The Data of Darkness
Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing have broken down the wall dividing Art from Science. Science positioned itself 400 years ago as the only recognized means of healing in the West while practitioners of Storytelling, Poetry, Shamanism, Alchemy, Witchcraft were exiled, burned at the stake, devalued, made fun of, called blasphemers, and executed en masse. This sad window of history closes as the data about healing with our stories accumulates. It’s not as simple or simplistic as storytelling has been made to seem, along with other techniques of ecstatic healing: primitive. As objective reality melts away in the crucible of physics, objective medicine does as well. In both fields, Science unites with Art. Maybe this is the Alpha-Omega of it all, where one ends the other begins, and both are eternally ending and beginning at once.
Tonight in Narrative Medicine class, two practitioners of Narrative Therapy opened our conversation. They shared case studies wherein individuals who carried shame and guilt told their stories. In the process of telling, they noticed how the stories they had been telling themselves were different from the stories they now wanted to tell. They had changed. Their stories could change now, too. Our stories don’t change without our telling them. In the telling lies the awakening of the new self. It is an on-the-spot discovery. We can feel the untrue thing we are about to say. It was true the last time we told this story, but now we can’t even say it. Even more powerfully, we might think to ourselves in the instant before telling it, “Nah, I don’t need to.”
If we aren’t telling our stories to anyone, though, we miss this part. The outmoded self remains locked up inside the outmoded story. No light can get in. In Alchemy, this is the nigredo. In Neuroscience, it’s the Default Mode Network at middle age with so much un-gone-through experience, it hardens and saps its energy from other parts of us. Depression takes over. That’s the price of ego’s need to be in control of it all. Like that robot sculpture that scoops up its own leaked fluid until it now can barely move at all. Ego works very hard. A culture that only values prefrontal cortex reasoning and certainty wants us to work very hard and even witholds health insurance from those who can’t or choose not to. It threatens us with death while it kills us.
Here’s the thing. Ego is Western Sun. It is always running out of time. It is always setting. It is always moving toward its demise. It must rush to get it all done before it’s over. It doesn’t even know what “it” actually is. It just hurries to keep it, whatever it is, going. It’s sad about this but can’t stop to cry. The pressure is so packed in, it has to keep it packed because to open it, whatever it is, would be to set off an explosion. Keep it down then. Keep going. The sun is setting, always setting, always running out of time. Ego’s perception of reality is extremely and tragically limited. It confirms its perception by being stressed out about it. It even confirms its perception for everybody else, too. It ridicules anyone who daydreams or writes poems with no interest in publishing or who finds utter delight in the fleeting scent of a violet. Anybody who isn’t completely stressed out, angry, vehemently opposed, worn out, pissed off, tense, fixated isn’t aware how very serious all of this is. Not only does ego ignore reports of its own ship’s sinking, it seeks to sink all the other ships as well. It will gladly sink the whole ocean to prove its point. Whatever that may have been.
Ego is stupid. So so stupid. Look what it has done. Look at the world the homo sapiens created all on their own at the mere cost of centuries of enslavement and genocide. It has created its gods who have so much disposable income they make rockets and fire them into space for fun without anyone ever saying, “Gee, if we could only fire a rocket into outerspace while all these people are suffering.” It kills trees and locks up children. It makes food you can eat while driving your car. It makes bridges and ships that tear down bridges. Highways under ceaseless maintenance, cities where people work so they can absorb food brought into the cities, food that literally grows from the earth and has seeds in it that can be planted to grow twenty more of the thing just eaten. And we don’t need more than that. Drink rain. Eat veggies. The original business model was aces.
Ego can’t afford its own kindness unless somebody is watching, in which case it’s okay.
That’s the danger of stories, isn’t it? Ego can’t stand stories. Ego IS the story. How else could one network of the brain eclipse its counterpart so magnificently—to the extent that it forgets it is even there? Every time somebody dismisses sweetness and beauty in favour of keeping an eye on the ball or whatever, the illusion of reality hardens even more. Ego and reality are one thing, a tiny alpha-and-omega on perpetual loop the reinforces and confirms, reinforces and confirms. Once you tell a story, though, and experience the shift in perception that follows, you see how much of a construct all that is. When you tell another story and another and another, You start to wonder if you’re maybe a wizard because no way on earth is anybody else seeing what you’re seeing. It’s that wonder-ful. It’s that mind-blowing. Tell another story, and you see that as you soften so does the world around you. Life gets better. It’s as though we move into another dimension one where all the other people and things are there, but also, everything’s completely different. Yes, even the people change how they are. Reality becomes shifty. Other strangeness occur as well. You notice them and wonder if anybody else caught it. You don’t dare ask because you sound crazy. Maybe you are. And that’s where the real alpha-and-omega comes into play: Once you validate creativity, as clinical Medicine and Physics have, you can’t cop out anymore. Reality is not a fixed event. Sure, you can hang out in your ego-surface brain, or you can let go a little and start to see how things really are. That’s courage.
There is a zen story of two monks that carried a man across a river. After they put the man down and continue on their way, one of them continues to talk about how heavy the man had been. The monk listening makes no comment. The venting monk asks why he isn’t venting with him, and the quiet monk replies, “I put the man down as soon as we reached shore, but I see you are still carrying him.” When we write and tell about the various beings and incidents we carried across the river, we leave them at the shore and walk on. That process, now fully substantiated by evidence, is the territory of mythology. In class, for instance, I shared the story of Danté Alighieri’s exile from his beloved Florence and framed the Divine Comedy is a healing narrative, one that takes us from revenge to resilience. In its creation, Danté affixes his own rage and hurt upon the sacred cosmology of Christianity and populates the three worlds with his enemies, friends, and, of course, Beatrice. Danté carried a lot of people across the river. Writing posed a way of leaving them at the shore.
After the Royal Society laid down the limits of reality, the impact resounded beyond the halls of science. Poetry fell off the Billboard Charts. Folktales, plays, storytelling fell with it. Troubadors who didn’t get the memo continued to stroll narrow streets across the centuries. They evolved into garage bands holding keggers to pay for recording studio time to make a demo. The poets found diners and filterless Camel cigarettes. Writers delivered life’s work manuscripts to publishers and made 8 cents on the dollar from sales. A handful of these artists succeeded for each generation giving their communities enough juice to prevent the cold surface perception devoid of insight and play from turning us to ice.
Beyond this meagre allowance of art, the reward for expressing pain and sorrow in a S.T.E.M. world was silence, suicide, and a diagnosis of madness. It was important to paint the artists as mad. Why allow well-being through creativity spread. Even 1989’s Dead Poets’ Society reads like a cautionary tale. Poetry kills. Despite such discouragement, artists kept making art. We tried starving them, sending them to gulags, hooking them up to drugs. They kept coming. So we gave them a false set of aims to strive for. We made up awards. We paid hefty advances for yet unwritten works we hoped would be like the first ones. We gave them jobs in universities they could keep as long as they published. On this we based their worth. To let them be healers, though, created a paradox. In ego’s eye, there could not be two Medicines.
This is what makes the Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing movement within clinical research so delicious. Now science supports two Medicines, one of the body and one of the soul, the latter of which only other storytellers, individuals whose brains operate in the opposite way, can administer. That’s not to say doctors can’t, since we are all storytellers at some the basic level. Many doctors and clinicians are developing their stories for their own well-being. What changes is that non-clinicians are qualified to share the medicine of storytelling.
The age of the maladapted creative can end. The age of the maladapted human, which means all of us in the modern world. can find healing in our evidence-proven creativity. We can realign ourselves with deeper assessments than how much money we make. We can find meaning and healing on our own, which lessens our dependence on consumption of goods. When we’re engaging our communities in storytelling and playing our pianos and fiddles just for fun, we stop craving all the plastic things. We live. We individuated from the pressures and enjoy peace of our own making. Best of all, we stop wanting to kill. That’s a big one. The other nine commandments fall into place in our lives as well. When we’re happy, we are healthier. We live longer. My friend, Dan the Thoracic Surgeon, taught me that.
The current bifurcation of Medicine relies on Science relinquishing of its monopoly of knowing, literally its name. It won’t know this more profound mode of healing. It cannot know it because science seeks sameness, patterns, prediction, repeated results. We don’t want to change that. It’s useful at times. It’s not everything, although it would like to be. The healing of the soul is not a protocol so much as it is a practice. You show up for it every day, or aim to. You pour your coffee and chase the cursor down the screen and go into some other mental space, and when your coffee cup is empty, the page is full. You might even not notice your cup is empty because in the world you’ve entered, the body is far behind. You’ve created another body, though, with your words. It’s doing things. It’s a child again or it’s you as you are now describing yourself as someone you’re seeing for the first time and want to get to know. We say in the writing world, we meet ourselves on the page. We have authentic encounters with this person we have probably been avoiding for some time. There they are, though. Ourselves. Ready to tell. At a time when Mark Zuckerberg attempts to lure us into a metaverse, Medicine has opened up the deeper metaverse, that of our own stories. This deeper one takes into our lives rather than away from them. We are our own Danté and our own Virgil and even, when we’ve let go all the old stories we carried, our own Beatrice.