The Underworld
I worked as a therapist in forensic settings for 27 years. A disturbing feature of long-term imprisonment is the way that it becomes like living in a cave, an Underworld where time doesn’t move as it does amongst the living. Years can go by and nothing changes. This strange condition where it is as though time has stopped can affect us all in various ways, even if not with the same severity as that of long-term imprisonment. In a very direct way, I imagine that all of us entered a cave during the lockdowns, for example.
But when we are in the Underworld, do we necessarily stay in touch with what has been lost?
I mean to offer a series of reflections about life in the Underworld. Firstly, though, to consider the entrance – how we might enter the cave.
We make plans, we have hopes and dreams but for some of us things do not turn out as we wanted. We encounter barriers on our paths and find ourselves having to go by routes that we didn’t want to take. There can be a very painful sense of feeling, ‘but this is not how I wanted my life to turn out at all.’ Situations that can seem to stop time are chronic illness, exile, migration, social exclusion, estrangement, family break up and severe unresolved trauma, to give just a few examples. Grief, depression and addiction can all contribute to living as though in the Underworld.
Dante is one of the great writers of the Underworld. Inferno begins in such a curious, even startling way. Half-way through his life, Dante saw a higher path ahead. He was about to make his way along this higher path but his ascent was blocked and he had to go by a different route. The barriers in his path were not walls or other obstacles made of stone. Instead, the barriers were 3 wild animals – a leopard, a lion and a wolf. Each in turn forced him to change course and eventually to enter the Underworld, a place of suffering and death.
It is surely a startling thing that the route to the Underworld involved encounters with 3 wild and dangerous animals. What was taking place in Dante’s imagination that he would choose dangerous animals for obstacles in the path? I am not seeking to go back and understand historically what he might have intended. But at an imaginative level, we more readily think in terms of the deadness of stone as barriers blocking our way. Walls represent the deadening effects of suffering and decline. Imagery of lively animals on the other hand convey a sense of life and liveliness, that although there is suffering, aliveness is at stake, as well.
If aliveness is at stake, then everything changes. For then the question arises, how can aliveness be recovered? We can be sure that it won’t be through following the ways that were used before. As I hope to convey in future pages, the barriers involve the painful encounter with limits to our control, that in going through the Underworld we must face that we are going by a route that we do not readily choose. The solution, therefore, is not going to be found through more power and control but instead in learning to welcome powerlessness. We might ask ourselves and just what does learning to welcome powerlessness involve?
There will not be an easy answer to that question but it is significant that in those opening lines of the Inferno, Dante reaches out and meets a guide, someone who walks with him on the long, difficult journey through the Underworld. Political misfortune, loss and exile were probably some of the events that took Dante down into the Underworld but he made a vital decision not to travel in isolation but instead to have a companion and guide who accompanied him.
The path into the Underworld may not be of our choosing but one vital decision most certainly is and that is whether to walk the hard road alone or to have another alongside. It is a vital and life-shaping decision. Do you have to struggle on by yourself? A therapist commits to being alongside you. Whatever you are going through, the therapist is reliably there for you. The therapist commits to listening to you week by week, building understanding and supporting you as you seek out a new way forward.