Re-Sink the Titanic

Glen Slater Wrote

“Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him.”

 At the bottom of the sea, somewhere between the Old World and the New, a giant sleeps. It is a final, deathly. sleep, though not a peaceful one; the demise was too unexpected, the shock was too great, the consequences too much to integrate. Contrasting the image of her motionless bulk, the dreaming remains restless.

The Titanic, yet to find her place in the underworld, exists between worlds, waiting upon some gesture, remembrance, or ritual. The broken waters of a calm, clear night early 19th century still stir the imagination and wait upon soulful attendance. Between fact and fiction, history and myth, this once celebrated Titaness lingers. Our response to her cry has been fervent, but not very insightful.

We have searched for her broken body, pondered the circumstances of her demise, retold her story and that of those who anchored her fate. More recently we have mapped out her murky location, photographed her through a deep blue shroud, and irreverently removed her belongings. Still, Titanic sleeps uneasily, and we are a part of her restless dreaming.

The Titanic disaster of April 15, 1912 is singular among modern catastrophes for its hold on the collective psyche. As the largest steamship of her time, longer, taller, heavier than anything else afloat, a technological marvel without precedent, Titanic ferried the visions of a modern industrial age. As an icon of technological disaster, painfully checking the flight of this modern bearing, we turn to her story for historical perspective.

And as a messenger to a culture continuing to ignore nature's warnings, we still live within Titanic's wake. More than one hundred years after the event, books, documentaries, feature films, and even a Broadway musical bear witness to this unfinished dream. When the technology arrived, fascination with the disaster turned into literally dredging.

The exploration and museum plan made way for corporate-sponsored treasure hunts and salvage expeditions. Recently such exploits provided a spectacle for cruise ships which circled like sharks awaiting the arrival of each disemboweled section. But as superficial exploits increase and fascination turns to titillation, the disaster's unplumbed poignancy is only underscored.

Although the ship herself has plunged into the deep, we have not yet made the accompanying descent. Submarines make it down but our reflections on the tragedy do not. We have not soulfully remembered Titanic's broken body. The autopsy has not yet progressed to a funereal rite.

The dream has not been worked. Our cultural attachment to the disaster resembles an obsession with an open wound and has all the characteristics of an unrecognized cultural complex. We are compelled to get to the bottom of the literal reality, immersing ourselves in facts and theories; we want: to see, touch, unravel, control. But, at its core, we cannot loosen the intensity of the initial devastation.

Caught in a spell, chased by images, we are unable to assimilate the event's impact. With each revisit little seems to change. The story is the same one, we know it backwards, and yet it continues to hold something. The pull does not subside.

The event penetrates our vitals, but that which is vital consistently escapes. So, we keep searching for the one thing we have overlooked all along-the memory that has not surfaced, the missing piece of evidence, the things That might have gone differently. The combination of this obsessive-compulsive attachment and the failure to honor Titanic in her dying suggests that within our dreaming there is also haunting.

Here spectacle hides specter. Caught on the wrong level, our shallow remembering lays little to rest. The task this dreaming and haunting present is one of finding ears to listen and eyes to see; we need a fitting mode of perception. This is psyche's balm. When a traumatic experience rocks the soul, only the soul's forms and languages will be enough to digest the disturbance.

When caught in a dream, we must follow the ways of the dream; when haunted, we must turn to the underworld. Technological analysis, recounting of facts, and photographing evidence will not do. A psychological salvage must be undertaken. This salvage attempt will explore our obsession with history's most substantial maritime disaster through mythic forms.

The locating submerged fragments by following currents of, re configuring the story from a soul perspective. Such an attempt will anchor itself to those points where the Titanic corresponds to modern crises and pathologist. Making this dive into the depths, attending to this level of complexity, would, you believe, mitigate the compulsion to drag concrete fragments of twisted wreckage to the surface.

Witnessing the ship as she lies, locating her story within that of the modern era, its unconscious complexes and their archetypal roots, would forge an understanding that Titanic has a resting place. It is we who have not yet completed this voyage.

The Grip of a Titan

The gigantic ship and her story suggest a powerful but largely unrecognized my theme at work in the culture. When an eleven-ton section of Titanic's hull was nearing the surface, it broke loose and returned to the ocean floor. Here psyche exercises her own intentional: Opposing the great twentieth-century exploit of dragging everything into bright light, this event issues the decree that some things belong in the deep dark.

At the very least it suggests an invitation for deepening and reflection a need to take pause before action. But even the poesis of this moment and its invitation for introspection is avoided. Both the mechanical analysis of what went wrong and the counter-pole declaration that "the wreck is cursed" miss the boat.

Both the scientific-technological attitude and the New Age seductions of curse and karma prevent the psychological salvage. Although the fantasy of a curse may surely be taken as a sign of sacrilegious arrogance. Both the rational explanation and the metaphysical speculation remain unconsciously bound to the my theme-caught in the headlock of an unnamed archetypal presence.

A major site of insight recovery stares us in the face. The archetypal character of the tragic event is already there in the ship's name. As architects of hubris unmitigated pride and sacrilege the Titans, a race of giants, fought with and were defeated by the Olympian then banished to the underworld. The root meaning of "hubris" suggests a "running riot" over other cosmic principles.

The term "Titanic" refers originally to the temper of the war between the Titans and the Olympians. The Olympians, of course, portray the dominating forces of the cosmos, and personify the very organs of psychological life. Ever poised to displace this organic, the Titans sponsor the gigantism of the psyche-inflation, grandiosity, unchecked haste.

The myth recommends that identification with the Titanic tendency results in a heady power trip followed by certain descent. Olympus will not tolerate Titanism; Titans belong in the underworld. It is ironic that Titanic's sister ship was named the Olympic, and, despite an almost identical build, sailed steadily past her sibling's fate without infamy. When these ships were named, someone failed to take their mythology seriously.

The place of the Titan is in Tartaros, a dark prison beneath the sea, as far below the earth's surface as the sky is above. What's in a name? Indeed. These reflections on naming align with the events and atmosphere surrounding the giant ship herself. Hubris lived not only in title but in the ship's birth into the world and the attitudes which accompanied her maiden voyage.

It is well known that Titanic was declared "unsinkable" by elements of the press before she sailed, a claim desperately returned to by the White Star Line in New York once the reports of her distress were known. The claim was due to a special design dividing the bowels of the ship onto several watertight compartments. Yet, when the fateful moment arrived, this innovation was no obstacle for the perfectly positioned jaws of Poseidon, eager to correct the slight of an irreverent age.

The iceberg tore into the hull and soon the invading sea flowed over the top of the bulkhead dividers. A side-glance from the deep's protrusions and it was all but over. Several facts are spectacular in their fidelity to the mythopoesis of the tragedy. The Titanic's radio room received iceberg warnings several times from other ships. Most were ignored or were not communicated to the bridge.

On the bridge warnings were not observed. Due caution was never detected. True to her name, the Titanic steamed on at a speed, fueled by an unofficial attempt on the Atlantic crossing record. When she set out on her maiden voyage, her stopping capacity and turning ability had never been fully tested during sea-trials. The ship was unwieldy in its bulk and displacement dynamics.

She narrowly avoided collision leaving herb or when a smaller ship was sucked into her path. The Titanic carried lifeboats for roughly one-third of the passengers. Because there was a tendency to think of the ship herself as a life boat. Topping off this archetypal congruence a recent discovery suggests that Titanic's hull was constructed of extremely brittle, highly sulfurous steel.

This metallurgical matter provides an apt metaphor for the rigid mentality of the whole exercise. Let the alchemists muse upon the corrupting attributes of excess sulfur. The fate conspired around this combination of irresponsibility, virginal temptation, arrogance, and sheer poetic consistency. The sea was visited by an eerie calm that night so that the lookout did not have the foamy meeting of sea and iceberg to warn him.

There was no moonlight to offset the dark of the evening. And had the ship not attempted to maneuver at the last moment, the iceberg would not have punctured as many compartments; most likely she would not have sunk. When the stern rose high enough into the night, the ship's innards tore loose and roared towards the bow. Her back broke when she settled.

Survivors of Titanic’s

As if the Titaness had always known her fate, the ship was taken by the sea with barely a ripple. A few survivors simply stepped off her deck as she headed down. When the screams ceased, the lifeboats drifted into a deathly silence. The consistency of these themes is crystallized in a 1996 obituary of a Titanic passenger, Miss Eva Hart.

The obituary notes that seven of the eight passengers rescued at that time were then too young to remember the event. The remaining survivor no longer remembers". Thus, Miss Hart was the "last link of living memory" to the disaster. The article recognizes that no other shipwreck "claimed such a chilling grip on the popular imagination," and that this was "mainly because of a well-publicized exercise in hubris."

Nevertheless, it is the recounted words and actions of Miss Hart's mother that are most striking. The claim that the ship was unsinkable caused Miss Hart's 'mother such apprehension that even as they walked up the gangplank, her daughter later recalled, she renewed her warning that calling a ship unsinkable was "flying in the face of God." She was so convinced of impending doom, her daughter later maintained, that she slept during the day and stayed awake in her cabin at night fully dressed.

Eva Hart and her mother survived. Eva's father went down with the ship. This "last living memory" asks to be integrated into our understanding of the catastrophe. Eva Hart's mother perceived an overstepping of cosmic and psychological boundaries; she knew, intuitively, that something had been pushed beyond its limit. She expected a backlash. Such a sensibility, which keeps one eye on the invisible constants of life, is missing from our age.

The Titanic disaster carried within it the failed recognition of such invisible. Tragedy struck hard because, in identifying with Titanism, backs were turned on the Gods, the Furies, end the Fates. The Titanic may have been less prone to disaster were the atmosphere of hubris confined to the ship itself. We do, after all, get away with a great deal of "flying in the face of God." However, Titanic's hubris reached beyond itself and played too neatly into the hands of a cultural zeitgeist.

The doomed ship exemplified too perfectly the overly focused technological faith of a complete age. She carried many wealthy exemplars of a cultural revolution based on the philosophies of the Enlightenment, and, in the sometimes-impersonal world of archetypal justice, these high-flying industrial elite were prime candidates for corrective descent.

At that time, with declarations abounding of science being on the brink of unraveling all mysteries, nothing seemed to stand in the way of progress. No previous age had dispensed so efficiently with ties of religion and nature. But as rationalism was evicting soul',; inhabitants, one can hear the voices of dismissed gods inciting Poseidon's act of revenge. Since that time, we have lost a great deal of the mechanical uncertainty with which the universe was then regarded. Yet we are not so far from the underlying confidence and faith in our own devices. 

In looking back upon these events, we realize that a significant hubris is still afloat in the culture. When perceived psychologically, the Titanic confronts our present-day hubris and challenges the dominant Western cultural ethos of "where there's a will there's a way." Recognition of this theme is unnerving. It entails seeing through our fascination with disaster into our state of archetypal possession-our identification with the ways of the Titan. It involves an acknowledgment of our participation in a dream, a story with its own autonomous presence. 

It fosters a sense of this archetypal movement, placing us within the same tragedy now, today, knowing the way in which we are still aboard a sinking ship. This recognition uncertain that to forget these things is to sail blindly into a stream of catastrophes, unconsciously provoking recreations of the Titanic tragedy. A psychological perception of Titanic's murmuring compels a recognition of our Titan roots, an awareness of where our souls are stirred by the unfinished business and attitudes of our immediate ancestors. 

We thereby return our Titanic dreaming to the dream of the Titan. Then the grip of the giant is felt as an active myth-a myth that cradles our desire to plow across the surface of the world and simultaneously underscores the call of the depths below. Between Abandon and Binding: The Trouble with approaching the psychological impact of the Titanic via the Titan myth leads us to a more specific mythic narrative. Seeing into the grip of the Titanic story and its archetypal complexity suggests the palpable presence of Prometheus; the Titanic carried the imprint of this most celebrated Titan more than any other. 

Prometheus brings the gifts of ingenuity and invention, steals fire from Zeus, is bound to Caucasus and has his liver eaten by day and restored at night, cheats in sacrificial ritual, and is the divine patron of the human reach beyond the gods. This champion of human freedom and creativity deserves to be celebrated for freeing us from a kind of unconscious slavery to the gods. Yet this freedom comes at a cost. 

This Titan's foundation role in humanity's cosmic predicament is witnessed by Karl Kerenyi's subtitle to his work on Prometheus-"archetypal image of human existence." Bearing a name that means "forethought," Prometheus is present in any innovative design which furthers human intentions. He is thus enmeshed in the dominant cultural ethos of the 19th and 20th centuries-expanding consciousness, growing industry, technological breakthrough. Prometheus provides the impetus for scientific discovery and application in the modern world and is most present whenever these innovations begin to exhibit a godlike power. 

And so this particular Titan has also gotten us into some big trouble. Embracing this Titan we are called to remember the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modem Prometheus and to locate the monster lurking in the shadow of the Enlightenment's brightness.The problem with our embrace of Promethean gifts and the freedoms of the enlightened age is that we split off the darker portion of this mythic narrative, namely the tortuous results of un-tethered innovation. 

We forget that Promethean abandon can lead to an incarnation of gigantism, which then calls forth a corresponding binding-a chaining to the laws of Zeus. Through this familial association, the unruly behavior of Prometheus' relatives endures and enters the world cloaked in the garb of progress. Blinded by the wonder of his creative gifts, this residue of Titanic ancestry easily escapes our perception. But it is losing sight of the Titan in Prometheus that we become most prone to hubristic excess and its results. 

Akin to the sinking of the unsinkable and the tragic demise of celebrated social figures, the myth of Prometheus is one of enantiodromia, of reversal, the assertion of opposites the revenge of gods whom we fail to recognize when we become enchanted with our own craftiness and power. Here we find out just how much we are tethered to an archetypal psyche. What sailed with Titanic on her maiden voyage were the Promethean dreams of a culture reveling in a perceived emancipation from "superstition" and in an unprecedented industrial reduction of nature to resource. 

It was through this mythic identification with one side of the Promethean narrative that a ticket on the Titanic became an invitation for catastrophic reversal. Today we are still poised on the edge of Promethean enantiodromia. And as we approach the 21st century, glued to the information superhighway, technology at our fingertips, our consciousness still identifies with this Promethean forward thinking while remaining largely unconscious of its Titanic background. 

There is a part of our psyche cruising unawares through dangerous waters, with unchecked speed and techno-faith, focused on the distant horizon of the New World, its back to the Old World. We are still on the deck of the Titanic. And under the belly of the ship, Poseidon and Tartaros await. Irreverent of the depths below with its gods and ancestors, this Titanic tendency accompanies us into post modernity. 

However, the relationship unravels when Prometheus cheats in a sacrificial ritual designed to stabilize god-human relations. In this act of cheating, his Titan ancestry shows through. Zeus consequently withholds the gift of fire, which Prometheus promptly steals. The guardian of human ingenuity is punished for his theft, eternally (or nearly so) bound to a cliff-face where an eagle from Zeus picks daily at his liver. The slighted sacrifice sets these events in motion. 

This narrative is imbued with insights into our Promethean heritage. Here human-divine tensions coil around a specific Zeus tolerates human innovation and power by only a marginal degree. At the core of this tension, defining turns and outcomes~ lies the ritual sacrifice. Sacrifice-making sacred, surrendering to the presence of a god, humbling oneself to the scheme of things-plays a pivotal role in a myth by determining the mood of archetypal forms which rise to meet the protagonist.

It was the distance from god(s) which provoked the disaster, and the movement nearer to the gods in this final, tragic, sacrificial scene. Embracing this very movement would not only be in accord with the dying perspective of the Titanic's passengers, it would also move our fixation on the process of autopsy to the remembrance of a funereal rite. "Nearer my God to Thee" is the soul's response to an event which demonstrated the separation of human endeavor and archetypal integrity. The Titanic's pieces need to be collected in the soul, not in the museum.