It happens to all of us. We’re minding our own business when someone or something intrudes. And then we have a choice to make, one imposed by circumstances. How do we handle the intrusion? 1) Accept it. 2) Expose it to alter it? 3) Use it as a resource.
 
If you go to Barre, Vermont, you will see a complex of abandoned and working granite quarries mined by the Rock of Ages Corporation.* (You can tour the site, and the people in the gift shop are very friendly) Depending on the quality of rock and the needs of the company, the working quarry can be a big hole hundreds of feet deep. From that quarry the company uses cranes to lift blocks of rock that can weigh more than twenty tons. As long as there will be a market for its rock, Rock of Ages has a somewhat endless supply. The unit of rock they quarry runs about ten miles downward.
 
Where did the granite originate? It, along with other igneous rocks in New England, probably arose from deep within Earth as a partially molten and fully molten mass of mineral matter that cooled and crystallized long ago. It became rock within rocks, specifically, a batholith (a deep rock body). Most of it has lain below the surface originally as a magma that became igneous rock. In the case of the batholith beneath Barre, a relatively light-colored granodiorite formed.
 
The erosion of overlying rocks lessened and even wiped out the distance between the top of the batholith and the surface, in some places exposing the granodiorite as an outcrop. As a tough rock composed of interlocking crystals, Barre’s rock resisted the forces of erosion that wind, water, and ice exert. Its durability is what makes it an appropriate material for monuments, memorial stones, and even statues. 
 
Like the Rock of Ages granodiorite, intrusions into our makeup often crystallize beneath the surface and remain largely unexposed. Attitudes and beliefs, not of our own origination, have forced their way into our being and there crystallized, only to be exposed by the erosive forces of character development and human interactions. The latter cause significant erosion. If you have not said it, you have heard, “Life is wearing me down” or “After all her years of struggle, she’s been worn down.” And once someone is “worn down,” those interior, crystallized attitudes and beliefs are more easily exposed. There’s an underlying crystallized character, those minerals of attitudes and beliefs that have solidified well beneath the surface of everyday life.
 
The surface of everyone’s life is composed of thin layers that are often relatively weaker than the deeply rooted intrusions. For some, like Jung and his followers, those intrusives are crystallized archetypes. And here’s where we can debate their significance. Some might say that we build our lives on those deep intrusives. Everything at the surface overlies the hidden batholiths. At times we quarry for meaning. Others might argue that our personal geology has no analog in intrusive rocks since there’s a simultaneity of both surface accumulations and new intrusions. New intrusions occur contemporaneously with any sedimentation of beliefs and knowledge (true or untrue) that cover the surface of our lives. All the while the erosion of daily life works to destroy surface layers and expose the interior.
 
We live a complex human petrology. The friable and dissolvable composition our makeup is under constant attack at the surface. At depth the composition most resistant to change is largely protected from the erosive onslaught of human interactions, but it is constantly quarried where it lies near the surface.
 
Are the deep intrusives the predicates on which we declare our commonality? Not necessarily. One batholith differs from the next in mineral composition. Just as the pink/red Conway Granite in neighboring New Hampshire stands in contrast to Barre’s grayish rock, so there are probably compositional differences in our underlying intrusives regardless of what Jungians might argue. In granites, color changes as mineral matter grades from plagioclase to orthoclase. Your archetype might vary from mine through a similar gradation of “minerals.”  
 
If our intrusive archetypes, beliefs, and symbols can differ, does our commonality lie in our easily eroded surface layers? If so, then we might easily explain how our commonality can disappear under relentless attacks by those erosive forces called needs, desires, ambitions, self-centeredness, and possibly most importantly by the influences of others.  
 
Magma chambers are still forming, intruding, and crystallizing beneath Earth’s surfaces. They do so while the surface itself undergoes erosion of old and sedimentation of new cover layers. Are our lives an analog of the rock cycle?
 
Are we miners of Self, seeing what the social market needs, using deep resources when we can, and taking on new layers of meaning and character while part of what we have been erodes? Do we notice that whenever we try to dig deeply, we find less uniformity than what we believed we would find, that some of what we find at depth is useless in the economy of the surface? Do we abandon older quarries to start new ones? Finally, do we, like the friendly owners of Rock of Ages, allow visitors to look into the depths of both our abandoned and working quarries?
 
*http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=rock+of+ages+barre+vt+pics&id=B6265DE51548A00291C64B9B65BC38739E6D9741&FORM=IQFRBA

It seems to do what we want it to. It’s a perfect martinet. We say, “Print.” It prints. We say, “Copy”; it copies. We say, “Fax”; it faxes.
 
And then, just when we think we are in complete control of this machine that does our bidding, its tiny screen flashes “Paper jam” or “Low ink.”
 
A printer teaches us the limits of our control. Remember that in your dealings with others. 

You are always under attack. That’s the reality of the biological world. You’re not alone. In fact, probably every organism that ever lived has been under attack of some kind. Viruses. Bacteria, ultraviolet light, and natural background radiation. You are always under attack, and there’s always the danger of a pandemic that starts in one organism and spreads throughout others of like kind.
 
So, does it surprise you that with the advent of social media attacks once limited to neighborhood gossip, then newspapers and magazines, and radio and television, have now jumped onto the Web? You have another wall to erect on top of the walls you have already constructed against viruses, bacteria, wild organisms like spiders, ticks, and mosquitoes, trips down stairs, malicious gossip in the neighborhood, and maybe meteorites.
 
It’s a great planet, and regardless of the risks it imposes, you are probably happy you chose this one for your residence. Venus is out. Too hot and too acidic. Mars is too dry and cold. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Eris all offer their own versions of inhabitability and grave dangers. But Earth? You’re here, aren’t you? That means you have so far had the measures to ward off to varying degrees all attacks on your defenses.
 
The biological and physical attacks you defend against will never cease. And now, round the world, the emotional attacks spread in a pandemic. Unfortunately, there’s not really a cure, not even one in development on some research table. There’s only personal, emotional defense and, if you are concerned about others, a washing-of-hands-during-flu-season-and-not-coughing-in-a-crowded-elevator approach. 
 
You might not be infected or affected. That would be great. But you might see emotional disease spreading through others, and you know it can ruin lives. Why contribute in any way? Here’s a temporary and partial cure for a malicious Webdemic. When you see an attacking organism spreading, just don’t click “Forward” or “Retweet.”  

So what? It’s always the end of the world as we know it. That just means there’s a new one, a new world, one that is of our making. Darn, that song by REM is hard to shake once it enters the brain. “It’s the End of the World (As We Know It),” but remember the ending, “and I feel fine.”
 
Regardless of the motive behind the musicians’ lyrics, their words bear some truth and advice for everyone. The “old world” ends every moment. Look: It just ended, and look at you, still here, still capable of feeling fine. A new world to construct with no obstacles from the old one: Whenever any “old world” collapses, there is the potential to build a new one. And that’s the potential revealed in some archaeological digs.
 
Whether or not Heinrich Schliemann discovered Homer’s actual “Troy” is highly debatable. What he did discover seems to be layers of a settlement, succeeding ruins built one after another. So, also, we find such layering of settlements throughout the world, and that practice seems to go so far back that it is evident in the rock shelter Meadowcroft at Avella, PA, one of the oldest inhabited sites in North America. Layering is what we humans do. As one “world” falls into disuse or disrepair or abandonment, another rises in its place.
 
You might have experienced an “end of the world as you knew it,” but here you are, building a new layer, another world on top of that which you lost. It’s always the “end of the world as we know it.” For you. For me.
 
I can’t answer for you, of course. I just know that I seem to have little choice other than to rebuild daily. I know that laying a new city over an old one or building a new life over an old one isn’t easy for any of us. Yes, “it’s the end of the world as we know it, and (or but) I feel fine.” You? 

You know that even with the help of all the king’s horses and men, Humpty Dumpty remained a broken egg. Eggs on precipices don’t fare well when they fall, even for short distances.
 
You have climbed and sat on many walls of expectation and, no doubt, from your perspective have fallen probably more than a few times. But look at the difference between you and Humpty. You’re patchable. Fixable. You’re a living example of reversing entropy.
 
For a brittle egg once broken there’s no reliving the past, no reordering of parts into an original whole. Like the egg, you can’t relive the past, but unlike any Humpty, you aren’t brittle—unless you want to be. That you have a flexible skin is your advantage. That you have a flexible character is your greatest advantage when you hit the ground.
 
You—like every human—have fallen. At times, you have fallen short of expectations. But expectations are like breakfast appetites: There’s always another one. A new day provides a new egg to eat. As long as you live you will be able to reorder, to patch. Some falls might leave a permanent mark, but no fall leads to an un-mendable break—unless you let it.
 
Regretting one of those “falls” in your life? You're alive because you can bend without breaking. Mend where you bend.    

“Never, with an aching Heart I say it, never did the warlike Spirit burn with so intense a flame throughout the civilized World as at this moment.”* That is not a quotation from the twenty-first century. Those are the words of John Quincy Adams, written to his mother in 1812. Adams was in Russia. In his estimation the whole world was at war. And he was right, of course, because there’s no time in history when the world hasn’t been at war. Adams also told his mother, “Never was the prospect of its [the warlike Spirit] continuing to burn and becoming still fiercer, so terrible as now.”
 
Those who experience war personally are often horrified by its visible effects. Adams knew personally the destruction Napoleon had wrought upon Russia, and as an articulate observer of his world was aware of multiple simultaneous conflicts. Those who experience war personally are often affected by their experience throughout their lives. I think of all those who served heroically in World War II who, now in their eighties and nineties, suffer from depression or unspecific anger without knowing the cause: Horrors tucked away in a youthful brain now subtly emerging in old age.
 
We live in a rather enlightened time with respect to human psychological maladies. One of those is PTSD, a condition unrecognized before the twentieth century. Yes, people around those suffering knew something was wrong. “Shell shock” was one of the terms used after WWI and during WWII. But think of what Adams said. In the early nineteenth century war was rampant. Did not many of those soldiers also suffer PTSD? Go back further through the many wars in Europe to the wars in the Middle East to those in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and those between the peoples of North America long before Columbus. Even beautiful Hawaii knew warfare. Why else were there weapons with which to kill Captain Cook?
 
The “warlike Spirit” is among the most persistent of human entities. Nothing seems to put out the fires of its burning. It is pervasive, so much so that we can see it in everyday crimes against the innocent, such as home invasions. Maybe some form of PTSD is a universal condition with which we all must deal.
 
If you have been in some personal war, your neurons might still hold its ravages. Know that you aren’t the first to suffer and that you won’t be the last. That in itself is not a consolation, but it is an indication that maybe all of us share in human tragedy, tragedy that extends to our beginnings—and probably into our prehumen ancestors. We might not be able to overcome completely the emotional effects of the “warlike Spirit,” but in understanding it, we come closer to knowing what role it has played in our lives and in the lives of others, even those who preceded us.   
 
Recognizing and understanding empowers us, and that applies to traumas we have experienced.
 
*Letter of John Quincy Adams to his mother, dated October 24, 1812. Gutenberg Project http://www.gutenberg.org/files/54545/54545-h/54545-h.htm

In an environment of nastiness, expect little, but do good. Regardless of your charitable efforts, you will always be open to attacks large or small by those who will be driven by motiveless malignity like Herman Melville’s character Claggart or Shakespeare’s Iago. “Motiveless malignity” is Thomas Carlyle’s term for such a character. Iago, if you recall, is the guy who gets Othello to kill his wife Desdemona. In Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Billy is a young and capable man whom Claggart dislikes for some undefined reasons.
 
The consequences of the stories are bad for the good. Desdemona and Billy Budd die. And today, we see our share of Claggarts and Iagos online and in the media. They seem obsessed with destruction, and we can’t always figure out why. They have junior high school bully mentality, a motiveless malignity. And there is nothing the innocent can really do to prevent the onset of their malicious actions.
 
You might argue that there is no such thing as motiveless malignity, that there’s always a cause. Maybe you are correct, but tell that to millions—if not billions—who have suffered because of motives they could not fathom. As the deaths of many well-meaning people from Christ to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrate, good, as we know from history, doesn’t stop Claggarts and Iagos. Every generation has them, and many good people suffer indignities because of them. In today’s language, they are known as “haters,” and they have access to instantaneous worldwide messaging.    
 
Those with motiveless malignity will continue to work their varying degrees of destructive energy for the bad of those they want to hurt or destroy. And when this generation passes, the next generation of Claggarts and Iagos will follow. Of course, all malignity hurts, but no amount of self pity will change the attacker.  So what choices do any of us have with regard to those who would do us harm regardless of our attempts to do good? The only counter that lasts is to continue to do good for others.
 
Recipients of our acts of goodness might be only a small fraction of humans, but if you believe our species is capable of and deserving of dignity, then you will have done your part to foster it. We seem to know that dignity best that is tested dignity. 
 
Those out to harm you or someone else will most likely not consider the full consequences of their actions. In that regard they are pitiful. They have devoted their lives in either the short or long run to destruction for unknowable deep-seated reasons. What will we put on their tombstones—surely each, like 100 billion humans before them, will have one—that characterizes their accomplishments? Should we write, “Here lies the modern Iago” or “Beneath lies the Claggart of his (or her) times”?  
 
Your tombstone will say, “Dignity survives because of _____ [your name here].”  

The Latin verb discurrere means “to run about.” We’ve inherited discursive from it. Wonder whether or not the Romans “ran about” as much as we do? Hey, they were people, weren’t they? I know what you are thinking: “But those were simpler times, you know, times of going to the open market, buying vegetables or slaves taken from captives of a foreign war, going to the Colosseum (Coliseum) to see people kill and get killed, and maybe visiting a soothsayer at a temple to discover a personal future. Yes, much simpler times.”
 
“Aren’t you forgetting all those wars, both civil and international? And what about all those assassinations? Think Julius. And wars. Think coups and revolutions. Think Hannibal and Spartacus. And the proscriptions! Oh! The proscriptions: People in power eliminating their ‘enemies’ by proscribing their property or lives. And then Nero. And Caligula. Fires and murders. And then the debates in the Forum. Anyway, to return to discurrere, have you noticed that our own conversation is discursive? Both of us seem to wander through various thoughts, both of us incapable of focusing for very long.”
 
It isn’t just a sign of our times that we can’t stay on topic. It’s a human problem. We want to say whatever pops into our heads, where those 100 billion neurons fighting for some recognition of what they have to offer (the learning of a lifetime) keep us from staying on point.
 
Is it just my experience, or am I wrong to suggest that most people wander—even when they wonder—from topic to topic as they argue? Whenever I see a political argument on television, I invariably think I’m in for a wild ride from neuronal place to neuronal place, corkscrews and loops, especially the latter. Just when someone is able to ask a very specific question, the answer always seems to include some peripheral or distal topics or to swing around, looping loops. I’ve noticed the same in arguments I’ve heard elsewhere. We are discursive by nature, I think. “Running about” characterizes not only our lifestyles but also our method of thinking. Is there anything that has the potential to keep us in our mental places, on topic and emphatically on point? Anything to keep us in these discursive times from running about so much? Maybe.   
 
Writers have employed allegories. Such tropes provide representations of otherwise complex thoughts and help tell stories without rambling. The allegorical character or object is an unwavering representation from beginning to end. The technique might seem primitive or too didactic to the discursive minds of today, but by its use the story is told. We need a little allegory in our times. 

While we sleep, astronomers explore, trying to understand what’s “out there.” They tell us that Dark Matter and Dark Energy dominate the universe and that the stuff we see is only a small percentage of the universe. We do not know the level of pervasiveness of both “Darks,” but we suspect they affect all there is. We know both only by the effect they seem to have on the visible universe.
 
The microcosms called people mirror in their makeup the composition of the Cosmos. Understanding the composition of microcosms requires wakefulness and exploration because each of us has a makeup that is ultimately mysterious, undetectable, and pervasive. Like astronomers, we keep searching among effects in visible behavior and consciousness.    

It isn’t easy being you. I know I couldn’t do it, and I don’t think anyone else could. When I think of all that went into and goes into your makeup, I marvel that you haven’t had a meltdown leading to an explosive ending. How does all that incongruity stay together?
 
Geologists of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century had a long-standing model of how volcanic island arcs, such as the Aleutians, got their lava. The standard explanation was that subduction (“led under”) was the ultimate cause. As an ocean plate like the Pacific’s collides with more buoyant rock of a continent or equally dense rock of another ocean floor, it dives into the mantle, or subducts. Before ocean crust sinks, however, it accumulates vast quantities of water-laden sediment composed of the hard parts of organisms and rock debris, including dust blown off continents. Prior to a recent discovery, subduction was thought to release fluids and partially melted rock that rise, eventually mix, and alter the melting point of overlying rock. The mix becomes a magma that breaks out at the surface as lava, forming volcanoes. Anyway, that’s the old model.
 
In the new model, a mélange that is a mixture of metamorphosed (“changed by heat”) sediment lies atop the slab of rock before it undergoes mixing in the mantle as the ocean plate subducts. That “premixed” magma eventually makes its way to the surface.*
 
Lavas at the surface reflect the composition of the mélange. Geologists can trace the kind of lava to the mélange that produces it by examining isotopes in the resultant lava. Wherever the melt is “andesitic” and “rhyolitic” the eruptions can be quite Mt.-St.-Helens-or-Vesuvius-like: Very violent. Those majestic volcanoes of the Cascades, the Aleutians, and the rest of the Ring of Fire’s volcanoes are products of this process.
 
Back to you being you and no one else being you. Just as isotopic fingerprints of a mélange can be found in volcanic rocks and just as the composition of lavas reflects their source, so, too, you have traces of those incongruities in your makeup, the isotopes of inculcations both remembered and forgotten. They aren’t always easy to detect, but they are there, nonetheless. Everyone—and that includes you—has a mélange in his or her background.  
 
The melting, rising, and reappearance of a mélange is an ongoing process. We don’t usually keep our makeup deeply hidden until an eventual release and later mixing. We are already mixed before we arrive at the surface. Our personal volcanoes are predetermined by the mélange. There are hints in our past of what will rise and form. But like an ocean floor mélange hidden beneath water, our personal mélanges are partly hidden from us. A mélange is a mélange because of the diversity of sediments it contains. A mélange has an incongruous composition. You, too.
 
The difference between an ocean floor mélange and your personal mélange is that you can filter what reaches the surface. And again, just as geologists study isotopes to determine the nature of the original mélange, so you can look at the hints of your personal lavas. You are in control of the surface features that form regardless of the isotopic composition of the underlying magma in your life. You can sort through your personal incongruities, but I can’t. That’s one of the reasons that you—and no one else—can be you.
 
*Sune Nielsen of the Woods Hole Oceanograhic Institute
 https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/137612.php