Mark Allinson

Broken Loose

She doesn’t care, she doesn’t care, old heart.
But ox-dumb heart is thick and won’t be told.
Reason frowned and argued from the start:
her skin is fine bone china, and you’re old.
But ox-thick heart is nothing if not bold,
and paws the ground and snorts and doesn’t care,
and foolishly refuses to be told.
Stay in that pen, you beast, and learn despair!
Reason ruled as the conference went to air.
Six weeks unseen, I watched the screen in dread
my hope she’d dress in grey with tied-back hair.
But her black-hair was down; her top, pink-red!
That’s when my ox broke loose, now I can’t stop
him running wild in reason’s china shop.

Companion Piece

You see — as I couldn’t at the time — it was like this. I had been out of university work since the end of my second contract at Monash University in Melbourne in 1993, when the cultural revolution hit and a doctorate on Donne became a career death-sentence. And now, thirteen years later I was once again employed (albeit casually) in a university, teaching English literature.

The day I went to meet the other staff and co-ordinator of the course at the main campus was a balmy day in late summer, warm but not oppressive, the air replete with pleasant memories and associations of my alma mater, and the campus-grounds around me like a garden of Eden, with trees and shrubs in bloom, and wide lawns, complete with umbrageous grots and murmuring waters. And lolling on the warm grasses grazed the herds of knowledge-seeking Eloi, straight out of Wells’ imagined future “paradise”. So I was already in an altered state of consciousness when I walked into the room for the meeting, and beheld...

Well, you can guess what happened next – how one mistaken sign leads to the next, and, before you realize it, you are OBSESSED! Perhaps I was already in a state of love when I walked in that door, and personified it in a single real person …
but then again, she was … NO! That way madness lies!

The events of that day were all so dream-like, and seemed charged with tacit meaning. And in the weeks and months which followed, over-reading of normal communications produced meaningful “signs”.

And that’s the point when the images begin a life of their own, as distinct from being under the control of the ego-will. Dreams begin to invade waking-consciousness, and you feel possessed. You are. Possessed by the living imagination, which seems to have its own disconcerting agenda. I use the word “disconcerting” since it implies the coming apart of things previously in concert, or harmony. That’s why we say we feel we are “a complete mess” or “coming apart at the seams” at such times, especially when the images come into conflict with each other. And especially so again when you finally come to realize that you are in this state all alone, along with your bustling crowds and multitudes of opposing images.

One thing I realized clearly while in this state, is that the deep psyche is the powerhouse of waking consciousness: every mood, thought and image arises spontaneously, and we are what the psyche is doing. This becomes painfully clear in the state of obsession, when the images have a life of their own.

Finding the images behind emotions is a great challenge for poetry, of course, and a good way of staying relatively sane at such times, or at least in a state (as James Hillman says) of “illuminated lunacy”. Jung says in his autobiography, that if he hadn’t been able to find the images behind his emotions, those images upon which our emotions ride, he would have been – at one stage of his life — “torn apart” by them.

But every negative has its polar positive, I have found. And so even through the madness of an errant obsession, whose images have such lacerating power, the cuts and bruises visited upon the psyche may bud-forth new shoots of growth.

Well, put it this way, I did get a few poems from the experience, such as this one.