Chapter Eleven


    IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD II
    ~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~




    - chapter 11 index -
    pg. 1 - Moonchild | pg. 2 - The Dream The Illusion
    pg. 3 - The Court of the Crimson King | pg. 4 - The Purple Piper
    pg. 5 - Three Lullabies | pg. 6 - Orpheus
    pg. 7 - The Keeper of the City Keys | pg. 8 - The Pilgrim's Door
    pg. 9 - The Gardener | pg. 10 - The Yellow Jester
    pg. 11 - The Dance of the Puppets | pg. 12 - Dionysus
    pg. 13 - The Fool | pg. 14 - Logos
    pg. 15 - The Magician | pg. 16 - Finis


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    "The purple piper plays his tune,
    The choir softly sing;
    Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
    For the court of the crimson king."

    The three lullabies are the three psychological functions (Thinking, Feeling and Sensation) dimly remembered (in an ancient tongue) as once working (being sung) together (lullabies suggesting the womb and infancy).

    "Childhood memories of being rocked to sleep with a mother singing lullabies are momentary experiences of being at one with nature, people, and feeling closer to God."

    - Constructing a Psychology of Addiction from Winnicott's Absence and Bion's No Thing

    "Women were more than likely the first musicians singing lullabies to infants and wailing in grief for loved ones."

    - Breaking the Silence

    "Three lullabies in an ancient tongue"

    "I observed that lullabies were relegated to the past: young mothers no longer knew this folk song tradition. Michel Odent, M.D., believes that women have a profound need to sing to their babies but that the medicalization of birth has upset this process. In the past, women all over the world have sung lullabies to their babies. These were very important because as we now know the fetus is having first language lessons in the womb. The inflections of the mother tongue are conveyed not only through speech but most importantly through song."

    - The Importance of Prenatal Sound and Music

    "Fears can sometimes be soothed away with lullabies, although lullabies often list many more dangers against which the child has to be protected than the child may have previously imagined. However, 'Singing is a charm against the dark.' I wholeheartedly agree with Warner when she writes: 'And could it be that the power of music is linked to the nature of language? Are they both systems that order disorder, that have a calming, soothing and hopeful effect upon the listener, enabling him or her to let go of fears and sorrows?' It is arguable that music originated from the coos and hums with which mothers address their infants. Baby talk is closer to the sounds of music than ordinary speech."

    - Marina Warner Says No to the Bogeyman

    "The importance of ritual, as of art, music, literature and poetry, is that it captures the magic communication of the non-verbal and pre-verbal. Even more so because it is at the point of symbolisation that the baby responds to absence and separation by creating a fantasy or symbol. Winnicott on transitional objects, Segal on symbolisation, and Bion on thinking, amongst others, highlight the importance of the first me/not me objects and experiences. These (transitional processes) moderate the loss of omnipotence, allowing some control and power as the baby moves from the paranoid-schizoid to a depressive position. So the ritual (helps by) encapsulating the experience of helplessness and loss of control Projecting into the (ritual or) symbol and then controlling it is a way of accessing (otherwise) unspeakable feelings."

    - Of Rites and Wrongs

    "Bion was instrumental in developing an appreciation of the constructive use of projective and introjective identification, which serves as a bridge between the inchoate mind of the infant and the receptive mind of the mother. Projective identification enables the infant to transfer its nameless dread and beta elements into the receptive mother where it can be contained detoxified, alphabetized named and given back to the infant in a form that can be used for the development of thinking and the experience of being able to suffer one's own pain. The ability to suffer one's pain allows for the emergence of depressive organization with its capacity for reparation, gratitude and love of differentiated others."

    - Schizophrenia from a Group Perspective

    "A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream, and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, in this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will just do that. She will take the child and cradle it in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater... She will speak or sing to the child, and the content of this communication will invariably be the same - "Don't be afraid - everything is in order, everything is all right" If all goes well, the child will be reassured, his trust in reality recovered, and in this trust he will return to sleep."

    - Peter Berger, Rumor of Angels, 1970, p.61

    "Alpha function refers to the ability to create meaning out of raw, unprocessed sensory data which he called 'beta elements'. The mother's 'reverie' is her alpha function, and represents the ability to modify her child's tensions and anxieties. The mother and the child form a 'thinking couple' which is the prototype of the thinking process that continues developing throughout life."

    - The Legacy of Wilfred Bion

    "If we carry out a retrospection of that woman that rocked us in our cradle and breastfed us when we were babies, there we will find a poem lived very intimately, in a profound and natural manner, a poem of an extraordinary simplicity and a greatness that always goes unnoticed by all those "humanoids" that have their consciousness asleep."

    - The Eternal Feminine Principle

    "The Golden Fleece was guarded by a monstrous serpent with a dragon’s head that never slept, but Jason, guided by the witch Medea, asked Orpheus to play a lullaby on his lyre. The monster slept, and Jason absconded with the Fleece."

    - Ancient Greek Mythology


    "Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;
    Old ditties sigh above their father's grave;
    Ghosts of melodious prophecyings rave
    Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot;
    Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
    Where long ago a giant battle was;
    And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
    In every place where infant Orpheus slept."

    - John Keats,
    Endymion: A Poetic Romance





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