Our race has re-made the world to be a reflection of our own chaotic inner lives and processes. We’ve fashioned our environment in such a way that it has become our self-portrait (if we dare to look). Perhaps we see ourselves for the first time, when we look out on the world we have made.
And perhaps we choose, or allow into power, our leaders, in the same way. They represent some sort of answer to the questions that plague us, that disturb us in our sleep, questions we cannot resolve on our own. So we choose these individuals to resolve them for us, or as a living embodiment of the answers we think will do the job. Often, I believe, our assumptions of what sort of leader is needed, or what sort of person the leader we’ve turned to actually is, are wildly wrong. This is because we have projected onto them our own images of what we want them to be, blinded by our confusion and dissatisfaction, and yearning for relief, however illusory.
I think Jeremy Corbin is a case in point. He still has a following, despite the dreadful election result, despite all the evidence he has provided of gross inadequacy and incapacity as Party Leader. A legend has been written, overriding the reality. The legend will rise again from the waves some day, waving Excalibur, this dream leader who never was.
Onto to a more present legend – in my terms, the legend of Mr Toad and Dr Doombeetle. Other people might give it a different title, such as Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings. I was recently struck by a correlation between these two individuals (whoever they really are) and the title of a book called “The Master and his Emissary – the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” It is by Iain McGilchrist and was published in 2009. As I understand it, it took McGilchrist over 20 years to write.
And this book is not of some legend. It is a study of the human brain, a study, in other words, of how each one of us functions. And the Master is the term McGilchrist gives to our right brain hemisphere. And the Emissary is the term he gives to our left.
And our two brain hemispheres are very different from one another and yet have to work in close partnership, despite the gap that exists between them, and the fact that they are not equal, nor easily complementary.
And – wait for it – they are actually at odds. And the “emissary”, the more analytical hemisphere, which should be working in the service of the more imaginative right hand side, does not see the point or validity of the Master and strains at all times to unseat and replace it.
And McGilchrist suggests and demonstrates that the world we create at any one time, or in any one generation, reflects which of the human brain hemispheres is in the ascendant at that time. And if the emissary finally and fully comes out on top and takes over from the Master, the human race as a whole will not survive. For the emissary to “win,” runs against all our interests, including those of the emissary.
Get the connection ?
And a few years ago, I wrote a poem inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s great book, making my own kind of legend out of it. And, for the purposes of the poem, I called the left hand side of the brain “Hard Drive” and the right hand side “Cat.”
Personally, I think things have got worse since the days of Cat and Hard Drive. Our present Toad is a dreadfully degenerate version of Cat, in thrall to Self and now hypnotised by Doombeetle’s world-view (so long as Self benefits from it).
Truth and Reality are accordingly old hat. Now Dr Doombeetle stands at the wheel of our human ship, the human brain, while the Toad preens himself down below, in his first class cabin, admiring himself in the mirror.
Here is the poem :
Cat vies with Hard Drive for my Soul
A Confession of Bias
I wish myself cat
cats-eyes
cats-ears
I wish myself cat-alive
cat alert,
sonar centre,
electric
lithe advance.
Hard-drive blunts me
splits
and thickens me
Hard-drive weighs on me
like a hump,
an imperialist
goiter.
Cat asleep
Ears at attention
sharp as bayonets
still scanning
and reading.
And eyes though closed
are still reckoning
keeping the captain
abreast of all weathers
as he paces
alone
on the bridge.
Any time now
those eyes will blaze
open
and cat will rise
and crouch
and bare teeth
and pounce.
Hard Drive in the bath
Hard-drive specialises
in mean look
and fierce straight line.
Curves dismay him
They hint at softness
and lying back in the bath.
You don’t bathe for joy,
proclaims Hard Drive, but for profit,
an increase of power and standing.
So yes, bathe often
but with vigour
and never lie back.
Hard-drive comes alive
Hard-drive waits for nobody
and never gives way.
To pause is life-threatening
and to make allowance for other life
risks invasion
by gargoyle
possession
by Dracula.
I shall force my will
on the landscape.
I shall stamp myself on the earth
like a brand.
Hey mother, do you see
this corpse at my feet
this victim at my hands ?
Until the moment
of victory
I had not arrived
O mother, mother,
I was not born.
Cat in the Sun
Cat glories in the sun.
He sees it a mile off
and knows he belongs there.
He rolls in the hot dust
and delights in that sliding, grain by grain,
inwards to the skin
to play among the follicles.
Hard Drive can’t bear to look.
Instead he fixes on the horizon
in case typhoon is threatening there
or the barbarian horse
have broken through at last.
Hard Drive busies himself
on his preventive measures,
glancing with contempt
to where Cat lounges,
absorbing the sun’s heat,
cat ears pointy,
muscles flexed.
Hard Drive begs to go hunting
Gimme routine
rages Hard Drive,
you’re unsettling me,
gimme something that stays
the same, gimme repeats,
gimme quarry to
run down, gimme
victims, gimme
leave to blame.
Cat’s astonishment
Cat spends all his life astonished.
His astonishment exhausts him
so he sleeps and then, on waking,
is astonished all over again.
Interview
So what do they make
of each other, these two,
Cat and Hard Drive
forced to travel on opposing sides
inseparable ?
He leans over me
snarls Cat, he positions
himself way beyond his station.
He eclipses my sun.
He has tricked me into a cage.
He frightens me, rages Hard Drive.
Every pace we take along the path
wears on me. It is like walking
chained to a fire-storm.
I never sleep.
Conclusion
It is cat who carries the weight
of true being,
who loves and suffers
in his worn flesh
the seasons, the tides, the razed trees.
Hard Drive lives in panic, a life-long
franticness to avoid
being overwhelmed. The fears
of Hard-drive
will overwhelm us all.
Rogan Wolf, June 2013