the lion's roar

According to Joseph Campbell, religion begins with art. Before there is any such thing as a church, or a priest, or a prophet, there is the poet: the sensitive soul to whom comes inspiration, a vision, an experience, and the capacity to give it expression.

If the poet's words evoke a similar inspiration in others, then there is the possibility of the spread of a spiritual idea. Depending on how powerful and infectious this original idea is, there is the possibility of institutionalization: the development of a social structure based on the idea. A sect is born, which may possibly, depending on many factors, grow into a religion.

One of the points that Campbell makes in his Masks of God tetralogy is that in our modern age the traditional institutional religions have lost their inspiring force. In the Christian West this loss of inspiration was already happening in the 12th century, just when the cities of Europe were throwing up cathedrals to exalt the God that everyone said they believed in. But the most sensitive souls of the time, the poets, recognized in their own hearts that the forms of Christianity, then more than 1,000 years old, had ceased to inspire educated people. The rites had become a mere routine, and the pulse of genuine life and meaning had to be sought elsewhere.

Where? God was dead. Where was the living water of spiritual value to be found?

This sought-for spiritual life, according to Campbell, became symbolized as the Holy Grail, and the new spiritual story that could excite modern imaginations and rouse modern hearts was the quest. This vision was articulated not by priests, schooled in an already institutionalized faith, and not by prophets, proclaiming the words of a god already known, but by poets, sensitive to their own experience and their own genuine perception of value. They were not professing a creed, not repeating words given them by others; they wrote about what they truly thought and felt. They looked into their own hearts and reported back.

In this way a work of art can turn into a rite: a structured experience that leads one to particular feelings and insights. The architecture and services of a church are intended to have this effect. Originally it certainly does (or the church could not survive), but over time it becomes stale. Endless repetition of the same experience loses its living force, and boredom sets in. It becomes mere duty, habit.

Speaking for myself, I can say that certain works of art--especially novels--have acted as rites for me. The single most powerful instance was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce when I was 18. I did not understand conceptually what I was going through while reading it, but it was emotionally powerful and undeniable. I experienced the power of language, of poetry, to reconfigure my soul. As with any effective rite, it changed me; I was a changed person, a deeper person, on finishing that book. It initiated me into the sensibility of a poet, and passed to me some of the mental and emotional tools I would need if I were to take up that calling. It showed me how to open to the creative life, how to be an artist.

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is an expression: "The lion's roar is fearless". The lion's roar is the truth. A tyrant can kill 10 million people but cannot scratch the truth. Each of us can die and will, but the truth cannot be killed. Fear of death, though, has us cringing from the truth--hiding, concealing, denying, avoiding. The artist, when he or she is true to his or her vocation, embraces the truth as he or she finds it--and proclaims it, whatever the consequences. That is the lion's roar, sending a shock and a shiver of alertness through all the other creatures within earshot.

This vocation is supremely worth following, wherever it leads. Like any sacred thing, it must be kept pure. It is a desecration to use it for petty motives of social or financial gain. That is the artist's equivalent of simony.

Right. On with it.

Stand By Me

The cold symptoms are deepening, but still have not reached the depth of which I know they're capable. My mind is still mostly sharp, and my nose is running only very slightly. Want me to keep you posted on my symptoms and secretions?

I got three pages written yesterday, limping a bit further through the desert of chapter 28. I was trying to rush, trying to go fast--to write with the same careless aplomb with which I knock out these blog-posts. A little bit of Stephen King in my gas-tank.

And speaking of whom, last Saturday's show in Paul's 80s Festival was the 1986 movie Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on King's novella The Body. It was the third or fourth time I'd seen it, and, as with all superior films, it was even better on this viewing than on the previous ones. The genre is actually adventure: in small-town Oregon in 1959, a band of four young heroes sets out on a quest to find the corpse of a boy their own age (12) who has been killed in the woods, hit by a train. By fibbing to their parents, they manage to embark on the quest secretly and unsupervised, and must face their adventure with only their kid-smarts, along with a few cigarettes and a handgun boosted from one of their dads.

(Looking at the film on Saturday, I was surprised to see how strong its correspondence was to my own TV show The Odyssey, complete with a treefort club at the beginning--this must have been an unconscious influence on us as we set up our own story in 1989-91. Warren and I always felt our main debts were to The Wizard of Oz and Star Trek--now I would have to stir Stand By Me into the mix as well.)

The hero, Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton), who narrates the story as an adult (Richard Dreyfuss) in 1985, has recently experienced the loss of an older brother (John Cusack), whom his parents loved more than they love him. The story is Gordie's journey to come to grips with his brother's death, and life and death in general. (In this sense the movie covers--much more powerfully--territory similar to that of the 1981 movie Ordinary People.)

This time I was struck by how much the movie centers around death, since the story itself and its young heroes are so full of life. The story itself is launched by the adult Gordie reading that his boyhood friend Chris has just been killed trying to foil a robbery in a fast-food restaurant, catapulting Gordie back in his mind to 1959 and their journey together to find the other boy's body. Gordie is not alone in struggling with family issues: two of his companions also have hard relationships with their fathers. At some deep level, their journey into the woods is a trek to father-atonement (another link with The Odyssey).

Although they are trekking into the forest, they follow train tracks, so there is a sense of path, as in The Wizard of Oz with its Yellow Brick Road. The symbolism of the path is different from the symbolism of hacking one's way into wild bush, as the Grail heroes did: this road has been built, but built by adults--by fathers. It's not a footpath or road, though: it's for trains--big, impersonal, masculine machines. They're powerful and get you where you're going, but they're also deadly if you get in their way. They don't stop for children.

Trains are one image-system in the movie; another is bridges. When the boys first set out, they cross a little rail-bridge: the threshold of adventure. Their most dangerous adventure en route is when they decide, after argument, to cross another rail-bridge: much longer and much, much higher. What is a bridge? It's a way to cross what is otherwise uncrossable--it carries you to a place where you could not go without it. From childhood to adulthood perhaps, or from one's everyday consciousness to the deeper zone of the unconscious forces within. I think of the Chinvat Bridge in Zoroastrianism: a narrow bridge in the afterlife that each soul must cross, but which only the good can reach the far side of, the bad plunging to the abyss. In this adventure, the two image-systems come together: a train shows up on the bridge, chasing them from behind, terrifying them and almost killing them. The boys have taken their lives in their own hands, and are branded as worthy for the rest of the adventure by surviving this brush with death--the same death that claimed their quarry.

It's a true heroic quest: the boys are up against forces that are bigger than they are, both within and without; they have to dig within themselves to meet the challenges, with no guarantee of survival. It's not a playground, it's real life.

This is a really well-written and well-produced show. It's got a permanent spot in Paul's 80s Festival.

the sleeping wounded

A mite underslept this morning after awaking at 3:45 from this dream:

Dream of being shot--or rather of having been shot--with a diamond bullet. I'm with Kimmie and others, cleaning out a house or apartment, and I'm putting on a record to listen to: a 45 RPM disc of "Reelin' in the Years." For a lark we're going to see whether we can clean out a certain room in the time that the song plays. I'm expecting the song to last maybe four minutes, but I see on the label that it plays for only 2:59--even less than three minutes! I'm surprised; this won't leave us much time.

And now I notice that I've been shot: there's a bullet-hole in my chest or upper arm, a clean, dark-red hole. I know it's a diamond bullet, but to Kim (or Mom?) I say, "It's a carbon bullet." This is bad, because this kind of bullet does especial harm, maybe blowing up inside one after a certain time. I'm not in pain, but I realize that I may be about to die--a reality I find hard to grasp, and I wonder whether Kimmie and the others realize the urgency, or whether I'll be dead before the song's over.

I quickly typed those paragraphs into my journal when I got up so I wouldn't forget the dream. I can see in the images certain impressions from recent days: I was thinking yesterday or the day before of when we moved Robin into her new apartment down the hill in October; a few days ago something caused the old Steely Dan song "Reelin' in the Years" to surface in my mind--possibly when Kimmie and I were reminiscing about the song "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo" by Rick Derringer, from the same year (1973), and I recalled an anecdote that Fagen and Becker of the Dan had exhausted Derringer in a recording session once by demanding endless repeats of a guitar solo; a couple of days ago I read an article in The Economist about the world diamond trade, and some of the effects of "blood diamonds" on that industry. (Curious side-note: Rick Derringer now appears to be a Christian rocker.)

I've also been reading and thinking about nanotechnology, which relies on carbon nanotubes and the minute carbon polyhedra called buckyballs. Maybe a week ago or so Kimmie asked me what a geodesic dome is (invented by Buckminster Fuller, after whom the nano-balls are named).

I recall too that "Reelin' in the Years" contains the lines "You wouldn't know a diamond/If you held it in your hand." Diamonds, of course, are also pure carbon. And I have toyed with the idea of setting a story in a globally warmed future, with the working title of Carbon. I've been reading about how the complexity of living forms is made possible by the special properties of carbon, its many different ways of making combinations with other atoms. In that sense it's the element of life. To be shot with a bullet made of it is therefore something of an irony.

These are just scraps of impressions and thoughts: the shreds from which the collage of the dream was made. But I haven't thought about what the dream might mean. I felt a sense of sadness and vague urgency in the dream rather than the dread I might really feel if death were so imminent. But it was striking, anyway--and I think a new kind of dream for me. Why that? Why now?

I never did return to sleep. The alarm went off, and it was time to lumber down here and start my day.

working with symbols

I'm back.

Lately, as I rehabilitate myself after my long hiatus, I have been confining my blog posts to weekdays. Yesterday I missed again due to a time squeeze in the afternoon: Kimmie and I were to head out to my mother's place to join two of her sisters, here on their first visit from Ontario, for dinner. Mindful as ever of getting my reading-time in, I went to my reading-chair early and never got to the blog.

I haven't been doing much on my book for the past week or so, focusing mainly on this copywriting gig. In a burst just before lunch yesterday I did manage some more notes in my steadily growing Notes document for chapter 25 (49 pages and counting, I'm almost embarrassed to admit--though quite a few of those are extracts from research books). I just repeated and consolidated to myself some of my thoughts about the imagery and symbolism of this chapter and therefore of the work as a whole.

And what exactly is a symbol, anyway? I must have some definitions of it around...

I turned to the bookcase and pulled out my old hardback copy of Jung's The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. I checked the index for "symbol", and, among many other entries, there was this in the chapter called "Spirit and Life" (slightly compressed):

By symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in language. Spirit that can be translated into a definite concept is a psychic complex lying within the orbit of our ego-consciousness. It will not bring forth anything, nor will it achieve anything more than we have put into it. But spirit that demands a symbol for its expression is a psychic complex that contains the seeds of incalculable possibilities. The Christian symbols’ power changed the face of history.

In this context he is talking only about symbols of the spirit, but what he says goes for other symbols too--they express the inexpressible. They are the best way of saying something that cannot be said. Their very lack of explicit meaning makes them more meaningful than conventional signs--"symbols" in the everyday sense.

Since, in storytelling as in all true art, nothing is as it appears, this means that everything is a symbol. And therefore symbolism is another rack of tools in the writer's workshop. These are the tools I've been working with lately.

authority again

The sun continues to shine. It's like summer, but the sun is lower, and the shadows darker. Trees are turning yellow and orange.

I had a chance to do a bit more work on chapter 25 (notes thereon) this morning, around my copywriting tasks. I'm still investigating the symbolism of my material, making connections. I don't want to say too much about it, since symbolism is not effective if it is perceived consciously as such. At least, this is certainly true in filmmaking. In fiction there is more leeway, since the reader controls the pace of his or her interaction with the material. Some readers enjoy thinking about the material on more than one level.

I'm thinking now about how I like to read a work of fiction. What do I do? How exactly do I do it?

I like to be in an alert, receptive frame of mind, unhurried and relaxed. If I'm just starting a book, I look for signs of the writer's authority: can I trust this person with my attention? I notice awkward or redundant turns of phrase, and these count heavily against the work; I start switching off. If the writer appears to know what he or she is talking about, though, I will bear with it as long as I can.

I've said it before but it bears repeating: authority is the writer's only asset. If you don't know what you're talking about, why should anyone read you?

For some reason I wanted to pull down my paperback copy of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. Here is how it opens:

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.

To me, this exudes authority. The narrator to me suggests that he knows this world and its people, and this knowledge comes through in subtleties of expression, what he chooses to emphasize and chooses not to mention. Weydon-Priors sounds like such a specific place, even if fictional: it grounds the story. And Hardy even, in those two sentences, manages to evoke a sense of curiosity, even mystery, making me wonder why this young couple has been on such a long journey on foot with a baby.

Authority comes only from knowledge. The writer's job is to communicate, but first of all it is to know.

an old-time lovebird

I feel somehow like an invalid recuperating from a long illness. I need to relearn the habit and method of making blog posts. I'll do one more for this week, and will return to it on Monday--I can start taking weekends off. We'll see how that goes.

Today I got off to a slow start, and returned again to my researches into imagery and symbols. I made some headway, I think.

I became involved with looking into partridges. According to Robert Graves in The Greek Myths, the partridge, sacred to Aphrodite, was linked to the smith-god Hephaestus, who was her husband. Hephaestus, like his Roman counterpart Vulcan, was lame (the result of being thrown off Mount Olympus for the second time--not the first!), but of surpassing skill in his craft. (He even made a number of metal women to work in his shop--the forerunners of Austin Powers's fembots.) This lameness is one of the links to the partridge, which, according to Graves, practices a hobbled love-dance, keeping one heel raised to strike at rivals.

According to J. E. Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols, the partridge was remarked on by many ancient and medieval authors, who all pointed to the fact that its young do not follow their parents when they hatch. Thus the partridge became for Christian writers an image of the rich man whose wealth does not follow him beyond the grave.

I suspect though that this is a later overlay on an older symbolism. Searching online, I found material on the gray partridge (in French, darn it--I had to read with a French-English dictionary). When mating they are very affectionate and amorous, male and female rubbing their necks, bills, and faces together. This will be one reason that they were held sacred to Aphrodite. Another will be the fact that in season, both sexes flush to a vivid rust-brown color on their faces and necks--a sign of their erotic excitement and readiness.

But I became interested in the image of the abandoned young (and I'm not sure that's true). What is the significance, the symbolism, of that?

A couple of thoughts: one is that the partridges are lovers rather than parents. This strengthens their association with eroticism. But another is that the young partridge must find its own way in life, without parental guidance. So the young partridge is on its own, equipped only with its instincts, and whatever it can learn. It has been not orphaned but abandoned--a significant difference, for it speaks to the relationship with the parents. Who among us might not identify in some ways with such a creature?

Incidentally, the Christmas carol "A Partridge in a Pear Tree", which I didn't find any reference to (except a quick parenthesis that partridges would never be found in trees), seems quite clear--at least, as far as the partridge goes. Sacred to Aphrodite, it's a true lovebird, and there being only one, the implication is that it stands for the singer, and he (or she) has just got a big hint from his or her true love...

you have to love it

An early post today, as I'm to head off to Mom's place for lunch--a near-weekly tradition now.

I returned to my desk at around 6:30 this morning, coffee mug in hand, and nudged myself back to my project after touring through some news stories online (I'm experimenting with Google News, getting fed up with distracting animated ads on CNN.com, as well as increasingly frivolous content).

Somehow I have become wrapped up in symbolism--delving into the symbolic aspects of my story, researching the meaning of different possible images. In a way I disapprove of myself as I do this, since it seems like intellectual footling and not really related to storytelling. And yet symbolism is at the heart of all storytelling, since, as Robert McKee declares, the cardinal rule of good storytelling is that nothing is as it appears.

Nothing is as it appears. This operates on many levels. On the level of imagery, it means that a boat is not a boat, a knife is not a knife. That is, a boat is not merely a boat; a knife is not merely a knife. Every story is like a dream, where meanings are expressed through images and through events. So the storyteller is confronted continuously with the questions, which images? which events?

The task is difficult, fussy, and uncertain. There are moments of illumination and inspiration--but much more questing and tinkering. I feel like a plumber down in the sub-basement of my story, digging and wrestling with rusted pipes in a cramped, dark space that is not intended for human occupancy. Just getting a rusted nut off can be a minor triumph. Minor, as well as private and useless in itself.

But I think of the last time a plumber was in my house, about five years ago, installing a new hot-water heater. Small, wiry, and enthusiastic, he liked nothing better than talking about his work. While he torched solder onto the new joins he talked about the many call-outs and late-night jobs he'd had. He was entirely cheerful about it.

"It's not enough to like this work," he said. "You have to love it."

I felt joy for him, as well as admiration. He loves plumbing. And if I'm honest with myself, I love poring through A Dictionary of Symbols and The White Goddess and the Dictionary of Word Origins, making discoveries and connecting meanings--finding a hidden network of order beneath the chaos of my incomplete work.

Sunset Boulevard

After a cloudy morning and a forecast of possible thundershowers, the sky is clear and the hot sun is back. I have returned from a brief errand trip, which involved dropping off a couple of DVDs at the library. One of these was Sunset Boulevard, which Kimmie and I watched last night.

It was the third time I'd seen the movie; I'd seen it once before Kimmie and I watched it maybe a dozen years ago. The digitally restored production was excellent. Again I had the happy experience of finding a movie I knew to be good to be even better than I'd remembered. As when I recently watched Risky Business starring Tom Cruise, it was such an absorbing experience that it seemed I was watching it for the first time. I know that Sunset Boulevard has been extensively studied, but I've not read those studies, so I'm going to make some observations of my own.

The 1950 movie, which stars William Holden and Gloria Swanson, was directed by Billy Wilder and written by him in collaboration with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman, Jr. Supposedly, Wilder and Brackett, who had been successful but mutually irritating collaborators before, had started a script in 1948 about an aging silent-film star wanting to make a comeback in a much-changed Hollywood. Dissatisfied with their progress, they brought in the film critic Marshman after being favorably impressed with his analysis of their earlier film The Emperor Waltz, and Marshman contributed the idea of a young gigolo character.

Whatever the case, I see in the story another cluster of elements around the theme of the Great Goddess. This theme was worked out thoroughly, in different ways, by J. G. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough and by Robert Graves in The White Goddess. As Graves observed, the essential story of the myth was that of the immortal Goddess and her two mortal consorts: the reigning priest-king who was, in effect, her husband, and the young man who would overthrow the king to become his replacement. The new king would, in time, be overthrown by his successor in the same way.

In the movie, the goddess is of course the screen legend Norma Desmond. The old king is her servant Max (Max von Stroheim), who, it comes out, was in fact not only her director at Paramount, but her first husband (she's had three), and therefore presumably the first occupant of the "husband's bed" which the young writer Joe Gillis (Holden) eventually comes to occupy. Interestingly, in this story the young protagonist is not seeking to win the goddess; he becomes "attracted" to her by money, because he sees her as a way of paying the finance company that wants to repossess his car. Gradually, without knowing it, he falls under her spell.

In a deeper reading, based on Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness, the myth of the Great Goddess and her vying lovers is itself an expression of a phase in the emergence of ego-consciousness from the womb of the unconscious, symbolized by the Great Goddess. One stage of this is marked by the emergence of twin brothers, who are in a sense womb-mates of the Goddess, and who take on the qualities of light and darkness as part of the gradual separation of the world into opposites, which is the function of consciousness. This represents an earlier stage than that of the divine king who is the consort of the Goddess.

The Goddess image is strengthened by the fact that the movie project Norma wants young Joe to rewrite for her is Salome, the story of the biblical princess who performs the dance of the seven veils and orders the beheading of John the Baptist. The dance of the seven veils is actually a much older mythological motif, dating back to Sumerian times, when it was performed by Inanna, the queen of heaven, who had to remove her clothes in stages in order to descend into the underworld to rescue Dumuzi, god of vegetation, who is trapped there.

It becomes clear that Norma Desmond does represent the devouring dragon aspect of the Great Goddess after all: through her wealth, power, theatrics, and emotional instability, she seeks to draw Joe to her and keep him there forever. His independence and his artistic creativity become bound to her, sold for a luxurious lifestyle.

He sees the potential for freedom and creativity again in the person of young Betty Schaeffer (Nancy Olson), a reader at Paramount, who sees potential in him and wants to work with him at developing one of his ideas. She also falls in love with him, and he with her. She is like the captive princess in the Neumann analysis: the young, beautiful aspect of the Goddess, who represents the good things in life that the hero can attain if he can overcome the dragon and free her. Betty's captivity is expressed in the fact that she can't write the script on her own; she needs Joe in order to realize her own dreams.

But Joe does not slay the dragon; the dragon slays him. He does not have the strength to overcome her overwhelming power. In Neumann's terms, he does not make the transition to manhood; he is the adolescent who dies because he doesn't yet have the inner resources to defy the Goddess. Consciousness is snuffed out; it will have to await another rising, another hero, who may have more moxie.

There is so much more to say about this movie. To name only one element: Gillis shows up at the house and is mistaken by Max and Norma as the undertaker for their pet chimpanzee who has just died! The movie places much emphasis on this element, later showing a grotesque scene in which Max and Norma inter the chimp in the yard in a child's coffin. I could only shake my head in awe and admiration as I watched.

Yes, much more to say. The short summary is that this is one of the best movies ever made. It was a privilege to watch.

Risky Business

Yesterday, stopping in at the library on our way home in the cold wind and rain from New Westminster, Kimmie and I picked up a DVD of Risky Business, the 1983 movie written and directed by Paul Brickman and starring the young Tom Cruise. We watched in last night over our dinner of sauteed zucchini, broccoli, and portobello mushrooms on pasta.

It was our third viewing of it, and we both enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed it more than ever before. One important reason was that I saw in it a depiction of many of the elements of the great cycle of human myth described by Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness.

Neumann's thesis is that world mythology maps the birth and development of ego-consciousness in humanity as a whole, which is identical to its birth and development in each individual. The conscious ego, the center of our personality, emerges from the dark bliss of unconsciousness as a baby emerges from the womb. After a long period of fleeting moments of consciousness that rise and sink back into the bliss of unconsciousness, the ego gradually becomes stronger, until it decisively proclaims its own independent existence, recognizing its distinctness from the nurturing but also smothering womb of unconsciousness. This decisive moment is pictured in the universal myth of the separation of the World Parents, in which a hero pushes apart his mother and father to create earth and heaven, and between them the whole manifest world.

Tom Cruise, playing Joel Goodson, the well-heeled, dutiful teenage son of complacent, affluent parents, is this hero. When his parents, leaving on vacation, leave him to look after the house, they expect him to continue along the rails on which they have set him from birth: the predictable track of responsibility and submission to their dictates. They show every sign of expecting his whole life to be lived in that way. He is nudged off the track by his friend Miles, who orders in a call-girl for him. When the girl, Lana (Rebecca de Mornay), arrives, Joel receives his sexual initiation, then finds himself embroiled with her further when she steals his mother's prize possession: a giant crystal egg she keeps on the mantle. In his effort to retrieve the egg, Joel finds himself in conflict with her pimp, and is eventually driven to accept Lana's suggestion that he host a night of schoolboys-paying-for-hookers at his parents' place in order to pay for damage to his father's Porsche.

The story contains virtually every element of the complete mythic emancipation of the hero from the matrix of the unconscious. I was most intrigued to watch how Brickman handled the crystal egg--an element I did not remember from my previous viewings of the movie. The egg, very valuable, was the "dragon's treasure"--for the dragon is a symbol of the devouring, regressive aspect of the mother, and the treasure is the boon of life and consciousness that she nonetheless carries within her and which it is the hero's task to free. The dragon itself appears in the guise of Guido, Lana's pimp (Joe Pantoliano), who gains possession of the egg, and is also in possession of Lana--the captive princess of myth. The captive princess is another epiphany of the Great Goddess, but a personal one, one that can be known and loved as an individual--one who contains all the love and life and creative potential that is to be gained by the heroic accession to full conscious autonomy.

Even the fact that Lana is a hooker is consistent with the symbolism, for the Great Goddess was regarded as mother, virgin, and prostitute. In the ancient world, "virgin" did not mean, as it does for us, physically inviolate; it meant a woman who was not under the authority of any man. In the ancient Near East the Great Goddess, whatever her name, was honored with the institution of ritual prostitution: her temples would be staffed by women who were regarded as epiphanies or priestesses of the Goddess, and they would have sacramental sex with men as a rite of both love and fertility, which the Goddess ruled. Often townswomen would have to prostitute themselves in this way before they could be married, to render due respect to the Goddess, and their wages would be offered to her.

So Lana's status as a hooker is consistent with her identification with the Great Goddess. And in the story she does indeed bring vitality to Joel's sterile, dutiful life. Sex, money, danger, violence, disgrace, risk, adventure--all come in her wake. Joel's mettle is tested, and he grows up; he becomes his own man. He is able to relate with Lana not as a timid teen but as an equal: a man worthy of her. By boldly displaying himself as he now is, he wins admission to Princeton University--the Ivy League college seemingly out of his reach as a "good boy".

Joel's mother, who has made an issue of how much she "trusts" him throughout the story, gives this the lie at the end when she angrily accuses him of putting a crack in her crystal egg. Yes: for the hero has hatched now. And Joel has indeed separated the World Parents, for while he mother stalks upstairs in a huff about the egg, his father takes him aside to reveal to him, joyfully, that he has been accepted by Princeton. Father and son are atoned. Joel reveals himself to be a "Good Son" not just in the sense of a dutiful boy in thrall to his parents, but one who has thrown off their authority and proved his worth to inherit a kingdom.

This gives an idea of why I found watching the movie so absorbing and exciting this time around. I doff my cap to Paul Brickman. Nice work.

the symbolic education

Home from a final day of holiday errands and pastimes. Kimmie took off a few days around the Easter weekend; this is her last. Now she's up at the hair salon, having color added (the perm was last week). I have a few minutes to type a blog-post.

This is a time of deep, dark soul-searching. Many things I am thinking and finding I can't publish in this blog. I can barely write some of them in my journal.

I'm reading many different books, as usual, slowly, a few pages at a time each. One of these is Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness, first published in Germany in 1949. I bought the book in 1979, when I was 20, as part of my passion for Jung's teachings, and because the title intrigued me. I read it at the time but found it tough going, or perhaps not what I was expecting, so I didn't get much out of it.

The cover of my Princeton Bollingen paperback edition is a simple white with an off-center graphic of a snake biting its own tail. According to Neumann, this ancient image, the uroboros, is a symbol of the primal unconscious, before the arising of any consciousness. He goes on to explicate, through the use of myths, how the consciousness of modern man, especially modern Western man, has slowly evolved and become more differentiated. This phylogenetic process is also repeated in each of us, ontogenetically, in our individual development of consciousness.

The development of consciousness, says Neumann, is symbolized in three main stages, represented by three great cycles of myth: the creation myth, the hero myth, and what he calls the transformation myth. Each of these cycles is composed of two or three substages of its own, with accompanying myths. For example, the first cycle, the creation myth, he breaks down into three parts: the uroboros, the Great Mother, and the separation of the World Parents, or the principle of opposites. I have read, this time through, only as far as the Great Mother (page 101), but I am getting much more out of it than I did 27 years ago.

Back then, I think I was disappointed to find this book to be not merely an explication of Jung's work, but an extension of it, as Neumann takes Jung's ideas and organizes them around his own theme. I was hoping for something more "orthodox". I was barely becoming acquainted with Jung's ideas; I wasn't ready to hear about reorganizations of them and new concepts. Now I take at face value Jung's own foreword to the book, in which he expresses appreciation and even some envy for Neumann in his systematization of the ideas. Jung felt himself to be a pioneer, and therefore not in a position to be able to see the significance of his own work so well.

I find Neumann's view of psychology and mythology to be powerful and profound. His relative obscurity is undeserved, and may be partly because he died in 1960 in Tel Aviv at the relatively young age of 55. This book, appearing in 1949, is a worthy companion to those other mighty symbolic works of the 20th century from that same period--Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947), The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948), and The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949).

So: the symbolic education continues, which is an education in my own psyche, my own past. Time for today's lesson.

out with the old

I'm running out of 2005--although not as much as others around the globe, since anywhere east of about Germany is already in the new year. Vancouver is one of the world's "latest" populated places. So be it: I'm usually the last to accomplish anything.

We'll spend it quietly, as ever. Robin is going out to dinner and on to a house-party; I hear the shower running upstairs as she prepares. But Kimmie and I have not gone out for New Year's in some time. I believe the last time was when we joined her brother's family down at Pasparos Taverna for a Greek dinner, probably before going on to her niece's place to actually usher in the new year. A few years before that we went to Pierre's, a nearby French restaurant (now gone, alas) and had an excellent dinner before being served champagne and party hats for midnight.

Years ago I had a clear memory of exactly how I'd spent every new year's eve from about, well, 1972 on. That ended sometime in the late 1980s, when Kimmie and I were living together and our new years became quiet and indistinguishable. I have spent two new year's eves away from home: in 1978-9 I was with Tim in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, fighting to stay awake till midnight in our 1970 Volkswagen Westfalia, possibly even having some Spanish sparkling wine to celebrate. The ships in the harbor all blasted their horns at the stroke of midnight, just as they do here in Vancouver. In 1981-2 I was in Tel Aviv, Israel, and by chance was invited to a private party by a girl who ran a snack bar where I'd had lunch. I was delighted, since my fellow hostel-dwellers were stuck at the hostel with each other. I brought in 1982 dancing and swigging scotch in an apartment somewhere off the beach. The hostess paid me the compliment of appearing at midnight to give me a kiss to bring in the new year. Wow!

I have long been interested in the symbolism of the new year, and indeed, in my earlier (unpublished) novel, Truth of the Python, the story opens on New Year's Eve, 1990, which was also a full moon (I made it into a lunar eclipse as well). Mircea Eliade discusses the symbolism of the ancient new year, as exemplified in the great festival in Babylon, in The Myth of the Eternal Return. The end of the year was the destruction of profane time and the elimination of the accumulated sins of society for the past year. The initiation of the new year was a rebirth of society, when all its citizens and institutions would start afresh, stamped out anew from their pristine cosmic models. In ancient Rome it was the Saturnalia, festival of the winter solstice, in which public gambling was permitted and masters served their slaves--an inversion of society to show that it had become scrambled, chaotic, and ready for rebirth. This myth still underlies our modern new year's parties (decadent, chaotic) and our custom of new year's resolutions: leaving one's sins behind and starting afresh as a new person.

Tonight Kimmie is making seafood chowder as a treat, and we'll watch the next installment of Paul's Rom-Com Festival: Bridget Jones's Diary with Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth.

But first: I'll build a fire, drink some tea, and do some reading. Now that's what I call fun.

hermaphrodite dream

A night of dreams. Here is one I remember from shortly before I woke at around 4:45:

I'm with Kimmie. We're at an exhibition or a theme park. The particular locale seems to be a kind of football or soccer field. It has historical and maybe archaeological exhibits on it, like ruined portions of buildings. I see that off to one side of the field are the great stones of Stonehenge. I'm surprised to see these here, since we’re in Israel; why would Israel have the stones of Stonehenge? It might be incongruous, but I feel awe. Don't others feel how special they are?

K and I go into an annex at the side of the field, a kind of trailer for museum exhibits (more like a ferry-terminal waiting area). A few tourists are trailing out, having seen the last screening of the film they show here. It seems we're just in time to catch the next showing--something to do with the overall exhibit: the history of the area or country.

K and I take seats in a row that is getting full, hard-plastic bucket-type seats on fixed racks, as at an airport or bus depot. A group or family next to us is taking seats. One woman, a plain-looking woman in glasses and a gray sweatsuit, but energetic and lively, is dropping off her stuff, trying to get her friends and family to save her a seat while she goes to do something. For some reason she has to fetch something from or put something in a big cloth duffel-bag that her female friend has in front of her on the floor. I watch while the friend opens the bag wide, and the woman tugs down her sweats a little to produce her large, semi-erect penis with black pubic hair. She flexes her legs to point her penis into the bag, as though the bag provides cover so that only--or almost only--her friend can see her flash it. Her attitude is saucy and mischievous. Is it a joke? Is she relieving herself somehow? She covers it up and whisks away.

Now K and I arrive at the couple of little rows of seats facing the TV screen where the museum film is about to start. There are just a few tourists and bored kids here. We take our seats and the film starts: maybe previews featuring old black-and-white documentary footage.

I typed up this dream during my morning coffee session, and made some interpretive notes. The image of a museum or theme park made me think of my recent reflections on theme, in both my work and my life. Theme = meaning. So a park (it was set up on a playing field, actually) to do with the meaning of the past. My work is historical fiction, and the dead hand of the past reaches through my life as well, as through everyone's.

The park is in Israel, and my story is about the ancient monarchy of Israel: the "Holy Land". I'm treating it as a place of origin for some of the most important cultural and mythological strands in our world today.

The sight of the monuments of Stonehenge was awesome (I in fact visited Stonehenge in 1978) in the dream. They were not in their circular formation, but standing in a row discreetly at the side of the field, near bushes and trees; and they were not being paid particular attention by the rest of the visitors. I'm reading about henges (ancient circular ditches that were used for astronomical purposes) in Uriel's Machine by Lomas and Knight; there are 40,000 megalithic sites in Britain--more than there are modern settlements. The megalithic structures date back to 4000 BC and earlier. The authors are making an argument that the megalithic monuments were the products of a culture that practiced relatively advanced astronomy, and that these astronomers were the ones referred to in the Book of Enoch, a core spiritual text of a Jewish tradition that never made it into the Bible. In my dream the stones have been brought to Israel; the connection has been made, but is not being paid attention to.

As for the hermaphrodite in the annex, this was a powerful and uncanny moment in the dream. The duffel-bag made me think of the magic wallet of Perseus, in which he put the severed head of Medusa to hide it after he cut it off. The bag, like his other accoutrements, was owned by Hades, and kept by the three Stygian Nymphs--the women who shared a single eye and a single tooth, passing these between themselves. I had a unique point of view into the bag, and saw a strange sight. I was witness to a secret, a mystery.

Here's what Cirlot, in his Dictionary of Symbols, says about the hermaphrodite (compressed):

The hermaphrodite is a consequence of applying the symbolism of the number two to the human being, creating a personality which is integrated despite its duality. The hermaphrodite is, above all, a god of procreation, closely linked, and ultimately identified, with the Gemini archetype. Psychologically hermaphroditism represents a formula of "totality", of the "integration of opposites". In other words, in expresses in sexual terms the idea that all pairs of opposites are integrated into Oneness. In addition, it is a symbol of an intellectual activity not in itself connected with the problem of the sexes. Blavatsky says that all peoples regarded their first god as androgynous, because Primitive humanity knew that he had sprung from "the mind", as is shown by traditions such as that of Minerva springing from the head of Jupiter. In alchemy, the Hermaphrodite plays an important role as Mercury; he is depicted as a two-headed figure, often accompanied by the word Rebis (double thing).

If the hermaphrodite is Mercury, the transformative agency of alchemy, then the bag is the alchemical vas, the vessel in which the transformation takes place.

Things are changing within me. I already know this. But I don't know from what, or to what.

the symbol without meaning

Another day, and what can I tell you.

Yesterday morning I opened up yet another new document to make, what, philosophical? personal? notes in. I took another Joseph Campbell text, his essay "The Symbol Without Meaning" from his The Flight of the Wild Gander, the highlights of which I keyed into Word sometime last year. It is yet another approach to the question of the mythology of our own modern age--and a profound and fascinating one, written later than his Masks of God series. I'm connected with this somehow, my work is connected with it, but how? how? Instead of merely reading and thinking, this notes document gives me the chance to read, think, and make notes right in the text: my own thoughts, my own insights.

In the course of this one short essay Campbell covers the whole sweep of mythological development, from the Paleolithic Age to the present, in terms of an abiding contest between two archetypal mediators of mythology to society: the shaman and the priest. The shaman is the older: he existed in the age of the hunting cultures of the Old Stone Age, the individual who, through vocation from the dream-world, the realm of the spirits and gods, was chosen to a spiritual life. He journeyed to the spirit-world and met and battled its denizens. The visions he saw were his own, as were his means of expression to the group--if any. For being a shaman was not a job: he might be considered a dangerous or outcast figure as much as a medicine man or soothsayer. The shaman lives on in the few hunting societies left on earth.

The priest was the product of an agricultural society that had become settled and diversified with a division of labor. Priesthood was a job, a social role, just as being a farmer or a soldier or a potter was a social role. It was a powerful role, because mythology, religion, was a powerful force, closely associated with the running of the state. Kings in the earliest days were gods, then priest-kings, and then the job-function became separated out to a separate clergy. Priests were part of the social order, and were charged with maintaining it. Priests we have with us still.

The basic tension between shaman and priest is that of personal mythology vs. collective mythology, personal vision vs. the voice of authority.

Fast-forward 4,000 years. Campbell chooses 1492, the year of Columbus's landfall in America, as the watershed when the ancient mythological order of the priestly state was broken. Columbus had expected to find Paradise in his travels; he had expected to find the confirmation of the mythological map of the world set down in the Bible. Instead he found the New World, seemingly a place no one associated with the Bible had ever been. The era of scientific exploration of the earth had begun; to learn the form of the world, people would no longer check a Bible, they would get in a ship and look for themselves.

The Scientific Age had begun (in fact had been in motion since the time of Roger Bacon and William of Occam); soon the Industrial Age would follow. As the world's mysteries were seen increasingly to be the product of mechanical and mathematical forces, man's mastery of it also grew, confirming the power and truth of that method of knowing. Lip-service continued to be paid to the ancient myths, to God and his heaven of angels and their omnipotence, but people invested their time, money, and effort in physics and chemistry and their products. Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud delivered the death-blows to the Judeo-Christian God for thinking people--at least as he had been worshipped for the previous millennia. Priests languish, preaching to aging, shrinking flocks.

Campbell thinks that the rise of science and technology is a resurgence of the spirit of the shaman, or of, as he puts it, the titans--those mythological individualists who would not bow down to the laws of the cosmos, as would the gods themselves. The truths of science are provisional: growing, changing. In Campbell's own words:

With the rise of modern science, the entire cosmological structure of the Bible and the Church has been destroyed and not the cosmological only but the historical as well. The gradual, irresistible, steady development of this new realization of the wonder of the world and of man'’s place and possibilities within it, against every instrument of resistance of the Church, has been, and continues to be, the fruit of the labors of a remarkably small number of men with the wit and courage to oppose authority with accurate observation.

And he closes the essay with these optimistic words:

[N]ot all are of that supine sort that must have their life values given them, cried at them from the pulpits and other mass media of the day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress in this world, outside the sanctified social centers, in small groups, and more often, by ones and twos, there entering the forest at those points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path.

I feel I am one who has entered the forest where it is most dark, and there is no beaten way or path. My job is to record my discoveries here, in a sense. There is no companionship, and no reward; only the dark trees pressing in as night falls.

spider dream

Feeling annoyed. I finished this post, then my browser locked up ("performed an illegal operation"--why are browsers permitted to attempt this?). I was forced to close it, and there is no trace of the post at Blogger.com. Nothing for it; start again.

I woke at about 5:20 and lay in the dark of morning (personal rule: no getting up on weekends before 6:00). I rose, took coffee to Kimmie in bed, and came down to key notes from A History of Technology. Then I remembered I'd had a dream, and keyed that instead, along with interpretive notes:

Sat 17 September 2005

7:00 a.m. I woke a few times in the night, partly from dehydration after the lack of water (I supposed) when I attended Kimmie's work barbecue at Tyler and Charito's. One dream:

I'm in the ensuite bathroom, maybe brushing my teeth, and I notice a little spider in the sink scrambling to escape the rushing water. I try to help the spider along without hurting it, maybe trying to move it with a piece of paper or cardboard, but the spider is quick, and gets itself into more trouble.

The water does hit it, and I quickly am able to push it (toward me) to a dry place in the sink. Is it drowned? No: it quickly springs to life and scrambles up out of the sink.

Somehow it gets itself on me, and I try to get it away from me by moving my hand and arm so that its defensive thread of silk drops away from me, sending the spider to the floor. But it is much faster than I can react to, and I hear its minute legs tapping on the counter as it scuttles quickly, trying to defend itself. I don't want to accidentally crush the thing after all this effort in saving it, and I feel irritated that its defensive instincts are what stand in the way of its rescue, since I mean it no harm. I also feel the fear of having a bug on my body, when I don't know where it is--will it bite me? Is it actually dangerous?

I think I manage to ensure it's off my body.

What might this mean?

in the ensuite bathroom: Bathroom: place of privacy, cleansing, hidden from the world. Ensuite, connected. I've told people that a big attraction of this house was its master-bedroom suite, with the generous ensuite bathroom and walk-in closet. A sense of inner sanctum: so almost a citadel or home within the home. This is where even guests to our house do not come: so truly our "inner world". So: my inner world?

brushing my teeth: Water, cleaning. I've read recently about the power of water to wash away sin: baptism. Brushing teeth: cleansing the mouth, what I eat and speak with. Teeth are for chewing: crushing food for digestion. Hygiene = health.

a little spider scrambling to escape the water: As I've seen lately--is it there, in the ensuite? Or in the kitchen? There is somewhere here in the house where I've been noticing a tiny spider hanging around (on the kitchen counter? or maybe it is in the bathroom), and think about what a scientist said in a documentary: wherever you are on earth, you're probably no more than one meter from a spider. Their surprising ubiquity struck me. The dream-spider is not so tiny as the one I've seen lately: this one was about the size of maybe a ladybug. (I also recently--yesterday?--found a bunch of cottonlike fiber stuffed in the channel in which the bedroom window slides, which I took to be some kind of spider-made egg-yarn, or something, apparently empty.) Spiders are attracted to sinks and tubs to drink, and then find they can't get out. Trapped. I recently wrote in my blog about the Waste Land, and the desiccation described in Eliot's poem: so water as life, including spiritual life. From Cirlot:

Spider The spider is a symbol with three distinct, sometimes overlapping, meanings: (i) the creative power of the spider, as exemplified in the weaving of its web; (ii) the spider's aggressiveness; and (iii) the spider's web as a spiral net converging toward a central point. The spider sitting in its web is a symbol of the center of the world, and is hence regarded in India as Maya, the eternal weaver of the web of illusion. The spider's destructive powers are connected with its significance as a symbol of the world of phenomena. Spiders, in their ceaseless weaving and killing--building and destroying--symbolize the ceaseless alternation of forces on which the stability of the universe depends. For this reason, the symbolism of the spider goes deep, signifying that "continuous sacrifice" which is the means of man's continual transmutation throughout the course of his life. Even death merely winds up the thread of an old life in order to spin a new one. The spider is a lunar animal because the moon is related to the world of phenomena, and, on the psychic level, to the imagination. Thus the moon, since it holds sway over the whole phenomenal world (for all phenomenal forms are subject to growth and death), waves the thread of each man's destiny. Accordingly, the moon is depicted as a gigantic spider in many myths.

Ah: continuous sacrifice which is the means of man's continual transmutation throughout the course of his life. I see an echo of the symbolism of the tattoos on the girl the other night [another dream]. The eight-leggedness of the spider can't be an unimportant part of its symbolism. From Serpent in the Sky:

Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks, Mercury to the Romans) is Master of the City of Eight. Thoth, the messenger of the gods, is the Neter of writing, of language, of knowledge of magic; Thoth gives man access to the mysteries of the manifested world, which is symbolized by Eight.

Eight corresponds to the physical world as we experience it. But the physical world as we comprehend it is still more complex. The interacting functions up to Eight do not permit of pattern or plan--of the ordering of phenomena. Nor will an eight-term system account for the source of order or pattern--for the pattern-maker, as it were.

What is a web but a pattern? The spider is indeed the "pattern-maker", using its eight legs, among other things, to weave its web.

Here in the dream, the spider has no web: the web-spinner is something that I suddenly notice as being affected, endangered by my so far unconscious focus on my own oral hygiene. The small living thing comes into consciousness. It is scrambling to avoid being drowned. I think of "drowned out": a signal or message that is overpowered by surrounding noise. It has come to my attention just because I am unconsciously endangering it by my actions. What does this describe? The "pattern-maker" in my life? My "acorn"?

I try to help without hurting it: I don't want it to drown, to be the accidental author of its death. This requires delicacy, for the spider is vulnerable. I need to be skillful and gentle, and to act quickly. Time is of the essence here. The moment is now.

try to move it with a piece of paper: Not sure whether I remember this correctly. If so, paper is for writing. I'm trying to get it on paper: write it down. Capture the intangible through writing. Something that's alive and in danger of being lost.

but the spider gets itself into more trouble: My effort fails, or partly fails. It can't be caught that way--does this mean I can't achieve this "rescue" via writing? It's too "quick", —i.e., alive? I mean well: my conscious intentions are good, but my method is not effective for what needs to be done. Suggests that writing is not the answer for this? It's more existential than that? The situation in the dream was dynamic, fast-moving: like a real rescue. Every moment counted. Some part of me would have thought too, Is this worth it? Is this little spider worth all this trouble?

water does hit it: The water of life paradoxically seems to kill the living spider. Water a paradox like the spider: life and death. Also paradoxically, this gives me the opportunity to save its life, by slowing it down. Just as the little web-weaver is knocked out of commission, I can (consciously) move it to safety.

it quickly springs to life and out of the sink: Surprises me again: it's got more vitality than I bargained on. It's alive all right--and coming right at me!

it gets itself on me: Although it isn't "trying" to get me, its instincts have sent it straight at me, right on me. It sees me as the way to save itself. Is it my Self? The acorn--that which "spins" my life, my thread--my story? We were separate, but now we're united--and I find it frightening. The non-frightening spider has become frightening by coming into contact with me. (Last night at the barbecue a wasp hovered near me while a woman looked on. I stood calmly, an example of how not to panic around wasps.) It can't really harm me, I don't think, and yet I feel icked-out and alarmed. Maybe it can bite me--again not because I wish it harm, but because it doesn't know better.

it drops away on its silk: I use my knowledge of how spiders like to escape to try to get it away from me. Now it is spinning: doing its spider-job. I'm relating with the spider skillfully, not in panic.

it is much faster than I can react to: I'm simply too slow for it. It's not at my mercy; it moves quickly under its own power. Autonomous.

I hear its minute legs tapping: I don't expect to be able to hear the spider--but I do. Again from Cirlot:

Sound In India, the sound of Krishna's flute is the magical cause of the birth of the world. The pre-Hellenic maternal goddesses are depicted holding lyres, and with the same significance. There are traditional doctrines which hold that sound was the first of all things to be created, and that which gave rise to all others, commencing with light, or, alternatively, with air and fire.

Yes: even in the Bible light is created because God says "Let there be light". Sight is the sense of reason, consciousness, but hearing is a way of sensing the remote but invisible. Hearing lets us position things in space all around us. In the dream I found it unsettling to hear the spider; it made it so much more real and immediate. From Cirlot, it seems sound is connected with phenomena as the spider is: they go together, even though spiders are usually silent. I remember years ago Jackie talking about how she could hear spiders crossing her bedroom floor in the basement at St. Georges. So I hear the action of its eight legs. I'm involved with the spider via sight, touch, and hearing now. It's here and now.

I feel irritation and fear: Emotions, negative ones, after my attempted positive actions. I was only trying to do a good deed—which I thought I could do without risk. But I was wrong: there is a risk: I get "involved". This little thing that almost died turns out to be a big deal. Will it wind up killing me?

I think I manage to ensure it's off my body: The crisis has passed, but the spider is invisible again. Where is it? I don't know. It might be on my body after all--a disquieting, uncomfortable thought, but one I might have to get used to. Have we merged in some sense? (I seem to be in pajamas in the dream--which I don't wear, haven't done since childhood.) Have I take my acorn on board?