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)
AziMuth
The most valuable unpublished work I’ve ever come across was a short essay by the poet Charles Olson titled “Notes on Reading Frobenius.” I was honored to receive permission to publish it about eight years ago in a small literary zine I had created, also titled AziMuth. It was an honor because the accomplishment of the publication relied on the insights within the essay. The whole premise using the analogy of an African hunting ritual: “To put one in shape for action.”
One draws a ‘picture’ on a bare spot on the ground, 4 palms size. Just as the sun rises you fire an arrow into the picture. After you have then duplicated the success in the hunt you come back and put hairs of the animal [you took away some grass or tuft to make the spot bare] and some of its blood onto the drawing. Having done this as carefully as you did the preparation you then rub it all away. And then you are free to go eat the animal or anything else, to go about your business until another time when you may, and there isn’t any question that you will, have to do like again in order to do anything as meaningful at all.
There is one catch that Olson makes clear: the importance of not explaining what you are doing. He continues,
“There isn’t but this one way, and with each of its exact steps included [and taken, including not mentioning that that is what you are doing. That is you can say anything which is itself part of doing whatever is sought to be done, but above all & never dare you let that become a knowledge other than its own written evidence, itself as an ability. Or you loose then…”
The danger of talking ‘about’ for any ‘action’: it is how energy gets diverted, siphoned away, depleted. To talk about is to talk around; action, the firing of energy, the release of self into the intended image. Much of the ritual in our lives is directed toward collective spiritual ends, far removed from individual action. Does this serve us?
(image cc via Wikipedia)
Dreams Unfolding
I climb stairs in a factory heading to a studio space. When I enter the woman artist I’m sharing the space with is holding four balloons. She begins to explain the sculpture she is making.
my response:
At once I recognize that she is the image of a fertility goddess, resembling the neolithic images of the many breasted statuettes. The dream series that is emerging this week is swinging between the opposites. A few weeks back artists were evicted from a studio space and the next image was as a recruit heading out to sea with the merchant marines. Then the image of the Gothic church and the discussion on the nature of faith was followed by heading down to a stone basement for a message in the empty jail cell. Her the sought message from the basement gets its expression. In the series the movement went horizontally from the creative to the ordered; then vertically moving from the upper and exploring faith to the below and the repressed.
We return here to the artist studio and the ‘mate’ provides an image of worship that digs deep into our ancestral heritage, faith in the provision of nourishment, sustenance…survival. In some ways, drilling down into a faith in survival makes a faith centered on resurrection seem like a high class proposition, and in that regard, very modern.
This reminds me of an African survival ritual Olson found in his reading of Frobinus: before dawn a hunter would go some distance into the bush, remove a piece of turf, draw an image of a beast he sought and then fire an arrow into the image at the moment of sunrise. He’d then proceed with the hunt. When the hunt was over, he’d return to the spot, remove the arrow, offer a bit of fur, etc to the image, then replace the turf. The same process would be repeated for each hunt.
Here though the image not masculine. Here the nourishment honored is not cut down, but instead the psalmist like image of a place flowing with milk and honey.
AziMuth
During my travels earlier this week I made it a point to spend part of an afternoon in Gloucester, MA. I first discovered the town in the poetry of Charles Olson who resided there while writing his epic The Maximus Poems.
Olson’s work and practice has been the single greatest influence in my life. Over a decade ago I spent a considerable amount of time in his archives reading into his head and his methods. His output was vast, his interests as diverse as deep. Through his lens I found an entry into subjects I didn’t know existed.
During the current political season it is perhaps difficult to make this point, but in his methodology he revealed to me the workings of a liberal mind. The point I’m reaching for here is how you work and develop mind. Mindfulness. Mind-full-ness. The practice of it.
Gloucester provided Olson an amazing foundation to dream, think, explore and write off of. It remains to this day a working fishing port, and the strong odor of the fish packing plants continues provide downtown with a unique signature. It has an interesting pre-colonial history. The beauty of rock and sea sourced his springs of mythopoetic imagination. Each time I visit, in the impressions of the harbor, the commerce, the polis that is Gloucester, it seems I’ve entered again into the living poem that Olson revealed. I see the place through his eyes. It can’t be helped.
Along with his stance toward life, his amazing engagement in text is an important lesson he left us. His active dialogue with all that he read can be seen in the scribbles decorating the margins of the well worn volumes in his library. You can track these scribbles as they get developed in notebooks, then into multiple drafts of essay and into the poems. He worked his craft with the ethic of a fisherman.
To set off in a box upon the sea…
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