Get thee to Brook Cherith! Elijah's refuge from the idolatrous King of Isreal, Ahab, does sound like a suggestion from a voice in Elijah's head. Maybe not.
"Can we look at the Authority of the voice. Whether God or in the mind, its relationship to power and ask whether the many verses in Leonard Cohen's Poem Hallaliujah explore this strange relationsip between power and authority as the two themes move around our fleshy minds searching for something the mind might hold up as truth."
Of Cohen's many lines, here are a few - "love is not a victory march," "I used to live alone before I knew you" and there was something about the rich getting richer and the poor staying the same.....
"I'd love to know what the English Archers, not the knights at Agincourt and Crecy, confessed to the monks. It's a long question Comrade to which I'd like to add a question about how psychiatrists address these 'Voices'."
Battle of Agincourt, it was a different world. The peasants called to serve their kings and princes had God, not as we people have god in the West Today, unless you count the surrender of fundamentalists. A man called Jean de Wavrin witnessed the Battle of Agincourt. Jean reports that when the French Army realized they were trapped in the mud, French foot soldiers and pages were terrified, they began embracing, kissing, and making peace with one another, loudly confessing their sins to anyone nearby because there weren't enough priests to hear them all.
When the killing was done, there was traditional 'finger pointing' from foot soldiers who survived. The French blamed their leaders for marching them into a slaughter house. King Charles VI of France himself was absent from the Battle of Agincourt due to mental illness, the French forces were led by Constable of France Charles I d'Albret and Marshal Jean II le Meingre. The victorious English were led by Henry V. You can read all about him in Shakespeare's play, Henry the Fifth and the Saint Crispin's Day speach - "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers....." and on it goes into pickled eggs, crisps and rah-rah.
In the days of Elijah, and the early Carmelites, if a man heard a voice in the quiet of the wadi, the culture had a container for it. It was treated as a terrifying, high-stakes event of Authority. You listened to it. You tested it against prophecy. You allowed it to alter the community.
Elijah didn't trust his king, nor his queen. He had a 'voice' and in that voice he saw Authority. The prophets of Baal lost the contest, they were escorted away from the spring that birthed Brook Cherith, they were taken down to the river to be slaughtered. And Lo, a tiny cloud the size of a man's hand sprung from the salt sea, it grew into clouds that rained fresh water, and hallelujah, the drought was broken.
The early Carmelites had a voice, it didn't tell them to obsess on the fate of Prophets of Baal. Oh no! It told them to disappear from the public square, start again, reimagine their world as Elijah had done. The voice at the brook is the subconscious reasserting a moral orientation that the conscious world had wiped out. It was and is the mind creating a sanctuary because the reality on the ground has become insane.
To modern clinical psychiatry, a voice in the head is not an active Nous hunting for meaning. It is a chemical misfire. It is an over-abundance of dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway. The goal is not to find out what the voice is saying, or why the meat had to split itself in two to survive a hostile environment. The goal is to re-calibrate the machine, make it fit better.
"That's the background noise of the human empire. It’s the realization that while the fleshy mind is searching for a high, majestic Truth to hold up as a god, the cold machine of the front row is still quietly running its extractive metrics in the corner, un-moved by our poetry."
The rich and poor line from Leonard Cohen was from his song "Everyone Knows." The poor stay poor, the rich get rich, that's how it goes. The song goes on to suggest that everyone knows the war is over, everyone knows the good guys lost. A Cato the Younger moment from a Canadian freeman maybe!
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