Strange days: our mask and our shadow

“like a priest with a pornographic watch/looking and longing on the sly/sure it’s stricken from your uniform/but you can’t get it out of your eye”

-Joni Mitchell The Boho Dance

“strange days have found us/strange days have tracked us down”

-The Doors Strange Days

Every one of us wears some kind of a mask, a persona[1] to help us manage social situations, family tensions, political and economic stressors, religious thoughts and aspirations, a personality to meet the day and face the world, we all “prepare a face to meet the faces that [we] meet” in T.S. Eliot’s words[2].

Long ago we learnt to wear this mask, tie it on tight and disown those parts of us that do not fit the persona of the mask-disowning the imago, as it is often known[3]. Thus, we identify and further cram our future identifications into a reduced part of us in order to get by. Our life may become a tense collusion with what is essentially an inauthentic life. This cascades into our whole being in an effort to fit in with this conditioned and self-conditioned identity. We become-in the words of the French philosopher Foucault[4]– docile bodies, ripe for relational, religious, economic, political and social control.

We live split off from our shadow, that part of us we have shoved into the dark cave of our unconscious, where is still lives as suppressed or repressed, barely processed psychic energy that occasionally erupts in a flame of anger, hate, greed, lust or shame, a litany of desires that do not fit the image we have assiduously created; the mask cracks and we appear as a stranger to the world and ourselves: the vegan chews on a bloody steak, the 17 year old varsity princess now wears ripped tights and black lipstick, hungering for a tattoo, the 45 year old faithful husband confesses to dozens of affairs. The levee breaks and the shadow shows its face.

Of course, this might not occur with such brutality. Our shadow side is very old and it’s learnt a trick or two. It’s learnt to express itself in ways that are socially acceptable (therefore it becomes stitched into our persona as a whole) so it might express itself as a kind of strangeness such as eccentricity or an addiction, depression, guilt, or a justified intolerance, especially of the political kind (if politics is The Grand Theatre of Shadow then online comments boards might constitute a kind of mass Off Broadway) and psychological projection, where the shadow side of us projects onto the other in othering and victimises (the poor, the mentally ill, single mothers, refugees). Our shadow might express itself by what is known as parapraxis, Freudian slips which express an unbidden truth papered over for years, such as a slew of racial slurs committed one tipsy night out, as if a sudden Dionysian truth breaks though our Apollonian control freak, our mask; we then seek to justify and reassert our image, deny it ever happened or it meant anything at all.

The nature of our shadow is that it needs to come out of hiding by any means at all, the nature of our mask is to stop this happening, for if the shadow erupts this constitutes slaughter-an ego death-for the mask.

Ever gone on holidays and tried to submerge that ball in the pool? You can, but it comes back up with some force. This is analogous to the sheer psychic force it takes to suppress and force into shadow the things we cannot tolerate.

So, we live in tension, between the need to bring our shadow out of hiding into a right brain spaciousness and the desire for our Control Freak or mask to stay in the data stream of our left brain.

We need to meet the shadow, our shadow, to encounter and engage with what we have disowned: we need to walk into our strange days.

[1] See http://journalpsyche.org/jungian-model-psyche/

[2] T.S Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

[3] Jung Psychology of the Unconscious and https://vimeo.com/95856382?outro=1

[4] Foucault Discipline and Punish