I recently purchased The Red Book. As you probably know it is the reproduction of Carl Jung’s most personal work on what he calls the collective unconscious. The book is astoundingly beautiful. It is full of illuminations and calligraphic text.  I know this despite the fact that I have yet to open the cover.

I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book.  Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.

So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.

I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.

I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.

Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.

What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.

Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like.  I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me.  I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.

The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?

All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.

I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.

But wait a minute!  I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout).  The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.

At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.

There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.

So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have  a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.

Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.

Cool.

I live in an older (ugly) house in Vancouver. It’s a rental, and the landlords are really good about keeping the interior functional but not at all good about making it look nice. Apart from sending someone round to cut down the grass up front during the summer, nothing else is done. So the house (a grey clapboard looking narrow 3-story perched up on a little hill) presents a bland face to the world.

What I’d like to do is set someone I know free with some paints. I have no idea what ideas she’d come up with but I think I’d like a combination of the modes below.  The idea that a house should present a face to the world that says something about its dwellers seems deeply right to me. I wonder if I just paid for the supplies whether the landlords would get all huffy or they’d be like “wow, that’s cool.”  I mean really, the house is of less value than the land it sits on and I suspect that someday the house will get torn down and rebuilt for someone who is upwardly mobile in an deeply economic sense. And it occurs to me to wonder, if they painted their home with iconic representations of personhood, what would it look like?

I went to the museum in Victoria yesterday and I had a bit of a shock.

I’ve lived here for nearly four years now and this is the first time I’ve gone. Partly that’s because I’ve been to severally really great museums and so now I tend to measure all new museums against their measure and that is really not very fair.  I spent, for example, a lot of time as a child in one of the Carnegie-Mellon museums, and in the British Museum and to tell the truth they’re pretty hard to measure up to.  And while the Royal BC Museum is really wonderful in many ways, it is not a museum with anywhere near the breadth of the C-MM or the BM.

Still, I liked what was there. They represent, for example, various parts of BC history and environment in permanent dioramas that do a really good job of giving a visual sense of what they variously represent.  There is also, on another floor, a First Nations exhibit (also permanent) that provides story, examples of art, culture, etc.  Now I find exhibits of First Nations a bit difficult.  There’s the history for one thing  – imagine Turks staging historical displays of the Armenians, or the Taliban leadership building a loving memorial to women, or a Nazi museum to all things Jewish.  That may seem a bit harsh, but there you go, that’s feeling for you. But for the shock…
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…time off. This year at 4.5 days. Lovely.

Of course Christmas means more than that, having been raised in the Western Civilized World. All the lights and stuff are symbolic of the dark skies that will cycle into the spring for one thing, but now, in the world of city and work, Christmas has become about time to read.

It could be worse.

When I was still a child I held in my hands a slightly curved arc of yellowed bone that had small holes drilled into it. The holes swirled across the surface like a flattened, elongated S. It was a moon map that one of my relations had made long before my life began.  Keyed to a particular bit of horizon, the drilled holes marked the rising point of the moon as it wended its way over the course of a bit more than a month. I’ve never seen another, and have yet to make one myself, but I can still feel the bone in my hands. It made a huge impact on me, although at the time, and for decades after, I could not have said why. Even now, as I think I am beginning to understand it, its power over my imagination is still largely beyond my linguistic mind – as all good symbols should be.
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The CBC reported that there has been a drug bust. They estimate that the value of the bust is more than $1,000,000 but this isn’t the real news. As most of you probably know, the winter Olympics are being held here shortly. The real news is that apparently ecstasy dealers are excited about that too.

Advertising and its reach

Nope. It’s not a joke.

Today in 1838: Emma Wedgwood and Charles Darwin became engaged. That’s what is at the core of November 11 for me. It’s the thing that holds all the rest of the pieces together.

I have a day off work today. Ostensibly this is to honor those that are dead in war. All week last week, and for the first part of this week, there have been old men in uniform with paper-covered cans and red plastic poppies camping in the corners of work-a-day high-rises quietly asking for money and to be remembered.

Here are some of the things I remember.
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In Newsweek (I found it by way of Arts & Letters Daily) there is an article about Kandinsky called Kandinsky’s Influence on Painting is Far-Reaching. It’s a delight. Apart from the author’s insight there are 11 paintings loaded into the presentation.  My favourite was Elizabeth Murray’s “Open Drawer.”

What the author (Peter Plagens) says:

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The purpose of Western esoteric tradition, writes Versluis, is “the restoration of paradise, which could also be expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other.” For this to occur, a change of consciousness (or rather a transcendance of consciousness into awareness) is required. In the Western tradition, this change is codified in text providing both the means and the method of personal transformation. The word (lettter, number, glyph, what have you) is sacred because it is both the method of transformation and the desired outcome.
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The New York Times has an article about the publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book. (My son sent me the link this morning.) It’s 10 pages of goodness and is essentially both a tracing of the rather tortuous route to publication and an examplar of the book and its ways in action.

It’s an expensive book — on Amazon its nearly $120. Still, here’s a look at a couple of the pages.

It’s a contemporary illuminated manuscript. I mean who could not buy that.

There are more pictures available on the Times site.