SubscribeAugust 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.
May 1st, 2011
happiness whilst falling
I’m still in recovery-mode from all the turmoil and work of the last weeks, but in pain or not the sun is out and my extra-strong coffee will probably knock this headache back some. (I fell whilst cleaning and hit my head on the toilet seat as I went down. The lump is not all that tender, but the memory of the shock still lingers along with the headache. Falling is a very odd experience don’t you find?)
All that-is-past aside for a moment, I can feel the future beginning to open its eyes and peer back at me. It’s a nice, hopeful feeling even with the shadow-attendant fears about how the frak I’m going to pay the rent, now that I am officially unemployed. But for some delightfully odd cognitive evolutionary reason, I trust that it’ll all work out. Probably because I can’t imagine myself dead.
Prognostication is a species of falling, I think. You may be able to mitigate the effects to a small degree, but most of the time, what you think you know about your future is really just an abudanace of luck, both good and bad. Like hitting the toilet rim just a glancing blow. It could have been so much worse, but it wasn’t. The reason? There wasn’t one: the luck of physics. And of course there’s the odd working of the imagination, what and how the mind/brain works when we confidently assess what tommorow could bring.
I’m starting to get the sense that what I know about my own happiness is just as much out of my control as is the physics of a soapy hand on a wet floor. I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and through humor (he really is funny) and erudition he’s given me a view of humanity that has much more to do with latter-day rationalization from the mouth of Socrates as he slides away on a banana peel.
I haven’t got to the part of the book where he promises not to tell me the secret of happiness, nor to the part where he’ll expose the mechanics of my illusion (which, he says, I will disregard). I’ll likely get there today, since I have declared this a Mary-holiday of a one day duration. (My house is still a horrendous mess, but it’ll have to stay that way until tomorrow. I’m going to sit in the sun, drink coffee and read. So there, you nasty dust buffalos.)
Contra-Gilbert, I do think I know what makes me happy. Yet, I also have doubts about that word “happiness.” I know what gives me pleasure in the moment, especially when I am experiencing it. But even the mostly-tried-and-trues don’t always work. Sun and coffee and a book usually work, but really it is a combination of things (some effecting life by their absence – silly bitchy people who cry at the drop of a hat, for example) effecting the place I am in life at the moment (and here the past comes back, never having really gone away, but like a shadow its form, shape and density is dependent upon the nature of the light source – Given the dependency of shadows on light, do you think shadows can really be said to exist?). Such a literary-caffeine combo wouldn’t always have worked (17-year-old Mary was an alien, probably from Pluto. She did not, for example, drink coffee.), and probably it won’t always work in some future-Mary being. (I cannot imagine a post-coffee Mary any more than I can imagine being dead – this being the crux of the problem of prognostication – the limitations and workings of the imagination.)
I find the “failure” of imagination interesting, but not worrying. I mean, if I’ve fallen through time to reach this moment then I obviously have the necessary amount of good luck and the appropriate access to accidental physics. Banana peel-realized or not, today is about the movement of cool air across my arm, the warm response my shoulders have to the morning sun, the feel of a paper’s edge under my fingers, the sweet-bitter of espresso with brown sugar and the sound of the local black capped chickadee. The feelings I have under these conditions, that, I’m pretty sure, is happiness. It’s funny to think I’m probably wrong.
February 19th, 2011
books, libraries and the spare dark of a quiet evening
I spent the morning outside, making a few stops for fresh vegetables, Greek delicacies, coffee and a new book.
Once the errands were safely stowed in the trunk, the book, coffee and I (and a delicacy or two) spent the rest of the time between the hot-house sun and the cool breeze.
The book was a perfect thing for those indwelling circumstances. It’s called The Library at Night and is from the first pages a gentle and loving exploration of just why collections of books matter. Deeper and sturdier than the root and vine of a kudzu, the human desire for information and connection has been met by books, and even, occasionally, satisfied by rooms filled with those paper companions. We know this, just as we know the danger books pose to usurpers, and the dangers posed to the rest of us by books’ absence.
I’ve been thinking about this, I suppose, because of the bankruptcy of Borders and the horrendously stupid threatened cut to libraries in the UK. It’s so easy to underestimate the importance of those relationships we develop with the long-dead and the far-away. Some people get the power that comes with reading (which is why we still have book burners and censors) but politicians are often under the impression that books for the general public are not worth the money that, they seem to think, could be better spent on other things. One wonders if they read?
The Library at Night is bit of a personal remedy to how these things have made me feel, and as I said, its effect goes right in the lovely category that already includes sun, cool air and good coffee. There are some really fun bits too, like how he feels the zipping connections between some tomes, as if they are talking to each other in the spare dark of a quiet evening. I’ve noticed this amongst my own collection but I am not as nice a person as Manguel appears to be. I put Starhawk next to John Knox and just know that poor old Knox’s knees are quaking.
It’s just so delightful when books like this come to inhabit my home.
September 19th, 2010
Too much to think about
As a brief perusal of these pages will establish, I am interested in a number of things. My main obsessions are poetry, poetics, 18th and 19th century American history and literature, the importance of the esoteric in the development of the American psyche and its expression as religious history, the concept of imagination and its philosophical history, the concept of wilderness, Phenomenology especially when it speaks to the arts, embodied cognition and perception (and where perception and imagination diverge), plants, beading, indigenous technology, music, tarot and alchemy.
And that list is considerably diminished from the one I would have made a decade ago.
The problem is that following (even modestly) these interests is time consuming. And I’m writing poetry at the moment – a raft of stuff all about one subject, telling one story. So I think I’m going to have to put my books on imagination, history, alchemy, etc aside for the nonce. Even my reading on poetics is getting in the way. I suspect that all I can really do is write and bead for now.
What that means for tailfeather is that you are likely to get a bunch of angsty moans about how hard it is to find a way to tell the truth (which is what makes poetry readable) and maybe some more pictures of my beading and quilling in progress. I apologize in advance.
I suspect this putting-aside might be hard to do since I find myself continually circling the idea that imagination is an intentional act that positions one with regard to the Other. That is, imagination is not a static thing, not a theatre where images are displayed, but more the projector, and simultaneously the energy that it takes to run “the projector”, the images that are created, the (ir)reality it creates in the process and the real world from whence the power and audience originate.
Oh well. We all know writing is difficult and I am just not the kind of person anymore who can carry it all, juggling whilst running a marathon. Nope. Can’t do it.
August 24th, 2010
Kearney and the imagination
I’ve read the majority of Kearney’s Poetics now and find it interesting. I looked him up on the nets and read a few interviews, listened to bits of podcasts, saw a bit of video and what I heard (amongst other things) was his predisposition to avoid the simulacrum-trap of post-modernism. This, I suspect, comes courtesy of his early (positive) religious training in Irish Catholicism; he seems a man deeply interested in ethics and empathy. I get that, although, obviously, I don’t come at those ideas from a religious standpoint.
How his obsession with grounding human meaning in something that we can authentically share (i.e. meaning isn’t a solipsistic illusion) is reflected in his reading of phenomenology and his understanding of imagination is as complex as it is interesting.
He says of phenomenology and imagination:
Three decisive claims made by phenomenology – as it emerges in Husserl and evolves through his existential and hermeneutic disciples – are: (1) imagining is a productive act of consciousness, not a mental reproduction in the mind; (2) imagining does not involve a courier service between body and mind but an original synthesis which precedes the age-old opposition between the sensible and the intelligible; and (3) imagining is not a luxury of idle fancy but an instrument of semantic innovation.
That’s rather a nice summary; and if each point was followed, it would lead to some interesting conclusions about what it is like to be a human being.
Another dimension of his thought about imagination is that it has an orientation to the “other”. This orientation enacts ethics. Throughout the book he examines “Kristeva’s melancholic imagination, Vattimo’s fragile imagination (and) Lyotard’s narrative imagination” each of which presents “an irreducibly ethical scruple.” I can feel the religiousness in him here, as I do when I read Alasdair MacIntyre, and can’t help but think about Wallace Stevens’ and his underlying assumptions and this apparently required sense of a moral universe. I do find it interesting that it appears that these ethical thinkers (all Catholics) have been reducing the scope of the claims they make with regard to the seating of this morality, as they must to avoid the old pitfalls of a necessary, but unworkable, god.
There are numerous similarities between these three. Whereas Kearney’s required Phenomenologically-based shift of perspective is explained as imagination ceasing to “take itself for granted and (coming) reflectively to acknowledge its own pre-reflective engagement with everyday lived projects and preoccupations,” Stevens has this as his “supreme fiction” and his requirement that imagination and reality co-adhere for an effective poem/narrative/life. For MacIntyre these same ideas are present, at least in part, in his notions of dependence and “goods of excellence.” These men are all humanists in the sense that they have seated the human capacity for ethical behaviour at the center of their lives and read it as the center of ours as well. And yet they also seem monks-in-disguise, not humanists but theists: their work seems a kind of secular application of the contemporary Christian man’s tendency to priesthood when those men aren’t in agreement with the dogma and social practices of the institutional church.
Anyway, I’ve gone off topic. It’s just that I find it interesting the similarities in religiosity, ideas about ethics and their apparent shared assumptions about what empowers and/or constitutes imagination.
One last quote from Kearney, to resonate with Stevens’ struggle between imagination and reality:
The ethical potential of narrative imagination may be summarized under three main heading: (1) the testimonial capacity to bear witness to a forgotten past; (2) the empathic capacity to identify with those different to us (victims and exemplars alike); and (3) the critical-utopian capacity to challenge official stories with unofficial or dissenting ones which open up alternative ways of being.
Compare Stevens’ imaginative force: it is the thing that will ultimately return us “not as a god, but as a god might be, / naked among them, like a savage source.” The alternative way of being to which Kearney alludes is this utopian semi-divinity, an ethical, reasonable yet passionate, human being who shares the world of possibility with the “other.” Here is the basic vision of these post-modern Catholics — an utopian ethic founded on the power of human narrative/poetic imagination. It explains their similarities, and their assumptions, but I still haven’t answered my own question. Without the battle – this “challenge” – as the motivational centerpiece, how will the imagined narrative go?
August 22nd, 2010
Imagination, Part 1
Wallace Stevens’ essay “The Noble Rider” is really about rehabilitating the concept of nobility and resiting it as “a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed.”
It (nobility) is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature.The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
What really interests me in the essay is the assumptions Stevens’ makes about imagination. He has a poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” in which he says
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
I want to be careful here because, despite Stevens’ apparent conversion to Catholicism on his death bed, I suspect what he was agreeing to and what the attending Priest thought he was agreeing to was rather different. For one thing, the fact that there was a realm in which Stevens could equate imagination with a divine entity seems a little different from the divine entity postulated by Pope Benedict XVI and probably quite different from the Pope that was reigning at the time of Stevens’ dust-up with cancer. In fact the equation of imagination with the divine sounds a lot more like Carl Jung than Joseph Ratzinger.
Regardless, this idea of what imagination is lets us know it was of critical importance to Stevens. In “The Noble Rider” he says that
the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential.
This posits imagination and reality as mutually necessary but disparate forces/entities. The idea that imagination is a force independent of the world (reality) is a common enough assumption in the West. It underpins much of what we think we know about the world and our place within it. Stevens’ narrative that results from the assumption is to posit a place for the poet that is most certainly at least semi-divine, which is why he is so interested in rehabilitating the concept of nobility. The struggle between imagination and reality is the engine (the force) which makes art transformative and changes society.
In the first quote above, this force, which he identifies in the essay as “nobility” manifests as the pressure imagination exerts as it “adheres” to reality, as it narrates the nature of nature. Nobility of person is the individual’s part of the more universal or general Mind/Imagination (supreme fiction). It is this general Mind that reminds me so much of Jung’s Collective Unconscious and what I think Stevens’ meant when he said “god.”
Imagination, for Stevens, is both a thing and a force. This seems to be the case throughout the essay and, although not as thoroughly thought out as many of the Phenomenologists who also write about imagination, it seems to follow the same basic line. A “thing” is not an object contained within the concept that is its name, but a more of a thing-in-itself, a force that forever escapes our attempts to contain it.
There is a line near the end of “The Noble Rider:” “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words.” I am not at all saying that Stevens’ was a Phenomenologist but rather that the focus on forces in Stevens’ thinking led to some of the same places that the focus on events led Phenomenologists. If imagination is a force that contends with reality, that posits at least two basic “substances” and creates duality narratives of the white/black, raw/cooked sort. It also makes possible a third world, which mediates the two forces. This is the world of words, or art. This is the world of things in the Phenomenological sense. It is the words that attach us to reality but in such a way as to also attach reality to the imagination.
Albeit, Stevens never saw either imagination nor reality as possible without the other (at least in a world without humans or other imagining beings in it), but it is still a world riven and eternally struggling. In this he was very much of his time and place. For me though, I cannot help but wonder how the narrative would work if imagination and reality are not two but one force. One materially driven force, at least at the level of organization that can support human life. I keep coming back to photons and waves. I know it seems like two but it isn’t. It’s one. Then, there is only reality and imagination is a part of it. So it couldn’t be narrated as a battle, but could be narrated as something akin to fetal development, or perhaps the odd and curious development of the first “cell” wall – something entirely unprecedented but nevertheless a function of known forces.
Anyway, the point is just that if imagination is taken out of the dual world of a soul’s battle with reality, then how will the narrative go? That is my question.