Red (-Violet) Book the Imaginal

¶ … Red (-Violet) Book

The imaginal is the realm in which each one of us gets to be the hero of our own life. This is something that we each yearn to be much of the time and in most places, but often do not have the chance to achieve, or the courage to try. But when we are dancing in the world of Shadow and Light, handing off as our partners the archetypal lovers of our innermost dreams, we can imagine that we are always on the cusp of becoming ourselves.

As I imagine myself in this dance of the fundamentals, I imagine myself in a conversation with the man who has taught me about these ideas. The following is a series of snippets of conversations that I would like to have with Professor Jung. Not being a fan of or believer in seances and like events, I cannot quite see myself talking aloud to him in a literal way. But when I read his thoughts and look at his beautiful drawings in his Red book, I feel that he is indeed talking to me, speaking to me in intimacies through his words and drawings.

Feeling how close his ideas and precepts are when I read his work and look at the images created by his own hands, I feel the urge to respond in kind by writing about some experiences that have occurred recently in my own life that seem to have been touched by as well as informed by the core ideas of Jungian theory. Here I try to respond in kind, following the implicit path laid down in Jung's (2009) the Red book. While he could create his own images, I lack his artistic skill, and so have illustrated my writing with the kinds of imagistic scenes that he would have created if he could not paint, and had Google image search capabilities. He would, I think have very much approved of the synchronicity involved in such searches.

Each of the moments in time below is a moment that I have felt myself tottering on the top of a thin fence, on one side of the rails the Shadow, on the other side those parts of myself that I believe to be known, liked, and acceptable. I find myself drawn to images and ideas of houses: For Jung the house was a proxy for the psyche, for the human soul itself, a physical structure that -- like the image below -- provides a protective shell for emotion and thought. A shell that both protects and imprisons.

(http://www.texasescapes.com/SouthTexasTowns/KenedyTexas/KenedyTexasOldHouse2JT1003.jpg)

I went to buy boxes today to begin to pack up things that can be in storage for a while without causing too much inconvenience. This is the first step of packing up and moving my life. Given that the future is obscured this seems like a good strategy. Very rational and organized. Two attributes that (as far as I know) I generally exhibit and value. So I came back home with dozens of boxes and strapping tape and Sharpies and "FRAGILE" labels. And a nice, organized plan for packing up the first dozen boxes.

But metaphors (and analogies too) entangled me. I was sitting there on the floor of my bedroom with all these empty boxes and I had a distinct sense that I had no idea how to fill them. How do you box up memories? What kinds of things should one have to show for a decade in a house? A marriage? A child raised?

Pragmatics intruded, of course. The meaning of life is all well and good, I told myself, but for now there's a large house to pack up. Archetypes get in the way of life. It was not a day to be considering the meaning of things. Just a day to keep my head down and my hands busy.

But I kept sitting there. Running my hands back and forth across the hardwood floor. Half a life time ago I refinished all of the floors in the house (in case you've ever thought: What a jolly idea -- let's go refinish floors! you should rethink this plan) and so I'm rather attached to them. I breathed in the sawdust as I sanded so that the floors literally became a part of me.

And so I kept sitting there. Watching the sunshine come in as it was split into a piebald design by the apple trees that I planted as seedlings and that are now past the roof of this three-storey house. Shadows and Shadow. The light was illuminating the wood, bringing out the red of the stain. This house is a hundred years old, and the trees cut for the floor were probably at least a century old themselves when they were harvested so the seedlings of these trees were germinating at the same time that the Constitution was being born. How do you put any of that -- the apple trees that I grew and that I've made pies from, the floors I sanded and sanded, the perfect color of the stain that I mixed (after many false starts), trees in their infancy when Jefferson was in his -- into a box? And even if you could, what tape would hold it closed?

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Xq2HJsZHleg/Sg4-FztA_1I/AAAAAAAAArk/JOjA42XKq-Q/s400/Crab%2BApple%2BTree%2BAshfield.jpg)

For Jung the apple tree like the one above was a symbol of the feminine, the maiden, the anima given embodiment and life. But it was also a symbol of the questioning of one's faith. It thus represents one of those moments of the opposition and balance of opposites that Jung found so powerful.

In the end I just sat there, remembering and wondering, and trying to be still and patient with loss until the sun shifted and the room darkened enough that it was not quite so enchanted (or rather enchanted by less kindly beings) and I began to do the practical kind of packing. This process does have has its rewards too, albeit much dimmer than the rewards that come with considerations of meaning, metaphor, and memory. One does tend to accumulate things, and getting rid of them (those favorite shoes that are falling apart; the oddly colored clothing that my mother sends, no doubt to convey something malevolent; dresses that were surely always an unfortunate choice) is freeing. A salutary reminder of how easy it is to become wedded to materialism.

Opposites, in my experience, do not attract but rather collide. They did this day. In the splinters of the collision, I found no answers. I worked on turning these fragments into a design, the ordered symmetry of a mandala. But I only cut my hands and blessed this house once more with the alchemy of blood. For Jung the winter solstice was -- as it is for so many others -- a time of the triumph of light, of the power of a handful of candles battening back the darkness.

(http://www.earthrites.org/turfing2/uploads/solstice_candles.jpg)

And so, the yule season is upon us. And I am struck even more than usual by how much truly bad behavior one sees in the month of December. I would have thought that even many of those, like myself, who are secular in nature, would feel inclined to honor the solemnity of the season, as the world turns back toward the light and -- from the Neolithic onward -- we tend towards the ceremonial to thank the sun for its return. The fact that we are more sure of its annual arc now than were our earliest ancestors -- and the fact that we have a wealth of technology that allows us to believe (manque global warming) that we are inured from the natural world -- should not wholly diminish the rather miraculousness of the solstice. And this is not even counting those who celebrate holy days this time of the year.

And yet. It is difficult indeed to find an authentic way to honor a holiday celebrating the Light when there is too much jingle-belling to identify my shadows.

It's remarkable how much truly bad behavior one sees in the month of December. I try to avoid all places of commerce from Thanksgiving until Epiphany (and sometimes through Candlemas) but I do have to make exceptions. Such as my weekly emergency trip to Target to stock up on Diet Coke. (I'm tending more towards the lime variety lately, although of course there is always the lure of the ur-Diet Coke). So I'm there yesterday, taking as direct a route as I can from the door to the beverage aisle and thence to the cash register and back to my car. Even in this short voyage I am struck by three things. First, a mother yelling (verging on the edge of screaming) at a boy of about thirteen who had very politely -- and rather astonishingly politely, in my experience, for a boy his age -- said that he liked the blue shirt better than the green shirt. The woman (I am assuming that she was his mother -- certainly a close-enough relative to engender that type of viciousness) took and pulled everything out of her shopping cart and dumped it on the floor and strode off. The boy just stood there staring at the pile of clothes and cat food and bows. I went over and asked him if I could do anything but he told me that he was used to it. I wasn't actually all that surprised by his answer.

And so I ask myself: Which story of the family are these two telling themselves? Does the boy know that he is Horus and Apollo? Or does he know that he is Bluebeard in the making? And does the woman yearn to be Demeter? Or is she still aching to be Persephone? Persephone is for Jung a symbol of completeness, for she encompasses opposites -- life and death, mother and daughter, even male and female. The whole eternal cycle of birth through to rebirth.

(http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.heavenandearthessentials.com/images/Persephone.jpg&imgrefurl)

Then there were two women, well dressed, nice jewelry, standing in the candle aisle. I was there because -- like pretty much every year since I began my own household -- I don't have any candles for my menorah. (Celebrating Jewish holidays and believing in either a benevolent or vengeful God are pretty much unrelated in my experience.) So I'm standing there looking for the right size of candles, and feeling just a tad irritated at myself because I remember doing exactly this same thing in this same aisle last year and also not finding any of the right kind of candles. I was having one of those little discussions with myself about why I expected things to be different, and not just different but better this year (ah, that Western attachment to the idea of progress) and started listening to the two women to avoid castigating myself. And the two of them were discussing a coworker like this: "I don't know -- I think that she's worth $18 this year. Help me find something that costs that much."

A very distinct breath of the Shadow of capitalism.

And, yes, I know that in giving gifts we do make calculations about relative worth. I'm certainly not naive about the ways in which gifts are assessed and selected. But this suddenly seems very unclean. And then -- and this was not so much bad behavior as simply bizarre -- there was a woman dumping dozens of boxes of toothpaste into a shopping cart. I thought at first that maybe she was an employee and this was a recalled item -- maybe seasonal workers don't wear name tags? -- but then I saw her pulling up to the check-out line. She must have had a hundred boxes of toothpaste and nothing else. I have been entertaining myself with possible scenarios that explain this and I really can't think of a plausible one.

What role is she acting out? What story does she tell to herself to make it through this dark time of the year? Is it a story that I would recognize?

And a final observation. Putting up tinsel and lights and faux-Victorian cut-outs in a hospital doesn't make one feel unafraid or make things not hurt. Hospitals still smell like hospitals, and the floors are always cold. I am spending a good deal of this holiday season watching a friend head toward the kind of diagnosis that -- depending on how the internal pendulum is swinging that day -- makes one think either that it could have been so much worse, or that it could have been a damn lot better.

Life, as you keep telling us, Prof. Jung, is the constant merging of opposites.

I did find candles today, and will light them tomorrow, in honor of the solstice and of the rituals and ceremonies of my forebears. And for my child, who's so desperately trying to be well. There is power in saying prayers that have been said for millennia, even if one does not think that there is anyone out there listening. And who's to say that prayers said for oneself alone are unheard?

To light a candle is to cast a shadow. -- Ursula K. LeGuin

And one more step back, another step downward into the unconscious & #8230;

(http://www.amovingtrain.com/transmissions1/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/nest.jpg)

So I go out in my back garden this morning to check on my aviary (it's been cold here, and very windy and I was worried about my birds so I was out early) and I found a nest that had been blown down over night. Not one of my birds' nests. (My birds are saved the work of making their own nests by the fact that I have provided them with deluxe nest boxes.) I looked up into the trees above me as soon as I saw the downed nest. Irrationally, because as we near the winter solstice I know that this nest was used months -- if not years -- ago. So whatever life was hatched here, in this cluster of rather sturdy twigs, made its way (or failed to do so) when the days were longer and warmer. Nothing is actively imperiled here. This is merely a collection of sticks, clipped into surprisingly regular lengths and loosely twined together. You might even think -- as the nest blends in, blurs into the other sticks that have been blown down into my yard in this latest round of santa anas -- that there was no intelligence behind this. Just a few sticks in a pleasing arrangement.

I tried to convince myself that it wasn't really a nest because it would seem so forlorn if that were the case. I went over to it and bent down and touched it, trying to persuade myself that it had never been the abode of small and fragile things. But there were bits of down caught in the smallest nodes on the twigs. And there was a sturdiness in the construction that comes only through intention and intelligence, not the mindless fierceness of the desert winds.

So what meaning does this nest bring to my life this day? If I start with the personal and the particular (as one is taught to do), the meaning is a melancholy one. I feel as if I were being blown out of my own home, feel as if my foundations were being over-tipped and my family scattered. The record of a family ever having been here as hard to read as joss sticks. Jung saw the nest as a sign of the collective unconscious itself, as a symbol of the ways in which our unconscious knits together disparate stories.

(http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20080219-joss%20sticks%20peace%20of%20mind%20com.jpg)

This is a sort of waking dream for me, an experience to which I can brings Jung's (1966) advice to the wanderer through the realms of the mind's nether worlds. Usually we find access to such spaces only within the waves of sleep, but they can be found in other places as well. There are moments that are out of time when our consciousness recedes, Jung notes. I am in one of those moments now.