Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts

Friday, March 30, 2012

The Muse of the Jungian Way



The Muse of the Jungian Way

What possesses people to leave collective consciousness—the comfort and security of the mainstream—and follow an arcane path in which they cultivate their dreams and visions, follow synchronicities, talk to inner figures, use ancient divining tools such as the I Ching, study myth and fairy tales, wrestle with their shadows and generally wander far away from the familiar worlds of family and friends?

There are as many stories of how this happens, as there are Jungians. In Marked by Fire you can read 13 soulful and gripping versions of the story. Here is a part of my version, which I didn’t have space to tell in Marked by Fire.

My story begins many years ago when my children were little. I was a lost young woman, severed from my deep Self. I had a frightening dream:
My baby daughter’s head was severed from her body. My mother’s voice said: “You’ll never get her together again.”
The dream spooked me. I thought something bad was about to happen to my child.

In a synchronistic event that changed my life my girl friend’s mother—who was seeing a Jungian in therapy—invited her daughter and me to a Jungian Conference called The Forgotten Feminine. I knew nothing of Jung and had no idea what the conference title meant, except that it tugged at me. I wanted to go.


The Handless Maiden (by Lucy Campbell)

At the conference I heard mature, wise, potent women—Jungian analysts—unlike any women I knew in my life—describe their work with their patients. This was the late 1960s. They told stories of women who were lost in their lives, who had forgotten their creative gifts, forgotten their souls, who had given themselves away to their men and their children, buried their deep natures and their wildness, severed their heads from their bodies. I learned that in the sanctuary of their Jungian analyses they found their souls, reclaimed their writing or painting or dancing, connected their heads and their bodies, found their deep selves. It was suddenly clear to me that my frightening dream was not about my daughter, it was about me. I was in trouble. I turned to my friend’s mother and asked her about that Jungian she was seeing.

That is how I tumbled into a Jungian analysis. It saved my life. I wrote a poem about it:

letter to a first analyst

I caught the dream
and rose dreaming
H.D.
you sat with me in the early years when it was all
coming apart my too young marriage that business of the donkey
in the basement the father whose eyes entered
me took what they would

you sat with me and I opened like a window
in a suffocating room whose drapes have been drawn for too long
now blinds snapped up smell of hot tomatoes
strawberries in the sun

i had been living in my body
as though it were an unmade bed for years the smell of decomposing
dreams under the bedside table crumpled kleenex bad blood spotting
the sheets the children were so little they wandered in
wanting their breakfast and me just waking from a dream of spitting out my teeth on the road or dream of using a contact lens for contraception it splintered
inside me what spirit led me to you after the terrible dream—my daughter’s head was severed from her body— my mother’s voice said: “you’ll never get her together again”

i write to tell you that i danced at that daughter’s wedding on a hillside in berkeley
not far from your house she was beautiful and i was glad
for all the years of catching the morning dream the hours you sat
with me through sandstone storms and backdoor me even death’s most yellow incarnation made a pass at my bed but you
who opened windows closed that door i remember

once you told me the story of a prince and a hairy wild man fresh out of the forest
they wrestled for a long time fought until each knew
the other’s body and mind until they were inseparable friends
(published in crimes of the dreamer)


Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Years later one of the women who stood on the stage of that conference on The Forgotten Feminine—Elizabeth Osterman—would greet me when I was a new candidate at the Jung Institute. She’d been watching me, she said. “You are a poet. You must follow your nature.” Though she was never my analyst or consultant, she was a powerful figure for me; I felt her support for my deep nature. When she died I wrote a poem called “Dirge” in which I looped back to my first experience of her. Here is that section of the poem:

You stood
on a university platform
in Wheeler Auditorium
where I had heard
many famous professors
but no one had ever told me

that a woman
writing down her dreams
can spiral inward
to her dark center
and come back out with flaming colors
and her own wild tongue!
(published in red clay is talking)

My story is not unusual in the Jungian world. In Marked by Fire, the collection of memoirs edited by Patricia Damery and me, there are many such stories. Sometimes it is a dream that opens up a person’s psyche, sometimes a longing, a difficult conflict, a terrible event like the death of a mother or a serious illness. The Jungian way involves noticing the small voice within you—your muse, your soul—that speaks from another realm; it requires attention to the world of dreams and synchronicities, an openness to the irrational and the awesome, an ability to see life’s pain and suffering as a meaningful aspect of one’s path.

These personal stories by Jungian analysts are about the direct experience of the unconscious—the fiery process of becoming ourselves. They are food for the soul.


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