We shod our feet against what long loss of motion,
eyes downcast or boldly returning the stare?
Beneath each eye there's some familiar look we refuse.
We map our way to sleep in the palms of shy or frightened hands.
—Raul Voz
The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it though not always and not everywhere."
—C.G. Jung
"His defeat astonishes and overwhelms him, but he claims that he has doomed himself since childhood... submerged in a ghastly present, he leaps, at the same time, far into the future, turns to look at his dead life and finds it exemplary. He is himself and the Other, as always; and, as always, the Other is imaginary...
...Hopelessness is its own hope. He creates a way out by himself; he is even the way out; and he knows it. He knows that he is being observed by an invisible witness who will come and lay his hand on Jean's brow and whisper gentle things to him:
"You would not seek me if you had not found me."
—Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr p 191
" the refulgent point
of the dazzlement in which
I stray in order to be. ”
―Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
[The name I've given to the photo is my own poetic response to the image. A sculpture in Princeton, NJ sculpture garden. Click on it to enlarge the image. Photo by Warren Falcon, September 2008. Currently seeking the names of the sculptor and sculpture to give full and due credit]
Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others, and at the same time much less......because there was nothing left which would link me to them...
— my rearrangement of quotes from text of C.G. Jung immediately below
The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own; that to achieve consciousness and discover the nature of one's own inferiority it is at times necessary to go against one's own ego-dominated commandments.
—Charles Ponce, Working the Soul, pgs. 68-69
Canto 1 — The Daimon According to C.G. Jung
Carl Gustav Jung spoke of his life long difficulty of living with and in conscious relationship to "the daimon", a kind of demi-urge of massive creativity insisting/persisting that life must be consciously lived, embraced, wrested within the givens. The daimon is a "striving after" demanding evolution at all costs.
"I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. Itoverpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because Iwas in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything onceattained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.
I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed onme and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not alwaysobey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?
For some people I was continually present and close to them so long as they were related to my inner world; but then it might happen that I was no longer with them, because there was nothing left which would link me to them. I had to learn painfully that people continuedto exist even when they had nothing more to say to me. Many excited in me a feeling of living humanity, but only when they appeared within the magic circle of psychology; next moment, when he spotlight cast its beam elsewhere, there was nothing to be seen. I was able to become intensely interested in many people; butas soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In thisway I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.
"Shamefully
A power wrests away the heart from us,
For the Heavenly Ones each demand sacrifice;
But if it should be withheld
Never has that led to good?
says Holderlin.
This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if I were on a battlefield, saying, "Now you have fallen, my good comrade, but I must go on." For "shamefully a power wrests awaythe heart from us." I am fond of you, indeed I love you, but I cannotstay. There is something heart-rending about that. And I myself amthe victim; I cannot stay. But the daimon manages things so that onecomes through, and blessed inconsistency sees to it that in flagrant contrast to my "disloyalty" I can keep faith in unsuspected measure.Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others,and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, oneis always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can oneachieve moderation.
The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it though not always and not everywhere."-- C.G. Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pg. 355-357, Vintage Books, 198
Canto Two — Of Madness
What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? -- Theodore Roethke
What I find most astonishing -- aside from that belief of mine, which never ceases to surprise me by the very fact of its surprising lack of pleasantness, the belief that I might very easily -- as they say -- lose my mind one day, not that I suspect I am about to, or am even...nearby...for I'm not that sort; merely that it is not beyond...happening: some gentle loosening of the moorings sending the balloon adrift -- and I think that is the only outweighing thing: adrift; the...becoming a stranger...the world, quite...uninvolved, for I never see it as violent, only a drifting...But I could never do it -- go adrift-- for what would become of you?
-— Edward Albee, opening lines from A Delicate Balance, A Play In Three Acts, Samuel French, 1967
I wish there was something practical I could say about madness.
To change only one word in a line of poetry by the late Anne Sexton for the purpose of my own attempt at a practical essaying on the topic at hand, "I was born doing field work in madness," which I suppose has it's own practicality, some Devil's, nay, Daimon's Primer imprinted, though not in literal print, in every human brain and spine. For all this hissing amiss and gathering at lost crawses and these grizzled grists for Blakean Satanic Mental Mills, in madness the "Daimon's in the details", drivel and dervishes prevailing.
Enough people--Carl Jung, the innovative Swiss psychoanalyst and writer being one, and he speaks much of this, of the daimon, of madness, of mentations foments--have discovered that there are threads in, methods to, madness; indeed, there are myths in madness, "myth-ods" (to be wordly playful with emphasis on the -odds), so the meanings therein need to be attended to, midwived, espied via spurious speculums pushed, pulled and pried through into bridges between worlds, between the "normal" consensus world and that of the unconscious which has its own ever-shifting "norms" in terms consistent internally and infernally to itself.
Practical things to say about madness and its myth-ods are hard to come by, at least for me, therefore I can and will speak only of my own madness and of some of my experiences with the madness in others. We do have recourse to religions of all sorts, to artists from bone carvings to cave walls, to castles to museums, to madhouses to mausoleums and the marbled warbling more-- those poets and writers like Nagarjuna, like Jesus, Shakespeare, like Blake, like Joyce, like Beckett, like Gertrude Stein, like so very very many gone naying neti neti before us here now in rumored, malhumored, millenia-wired primal primers in mind of mind on Mind, of going beyond it by going more deeply into It.
Madness justifiably disturbs us so much that we invent, and not with bad intentions, theories and techniques about mind and mental illness, we concoct noxious potions and potages to reign it in, to explain it, to take the reptile-filled smelly sump of human soul, fortunately not the only place on the human soul map, and drain it, dry it, then return the once-were-mad ones, ourselves, back to consensus reality, two lumps of sugar in the tepid tea and nevermind that a tree swaying just out the window at twilight menacingly or mercifully becomes in cornea-corners and viscous-veined eyewebs an ever-maker soft-soughed shaker of mind.
Canto Three — "Hell Has Value,"
A Monstrous Mad Confession
Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we're going through hell.
— William Carlos Williams from Introduction to Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Was I too glib about eternal things? — Theodore Roethke
The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions -- traitors to the selves we thought we were. — C.G Jung
Four years ago I had my most clear image and decisive and momentous encounter with my own daimon.
I always intuitively knew it was there within me, that resistant, oppositional force with it's own agenda and power all the more insistantly, compulsively predominant and forceful because of its being rejected and repressed. So much for all my sincere Michael Jackson-esque Mystical Moonwalking toward imagined transcendence-of-the-dusty daimonic, instinctual, material world and, of course, according to the gurus, avatars, magicians, high priests, high priestesses and values of all those systems and pseudo-systems I had spent long years exploring, to quote my mocking Daimon, "I done them all wrong."
This, my daimon, when I finally saw him, was a dark, underworld, Grendel-like creature whom I saw hunched before me while crossing the street at W. 91st and Central Park West one day heading reluctantly and resentfully toward a professional commitment that I had come to loath. I realize now it was the daimon's loathing and my ego was finally catching up to his dark awareness and wisdom that the dream of transcendence, as that daimon-possessed bard John Lennon once sang, that "dream is over".
I stopped mid-street and said outloud, "I SEE YOU!! What do you have to say to me?!"
A car horn blared as I dodged and scuttled to a park bench with 5 minutes to spare before the dreaded meeting with "the Holy Pokeys" as I had come to call my now very alienated once-were-compadres for they were convinced that their sanctimonious boundary-disrespecting, insistant poking at my and each others inner privates and vericose vicera was good for me and them when I and the daimon knew it was an elaborate form of psycho-spiritual entertainment of egoic proportions mimicing transformative encounter while actually being a form of Jerry Springer-like pornography--a public display baring and spilling one's most sacred and secret guts naively, foolishly, luridly and self-destructively before undeserving others in desperate need of some presentiment of community, surrogate family belonging, "process" and purpose--prurience by any other name...
Hastily seated I asked again, "What do you have to say to me?"
Daimon answered, "I fucking HATE spirituality!!!"
I burst into mad laughter for he had named an as yet inexpressible and yet to be expressed difficult-to-own truth that I had yet been able to own up to much less confess to another and mosts certainly not to the "Holy Sm-others". As he and I spoke he ragefully told me that I had kept him "in the deepest and darkest depths of Hell" and I knew when he said it that this was true. I wept for I had been very much unconsciously identified with him as him, a persecutable and persecuted monster. He hated spirituality which would not at all embrace his essential instinctual energy, "SACRED ENERGY!" he screamed. I knew then that I would have to remove myself from all so-called and supposedly spiritual affiliations professionally and inwardly introjected. Excising/integrating these introjections proved, and still does, to be difficult, slow, stubborn and tenacious work. These had served as rigid character defenses propelling me away from the depths, material, psychological and instinctual.
I told the daimon that I did not know how to work with and for him but that we could try to find a way. I also knew, and he confirmed, that our work together would offend myself as I knew myself to be as well as many others I had once been associated with personally and professionally. "Was I prepared to lose all this?" he asked. Already miserable I said, "Yes." I then said I wanted to take him out of Hell. To my surprise he told me that I "should not and could not lose the Hell realm. It has tremendous value to the soul but humankind has not been able yet to assimilate this aspect of soul much less acknowledge any value to it." This got my attention!! Having been born into, bred into, and educated into a Christian Fundamentalist church and culture (this permeates all of America and not just the South where I am from) where Hell has no value to humans unless we're cursing others to go there and has value to a rigidly "just and exacting deity" (Jehovah) I was "all ears." This news of the value of Hell was tough meat. This would not be easily chewed on but chew I would and I intuitively knew of the correctness of Daimon's view. Jung apparently had arrived at a very similar understanding (see his book, Answer To Job).
The telos, the purpose, the aim, the goal, is the ongoing, at least the attempt of, assimilation of Chaos (read/study William Blake's "The Four Zoas"1). I have yet to assimilate Daimon's wisdom on the above but this is my personal meat and drink, probably my ongoing life task to work till the end of my days (See Canto Four below). There is a conscious cave return, an open-eyed descent into the underworld, the nether places where Daimon has hurled angrily at the sealed gate keeping him in the dark carrying all our disowned and projected darkness in our Icarus-Angel flight into the sun trying to obliterate our Night-selves.
James Hillman's book, Dreams and the Underworld, deliciously explores the dimmed yet dynamic dimensions of the Nightworld, the mythic unconscious where upon entering there, says Hillman, human Dayworld values must be left behind. In the Nightworld, in Dreamtime, in the Unconscious, the world of daimons and more, one enters often kicking and screaming or-- dangerously to self and others--New-Age naively, to encounter a more accurate and politically-incorrect-to-the-ego-and-dayworld-values view of what individuals and collectives really are like. Because, according to Carl Jung, dreams are ruthless, "impartial facts" from the objective psyche many people resist them knowing that if taken seriously their whole view of self, other and reality will be profoundly altered and not so readily wrestled into the ever narrowing corrals of (dis)positivity. Out of site in this case guarantees out-of-their-mind; even apparently "sane" and cool dimentias will out, the nightworld, the daimonic will out by any means necessary and cares not a hoot whether one smells of light and sandalwood, is yogically stretched yet still karmically kvetched and shadow projected for the psyche, the daimonic eventually, finally-had-enough, turns like the proverbial whipped dog and bites.
In Michael Eigen's immensely wise and helpful book, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, in a section describing the function of faith in psychoanalysis and therapy work he speaks of "the explosive or catastrophic potential in every therapeutic encounter" (page 124). This is certainly so in any encounter with the daimon. Therapeutic work implies the goal of becoming conscious and making consciousness, thus a conscious explosive/catastrophic encounter with the daimon is an inevitable arrival in good, and extremely patient, therapy. Eigen describes William Blake's Heaven, a similar description which my daimon depicts of Hell as does Hillman in his book on the underworld, "William Blake describes heaven as all out war between every human capacity in which all have their say without compromise yet incessantly enrich and are enriched by others. Here faith functions as a boundless or infinite container (pages 124/125)."
The Demonic In Groups When The Rejected And Projected Daimonic Raises Its Head
I have without exception personally repeatedly found that "containment" in overtly identified-as-spiritual groups to be the exact opposite of Blake's description. The so-called "spirituality of the "spiritual group" and it's leader demand an absolute merger usually with the leader and her agenda on the leader's and the merged-with-the-leader, obedient group's terms. If one begins to e-merge and individuate from that leader and her group then an e-mergency ensues where usually one is identified as a kind of virus, a faction, and is thus scapegoated and run out, excommunicated or fired. The pathological narcissism of the powerful charismatic leader or leaders are daimon-identified (meaning mugged by the daimonic and thus are unconsciously acting inflatedly demon-maniacal). Being unconscious of one's daimon and of a group daimon makes all vulnerable to powerful, numinous upsurges of the daimonic. There is indeed an archetypal energy afoot but not necessarily all-good and "spiritual". The leader appears to be all-good and to do everything, even process, the received "right way" but without authentic recognition of shadow the followers and underlings in the group are assigned the task of carrying the shadow of the leader who usually can find no shadow in themselves when inevitably there begins to be "trouble in her paradise." This inability to find the shadow is willful, very toxic and pathological. And, maddeningly, the leader or leader- identified group experiences her/itself as victims of that one, carrying, often naming the shadow, emerging from the group trance and individuating away from it.
Heaven or Hell or, rather, Heaven and Hell--for there is not one without the other--divine warfare between human capacities as well as transpersonal powers vie for conscious attention and relating to within the individual and the group. Humans, flawed as we are, have the very slow yet gradually growing capacity for consciousness which is within and partakes of "a boundless or infinite container," the Self, Atman, or any number of words attempting to approach this mysterious yet palpable, experiencable even though unnameble hold. I stress the need for the ego here in this operation, this alchemical operation, this warfare of human capacities "which enrich and are enriched by others." Thus the essential importance of recognizing one's daimon and working with it. And acknowledging that it is and will ongoingly be very messy so let us not sanctify "cleanliness" especially in psychological soul work no matter where one is forced by the daimon to do it.
Psychology has an ongoing fantasy (and by fantasy I mean a very real image moving up from the very real psyche into the imagination of an individual and group) of "integration" of part-selves, daimons, shadow, personal history, historical events, personal, collective and transpersonal powers. Some integration is possible but it never ever complete. Our capacity to dream and in dreaming encounter the nightworld reveals an intrinsic faith in the Psyche and, weakly, in ourselves of a boundless, infinite container which holds heaven and hell dimensions in expressions of external and internal existence.
New Age spirituality and pseudo-psychology, most historical religions and some cosmologies oriented toward transcendence reinforce the split in humans between these heaven and hell dimensions. "A boundless or infinite container" holds, endures and cooks (in alchemy the cooking vessel is hermetically sealed and firm) both dimensions (the opposites) and from that intense and searing conflict consciousness grows. The human being contains and is the vessel of this divine conflict enduring, tolerating, at least trying to, the intolerable stuff of self and Other/other. The fantasy of tolerance, too, though ideal, is inimical to material existence which is born and fabricated of and from conflict. Realistically, humans can barely tolerate themselves much less the other but, and I take the following after W.R Bion and Eigen here as an object of faith) there is a boundless, infinite container to and within which I can only bow to and be grateful for for I am an often intolerable mess of warring capacities and contradictions ala Hillman as it is the very nature of the soul, says he, to pathologize .
All this one endures or must try to endure. When wide awake to the fact that the soul pathologizes one is humbled and liberated all at once to live more freely one's creaturely instinctual self less addicted to transcendence becoming more embracing of the givens of human existence, more embracing of the noble and tragic creatures we humans really are. As Ernest Becker accurately says in his always astounding book, The Denial of Death, we are creatures who cannot get over the fact that we are [conscious, creative] "gods who shit!"
W.R. Bion says that the tragedy (and hope) is that humans are creatures--who have indeed evolved up from animal consciousness enough to intuit/know where it appears we may be going but our bodies and nervous systems and psyches--haven't evolved enough yet to handle the tremendous animal drives which still demand and command us all the time. Ken Wilber accurately calls this our present Centauric condition, our being at the centauric level of consciousness, half animal/instinct/unconscious and half human/rational-creative/conscious. We are awake now to both and must endure as best we can the conflict of these opposites that we are. I take comfort here in Gabriel Marcel's homo viator to soften Bion's, I believe, accurate assessment of the human species; we are, as Marcel has it, viator, humans-on-the-way, still evolving or, as centaurs, still trotting along.
With Becker's insight in mind, any inflation humans have is confronted by this insult of being "gods who shit". To think we are gods is to be inflated and thus to be gods who shit, says Becker, comes as a shock to our nervous system and its conscious dreaming of itself as humans. However, I find that the dream of the infinite, boundless container is an image of the alchemical container mentioned above in which the prima materia, the primal stuff, the "shit" begins to be cooked and ultimately, so the alchemical fantasy goes, is transformed into gold which signifies greatest value (which is an ever expanding hold which includes and does not exclude shit). Jung's discovery of alchemical symbolism in psychotherapeutic containers helps us, gives us faith in transformation into fuller humanity and creaturehood more consciously containing, tolerating and incarnating archetypal forces. Perhaps that which is most transforming is the growing awareness of the infinite boundless unbreakable container which holds the heaven/hell of Nature and Consciousness, of warring human nature within and without. An intuition of, an experience of, the cosmic hold is transformational indeed and reinforces faith in not only the value implicit in the very struggle to endure much less transform but in very existence as it is itself. Eigen says, "All (warring) capacities find their place within a primary faith."
I call this primary faith animal faith, the kind of faith that the animal has, say, when after the lion has hauled down one of its own; the herd just a few feet away from the mauling munching lion bends their heads back to the grasses to also feed life. That bending to the grass is the statement of faith: "Not today, Death. I live and eat. And shit. And I run when I must." Animal faith assumes, contains, that facticity that life/death goes on. Creation and creatures continue. All are contained in the boundless, infinite container which is not static but alive Itself, ever forming from universal material givens.
Canto Four — "Ecrites de l'Enfer"
Pere Bleubols Writes To The Bishop
God has knowledge of the opposites but not the experience of their effect. He has experienced only their peaceful unity...The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own; that to achieve consciousness and discover the nature of one's own inferiority it is at times necessary to go against one's own ego-dominated commandments.
—Charles Ponce, Working the Soul, pgs. 68-69
Dearest Bishop D'Boue*,
Thank you for the subscription to the science journal. You are correct that I find the new science tempting and attempting whether consciously or not to come to terms with aeons of intuition that there is more to Reality and humans place within it that meets the eye or thigh...I reread your letter with great relish and with great appreciation for the tremendous patience you have with my ongoing battles 'twixt heaven and earth. This, as you know, is still the battle of all humanity caught between the animal instinctual and the rational/spiritual...
...Have been in a 'hermit' phase since the recent Trial and the Purgings...already a spiritual exile long before the Inkling Inquistors I now am more than ready to move to my own self-chosen Patmos...I am a mendicant now, without real temples to kneel in...to quote once again my beloved Rimbaud, "Ah, I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection," only the word perfection, as you know, you who bothers with the roots of all things including words, this misused word actually means complete, as in evolving in space in time, ripening like fruit, into maturity and readiness...
...I dreamed last night I was in an old European city, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, Bruges-type city, late 1800's (gas lamps in the streets)...old dark city, heavy with something or other, some spirit/zeitgeist...I was some dark powerful man/force whom the zombie/daemon/vampire-like creatures roaming the city ignored since I had some of them, their energy, in me or was partially of them (a hopeful indicator, I think, of ongoing shadow integration) which allowed me to safely deliver a mother (my mother in the dream but NOT my mother in waking reality) and her son (just-adolescent, perhaps my baby brother, about 13 y/o or so with that fuzz just beginning over the upper lip) to a "safe house" owned by a still beautiful, late mid-aged blond/graying woman of magnificent eyes and bearing. She was the widow of a powerful man and prior to whatever had befallen the City was the 'queen' matriarch of society but not superficially...she had bearing, depth, wisdom, had suffered and was suffering but bore it with dignity though with concern and pain. She looked like a combination of my late and beautiful friend, Mdm. M., who died last December, and Madame Curie and some Nordic actress or other whose name I cannot recall. I was compelled to leave having accomplished the delivery of mother and son to the safe house.
The Boschers, as I now call them after demons in Heironymous Bosche paintings, look like enfleshed gargoyles of various frightening visages and bodies. They loaded dead bodies into vaults underneath the cobbled streets...they didn't even give me much notice as I comfortably passed by them. At some point they were stacking old blown glass laboratory tubes (like from science lab equipment of late 1800's) in which a forearm or lower leg with foot attached were sealed for future feedings/experiments.
I was a tall, dark, pockmark-faced man with long flowing black hair, caped, black expensive breeches/clothes, with shiney black boots moving quickly with purpose somewhere away from the safe house. At some point I was wearing expensive running shoes/sneakers, silver in color, very designed (like a lot of contemporary sneakers the new Droogs wear now), which enables me to leap easily, almost weightlessly over barriers, up rocky hillsides, leap down from high places...my arms easily grasp tree limbs, balcony railings, bars, eaves, bricks, pipes through the city propelling me over the streets below, over rooftops, to get quickly to where I was going (of which I am not sure in the dream).
I am of the "dark side" or have enough of it consciously in me now (rather than unconsciously) to allow me to move through the city, the countryside, the continent now full of the Boschers and other daemons and vampire/zombie-like beings going about the work of science...I am to assist both sides, Boschers/other underworld beings/forces and the humans, in this difficult transition during the upsurge of the repressed chthonic underworld beings, energies, creatures (brought about by science, Freud, Jung, etc.), the repressed content of the human and collective unconscious now erupted into the once safe, secure Victorian Christian heirarchical society where church and state and high social "crust" dominated the proletariet, those earthy, instinctual, "morally lower" and mentally/spiritually inferior (or so the power and spiritual elite thought).
I suddenly realize that I left my traveling bags back at the safe house/manor which apparently had some necessary things important enough for me to quickly turn around to retrieve them. Upon entering the safe house (passing two Boschers still stacking the human flesh-filled glass tubes under the cobbled street in a vault...I picked up two tubes in passing and tossed them to the Boschers who caught them and stacked them, me helping them out as I passed) the Dame of the House, the majestic beautiful woman who once was top of the socio-political and literati/philosophical strata of the city and the nation, looked at me with concern and pain in her clear piercing blue eyes...she turned away toward some slow and heavy task and I went to my bags intent on my 'mission' whatever that was..."no time to comfort her...must move on..."
I can easily reenter this dream and continue it...it is very real...I can sense, hear, smell, feel the ambiance and the mental/spiritual air of the time and place, the city and the period it all is taking place in. I am both good and evil, conscious and unconscious, human and Boscher (partake of the underworld realm)...the post-modern sneakers, silver colored, allude to the god Mercury/Hermes who is the traveler of and between all the realms, who is criminal and saint, who plays both or all sides, who has some mission of developing consciousness which does not exclude any realm, upper, middle, lower nor values from evil to good and all between...I move swiftly, a kind of flying, earth flight, low to ground but in flight and touching the earth lightly
...a whole era/aeon is undergoing a tremendous shift and it is a troubled, troubling, dangerous, violent, reactive time...Science has unsettled the old paradigm of God on His throne running the universe with the heirarchy of good and evil and His powerful Representatives on the Earth, etc., whereas the Boschers serve the "god of Science", the Lord of this World, eating/dissecting the human body, matter, reducing matter/Mater (Mother) to objects of research and knowledge, reducing or rejecting 'spirit' and 'soul' altogether, actually repressing 'spirit' and 'soul' by reducing these to rational scientific explanations as functions of chemistry and 'laws'). I stride between and within both paradigms, old and new, more of the old where magic silver shoes can help one 'fly', where being partially of the dark forces allows one to pass unharmed, even to assist, the Boschers and other dark ones experimenting compulsively urged by the emerging zeitgeist spirit/god of science/rationality which is the 'New'...yet the 'New' foolishly, inflatedly "thinks" it is not a part of or beholden to history, the past; it hovers, if you will, born like Athena from the head of Zeus, without mother, without history, full blown/full formed with no moral obligation to history, to matter/Mater including humans or Nature...Nature is reduced to an 'it' to be crafted to serve only the human will/ego...but the Boschers are driven compulsively to have what humans have, capacities for consciousness, emotions, subtleties, spirit, empathy as yet unable to fully integrate/embody these human things...
And your letter with the subscription to the Science Journal open a deep[er door to the scientific realm at least 100 or more years ahead of where my dream has me, late 1800's, as the European civilization begins Its outward decay/decline with the release of the unrepressed instincts and shadow surges up in individuals, cultures, nations, continents...all this the necesary antecedent to new consciousness incorporating past and the 'new'...
My gargoyle self in now fleshed out and moving in this dream...his mission? help the mother and the son, the Dame of the House, AND also assist the Boschers/dark ones in and through this transition, these rough beasts "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born" (W.B. Yeats in his poem, 'The Second Coming').
Synchronistically, while sitting at the Cafe Rue de Repos rereading your letter today, writing, reading, amplifying the dream, watching it unfold imaginally, writing it all down, an old still elegant though faded Victoria LTD automobile parks right in front of me, old world splendour of a car, large, cadillac-like, jaded copper/gold color green tinged--that verdigris "micturation of metals" that the alchemists speak of. The man driving it got out and I was shocked to see an older version of the tale dark man who was me in the dream, complete with badly scarred/pocked face, thick dark brown hair pulled back into a pony tale. He wore black boots, black jeans, dark brown shirt and a gold embroidered vest (having an Eastern European/romani flare to the design)...he looked part native american and part Romani/gypsy...I noticed on the large dashboard in the car interior were two black and white European-style images of the Our Mother (not the Virgin of Guadalupe whom you know I adore) along with what appeared to be a sacred card with a red felt frame around a red-lettered/printed prayer.
The driver went to his car trunk, opened it revealing full bags, unpacked scattered clothes, and a bottle of red wine, an Italian vintage whose label I recognized, inexpensive but sufficient for a boiled potato meal, or something like that...he fished a coat out of a rag heap, closed the trunk, put it on then reopened the trunk to adjust the wine bottle further into the rags, clothes and papers (so as not to break from the closing trunk?)...he walks away...watching all this the hair is standing on my arms and my neck is all prickly...this is too too passing strange...he looks just like the man in the dream who is 'me' only maybe 10 or 15 years old, my age now, late 50's/early 60's, but large, in good shape but for a bit of a middle-aged stomach and hips but barrel chested and strong with a powerful aura like a medicine man or wizard where Rasputin meets the Righteous Reaper and the Dear Savior, sharp clear eyes, shining...
I tried to see the car tags as he later pulled away but looked up too late from my writing to be able to make out where he is from...Canada? Wisconsin? Couldn't make it out...damn. I half expected to find him parked in front of my quarters in the church yard upon return home. Not.
This dreams seals it...there is now no wonder why I could no longer be in the Enclave d'Esprit Spirale which inflatedly thinks it can be "all Light", naively spiritualizng Nature and the Chthonic forces of which I believe the Boschers represent in the dreaml. To what purpose can I turn or guide, if at all, the Boschers and other related 'ill-k"? Who leads all this if it is One Entity at all? or some greater force partaking of Dark and Light, some Archon, some Entelechy experimenting, forcing, thrusting, using human consciousness to what purpose which moves manipulatingly through what humans call "Good" and "Evil"...we personify the Powers/Archetypes but these ultimately defy such personifications which are images and embodiments, hints and conjectures with hiccoughs of their work/way/will under the push of the Force...
...In this dream I leap from hill to roof to cliff to church ledge equally at home in the boulevard and the hedge, the city and the valley creche (cradle), the height and the hole; I feel something for the mother, her son, the Dame, the human bits and parts parceled and packed, parked under the cobbled streets but the feeling/emotion is remote and subject to the detached overview and perspective of larger Vision/Mission--Impersonal Forces are at work in the World, in humans, too, almost especially so, therefore sentimentality is dangerous though compassion is not although I cannot stop to comfort or explain (if I know at all) what is going on and wherefore to the Dame of the Manor. I must to my bags then swiftly fly off to some as yet to be known by me the dreamer though the dream Bluebols knows or at least intuitively leans toward the place, destination, further mission...
To be continued. Must be noted that the dream Bluebols was not inflated, not full of himself at all though he strode with magnificent confidence, authority, power and assurity through the city and the world. There was no question as to right to exist, purpose, no 'moral confusion' but a sense of ethical obligation to the Forces and the creatures born of such, human and otherwise, a mediary between what appear to be opposing worlds/energies, the Opposites Jung wrote so much about.
Please accept my gratitude along with my apologies for sending you all this and taking up so much of your time. It aids me so to know you are constantly present to receive my rantings, my prayers, my quandries with such equanimity and genuine interest. I am forever indebted and grateful.
Yours humbly and darkly,
Pere BB
* Boue means mud in French
