My Lord in Plaster

I am uploading this Blog in Audio/Visual to this Youtube channel soon-

Ciara Cant Dance

There will be other content available on YouTube later which will not be available here.

I am linking a few seemingly unrelated things this week.

In my last Post I explained that I would be doing a number of Blog posts around Narcissism, and how we use the myth of Echo and Narcissus allegorically to describe human behaviour.

I read a great book by Jon Ronson in 2013 called “The Psychopath Test” I highly recommend it if you haven’t read it-

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson is available to buy on Amazon

This was one of the instigators for me becoming interested in this kind of forensic psychology, whereas I was otherwise reading more about therapies and theories which were for helping with depression and more ordinary mental health problems.

By February 2014 I was in Melbourne, Australia, and wasn’t able to leave the accommodation where I was staying for health reasons. So I had a lot of time to read and write, but could only read via the internet.

I had realised God exists about a month earlier and was reading the Bible online, Psychological journal articles, free books and websites; usually written by psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

I was also developing a more intense interest in reading about the seven deadly sins, and read things like extracts from Dante’s Divine Comedy for the first time. This in turn often led to blogs and Christian websites, though I don’t remember taking what the Christians had to say too seriously.

Less often I ended up on Blogs and similar sites written by mentally ill people and victims of abuse. These in turn led to poems by victims, which I found often spoke about Narcissism, because lots of abuse victims describe their abusers as Narcissists.

Although it was during this period that I became interested in Narcissism I was also reading around other areas of Psychology. I was interested in the genesis of mental health problems and so also often ended up reading about child development.

I filled notebooks with poetry at this time! I can remember much of what I read because of how it inspired my thought processes and ended up in these poems, most of which I still have.

Recently, during protests by people passionate for justice, statues of certain figures have been defaced and destroyed; usually because the protesters feel that the person represented is not worthy of being honoured.         

I am not commenting on these events from any kind of moralistic or political perspective, but it reminded me of a poem I wrote in February 2014.

The poem is about idealising people. It sprang from my analysis of my relationship and attitude to my own Father, from my personal introspection I interpreted a general theory and extrapolated, applying it to other people and situations.

As is usually the case with me, there is a manifold amalgamation of inspiration to each poem. In this one I could cite the TV show 'Frasier', the Studio Ghible film 'Spirited Away', the journal articles and websites I was reading about child development, crumbling statues, and then personal reflections from my own life and the subsequent extrapolations.

As I wrote it, I imagined looking up at an extreme angle to a crumbling statue which is outside, it is looking a little worse for wear. So, it was difficult for me not to make the link with current events of querying the worthiness of figures from the past who were once honoured and are now being denigrated.

My Lord in Plaster

Ideals,

Like idols, vain and built long ago,

Disintegrating slowly.

Had I an idol of my own?

Measurements.

Soon I would see they don’t match up.

My face would betray me!

There is worthiness in stature.

My growing pains

Spirited away, weathered,

And such as life provides.

All the illusions of fate flatten.

Degrading-

A chip in the nose,

A shit on the shoulder,

Suddenly my flesh is less fragile.

You could crush me

But you too were a man.

 

The poem is not entirely about one relationship or person. My interpretation of human behaviour and the conclusion that it is common for people to idealise a person, especially a parent figure, and then to denigrate them when their flaws become apparent, before accepting them as they are in their humanity is not my own idea but it was the first time I thought to apply it to myself. My subsequent introspection and imagined visualisation inspired the poem. 

May more delicate readers please accept my apologies for the bad swears, this was written in the pre-Christian Ciara, whose own family dubbed her a "hamster-handed fishwife". It would hurt the poem if I changed it, and I don’t feel the need to.

So how does the poem relate to Narcissism? It doesn’t directly, I wrote the poem around the time I started reading about Narcissism.

Though I will explain more clearly in the Youtube Video how I think this idealising/denigration theory and Narcissism are linked and it will become more clear when I explain my interpretation of Narcissism. 
It is too much to go into now- but my first clue is that in the myth, poor, vain Narcissus is captivated by his own reflection in the water!

May God bless us and help us to be kind and merciful. Especially when we see the things in ourselves and others which make us less qualified for a place on a plinth.