The first painting was a gift given to me when I was leaving New Zealand. There is a story of the cultural Māori hero, Maui, catching the sun and holding it close to the Earth to bring it out of darkness.
Here is the text from the back of the painting:
Dr. Dave’s moment of Satori at Takapuna Beach in the middle of the night. Ranginui the sky father is present giving you his blessings of a safe trip home. Papatuanuku the Earth goddess is praying to Ranginui hoping you will visit Aotearoa’s shores some time again in your future. Maui has caught the sun slowing down its course across the sky so there is enough daylight for life to be reborn again.
The next painting is one I did. It had the feeling of many little circles emanating outward from one large circle. I made a play on words with the motto of the USA, e pluribus unum – out of many, one. I thought of creation as having an emanation and then a re-absorption, like the in-breath and out-breath, diversity arising out of unity and then diversity returning to unity.
Out of One, Many, D. Kopacz
With the second painting from The Art of Becoming Medicine.23 (Drinking from the Flowering Light of Mother Nature), we have entered into the final section of the book, Part III Return, Chapter 12, “Returning to the Land.” Out of One, Many is from Chapter 14, “We Are All Pangeans – We Are All Related.”
“When anything is occurring, in any moment in time, it is occurring not only to the individual, but it is also occurring to that geography—to that physical geography. What is happening to me is also happening to this place, this continent, this Planet Earth, this galaxy. I am giving and I am receiving energy back from the Earth, and so are we all. We are receiving it, each according to what he needs, and translating the energies we are receiving according to what we think is happening right now.”
(Joseph Rael from Sound: Native Teachings & Visionary Art – quoted in Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, page 339)
It was a pleasure to have this conversation with Marianela Medrano and Anjana Deshpande. The conversation ranged across topics of post-traumatic growth, creativity, resilience, and vulnerability.
Mental Contagion is publishing online some of its archive. Coniunctionis: Trauma, Transformation & Punk Rock was a column that I wrote from 2000 – 2002. My sister, Karen Kopacz started editing and publishing Mental Contagion and brought together a great group of writers, including Gene Dillon, Wendy Lewis, Dean Pajevic, and Eric Hoffman, as well as many others over the years.
.4 : How Can Ugliness and Disharmony, Which Are the Content of Tragic Myth [and punk rock], Inspire Esthetic Delight?” (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part I) (February, 2001)
.5 : Why is Revolt Necessary? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part II) (March, 2001)
.6 : Is Alienation Necessary for Creativity? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part III) (April, 2001)
.7 :Is There an Inside/Outside? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part IV) (May, 2001)
.8 : What is the Meaning of Ian Curtis’ Death? Where is the line between the Art Object and the Artist? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part V) (June, 2001)
.9 : What is Punk Rock? What is Not Punk Rock? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part VI) (July, 2001)
.10: What Does the Shadow Know? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part VII) (August, 2001)
.11: What is the Relationship Between Music and Religion? (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part VIII) (September, 2001)
.12: What Are We to Do? Quotations (October, 2001)
I: Interview: Ouroboros (Houston) by David Kopacz – for Mental Contagion (MC) (November, 2001)
.13: What Does Religion have to do with Rock? A review of Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion(December, 2001)
.14: What Did You See There? Ian Curtis and the Visionary Quest of the Shaman (Joy Division, Punk Rock, Violence, Despair & Transformation Part IX) (January, 2002)
I: Interview: Poster Children by David Kopacz (With Special Guests Doug McCarver and Mike Barry) (February 2002)
.15: Afterwords
CONIUNCTIONIS.0
On stranger waves, the lows and highsOur vision touched the sky. “A Means to an End,” Joy Division, Closer, 1980.
There is a movement within me, a current and flow that lives through me. I have felt the pull to be inside, where everything is happening. I have felt the pull to be outside of it all, where nothing is happening. These essays, written between 2000-2002 for the online journal Mental Contagion, are attempts to understand the inside and the outside and the power that flows from outside to inside and from inside to outside. These essays are investigations into the nature of reality through Joy Division, trauma, transformation, and punk rock.
There is a pull that some people feel, to go deeply inward, sometimes that pull is a push, from alienation or trauma in the outer world. Going into this inner wilderness is a kind of darkness and it can overlap with despair. Maybe despair is the cause of the inwardness or maybe despair is a station along the path of inwardness, like a phase of grief that one goes through, leaving the communal and collective world and entering into the sacred inner cave of consciousness and being. Jung wrote,
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious. . . .
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. If fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum,” (Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 356).
For Jung, this loneliness was difficult to bear, but it was a source of learning and experience that he would not have traded for fitting in. Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, also found a creativity in the darkness and the loneliness and he sent back missives from the depths, as a lone astronaut exploring space might send back scratchy transmissions from another galaxy:
“You’ve been seeking things in darkness, not in learning” (No Love Lost)
“I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand. Could these sensation make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?These sensations barely interest me for another day I’ve got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away” (Disorder)
Depending on how this pull is engaged in, one goes on an inner journey. If one goes deep enough, there is an inner well of transformation, drinking that water of the deep self is like a form of rebirth, but rebirth infers that there has been a death. Without guidance, many are lost on this path and there is untold loss of human potential. Yet, these brave souls, these inner warriors, can serve as heroes as well as cautionary tales. To give one’s self over to this inner secret is like taking the steps of what Joseph Campbell called the “Hero’s Journey,” with steps of 1) separating from the everyday world; 2) entering into a magical world or the underworld and going through an initiation and transformation into a new way of being; and 3) a return and reintegration into society. Jung’s process of individuation would say that the hero brings back energy and ideas from the collective unconscious, and yet the hero bringing this back is alone, because no one else made that journey and no one else yet understands the beauty and value of what the hero or heroine has brought back from the unconscious into the light of day. Joseph Campbell felt that the hero is rejected by society, because he or she has gone places that most people do not know or understand. Herman Hesse, in Steppenwolf, wrote of a similar concept, that creativity is infused into society by the lone wolf, the liminal being, the misfit.
“We are psychiatrists; we are German; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to risk becoming one – that is what we get paid for,” (Huelsenbeck, quoted in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 226).
I was a young psychiatrist when I was writing these columns and I was trying to find my path as an artist, a writer, a professional and a person. I was not German, but I had read Nietzsche, Jung, and a number of other writers you’ll find in these pages. I had listened to Joy Division and punk rock and post-punk. I was gazing at monsters, both inner and outer, as Richard Huelsenbeck, the Dadaist Psychiatrist.
These essays were about me trying to figure some things out, but they are really more explorations than answers. Over the years, the topics in these essays have resurfaced and recurred in my life in various ways. After a period of some years, I found that I had more to write on these topics and began writing additional columns.
For the purpose of this archival collection, I have just collected those essays published in Mental Contagion 2000 – 2002. Post 9/11/2001, I mostly shifted to doing interviews for the column, for this collection I have kept just a few interviews as many of them seem more specific to that time and that place (Champain-Urbana, Illinois). You can read more recent Coniunctionis essays on my blogBeing Fully Human. My website www.davidkopacz.com also has the original Coniunctionis essays, along with artwork, photography, poetry, publications, and other work. The work of Coniunctionis prefigures my current work with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and has continued to influence my writing and published work:
David and Suzanne continue their moving discussion around ‘doing better than rushing to return to normal’ after things shift once again with COVID 19.
This episode dwells in the land of opportunity: What could things look like for us as a people, a world, an environment should we thoughtfully, purposefully move with the new things ushered in despite the chaos vs desperately trying to ‘get back’ to what was once upon a time—back then?
There is such beauty in their words!
I will borrow a saying from David: “Like pinatas of wisdom…”
Suzanne Richman is an education consultant, had founding roles within Goddard College in Vermont, she has expertise and passions within the realms of trauma, grief, social activism. She is a self-confessed recovering academic. You can contact Suzanne at : Suzannehummingbird@gmail.com.
David Kopacz is a psychiatrist, a painter and an author. He lives in Seattle where he does transformation work with veterans and their stories. He is a TLA member.
Suzanne Richman is a passionate teacher within such realms as: Ethnobotany, Social and Ecological Medicine, Community Health Systems, Trauma and Transformational Leadership. She lives in Vermont, and is a TLA member. Suzannehummingbird@gmail.com.
Thank you to Michael H. Cohen for his kind and thoughtful review of Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD. You can read the entire review here. A few excerpts below.
CAN INDIGENOUS HEALING SYSTEMS RESOLVE COMPLEX, MODERN CLINICAL PROBLEMS SUCH AS TRAUMA AND PTSD?
“Answering this question, as part of a larger inquiry into integrative medicine, psychiatrist and integrative physician David Kopacz, and Native American visionary Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow), have written Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD.”
“Importantly, the book notes that ‘the real importance of ceremony is that we are not just going through meaningless motions, but that our motions are full of deep meaning, our motions are the motions of creation.’
Healing not only helps the person – it changes the cosmos.
That is why this is such an important book. Walking the Medicine Wheel shares wisdom from two divergent traditions—one clinical and the other focused on healing through imagery, sound, poetry, introspection, visioning. The quest is nothing less than clearing the fog of the aftermath of war, instilling sacredness, and reclaiming the whole self.”
Being Fully Human 