Dreaming of mercy street

Journey to the orphan

In his song ‘Mercy Street,’ Peter Gabriel places the most dissonant harmonies on the word ‘mercy’. His voice barely rises above a murmur, aside from when a high-pitched wail breaks through the gentle confusion of the dream. The song is based on the poem ‘45 Mercy Street’ by Anne Sexton and is inspired partially by Anne Sexton’s complex life - her relationships with men, with her parents, with her children, with therapy, with art and poetry, and her death. I find I want to approach Anne Sexton carefully, gently - she is both delicate and like a storm that one must weather to get to the glimmers within. Her spiritually orphaned inner child breaks vividly through in her poetry, haunting, threatening, small, child-like, beautiful. Gabriel captured this masterfully in sound, which is a gift to the unconscious - music and sound can touch deeper experiences and aspects of our inner lives that are beneath our verbal awareness. The archetype I feel resonating through Sexton’s poetry and Gabriel’s song is the archetype of the orphan - a longing for safety, nurturance, mercy, from a part of us that feels starved of those.

The orphan archetype

The inner child so often appears in dissonance - a longing that breaks through or tears you open - desperately seeking softness, mercy, gentleness; yearning for the steadying arms of the absent father (or mother). I have found that as adults we are most often ashamed of this childlike longing, even though we all have it. We all experience the pain of separation from childhood and innocence, and our deepest pain/desire is often our largest source of shame. This condition is deepened when parents have been absent/abandoning or a direct source of pain, even though this is where the most attention and care is needed. We are repeating the cycle of rejection, disowning that child because that is what we have learned to do, and preventing her integration into our conscious self (because this would require love, repair, and acceptance). We push our orphaned inner child deeper and deeper into the shadows, until the moments where she cries out and breaks through.

Pull the shades down –

I don’t care!

Bolt the door, mercy,

erase the number,

rip down the street sign,

what can it matter,

what can it matter to this cheapskate

who wants to own the past

that went out on a dead ship

and left me only with paper?

From ‘45 Mercy Street’ - Anne Sexton

The shadow side

It’s said that when a part of the psyche is banished into Shadow it becomes primal, animal-like, and apart from the mediating influence of the top-side world and its morals and expectations. It becomes mindless and hungry, and its Shadow qualities grow more pronounced the further we send it into exile. The orphan can take us to many dark places; we respond to the darkness with more repression. As we drive this shadow further and further underground it becomes more powerful, more primal. I think this is why we often see an odd juxtaposition between the spectacle of tenderness and the spectacle of cruelty online.

I see a lot of memes these days about the inner child - memes that are very tender and soft. They are deeply, infinitely gentle. I have no argument with this - infinite tenderness is, indeed, what is most needed. Still, I can’t help but notice that this archetype is most often represented in the lighter terms: the playfulness, innocence, wisdom, and confusion of a child, and I wonder if we are driving the Shadow side of this archetype further and further into oblivion. A frightened child is easy to love. What about the child who is so disenfranchised that in response she tries to ensure her safety by engulfing others, devouring others, possessing others? What about the child who is entitled beyond reason? What about the child who matches the cruelty he sees demonstrated to him? There is genuine darkness that is often borne by this little Orphan. She believes she is a monster, and she may behave like one. You may try to reject the monstrous parts of her, rescuing her from those facets of her(your)self, telling her, “No, that is not us.” This just pushes the darkness further into the shadows, where they grow stronger and plot their jailbreak. Loving this child is not as easy - yet they are deserving of love all the same.

Mercy Street is a representation of the complexity of the child, in motion & in time. Gabriel had to record the lower harmony first thing in the morning upon waking to get his voice to stay in the lower register. Anne Sexton is in some ways the perfect representation of the complexity of the Orphan - beautiful and awake and transcendent, raw, open, longing for comfort. And devouring, chaotic, self-destructive. She became like the sea - dangerous, mysterious, frightening, and life-giving. She searched high and low for the mercy she longed for, not knowing she held it in her own hands.

Your inner child

Contrary to some social media narratives, you are not meant to spend your life huddled over your inner child like a protective Bear over her cub. You are not meant to spend your life in tribute to her or piling coals on your head over what you did not receive in childhood. Rather, you can heal this part of yourself, and then integrate it into the rich and evolving tapestry of who you are. It may take a long while, and the journey itself deserves patience and the right to unfold organically, but it is not meant to last forever. Your inner child is not a demon or a god. It’s a child - perfect in its imperfection. Ugly, terrible, beautiful, innocent, stormy - worthy of love with it all, just like you are. You don’t parent this child by ignoring it, or by hovering protectively over it forever, or continuing to subjugate shadows. You parent her by accepting, teaching, and alchemizing her wisdom into your conscious life and the wisdom of adulthood.

Part of this means getting clear about your own values as an adult, and accepting the Shadow impulses toward destruction, devouring, engulfing, and possessing, and choosing to act differently. It means no longer casting your lovers and friends and children in the role of your missing parents, expecting them to heal this wound that they can never hope to heal on their own, because it’s a wound that can only be tended by you. To overcome, you must honor that seeking new parents is the quest for unconditional love, and that this is an impulse deserving of infinite compassion and love - while also honoring that such an impulse, unmediated, can impose on the agency and liberty of the ones we love the most. Then you can choose to respond in the most loving way to both yourself and the people in your life.

Listen to the song: the first ‘mercy’ in each phrase is harsh, but resolves gently upon repetition. That which is spoken out loud shows its face and becomes gentler; facing your shadow is coming home to yourself.