The Fifth Poem from Jason Ryan Morton’s Book, ‘Diverging Paths’

Here is Poem #5 from Diverging Paths, a book of poetry and prose by my Facebook friend, Jason Ryan Morton, whose work I’ve looked at many times before. As always, I’ll put the words of his poem in italics to distinguish them from mine. Here’s the poem:

My illusion of good, 
And my illusion of evil, 
Differ for the cause, 
I can’t believe I used to believe 
In these flaws, 

I want my sanity, 
My mind resentful of humanity, 
Returned to me, 
Behind the backdrop, 
Of falling profanity, 

Profane, 
In the domain, 
Of the choice of everything versus nothing,

And now, for my analysis.

This poem can be seen to represent the shift from what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. The first position is one of splitting our experience of others (our internal objects, the people we know and who inhabit our thoughts) into absolute good and absolute bad; the second position is one of reconciling the bad and good experienced in others, of allowing oneself to see in others a combination of good and bad.

Thus through psychological splitting, one sees an “illusion of good” and an “illusion of evil.” When one has achieved reparation, though, one finds the flaws of the previous, split thinking, so utterly wrong that one cannot believe one once believed the dichotomous thinking was true. The evolution, growth, and maturing of the personality requires an acknowledgement of the grey area in everyone, not just the ‘black’ or ‘white.’

When one splits objects into ‘black’ or ‘white,’ that splitting affects us internally. We try to project the bad parts, but we can’t, for they are a part of us. So, if “I want my sanity,” however “my mind [may be] resentful of humanity,” I must do this reconciling of the ‘black’ and ‘white’ into the grey that all of humanity really is. This is the only way my sanity will be “returned to me.”

“Behind the backdrop” is the unconscious mind, which is a repository of all the repressed hurt and trauma “of falling profanity,” all those hurtful words and verbal abuse that one has been subjected to all of one’s life. The splitting and projecting of the bad of others is a defence mechanism against such hurt.

But one cannot always go around seeking refuge in the illusions of splitting, which is “profane, in the domain,” an unspiritual place where illusion masquerades as truth, instead of the spiritual place of reconciled oneness, where contradictions are resolved, and the choppy fragmentation of splitting is replaced by a flowing of ups and downs.

“The choice of everything versus nothing,” caused by splitting, must be replaced by an embrace of everything and nothing, a confrontation with trauma in order to heal it; then one can have one’s sanity returned.