The Perilous Safety of “Hunkerin’ Down”

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There is a pale. And there are those who spend their life beyond the pale, some so far beyond the pale that they merit the term “deviant.” And then there are those who live very close to the pale, hovering just short of this boundary or just beyond it and do the work that offers art in its full gamut to the human race. This pale is what defines reality and “reality” must have some definition if there is to be any civilization at all. But there are times when the “energy” that has constellated at and just beyond the pale appears threatening to those who hover near the center of “reality” and then there is a tendency to “hunker down” and fiercely resist the precious offering of those “pale dwellers”—opportunities for change. But the “hunker downers”, if they find a chieftain around whom they can rally, often will become adamant about maintaining the status quo and the social body will suffer, especially those who do not have the comfort of the “in crowd.” Often those in the “out crowd” are easily manipulated and intimidated and can be convinced by their chieftain that it is in their own best interest to oppose the changes that would be good for the entirety of the social body, including themselves.

Change is scary. As Shakespeare put it, “We cling to these ills we have rather than fly to others we know not of.” The Bard knew that often we will prefer to maintain our misery rather than dare to take the risk that would be entailed in taking actions that might alleviate our suffering. A psychiatrist I worked with in a psych hospital one time quipped in a staffing about a patient that we both worked with, “She clings to her mental illness with the same tenacity that most of us cling to our mental health.” “Hunkering down” gives one, or the whole of a group, the illusion of safety. As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

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e e cummings and His Struggle for Individuality

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to be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

I so love the poet e e cummings! He was so intrinsically rebellious, refusing even the givens of punctuation and syntax in the English language. He must have been a tough kid to teach in high school, and if he’d live in modern times would have merited the label “oppositional defiant disorder” and been referred to an overly compliant and rule-oriented mental health counselor for therapy!

But it is painful to be outside the comfort zone provided by our tribe. Carl Jung has described the process of escaping the clutches of the tribe as “individuation” and he said that the effort and the experience always includes a profound sense of loneliness.

The loneliness and alienation of poets is beautifully captured by Theodore Roethke in his poem, “Dolor.”:

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paperclip, comma
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.