An overripe pear fallen from a pear tree covid19 summer 2020
"warrentining" in New York state Adirondacks.
Archetypal psychoanalyst, astrologer, cabalist, and writer Charles Ponce's phrase "the exquisite angelology of the ego", I take from his astounding essay, "Paracelsus and the Wound", the wound being Great Nature, Her Reality, and how most of human civilization and philosophy has been efforted/designed to overcome or transcend Her, meaning finitude, decay, and death...I quote extensively here since he, Ponce, minces no words though they, like he is, are poetic, evocative, and re-orienting. And sobering. Very. A KATSU as in a zen slap meant to evoke instant clarity, what the French call, "éclaircissement" - from éclaircir (“enlighten, clarify”).
And, human, all too human, I never knew what "éclair" means but now I know and so I prefer clarity and enlightenment to be filled with "dark chocolate".
The opening few sentences are my own from my blogspot essay on Pathological Happiness (don't get me going!!):
"Great Nature runs riot upon and within that which we can project some 'thing' (I like the German word for 'thing' - DING), some ding called "happiness" ('happy', meaning 'happen, luck, an eventing') but without a doubt the crushing dissolution, the decay and ending, is Nature's way, Her insistency, despite all our reification of wishful metaphysics - "for these subtleties must concretely be" we choose to believe in understandable desperation.
Ponce writes, and rights us, reorients us much and necessarily toward the ongoing immediacy of Existence, of Nature in Her appeal, in Her drive for attestation in each and every living ding:
...we rebel essentially against the autonomy of Nature, the natural breakdown of Nature, the need of Nature to relax into itself, even to collapse into itself in the way that trees retreat into themselves with the advent of Winter...We turn away from our bodies in illness and death not because we have resolved the issue of the wound, but because it is far easier to think of an afterlife, far less fearful and painful to surround ourselves with the good feeling that we may not only escape this life in one psychic piece, but that we will no longer have to concern ourselves with our physical humanity...This approach to death robs us of our tie to Nature, strips us of our humanity in favor of an exquisite angelology of the ego. It allows us to slip past the experience of the mystery: that the body is indeed a great temple which moves slowly towards a breakdown and dissolution. The alchemists knew this: that the soul cannot fly, cannot be released from the vessel until the body is broken down, dissolved, and even putrified. When you read the alchemists you will discover that this breakdown and dissolution is the beginning of the Great Work, and that without experiencing and seeing, watching and attending to this momentous operation--keeping the fire of heart and attention at the proper degree--nothing happens. The soul does not fly, the subtle body is not created, nor is the imagination which is the soul's experience of itself open to eternity. It is this focus on the body and the wound in both life and death that leads to the sacred marriage of the alchemists. Paracelsus stressed, "The eternal is a sign of the dissolution of Nature, and not the beginning of created things, and the end in all things which no nature is without."
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..A true medicine and counseling should therefore be one that addresses the immediate, the body of things and the body, for if we really wish to enter into the eternal, see the universe in a grain of sand, we must in our imagination understand...the soul's expression of itself through body, and that woundedness, disease, and the putrefactio of our humanity are for us in the West ordained as the focus of a yoga that sees in these sufferings the gods we have rejected."
- Charles Ponce, from "Paracelsus and the Wound", Working the Soul, Reflections on Jungian Psychology, pgs. 25-26.
In a personal letter Carl Jung wrote in response to a man who was overly identified with the spiritual and had a very problematic relationship to his body, nature and the social world of work and relationships. The man had written to Jung for advice and these two lines by Jung made me laugh when I read them since I, too, have been very much like the man in the letter. I love Jung's advice which goes well with Ponce's making sense of alchemical experiments and texts:
"You barricade yourself from the world with exaggerated saviour fantasies.
So climb down from the mountain of your humility and follow your nose."
Or snout. Sprout one if you don't got one. Slither, crouch, slouch stump and slump toward your own Bedlam-ahem and give Nature Her Due. She's gonna get it anyway.
At a crucial point in my own Jungian analysis where I very much was like the man in the letter, I had indeed, hesititatingly, painfully, begun to incarnate, own instinctually, to necessarily dis-identify with transcendence, "spirituality" (all kinds). What I needed for wholeness/hold-ness sake was what Jung calls an enantiodromia, "the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development." I was out of balance, out of Tao, and needed to land, even go underground to retrieve the wounded reptilian part of my self.
Hard work. But "dromia" happened....I dreamed of being in a dark swamp in pitch darkness far from a city which faintly glowed behind me in far off distance. I knew that I had to keep walking in the darkness, in swamp marsh, mud, thicker. Afraid? YES. But I HAD to do it. At some point I thought I saw to lights ahead of me in the distance which gave me hope and a conscious place to walk toward. As I approached closer the two lights got smaller, bright but smaller. Not a town or outskirts of one. The lights were close together and were peering! at the edge of a thicket, eyes bulging at the water surface. Terror! But the eyes were wide set apart by at least 6 feet or so. I realized that what I was walking toward was a massively large alligator, not a normal gator at all but I knew intuitively that this was "the god of Gators." Fascinated. Entranced. I decided to wake up out of the dream after this close encounter. As I was coming up out of sleep and dream I heard a voice, the voice of the GATOR speaking to me, counseling me "to step less lightly upon the world."
Much more to say but this dream put a coda to the years of incarnating, becoming human. And then the difficult work of living consciously with the alligator in an openly run by gators human world.
Theodore Roethke's poem, Infirmity, a new "scripture" for sure complements Charles Ponce's text. Much more commentary is needed when taking, as a preacher does, two texts to explicate and find a third ding, a synthesis derived from the two but no time here to do so...let Roethke have a say. I think Paracelsus and Ponce would acknowledge this poem as an alchemical text reflecting what they "have been at and about" in their incarnations:
Infirmity
In purest song one plays the constant fool
As changes shimmer in the inner eye.
I stare and stare into a deepening pool
And tell myself my image cannot die.
I love myself: that’s my one constancy.
Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!
Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity;
There’s little left I care to call my own.
Today they drained the fluid from a knee
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone;
Thus I conform to my divinity
By dying inward, like an aging tree.
The instant ages on the living eye;
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down—
The soul delights in that extremity.
Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath;
I’m son and father of my only death.
A mind too active is no mind at all;
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone;
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal,
The change from dark to light of the slow moon,
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear,
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire.
Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives
I’ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill.
The great day balances upon the leaves;
My ears still hear the bird when all is still;
My soul is still my soul, and still the Son,
And knowing this, I am not yet undone.
Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,—
Eternity’s not easily come by.
When opposites come suddenly in place,
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see
How body from spirit slowly does unwind
Until we are pure spirit at the end.*
**
CODA to go with the pear — A poem written for Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser some years back,
The "Idea of Pear Tree"
a pear tree forgets only itself as
an audacity
limbs recall themselves
appear to reach
one cannot see them
reaching
they may be silent but
we cannot know that toward
later sweetness they yearn
then seed a still dirt around
content to lie down
the idea of "pear tree"
reduces to all sparks
yet
no illusion of darknes
hastens the pear
but O it tastes
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