Monday, March 18, 2024

“Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery…” Jung’s Red Book and other mind breaths and meditations.

 





“Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery…” Jung’s Red Book and other mind breaths and meditations.

March 18th


“If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look at her,
and she does not want to be seen.  Sometimes
I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this.”

“Known to Be Left” - by Sharon Olds

@rdiskinblack and I read poems all afternoon, chatting, sharing his works as well as Sharon Olds’ homage to living on her own, enjoying the garden in springtime. The cats ran about, feeling the spring in the air. 


March opened a feeling of spring renewal, plants and trees growing, stories popping from the ground, old sensations, into the day. 


Robby and his crew dropped by and we told stories about Pete Seegar, MC5 and nova Scotia sea shanties as Shannon and Nico looked, listening intently.

At book group, we talked about Jung' s  Red Book. Nico was particularly interested in what Julie had to say.  Don’t be a hero says Jung. Celebrate the ridiculous.

Moving through a nervous breakdown after his break with Freud, Jung looked inside at dreams and myths, male and female selves, ever dueling, gods and heros, shadowns, and conflicts. At some point in 1913, he started channelling dialogues with Solome and the Oracle of Delphi, drafting notes of his active imagination, some hallucinations, others dreams, others fictions, dialogues and monologues with gods, in his head, integrating the madness of everyday life, drawing the outlines for his ever evolving theories of the self. 

The result was the Red Book or Liber Novus named for the  red leather binding drafted  by the Swiss psychiatrist from1913 and about 1930, and first published nearly five decades after Jung passed on June 6, 1961, Küsnacht, Switzerland. 

In much the same way as Ariel’s song in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, traces a metamorphosis into something rich and strange, by the sea, the Red Book reminds us we carry something magic inside us, something abundant, something rich and strange, ever changing  bones of coral, eyes of pearls.

Lean into the darkness, learn from it, he wrote. 

“Men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad and one lays blame on the other…” says Jung, in The Red Book, p. 200. “If one half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict inside his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster.” 

I can never quite get away from that conflict. 

Micah talked about this tension at Judson on Sunday, beginning with an invocation: 

“A Prayer for This Cross You Carry That right there, That weight that whisper-screams, That heft you fear only you can hear, Let it soften you, So it has nothing left to hurt. Look down from the hill you’ve decided you must die on. …Find one face that hasn’t hardened. It’s there and it might even be yours. Eradicate all executioner energy from your own exhausted frame. Give in to your prophetic power without making yourself a martyr. Taste water where once only vinegar reigned. That right there is the lightness, Filled with brilliant breath, Tough enough to deny these nails And bring you back your life.”


Dismantle the empire inside ourselves, said Micah. Account for the harms and dangers, the words that injur, he says, recalling “The Three Gates of Right Speech,” a Spiritual Practice by Eknath Easwaran, “The Sufis capture this idea [of how to stand guard over the gate of the mouth] in a splendid metaphor. They advise us to speak only after our words have managed to issue through three gates. At the first gate we ask ourselves, “Are these words true?” If so, let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, “Are they necessary?” They [our words] may be true, but it doesn’t follow that they have to be uttered; they must serve some meaningful purpose. Do they clarify the situation or help someone? Or do they strike a discordant or irrelevant note? At the last gate we ask, “Are they kind?” If we still feel we must speak out, we need to choose words that will be supportive and loving, not words that embarrass or wound another person.” 

I think about the words that I use, that I have used, that injur, the short sited words I didn’t mean, that caused damage, wishing I had had control of my speech, the words that came out of my mouth. 

 “Be silent and listen,” writes Jung in the Red Book. “have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”

Let it move through you, through us. Lets go there, learn from it, look at her, learn from her. Don’t turn away. 


















President Joe Biden has issued a statement on the death of trans teenager Nex Benedict, saying that he and First Lady Jill Biden are “heartbroken” by the loss.
“Every young person deserves to have the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are, and feel safe and supported at school and in their communities,” Biden wrote in a statement released by the White House House on Thursday afternoon. “Nex Benedict, a kid who just wanted to be accepted, should still be here with us today.”




Bullied to death. It's disgusting they didn't call the ems immediately after Nex was assaulted in the bathroom. Bullied to death. Death by hate. Could have been any of us. #ripnex

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

“To Put the World Between Us:” On the Whitewashing of January 6th, Amnesia and other episodes in collective forgetting.

 




From Jan 6th to the State of the Union. 



“To Put the World Between Us:” On the White Washing of January 6th, Amnesia and other episodes in collective forgetting. 

“Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump? It’s only been three years, but memories of Mr. Trump’s presidency have faded and changed fast,” note Jennifer Medina and Reid J. Epstein, of the NY Times. “In an era of hyper-partisanship, there’s little agreed-upon collective memory, even about events that played out in public. But as Mr. Trump pursues a return to power, the question of what exactly voters remember has rarely been more important. That pattern is particularly clear on how people remember Jan. 6. In the three years since the attack played out on television, Republicans have become less likely to describe the rioters as violent and more likely to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

I had a sense that this was happening over the years, watching Republicans distance themselves from the riot that threatened our democracy and left seven people dead. 

I saw this watching reactions to a post of mine last week after the Supreme Court ruled that individual states cannot bar Trump for sitting on the ballot.

“So much for states' rights,” I wrote on Facebook. 

“…All the justices agreed that individual states may not bar candidates for the presidency under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that prohibits insurrectionists from holding office. Four justices would have left it at that, with the court’s three liberal members expressing dismay at what they said was the stunning sweep of the majority’s approach.

But the five-justice majority, in an unsigned opinion answering questions not directly before the court, ruled that Congress must act to give Section 3 force…..”

The body blows that destroy democracy don't happen in one fell swoop. But every once in a while you wake and see the damage. I felt like that in 2000 when the Supreme Court ruled Bush would become president, rather than allow ballots to counted or recounted. Same thing today, when the Supreme Ruled that states can't kick Trump off the ballot. Let's remember five of the people on the court were nominated by presidents who did not win the popular vote.  Democracy is on the ropes. We hear about states rights until the Supreme Court doesn't like what a state is doing.  No recounts in Florida, no autonomy in Colorado to block someone from the ballot who engaged in an insurrection.”

A family member began writing asking how many were actually hurt on January 6th 2021? Wasn’t it just one person? No it was five said another observer. I noted seven people associated with it died, one by a heart attack. Dying of heart attack hardly counts as being killed, noted the family member, seeming to split hairs and minimize damages, before resorting to ad hominem argument before the conversation ended. 

In “Historical Revisionism and Worldwide Conspiracy: Techniques and Agendas of Three Holocaust Deniers,” Erica Spinelli notes that “ Although “each professional denier has developed an expertise” in the tactics he uses to deny the Holocaust (some dispute the six million death toll, whereas others deny the existence of the gas chambers), Holocaust deniers generally agree that there was no systematic policy of extermination carried out by the Nazis on the Jews.”

This felt like what was happening. Its a slow insidious process that undermines memory, doing damage to what we know and how we remember. 

Thats what it felt like. 

Cops getting killed by protesters and the damages minimized. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and it was the left who had done such damage. I remember dozens of arrests in DC when we were arrested for just arriving at the capital or for a hearing, much less armed, pushing down barriers, beating people. After the first wave of protesters got inside Jan 6th, many of us who’d been in DC for all the confirmation battles and skirmishes over tax cuts thought that it was an inside job, or they were allowed inside. We certainly were not allowed when we showed up. 

For Gore Vidal, we’ve always had a problem with memory. “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction.”

Garcia Marquez traces the workings of collective amnesia in 100 Years of Solitude, as a plague descends on the village of Macondo, with its perniscious symptom: collective amnesia. 

It feels like that plague is everywhere. You see it in mass condemnation of immigrants from those who thrive in a country of immigrants. 

The gap between our lives and the lives of others can vast. The line between our world and others can be a cavern. It can be everything. “It is psychotic to draw  line between two places,” writes writes BHANU KAPIL in Schizophrene, a collection of poems taking on themes of immigration and trauma, memory and gardens, pathology and health, fragmentation and the feelings of a new place, memories of those “left behind – neither place can be called home, or perhaps both can. Exile and diaspora is not entirely a new concept as far as Asian-American literature is concerned.”  

We all live our lives, doing our best to recall what came before. 

In “Because I Liked You Better” A. E. Housman puts it”:


“To put the world between us

We parted stiff and dry;

“Good-bye,” said you, “forget me.”

“I will, no fear,” said I.


Many of us remember the cold war years of conflict with the USSR / Russia. Others tend to forget the lessons of the cold war, built around containment and alliances. 

Biden would address the gap in his State of the Union message. The speech began with comments on support for Ukraine to condemnation of the gradual erasure and denialism of Jan 6th from the political consciousness. The president condemned banng books and supporting a two state solution in Israel. "Let's not erase history. Let's make it....To my transgender americans, ill always have your back..."


“The message to President Putin is simple,” said Biden. 

“We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down. 

History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on January 6th. 

Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy. 

Many of you were here on that darkest of days. 

We all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots.
 

They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people. 

January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. 

But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed. 

But we must be honest the threat remains and democracy must be defended. 

My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6th. 

I will not do that. 

This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. 

And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win. 

As I’ve done ever since being elected to office, I ask you all, without regard to party, to join together and defend our democracy! 

Remember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic.”

20 Days at Maripol won best documentary, a year after Navalny won. He was memorialized after passing, killed in a penal colony a few days ago. 


Said the director of the film, Mstyslav Chernov: “20 Days in Mariupol” is the first Ukrainian film to win an Oscar. “I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities,” Chernov continued. “I wish to give it all the recognition to Russia not killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians.”


The conflict seems to be expanding. 

“Do psychiatrists register the complex and rich vibrations produced by their dreaming subjects?” wonders BHANU KAPIL in Schizophrene, “erasing distinctions between what is outside, the sky and whats beneath it? What digs into the head? … A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements….” (p.7). 

I guess we are stuck drifting, along with the dreaming elements, through a tempest.  

Monday, March 4, 2024

Recalling Mama



Recalling Mama

Last weekend Will and I trekked out to State College PA, where we spent summers in football camp as kids, to visit our favorite aunt and uncle, Bruce and Susan.  Susan is my Dad’s cousin, the daughter Louis, the child of Ora Hewitt and Kirk Shepard parents of Kirk, Carl, Louis, and Winston. When we arrived, Susan was busy organizing material from her sister Trish’s collection. Dad loved Trish, presiding over her marriage to her girlfriend. All weekend, we told family stories of a sculley maid and a deserter from Hesse, who formed the family  a long time ago, looking a pictures of the Shepard Fertilizer company in South Georgia, near Thomasville, a long lost picture of Mama Hewitt in college in Bastrop, Tx, and her husband Kirk and her brothers. We tried to recall their tours abroad during WWII, Bruce sharing stories of his tour in Vietnan, tips on surviving a bar fight, lots and lots of stories of football, and grit, and debates about income inequality, and approaches to education for the people and a great dinner at Gigi's, some gumbo and grits, a morning cold bath and sauna and chill out in a hyperbaric chamber.  There are always stories to recall and make sense of, between Ora’s four sons, a fifth who died as a small baby, who she grieved her entire.  Three of her son’s ended up at Harvard, the forth, Louis West Point, like Bruce. And Louis outlived all of them. Kirk, Louis and Carl served during WWII.  Winston stayed home on the farm, one man home, during those years. Dad adored Winston. My brother named him son after him. Kirl came home from the war nuts, ready to terrorize his kids, and Bruce when he came to visit the old house in Thomasville. Carl is the biggest mystery of the crew.  Before I was born, he fell (or was pushed) down the stairs by another man, presumably his partner. Dad always chuckled it was an  S and M accident gone wrong. But no onr really knows.

The mysteries of these guys were many. That didn’t stop with Carl. Will and I played football with Coach Sandusky, the infamous coach at Penn State, who was later convicted of sexual abusew of his players. He was also an associate of Coach, Foglietta, the Poly Prep football coach who followed a similar path of Sandusky. “Poly Prep's treatment of Foglietta and his victims suggests an agonizing template for how abuse can proliferate unchecked over a long period of time.”.The toxic masculinities and injuries are many. But we’re getting away from the story. 

I met Mama only a few times in the late 1970’s, when she was in her late 90’s. But I didn’t get to talk with her much, just seeing how kind she was to us, giving grandad cash to take us to the store to buy ourselves something. I know she went to school in Bastrop Texas, just Southeaast  of Austin.  And taught my Dad to read, cajoling him with a love of Greek mythology, she would read to him, helping him to learn a bit of what was being said, enough to elicit curiosity for Dad to want to read it himself. Soon enough she was editing Dad’s essays about the myths, he was reading himself, beginning a lifetime love of reading Dad would carry until his last days.  He always smiled when he told me stories about her. If there is any one person who made us who we were are, it was her, the young woman who found her way into college in Bastrop Texas, before settling into a life in Thomasville Ga, a town with red dirt roads, where he she would make a life with my great grandfather Kirk. 

She left the her grandkids a mimeograph of her recollections of growing up in reconstruction south, the poverty that was everywhere, the soldiers who came home from the war, the freed slaves, everyone desperate for food, the omnipresent hunger, her desire for education, finding it where she could get it, inspiring it in those around her.

A copy of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From arrived in the mail, a gift from Rob. “The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried,” writes Didion.  I can’t stop thinking of Mama reading Didion, who wrote about growing up in the West. Mama wrote about the South, trying to find meaning in a family and a yearning for books, coping with civil wars, world wars, cold wars, and a family trying to do its best, coping with their wounds as best as they could, while passing both an ambition and injuries down generation after generation. 

Will and I stood for a photo with Great Grandfather Kirk, the father of the grandfather we knew in Thomasville, on our way out of town. Susan gave us a copy of his son’s wife, Harriet Heim's old bible, before we made out way back to New York.