuse rather than riches, and bums the handmade red shoes, the child becomes more than silent. She becomes sad, which is the expected state when creative spirit is locked away from natural soul-life. Worse, the child’s instinct to properly flee this plight is dulled to a nothing. Instead of aiming toward new life, she sits down in a psychic pool of glue. Lack of fleeing when it is absolutely warranted causes depression. Another trap.
Call the soul what you like—one’s marriage to the wild, one’s hope for the future, one’s fluming energy, one’s creative passion, my way, what I do, the Beloved, the wild groom, the “feather on the breath of God.”
5
Whatever words or images you may have for this process in your life, it is that which has become captured. That is why the creative spirit of the psyche becomes so bereft.
Through wildlife studies of various species of captive animals, it was found that no matter how lovingly their zoo plazas are constructed, no matter how much their human keepers love them, as indeed they do, the creatures often become unable to breed, their appetites for food and rest become skewed, their vital behaviors dwindle to lethargy, sullenness, or untoward aggressiveness. Zoologists call this behavior in captives “animal depression.” Any time a creature is caged, its natural cycles of sleep, mate selection, estrus, grooming, parenting, and so forth deteriorate. As the natural cycles are lost, emptiness follows. The emptiness is not full, like the Buddhist concept of sacred void, but rather empty like being inside a sealed box with no windows.
So too when a woman enters the household of the dry old woman, she experiences lack of resolve, miasma, ennui, simple depressions, and sudden anxiety states that are similar to the symptoms animals display when they have been stunned by capture and trauma. Too much domestication breeds out strong and basic impulses to play, relate, cope, rove, commune, and so forth. When a woman agrees to become too “well-bred” her instincts for these impulses drop down into her darkest unconscious, outside her automatic reach. She is said then to be instinct-injured. What should come naturally comes not at all, or after too much tugging, pulling, rationalizing, fighting with herself.
When I speak of overdomestication as capture, I do not refer to socialization, the process whereby children are taught to behave in more or less civilized ways. Social development is critical and important. Without it, a woman cannot make her way in the world.
But too much domestication is like forbidding the vital essence to dance. In its proper and healthy state, the wild self is not docile or vacuous. It is alert and responsive to any given movement or moment. It is not locked into an absolute and repetitive pattern for any and all circumstances. It has creative choice. The instinct- injured woman has no choice. She just stays stuck.
There are many ways to be stuck. The instinct-injured woman usually gives herself away because she has a difficult time asking for help or recognizing her own needs. Her natural instincts to fight or flee are drastically slowed or extincted. Recognition of the sensations of satiation, off-taste, suspicion, caution, and the drive to love fully and freely are inhibited or exaggerated.
As in the tale, one of the most insidious attacks on the wild self is to be directed to perform properly, implying a reward will follow (if ever). Though this method may (I emphasize “may”) temporarily persuade a two-year-old to clean her room (no playing with toys until the bed is made)
6
it will never, never work in a vital woman’s life. While consistency, follow-through, and organization are all essential to implementing creative life, the old woman’s injunction to “be proper” kills off any opportunity to expand.
It is play, not propemess, that is the central artery, the core, the brain stem of creative life. The impulse to play is an instinct. No play, no creative life. Be good, no creative life. Sit still, no creative life. Speak, think, act only demurely, little creative juice. Any group, society, institution, or organization that encourages women to revile the eccentric; to be suspicious of the new and unusual; to avoid the fervent, the vital, the innovative; to impersonalize the personal, is asking for a culture of dead women.
Janis Joplin, a blues singer during the 1960s, is a good example of a feral woman who was instinct-injured by spirit-crushing forces. Her creative life, innocent curiosity, love of life, somewhat irreverent approach to the world during her growing-up years were mercilessly vilified by her teachers and many of those who surrounded her in the “good-girl” white Southern Baptist community of her time.
Though she was an A student and a talented painter, she was ostracized by other girls for not wearing makeup
7
and by neighbors for liking to climb a rock outcropping outside town and singing up there with her friends and for listening to jazz. When she finally escaped to the world of the blues, she was so starved she could no longer tell when enough was enough. She had shaky boundaries, that is, no limits around sex, liquor, and drugs.
8
There is something about Bessie Smith, Anne Sexton, Edith
Piaf, Marilyn Monroe, and Judy Garland that follows the same instinct-injured pattern of soul-famine: attempting to “fit,” becoming intemperate, not being able to stop.
9
We could make a very long list of instinct-injured talented women who in their vulnerable states made very poor choices. Like the child in the tale, they all lost their handmade shoes somewhere along (he way and found their way to the poisoned red shoes. They all were filled with sorrow, for they hungered for spirit-food, soul-story, natural roving, self-decoration in keeping with their own needs, God- learning, and a simple and sane sexuality. But they unwittingly chose the cursed shoes—beliefs, actions, ideas that caused life to deteriorate more and more—that turned them into madly dancing specters.
Injury to instinct cannot be underestimated as the root of the issue when women are acting mad, are possessed by obsession, or when they are stuck in less malignant but nevertheless destructive patterns. The repair of injured instinct begins with acknowledging that a capture has taken place, that a soul-famine has followed, that usual boundaries of insight and protection have been disturbed. The process that caused a woman’s capture and the ensuing famine has to be reversed. But first, many women go through the next few stages as described in the story.
Trap
#5:
Trying to Sneak a Secret Life
,
Split in Two