Michael Jackson and Bright Shadow Projection

my husband and I were half a mile from the UCLA Hospital where he lay lifeless on the ER gurney. (Ironically, we were getting our tickets for the blacxploitation spoof, Black Dynamite, our de rigueur token activity for the Netflix junket to the L.A. Film Festival). But it wasn't till we were sitting in the Ford Amphitheater, nestled in the Hollywood Cliffs, that we learned he had died. The moment is now as indelible as the memory of where I was when John Kennedy died in 1963, when the Shuttle exploded, when the Twin Towers were struck in 2001.

Since Thursday, the City's Angels and all its pundits have been laying flowers, holding candlelight vigils, crying, hawking T shirts, and pundificating. The L.A. Times in particular, reduced by online news and social networking to, effectively, a broadside, had its music critics and rock journalists on overtime and over-column-inch. Triple lattes were evident in their prose.

Channel surfing CNN x 2, E!, and FOX is an All Michael, All The Time experience.

So how does this all relate to Medicine and Horsemanship? This way: everything I have heard and read refers to Michael Jackson's art, his loneliness, his torment, his stress. It refers to the shock and sadness of his family, friends, and fans. The print and online journalists, in particular, have spun the death to be about Michael and about their connection with him ("yep, back in '03, when Jackson and I were just hanging out at Neverland...") as part memoir, part self-aggrandizement.

What strikes me, is the Bright Shadow projection evident in the memoirs and in the fan reactions. Bright Shadow is an archetype that lives in each person and gets projected outward. The Medicine and Horsemanship Projection monograph [link] says:

"Projection is the act, usually unconscious, of attributing or blaming one’s feelings, traits, circumstances, and attitudes to or on other individuals, racial or ethnic groups, or animals.

The Bright Shadow is the part of us that we project onto celebrities, heroes, role models, pets, and people toward whom we feel immediate affection. Those who are receptacles for our Bright Shadow projections personify the talents, gifts, and strengths that we are afraid to recognize in ourselves."

After John Lennon was murdered, at least two fans killed themselves. Due to the less grizzly circumstances of MJ's death, I do not expect that Bright Shadow projections will reach the level of extreme despair that leads to suicide.

The Projection monograph goes on to say:

"Internalizing Bright Shadow creates the problems so many depressed and drug-addled celebrities have in trying to live up to their impossibly inflated public images. Bright Shadow identification can also, however, allow us to see the good that others see in us."

In Medicine and Horsemanship, we deliberately elicit projections on the horses. Horses allow us to enact our Bright Shadow projections in a healthy, playful way. In the short space of a Medicine and Horsemanship activity, horses don't introject (see monograph) our projections. It is a safe, well-intentioned archetypal theater for all involved.

Let us take Michael Jackson's death as an opportunity to examine our own Bright Shadow forces and find the courage to express these gifts and talents in a way that is joyous and constructive.

If They Say -
Why, Why, Tell Em That Is Human Nature
--Michael Jackson "Human Nature"