A new work by Carl Jung is in the process of being published. Actually, it's not a new book--he wrote the epilogue in 1959 and died two years later in 1961. And yet this book (The Red Book!) could be viewed as the psychological equivalent of a sacred text being unearthed in Ur, with nascent--yet ancient--wisdom riding the wind into our lives at full gallop...
Accordingly, such a personal tome carries with it Jung's madness and distortions, the collective unconscious, fire, god, the devil--a heady lineup, by any stretch. In the NY Times article, the author had a dream about the book:
ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big dream. A big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your regular dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling off a cliff or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.In our all too human lives we often are waiting for "another" to come along and show us true meanings of our mystery, to pull back the veil and reveal what is behind the mask of the ineffable. In the above dream the teacher doesn't show up, and so the job fell to the author--no waiting for "another" to do the work that you and I must do if we wish to realize more fully what it is to be alive, to be a human, to commune with silence and shadows.
It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death.I read that sentence about amber liquid and glass globes and knew I had to open the back of my mind and slip outside...
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santa rode his sleigh
on a holiday
he brought along a bag of dangerous custard
he ate it all down
flew into the ground
santa grabbed a pine cone and grew a new body
somewhere in the back
in a busted shack
lay the mottled portrait of the master
purples and greens
the paint was sweating
i think it was an artist in a new body
and we drank amber liquid from glass globes
wearing crimson robes
as the river rose into our sedation
boarding tiny boats
casting hollow votes
we sailed into the slumber of the godhead
we sailed into the slumber
and we drank amber liquid from glass globes
wearing crimson robes
wearing crimson robes
we sailed into the slumber
we sailed into the slumber of the godhead
blake married heaven and hell
thought they both looked swell
they exchanged their vows on the cold stone
saturn couldn't stay
the mandolin in play
everybody grew their fingertips out of powder
the captain and the clown
made a toast without a sound
we all raised our glasses and then fell down
the sky tried to run away
the old man made of clay
grabbed his horns and bellowed even louder
and we drank amber liquid from glass globes
wearing crimson robes
as the river rose into our sedation
boarding tiny boats
casting hollow votes
we sailed into the slumber of the godhead
we sailed into the slumber
and we drank amber liquid from glass globes
wearing crimson robes
wearing crimson robes
we sailed into the slumber
we sailed into the slumber of the godhead
panic is passe
so don't panic
just sit back with Uncle Job
and drink amber liquid from glass globes
drink amber liquid and make a toast to the wasteland
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Image taken by mjs at Indian Beach (a short but rocky distance from Cannon Beach, Oregon).
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