‘Let the Rain Fall Relentlessly’: Singing the Song of Survival

I wish she was here at the summer school, here with her sisters. It should not be me, it should be her, or, at the very least, we together. But she is not and I am. In a future imaginary, we should be here together. It is the reality, however, of the psychic place in which she resides, that travel is difficult and the nature of an academic conference pretty inconceivable, unless we were able to construct futures where her voice would be heard, not through me, but in her own language, body and text together. Perhaps we could conceive of ways in which that could happen.

So I am, for the present, a messenger, an amanuensis, a theological prologue to a song, her song that shall be heard. But she has gifted me, and us, more than this. She has gifted me a dialogical, a carnivalesque treat in which broken selves break out into new voices, multi-vocal dissonances, hard to hear, easy to ignore, if these new born, ‘mind-forged manacles’(Blake, n.d) free dances of the mind, and heart, and body slip their way noisily through the oh, so straight routes and landscape of the institutional paths and places of health and healing, paths and places in which she has found herself walking and residing ever since she was a young teenager. For what is to be healed when what is broken bears silent witness to the Song at the depths of the abyss, as Hadewijch might have sung (Hart, 1981: 344), except in my friend’s experience, there lies no paradox of love, except, perhaps the paradox of her own triumph of survival; what is to be healed when the poisonous text of patriarchal piss-taking has been carved upon her body, only for her many dimensional, multi-layered, deeply coloured and painted language of resistance, song of survival, and acts of impossible generosity have been named, and yet further carved as Schizoid-Affective Disorder. That’s alright then. We can all safely sleep in our beds, sure in the knowledge that the songs of the abyss are filed securely away in the category of psychiatry and the rich rhythms of resistances and refusals are the mere hermeneutics of the disordered. There is much to be said about what exactly the order that is dissed is in the world of psychiatry and madness. There seems to be a considerable amount of order around in mental healthcare including the relationship between classification and mental states, much observed by Foucault and Deleuze and the increasing interest that the contemporary mental health system has in the person as the productive economic unit and such a ‘unit’ being the principal object of treatment, therapy, and paid compassion. But I guess there has always been such an order, especially since the eighteenth century, such classification, such ‘diagnoses’ that have been concerned with either a restoration or recovery to being tools of economic and social production or being tidied away and anonymous, with voices and languages passed by on the other side.

The insane were to be restored to reason by a system of rewards and punishments not essentially different from those used to teach a young child to obey the dictates of “civilized” morality. Just as the peasantry who formed the new industrial workforce were to be taught the “rational” self-interest essential for the market system to work, the lunatics, too, were to be made over in the image of bourgeois rationality: defective human mechanisms were to be repaired so that they could once more compete in the marketplace (Scull, 1982: 72).

This would be an interesting but easy diversion away from the particular and the personal, this voice that has ceased to be honoured as a voice, the life that has ceased to be acclaimed as a life without excess, and yet utterly excessive of life because life is the breath, the ‘ruach’ of survival and yet without profit, without a balance sheet, philosophical, theological, economic, returning us almost to a pre-enlightenment vision of madness; and one which, though full of the language of sin, redemption, and prophecy, and where ‘treatment’ was harsh and overwhelmed by religious moralism, was also able to offer ‘alternative’ voices of resonance and integrity.

What was new in the nineteenth century was the extent to which medicine had taken over this discourse and harnessed it to a new institutional response: the asylum …The religious madness diagnosis was applied specifically by educated, male, bourgeois physicians to primarily rural and lower class (and, to a lesser extent, middle class female) religious beliefs and experiences. It was a concept deriving from medical discourse that fundamentally modified and redefined the phenomena it described, and in doing so turned forms of popular religious experience into pathological entities (Goldberg, 1999: 36–37).

My friend reminds me, in the language in which she voices her embodied, ‘spiritual’ identity and sense of prophetic witness, of one of those forms of ‘popular religious experience’ that Anna Goldberg incarnates as:

the female peasant-prophet who, in invoking her religious authority, asserted a spiritual status wholly at odds with her social place (as both peasant and woman), the hierarchy of the church and, potentially, the laws of the state (Goldberg, 1999: 46).

My encounters, my times with Linda can only be described in terms of a theological subjectivity which embraces both of us and a theological language that speaks of embodiment, ambivalence, and resistance and where the divine is yet to be wholly conceived and incarnated, an imaginary of the divine restless not for completion, not for resolution but for (as in restless for?) our mutually tentative wanderings towards resurrection, and a conception of the divine in the process of becoming; becoming not as a completed, integrated state, but within sacred places amongst sacred people constantly in the flux of justice seeking and angry, joyous resistant hand fasting. Out of the abyss of the ‘devil’s making’, Linda’s words, the devil being entirely equated with the brutality of masculinity, comes the powerful song of the peasant-prophet woman, a song that evades the pathologizing of her language as delusional, a common experience for her, because words with musical settings strangely avoid the psychiatrist’s editorial hand.

Christians, like myself, are glibly used to proclaiming the significance of the particular and the personal, to preach of the one who is supposed to incarnate the narrative of the human/divine encounter, constructed in a context and a time, for all contexts and times, for all genders and trans-genders, for all empires and dis-possessed peoples, for all authorities and revolutions. But if one Life made such a difference, even if the difference was made through a paradox of oppositional perspectives, are we not, therefore, invited to see in the most un-regarded of lives, in the most silenced of voices, in the most strange and other-ness of language, in the most divested of possession and in the most impossible of impossibilities of giftedness, and in the choosing of madness the way to kin-ship and kin-dom, an incarnation of incarnations? A lot like the Rabbi of Galilee whose ghostly path we continue to discover being trod not by the ghostly but by the remarkable embodiment of those who continue to make plastic crowns with plastic rubies out of the shit heap of others whose abuse and callousness compels their so-called ‘victims’ to create their own imaginations of death and dying, their life and living, the jouissance of their suffering outside the city walls of discreet, considered, and rational discourse and dialogue.

How did we meet and what sustains our companionship? As I said earlier we would not have met were it not for the bleak and imaginative landscape of the ‘severe and enduring’ mental health community. The surface text of our relationship is that I am a mental health chaplain and she was a long-term resident of a recovery house in the grounds of the new, clinical yet ever so self-consciously compassionate ‘mental health’ hospital, no longer an asylum, no longer sprawling over acres of ground, woods and countryside, no longer with 1500 beds but with 90 and tucked away in a little corner of the grounds, whilst the rest of the buildings were demolished or converted into luxury homes and the ground sold for a technology park. That’s the surface text and that is the landscape. And how we met? A request from Linda to see the chaplain, the recovery house was brand new, as were the rest of the mental health units and Linda had recently moved from the old asylum across to the new house, described as a house rather than a ward as this was to be a place of recovery from long-term residency to life out in the community. Ten years later, Linda has finally moved to a house where she finds not only a house and a home which can provide the level of everyday support she needs but, perhaps, a place where she will find, perhaps for the first time in her stormy, intensive life, respect and reverence beyond the pastoral, beyond the cared for.

My relationship with the old asylum had been as a patient, my relationship with the new hospital was as its brand new chaplain. Linda wanted to check me out. And that is how our relationship began.

She is 60 years old. She has written a song which she sings. She has granted me permission to tell you this and to play her song (the song was played at the summer school). Since the age of 14 when she was thrown out by her parents, she has lived either on the streets or in asylums, mental health units as we now discreetly name them, and occasionally prisons when there has been no-where else for her to be placed. She had a child as a result of rape when she was 16, a child that she was never allowed to see and for which she shall continue to search until she dies. She has a beautiful voice and she sings many songs and particularly her song. She sang in dingy night clubs in Manchester, Newcastle, and London, managed by even dingier men. She nearly, oh so nearly had a recording contract. She speaks sometimes of half-famous names she met in Wardour Street, treated her to a drink, and made her feel like a professional entertainer amongst other professional entertainers. But they soon faded from view and partially from memory and Linda was left amongst the sharks and the abusers. She was regularly, routinely raped, physically and financially abused until her body and mind collapsed in exhaustion and she became a long-term recipient of institutional and mental health care.

Eventually, by a strange route involving escapes and captures and dreams of the sea and cottages by cliff paths she arrived in Cornwall, settled into a rehabilitation unit, occasionally escaped, finding her way by train or bus to destinations that might, just might hold the key to something, to recognition, to resolution. Always she was found and returned to the unit and to a review of her medication.

I am an Anglican priest, and by a path saturated with my own jouissance of suffering and yet a path which has gifted me a new theological language and a new sense of transformation inviting a radical challenge to my masculinity, to my sense of the embodied sacred, to everything that I sense and see, hope and fear, by this path I find myself becoming a mental health chaplain where once I was and continue to be, occasionally, a mental health patient, choosing madness as my guise for dreaming strange dreams and speaking strange languages. I am a priest on the jagged edges of belief and faith and in places of only barely whispered holiness yet where is authentic incarnation ever found but upon those edges and within those places? And one of the places of spiritual, theological, and pastoral responsibility is the rehabilitation unit where Linda resides.

We meet, they meet and thus begins an ongoing 10 year relationship which has turned theologies of pastoral care upside down, which has taught me more of the mutuality of theological formation than just about any other relationship, that has invited me into the silent, unthinking compassionate abuse of long-term institutional care and thus my own compliance in it and further deepened and honed my own craft as theologian and the only tools, feminist, queer, liberational tools, that honour unconditionally the encounter with sister/brother theologians that continue to witness, that continue to remain at the edges of language, experience, and existence, as carnival survivors of the masculinist desire to carve the violence of their own ‘sacred’ power games upon the bodies and the minds of the writers and singers of the song. And I remain complicit and ashamed.

So who is this remarkable woman? Linda is the only person I have ever known who possesses almost nothing. I have known women who have had to flee violent partners with their children who have managed to put together a few carrier bags full of clothes before they have managed to leave their home for the refuge. I have known people without homes who have a dog, a spare set of clothes, and a carrier bag with everything precious to them within it. Linda has the clothes upon her back and, occasionally, a mobile phone, and a packet of fags. And that is it. When she buys a new set of clothes, she carefully washes the old ones and then gifts them to a charity shop.

She does not gift from excess as we all do but from that which she cannot afford to gift and yet gift is all she has to offer and gifting is the most human and needful of our offering to one another compassionately and unknowingly removed from those in institutional care. I was once visiting her in an acute mental health ward when Linda was feeling especially vulnerable when the ward manager came to sit by her, holding a bottle of Lucozade. She sat next to Linda and, in the most gentle of voices, explained to her that a member of staff could not accept any gifts from patients so Linda would have to take the gift back. I discovered later that she had offered the Lucozade, a drink Linda loves, to the staff member because of some kind act she had done for Linda. The Lucozade was Linda’s way, her only way, of saying thank you, of taking responsibility for responding to such an act, of refusing to become passive in the exercise of care, of seeking to gift in a relationship of reciprocity. But ‘care’ often is exercised in such a way in our healthcare systems that ‘giving’ becomes a focused act of compassionate oppression where the invitation to respond is not even acknowledged as the basis for a just, honoured and honouring relationship even though such a relationship may be exercised within a profoundly unbalanced power relationship that is not even recognized nor addressed. Margot Shildrick has described these ‘acts’ of compassionate care in the context of encountering and ‘caring for’ those we consider ‘monstrous’, beyond the gaze and the contemplation of human ‘norms’, culturally defined, theologically only conceived in terms of ‘care’ that protects ourselves from vulnerability and the strange wonder of the transgressive and the immanent:

And even when at best there may be an attempt at empathy, that empathy is about trying to smooth out differences, to find the grounds of sameness, but it is not about opening oneself-becoming vulnerable-to an encounter with irreducible strangeness. Indeed, insofar as the gaze remains operative, we might say that no real encounter takes place, for the emphasis is not on exchange in which mutual transformation might occur, but precisely on forestalling such a move’ (Shildrick, 2002: 74).

Within and shaping the personal relationship between ‘professional’ and ‘patient’ is the over-arching philosophy and politics of the ‘system’ which has decreed an artificial paradigm where ‘professional’ and ‘patient’ become essentialist notions rather than temporary, performative and social constructions of being human within a particular and pathologized medical environment which is itself profoundly politicized.

When Linda buys a mobile phone, she uses up the credit to call me and then throws or gifts the phone away. She has no family, except the long lost child who knows nothing of her mother. She has no friends except those that might be described as friends and yet who are paid to care for her, including myself, although I profoundly hope I do not ‘care’ for her yet I remain a ‘professional’ in the system described above. I have recently been named as her legal next of kin because she absolutely refused to allow the Director of Cornwall Social Services that privilege. I am now her father and my daughters have a new sister so perhaps it is no longer true that Linda has no family. She shouts, as I enter the ward after she receives the news of my new responsibilities in her life, ‘Daddy, how are my sisters?’ There is retrieval, a recovery of the past that speaks not of resolution but of resurrection.

Linda has a completely shaven head so that no longer will any man be able to swing her round and round by her hair and then throw her against the wall. Her many broken fingers clasp hands tenderly like gentle tentacles. But these all are descriptors and hardly bear witness to the complete, complex, broken, resistant person who seeks what I would describe as a theological companion, what Linda describes as Father Christopher. They hardly bear witness to the embodied beauty of a life without excess, yet utterly excessive of life and yet without profit except the song that is constantly sung. I cannot begin to know how to bear witness to the almost liturgical language that is shared where grammar and deep and surface meanings are shattered, linear positions of past and present broken into by stealthy intimations of the divine, of dissipated and diasporas of Godding and mythic rhythms that spiral upwards and downwards and sideways. As Rita Nakashima Brock has written:

Our technocratic, rationally orientated society has great difficulty dealing with dreams and the shamanistic magic of mythic images, except to relegate them to fiercely rational psychological analysis (Nakashima Brock, 1991: 43).

Linda’s memories are, frequently, so raw and chillingly traumatic that she uses mythic language and mythic concepts of time and space as her ‘rational’ way of enabling them to be expressed, re-claimed and resisted, because she has angrily, passionately, uniquely, overcome and she has triumphed. Yet she lives with a hurt so deep that you cannot go there, nor can she, without metaphorical travelling companions of language with strange meanings and images that seek to enable the most meaningless of violence a sense, an awful sense in the self she has become and is becoming. If the word ‘Shaman’ means seeing in the dark, then that is what she has had to do and that is what she is becoming. And yet nothing is, nothing is understood within the context of a healthcare system that has seemingly lost sight of a theo/psycho therapy of the journey of the interior and exterior and the craft of deep listening and deep abiding, so necessary within institutional walls, and thus deep, deep respecting and honouring becomes a lost art of the sacred, of the theological task, of the liberational task, of the shamanistic task, enabling a monologue to become a dialogue, to become a text of transformation, both mutual and reciprocal.