SubscribeDecember 21st, 2011
a fish swimming, part 2
The idea that we have become fish out of water, that we are somehow outside life, outside “the world” is Giegerich’s way of explaining why we can suddenly (since the 19th century) ask questions like “is life meaningful”.
Man had to have stepped out of his previous absolute containment in life, so that he now was both enabled and forced to view life as if from outside, because only in this way could the whole of life become thematic in the first place. Now, with the question about its meaning and worth, existence as such had become a vis-à-vis, as it were, which is the opposite of in-ness. Man now for the first time had a position to the world per se. The question of meaning is the mark of the modern period after the conclusion of the age of metaphysics at the beginning of the 19th century. (page 3)
My question is whether or not this is the best way (most accurate with respect to actual human history) to explain the apparent changes in human psychology. For one thing, such a metaphor – to view life from outside – implies a place that is outside our lives. Where would that be? To require a place outside the forces that generate our living for our consciousness to view those same forces necessarily divorces consciousness from its ground of origin. Not only is it probably not empirically possible for such a divorce to occur, but such a view generates a dualistic metaphor that can’t be undone later.
I also have to question the in-ness he assumes in “pre-modern” minds. He’s talking about the minds that so questioned what they had as to paint the cave walls in France, those same pre-modern minds that came up with the wheel, atl-atls, hide boats, figured out how to domesticate dogs, horses, barley, corn, and everything else that made modern minds what they are. I’m sorry, but those minds sure seem as if they could think outside the in-ness for long stretches at a time.
I think part of the problem is that thinkers about myth and the unconscious seem to take for granted that we have a mind. A mind. We don’t you know. We have many minds and a kind of floating flash-light of an awareness that only makes it seem like we have “a” mind.
As we evolved different abilities, we also developed different brain-body bits to control those developing skills. When the “control movements and coordinate with visual sensations” is needed the spot-light is there and not on the “continually assess smells but only make “us” aware of ones that indicate possible dangers or potential treasures” skill that we still possess (ever suddenly smelt a hint of acrid smoke when you were driving and notice how your attention shoots over there?). Each of those abilities is the hub of a “mind”; they run simultaneously; most of them are unaware and constitute the manifold territory we know as the unconscious.
If we view mind like a cell, with many interlocking bits that make the thing function as a whole, with no in-ness in any time of human (Homo sapiens) history, then what to make of the loss of meaning?
I’m not done yet so there will be a part 3.
December 19th, 2011
Image: a fish swimming everywhere looking for water
Cathy sent me a copy of Giegerich’s paper “End of Meaning” which I hadn’t read, nor even heard of. (Thanks Cathy!) It’s long and I’m still on the road so I’m reading it a few pages at a time when I stop and have a walk-break.
Here’s the abstract:
“Meaning” as in “the meaning of life” is not (“semantically”) a belief system, but (“syntactically”) the sense of “in-ness.” A comparison of the logic of animal existence with that of human existence reveals that man, despite having been biologically born, remained psychologically unborn, language, myth, metaphysics having served as a secondary psychological “uterus” for him. With the dramatic changes in the human situation since around 1800 (the closure of Western metaphysics, the industrial revolution), the previous in-ness was no more. This fundamental change can be seen as the eventual birth of man, astrologically expressed as the emergence of consciousness from the status of “fish in the water” to that of “Aquarius,” the lord of the waters. In this sense, the “loss” of meaning must not be interpreted negatively as a loss.
C. G. Jung’s personal need to nevertheless regain a new sense of meaning necessitated his becoming a psychologist. Only through the logical interiorization of former contents of myth and metaphysics, only through the displacement of the arena of essential questions from the public world to the so-called unconscious “inside” the private individual, was it possible to simulate a situation where the former sense of meaning could become true once more. This interiorization is comparable to Kronos’ swallowing of his just-born children.
This idea that man has lost the exterior meaning function, that is, we have lost the capacity to live inside myth because we have become individuals, seems a little sideways to me. Nevertheless there are some brilliant moments in just the small amount I have read so far. For example, the idea that meaning is not semantic is frakking brilliant. Of course it can’t be because otherwise any non-linguistic human being is incapable of meaningful moments, relationships etc, and what little is known of normal adults with no language shows that this is not the case. So meaning is pre-linguistic.
What gets me is that Giegerich then goes on to say as his “therefore”
Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori.
and this is a problem because it shoots us right back into Kant’s lap and that simply will not do. Now, perhaps that’s not what he intended so I’ll keep reading and see what happens.
So here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to do one of those post-as-you-read/react things.
The next installment will be titled: a fish swimming, part 2
October 3rd, 2011
more on Hecate, part 2
In the first part of this post I mentioned that I was examining the idea that Hecate works as a mythocatalyst and to explain that metaphor I compared a “mythocatalyst” to the biocatalyst Na+/K+-ATPase (the sodium/potassium pump that works to maintain cellular viability).
Forgive me, but this biochemical metaphor is the one that seems closest to my sense of how “Hecate” might function biologically.
To sidestep a moment: one of the things that has bothered by about Carl Jung is the total lack of realistic explanation of how an archetype might work in human beings. Unless you assume a layer of “reality” in which these archetypes exist independently of specific human lives, explaining how they get there is a bit of a problem. Part of what excites me about this notion of Hecate as non-human and a mythocatalyst is that it might serve to point a way to bridge this gap in the idea of the archetype and its realistic activity in human life.
For you who already know what a biocatalyst is and what the Na/K pump does you can skip this paragraph, and if you don’t skip it, please feel free to correct me if I get it sideways. A cell as an entity exists in a medium (the sea, a body, etc). By necessity a cell has more of some stuff inside it that it does outside it and, by virtue of physical/chemical reality it has to have help to maintain this difference – and it must maintain it or cease to exist as a cell. There are many operations taking place in a cell to maintain this “difference.” One of them is the sodium/potassium pump. This pump moves sodium and potassium against their natural gradient in order to maintain cellular conditions in a state in which continued existence and operation is viable. Basically it does that with a bio-mechanical bridge across the cell membrane. That “bridge” gathers up sodium on one side (and energy in the form of ATP) and shoots it outside the cell wall. It then gathers potassium on the other side and shoots it inside the cell wall. That “bridge” is the biocatalyst, an enzyme, that actively transports ions against their chemical gradient without being fundamentally changed itself. What I am suggesting that in the life of the mind, such a transport device, such an enzyme (metaphorically speaking) might be at work to negotiate our “narrative gradients” (more about what this might be in the next part of this post) and that this is what we call Hecate (and other archetypes, Hermes, for example).
(For those of you who want more info on how the Na+/K+-ATPase works look here, here, here, here, here and here. And here – fun animation.)
Remember that the body evolves using what it already knows and has as a starting point. Biochemical/mechanical means that solved one environmental problem can be used to solve another. Sexual behaviour, for example, solves the problem of producing the next generation, but it also solves the problem of greasing the social wheels when conflict threatens. One set of biochemical/physical attributes but more than one effect: that’s typical of evolutionary adaptation. Now while such biocatalysts as the sodium/potassium pump have clear functional duties, we still now very little about how such a system motivates behaviour if it gets out of whack. For example, what is thirst? It’s a methodology the body has of getting an organism to fix the body’s sensed dehydration problem. How does the body know it is dehydrated? Through biochemical/mechanical means. What those biocatalysts do – maintain cells (and therefore organism) within viable parameters. If it can’t do that without alerting the larger organism, then there has to be a methodology for doing so. Thirst is one such organism response.
What I am suggesting is that as we evolved the conscious/social/narrative aspect of our being we would have had to develop monitoring methodologies to keep that new aspect within viable parameters and we likely did so using systems already in place, co-opting them to a new purpose. Just like thirst, there would be “feelings” that guide behaviour when the system threatens to get out of whack (evoked by the mythocatalysts if the “invisible” processes constantly running couldn’t maintain the required parameters). I suspect that is what archetypes are.
One issue is that the biocatalysts we know (like the sodium/potassium pump) are usually invisible. But because we have had so very long (as animals) to refine (evolutionarily) their functioning this shouldn’t be a surprise. Who wants to have to keep in mind the sodium/potassium balance of our cells? The same efficiency cannot be true for the adaption of what biochemical/physical process is responsible for maintaining the conscious/narrative function that we call the mind within acceptable parameters. It may be that this new function is so new that what are acceptable parameters is not yet known (i.e. we still exist but may not be evolutionarily viable – no way to tell yet).
Who knows if Hecate is a mythocatalyst, or even if such a thing can be said to exist, but boy is this fun to think about.
More on Hecate, part 3 will talk about a wonderful source I found and some new ways of thinking about how Hecate functions in both individuals and in the larger medium called society that come from my reading.
September 2nd, 2011
the problem with asking questions
Someone asked the question “What is consciousness?”
What’s the problem with the question? For me the problems begin with the verb “is”. It’s usage in the sentence implies that there is an (one) answer, and that the answer when found will be a necessary and sufficient attribute of the noun “consciousness.” The sentence predisposes one to look for an object that is consciousness and to do so by finding its attributes.
There are so many answers to the question but what if we were to ask the question “What does consciousness do?” Would that change the set of answers? Almost certainly don’t you think?
Which seems to me to say what we are really addressing is not consciousness so much as the structure of the sentence. And this is not the point of asking the question.
If we were to see “consciousness” as just a word we use to speak to a rather fluid set of skills and abilities as those skills and abilities manifest in specific situations, then what would be the questions we would ask? What would be the fundamental assumptions? I suspect this last question is rather important having something to do with how language assumes itself to be to only means of communication open to human beings. I mean even Carl Jung assumed that the unconscious was a symbolic storehouse – that is the experiences we have are stored and activated as symbols – and symbols are very much linguistic artifacts.
Interesting to think about how many varied sets of questions and answers can be generated all around that single word “consciousness”. And if not a linguistically or symbolically structured set of events/actions/predispositions what then is that storehouse we think of as our consciousness and unconscious?
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.
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.
December 27th, 2010
dream animals
Another busy day, trying to restore the house to rights. That’s complete now, and really it’s been a good day because I have somewhat of a passion for order especially as it pertains to spaces I must inhabit. The consequence, however, like yesterday, was that my reading time has been limited. Today, I chose to spend those moments on Dream Animals.
I haven’t read James Hillman in many years now, but I remember liking him. Despite that I was concerned at first because there seemed to me in the opening transcribed conversation between Hillman and the artist (wonderful plates!), Margot McLean, and then in the following introduction, there was going to be that faulty logic that so disturbs me in some other authors devoted to mind arts, rather than the mind sciences. What it was that bothered me was this idea that the animals themselves come into our dreams. Now I cannot say what Hillman intended, but I found myself fervently wishing it was not the old tripe of psychic connection as it normally appears in works about “animal spirits.” Partly I hoped that because Hillman is really a very good writer and he enjoys language, and I adore that. Listen:
That Garden is a mythical nature. It cannot be found by dogmatic devotees digging in Holy Land dirt in search of literal locations.
What lovely alliteration. One can only admire and love a writer that takes joy in the bump and slither of words.
So I hoped, and read on.
Margot McLean, Risorius, mixed media on linen 1991
As I read further, I began to suspect that what he meant was something else, some kind of respect of animal kind that requires acceptance of otherness. This ability is what he calls “the primordial mind,” and is named “Eden.” The primordial garden is not a place to be dug up and displayed, but an attitude of equivalence, of inclusion, of the assumption of continuity of kind between all the garden’s denizens. This kind of mind is what I think of as the body-thinking; it is what our bodies do continuously and naturally as we live and move within the world. Body-thinking is when you address your dream animals with the respect due another. You do not command, or even suggest, but wait, listen, watch, dance and sometimes converse.
Margot McLean, Heart, mixed media on paper 1994
In the little essay on snake Hillman says
This is the psychological and imaginative work of animating the image, giving a life-soul back to the snake that may have been removed from it by your desire to understand it. The snake may have no objection to being understood. It may be pleased with your turning to herpetology books about snakes, by your visit to a zoo to watch them, by your reading of ancient serpent mysteries. But whatever you do, consult with the snake first so that you do not insult it by following your own plan without recognizing its arrival in your life. For its arrival is a summons to divert your intentions from yourself at least partially toward it.
Tremendous advice, and such a relief for me, since I am reading his “your” and “you” in the last two sentences of the quote as meaning “ego.” I feel that I can now complete my reading with out the tension of waiting for a logical belly-flop. Silly, aren’t I?
December 19th, 2010
aaaaaaaaaaaargh!
I’m reading Ego and Archetype by Edward F. Edinger. While it is certainly a book that knows its Jung, it’s more general grasp of reasoning leaves something to be desired. Let me give you an example:
In the first chapter (on the inflated ego) Edinger is discussing the earliest human experience of conflation between the ego and the Self, which according to Edinger, makes the child experience itself as the deity. Well, I’ll let that one pass but then when discussing the mandala (the most common symbolic representation of the Self) and the developing capacity of the child to render the human form he says:
As the child attempts to do human figures, they first emerge as circles, contrary to all visual experience, with the arms and legs being represented only as ray like extensions of the circle. These studies provide clear empirical data indicating that the young child experiences the human being as a round, mandala-like structure and verify in an impressive way the psychological truth of Plato’s myth of the original round man.
Gads! (take a deep breath…breathe…breathe…)
Taking (without proof) as true that all children do first draw people as circles (have there been cross -cultural studies? what were the parameters?), this does not mean that the child necessarily experiences the “human being” as a circle. It could be, for example, that the very young child’s visual obsession with the mother’s face is what is motivating the pencil hand. And, contrary Edinger, the face is in visual experience, circular. It could be that the early motivation to connect with faces might have something to do with circular shapes being hard-wired into us as “interesting” in the same way the sweet taste of milk is pre-programmed as desirable. The “rays” for the limbs can be explained by reference to the child becoming aware that the object in its visual field does not quite match the “hard wired” shape emerging from its drawing hand, and so as the eyes process material information, this is slowly added to the endemic image. This would explain the tentative and simple lines when a child is first developing an “agreement” between what it actually sees (the actual person in sight) and what its brain has already provided (the interest in the circular shape).
It’s also possible that the connections between the visual and manual centers of the brain are developed sequentially through the learned task of creating representations (i.e. drawing) and are built through a necessary developmental pathway that starts with circles and lines in much the same way as children learn single words prior to learning phrases and nouns before adverbs. This would mean that everything would be drawn with simple circles and lines. It’s just that infant humans happen to be most interested in other humans and not, say, landscapes; this is why they draw people more often than landscapes (if they do).
Having said that: have you ever seen a young child’s drawing of a tree? Yep. Circles and lines. Does that mean that the child experiences trees as a circle? And therefore experiences humans and trees in the same way?
Bah.