“Time is a child-playing like a child-playing board game-the kingdom of a child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of the cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.” Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, pg.227
This inscription, carved by Jung into a stone at his tower at Bollingen, was a spontaneous production, or as he says, “the words came to me – one after the other – while I worked on the stone.” Yet the editor makes a note that each sentence has its source: Heraclitus, the Mithras Liturgy, and Homer. So was Jung lying?
We had a small gathering yesterday in Judith’s painting studio and this very topic came up. Sid was noting compositional influences in the paintings throughout the space. He shared that often while writing short stories he would get to “the end” only to realize that he had reproduced Joyce, or some other author he admired.
When this occurs it does not constitute plagiarism. Instead, such a resonance with masterpieces can reveal the engaged psyche as it draws from the warehouse of relevancy and speaks through the lens of the specific artist.
Have you experienced such resonances? It happens all the time in music. Expression is an exercise in limitations.
I was twittering about Jung’s approach to playfulness earlier when I got tagged by All Considering . I overcame my initial opposition recognizing in the game, which is a viral project running through the blogosphere to help build community, a gift of the topic folks were discussing. The point: share six things folks don’t know about oneself, then tag six other bloggers to do the same. I decided to tag those who I was chatting with at the time.
So, six things about me you didn’t know:
1. When I watched the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1976, I was in third grade. I was so smitten with the whole event I began to run forty miles a week.
2. In college I was able to travel to Moosenee, Ontario on the Polar Bear Express. Moosenee is ten miles from James Bay, that tear drop at the south end of the Hudson Bay. During the train ride up there we traveled through a huge burn area from a great forest fire that raged during the 1976 Summer Olympics.
3. The closest I ever came to running a marathon was when I was twelve, when I joined a family friend during the last half of the Newport Rhode Island Marathon. The run along the ocean one of my most memorable.
4. Endurance has challenged me in different ways, especially the four years I delivered newspapers by car in the middle of the night, seven days a week.
5. When I visited Greece I was able to survey the route of the original run from Marathon.
6. I believe social media is a bit of an endurance test.
So now, here are the six bloggers I’m tagging:
http://ewainthegarden.blogspot.com/
http://howtobeawoman.net/
http://creativejuicesarts.blogs.com/
http://choosingtobe.com/blog/
http://togetherweflourish.com/
http://feelgoodguru.com/5-more-days-of-de-tox
Enjoy these folks…
(Image via Wikipedia)
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