Nigredo.

Nigredo, or blackness, is the first stage of the alchemical magnum opus, representing putrefaction, decomposition, and the "dark night of the soul".

I am not sitting on rocks looking out at the infinitely blue-black deep of Muxia.

Instead, I watch waves of blackness roll through me. YouTube lets me know when he has posted. I don't follow him, but YouTube knows that I care and so...so even if I didn't want to know, I know and it is my habit to 'turn my ear to The Great Below'.

It hurts. There is no remedy. No truth. No flux, no dissolution, no nigredo. 

The subject of his video?

Blackness.

Dressed in black, black background.

His lecture tears my heart wide open. We are so far apart that we meet. Enantiodromia - Jung, following Heraclitus, so named this phenomenon.

In the philosophy of Heraclitus it [enantiodromia] is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events—the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite. C.G. Jung (1949)                              

Hillman tells us that fifteenth-century meanings of “black” included: “deeply stained with dirt; soiled; foul; malignant, atrocious, horrible, wicked; disastrous, baneful, sinister …and that the colour black in the Greek world, and in African languages also, carried meanings contrasting with white and red, and included not only the fertility of the earth and the mystery of the underworld, but also disease, suffering, sorcery, and bad luck. In the conversation I had with the therapist, that began with Frost's poem about a raven and a hemlock tree...he wondered why a raven? But then, he remembered that the raven's blackness may represent the pain of grief, as in a story he once read. His confusion arose because older, Western traditions linked raven-black with Satan. As ravens really will peck out the eyes of a likely host, destroying sight. 

Ravens were once linked with the devil, as the devil likewise blinds, destroying moral insight.

Not that simple for me, I'm not a Christian. 

In the pagan tradition the Raven is linked to The Morrigan in particular. The Morrigan is no Virgin Mary, she brings terror and nightmare in her wake, she is found within war and destruction. 

In Her older form is Inanna, and then Ishtar:

With joyous heart she brings a song of death to the field (of battle), 

and while her heart performs the song, 

she soaks their weapons in blood and gore. [+]

Yet The Morrigan reminds me more of Inanna's sister -  Queen of The Great Below', a nightmare phantom Queen.

Death is dissolution and change. 

"As negation of negation, the black sun ontologically eradicates the primordial dread of non-being, that unfullfillable abyss—or, the abyss becomes the unbounded ground of possibility...But, to see by means of black, to see the habitual as mystery, the apparent as ambiguous, shifts the concretistic fixities into metaphorical images. This is the emancipation of the nigredo from literalism. Like cures like; we cure the nigredo by becoming, as the texts say, blacker than black". Hillman, James. Alchemical Psychology.

No moral blindness in this version, and the alchemical process will lead to beyond gold.

But, where am I in all this?

I am shocked by the power of my feelings, the yearning actually. For the man. It was always for the man, for the philosopher within the man; for a fellow explorer of ideas, for the man who holds tight to opposing concepts. His logic in opposition to my intuition. His binary oppositions scattering into kaleidoscopic fractals...and the joy of confusion.

Blue - hits me in waves.

"The dog of blue may be material in its attachment, but not physical in its purpose. Its nose points beyond its fondness for filth, beyond to the lunar land where the fascinating power of images possesses the mind...Reich’s blue orgone shifts the source of erotic arousal. Instead of blood and glands, arousal becomes an impulsion from the sky, a bolt from the blue imagination. Hence, perhaps, that sense of immutable destiny in sexual attractions, as if ordained by Heaven—and Hell" Hillman.

I've said it many times before, without some kind of earthing process, without being able to find out what was really happening, I am absolutely, completely stuck in this. My experience tells me that ideas of people being 'stuck' in grief, because there is a problem with them (!) cannot be true. I'm not usually stuck! I've never been so stuck before. Once I heard my husband's final lie - I knew that the man I'd loved, no longer existed. I had loved a man who had loved me. He didn't! So, he wasn't! Truth was patently, coruscating, and clear. Meanwhile our son is still stuck, still unable to comprehend how, the father who had been so loving and kind, open and accepting, became a hypermasculine nightmare! My son has not had experiences of that can explain, and bridge the divide. 

And that's all it bloody is!

Stuckness is an effect of incompletion, a desire for resolution...for contact with the truth. There is a sense of injustice, as of an inexplicable and suspicious death; of foul play. I wont get over this. But I will use it...

And so the therapist? 

Do I think that he thought of me as he explored the meaning of Darkness, of Ravens,  as he dressed in blackest black? What inspired his lecture, had he found the copy of Robert Frost's poem that I'd given to him? 

There have been so many times after the final session when his lectures referenced something we had talked about. And each time I get an intimation that the subject we have in common is Eros. For him Eros may be a problem - as the erotic - can so often be a real problem for therapists, and I want to say, men - male therapists. I base this on a lecture I attended about the intrusion (as it so often regarded) of Eros in therapy - research suggesting that female therapists weren't particularly horrified or perturbed, by Eros from any gender. Whilst male therapists (due to cultural stereotyping - being cast as predators - they sense a legitimate feeling of threat to their professional standing) male therapists would often become misogynistic, and blame the female client. 

Yup, that was my experience!

So, I am coming to believe that he and I have the subject of Eros in common, which he would no doubt prefer to call, sublime love.

It doesn't feel over at all.

Dust of Snow.

By Robert Frost.

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.