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NOVEMBER
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Novermber 10.
Spawning trout, the creek roils out of Earth's womb, unaware of time or seasons. "Clearly, spring, summer, and winter, as well as morning, afternoon, and evening are the terms of an inner timetable rather than an outer one."3 Today, the path along its shore is compressed by countless footprints, deep and shallow, shod and bare. I must walk a different way. On the other side of the country Thoreau's circle is shrinking. "27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long,"4 One muggy summer morning. I circumambulated Walden Pond, the famous cabin a memory exhumed from its foundation: "a lightly excavated, cordoned-off square of soil and, to its side, a waist-high cairn erected in commemoration by generations of pilgrims."5 Thoreau had searched for "the hook of hooks," in order to angle for the pond itself. What god can be snared when all the fish are gone? About 2000 years ago, the zodiacal sign of Aries moved into Pisces. Thus, around 200 A.D., in Alexandra, Egypt, the symbol of the fledgling Christian Movement became Ichthus, the fish—also the contour of the Earth Goddess's vulva, as we left the sea to seek a deeper mind.
The most pervasive symbol to emerge from Christianity is, of course, the cross, which extends back at least to the ankh of ancient Egypt. The Christian cross didn't appear until the 4th Century, the crucifix and its many variants rising about a century later. In mythology's copse, Christ's elder, the Northern god, Odin, was also "wounded with a spear...on that tree of which no man knows/from where its roots run..." Although, he hung himself up, "myself to myself..."7 No drama here, just the need to know. Not knowing is Divinity's stigmata. "The wound is the place where the Light enters you." -Rumi Where a myth has been deracinated, revised or revenanted, we discern the Tree that connects heaven and earth, faith and reality, the sacred and the profane, the Tree that, rooted in the Void, cradles the ghosts of rain. . 17. Last Friday night, Bryan Wittine gave a talk to Oregon Friends of C.G. Jung on "The Mystical Relationship of Lover and Beloved: Sufi and Jungian Perspectives." Dr. Wittine calls himself an "amateur Sufi," who studied the tradition in Turkey. Wittine began by defining Sufism, the mystical school of Islam, as "a way of experiencing reality as love." This love is for the Divine, and takes place in a reality that "has destroyed its images, and without these images that are so rich in its tradition, they are going crazy because they have no containers for their extraordinary imaginative power."8 But God, Void, Emptiness, Mystery, Spirit, "the Silence before all expression," can't be contained in images, rites, or prayers. Recently, I dreamed:
"In the Sufi tradition," Wittine continued, "God has 99 names, and each name is a quality of the Divine." Each name ignites an attribute of Allah, the One who would make an even 100, but the godhead doesn't round off. Like
numerous religions, Sufism also inspires "teaching
stories," in which one of the most beloved characters
is the holy fool Mulla Nasrudin, referred
to paradoxically
as "very stupid, improbably clever, the possessor of
mystical secrets."12
Wittine comments that "Jung's psychology will bring us to Nothingness." Then why the stories? Shah writes that "it is inherent in the Nasrudin story that it may be understood at any of many depths. There is the joke, the moral—and the little extra which brings the consciousness of the potential mystic a little further on the way to realization."13 On the way to the library today, I turned, instead, to the woods— taking a path punctuated with wide eyes of muddy water, and the creek beside it singing like a choir lost in the rapture of ancient rills racing toward the sea. Rain fell over my open notebook, as Platonic 'Ideas' fall completely to the ground if it is understood that these 'Ideas' have no existence, as Ibn 'Arabi puts it, or in other words that they are not of the nature of distinct substances and constitute only words faded into a proverbial autumn sky. "Love,"
Wittine said, "is the source and essence of our being."
Such platitudes collapse the numinous, which can be grappled
but not grasped. He also said, "Love shows us that we are
part of the whole." I don't know what the whole means here,
other than a montheistic shadow. I
do know that, to paraphrase
Jung, the more conscious we become the more expansive we become,14
and that those who believe in an infinite inclusion are condemned
to a cinctured frame of mind. Thus, cosmologists become contortionists
when figuring the shape of the universe. Reality is dynamic,
not a whole, or a given. In love with a person, not a god, we
create
who we are together.
23. This morning, I began to walk to the forest, turning back because of the wind's bitterness. Later, I set out again. The road chosen is like the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: couples, children and dogs promenading, until I'm lifted by a path heading in another direction.
as there's nothing we haven't been for ten million years. And the mountain? What rolls down is the silence of clouds, not words we are wont to repeat.
27. Thanksgiving Day is anointed with cold rain. I head for the city's Zoo, today open to the public for free. For me, visiting a zoo is like visiting relatives serving a life sentence for the crime of not being human. I have written about this before, because it as long as we cannot share this planet with equality and respect for other species, as humans we cannot live peacefully with each other.16 In an essay on architecture and ceilings, James Hillman speculated that the first zoos were modeled on bear pits, so that the animals were observed from above. Lorded over. Hillman put it this way: "The place from which the gods have fled is now where the planner sits."17 Animals were once our gods, as we see drawn large on the walls of Paleolithic caves, and still hinted at in metaphors and iconography of our religions. Now they are symptoms of our separation from the rest of the world. Walking past fences and bars, buffeted by children excited to see the animals they saw on TV, I tried to trace what led us here, only to find that everything leads back to a history knitted from an infinite maze of woolly strings.
Woven tight enough, our theories will float, but we'll still get wet, only slower. The pelting rain attracts demonic thunder to the jostling waterproofed crowd wolfing down corn dogs, as the little tourist train chugs by blowing its loud civilizing horn.
It's not the gazing of humans, but lack of it by the animals that most disturbs me. As John Berger says,
Silently watching the rain today, curled in corners of their premixed concrete dens, the captives play and replay the smells, tastes and sounds of their homeland. "Not only human memory, but the very ground of imagining is now threatened with extinction."20 Their world is "made of bars, a hundred thousand
the
problem with all interpretation: S.L. Drob, “James Hillman
on Language.” In, Archetypal Psychologies: Reflections
in Honor of James Hillman. New Orleans, LA., 2008. |
