Showing posts with label active imagination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label active imagination. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Shakespeare Camp for the Uninitiated

Last week, I finished M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, a novel about a group of theatre students in their fourth year of a drama program at an exclusive arts college. Their curriculum consists of all-Shakespeare, all the time, and by the beginning of their senior year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, they are both a well-trained theatre troupe and a close-knit group of friends (or, in some cases, frenemies). Things look promising at the beginning of their senior year, and at the start, I was almost envious of their situation, their ability to focus and train in exactly what they love best with a group of like-minded fellows at a small, idyllic-sounding Midwestern campus.

Actually, Dellecher is not at all unlike Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I studied mythology and Jungian psychology, and I can attest that my program had some of the same idyllic qualities—a beautiful natural setting, a program with a particular focus, and a tight campus community, though PGI is in SoCal and has a definite California vibe rather than the strict regimented intensity of Dellecher as described in the novel. Of course, even in paradise, real life goes on; in the midst of trying out for roles and navigating romantic entanglements and friendships, Dellecher’s seven seniors are looking forward to auditions and professional careers once they graduate. They seem on track to accomplish that and are on top of the world at the beginning of the term.

As you would expect, there’s plenty of interpersonal drama and competitiveness among these students. Some of the tensions that already exist intensify as one of their professors focuses on having each student identify and expose his or her greatest strength and greatest weakness to the group in an acting workshop. Sounds fairly harmless, right? I don’t know if this method is common in acting circles; I suppose it makes sense in terms of having actors get in touch with their own motivations, aspirations, and fears so that they can become better actors, but it’s also fairly brutal because it strips away their defenses. In any event, it marks the beginning of the end of the Dellecher idyll as it leads to psychotic breaks among the students. Instead of merely playing their roles, the actors can no longer quite contain what they are meant to be enacting, and Shakespeare’s rivalries, jealousies, and murderous impulses (which are really their own) spill off the stage and into their lives.

Jungians often discuss a technique called active imagination, which is a way of getting in touch with the contents of your unconscious to spur creativity and personal growth through the use of symbols, images, meditation, and other tools. It can be very beneficial but also, perhaps, destructive, if you’re not on solid emotional ground to begin with. To me, being immersed in the myth traditions of cultures around the world for several years of study was one long exercise in active imagination that was tremendously freeing as far stimulating the imagination goes. To me, it’s difficult to think of anything more beneficial for a writer or an artist. In the case of the Dellecher students, all of the wide world as presented by Shakespeare—while deeply beloved as a discipline—has been largely academic until the lines between role-playing and real life are breached. Once the students’ emotions begin to interact in a serious way with the roles they are playing, life begins to imitate art, and real-life tragedy is not far away.

Jung believed that the type of growth people strive for with analysis and active imagination often takes place naturally in the second half of life as people reach a stage in which their undeveloped capabilities, dormant in the first half of life, begin to make themselves felt. It’s generally a very positive thing. The Dellecher students in the novel, of course, are barely out of their teens and not really equipped to deal with so much emotional flooding, especially in the same context as substance abuse and tentative sexual exploration. Previously unimaginable events overtake the students as rivalries and resentments spill into violence and collective guilt.

At the beginning of the novel, I thought that of all the subject disciplines taught at Dellecher, theatre seemed the most rewarding because it has the potential to teach practitioners so much about psychology and human nature. This is true, I think, but as the plot in If We Were Villains unfolds, the downside to all this exploration of the psyche becomes apparent. If Richard, who has always been something of a bully, can become a full-on murderous sociopath, then James, previously the “good guy,” and Alexander, who has always been ready with “bad boy” behavior, can also cross over to the dark side once murderous impulses find a channel to the surface via a staging of Macbeth or Julius Caesar.

Obviously, this isn’t a common occurrence, and you can probably attend your community’s Shakespeare in the Park performances in relative safety this summer (if you were worried about it). Nevertheless, the dynamic the novel describes of unconscious impulses spilling out uncontrolled once they’re no longer contained is accurate, I believe. A witches’ brew of dark emotions in the plays of Shakespeare, a bit of unlicensed therapy from a teacher a little too oblivious to the dangers of probing complexes and insecurities, and a group of talented but still immature students struggling with all the usual problems of young adulthood—what could go wrong? Probably a lot.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Dream Trains, With Horses

I had a very striking dream a few nights ago, one that seems worth recording. In the dream, I had somehow walked into an area between two separate train tracks. I was standing near the track on my right when a loud train approached, moving very fast. The noise and power of the train were almost overwhelming, not to mention the fact that the train itself was outsized (as were all the other objects in the dream). In fact, the entire feeling of this dream was a lot like stepping into the pages of a book by Chris Van Allsburg (Jumanji, say, or The Mysteries of Harris Burdick), in which objects out of context behave peculiarly and take on a charged but veiled significance.

One train was bad enough, but there were two. Right after the first train, another came blasting toward me on the other track; they were almost simultaneous. The second one, too, was enormous, loud, and aggressively fast. Right after that, an oversize cart drawn by horses came bearing down on me between the tracks, but the cart was so large that it went right over me. I was shaken by the speed and the size of these moving objects, but I was not hurt.

The feeling of overstimulation due to noise and motion reminds me of the time I went to see Escape From L.A. with a friend at the midnight movie. This wasn't something I would have picked on my own, since action movies aren't my forte (or didn't used to be); my friend picked it out. Imagine someone accustomed to sedate Merchant Ivory productions and quiet character-driven dramas sitting in a big-screen cinema, way past her bedtime, being pounded by Dolby sound at a teeth-jarring level and assaulted by image after image of mayhem and doom, all conducted at warp speed. I don't remember the plot, just the nauseating feeling of sensory overload and a wish to bolt from the theater.

My dream was a little like that, except that it was in my head, so bolting wasn't an option.

For a Jungian, a situation like this calls for explication, amplification, and active imagination. I will assume, first off, that the two trains and the horse-driven cart are what they seem to be, objects of transportation. From my point of view, everything else was in motion, and I was stuck in a dangerous spot. I wanted to be moving, but no opportunity presented itself. On closer inspection, I saw a chasm in front of me, over which the trains were jumping without benefit of tracks. They continued to repeat this maneuver, and as much as I wanted to be on one of them and on my way, I couldn't help noticing how dangerous it was for the trains to keep making this leap. Disaster seemed to be in the offing.

When I think about trains, many things come to mind. I've traveled by train several times and often found myself driving alongside trains on my recent trip out west. I live not far from a railroad track and was nearly stopped by a train the other night after running an errand. I recently told someone about a memory or dream I have of traveling in a Pullman car once when I was very young. These associations are both positive and negative.

On an archetypal level, trains are synonymous with power, with the ambitions of the Industrial Age, and with the expansion, in our country, to the west. Trains traveling from two directions met to celebrate the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Interesting that the term "Iron Horse" was once applied to locomotives, since oversized horses dragging a giant cart also appeared in my dream.

Power. Ambition. Industry. Expansion. Transportation. Speed. And also, perhaps, from a certain point of view, a kind of ruthlessness or unheeding momentum.

In active imagination, you try to start a conversation with the people or objects in your dream. When I think about trying to talk to either the trains or the horse and cart, I feel at a bit of a loss. The very speed and force of their motion almost seems designed to preclude speech. And yet, standing still, in a seemingly precarious spot, I saw something that none of them seemed to notice: the width of the chasm and the danger it represented. Though eager to be on my way, I still saw that getting on one of the trains (never mind the cart) was not a safe proposition. Other than the discomfort of being where I was, I was safer on the ground.

At the end of my dream, the chasm loomed as the most important image. I started to think of how to get across it but wasn't able to figure it out. If I now address the chasm, and say, "Hello, what are you doing in my dream? And how do I get across?" The chasm might say, "You're right not to trust these lunatics." And, "Are you sure you need to cross? If you're meant to be on the other side, there's bound to be a bridge somewhere. Think about where you want to be. In the meantime, get away from these idiot trains . . . you've had enough drama. Go get a cup of tea or something. And those horses? And that stupid cart? Don't even get me started . . . "