Eros and Chaos: The Sacred Mysteries and Dark Shadows of Love

About a year ago I was present to hear Dr. Goodchild's response to a classmate's question about whether love is "only projection," an erotic glow we put into the person we fall for. We had just had a class in psychoanalysis, a useful but highly reductive set of theories and therapies.Although I can't repeat the response here, much as I'd like to, it was splendidly animated, asking in essence: if love is all projection, what does that say about the beloved--HER feelings, HER reality? Although you can't know the St. Elmo's Fire that cavorts from the very windows wherever Dr. Goodchild speaks unless you're there to have your hair raised by it, the passion behind it lights this fine book of hers, in which Sekmet and Shakti, angels and aliens rise like currents of celestial fire to charge the dance of Chaos and Eros, the mythic pair so often pushed off the dance floor by Chaos and Order or just Order, finally a solo in the positivist pageants of our time, so addicted are we to programs, lists, and control, we heirs to Apollo and Rome.And so the Chaos we try to arrange out of our lives and relationships (thereby depotentiating both) breaks in again in unexpected places, angered at going unrecognized, eager to initiate us into a richer and more genuine--and more tumultuous--kind of Eros than we're used to. For there's no such thing as a safe love, or a truly orderly vocation. Would we want them if there could be?Some of my classmates question whether depth-related learnings are still relevant, what with falling bombs, terrorist attacks, a literal anthrax to match the psychic poisoning of our era. In and below such surface-level cataclysms and the pain they involve Dr. Goodchild reads the re-emergence of a long-repressed cosmological love intimately bound up with everything else we've managed to marginalize: the fleshly, the feminine, the esoteric, the earthly, the imaginal. To quote from the book:"Could it be that the chaos of our world, losing its way in breakdowns on all levels from the personal to the political, from the cultural to the geophysical, signals that moment of deadly peril where collective consciousness seeks its own destruction and dissolution, in order to birth a relation to this complex Mystery, a connection that we can only approach, that we can only forge, with an attitude born of a willingness to suffer, and of a love that can only emerge from our grief?"Obviously, this kind of love has nothing to do with a manically optimistic "everything is love, man"; its wellsprings are deeper and its cost far higher than anything rainbow stickers and positive affirmations could tap. "Love is a paradox and evokes all our shadows. The claim in this book is that it is just this great undoing, this peculiar darkened illumination, that is part of love's great gift to us."It is a poetic, multidisciplinary work in which the author bravely brings in some of her own collisions and learnings with the lively pair mentioned in its title; reading it reminde