As you know, the degree to which you are divided is the degree to which you are conquered. And, as you know, also

Your subconscious drives are reorganizing your mind to try new strategies til one works, and since they aren’t conscious, they aren’t nearly as constrained by:

• what you’ve adopted as “acceptable”
• your own … belief … that you’re not allowed to fuck around and find out?!?

I think, for this reason, we need to distinguish between, on the one hand, a kind of ‘sub-agent’ which is in fact a ‘shoulder advisor’ — the conscious product of a neat subroutine running in your skull to simulate another agent that you’re familiar with from The Real World — and, on the other hand, a kind of ‘sub-agent’ which is an unconsious drive, or your ‘shadow’, or a product of your ‘shadow’, or a trauma reflex, or a divided part.

Consider this: immediately after the First World War, a defeated Germany was filled with young men, empty and bitter from loss. While many of those angry and defeated men would turn to darker things in time, a few of the returning German soldiers began instead to climb mountains. Here’s the introduction to one account, published in 1938 (in translation; emphasis mine):

There is little in our time which does not bear the indelible mark of the War years; even to understand the idea which led the German climbers into the Himalayas one must carry the mind back to 1914, for the turmoil into which our country had been thrown, and a striving for the sublime which battle had rendered only the more urgent, were even in this instance the motive forces.

When Germany emerged from the War I saw all that had meant my world-and that of hundreds of thousands of my comrades lying in ruins. In November, 1919, in a station building on the Rhine guarded by coloured French soldiers, I was summarily commanded to remove the uniform which I had worn for five years, and in incredibly shabby “civvies” issued by the Government, a skull-cap on my head and carrying my entire possessions in a sack on my back, I made my way home-an experience the bitterness of which is only now slowly evaporating.

We fought in the volunteer corps and were prepared to march at any time for a national revolution, but we were strangers, outcasts in our own country. Public life went its way, but in the spiritual life other influences were at work.

It was during this time of desolation that I began to go into the mountains and found that they had the power to restore that which town environment threatened to steal. They helped to convince us that the forces of good must ultimately assert themselves and triumph. They, proved to us that courage, perseverance and endurance bring their eternal rewards. In those joyless days we needed some means of proving that he who was dauntless and undeterred, he who was prepared to make the greatest sacrifices, and he alone could aspire to the highest attainments. Defiantly resisting the spirit of the time, we had to show again again what these virtues could achieve in spite of the heaviest odds.

Out of this was born the German Himalaya idea, and it was in this spirit that the first German Himalaya team set out in 1929. It was entirely independent and had no other support than that offered by a few individuals and one or two climbing clubs. But the team was determined that, as successful pioneers, or, if it had to be, as a lost company, they would strike a blow for their life ‘s ideal and with it for the true Germany.

It was typical of the spirit of this enterprise that the men, after some short trials which proved how ready they were, how well they were equipped for great feats of endurance, should at once focus their attention on the greatest of the Eastern Himalayan giants-Kangchenjunga. They did not reach the summit, but their attempt has ever since stood forth in the eyes of the world as a feat without parallel in the annals of mountaineering, and it is generally agreed that this first German Himalaya team through its heroic struggle and its magnificent achievement won such regard for German climbers that all subsequent German Himalaya expeditions have benefited from it.

It’s worth asking, I think, how one should best label the ‘motive forces’ for such young men. It’s clear enough that they’re describing something that is simultaneously a spiritual project, a nationalist project, and a response to trauma.

Of a later time,

Reinhold Messner, one of the greatest climbers of all time, and the first to summit Everest without oxygen, explained that when he climbs, his mind tells him to go back, to not venture forth into the dark, cold and desolate winds. Yet he does.

That phrase — “his mind tells him to go back” — is exactly the thing that we need to develop a vocabulary for. Sometimes ‘his mind’ is ‘a simulation of a lover, or a concerned and sensible friend’. Other times, it is a sub-agent.