by Dain Peters
As I write this (15/01/14) we are just over 40 days after the death of Nelson Mandela. Forty Days: the magical time period, the time for which great mystics (Moses, Jesus and Mohammed) exiled themselves in preparation for significant changes; the 6-week time period when, in crisis theory, the old status quo is in dangerous flux and most available for adjustment; the time (960 hours) it takes, according to some traditions, to form a new habit. In many cultures, the 40 day period after someone’s death is marked by a ritual. This confluence of thinking around the 40 day period would suggest some sort of universal, archetypal knowledge about the nature of our adjustment to new realities.
In her poem When Great Trees Fall, Maya Angelou writes
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
As a country the last 40 days has felt like a time of inter-regnum, as if we were caught in the gap between certainties, where an old guiding symbol had died and a new one has yet to emerge. It has been a time of much jockeying and regrouping in the political landscape. This is the time when, according to Gramsci, a great many morbid symptoms appear. Politically, as has been much reported on, the ANC leadership, instead of being able to bask, as expected, in the reflected glory of its former leader, has seemed to be shown up and roundly scorned for its deficiencies. This seems to be a time of profound uncertainty, especially in the run-up to this year’s elections, in which splitting and polarising will be resorted to as a way to simplify the unbearable, a regression to an earlier mode of functioning where we feel alone in a threatening world. The loss of Mandela highlights just how tentative and fragile is a sense of hope that is rooted in one individual. I suppose this also holds for institutions, religions and for the formation of new political parties. For many people globally the unique individual personage of Mandela facilitated the loosening of defensiveness and prejudice, stimulating a new and welcomed sense of our common humanity. However there is a shadow-side to this. In the global idolising of Nelson Mandela as the exceptional individual, we may have inadvertently entrenched the opposite rule, prejudice or fear, as is the nature of splitting. It certainly seems that, in the death of this great individual who carried all of our hopes and dreams we have, in these past 40 days, as a nation, been reduced, bereft to the “unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves”.
In therapy we see this often where the hard-won intimacy of the therapeutic relationship has not yet generalised outside the borders of the therapy room. Instead, what our work seems to have highlighted is the dark, cold, absence of genuine relatedness outside of the therapy room. For a time the exception proves the rule, until it generalises and we gradually feel less alone in the world and more capable of mutual concern. So, after our 40-days in a cave, perhaps this is now an opportunity for us to open our eyes and to dare to be more awake, alive and more human.
Angelou continues:
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
Written by Dain Peters (Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Analyst; SAPC member. Email: dgpeters@absamail.co.za)
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