High in the Afterglow

I woke up this morning with a dream: I am being transported in a small boat over blue waters whose waves curl up and down as elegantly as in a Japanese woodblock. Light sparkles. I am not in charge of this journey. But everything is so clearly delineated— so intense— I feel high. I realize I’m still in the afterglow of last Friday’s Red Book conversation in which Maxine Hong Kingston, Rhoda Feinberg and I wrestled with Jung’s strange and beautiful book.

The Red Book is the record, in the form of an illuminated manuscript, of Jung’s famous “confrontation with the unconscious.” He writes directly out of his vulnerability, working out his relationship with his soul in the depths of the mythopoetic imagination.

Maxine Hong Kingston lives in a mythopoetic landscape, as do I. Maxine, of course, is the author of "The Woman Warrior," "China Men," "The Fifth Book of Peace" and other literary treasures of our time. Rhoda Feinberg, Maxine’s good friend of many years, is a psychotherapist who traveled from Hawaii to join us for the evening. Her humor, her wisdom, her teaching stories of everyday life were earth to Maxine’s fire and sometimes water, my air and water.

We three had spent months reading the Red Book and getting to know one another. Here we were, unscripted—sitting in the lovely sanctuary of San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church before an audience of over 200 people—not knowing what would happen.

Conversation happened. We spoke of Jung, how he opened himself to the powerful forces of the collective unconscious, suffering the intensity of his visions, engaging in dialogues with his inner figures. This direct experience was the raw material from which he shaped a psychology that includes spirituality, imagery and the creative imagination. We spoke of the healing power of the creativity, of Maxine’s writing workshops with veterans, of the importance of social engagement with the world and its suffering. We “talked–story,” an essential element in Maxine’s writing and in Rhoda and my practices. We spoke of the ancestors, of what they need from us. I quoted Jung’s passage in the Red Book:

The primordial fire that conquers every necessity shall burn again, since the night of the world is wide and cold, and the need is great…
The words uttered at the fire are ambiguous and deep and show life the right way…
Aware of their deep helplessness…they will respect the holy fire again, as well as the shades sitting at the hearth, and the words that encircle the flames. p.280

We imagined we were all sitting around that primordial fire.

Soul was with us. The mythopoetic imagination stirred all three of us, and, as we gathered from the response we got, the audience as well.

I am so grateful to Maxine and Rhoda for their generosity, their big hearts and great spirits. This was the fourth and last of a series of Red Book Dialogues created by Ellen Becker and the Development Committee of the SF Jung Institute. They have created an exciting new format for cultural events. I thank them for all the hard work they did making these events so successful.

I was not in charge of this journey. But that evening sparkles in memory, intense, full of wave and swirl. I feel high in the afterglow.

Red Book Dialogues

The C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco has been hosting a series of dialogues between Jungian Analysts and leading teachers, writers and artists in the community--all inspired by the recent publication of The Red Book.

The final event in the series will take place Friday, March 25, 2011 at 7:30 PM and will feature Maxine Hong Kingston in dialogue with Naomi Lowinsky and Rhoda Feinberg. The venue is the Unitarian Church at 1187 Franklin Street in San Francisco.

Tickets are available at www.sfjung.org. [$25 General Admission ($10 Student)]

The Music Muse

The Music Muse was a visitor when I was a girl. She was not really my muse. She belonged to my father, a musicologist and a fine pianist. My parents were German Jews who raised me and my brothers in the great European tradition of music and literature. Musical evenings were a family ritual, especially when my mother‘s mother, my Oma, came to visit. They connected us to our European roots. My father had entered my mother’s family as the piano teacher, in Holland. When he married my mother in 1938 he entered a family that had the means to escape the catastrophe that loomed over the Jews.

My father was a haunted man. He yelled at my mother. He yelled at us children. Ghosts were riding him, but he seldom spoke of them: his mother and father had died in the Shoah; so had millions of nameless dead, whose fate he’d escaped.

When the Music Muse came to our house all the raw angry pieces of the day fell away— the atmosphere softened. My mother relaxed. My brothers relaxed. My shoulders relaxed. My angst and my vigilance took a breather. The ghosts were there; I felt them. But they had stopped careening around, making a big commotion. They settled down, as did we children, and listened to the Music Muse.

She came as Bach. My father’s crisp, clear articulation enhanced the long lyrical phrases of a fugue or an adagio. He had been on his way to becoming a concert pianist as a young man in Germany, when he injured his hands. They were small hands—he could barely reach an octave. It was a catastrophe at the time. My father taught me that something good could come out of the bad. It changed his path. He always said that he was grateful, because he was much more suited to being a scholar of music.

Sometimes the Music Muse came as Schubert. I loved to hear my Oma sing Schubert lieder, my father at the piano. They are poems set to music. Oma’s voice vibrated with feeling. She was telling her story through those songs. My soul was stirred. I was filled with a longing for something intangible that lay beyond the everyday, beyond the fear and the rage, beyond the unredeemed dead and the broken lineage. Music, I’ve come to understand, was the religion of my childhood. It was blessing, solace, and prayer, how spirit became manifest, how passion was expressed, how soul returned to our haunted lives.

My father, I can hear him now, would be the first to say that the Music Muse and the Poetry Muse were sisters, even twins. They began life together back in the beginning of human time. He would point out, if he were alive to comment, that my poetry is very musical, and he would take full credit for that. Certainly it was he who inspired the title poem of my new collection, “Adagio & Lamentation” which invokes one of those musical evenings in my childhood. And it was my musical step daughter, Lisa Safran, who put this poem to music, bringing the Music Muse and the Poetry Muse together again.

adagio and lamentation

when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow
our dead came in and sat with us a ghostly visitation
and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago

this is how prayer was said in my childhood solo
piano arguing with god adagio and lamentation
when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

music accompanied us into the valley of the shadow and lo
Bach was torah Mozart was our rod Schubert led us into contemplation
my grandmother sang lieder remembering long-ago

my child’s soul was full of glimmerings the glamour of the gone the glow
of candles borne by children into the dark German woods the illumination
of the evergreen all this I saw and more when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

my mother’s dead sister my grandfather in a cattle car woe
permeated shadows stirred the curtains took up habitation
in my grandmother’s body filled every song she sang with how she longed for long ago

long gone now my grandmother my father although
sometimes I call them back by villanelle by incantation
come my fierce father play for me water my soul in Bach’s flow
sing my sad grandmother your song is my covenant with long ago


Photo: Edward Lowinsky (toward the end of his life) by Nikki Arai