Simone Matzliach-HanochTales of reversible death. Simone Matzliach-Hanoch - Tales of Reversible Death

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Simone Matzliach Hanoch

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Tales of reversible death. Depression as a healing force

To my children - beloved Yaare and Agam

You taught me love

I know the depth. I penetrated her
Root. But you're afraid of the depths
But I’m not afraid - I was there, I’m used to it.

(Plat C. Soul of the willow. Per. Ruth Finelight)

Prologue

One evening in the third month of a cloudless pregnancy, I started bleeding. I sat on the toilet and cried. She called her then-future husband, got to the car - and to the hospital: it was a few minutes drive away. The thin doctor, with a Russian face the same shade as her pale green operating suit, looked as if she had just been woken up, and was so lethargic and indifferent, I would say even aloof, that I began to suspect that she had injected herself . After roughly digging into me with the tip of an outdated ultrasound, the doctor said that she did not see any pregnancy. It turned out that I had made it all up. Probably, my confused look aroused pity in her, and, softening, she added that this equipment was old and that I should wait until the morning, when they open the room with a new ultrasound and do a more detailed examination.

“It’s a pity,” she said, barely touching my hand.

I was lying on a hospital bed. One floor up, children were being born right above me; the mothers fed, circled along the corridor, as they should after childbirth, with their legs spread wide apart and bled into thick pads. I was no longer bleeding—my little defunct pregnancy was no longer bleeding.

In the morning, a young technician, about twenty years old, examined me for a new ultrasound.

- This is mis 1
The English abbreviation “miscarriage” is an arbitrary miscarriage.

“,” she loudly said to the doctor standing near my head.

I crawled out of the office; his underpants are stained with coagulated blood, his stomach is smeared with transparent gel. I dry myself. All. I'm not pregnant anymore. So what should I do now?

Everyone tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

“It’s not like you really lost the child,” my friend told me. best friend, and I didn’t have the courage to object to her.

But in fact, I felt that, yes, I had lost the child, but I couldn’t talk about it. All my life I tried to correct the incorrigible, to save the hopeless by switching to something new and wonderful - a kind of miracle cure that I invented for myself. The medicine is enough long acting so that when I wake up, I remember the pain I experienced as something fleeting and insignificant. This was the case after the miscarriage. Two days passed, we were driving in the car. This road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is always stunningly beautiful.

“Let’s fix everything,” I suggested to my friend, without taking my eyes off the road, “let’s get married.”

That same evening I called our closest friends and said that I had two news: one sad and one happy. I'm no longer pregnant and I'm getting married.

We plunged into preparations for the wedding and did everything we dreamed of: we picked out a wonderful wedding outfit; traveled several hundred kilometers in search of special cheeses, good wine and fresh homemade bread, which will be delivered still warm directly to festive table. And all this time I was not as happy as I thought I should be. And therefore I was angry with myself, I even began to suspect that perhaps I didn’t love my future husband enough, and found fault with him over every little thing, explaining how important it was not to miss a single detail. And we didn't miss anything; everything was great, of course. Everything except one thing: nothing really made me happy, and I came to the conclusion that I clearly had some kind of defect; that I am not capable of love. I continued to prepare for the wedding, angry at myself for not glowing with happiness.

We got married in his mother's garden. The chuppah itself took place on a trampled area between a lemon and an olive tree. Later, I mentally returned to this place more than once in the hope of finding refuge and peace of mind there. Everyone around us smiled touched, and with a superhuman effort I tried to connect myself with this garden, with these festive faces, with my groom, with my mother, with my wedding, with my loved one.

At night, without changing our clothes, we sorted out gifts and fought with ants that suddenly attacked us from under the bathroom door. That night I behaved like the boy in the old Dutch fairy tale who plugged a hole in the city wall with his finger to save his city from flooding. My city will be flooded the next day, but that very night I didn’t know about it. She just continued to stubbornly fight with the black, evasive creature that was erupting from the crack behind the baseboard.

All this time, my now legal husband was very generous: he was counting on a generous reward that awaited him somewhere among the vineyards of Burgundy.

We left early in the morning. Paris greeted us with pouring rain. We rented a car and only then realized that we had no idea where to go. The girl who placed our order said that the road to Auxerre (the first romantic town on our way) would take a couple of hours. Confident that nothing was impossible for us, we successfully navigated the labyrinths of the metropolis and quickly found ourselves on the country highway we needed. We stayed in a small hotel, at first glance romantic, but in fact gloomy and dusty. The ceilings were decorated with some kind of black transparent material; and it all looked either built in the style of the distant 1980s, or preserved untouched from those ugly times. We saw our black, negative-like reflections, first on the ceiling of the bathroom, and then above the bed; this picture was imprinted on me inner surface century and returned to me within many months, like a harbinger of inevitable troubles.

In the morning we went to Chablis. After a few minutes I became thirsty. I drank water, but the thirst did not go away; I drank more, but my throat was still dry. I panicked; I was sure I was dying. She asked me to return to the hotel. He didn't understand. We argued a bit.

We're back. We spent the whole day in the room. The next morning we set off on the road again. I felt weak and helpless. Looking out the window of our small car, I counted down the kilometers, enjoying the landscape that was already familiar to me: we were driving - and everything was fine. Here it is, the same tree that we drove past yesterday, and my throat was not dry; after him - road sign, and I'm not dying; we reached a small bridge, and I still hadn’t died. So the day passed. We drank the famous local wine; I felt dizzy, but I wasn't worried: alcohol usually causes dizziness.

For the remaining twelve days we traveled around the most beautiful roads France, spent the night in truly romantic roadside inns, medieval castles and small palaces. I was sure that one of two things was happening to me: either I was gradually losing my mind, or I was dying. I was crushed by the horror of death. And I was never able to really explain to my most beloved person, who had been mine for five years already. the only man and for several days now he has been my lawful husband, which is what I feel.

There were nights that he lay there without letting go of my hand, because I was sure that this was the last night of my life. Once I ran out of the restaurant at the very moment when we were served food: it seemed to me that I was losing consciousness. True, I immediately reassured myself that the local hospital was very close; While walking, we passed by it several times.

From then on we almost always ate in the room. He managed to cook deliciously and quickly, but then he ate everything himself: I lost my appetite and could hardly force myself to swallow anything. She began to lose weight and become weaker. He tried to support me. Day after day, hour after hour. I was happy when I managed - for his sake - to force myself to rejoice at something; cursed (mentally, of course) those endless hours when I sat with my face distorted in horror, peering into nothing. He didn’t understand that I needed to return home, and I was afraid to tell him about it.

At the beginning of the third week we stayed in a charming little hotel in one of the towns of Perigo. Having settled into a cozy room, we went out into the courtyard and unexpectedly found ourselves in an amazing park with a small pool that looked like a real pond; with lush green lawns and rose beds. I walked along the paths like a hundred-year-old woman with parchment skin and fragile bones: one step and another step, slowly and carefully.

There I finally realized that if I was not able to enjoy the beauty and love around me, it was better for us to return home. And not only did she understand, but she also said it out loud. He agreed. The next morning we left for Paris, which was ten hours away. From that moment on, I allowed myself to relax and immediately began to fall rapidly. I had no doubt that I was dying. In the evening, my friend came to our room. I lay in bed and smiled guiltily. She laughed loudly, smoked near the window, and suggested we sit in some small cafe. I was silent almost all the time; I had a feeling that this life was no longer for me, and everything that it had to offer - street cafes, jokes, gossip, fun - no longer concerned me. An irresistible force sucked me deeper and deeper. I was already far, far from the place where my friend rejoiced at our long-awaited meeting.

The doctor came and, after a short examination, said that I most likely had mononucleosis and, naturally, I needed to return home.

We returned. Outside the window there were long full of light and sun summer days, and I refused to get out of bed. I ate almost nothing. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me, how I felt. The slightest movement made me feel disgustingly dizzy. With eyes huge in horror, I peered into the emptiness, into the darkness surrounding me, into limbo, into nowhere... I did not exist... And so day after day, week after week. Eternity.

When, finally, still weak and frightened, I began to carefully, leaning on my husband, stand up and even take a few steps, it cost me incredible efforts to convince those around me, my mother, my confused husband, my skeptical doctor, that my sensations were not a fetus. my overexcited fantasy. I was offended by the whole world, scared and very lonely.

It must have been about three months since our trip. It seemed to me that the concept of time no longer concerned me. My life followed its own pattern: from dizziness to loss of balance, from fright to horror.

Well, then I went through everything existing analyzes and examinations. I was sent to have my hearing and spatial vision tested, computed tomography head and neck; recorded electromagnetic pulses, did an ultrasound and general tests blood; checked hormones and glands internal secretion. I was examined by specialist neurologists; orthopedists tapped the knees and probed the vertebrae. I sat in a soundproof aquarium and had to press a big button every time I heard a sound, sometimes so faint that I thought it was only in my head. I sat in front of a randomly flickering screen and had to press the button again for what seemed like three hours every time I saw (or thought I saw) a bright flash of lightning. I was connected to electrodes and lubricated with gel; I bowed my head, raised it and bowed it again. I sat down, stood up; They measured my blood pressure, pulse, temperature - nothing indicated any abnormalities; in fact, even the iron levels in my vegetarian blood have never been as high as they were then. Suspicion of mononucleosis was abandoned at the very beginning of the marathon after simple analysis blood. Well, what irritated me most was that my husband never tired of repeating how beautiful I was, and I myself, looking in the mirror, really saw in front of me beautiful woman, but at the same time, every time everything inside me shrank from the premonition of impending disaster. It seemed to me that this was my swan song. I thought this was another hint of the approaching end.

For hours I tried to describe to my husband, my parents, and numerous doctors the most detailed details of what I felt, what scared me so much. Panic, horror, sudden inexplicable waves of dizziness and weakness. I was looking for new images and comparisons that would bring them closer to my condition; would make them understand how I feel. I am standing on the deck of a ship rocking on the waves; no, I’m spinning inside a concrete mixer, I’m a small multi-colored pebble that rises and falls in some kind of constant circular rhythm; I rise and fall—almost fall—and have to grab onto something. But there was nothing to grab onto, because my husband had enough and said:

“I’m not going to plunge into this nowhere of yours anymore with you.” I'm starting to live again.

And he left. True, he returned from work every day and faithfully took me to the doctors, meetings with whom I stubbornly insisted, but he himself was no longer with me.

My mother, an experienced psychiatrist, and my local doctor began to increasingly say out loud what they had previously muttered under their breath. My mother said: “You are depressed.”

I called my psychologist, the same one I stopped seeing as soon as I got pregnant and was so happy (a million years ago...).

I came to her, sat on the sofa and cried. I cried for the first time since that terrible night when I lost my child; and this was the first time I cried at all in her clinic. I told her everything that happened after I left that room for the last time. About the miscarriage, the wedding, the honeymoon and my illness.

And she spoke the words that opened the door for me to a slow and long recovery.

“Something terrible happened to you,” she said. -You lost your child. You should have wrapped yourself in sackcloth and sprinkled ashes on your head, sat on the floor and bemoaned your fate, but no one could fully understand and acknowledge your pain.

What was happening to me took shape, and I, having understood it, poured content into it: I tried to overcome and cross out my loss, ignore the pain, suppress it, but it was stronger than me, it took possession of me, filled me completely - to the brim. I turned into a vessel, a container for depression, for despair and the persistent fear of impending death; and nothing else could fit there anymore. I was in hell, and there was hell inside me too.

I was depressed.

Once upon a time there was a girl

I can’t say exactly when and how the connection between depression and the people I knew arose in my gradually recovering soul. early childhood fairy tales Like long-awaited saving clouds during a long drought, images, words, pictures floated into my mind: Little Red Riding Hood, swallowed by a wolf, emerges from his torn belly, Snow White falls dead and comes to life again, Sleeping Beauty wakes up a hundred years later from the kiss of a prince... Now they have all become They are especially close and understandable to me.

I remembered a fairy tale I read as a girl on a kibbutz; one of those that I read and re-read as if spellbound five, ten, or even more times in lazy afternoon hours on the iron bed of the children's building, alone in the restless childish anthill. I remembered walking in a magical forest: there, in an abandoned castle, lived a princess with golden curls (the kind I had never had), bewitched by an evil fairy for seven long years. And then she woke up - beautiful, smart and matured.

Goldilocks, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and with them Persephone - the kidnapped ancient greek goddess fertility, who became the goddess of the kingdom of the dead - swarmed in my tired head; talking, whispering, or simply, silently, twirling in an airy, non-stop round dance. And, listening to them, I began to listen to what was happening in my soul: carefully, grain by grain, I cleared the present from the far-fetched, until the appearance of a monster began to emerge, threatening to deprive me of everything dear to me. And at the same time it became clear to me that my story exactly repeats theirs: like Snow White and Inanna (the Sumerian goddess who retired to the kingdom of the dead), I found myself buried alive at the bottom of a deep well called depression, and now I am trying to get out of there . And like Goldilocks, I wake up completely different.

At the same time, my meetings began with an amazing woman, a “shaman”, hiding her hair under a thick white scarf, who from then until today has served as my faithful and reliable guide.

At the same time, my husband managed to literally drag me out of the house: on jelly-like legs, trembling like jelly, deafened, as it seemed to me, by the unbearable noise of the street, with stops and breaks, I made my way from the house to the car, so that then, clutching in a grocery stroller, indifferently trailing after him through the supermarket. My optimistic mentor called the unbearable attacks of dizziness that turned me into an icy idol “an internal degeneration of the mechanisms of life.”

In those days, in the midst of the process, I could not understand the true state of things, but today, from the height of the past years, I see how unknown forces, as if moving drifting continents, rebuilt my soul. The barriers that seemed indestructible were demolished, and the gaps in the protective wall that formed in childhood, on the contrary, were sealed (and now I carefully protect them). Disheveled witches with black nails, hiding from prying eyes, crawled out of the dungeon, and to this day I can’t always cope with them... Obedient mother’s daughters, reciting children’s poems passed down from generation to generation on a stool, were driven into the attic and still don’t know how to get out of there, and whether it’s worth doing it at all. The goals that I strived for with all my might, not noticing how along the way I was trampling and crushing other particles of my own Self, suddenly evaporated, as if they had never existed. The images of success and happiness that settled in my mind as a child, mercilessly urging me on, stepping on my heels, froze motionless. Now I was controlled by new forces; and they were softer, more compassionate, more humane towards me and those around me.

Then I was able to see the fundamental model on which all fairy tales are built, not subject to the laws of time: after all, it was their heroes who whispered their stories to me when it was especially difficult for me. These fairy tales drive their heroines into a hopeless dead end, as a result of which they die for a while, and then, resurrected, begin new life. I call them tales of reversible death.

In my understanding, tales of reversible death are repeatedly repeated stories about the depressive process, told through various plots, which necessarily involve immersion in the underworld of mental hell, a seemingly endless stay in this hell, and then an equally difficult ascent, a kind of rebirth that entails entails sacrifices, concessions and losses.

Those of us who think in terms of modern Western society and classify illness, depression or loss as clearly negative phenomena that should be avoided and prevented will be very surprised when they realize how many heroines of the fairy tales and legends on which our culture is based are absolutely consciously doomed yourself to disappear (temporarily), to the torment of hell, to reversible death. Let me immediately note that this craving for oblivion (and return from it) is not exclusively a woman’s lot, but men and women die and are born again in completely different ways; I will definitely look into this in more detail. Before we continue, I want to emphasize once again that this book deals primarily with depression, which affects women exclusively, which is why I wrote it from the point of view of a woman: I often use the expression “we women” or “us women.” , and not the generalized “we” and “ours,” since I am writing from there, from the inside, where soul and flesh are inseparable. Well, to you, men who also decided to jump into our carriage, I, naturally, say “welcome,” but I warn you: sometimes it shakes a lot on this road.

Why Sleeping Beauty does not want to look at the world through the transparent cellophane in which her unusually devoted parents wrapped her 2
“Unusually devoted parents” is a paraphrase of D. W. Winnicott’s famous expression “the ordinary devoted mother,” which combines an endless list of desires, intentions and ideas that he talks about when exploring the relationship between parents and children. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about a mother from early childhood as “too good” or “too devoted” when, by hiding her daughter under her skirt, she unwittingly hinders her development and maturation. Such a mother must “die” to provide the stage for the teenager’s mother. This kind of mother is depicted (not at all flatteringly) in many fairy tales as a “stepmother” with the most negative connotations.

And searches throughout the castle for one single surviving needle so that he can finally fall asleep? And why does Inanna, the mistress of heaven, refuse the royal throne, leave heaven and earth and descend to the underworld of her sister Ereshkigal? She quite consciously goes towards her terrible fate. And Snow White? She opens the door to her Shadow again and again 3
In analytical (Jungian) psychology, the Shadow is a set of those negative qualities of a person that he possesses, but does not recognize as his own. These are those character traits that a person does not accept in other people, without noticing that he himself is endowed with them to no less extent. They form a shadow image of a person, " dark side"his personality. Often the Shadow contains mysterious, frightening properties - this, according to Jung, is reflected in many literary and mythological images. If we turn to shamanism, then the role of the Shadow is played by the “external soul”, which usually takes the form of one or another animal. “If something serious happens to the shadow, then the person who owns the shadow will soon say goodbye to life” (Nahum Megged. Portals of Hope and Gates of Terror: Shamanism, Magic and Witchcraft... Tel-Aviv, Modan).

Hiding under the guise of a poor old woman. It is unlikely that the girl does not know who is standing (several times in a row) outside the door: after all, it is the Old Woman Death herself, offering her an apple!

Snow White opens the door of Death until the gates to oblivion swing open in front of her. And there, in a glass coffin, having fallen into a deep, fainting sleep, she finally calms down and gives her torn soul the opportunity to rebuild herself anew in order to live on. Here is Inanna - she dies from the “gaze of death,” but then, thanks to the efforts of the gods, life returns to her mutilated body. Something similar happens to Sleeping Beauty: she plunges into eternal sleep, from the depths of which the long-awaited prince appears.

Despite the fact that I was brought up (in principle, we were all brought up this way) on the fact that the depression that I experienced and the heroines of fairy tales of returning from oblivion experience is a negative phenomenon from which it is necessary to recover, today I no longer think so.

Depression, in my understanding today, is an extreme weapon, an extreme measure of salvation from a hopeless, dead-end mental state (which is absolutely clear from fairy tales of reversible death); the tool is, without a doubt, dangerous, which I would under no circumstances recommend as a lifesaver. Yet I believe that we can take a fresh look at the ordeal called depression, leaving aside conventional conventions, freeing ourselves from the need for constant total control. We are able to treat depression as an inevitable process that the soul resorts to when it finds itself in an unbearable situation.

Many followers of holism see an obligatory therapeutic component in any disease, i.e., in their opinion, any disease is also a cure; Any disease can be treated as a “fall for the sake of taking off.” Moreover, even conventional medicine, although not always, recognizes that the history of many diseases can be traced to a history of suppression of emotions, ours or our parents, or, at worst, that the suppression of emotions can cause harm physical health. In this book, I write only about depression and only on the basis of my personal experiences, but I fully admit that similar processes are characteristic of many other mental and physical disorders.

I view depression as a kind of beneficial regression, as a refuge within whose walls you can hide, like a snail hiding in a shell. And there, in the depths of temporary oblivion, let go of the reins of the chariot of life in order to give the opportunity to heal that very spiritual crack that served entrance gate for depression. Well, as for loss of control, we can only hope for intrinsic property, called intuition, which, like a faithful horse, will not allow our soul to go astray and will find the way home that we have lost.

In my opinion, I borrowed this metaphor from a Russian fairy tale, where Ivanushka the Fool (seemingly such) trusts his horse (the Little Humpbacked Horse) so much that, on his advice, he jumps into a cauldron of boiling milk and, as usual, comes out of there as a handsome prince.

The first person I thought of when starting my journey in the footsteps of fairy tale heroines who returned from oblivion was Persephone. Young carefree Persephone, as narrated greek mythology, was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld of the dead, and became his wife. Demeter, the goddess of fertility and agriculture, searched for her daughter all over the world, indulging in inconsolable grief, and at that time the earth was barren; nothing sprouted in the sown fields. People died of hunger and did not make sacrifices to the gods. Zeus began sending gods and goddesses after Demeter to persuade her to return to Olympus. But she, sitting in a black robe in the Eleusinian temple, did not notice them. In the end, Hades was forced to release the girl, but before releasing her he gave her seven grains (or three, there are different options) grenade. Persephone, who had refused food all this time, swallowed the grains - and was thus doomed to return to the kingdom of Hades. She spent six months (spring and summer) with her mother on Olympus, and in the fall she went underground to rule the kingdom of the dead. And so, from year to year, all nature on earth blooms and fades, lives and dies - rises and falls along with Persephone.

This retelling of an ancient myth may cause bewilderment: it would seem that what is common between mythological abduction and us - women who voluntarily search for a path into the depths of their subconscious and walk along it until complete exhaustion? I’ll use a colorful image borrowed from Clarissa Pinkola Estes: all you have to do is blow lightly, and all the dust of “patriarchal morality”, which prescribes mandatory abduction to the Kingdom of the Dead, will fly away from Persephone and the ancient “original” will be revealed - Persephone herself sets off on a long journey of her own free will.

After all, it cannot be that the goddess of spring, the daughter of the goddess of fertility, was abducted into the womb of the earth, which, according to the logic of things, belongs to her mother: here, in the depths of the earth, trees go with their roots; here wheat grains sleep, gaining strength; earthly juices nourish all life on earth. The whole earth - everything on it and everything under it - is in the possession of Demeter, which means it already belongs or will belong to her daughter, Persephone.

What happens on that warm sunny morning? Persephone and her friends collect wonderful wildflowers - violets and irises, crocuses, flowers wild rose and hyacinth - and imperceptibly moves away from everyone. And so, alone, mesmerized by the heady beauty of the flowering meadow, she finds a daffodil that has been waiting for her for a long time and, naturally, picks it. Narcissus, with its bold, disturbing scent, with its alluring gaze turned inward, to the infinite “I,” takes us further and further into the depths, into the mirror labyrinth, in the walls of which bottomless eternity is reflected. The black void is sucking us in - we are drowning. As soon as Persephone plucks the daffodil, a chariot emerges from the bowels of the earth, and in it is Hades, the ruler of the kingdom of the dead; he takes her to his lightless lair.

Even if Persephone (who is nothing more than a later version of Inanna) is not entirely aware of what is happening, she is actually the most in an active way looking for the gate leading to where she should end up. What part of Persephone knows that the narcissus is the very gateway to the world of the dead? There is no exact answer to this question, but it is certain that it was this part that guided all her actions on that sunny morning.

And now one more light touch - and another ancient picture emerges before us: before letting Persephone go, Hades hands her pomegranate seeds. Tiny droplets on a man’s palm, they flicker in the dark like bloodshot rubies...

Smooth as river pebbles, the grains pleasantly cool a girl’s fingers; for a moment she feels their heaviness with her tongue, another moment - a sweet and sour explosion in her mouth, and then - a faint surge of memory, a slight pleasant chill; and that's all...

“Have a nice journey,” her husband tells her.

“See you soon,” he adds in a whisper, so that she won’t hear.

And Persephone? Taking a short glance back, she rushes up the stairs straight into the arms of her mother, who is ready to do anything for her.

“You didn’t take anything from him, did you?” – Demeter asks, hugging her daughter to herself.

- No, mommy, just pomegranate seeds. Only a few grains.

“My stupid girl,” the mother bursts into tears. “You know that you can’t take anything from Hades with you.” Now Hades is inside you. Now you must return there. Oh gods! Help me!

The mother falls to her knees near a black bottomless well.

End of the second act.

“You know very well why,” the serpent of knowledge that has settled inside me insistently whispers, “why Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds that her treacherous uncle gives her.” Those very grains that make it impossible for her to return completely to earth and force her to submit to the rhythm of the eternal pendulum: down - to the underworld and back, up - to the light; the rhythm, according to the laws of which the goddess of spring fades and consigns herself to the earth, like the goddess of death, and then is reborn - sprouts again, like spring.

The pomegranate seed, an ancient symbol of fertility, prosperity and marriage, is used as a metaphor, as a poetic image, hinting at the voluntary merger of Persephone with the spirit of the underworld; to the union between the higher and the lower, between light and shadow, between consciousness and subconscious.

Now I was attracted not so much by the ancient legend I had known since childhood, but by its ancient predecessors. And indeed it turned out that at the beginning of her evolution, Persephone descended into the Underground voluntarily, no one tried to kidnap her. The same goddess of spring, which the Greeks borrowed from the centuries-old mythology that existed before them, strove for the Eternal Kingdom of the Dead in order to quench her thirst for knowledge, shake up her boring, calm existence and finally meet the mysterious husband waiting for her there; to discover the inner image of her mother, covered in darkness - the image of the so-called Black Demeter, and to look closely at her own Shadow hidden in the depths of the soul.

And now, when we have removed the ancient mask from the face of our goddess of spring, it costs us nothing to discern the ancient roots of the myth, carefully powdered with the fresh cover of patriarchal ancient Greek morality, which preached a complete separation between the higher and the lower, between the inner, hidden, and the outer, located on surfaces. One more light touch - and we find ourselves in a completely different space, in an environment that recognizes the importance and even the necessity of periodically plunging into the bottomless depths of the subconscious. This is exactly how I propose to read all the tales of return from oblivion. Let's wipe away the patina of patriarchal dust from them, and the mosaic of what is happening hidden in the depths will be revealed to us layer by layer: immersion in Hades is an internal necessity.

* * *

Tales of reversible death. Depression as a healing force

To my children - beloved Yaare and Agam

You taught me love

I know the depth. I penetrated her
Root. But you're afraid of the depths
But I’m not afraid - I was there, I’m used to it.

(Plat C. Soul of the willow. Per. Ruth Finelight)

Prologue

“It’s a pity,” she said, barely touching my hand.

In the morning, a young technician, about twenty years old, examined me for a new ultrasound.

- This is mis 1
The English abbreviation “miscarriage” is an arbitrary miscarriage.

“,” she loudly said to the doctor standing near my head.

I crawled out of the office; his underpants are stained with coagulated blood, his stomach is smeared with transparent gel. I dry myself. All. I'm not pregnant anymore. So what should I do now?

Everyone tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

“It’s not like you really lost the child,” my best friend told me, and I didn’t have the courage to argue with her.

The medicine is long-acting enough that, when I wake up, I remember the pain I experienced as something fleeting and insignificant. This was the case after the miscarriage. Two days passed, we were driving in the car. This road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is always stunningly beautiful.

“Let’s fix everything,” I suggested to my friend, without taking my eyes off the road, “let’s get married.”

That same evening I called our closest friends and said that I had two news: one sad and one happy. I'm no longer pregnant and I'm getting married.

We plunged into preparations for the wedding and did everything we dreamed of: we picked out a wonderful wedding outfit; we traveled several hundred kilometers in search of special cheeses, good wine and fresh homemade bread, which would be delivered still warm right to the festive table. And all this time I was not as happy as I thought I should be. And therefore I was angry with myself, I even began to suspect that perhaps I didn’t love my future husband enough, and found fault with him over every little thing, explaining how important it was not to miss a single detail. And we didn't miss anything; everything was great, of course. Everything except one thing: nothing really made me happy, and I came to the conclusion that I clearly had some kind of defect; that I am not capable of love. I continued to prepare for the wedding, angry at myself for not glowing with happiness.

All this time, my now legal husband was very generous: he was counting on a generous reward that awaited him somewhere among the vineyards of Burgundy.

We left early in the morning. Paris greeted us with pouring rain. We rented a car and only then realized that we had no idea where to go. The girl who placed our order said that the road to Auxerre (the first romantic town on our way) would take a couple of hours. Confident that nothing was impossible for us, we successfully navigated the labyrinths of the metropolis and quickly found ourselves on the country highway we needed. We stayed in a small hotel, at first glance romantic, but in fact gloomy and dusty. The ceilings were decorated with some kind of black transparent material; and it all looked either built in the style of the distant 1980s, or preserved untouched from those ugly times. We saw our black, negative-like reflections, first on the ceiling of the bathroom, and then above the bed; this picture was imprinted on the inner surface of my eyelids and returned to me for many months, like a harbinger of inevitable troubles.

We're back. We spent the whole day in the room. The next morning we set off on the road again. I felt weak and helpless. Looking out the window of our small car, I counted down the kilometers, enjoying the landscape that was already familiar to me: we were driving - and everything was fine. Here it is, the same tree that we drove past yesterday, and my throat was not dry; after it there is a road sign, and I am not dying; we reached a small bridge, and I still hadn’t died. So the day passed. We drank the famous local wine; I felt dizzy, but I wasn't worried: alcohol usually causes dizziness.

The remaining twelve days we drove along the most beautiful roads in France, spending the night in truly romantic roadside hotels, medieval castles and small palaces. I was sure that one of two things was happening to me: either I was gradually losing my mind, or I was dying. I was crushed by the horror of death. And I have never been able to really explain to my most beloved person, who has been my only man for five years and has been my lawful husband for several days, what I feel.

The doctor came and, after a short examination, said that I most likely had mononucleosis and, naturally, I needed to return home.

We returned. Outside the window there were long summer days full of light and sun, and I refused to get out of bed. I ate almost nothing. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me, how I felt. The slightest movement made me feel disgustingly dizzy. With eyes huge in horror, I peered into the emptiness, into the darkness surrounding me, into limbo, into nowhere... I did not exist... And so day after day, week after week. Eternity.

Well, then I went through all the existing tests and examinations. I was sent for hearing and spatial vision tests, a CT scan of the head and neck; recorded electromagnetic pulses, did ultrasound and general blood tests; Hormones and endocrine glands were checked. I was examined by specialist neurologists; orthopedists tapped the knees and probed the vertebrae. I sat in a soundproof aquarium and had to press a big button every time I heard a sound, sometimes so faint that I thought it was only in my head. I sat in front of a randomly flickering screen and had to press the button again for what seemed like three hours every time I saw (or thought I saw) a bright flash of lightning. I was connected to electrodes and lubricated with gel; I bowed my head, raised it and bowed it again. I sat down, stood up; They measured my blood pressure, pulse, temperature - nothing indicated any abnormalities; in fact, even the iron levels in my vegetarian blood have never been as high as they were then. The suspicion of mononucleosis was dismissed at the very beginning of the marathon after a simple blood test. Well, what irritated me most was that my husband never tired of repeating how beautiful I was, and I myself, looking in the mirror, saw a really beautiful woman in front of me, but at the same time, every time everything inside me shrank from the premonition of impending trouble. It seemed to me that this was my swan song. I thought this was another hint of the approaching end.

“I’m not going to plunge into this nowhere of yours anymore with you.” I'm starting to live again.

And he left. True, he returned from work every day and faithfully took me to the doctors, meetings with whom I stubbornly insisted, but he himself was no longer with me.

My mother, an experienced psychiatrist, and my local doctor began to increasingly say out loud what they had previously muttered under their breath. My mother said: “You are depressed.”

I called my psychologist, the same one I stopped seeing as soon as I got pregnant and was so happy (a million years ago...).

And she spoke the words that opened the door for me to a slow and long recovery.

I was depressed.

Once upon a time there was a girl

I can’t say exactly when and how the connection between depression and fairy tales familiar to me from early childhood arose in my gradually recovering soul. Like long-awaited saving clouds during a long drought, images, words, pictures floated into my mind: Little Red Riding Hood, swallowed by a wolf, emerges from his torn belly, Snow White falls dead and comes to life again, Sleeping Beauty wakes up a hundred years later from the kiss of a prince... Now they have all become They are especially close and understandable to me.

Goldilocks, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and with them Persephone - the kidnapped ancient Greek goddess of fertility, who became the goddess of the kingdom of the dead - swarmed in my tired head; talking, whispering, or simply, silently, twirling in an airy, non-stop round dance. And, listening to them, I began to listen to what was happening in my soul: carefully, grain by grain, I cleared the present from the far-fetched, until the appearance of a monster began to emerge, threatening to deprive me of everything dear to me. And at the same time it became clear to me that my story exactly repeats theirs: like Snow White and Inanna (the Sumerian goddess who retired to the kingdom of the dead), I found myself buried alive at the bottom of a deep well called depression, and now I am trying to get out of there . And like Goldilocks, I wake up completely different.

At the same time, my meetings began with an amazing woman, a “shaman”, hiding her hair under a thick white scarf, who from then until today has served as my faithful and reliable guide.

And searches throughout the castle for one single surviving needle so that he can finally fall asleep? And why does Inanna, the mistress of heaven, refuse the royal throne, leave heaven and earth and descend to the underworld of her sister Ereshkigal? She quite consciously goes towards her terrible fate. And Snow White? She opens the door to her Shadow again and again 3
In analytical (Jungian) psychology, the Shadow is a set of those negative qualities of a person that he possesses, but does not recognize as his own. These are those character traits that a person does not accept in other people, without noticing that he himself is endowed with them to no less extent. They form a shadow image of a person, the “dark side” of his personality. Often the Shadow contains mysterious, frightening properties - this, according to Jung, is reflected in many literary and mythological images. If we turn to shamanism, then the role of the Shadow is played by the “external soul”, which usually takes the form of one or another animal. “If something serious happens to the shadow, then the person who owns the shadow will soon say goodbye to life” (Nahum Megged. Portals of Hope and Gates of Terror: Shamanism, Magic and Witchcraft... Tel-Aviv, Modan).

* * *

To my children - beloved Yaare and Agam

You taught me love

I know the depth. I penetrated her
Root. But you're afraid of the depths
But I’m not afraid - I was there, I’m used to it.
(Plat C. Soul of the willow. Per. Ruth Finelight)

Prologue

“It’s a pity,” she said, barely touching my hand.

In the morning, a young technician, about twenty years old, examined me for a new ultrasound.

“This is mis,” she said loudly to the doctor standing near my head.

I crawled out of the office; his underpants are stained with coagulated blood, his stomach is smeared with transparent gel. I dry myself. All. I'm not pregnant anymore. So what should I do now?

Everyone tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

“It’s not like you really lost the child,” my best friend told me, and I didn’t have the courage to argue with her.

But in fact, I felt that, yes, I had lost the child, but I couldn’t talk about it. All my life I tried to correct the incorrigible, to save the hopeless by switching to something new and wonderful - a kind of miracle cure that I invented for myself. The medicine is long-acting enough that, when I wake up, I remember the pain I experienced as something fleeting and insignificant. This was the case after the miscarriage. Two days passed, we were driving in the car. This road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is always stunningly beautiful.