The loon (Gavia immer) has the ability to dive to a depth of ninety feet and remain there, to see what lies beneath, and to resurface in a completely different place. The Gavia-patient carries within herself knowledge that she cannot pass on to anyone, and her isolation stems from this knowledge. Healing occurs when, after diving deep and gazing into the unconscious to see what others cannot see, she returns to the surface having learnt that she may let go of what she has seen.
The bird between two realms
Gavia immer, the common loon, is a poor citizen of both kingdoms it inhabits. Its feet are set so far back upon the body—so far back that it can barely walk—that it comes ashore only to nest, and it shuffles there. To become airborne it must run a quarter of a mile across open water, and even then it labours upward. Joanna Daly, who conducted an independent proving of this bird in 2003, wrote to me that one of its main symptoms is difficulty getting off the ground.
Yet it dives past ninety feet and stays. Below the surface it is a predator—swift, exact, entirely at home—and above it, upon land, it is prey. This is a creature that belongs to heaven and to earth and is at home in neither, whose whole competence lies in the water between them. Both patients and the language of provings hold polar opposites, and this bird is the polarity itself, feathered. I did not choose that theme for this issue. The bird arrived carrying it.
There is a word inside the name that took me the better part of two decades to hear. The meaning of immer is etymologically unknown, though the Latin immergo—to immerse—stands beside the Swedish immer and emmer, the grey or blackened ashes of a fire. The dive and the ashes, in one word. What I know now is that the ashes come first. Each patient I have treated with Gavia immer has been living inside a grief that had already burned through. Not a fresh loss, not a bereavement, but the cold residue of one—and very often somebody else's, a generation back. The fire is out—long out, and lit by somebody else—and the person is standing in what it left behind, having been told all her life to rise.
Table 1: Reading the Bird
Bracketed numbers are provers in the 2006 the author's Gavia immer proving. An asterisk marks an entry drawn from cases rather than from the proving.
The Bird
The proving
Patients said
Rubric
Needs a quarter mile of open water to fly
Difficulty getting off the ground
Cannot start. Needs an enormous runway before any change
MIND - UNDERTAKES - many things, perseveres in nothing
Dives past ninety feet and stays
Deep water, diving [4]
To take a deep dive, to see what others can't see
DREAMS - WATER - deep
Silent by day, calls at dusk; wails and yodels
Speech withheld [5]; verses, making
So I remain silent until dusk. Then I sing my song
MIND - VERSES - making
Winters find this bird quiet
Wants to be quiet [6]
Long silences taken for depression. They are wintering
MIND - QUIET; wants to be
Monogamous; takes another mate after a death
Forsaken feeling with isolation [6]
Wants one bond for life, keeps landing at the edge of somebody else's
MIND - FORSAKEN feeling - isolation
Nests at the water's edge, checks it is unwatched
Being watched, watching [5]
I watch. I wait. I hide
MIND - AILMENTS FROM - being observed
Immer: the grey ashes of a burnt-out fire
Grief with nobody dead [8]
It's this grief that something just isn't working properly
MIND - GRIEF
A water bird whose tissues, in proving, dried out
Dryness [13 provers, 12 locations]
GENERALS - DRYNESS*
Dry mouth, dry eyes, dry throat, cracking skin
Gavia immer in the consulting room
A bracketed numeral is the count of provers, out of eighteen who completed, carrying that symptom in the 2006 proving. An asterisk marks what comes from cases rather than from the proving.
Mentals
Inherited grief with a prohibition upon weeping, down the maternal line. Grief rising as anxiety falls. Liberty declined, the door open and she does not go [3]. Silent until dusk, then sings [5], with MIND - VERSES - making. Watching, and the sense of being watched [5]. The third point of somebody else's pair*. Anger arriving late, after the grief has moved [11]. Wants one bond for life and has never had one [6]. Long silences mistaken for depression [6]: they are not depressed, they are submerged, or wintering, and I have repeatedly mistaken the descent for pathology.
Dreams. Lakes, ocean, rising water, floods, swimming, deep water, drowning. Flying, and specifically flying bodily. Being pursued, watched, hiding. Travel from one part of the world to another.
The two that decide it. Grief with no event attached [8]: ask when it began and she cannot say, or names something that happened to somebody else. And a capacity for depth that she reports as a fault [6 isolation, 4 perceiving]: loneliness of perception rather than of circumstance, which is the separator from every raptor, the raptor being impatient rather than lonely. Those two together are the combination that has most often made me consider the prescription.
What not to mistake for failure. Grief rises and anxiety falls together, and both patients were frightened by it. Old symptoms return, mucous membranes and skin first, and should be left alone. The symptom changes function rather than stopping, so a homeopathic practitioner waiting for abolition will change a working prescription. Anger arrives late and announces the next layer. Off the remedy the relapse is specific: sleep first, then mood, then disconnected from something deep inside of me. Intercurrents do not break the arc. And the intervals lengthen as the material thins, which is the arc completing rather than the remedy failing.
Physicals
Dryness of mouth, throat, eyes, skin and stool [13 provers across 12 locations], the broadest finding in the whole proving and one we failed to submit as a general in 2012 (see table 3). A significant skin in all four cases, fungal or circinate upon the feet where it is fungal, migrating right to left and proximal to distal, worse for heat, humidity, sugar and fruit. Grief pain in the chest [1]. Metallic taste [1]. Expectoration yellow, greyish, during sleep [1]. Left-sidedness [8]. Fishy body odour of axillae and genitals. Waking between two and four. Exhaustion worse for sitting, better for motion, which is a Sepia officinalis modality and the strongest argument against the prescription.
Modalities. Worse wet weather [2]. Cold air ameliorates [2]. Heat aggravates [2]. Walking slowly ameliorates [4]. Pains migrating and wandering [3, 3].
