Climate Shadow: Weathering Hate and Love
[1]In a dark time, the eye begins to see. Theodore Roethke
Sickness, disillusion, loss and existential dread
In the preparation for writing, I became sick. Perhaps like Bob Dylan sings, I was ‘sick of love’ but also subject to the toxicity in the darkness of the subject matter. My ambivalence to engaging is as much an aspect of the journey as the cognitive exploration. It is a transference to the material. It is dangerous and I have suffered in previous engagements. And it is the nature of such enquiries that they involve attempting to digest what has previously seemed poisonous.
For example, there was a heartbreaking loss of my youthful dream which collapsed in the wake of Russian tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to prevent the Prague Spring. Perhaps it was a necessary descent for my innocence and an initiation into the brutal capacity of our world to extinguish untempered visions. The disillusionment still acts like a traumatic defence against my risking to dream again. Yet a dream lives on in my heart, activated through risky vulnerabilities opened within groups, chance conversations and random acts of connection with strangers out walking their dogs. Being love sick, or sick of love, I am grieving the loss of much beauty as a consequence of ‘Modernity’ – that cultural prejudice that legitimises human exceptionalism and the extractive industries’ destructive harm.
So this enquiry is into that threshold of existential dread that is the climate crisis - the defended underbelly of moderns. I read the climate crisis as the antipode of the rainbow; not a reassuring promise but a challenging initiation activated by radical instability. The hidden gift of this instability involves sensing the collective shadow.
Letting hate in
In a workshop on ecopsychology and the climate crisis a student in response to an opening exploration of the themes declared “I hate Nature”. This outburst was a stunning rupture of the caring narrative that had preceded it. It created a space for ‘hate’ to have a place in the conversation from which it had been excluded. If there is an idealised transference onto ‘nature’ as that of bountiful and long-suffering mother, the dark hateful feelings go into the shadow and may be acted out destructively. The coldness of modernity, which often accompanies a contempt for vulnerability as a weakness, can translate into persecution of what we don’t recognise.
In a revealing article, Winnicott[2] discusses hate in the counter-transference and how important it is for the analyst not to deny the hate they may feel towards a patient. He parallels this with nearly twenty reasons that a mother may hate her child, for example, ‘He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave’. He sums up the maternal challenge as ‘her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date’.
Winnicott gives an example of a nine-year old boy who could not be contained in a local hostel and was taken into the Winnicott’s home, leading to ‘three months of hell’. Whenever the boy acted out, eliciting hate, Winnicott physically forced him out of the front door, whatever the weather or time of day, telling the boy he hated him for what he had done. This was the boy’s first experience of having a carer declare their hate. Previously he had always felt like the bad, hateful one and learnt to internalise this. Now it was not his alone to bear.
As Winnicott said:
I think these words were important from the point of view of his progress, but they were mainly important in enabling me to tolerate the situation without letting out, without losing my temper and every now and again murdering him.
Such feelings are challenging. I had many experiences in my younger days of being seen as a negative presence through speaking out some shadow material I perceived within organisations – rather like a thirteenth fairy that breaks the spell of the ‘good’ fairies. In the story Sleeping Beauty this fairy gets revenge for being ignored by setting up a deadly sleep activated by the ancient technology of the spinning wheel. To break our fascination with the glamour of modern technology that seems to offer divine powers, we need a different sort of prick – one that bursts the bubble of the dangerous delusion.
Modernity’s spell on the culture of the techno-industrial complex blinds us to its destructive consequences as if there was no shame or accountability. Attempts to break out of the spell will involve us entering what has been cast out into our collective shadow. Can we recognise ourselves in this dark mirror?
Notions such as growth, progress, prosperity and predictability are part of this dangerous seduction. These call for an isolated ego struggling for dominance against a hostile environment; a social ego surrounding itself with social defences against felt threats, needing to be in control. This entitled exceptionalism is at the crux of defensive hating of nature.
Many children, including myself, have found solace and comfort with animals, trees or places. These can be both a consolation for what is missing in family and a balm for trauma, but socialisation can lead to the abandonment of this ancient rooting in nature. Like an absent parent, ‘nature’ can become an idealised or troubled other, both feared and longed for.
What is this ‘nature’ that we may hate as well as love?
Timothy Morton[3] says that the existential disentangling of ‘human’ from ‘nature’, leads to the idea of nature being something external and detached. The dissociated observer subsequently acts as if this external ‘thing’ were ours to have dominion over, including over ‘inferior’ species. This external nature holds fantasies of both benign mothering and a terrifying implacable threat, outside of ego control. Keeping ‘nature’ out there creates a false security. Terrifying ruptures such as storms, floods and fires break through: we are vulnerable after all. Then there is the threat of species extinction, not just of our species but also others we are taking down with us.
When the existential horror is felt and recognised, it can lead to either a doubling down or fresh perceptions of nature with terrible feelings of anxiety, guilt and grief. While it is true that such feelings can be overwhelming, the defences against bearing these feelings can be more problematic. This is especially true where human exceptionalism is the mainstay of a culture, where the denial and/or disavowal feels necessary for survival.
Delight
In contrast there is a delight when we give nature our attention. I have been blessed with such moments, when giving attention to an animal, a plant, or a mountain rock is reciprocated. Once on Dartmoor in a wild storm I sheltered in a rock crevice just big enough to squeeze into. The enforced intimacy brought an unexpected merging which I could only express later through wolf-like utterances.
During a conference workshop, we were asked to do a mini solo that meant we had all of fifteen minutes to walk out into the surroundings to find an encounter. At first, I doubted whether anything significant could happen in such a short time. As I walked, I slowly left my expectations and observed as openly as I could. A daisy caught my eye just before stepping on it. It somehow stood out and came into my expanded awareness. It was beautiful! So simple and yet such a delight. I stayed with it with gratitude until our short time for the ‘solo’ was up.
Beyond the splitting; moulting the defensive exoskeleton
Might there be a transformative process that breaks out of this binary split between human nature and other-than-human nature? Timothy Morton[4] points out that ‘nature’ is a construct that perpetuates this division and hides the evolutionary entanglement of humans and the other-than-human environment. He writes:
Dark ecology is the ecological thought’s acknowledgment of the strange, uncomfortable, and eerie aspects of nature — the fact that nature is not a harmonious whole, but a place of violence, decay, and death as well as life.
Nature is not ‘one harmonious whole’ . The romantic notions of nature and those that invoke ‘tooth and claw’ create false separations. Nature is not here as a human resource to be utilised but is a mysterious, complex and paradoxical reality that we have difficulty thinking about; difficulty finding a more humble and relational connection to it.
This relational humility lies in the shadow of the arrogant exceptionalism and entitlement of the western industrial complex. Shadowing, as here, is not always negative. [WH1] The bright shadow is what is hidden behind a dark separateness. We may defend against having our yearning for belonging met. In a previous book chapter[5], I wrote:
It is as if Moderns have outgrown their hard shell - their neo-liberal industrial complex - but not yet taken the risk of letting it go. This is a precarious state in which we find ourselves. We know that ethically and pragmatically we cannot maintain that privileged exploitation but hesitate to engage the process of moulting our exoskeleton.
The shedding of skins includes sloughing off an old one as snakes regularly do. What might a human metamorphosis look like? This is not a question of individual change such as in a mid-life crisis but a cultural or even a species transformation. The shedding of our exoskeleton could be the means of release from the defensive shield of being an exceptional species. I want to explore what happens psychologically if we were also to accept this loss of a defining skin. How might we re-imagine ourselves as interconnected and mutually dependent despite the anxiety activated?
One of the primary things in the way of this metamorphosis is the density of the unprocessed feelings of shame and guilt in our complicity with terrible destruction that our modern way of life has brought. They feel unbearable. Most of us can’t bear it, it’s too painful. We need to numb the pain. And those willing to engage are subject to the unprocessed collective suffering of others in denial that ‘piggy-backs’ onto our personal feelings. No wonder it feels too much.
The destruction I see outside feels like it has morphed into a personal distress. The permeable membrane that protects my identity has worn thin. The planet’s hurt is my wound. As deep ecologist Wendell Berry has said[6], “The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh”. This is no longer an abstracted discussion about probable and improbable climates but a felt reality. The end of the world (as we know it) comes up close and physical. It is not an external apocalypse but an imponderable act of Self-harm in which Self includes the other-than-human.
Weathering
It seems that many different types of contradictory narratives are intersecting in a strange and very uncomfortable manner. The climate crisis has come home to me. It feels like an ending in which I am being weathered:
Weathering, then, is a logic, a way of being/becoming, or a mode of affecting and differentiating that brings humans into relation with more-than-human weather. We can grasp the transcorporeality of weathering as a spatial overlap of human bodies and weathery nature. Rain might extend into our arthritic joints, sun might literally color our skin, and the chill of the wind might echo through the hidden hallways of our eardrums. But not coincidentally, the idea of weathering also invokes a certain perdurance—a getting on with, a getting by, a getting through[7].
Weathering seems to bring together the conjunction of the global and personal, the geophysical disturbance of our planet and the cultural crisis of the Anthropocene. If I relinquish my separateness, I become part of this weathering. I am being weathered—not heroically, not redemptively, but slowly, unevenly, without consent. I am no longer sure where the boundary lies between my own distress and the planet’s. The membrane feels thin, porous, unreliable. What once felt like observation now feels like exposure. I am in this weather that is weathering me.
At this ending of what has touched on things vast and unseen, a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez:[8]
I have a feeling that my boat has struck,
down there in the depths, against a great thing.
And nothing happens!
Nothing ... Silence ... Waves.
Nothing happens?
Or
Has everything
Happened
and we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?
References
[1] https://theosymmetry.wordpress.com/2020/01/24/the-abyss-in-my-eyes/
[2] Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 30:69-74.
[3] Morton, T (2016) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia Uni Press (p91)
[4] Morton, T (2016) (ibid)
[5] Hollway, W., Hoggett, P, Robertson, C. And Weintrobe, S (2022) Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death. Phoenix Publishing p.91
[6] Berry, W. (1993). Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays. New York: Pantheon Books.
[7] Neimanis, A. and Loewen Walker, R. (2014) Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality: Hypatia 29( 3), SPECIAL ISSUE: Climate Change (SUMMER 2014), pp. 558-575.
[8] Jimenez, J.R. in Bly, R (1999) The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures. New York: Ecco Press