Resilience: A Sally
‘What can I do?’
‘You and I are unique bits of shock waves, contributing our own ripples, pulsations, bits of quakes and floods’ (Michael Eigen, Psychic Deadness 142)
‘We are particles without depth in the scene of the present. The deep effects arise in the aftermath. The roots grow afterward, first the shock, then the nerves’ (Hélène Cixous, Rootprints 67-68)
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry 'Courage! To the field!' And thou hast talk'd
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream,
And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?
(Lady Percy, in Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV, Act II, Scene 3)
In the current circumstances please don’t entirely lose sight of who and what, all of the whos and whats, you are on the way to becoming. That also means please don’t lose touch with what is around you in the spaces where you live, of the affinities that exist between you and your best blanket, of the remembered sight of a silver river at last light, of all the memories that message you from the depths while you are queuing two metres apart outside the pharmacy, and stay in touch with your dreams—not to decipher them.
When all’s not well, Lady Percy draws attention to dreaming.
Her speech recognises the relationship between the state of dreaming and a state of war, complete with attempts to manage. She hears her sleeping husband giving orders to his horse. (Freud says the id is like a horse, and that sometimes the ego has to ride the bounding steed the way it wants to go.) Harry Percy isn’t wanting to be run away with, that’s part of the struggle, and the value of a rider’s knowledge of the ‘terms of manage.’
Lady Percy’s speech is full of language that lends itself to the energies and movements of what psychoanalysis calls primary process. ‘Primary’ because these movements precede us, don’t belong to us, we host them without having issued an invitation. They don’t even belong in words. She refers to forays, retreats, entrenchments, defences, weapons-of-choice, prison, bargaining, deaths. There is bounding, sallying, disturbing, strange motion of holding-on. All these things are virtually in all of us all the time.
She looks at her husband and sees ‘the currents of a heady fight’ flow through a particular beloved human being. The eyes of love become available. She witnesses that he, and we, fight battles and cross streams, and there are battles and streams streaming and battling in us and they don’t begin or end there.
Her speech has a dream-like quality, she is permeable to what she is seeing, she enters into an exchange with it, with him, with us as we read. We feel. It is as if she already knew what we ourselves have felt. Time of dreaming, time of writing, Shakespeare appearing as Lady Percy, the writer ‘in character’ as per usual, here in the time of reading, which is also an experience of currents (flows and times and also currencies, forms of exchange).
Why does primary process matter? Dreams condense and displace dismissed experiences and relational catastrophes, the strange motions of holding that won’t go away by themselves, beginning to transform them. (‘Bits of nameless, formless catastrophic impacts are reworked into moods, images and narratives in dreams, myths and reveries and become psychic objects and parts of successive levels of thought,’ Eigen says.) They are, in Lady Percy’s word, sallies from the unconscious. They set out from the inside that is not simply ours and make a break for consciousness. We are all more or less besieged but there are exceptions, key workers, so to speak. They remind us. They have words of manage.
Sometimes a beginning, a sally, is all that needs to have happened.
Sleep isn’t only rest, which is vital, and immune system maintenance, also vital. It is for dreaming, which reminds you of your own depths—deeps so deep they aren’t able to be owned by anyone, and yet can still can push their way into your exact daily life.
If you are having trouble sleeping, you might try a course of 5-HTP, which won’t stop your dreams.
What is happening at the moment—contagion (viral contagion to be sure but also other contagions, including that of fear), isolation, restriction and the anxieties accompanying them—tends to pull us into a trapping, painfully narrowed sense of the present. Life can feel frighteningly empty of promise but at the same time, dreadfully without the spaciousness that lets us be surprised and reanimated by what enters it. This can apply to those who are currently on the front lines, working intensely under difficult and uncertain conditions as well as to people with time on their hands. Many people will be finding themselves in both situations.
There is also the possibility of odd moments of timeless, intense, awareness. On my way to buy vegetables last weekend, before the lockdown, I saw a woman looking up and listening to a thrush singing in the small hawthorn tree by the recreation ground. I saw her face seeing something I couldn’t see as we listened. It was ecstatic. Good moments are good moments but to really do good they need to be melted into what Eigen calls the linking-dividing power of primary process work, which is serpentine, liquid, electrical and makes sallies into language, rather than belonging in words. It forms and reforms all the time.
The inner processes described with difficulty by psychoanalysis, and spoken of with a strange kind of inadvertent divination by people in individual psychotherapies, flow before and beyond human psychology.
What has this got to do with resilience? The past life of the word is indirectly instructive. Its bio begins with a movement back In Latin the word came from the joining of re-, meaning ‘back’ and salire ‘to jump or leap’. It named a recoiling or rebounding movement. Salire is also the root of Lady Percy’s word ‘sally,’ meaning the bounding leap forward, the sortie, the expedition. It was first of all a military and defensive term in English but its field of reference includes all kinds of activity, including emotional, literary and architectural activity. Words know things. Resilience has to do with a capacity to make virtual leaps and to be receptive to inner leaping. We can’t make trips out at the moment but there are other kinds of foray.
(The entry for ‘sally’ from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:
- 1 A sudden charge out of a besieged place against the enemy, a sortie (esp. in make a sally). Formerly also, a place from which a sally may be made. lME.
R. L. Fox Stone-throwers…used to repel army sallies.
- 2 A leaping or rushing movement. Now only Nautical, a sudden rush by crew from one part of a vessel to another, usu. to free it when aground. l16.
- 3 A sudden start into activity. e17.
Daily Telegraph A…sally against the credit industry would choke off…demand.
- 4 An excursion, an expedition. m17.
P. P. Read The elegant suit…for sallies into the West End. fig.: L. Edel Faulkner's bold sally into the consciousness of an idiot.
- 5 A sudden departure from the bounds of custom, prudence, or propriety; an audacious or adventurous act, an escapade. Now rare. m17.
- 6 A breaking forth from restraint; an outburst of emotion or expression. l17.
D. Hume It is difficult to abstain from some sally of panegyric.
- 7 A sprightly or audacious utterance or literary composition; a brilliant remark, a witticism; a piece of banter. m18.
W. S. Maugham Laughter at the sallies of the local wag.
- II
- 8 Architecture. A deviation from the alignment of a surface; a projection, a prominence, esp. on the end of a timber. m16.
Clearly, from these definitions, a sally is brief, a minor but significant deviation. Our topic is resilience.
Francis Bacon’s scientific writings first used the word ‘resilience’ in English in the early 17th century, to discuss the rebounding of sound. He describes sound as a body in motion, like a ball—a ‘Round Orbe of Aire’ that collides with and echoes off surfaces (see Sylva Sylvarum, or of Natural History in ten Centuries, quoted by David Alexander in a very interesting 2013 article, ‘Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey’.)
…
So there is also a question of space. If we are made of streams and held breath, if we are at war with ourselves and also at times preoccupied by ‘iron war’ that will not float or yield or move, if we are stuck, as in ‘stuck at home’ or deeply committed to a vital but exhausting role, and having to go where we are sent—we need to find another, more resonant, kind of space and another thought of spacing.
'Emptiness is vast and astonishing … it does not have to be toxic. When we grasp the emptiness of our false selves, we are touching a little bit of truth. If we can relax into that truth, we can discover ourselves in a new way. But without a method of looking into emptiness, most of us are at risk of becoming overwhelmed by fear. In meditation there is such a method for looking into emptiness without being overtaken by the fear of the disconnections of the past.' (Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart 20)
Now might be a time to start, resume or continue meditating. It helps the immune system. Metta, or Lovingkindness meditation could be a good one, as there is something to occupy the fluttering mind. There are good apps. Find a voice you like to guide you.
Works cited
David Alexander (2013) ‘Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey,’ Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 13. 10.5194/nhess-13-2707-2013.
Francis Bacon (1626) Sylva Sylvarum, or of Natural History in ten Centuries, collated by W. Rawley, London.
Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber [1994], Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, translated by Eric Prenowitz, Routledge, London, 1997.
Michael Eigen [1996] Psychic Deadness, Karnac, London, 2004.
Mark Epstein (1999) Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, Harper Collins, New York.
Sigmund Freud [1923] ‘The Ego and the Id,’ translated by Joan Rivière, translation revised by James Strachey, The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925), Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 2001.
William Shakespeare [?1597] The First Part of King Henry IV, edited by Herbert Weil, Judith Weil, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007