"Who will lend a dipper of water
to save a fish in a carriage rut?" - Han Shan
“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.”
In the text of this Jung-stone the orphan describes itself in part as "a white stone from heaven" fallen to earth...there is no room here for an extended amplification of this heavenly white stone's pointing-to (what symbols do) but to say only that it falls to earth "mortal for everyone [incarnated in and as everyone], yet is not touched by the cycle of aeons.” Falling is an image of coming down from above into material reality, incarnation, what is called coagulatio in alchemy. This process marks the dynamic moment when the high becomes low, ideal/idea/thought becomes act then takes on/brings about material form, limitation, quality and quantity, time and space (in this case thoughts become "things" or are capable of bringing things into material being as extensions and expressions of ideals/ideas/thoughts), giving material and symbolic (symbols are real!) heft to what was and is etheric, the "very or too light" and, limited in its "too-lightness," needs/longs for the low, the thinginess of mind and substance, form and function, compulsion, compunction and a bursting forth into some ever new expression from the conflagration come from mind and matter, spirit and flesh, air and earth, and on and on in these couplings, the opposites.
Poet William Blake, his entire oeuvre attempting the assimilate the chaos of falling into existence, says it very clear,
that this "too lightness," let's call it Eternity,
"is in love with the productions of time."
He tells us in many of his poems to take care of the orphans, the lost children, the abandoned ones, the abject "littles" and "lambs" who seek reunion, inclusion and the effusion to be found in the "gardens of love" where uniqueness, individuating ones, can play and grow where "down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. And...have God for [their] father & never want joy ("The Chimney Sweeper")." And love implies a longing for completeness brought about by the other-than-itself-or-one's- self which is not a static congealment but one which endlessly, in prick-and-puerperal principle, reproduces not just exact uniform copies but diverse, overflowing cornucopias of "little ones," varied, variant, verily valuable...Blake says/insists/counsels us to "tend to the little ones..."
Thus, in our tending, eternity "falls from heaven, a white stone" an orphan stone, say, carved in Jung's garden speaking of these things imbued with, and displaying, playing (pretending?) reality, stones, hard, the more insistent real.
I conclude, within and from this petrine mystery, my little mind, very small, can barely grab/grasp the preponderance of the small which gets "low down" (because it is) and willfully refuses a King/Queen's crown and throne except that of "the Prince willingly turned the pauper" choosing his/her stone upon which to sit and rule as Ezra Pound's "ant" —
"a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity" [Ezra Pound, Canto 81]...
Crowned bairn of the barn, the chimney, the alley steep, wears the wreathed crown of pricks which, downward press, hard, brings blood, blood which affirms the reality, the here-ness thick, thusness (just-so-ness) of incarnate existence, wickedness a vital part, too, Eternity's lover, and vessel, and "shapely mind (consciousness)" with prehensile, yes, tail and hands/tales to give form and forth-ing to and of and for and with the "ten thousand things" which, O Buddha, sorry, are indeed real and not just false products of baseless mind, mere projections/ghosts, mere epiphenomena but rather these things, hard pressed down provide, provisional, base mind and matter ever dividing the swarming swarm teeming torn between the one and the many which partake of each, one or many armed.
"Things that have hands take hands," says poet, Theodore Roethke, and thus eternity needs/makes hands/minds, takes hands/minds which take, too, take back, grasp, grab and delight/suffer the grubbiness of the reach, and the consummations thereof.
Love plays and is played out in sequences and ever hints to that which extends love, greater's love, the more. But to dwell in "Love Abstract" and not act in tongued and lunge-ed love, is a bore.
White stones fall from heaven sure
in the need for dirt and time. Love
there in the muck and the wash is
love all the more because not "pure".
One, then, grabs a little suchness in existenz from a falling altar in pretentious postures ("Pull down thy vanity"), a white stone in the hand to suffix-suffice a mystery, leaves the fishbowl one has confused for a universe, is driven from or abandons local central hill and value, a centaur wandering in skivvies and bones, an orphan alone yet everywhere, Kansas (is) Kansas even though "Baltimore gleams in supernatural ecstasy" (Allen Ginsberg, HOWL) yet "in woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons [C.G. Jung].”
Jung's stone is more than souvenir of his having been here. And "souvenir" is French for a remembrance or memory, a memento, keepsake or token of remembrance, an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it. Dream work a la Jung (and others) involves working with memories of one's personal past as well as the (if) "remembered" archetypes and symbols of the unconscious which are, and do go, deep. One reaches, excavates, as do dreams, for personal and collective memories, symbols and their associations which show up in life in order to ken meaning of things beyond what "just presents" but are precisely for what is presented here and now in a life.
And dreams are progressive, intending growth, development, advancement, renewal and generativity/creativity. And most importantly, relationship/relatedness -
I and other,
I and not-I,
I and (even)
"I"is another" - Rimbaud
Dreams expose often enough how we avoid relationship of all kinds (O Narcissus) and thus intrude/relate to us at night or other "in-trusion" which insist on relation. The goal is not grandiosity and escape via dissociation/inflation but rather, the work is grand in the sense of most important, meaningful, and available to one and all no matter class, age, education, cultural or spiritual caste and, apparently, species. Animals dream but to what end we can only speculate. As do we. We are caught in the speculum of the dream, of and in the unconscious, each plummet far first as stone into existence where, perhaps, each we may gather another view toward being and relatedness which serves greater and better purpose to more than our own species.
William Blake counsels re: self and other species ("Little lamb who made thee?" to "tend to the little ones" which is a good place to end to, yet and yet and yet again and again, begin:
"Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones;
those who are in misery cannot remain so long,
If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.…
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars,
And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power:
The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity.
Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually
Thank god for mystics who chew cud, ponder stone, forcibly or not (if yer "a little lamb leaping") moved or driven to be alone
with the Alone (in countless images and manifestations).
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