SubscribeSeptember 9th, 2011
funny dream
dreaming: I am in a squirrel costume, or some similar rodent, maybe a hamster. And banging against my knees two heavy metal balls. What’s this I yell irritated and mildly repelled at the deep inefficiency of trying to walk with such things in the way.
When I awoke, I laughed.
September 1st, 2011
dreaming bits of speech
Sometimes I wake already speaking. In one case it was a remark made by Wittgenstein. In this case it was something else.
the blue rise of a dead breast
that’s what I was saying as I woke.
I googled the phrase but got no hits. Anyone recognize it? Might just be my inner poet with a particularly gothic twist but I thought I’d check.
August 30th, 2011
a funny little dream
So I had a short little dream. In it I am a minor demon. I have horns, a tail and am bright red. But I’m just a little guy, standing next to this hulking great demon with very few brain cells but one heck of a “tail.”
Funny.
Even funnier, I told my dream to this rather nice woman I know from the coffee shop (she had just told me hers) but it turns out she’s one of those Christians and took it literally. Not kidding. I suspect her earlier life has resulted in some neuronal damage. It’ll be fun to see if she either tries to convert me to save my soul or ignores me now that I am a self-admitted demon.
August 17th, 2011
priming dreamtime
At the surrealist exhibition I saw this for the first time.
Woman in the Mirror (Paul Delvaux), 1936
I was immensely struck by it. I’m not sure what it is, but it feels both safe and tremendously fertile (which is anything but safe). It’s not just the nude, but her place in the dark rocky gap, the sun at the entrance, the light in the mirror and the silver scarf, so snake like.
Anyway, my hope is to dream of it tonight, to walk further into the mountain, and out onto the plain to see what is there.
August 1st, 2011
dead mothers and dreams
My mother died early. She was only 43, and since we were unlikely to develop any kind of adult relationship — she was a bit of fruitcake and I had been raised to be her caretaker — what’s true is that I didn’t really miss her then, and I still don’t, even now.
I suppose that strikes you as mean, and undaughterly, although some of you will understand it. I did not come off unscathed by a woman who used her 6 year old daughter’s body to catch a cricket ball thrown wild; it was just instinct—her sense of physical self protection was strong—and she felt horrible afterwards. Even I, at 6, could tell that expression was shame.
At first after her death, there was the odd occasion when I would see a woman in a waiting room somewhere and have a sudden clamping in my chest and a sense that mum was sitting there. It would quickly dissipate of course, and as the months went by the occurrences stopped.
My own damage following a childhood like mine has become mostly clear. For example, I have taken care of a series of crazy but talented women throughout much of my life. At great personal cost, I might add. I’ve largely stopped that, it seems. So that may explain why I’ve dreamt of my mother for what is, I think, the first time in the three decades since her death.
Such “remodifications” of children can be reconfigured again by careful attention to freedom, knowledge and awareness, but all that essentially means is that the scars can become less painful, less dense. Healing is not about removing scars, it is about learning how to return to beauty with them on-board. In other words, I’ll never be entirely rid of mum, as she is literally inscribed on my person by the scars she left but such scarring doesn’t mean I can’t live in beauty. What it does mean is that beauty has to accommodate the scarred.
One day last week I drove out of the city on a clear, warm, breezy day. On the way home, evening had come with its long spears of light dissolving slowly in the face of growing darkness. As in these late summer days, such evenings are perfect and intensely beautiful. Those moments are also melancholy, largely because they are so short-lived, but also just because they are so beautiful. Beauty is sometimes as hard to bear as pain.
My mother had moments like that, very few, but they were there. She was an artist that ended up living the life she couldn’t bear without breaking. I suspect she broke very early on, probably before I (her first born) came to be. She lived her life as that grey winter downpour that drives away the last of the bright autumn leaves. But there were a few moments when who she wanted to be surfaced. Bluesy jazz would evoke it, as would the voice of Maria Callas singing Tosca, or Cezanne. Her entire body would shift, her face return to its sharp focus, her grief disapparate; she would be a vast forest of flaming hard wood trees in the height of their autumn beauty. In those few moments she was intensely beautiful, intelligent and alive. Those moments represent much less than 1% of her life. The rest of the time she wasn’t much better than a zombie, and quite nearly as destructive.
The summer light taught me about my mother’s perfection, about her melancholy and her inner death. I suppose my unconscious has been working on it for quite a while, and got its start facing my own death, but it was the light of a summer evening that allowed me to become aware of my mother’s beauty. I still don’t miss her, of course. I’m not a stupid woman; and she was a terrible mother and a miserable human being.
And it isn’t about forgiveness either. Such a thing is a terrible place to be. Forgiveness is about power. It’s about claiming the right to make a moral judgement about another’s behaviour. I don’t claim the right, nor want it. Forgiveness of another as a moral act is cowardly, and mean spirited. I have no right to claim her and she no right to me. We each have only the right to claim ourselves. My mother’s behaviour had its reasons, of course, some of which I understand. That’s the point I think, to come to understand so that I can understand my own doings. Forgiveness is a cop-out, a refusal of learning. What really makes a difference to the quality of life in the long run is understanding. Once that is made, forgiveness is understood to be a donut for the mind – just as delicious, and just as unhealthy.
The dream followed on the heels of that day driving through the last light. It was a non-fraught affair, just a woman there, my mother sure, but really just a shade in an Odyssey-like moment, if the Achilles shade-scene had been written by Penelope rather than Ulysses. What such a dream tells me is that the scars have shifted, and my own recent pain has finally blossomed in the unconscious into something like understanding.
Do I like my mother now? No, of course not. I don’t even respect her really. Understanding changes nothing of what in fact happened, but it does give me the power to effect what I will choose to do in my future. It explains why I’ve dropped the crazies and gives me some hope that this situation is permanent. Still, the scars aren’t gone so I expect some other personal weirdness will pop up, but that light, that moment of perfect light has turned more of my own pain into something of deeply earthly beauty.
July 27th, 2011
just because / I dreamt
Last night I dreamt I was walking through this field – but unlike the reality – this place was in Britain, the Somerset Way to be precise. I know. But that’s the thing about dreams. It was a lovely dream. I felt enormous, the size of the view looking out from the Mendips.
taken by peardg
Then this morning, walking around the lake with the dog, I found myself longing to actually do that, to walk up there, to go back to Europe and walk around a bit. That made me think of Aja, who is living in Paris at the moment. Maybe I’ll visit next year. I could alternate walking with coffee-shopping. Nice.
taken by Aja Dawn
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.
May 2nd, 2011
ooops
So about 2 hours after I posted yesterday, I noticed my eyes were really sore and I was having a hard time focusing. My headache was back and I was starting to feel nauseas. So I went home and by 16:30 things were bad and I was moving between the bathroom and my bed. Bleh.
Does it matter that I mixed up a magnolia and a gardenia?
I suppose I have a touch of concussion from banging my head.
I did have good dreams last night, and I woke thinking I can write the book of poetry now. I do feel considerably better today, so on with Stumbling on Happiness, and when that is finished a few other books that have been hanging out waiting for me to get back to them. And all the while, I’m going to be thinking about poetry.
Yeah for freedom!