Skull

A Note on the Poem

“Skull” is a meditation on embodied consciousness, and on the precarity of mind embedded in the fragile brain. My wife, whose own mother died from complications of a fall, recently slipped on some sand in the driveway. In our seventies, we do not need, but certainly have, the Covid 19 virus to remind us of the fragility of our lives. The poem counterpoints a personal history, from the point of view of my skull, with the evolution of life and consciousness. How striking that each moment of our lives is set against millions, if not billions of random events that got us here; not just in terms of the evolution of matter and life, but, according to the Neural Darwinism theory of Noble Prize winner Edelman (1990), of consciousness itself, which is a product of an analogous process of random selection.

The clinical moment bears this same paradox. Exquisite in its specificity, yet always embedded in history, both personal and collective. How strange now to be talking to our patients on Zoom, in which the medium of communication itself bears witness to the dislocation of everything by the pandemic. And stranger still that we wear masks to protect us from others, while therapy speaks to our undeniable need for an other. The virus makes it all too clear that, in the words of Stolorow (2007), we are “siblings in the same darkness” (p. 47).

In Book VIII of The Iliad, Homer (1990) captures a moment of transcendent peace on the night before a battle where the Greek and Trojan armies are about to literally bash each other’s skulls in: “ … stars in the night sky glittering/round the moon’s brilliant blaze in all their glory/when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm” (p. 249). A moment of transcendence, a moment of meeting. Three thousand years later, beset with a very different enemy, the virus offers our patients a similar leveling, a similar opportunity for us to meet as siblings in the same darkness.

Skull

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