Thor in the Land of the Giants: Part I

Maybe the strangest part of the long strange trip of psychedelics is how seamlessly they have moved from the discotheque to the psychiatrist’s office. No longer just the stoner’s delight, they are now touted as the new cure for anything from the fear of death, to anxiety, to addictions and compulsions, to the famous “treatment resistant” depression. With all the new studies and news releases coming out, our default mode networks must be trembling in their boots. But what makes our depressions, fears and compulsions so resistant in the first place? What’s up with them? After I have done my ten thousand hours of yoga, meditation, and therapy, after I have thrown up from ayahuasca and scarred myself with kambo, how come I am still the same old me, essentially with the same old hang-ups? It seems unfair that the brain, subjected to more pills, therapies and theories than any other human organ, should be so obstinately immune to change. Why can’t the Western World just cheer up?

Paul Simon said it simply enough:

 I’m not the kind of man who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on old familiar ways
And I ain’t no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears

Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy after all these years.

Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers

Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years

 Simon doesn’t ask why he is still crazy, he just notices the unavoidable fact. In therapy, since we are paying money to get better, we do ask why. But some days we might notice that the therapist is also a little crazy, as are the bulk of the other people we know – our friends, family and colleagues. It may even have occurred to us that our bosses are far from immune to the infliction, in fact they may be worse off, as are most world leaders, our thought leaders, and certainly our delightfully scandalous celebrities, we’re all off our rocker in our own special way. Is there anybody still sane after all these years?

 Something weird is going on here, so we have to go to weird places to start figuring it out. In this case the weird start is Thor, Norse god of thunder, lighting, and war. At the end of time, the Norse gods will fight all the giants of the world in one almighty ultimate battle that, like a bar room brawl that wrecks the joint, will destroy Planet Earth. But that Ragnarök as it’s called, is a long way off, and in a lesser-known and more peaceful preview meeting, Thor and his young servant, who has the catchy name of Thjalfi, go to visit the giant Utgard-Loki (no relation to the mean trickster god named Loki) in his castle. Utgard-Loki happens to have a bunch of his giant friends over when Thor arrives, and as guests Thor and Thjalfi are feasted and feted in proper fashion with laughter, music, and of course lots of manly contests.

 In the first contest, Thjalfi, takes on one of the giants in a foot race. Now Thjalfi is known to be the fastest runner in the world, so it is a huge surprise when he is beaten by a country mile by the giant’s champion. Next comes the drinking competition, and Thor exudes confidence over this one because of all things competitive drinking is his strong suit. The giants challenge Thor to empty a flagon of beer in three pulls, explaining that they do this all the time as a warm-up exercise. He sets about his business but to his astonishment, after three tremendous pulls at the drinking horn, the level of the beer has barely gone down a few inches.

 Thor is astonished at this defeat, but the giants say never mind, we’ll give you something easy to do – see the household cat over there, the children here like to pick it up and play with it for fun, so see if you can pick it up too. The cat comes forth, Thor struggles with all his might, but eventually, after an immense contest, he can only raise one of its paws off the ground. Enraged, he dares all the giants to wrestle against him. The giants, being sensitive souls, say it would offend their dignity to take on such feeble opposition, but if he wanted, he could wrestle with the old nurse dozing in the corner. Thor wrestles back and forth with her, but she eventually tosses him to the ground. Thor and Thjalfi are sumptuously feasted by the giants, they have no complaints about that, but by the time they go to bed their feelings of defeat and dejection are, understandably, quite treatment resistant.

 In the morning Utgard-Loki accompanies them out of the castle and onto the plain beyond. Once they are safely outside the castle Utgard-Loki explains to Thor what had really been going on. Thjalfi did not race against a person at all, but against Thought, and no-one can outmatch the speed of thought; the drinking horn that Thor drank from was connected to the ocean, and he drank so hard that the sea level all round the world went down terrifyingly, creating the daily ebb and flow of tides; the household cat was really the Midgard Serpent in disguise. The Midgard Serpent encircles the world, and when Thor lifted the cat’s paw off the ground he nearly dislodged the Serpent from its place, which would have put the whole planet out of kilter; and the old nurse was really Old Age, whom no-one has ever overcome, nor ever will. In a rage, Thor turns with his hammer to mash up Utgard-Loki for his trickery, but too late, giant, castle and all have vanished, and the only thing to be seen was “the spacious and beautiful plain.” Thor goes back home to Asgard a very grumpy god.

 Thor only had to wait till morning to discover the cosmic proportions of his tasks, while we may forever be blaming ourselves for the emotional undertakings we don’t accomplish. When we take on the challenges of life – outrunning our fears, wrestling down our depressions, subduing our bad habits – we may, like Thor, find that lifting even one paw of the pussy cat is far harder than we ever dreamed it could be. The first stop on our journey to see how deep it all goes, where our personal trauma connects with things beyond us, was summed up by Phillip Larkin:

 They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
   They may not mean to, but they do. 
  They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

 But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

 It was Freud, speaking about the individual life, who said that forgotten memories are not lost, meaning that our memories don’t have to be conscious to bump around inside us and have their full impact on daily life. But this applies to our collective memory too, where our accumulated species pain reverberates through to the present moment. Every country has been a war zone and every ancestral blood line has poignant, wonderful, terrible, tragic stories that have been told, re-told, forgotten, lived and re-lived over and over. These ancient events live on in us through our moods, our habits and the way we treat each other. How many famines, wars and persecutions whisper down to us from tribes whose names we no longer know? The tankard of history goes all the way to the creation of the first pain cell, (Whoever it was thought that one up!) and when we drink from our depression or dive into our compulsions, we are encountering elements on a collective as well as a private scale. We have, all along, been looking at “our” problems through entirely the wrong lens.