The gift that keeps on giving - one of my most favorite Christmas presents ever - besides the ultimate which was the utterly unexpected and dreamed of telescope my father got me for Christmas 1966, I believe. There's a photo of it and me near Cape Canaveral with Ellen Collins from my journalism class. Dad drove me and some journalism class students (about 7 in all along with my younger brother Richard) to Florida to watch the launch of either Apollo 7 or 8. The launch was seen from where we were for only 8 seconds or so because there was pouring rain and low clouds. But NASA in its weather wisdom was go for a launch. Suffice it to say, 8 seconds of fire and smoke and a mocking distant and distancing rumble was sloppy seconds. So it goes, or went.
I didn't realize it then but Ellen was "sweet on me" but my head then was in the stars (obsessed with astronomy) and Jesus mud (pervades the air down South) and up mine own frightened arse so much so that infatuation of hers, Ellen's, with addled me "went over like a pregnant pole vaulter."
Anyhow, the telescope rules for childhood/teen gift, and in adult-enough Christmas this book A World Unexpected: Portraits of Southern Childhood, an anthology, was given to me by an older brother in 1987. He and I, exiles from the South, and childhood in specifics too numerous to recount here, were voracious readers and aspiring (well, I was aspirating) writers and, with physical distance out of the South, post Nam where he was a chaplain's assistant, he had Philadelphia and a radical Jesus (Nam woke him up out of the Calvinista haze/craze), and I had my own self-exile from the "Christhaunted Landscape of the South" (Flannery O'Connor's very accurate summation of the infernal sump "sodden toward corn pone" (sorry Mr. Eliot), and tons of books, poetry, and some long enough employment at psychiatric places, institutes, mental health centers, half-way houses, juvenile detention centers, etc. to know, rather, to have repeated confirmation that I was "a lost fart in a catastrophic whirlwind" (a dream of my father as a massive hurricane covering the entire Gulf Ocean almost hitting the USA Gulf coast where he was born); all the psychiatric jobs were therapeutic for me, I felt that I was a patient or resident the entire time only I had the keys to the wards and could come and go. Thank you sweet Jeebus.
So, I fled the expected catastrophe of the South (but not of myself) to the unexpected world of New York City, arriving NOT without projections, all positive, the first being that there were months of piled and piling snow! Within two months I began Jungian analysis which was one of the primary goals of getting to NYC. I had discovered Jung while in high school, senior year, only two paragraphs in a high school psychology textbook, laughably paltry offering that book was in retrospect, surprised that there was a class called psychology back then, but I got what I needed from the class and the book - two paragraphs about Carl Gustav Jung, complexes (he coined the term) and archetypes (he renewed and expanded the word's meaning and usage). BINGO.
Time passed. Then there was a woman (still best friends), I'll call her Evangeline, who strayed into the Christian college I then attended in Tennessee early 1970's; she arrived from NYC for only a year then fled! I am convinced, no, I know, that she wound up there, predestined!, only to meet me as my "Anima-as-Fate" (sorry Ellen Collins) and gave me, ushered me (chastely) into, the projected and hopefully to be gained or at least cozied up to "world of art, literature, jazz, culture, et. al. and international culture" available out one's door in NYC. A one woman missionary who by just being herself with me was graduate school level (for me, probably kindergarten) education. Gertrude Stein? WHOOO? John Coltrane? WHOOO? Henry Cowell? WHOOO? and on and on. Virginia Wolfe? (I did know Edward Albee's play from high school but had no idea that who Virginia Wolfe was a real person).
Evangeline asked me if I had read Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections [almost wrote "Desire"]. No. I hadn't, wrote it down in my journal then and there and later headed to the college library to see if it was there. NOT. So hitch-hiked down the mountain into the city to a shopping mall that did have the book. I purchased 2 others that had a big impact then and there and ongoingly, Fritz Perl's 2 books on Gestalt Therapy, his autobiography, "In and Out of the Garbage Pail" (that "pail" being the Freudian unconscious - place of repressed gunk and stank and DESIRE - and his "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim" which, upon reading, was immediately useable in that I could dialogue with dream figures, complexes, etc. and actually gain some real ground, at least a sand bar (after the tidal wave dream) to wiggle my wolf claws in).
So. Time progresses back to me newly in NYC, out of the South and I
With the anamnesis that is psychoanalysis, memory is supreme, with dreams giving narratives beneath ego memories and narratives of life experiences, and so the South and I were slouching (no Bethlehem in sight) "on the Jungian couch" (Zurich WAS in sight, sorta) - my analyst sat at one end and I at the other - not a Freudian couch situation though there was plenty talk of early childhood, parents, clan, community. Sex, sure cuz John Calvin ruled and still rules the South (and makes existentialists out of those who have fled, Calvin and Camus, nanook nanook, abandon all hope for an ongoing lifetime of theological rope-a-dope having grown "an arm to box with God, the odd odd assortment of them, variations on a theme evolving/devolving, distorting perfectly marvelous words like "grace" "renewal" et. al. into weaponized (a word used too much these days) self-hatred as the flavour du-jour Western Deity tormented and teased.
My analyst, Bertine (not her real name), was patient enough with me. I now feel badly for her since I couldn't figure out shit from peanut butter then - am a bit more nuanced now - jar of jam nearby for frequent assistance. It didn't register to me when with her that she had studied and trained with both Gordon Allport AND Carl Rogers. After some years of clinical practice she trained to become a Jungian analyst (9 years of training!).
Poor Bertine. Had to put up with me, my acting out but not knowing such as not showing up for sessions (and not paying for missed sessions). Last minute cancellations. Again, not paying for the missed sessions. I think she knew I'd probably bolt in rebellion, etc. Blah blah. God bless her. I was hard work and didn't know it. Had no idea, really, what therapy sessions were about, the rules, expectations, etc.
So, not quite yet fired by Evangeline, 1987 and Christmas, and A World Unsuspected happened which confirmed that I was not the only basket case out of the South and "so-called" Christianity which is as predictable as the violence it does to countless hordes, "soul murder", what a very helpful to me book calls pathological Christianity - which presumes there is it's better alter - but I'm not interested though my psyche has this obstinate, obdurate Christian part that I've had to learn to live with, make room for, along with many other parts that "don't hold with that Fundamentalist stuff", in other words, I've had to expand a sense of self, have had to allow for its inevitable pushing the perimeters beyond the "official ones" sanctified by sect and society. All this from my learning that the Psyche indeed contains worlds" and, like Whitman, I, me, Warkles of the Wasteland, contain worlds...the trick is not to get inflated over the largeness that ego is but a part of (vitally since ego = consciousness). Dreams are part of that largeness as well as personal narratives which offer new thread lines from previous narratives which are not forgotten or rejected but included as the narrative life continues on.
Time presently presents NOW ellipses....
....So, every Christmas I make sure to reread parts of Alex Jones offerings of various Southern writers mostly from the second half, some from last third, of the 20th Century.
Two screen grabs (grabbed from the book online) are 1) ofo William Carlos Williams from whence the book title derives, and then the opening two paragraphs of Padgett Powell's autobiographical accounts of Southern childhood. And a photo of me near Canaveral, my bro on the right. I have a photo of me and Ellen with the telescope, me grimacing but now sure why. I'll search for that. But that gift from my father - "fear was my father, father fear"— Theodore Roethke - was, looms still, massively, conveys that he actually did "see" or "get" and support a vital part of who I was then and now. And this was a man of his generation without a psychological bone in his body. I'll call it, intuition. And picked up enough that there was love after all. But the Hurricane was too big.
And if Perls and others are correct, that one is everything in the dream then, gulp, I too am that Hurricane. I too am that Tidal Wave. I too am that violent Deity of the West. I am that young "spiritual woman" (who later committed suicide). Makes me sit up straight, alert. Check with her in fridge and see if I've at least consciously fed her, satisfied her, quelled her terror, made her confident enough that I can manage catastrophe, develop capacities to do so, not perfectly...and not hide out in the fridge or Christianity or alternative bastions.
NOTE: I once did a gestalt and became that tidal wave and was AWED by "my" POWER, the physical sense, and learned that I had to ground and let that power flow....great stuff, psychology. Saved my life. Does so still. Not pushing it though. 2 paragraphs, anima-as-fate and exile, new territory of "the couch" and reframing the fridge, the meat, and on and on.
Did I mention Moby Dick? Melville? how that White Whale and I had, and have, ongoing business. My inner Ismael and Ahab, that real "god-man figure", Queequeg? NO? Just did. All that for another account.
Here's a link to the book online...not sure it's still in print :
https://archive.org/details/worldunsuspected00harr/page/14/mode/1up
One endures long enough to break through thunder,
a taut belly, a smooth place for lips to land.
One may reach a Pure Land which has no logic,
the tedious seasons of a long life endured.
Still, one gathers names of each joven prince
passed beneath loving, yes, arduous hands.
Again, upon Kingfisher's wings I blow these kisses,
this music, your patient ear awaiting the purist pearl,
for you were once the bequeathed, escaped girl
without fear of oceans, this one between us which
now must be overflown to reach you.
No comments:
Post a Comment