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Kilimanjaro, Ketamine, and Crying
What causes cathartic release?
All of a sudden there was a crow. It was squawking loud, rough, painful “caw, caw, caw” sounds, vibrations that grated against something inside me. The angular shape of the bird was clear to my inner-eye, with its oily, black feathers hanging off its slightly-raised wings, wings raised repetitively by the pumping of its chest. That’s all there was, just this crow, and somewhere in the distance was Duncan’s body and the guttural cries that were emitting from the mouth of that body. It was as if I was somehow making these cries, but also as if they had a deep meaning that I could not understand. Somehow I had become the crow and the crow was saying what so badly needed to be said.
Then the birth began: the pushing through into the light; the hopeful escape from safe confines of the womb, an escape into space, a place where I could spread my wings, a stage filled with potential. It was not only a human birth; it felt like the birth of a cosmos; perhaps it was an archetypal birth.
But I would never be one with my mother again. I would never feel her heart so close to mine. My birth could not be felt as anything but rejection, because it literally was, even though it was for my own good. In some way or another, I imagine that all births are traumatic, that all births represent loss.
