Slingshotting

During the last week I’ve asked on Twitter for topics folks would like to see me cover in this space.  It led me to generate some real surprises and to cover some new territory.  In passing yesterday, @sidp3 asked “how did I come to the Jungian perspective?”  So…a bit of autobiography.

Back in the mid 1990’s, after finishing my graduate studies at Wesleyan, I began doing independent research in the Charles Olson Archive at the University of Connecticut.  Olson’s work remains to this day pretty much off the map, but even if you consider only the published works, it’s an impressive opus.

In the archive I entered into a view of the creative life that was beyond anything I could have at that time imagined.  Thousands of items where waiting to be viewed: notebooks, letters, volumes from his library all with handwritten annotations throughout.    And drafts after draft of the poems.  After an initial scan of the variety of offerings, I began to call for the notebooks chronologically.  I became intrigued by the notebooks which were the most difficult to understand, the ones where he wrote his dreams.  While I had a difficult time sorting through what was going on because the notes were so fragmented, mere pointers, I was able to follow the images out of the dream notebooks and into the poems.  I realized I had found an interesting aspect of his practice.

A curator pointed out to me that most of Jung’s works were in Olson’s collection and I might find some clues there to what I was uncovering.  And that need, to get a handle on the incomprehensible dream notebooks of Charles Olson, gave me the needed momentum to launch into the work of Jung.  I’ve been going ever since.

I recently heard that there’s a plan for human space travel to Mars where the spaceship will propel itself by slingshotting off the gravity of Venus.  I think the analogy fits.

(Image via Wikipedia)