SubscribeMarch 21st, 2012
falling inside a project
The last few days I’ve been writing a poem about alchemy. In Latin. In English. Using made up tenses in Latin. Using very (very) unusual sentence structure in English.
It’s been a blast.
I’m still not done with the last stanza. Life intervened today to distract my attention from the project, but for those days I sat here in my room with Latin dictionaries and grammars, books on alchemical equipment, texts on chemical terminology, looked up names of flower cultivars, watched vids about chemical signalling (in particular adrenaline and kinase receptors), read about the Kingdom/Domain changes in biological nomenclature over the last few decades and wove it all together into a reverse-order alchemical bit of magic.
Oh so much fun. So arcane. It felt like I was crafting a magic spell.
No idea if it will be readable by anyone but me, but still, I loved doing it.
Then I heard this wonderful bit of wisdom tonight about writing what you want to, and I thought of the alchemy poem. Imagine! A whole book of arcane, but secular “magic!” Yikes. I’d disappear into convoluted syntax and unusual lists of words. I’d never be heard from again.
February 12th, 2012
Tony Tost, poetry
I’m reading Tony Tost‘s first published book of poetry (and winner of the Walt Whitman Award) invisible bride.
From Story South here is a brief selection from that work.
It’s like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I had a pet chicken. Echo. He was my favorite chicken. Had him when I was a child (first chicken best chicken). Tonight the night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. Tonight the night is a black mouth. They killed my favorite chicken. Tonight the night is a black month or a red month. It’s December. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it’s the way out.
There’s more over at the site.
The whole book forms a kind of narrative and frankly that’s what interests me about it. The opening sequence, as much as I recognize the masterful handling of image and feeling, also irritates me because of its conceptual foundations. (I’m a bit touchy about idea, I think).
It starts like this:
The Man's Vision begins with the child's Sob.
Who shall say what one's Vision has to offer another? Yet, in many cases, Vision's pat h is presented with such singular exactness of fidelity that we are perfectly safe in submitting the minds of even the youngest children to its influence: the gatehouse will hold firm and keep out the invaders, and the fires shall illuminate the archers manning the battlements. Fire is indeed a sweet and proper vision for children; it is most instruc- tive and fascinating, and forms a realistic preparation for the afterlife, with a more serene and thoughtful appreciation of its meaning. We might fan our flames by a thousand and one simple observations; for instance, that the same sun which ripens by beans illumines an inner ward with is a nightmare of smoke and flames and the screams of horses and men.
And now post “afterlife” I have to work at it. It has stopped being emotionally intelligible to me.
As it happens I was reading about “new materialism” today. Partly that’s because I am seeking an ordering principle for a developing poetry manuscript. Tost’s work reminds me of William Blake, or some cross between an Alchemical Mystic and Shaman. There is undeniable power there yet I would rather be allowed to find my “path” on the actual earth, the one we really inhabit.
Where are the narratives based on the relationships between levels of chemical and biological functioning systems? Where are those stories? Those hero ones, the Visions, and Archetypes, they are all based on the relationship between the real and the unreal and so cannot guide us out of the miasma we have made of our species and environment. For that we need an actual road, one we can actually walk.
Bah.
August 29th, 2011
Jung, matter and the problem with worship
Plate 64, opening the egg (rebirth of Izdubar)
(This post is the result of a question in the comment section of this post. Thanks for the question Cathy.)
On first sight what caught my eye was the worshipful pose, and then the egg – and I laughed. Then grimaced.
I relate to the egg as “the cosmic egg” and my imagery for that comes primarily from the Thoth tarot. I don’t subscribe to Crowley’s meanings but the basic iconography is very Western and deeply embedded in our collective psyches. So I relate to Jung’s egg as the great cosmic egg out of which reality pecks its way into the mundane.
Now I am a materialist, in the sense that I suppose matter to be what the world is made of. (The subatomic world is something else, and what ever its constitution, it comes together to create the material universe.) However, I do not consider matter to be dull, passive, inert and this erroneous conception underlies every Western magical/imaginative/philosophical tradition as far as I know. Science tells us that passive-matter is simply not so. Thinking such is a bit like assuming the womb is a passive place made solely to receive the active male seed.
Herein lies my problem with Jung and his re-born god Izdubar. If you read the story that goes with the picture, Jung (his imaginary self) has met up with Izdubar on the road and has inadvertently poisoned the god. This has lamed Izdubar and caused him to shatter his great axe. The poison that lames? Science.
Such a dreadful misunderstanding of the world as-it-is. I’m a poet, I get how important imagination is, how vital our stories and our capacity to read our narratives out into the world. And really Jung’s saving of Izdubar by convincing him that he is a fantasy is brilliant, but at the cost of Jung’s relationship to the corporeal? No.
The deal is that reason and feeling are irrevocably together. Imagination works because of the mind that we call “science.” And science works because of imagination. Try running a car on half an axle, that’s the result of valuing one over the other.
The picture, that worshipful pose? It’s the Jung-imaginary with his face pressed to the ground in awe of the mightiness of the newly healed god, but it is also the beginning of Jung’s descent into hell. He has used up all his creativity, his “higher” self in the healing of Izdubar and all that is left is…
Does it give you a clue that Jung has had to become a mother to give birth to a god?
What remains of human nature when the God has become mature and has seized all power? Everything incompetent, everything powerless, everything eternally vulgar, everything adverse and unfavorable, everything reluctant, diminishing, exterminating, everything absurd, everything that the unfathomable night of matter encloses in itself, that is the afterbirth of the God and his hellish and dreadfully deformed brother.
There you go. And hence my problem with worship. This is the kind of thinking it brings; it is an example of valuing imagination over and above science. Matter is nothing, nothing, nothing like what Jung postulates and motherhood is not a descent into hell.
In my world this Agni, this fire born of the cosmic egg has a different meaning since for me matter is creative, self-actualizing and motherhood is not about giving all one’s “juices” to the newly born.
I can only relate to the dude’s position as it would be for me – the sensitive skin of my cheek against the wool, the smell of years of history, the lanolin of a sheep’s life, the delicate creamy shell of the spent egg. I would have me eye up to the world and not hide my face.
And the idea of giving birth? And the afterbirth? One dies once the new generation is old enough to take over, at least that’s the way it normally goes. So yes becoming a parent is a step on the road to death, but then so is birth, eating, shitting, bathing. It’s hard work being a parent, but one can see the adult child as one’s replacement, or as an extension of one’s world. Most mothers I know tend toward the second option.
If this second option is what one chooses, then all that energy given to the new “god” does not divest Jung of his Agni, his life energy, it expands him to the god’s horizon. Such a creative act doesn’t leave behind the dross, it makes of the world something richer, larger, more complex. Like Na and Cl coming together, no dross, but born is the capacity for saltiness; a more complex world, not one with a irredeemable pile of garbage and a shiny new toy.
And what of the moment after this image was recorded? Where Jung goes to hell, I watch the fire-bird form, the phoenix feathers coalesce and start beating the air inside the room. I’d run to the doors and spread them wide and watch as the bird found current and lift into the blue. She’d speak to me as she rose, and from that I would create a poem. And later, when she comes back to visit, I get to hear about the things she’s seen and done, and she gets to hear of this earth, this one where I continue to thrive and grow.
Jung speaks of re-fashioning the gods. He says we have killed them but cannot be fully human without them. I agree only if we can say that the gods are those narrative aspects of our species that reach out through metaphor to shape the world in which we take our lives. In that sense we cannot kill the gods, because we will always reach out and find ourselves in the world. It is really only the death of worship that Jung fears, I think; the death of those forms of god that come with axes, require worship, and do not give back, nor value us equally as we value them.
That prostrate pose is so old, and so deeply wrong for us.
There is a place for awe of course. No artist could really think otherwise, but that is not worship. One can be in awe of Agni without falling on one’s face. One need not turn away from our tool-makers mind, our capacity for science. It does not poison us. What hurts is our refusal to let go of an old story, one that makes of the creative source of our universe a dark material evil.
One last thing about “children”: yes they can kill. We can create those things that will end us. Take the USSR’s “Tsar” bomb exploded during the cold war. Take Nobel’s invention of dynamite. All the death and pain that caused. Sometimes we have children over which we have no control and yes Agni can kill us once released. It is the nature of fire to warm and burn. So? We know this. Look at all the stories and all the religious and cultural investment we put into rules like honour thy mother and father. Probably wiser to say, honour thy children for they will become your farthest horizon. Or even better, honour material truth in all things, for it will be the home that protects and the fire that warms both parent and child.
The balanced mind, the one in which science and imagination are equally valued will be the tool by which one can come to heal when the “child” breaks the body or the known world and pushes us to an even more distant horizon. And this will come. Better to face it with both feet, both axle’s intact.
July 12th, 2011
magic, tradition and the golden age myth
I picked up a copy of Arthur Verluis’ The Philosophy of Magic sometime ago but apart from the first few pages, haven’t put any real effort into reading it until last night. I’m a person that reads in fits and starts and some books just have to wait until my mood is right. I keep a stock of funny books for when I need a mood lift, for example.
Not that Versluis is a comic, although he can be comical. I’ve written about Versluis before and you may be wondering why I keep reading his stuff since I sometimes appear to have a “hate-on” for him, at least according to an email I received from a Tailfeather reader. The thing is I adore magic, the way magical belief systems work, the power of magical narrative in human life, and especially, the way magical systems are transforming themselves in the contemporary West. And yes, I am an atheist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the power that the concept of magic has on the human mind. And remember, like all art forms, this power is not a bad thing. It’s only when narrative is confused with empirical reality that it gets hairy.
So I keep reading Versluis (and others like him) because he is a magician, and one that clearly that has some deep knowledge of his chosen path. Reading him is instructive with respect to how such belief systems work; how true believers function conceptually to enable magical systems in their life and world.
Having said that, the other reason I read Versluis is because he is also an academic. That I find particularly engaging because I have always associated academia with intentional rationality and Versluis just blows that fucking right out of the water. I mean how cool is that to get blown away and reminded that all is not what you expect. At least for me this disturbance pushes me to attempt understanding, to read, to think, to reason.
The thing is though, that this book is actually a little scary. Or at least, reading it because I couldn’t sleep last night, at 2 AM and 3 and 4, the book took on a kind of horror, like the thought of one of the current batch of mad-dog Republicans becoming the US president and devastating the sanctuary of Western democracy.
Why so scary? It’s not the overall stated purpose of the book. He just wants to say that magic (alchemy, et al.) can only really be understood and practiced properly from within the tradition that gave it birth. OK. His idea is that magic, ripped from the larger tradition (belief system) is like a sick person dealing with symptoms and not the root cause of the illness. That’s just going to cause more problems. Health – in this case spiritual – comes from walking a hermetic path and using magic when appropriate to that path. The assumption, of course, is that walking a hermetic path is synonymous with working for spiritual development and with that bringing on emotional and behavioural adulthood. Of course the biographies of such seekers in history tends to undermine the veracity of such assumptions, but that is something Versluis doesn’t seem to address. (At least in my readings so far. If you have a reference or two that contradicts this, I would absolutely love to follow it up.)
Where it starts to get scary is what he considers to the true path, which, of course, is hermeticism for those of us in the West. What is scary is the disdain, the anger and fear, and the apparently concomitant severe lack of factual historical knowledge or analysis that underlies such a belief in the existence of “true”.
Although it is difficult for us – bound as we are to the dualistic, Cartesian view of existence as consisting in the purely physical and in external series of coincidence – to rightly understand the more organic and unified vision of the traditional cultures, reflected in the West by the Hermetic tradition, it is precisely this which is most necessary, for it is only within such a tradition that magic and alchemy arose, and through which they can be understood.
(As if, even were it true, that a “more organic” understanding of our ancestors resulted in better behaviour with respect to the earth, its indigenous peoples, or non-human animals. I mean what does he think this “organic” understanding really achieved in the functional lives of the society?)
He’s just as mad at modern manifestations of magical religion as he is at the church and science. He names, for example, neo-shamanism. Versluis feels that without the “protective shell” of hermetic tradition, Westerners who practice magical technologies like shamanic drumming and alchemy are in danger. What danger?
For this reason, to the extent that magic and alchemy exist outside a tradition they are – as is the traditional orthodoxy – increasingly subject to malevolent and infernal influences, manifested in greed in the former case and hatred in the latter.
In other words, the fact that we have left behind the traditional belief system of Hermeticism has caused us to be at risk for what the Christians would call the devil and his lesser demons.
I shit you not.
…because the modern era has consisted in a ‘hardening’ against the Divine protection which traditional cultures afforded those within their sphere – in the ‘unchaining’ of the inferior or infernal forces against which modern man has virtually no higher protection, having cut himself off from the traditional.
Dude.
Has he read any actual history? Any idea of what women (or any other power-minority) suffered under those “traditional” cultures? The devastation done to the earth because of the assumptions of such belief systems. The idea of “purity” for example. The horrendous and morally bankrupt idea that error equals “deformity”. Has he read anything at all about the position of the disabled in our history? Is he really suggesting that “infernal” dangers are something worse than what was done exactly because of those traditions? Does he not understand that those traditional horrific acts were in fact the infernal and malevolent forces he perceives as endangering us today?
This text is a manifestation of a golden-age longing, apparently completely divorced from any real understanding of how those traditions functioned in the real economic, political and ethnic worlds.
I understand why neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and Pythagorian systems hold on to the spiritual movements today. They provide a sense of rootedness, a belief system that is deeply Western and therefore feels like home. The problem is that they are just wrong. Empirically wrong. It’s like holding on to the ideology of the celestial spheres because you just know you are the center of the universe and that damn Copernicus is placing you in infernal danger.
I am not sure I can be said to worship anything, but if I were to have to name something it would be the earth. It is, after all, my life blood, my source, my future. The thing is that exactly because it is so important to me I would rather actually come to know it. Not what my 2600 year old ancestors thought of it (although that is also valuable in a narrative way), but what reality is like from the point of view of the Other, from the Now.
So I balance narrative and science. Currently it is the only way to access something close to the truth, in particular a workable truth for the contemporary world and the world of our children. Traditions won’t cut it. Belief systems alone won’t do. The earth is not the center of the universe. Neither is the sun. It’s better to know this than pretend otherwise. I suspect we’ll live longer as a species if we can come to grips with this.
So, again, why keep reading Versluis and others like him? Because at some point, some academic (believer or not) will find a way to honour his or her “spiritual” tradition in such a way as to not violate the actual facts of the case – whether empirical or narrative. I suspect this might come out of eco-spiritual traditions since many of them are also science majors. Someone, somewhere, will find a way to pull scientific reality and narrative together and then a new, workable, tradition will have had its birth. I hope I live long enough to see it, and am astute enough to recognize it when it happens.
June 24th, 2011
magic, dreams and Jung’s Red Book part 2 of 2
…continued from part 1…
The second image is from capital 19 and called “The Gift of Magic”. Spooky, right?
Jung’s relationship to magic is a bit complicated. This story follows from “Three Prophecies”, capital 18. In this personality 2 (Jung had 2 voices, personality 1 – the here and now, or science and personality 2, the past, tradition, or the humanities) speaks to Jung’s soul and to personality 1 saying “From the flooding darkness the son of the earth had brought, my soul gave me three things: The misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.” Be aware that Jung was deeply religious, and for all the current trend of utilizing Jung in the New Age, he was himself steeped in a magical, and Christian, tradition.
As the text moves into “The Gift of Magic” personality 2 has had horror creep up into its understanding of the world.
And a horror crept over me. Am I not the tightly bound? Is the world there not the unlimited? And I became aware of my weakness. What would poverty, nakedness and unpreparedness be without consciousness of weakness and without horror at powerlessness? Thus I stood and was terrified. And then my soul whispered to me: The Gift of Magic.
This is the awareness of the deep dark, the abyss and the need for a human being in search of self to accept its gifts. One of those gifts is magic. Personality 1 (P 1) and the soul have a long conversation about magic. P 1 is afraid to take the magic iron rod offered.
S: “Magic will do a lot for you.”
I: “I’m afraid that you’re stirring up my desire and misunderstanding. You know that man never stops craving the black art and things that cost no effort.”
Soul points out that magic is not easy, “and it demands sacrifice”. The sacrifice? Solace – both given and received. I find that very, very interesting. The thing is that P 1 is an old-style materialist – the kind people mean when they have maintained a dualistic universe of heaven and hell, and just ripped heaven away leaving hell. That’s what many really mean when they use the term “materialist.” They do not mean someone for whom heaven and hell were never sundered. They do not mean a person for whom all awe and wonder are material manifestations. But since P 1 is an old-style materialist, yes, he has much to learn.
The black rod is a gift from the darkness.
I: “Magic! What should I do with magic? I don’t believe in it, I can’t believe in it. My heart sinks—and I’m supposed to sacrifice a greater part of my humanity to magic?
S: “I advise you, don’t struggle against this, and above all don’t act so enlightened, as if deep down you did not believe in magic.”
I: “You’re inexorable. But I can’t believe in magic, or maybe I have a completely false idea of it.”
S: “Yes, I gather that from what you’re saying.”
I think it’s key to remember that the “I” here is personality 1, the part of Jung that clings to the here and now, to the material world, to science. It is this part that is being torn apart by the soul. It’s an old argument that the material self doesn’t understand the immaterial soul.
Then when P 1, “dazed and confused” asks the soul for “an enlightening word” the soul answers, “Oh, so it’s solace you long for? Do you want the rod or don’t you? That’s the choice Jung has set up: magic and the deep unconscious (the world of P 2) or science and solace (the world of P 1). Don’t you find that an odd dichotomy to establish? Is it just me, or is Jung saying that the Enlightenment was this solace, but by virtue of that, only a partial truth, one devoid of the gifts P1 and P2 receive by virtue of their descent into the abyss and later salvation via the virtues of the cross?
Yet just after this, Jung (P 1 or “I”) wails. “You tear my heart to pieces. I want to submit to life. But how difficult this is! I want the black rod because it is the first thing the darkness grants me. I don’t know what this rod means, nor what it gives—I feel only what it takes.”
“Life” here is the darkness, or the world of the unconscious, the world in which magic is the primary gift. So life is what occurs after one gives up the enlightenment/solace?
He does accept the gift, of course but: “the black iron in my heart gives me secret power. It’s like defiance and like—contempt for men.”
Now P 2 speaks:
Oh dark act, violation, murder! Abyss, give birth to the unredeemed. Who is our redeemer? Who our leader? Where are the ways through black wastes? God do not abandon us! …Step onto the great way and grasp what is nearest. Do not look out, do not want, but lift up your hands. The gifts of darkness are full of riddles. The way is open to whomever can continue in spite of riddles. Submit to the riddles and the thoroughly incomprehensible. There are dizzying bridges over the eternally deep abyss. But follow the riddles.
These riddles are the seeds of the future, and must be cherished but cannot be known. And here comes the true definition of magic (according to Jung):
Great is the power of the way. In it Heaven and Hell grow together, and in it the power of the Below and the power of the Above unite. The nature of the way is magical, as are supplication and invocation; malediction and deed are magical if they occur on the great way. Magic is the working of men on men, but your magic action does not affect your neighbor; it affects you first, and only if you withstand it does an invisible effect pass from you to your neighbor. There is more of it in the air than I ever thought. However, it cannot be grasped.
The final section of this capital is of the Magician, the “solitary” in the text. This solitary is at work.
A solitary is cooking up healing potions. He makes offering to the four winds. He greets the stars and touches the earth. He holds something luminous in his hand.
Sounds good doesn’t it. But it isn’t. No far on, humanity speaks to him.
Solitary, who are you waiting for? Whose help do you require?
There is none who can rush to your aid, since all look to you and
wait for your healing art.
We are all utterly incapable and need help more than you. Grant
us help so that we can help you in return.
The solitary speaks: "Will no one stand by me in this need? Should I
leave my work to help you so that you can help me again? But how
should I help you, if my brew has not grown ripe and strong?
(Have to tell you this solitary reminds me of Byron’s Manfred.)
What finally occurs is that the brew is completed but without the piece of flesh of the solitary. Instead a piece of humanity is mixed, and this is what clarifies, and makes ready, the brew. The god, this solitary, this magician, says “for the sake of men, I abstain from being a savior.”
To understand this, it is important to know that the section that follows is capital 20, “The Way of the Cross” and that Jung saw this as “the transformation of black into white magic.”
So not what I would have to say, if asked to interpret that picture.
In the text, this painting sits just before “A solitary is cooking up healing potions.” That isn’t a coincidence of course. Yet to me the picture speaks of power, of beauty, of enlivening knowledge, not of the need to transform the dark into the light. It’s a fundamental difference between someone like me who was raised inside a truly material world, undivided by dualism, and someone like Jung who is a dualist—one who is always trying to bring together heaven and hell, the depths and the heights. He is an example of what Henry Real Bird calls the horizon people. When you split the world into two, the only place where remediation is possible is in the narrow band, the “way”, between the two.
Another consequence is that magic needs to be the power to manipulate oneself, turn oneself into something one is not, to learn to ride the vanished line between the dark and the light. That’s why it’s a riddle, and incomprehensible except to an act of faith. It’s actually not there, not visible to an eye-borne species. All one can do in a dualist situation is to walk at the very edge of both worlds and hope that this marks the “way”.
So not promising. I could not interpret magic in the way the text does, and yet his picture evokes my sense of “magic” rather exactly. But then for me the world is all that is the case. I suspect for Jung the picture is of darkness transformed into light; for me it is darkness and light birthing each other, sharing space, alternating in time.
My materialism means I don’t have to mediate two worlds and get caught between them on the horizon. Still, this old-style materialism of Jung’s is what underlies the traditional Western notion of magic. It is what alchemy is all about, for example. The mediation by humanity of the two worlds of above and below purifies and transforms the dark into the light, the lead into the gold. It is no wonder that Jung made use of the basic scenario; it’s a Western classic.
In my own dream, the dismantling of the spell, I wonder how much of that represents and speaks to the dismantling of the pervasive dualism sucking the life out of the world and trying to spit it out to create a transcendent reality so desired by many in our civilization? But the thing is that magic for me is all about power, but personal power, power based on a knowledge of where you are, when you are. It is power, as Jung says, to change oneself, but not to refuse the healing potion of the solitary, but to become the solitary, to require a relationship from others to enact magic. What Jung’s refusal of the solitary does, and his “way of the cross”, is require a god that first sacrifices himself, gives of himself. This god is like a mother with a fetus – all give, give, give. I don’t want that; don’t need it. I was born, and what I want of my gods, of magic, is a working relationship with others of many gifts. This is exactly what Jung refuses when he refuses the solitary.
In Salish the term for this is sumesh. The word is often translated as “power” but it really denotes the power or surety of place and time that comes from an on-going relationship with a being other than oneself, other than one’s species. Sumesh is the sharing of gifts, of talents, of rights and responsibilities. It is the relationship that is sumesh not the results. That’s magic.
June 23rd, 2011
magic, dreams and Jung’s Red Book part 1 of 2
I have a little folding wooden table which is beside my bed at the moment – since I spend so much time here. My son carried Jung’s Red Book in for me (the sucker is heavy). I read through the introduction and then leafed through the original text. I treated it a bit like I do tarot cards, since calligraphic German is well beyond my ability to make linguistic sense of the markings. So I just let it make imagistic sense.
Two pictures stood out for me, with this magic dream taking up the background of my awareness. I am thinking of these two as foreground characters in a poem with the background being my dream. It’s appropriate, don’t you think, to take Jung’s Red Book as a magic text from which to illuminate the darkness of unaware knowledge?
This is the first one. The second picture will be in the second part of this post.
Once I had identified the images that caught my attention, then I turned to the back of the book where the German is translated. The first picture is on page five of liber secondus. In fact both pictures are from the second book. The second picture is from page 131.
There are three books: Liber Primus: The Way of What Is to Come; Liber Secundus: The Images of the Erring; Liber Tertius: Scrutinies. The whole thing, popularly known as the Red Book, is actually called Liber Novus.
The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology. Liber Novus presents the prototype of Jung’s conception of the individuation process which he held to be the universal form of individual psychological development.
The first book ends with Jung’s realization that he “must become a Christ.” To do this he must sacrifice his pleasure for its higher form, love. “Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Both principles are one in the synbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves of human form.” So the underlying narrative is really the Christ story but stripped of its old cultural trappings and given symbolic form more in keeping with our age. This symbology turns out to be a lot like alchemy. In other words, it’s a western magical system for psychological development.
At the end of book one he is essentially booted from “the mystery.” The second book opens with Jeremiah 23:16, 25-28. Essentially: listen to the god within, that is where true prophecy lies.
Each new story or idea is introduced with a capital. Cap. i, is The Red One – a story of Jung’s devil. The next capital (Cap. ii) is the first picture, the one copied above. It turns out to be a story called “The Castle in the Forest.”
What I find interesting about the devil story is that joy is the devil, or “that the devil is joy.” Downer right?
The devil is an evil element. But joy? If you run after it, you see that joy also has evil in it, since then you arrive at pleasure and from pleasure go straight to Hell, your own particular Hell, which turns out differently for everyone.
With the idea of love being the higher form of pleasure, I can see where he’s coming from but talk about Western christo-ideology. Jeez Louise dude. I mean it wouldn’t be so bad if Love wasn’t normally considered a transcendent entity and pleasure something of the body, but it usually is you know. All kinds of nasty Western christo-ideology gets generated from this basic wrong-headed notion. Women, for example, are almost always associated with the body and pleasure, but only virgins get to be associated with Love. Meh. Don’t get me started.
In the castle he meets his anima. She is the rather insubstantial daughter of the scholarly man Jung meets when he comes into the castle to seek lodging. She comes to him to see if he can relate to her, to see her, in essence. It’s rather funny really, the dialog.
Unable to sleep the I/Jung in the fantasy lies in his bed berating himself for his childish fantasies and bourgeois soul.
…until I finally notice that another thought doesn’t let go of me, namely that the old man has hidden his beautiful daughter here – a vulgar idea for a novel – an insipid, worn-out theme – but the romantic can be felt in every limb – a real novelistic idea – a castle in a forest – solitary night – an old man petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world…
He goes on like this for a while, imagining the most banal, a blond, blue eyed daughter, and of course she comes knocking at his door.
“Have you come at last?” she asks quietly. Impossible – this is a cruel mistake – the novel wants to become real – does it want to grow into some silly ghost story? To what nonsense am I damned? … She says, “Oh, so you too think me common? Do you too let yourself be deluded by the wretched delusion that I belong in a novel? You as well, whom I hoped had thrown off appearances and striven after the essence of thing?
Get him girl!
I do like the idea of ridding oneself of delusions, but essences! Nope. For me the castle in his D capital may start from the same location but we diverge. I would not, for example, have met a devil once I had lost that oceanic feeling that Jung identifies as The Mystery. Yet that castle of the common place, of the “novelistic” is definitely a stop we must all make. The desire to make much of our uniqueness is both ubiquitous and simply an error. Our power is in our ordinariness.
One of the reasons that I diverge on interpretation is that Jung identifies the water in the picture above as a bit of a swamp, and I get a feeling that the castle didn’t meet up with Jung’s ideas of what his scholarly castle should be like. People always seem to get inflated ideas about their own genius. Still, I liked the picture he drew. The waxing moon, for one thing, and its shine on the water. It seemed to me a protected castle, yet an open one surrounded by slightly ruffled waters.
I think I connected to it because that’s how I see power. Power isn’t something that can either survive total immersion or total isolation. Power is something that remains healthy and growing by circulation, contact, openness, yet an aware distance and self protection. In my dream, the woman casting the spell is doing something to force another. I don’t know what but the act of force is not an act of power. Really need like that is usually born of fear.
Does the woman casting in my dream represent my anima (and I do think women get to have one since we are still objects unto the culture, and therefore unto ourselves)? So while Jung’s anima is busy trying to get him to see her, mine is busy trying to enforce her own safety?
Telling.
June 23rd, 2011
dreaming about magic
Last night I dreamt of magic. In the dream a woman had started a spell and located the material power of it – the magic’s physical source – in a room well away from its point of impact. She was doing something to someone, I don’t know to whom or what the intent was, but in the dream I want to stop it. I find the ritual objects which bind and direct the power and I dismantle it, thereby breaking the spell.
It was an arcane and complicated dream. I don’t remember much of it but I do remember the feeling. It had a sense of intricacy, of a mystery novel, of slightly malicious intentions. I’ve put little time into it today, but it has been ringing in the hollow of my head. I’ve not been able to concentrate, nor settle to any of the work I really need to do this week. I even went to see a movie (Midnight in Paris – it was great) to try and break my mood. But it’s been a no-go.
So I came back home, have eaten half a small vegetarian pizza and am going to settle down to look at Jung’s Red Book and think about the dream, try to reason with it. I’ll let you know if anything interesting comes of it.
Or you can just tell me what such a dream would mean to you. That would be helpful.
March 26th, 2011
Saving Noah seems to be on “repeat.”
There’s an interesting post over at This is the End. The whole site is concerned with the question of the myth of apocalypse, its effects and its ritual remedies. The author seems to treat the notion as a kind of social nightmare, which I think has some real potential as a metaphor.
One of the things this specific post mentions is Corbières. I had not known that there are supposed to be aliens living in the limestone caves waiting for December 21 2012 to save the few humans in the area.
I’ve always thought about what Noah’s neighbors must have felt when he started promulgating his own version of Corbières in 2012. I’ve never imagined it was a good thing but these two articles in the Telegraph have given me new fuel for that imagining. One of the articles says specifically that the villagers don’t find it funny, and I’m sure I shouldn’t, but I do. Not that I would want to live there in the next months leading up to the 2012 Winter Solstice. They could make it one hell of a party though.
March 19th, 2011
the experience of self and zombies
I found Phantasmagoria by Maria Warner. Stars, what a good writer. In fact she’s so good I find it a bit hard to keep my mind on what she’s saying, so taken I am by how she’s saying it.
I know I found her through someone else, probably Chas Clifton or Bron Taylor but I can’t remember now. Probably doesn’t matter, but I’d like to thank who ever it was.
Phantasmagoria is a huge book full of interesting things so I’m going to break it down. Right now I want to talk about her chapter on zombies.
She starts with what she calls “a very brief genealogy of the zombie” which I find hilariously funny as a phrase. I’m not sure why exactly, except the whole point of a zombie is that they no longer have genealogies, since that requires a self. That linkage which is a familial past, a sense of placement that one has by being the past’s arrow into the future, is just what a zombie has taken from them.
Warner’s commentary on the creation our current concept “zombie” through the vicious destruction of the slave self is interesting but what I find really fascinating is the process of metaphorical extension of that history, that cultural genealogy, into the world of art.
Their (zombie) incarnate but numb and vacant condition reproduces the state of someone captured on film forever: materially present but also entirely absent.
I’d never really thought of movie “people” like that, as an echo of our deep anxieties about being cogs, or cannon fodder (or canon fodder?). A well greased cog is still a cog. It might make one feel as if the machine won’t wear our edges down so fast, won’t make us spin uselessly quite as quickly, but we know it only delays the inevitable. Is that what our movies have become? Our new religion? Our stories to both soothe and point our mortality, our dying? Do I do that, experience—at some probably unconscious level—the image as a “spirit”? Or as a material entity without an independent “self”? Are moving images zombies?
The thing that amazes me is in all the angst about the loss of feeling, we generate an ocean of pain, outrage, fear—feeling. When will that sink in? When will we get that the loss of soul hasn’t done what we feared?
While the quest for human spirit has engendered a train of spirits—from angels to ectoplasms—in modernity, soul is now chiefly figured by its absence.
Sure. But where from there? Because we still have the experience of living, of presence, even if it is from the point of view of the terror of absence.
The point of Warner’s book—the logic of the imaginary—has been to show that the things we use to think about our self/spirit/soul—”wax, air, light, and shadow”—are rooted in how we are, how we think, how our body is. But, these tools to think, these experiences of self/spirit/soul turn out to be “contingent, shaped in relation to time and experience”, as are all metaphors. As we are.
So our experience of a unified self, this thing captured by the term “soul” is dying in our world. We have become zombies not because humans are being particularly nasty to other humans. We always do that. Probably always will. We’ve become zombies because we need new metaphorical ways to think about the experience of self as a multiplicity since we’ve finally gained enough knowledge to realize that unity is a phantom and that it has left the material world which generated it.
In other words, we have finally realized that the way we experience our selves do not always reflect the facts of the case.
Wowzers.