Showing posts with label Tarot Deck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tarot Deck. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2012

News from the Muse: The Muse of Jungian Memoir



[from the Tarot of the Sephiroth]

When inner work is brought out into the world—a poem, a memoir—it’s as though something has been constructed in the soul. The inexpressible finds expression; the unsayable is said. I’ve been reflecting on this experience, which feels magical to me—transformative. It’s not just the writing down of inner experience, the process of tracking dreams or engaging in active imagination. It is how it feels to go public with it, to present it to a live audience, or to see its transformation into print. An imaginal space is opened up and something is created there—a temple deep in the woods, past the swinging bridge, or perhaps an altar by the banks of the river, a chupah for the sacred wedding, a teepee in the meadow. This is a holy place to which one can return. It is both an expansion of inner space and creation of something substantive. Is this what the alchemists mean by the Lapis? The Kabbalists by the “Work of the Chariot?” The Hindus by Shakti? The Jungians by the Subtle Body?

The Sister from Below, my muse, informed me that I was writing Jungian memoir when I was working on her book. She told me that Jungian memoir illuminates the inner world, follows the Jungian tributaries of dreams, conversations with inner figures, synchronicities. It is the grandchild of Jung’s great memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Its ancestors include the alchemists and the saints, whose spiritual autobiographies, like the Confessions of St. Augustine, connect us to the Spirit of the Depths, and to the Wisdom Traditions.

Since the publication of the Red Book it’s become clear how Jung’s direct confrontation with inner figures cracked open the walls of rationality and allowed the uncanny, the unfathomable back into western consciousness. Jungian memoir attends to those strange unfathomable experiences that shape our souls.

I was privileged, last April, to participate in a conference put on by the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, called C.G. Jung and the Jewish Connection. This was the swan song of our beloved Baruch Gould, who had been the creative and innovative Director of Public Programs for ten years, and was preparing to end his service. He’d been incubating the idea for the conference for years.

I was among a group of Jungian analysts and scholars approaching the subject from very different vantage points. There were historical papers, papers on Jung and Jewish mysticism, and papers I would call Jungian memoir, telling personal stories from inner lives. Several spoke as Jews struggling with Jung. I spoke as a Jungian struggling with Judaism. The Jungian memoir I wrote for that event has opened an important space in my soul, a deeper and more open connection to myself as a Jew and to Jewish mysticism—a Chupah for the sacred wedding of Tifereth with Malkuth— male and female energies in the Kabbalistic worldview—which Jung saw in a vision of the “Garden of Pomegranates” and described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Now, thanks to the Jung Journal, all the papers given at the conference are available in print (Volume VI, Number 1). I hope you’ll take a look at them.


Here are some excerpts from my paper.

The Rabbi, the Goddess, and Jung

You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.
The Zohar

Spiritual Exile

How does a Jew to whom God never spoke in a synagogue, who has wandered the world and the paths of other religions seeking direct experience of the sacred, stumble upon it in her own tradition? How does a spiritual exile, whose life was transformed by the Goddess, get past her issues with the patriarchal God of the Jews.

With Jung’s help…

This is the story of how Jung, or the Jungian worldview, helped me find my meandering way home to Judaism. As is my fashion I will weave in poetry, dreams, a journey and a conversation with a ghost.

I have always longed for myth, for mystery, for those moments when the world cracks open, when something uncanny, wild, awesome, enters. I have glimpsed it in Hindu temples, in Catholic churches, in Pagan rituals, in poetry, everywhere but in the Jewish world I knew as a child…

*******

The Ten Commandments of My Childhood

It was a proud thing to be a Jew in my family of origin; it was also a difficult thing. We Jews had responsibilities. We had suffered as a people. We needed to be eternally vigilant, on the look out for tyranny, oppression, discrimination— whether against us Jews or others. There were unspoken instructions for how to be a good Jew below the surface of dinner table conversations, and in social gatherings in the very Jewish neighborhood in post war Queens, New York, we lived in during the early 1950s. These are the commandments I heard:

I. Thou shalt vote Democratic.
II. Thou shalt take a stand against injustice and inhumanity.
III. Thou shalt believe in the innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
IV. Thou shalt support unions and the ACLU.
V. Thou shalt love Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and the Weavers.
VI. Thou shalt sing folk songs, spirituals, and union songs with gusto.
VII. Thou shalt know all the famous Jews in the culture, and speak of them with pride, from Albert Einstein to Sammy Davis Jr.
VIII. Thou shalt love the state of Israel, but not forgive it its trespasses.
IX. Thou shalt know the stories of the Hebrew Bible, for thy father will tell them to you as “great literature.”
X. Thou shalt never forget “what happened.”


Upside Down Tree

I was given a gift of a dream. I am shown an image. It is an upside down tree—whose branches touch the earth, whose roots are in the sky. The tree is filled with Hebrew letters. I did not recognize what it was, at the time, though the image stayed with me, tugged at me…[It took me some time to realize that I had] been shown the Tree of Life—the symbolic expression of Jewish mysticism. I [had] stumbled into the esoteric aspect of my own tradition, which I had thought lacked a mystical, contemplative side.…


Black Fire Written on White Fire


It must be She, the Shekina, who is behind what happens next. In September of 2004 I find myself in Girona, Spain. My husband Dan and I have come here because it was a center of Jewish life and Kabbalistic thought before the expulsion of the Jews …

*******

I sit on the tiny balcony of our hotel room, and try to focus…despite the sounds of passing people, cars, motorcycles, water being poured, conversations in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, English, despite the bells of the Cathedral. I imagine the rabbis meditating—making contact with God amidst donkey piss and roosters crowing and children running about and bed pans being emptied.

*******

In my wanderings in the old Jewish section of Girona I happen into the Nahmanides Institute of Jewish Studies. I learn that Moses ben Nahman (nicknamed Ramban by the Jews, called Nahmanides in the Greek fashion of the day) was a leading Kabbalist in the 13th century in Girona. He was of the generation before the Zohar was written down, and one of those who influenced its writer, Moses de Leon.

[from Tarot of the Sephiroth]

*******

I am filled with the presence of this Rabbi. Later, in my readings, I will stumble upon a reference to a Jewish myth in which “the soul of a great sage who has died binds his spirit to one of the living in order…to guide a person through a difficult time of transition.” This spirit is called an ibur, in contrast to the malevolent spirit known as a dybbuk.

I find myself talking to him: Ramban, I walk the Roman walls of your city and your light walks with me. I walk the narrow streets of the Call de Jueu and the light you received from Moses at Sinai walks with me. You speak in my heart. This light, you tell me, is not of memory, not of the history of our people, not the word remembered and written down. This light is now…

*******

I wonder why it is you who have come to guide me, you who are at once a mystic and a learned Rabbi of the tradition. You say it is because I need to learn your teaching, that “Everything that is done in the mundane sphere is magically reflected in the upper region…” You say I listen too much to my fears. I need to open all my senses to the Shekina. You say I need to contemplate the mystery of “black fire written on white fire —the tension between the oral tradition and the radiance, between manifest wisdom and the transcendent. Because you want me to understand that the Goddess is alive in you, that The Sister from Below is your familiar, you tell me a stanza of your mystical hymn about the birth of the soul.

He radiated light to bring her forth,
In hidden well–springs, right and left.
The soul descended the ladder of heaven,
From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

You say our souls stand in eternity, they are forever, we spend our lives finding our way back to them, for we are in exile from our beginnings. You say the light is now, here in this place where we meet.

********

I wrote a poem for Ramban, who became a beloved familiar in the writing of this paper. Here is the last section:

God’s Singing Tree
In Two Voices

Ramban
you are old magic with goddess eyes
you are warm fire in the dark of the cave
you gather me back to the breath of that mother
in the long long line of my great grandmothers
who picked up her baby her sack of food
and walked out of Catalonia in 1492

the vessels shattered there was contraction
there was exile you tell me
this is the nature of creation

they who listen will hear
they who open their eyes will see
there is a tree it grows from the feet
of Abraham and Sara its leaves catch the light
on this balcony where I sit with you

remember my daughter
wherever you are the poem is
black fire written on white fire
God’s singing tree



Friday, October 28, 2011

News from the Muse: The Muse of Persimmons

True joy is simple: it comes and exists from itself, and is not to be sought....All you must do is fulfill your task.
C.G. Jung in The Red Book



The news from the muse is persimmons. The little tree in front of our house is aglow with them. The joy they give me is a surprise. Persimmons are new to me. I never paid much attention to them. I’m a summer fruit kind of girl. Give me a juicy peach, a sassy apricot and I’m happy.

When Dan and I moved into our town house a few years ago, the father of the seller showed us the garden he had tended. His name was Mohammed. We gathered his son and daughter-in-law were not interested in roses and trees. He introduced us to the persimmon he had planted. It had not yet borne fruit.

Mohammed was gaunt, dark eyed, white haired. He told us he was from Bosnia. I wondered what he had been through. We’d followed, with horror, the terrible stories of war and genocide in the ‘90s. As the daughter of refugees, I identify with refugees. I wrote a poem during those years about that identification. It’s in Adagio & Lamentation.

again the raptor god

I’ve never stopped hearing the screams
never stopped smelling the blood
Vietnam Vet on the radio



1. repeat after me

we are flesh (for now)
have bones
wake up in the middle of the night
in the grip of what
won’t drop us

words gather their stories around us
when we were children there was a song
about a bird who flew away

do you remember how the words grew axe heads?


all night my love you shook the bed
were you walking through the mountains to Albania?
dancing on a bridge in Belgrade?



2. the good life

we were fat and sassy
had three babies in a row
grapes grew
in our arbor
cock crow woke us
every morning



3. old lady

I have seen you on tv in your bedroom slippers
in the snow your dark haired grandson carried you
over the mountains across
the border your eyes enter
my house follow me down
the carpeted hall

rain on the roof
rain on the only blanket you have

O son of the mother
what have you done with the bones
of our grandparents?



4. Passover

the angel passed over our house
nobody

came to the door
in a black ski mask
nobody

ripped up our baby photos
tossed fire on our roof
nobody
made us to lie down
in the back yard

under the fruit trees



Persimmons came a few years later. Nothing prepared me for their glory--how they filled the tree with golden suns, how they tasted--subtle, nutty, wise. A strange thing to say about a fruit, but I find myself musing--if there were a garden of maturity, a garden of the fruit of ripeness, the tree of late life would be a persimmon.

Whenever Dan brings a handful of the elegant fruit into the house, I think of Mohammed--how moved I was by him. His son liked fast cars and motorcycles. His daughter-in-law liked shoes and boots with spikey heels. We’d seen the signs of these obsessions when we first looked at the house. They’d painted the place in blazing colors--orange, metallic blue, yellow. We changed all that. But the gifts of Mohammed, who had tended the roses, planted the persimmon, continue to nurture us and give us joy. His children have gone on to bigger and better in America. Does Mohammed remember his persimmon tree? Does he have any idea of the treasure he has left us?


I muse about the magic of persimmons. What makes them so enchanting to me? Is it that, when you cut them open, you see a design in the shape of a mandala? Is it that they look like tiny suns, or like the orb the Emperor holds in the Tarot Deck? Is it that like me, like Mohammed, they are wanderers? They came originally from China, wandered to Japan where they’ve become the most beloved of fruits, before they made their way to the new world. Is it that they belong to a genus--Diospyros--which means fruit of the gods?

The joy I feel at the sight of the luminous persimmon tree reminds me of a dream I had some years ago, of a tree filled with golden flowers. The dream took me back to Jung’s essay--a Commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower--which is an ancient Chinese alchemical text. Jung writes: “The Golden Flower is the light and the light of heaven is the Tao.” The Tao is mysterious. It has brought golden fruit of the gods from China to my front garden in America via an old man from Bosnia.

I wish my Oma were here to paint the persimmons--perhaps a still life with glowing fruit on a silver tray, a bowl and its shadow nearby. Perhaps she’s paint the treeits branches weighed down by the golden fruit. In the middle of the night I remember that we found a painting by her, of persimmons, last time we visited my mother. She did not paint the Fuyu persimmons we’re enjoying. Hers are Hachiya persimmons. But they too, are magical.


Painting by Emma Hoffman

I wish I could give Mohammed a basket of his persimmons. Instead I wrote him a poem.


TO AN OLD MAN FROM BOSNIA

I never expected persimmons.
That tree you planted—
before this became our home—

was a stick in the winter mud.
Your name, you said, was Mohammed
I wonder what lies behind you.

You tended your son’s garden—
what he loved was—
fast cars.

It’s been three times September
since we bought this home—
that scrawny tree surprised us—

clusters of hard green fruit, turning gold.
I’d not known persimmons
their taste from another world

the splendor they steal from the sun.
I wish we could talk.
We could walk in the garden

admiring your plantings.
I’ve been wanting to tell you, Mohammed
I never expected persimmons.