Dragons Above and Other Wonders

There are certain things in life that really can’t be explained. I’m sure you could give a few examples of your own, but here’s one of mine—and I admit that I was reticent, actually reticent, about posting this when it happened because it seemed too fantastic to be believed, and I thought people might think I was making it up. I didn’t get a photo, you see, and thought I might be accused of exaggerating. I was having trouble believing it, and I was there.

However, as you know, Wordplay strives ever to tell the truth, and if we left this out, it would be a dereliction of duty, I think. What happened was this: I’d spent some time one afternoon putting together a photo essay about dragons trending in the culture. As I recall, it was right after that, as I was leaving the coffeehouse, that I walked out into a brewing storm. I drove over to the grocery store, marveling at the big mess of clouds swirling overhead.

While I was on the way over there, I started to notice that one cloud in particular had a shape to it. It was a long, black coil, like a snake, or, actually, a dragon, with a dragon head, a long, long body stretching and twisting across half the sky, and a mouth open as if ready to spew fire. I have never seen a cloud shaped like that and am sure it has something to do with one big air mass meeting another along a fairly uniform line. I know there had to be a scientific reason for that gigantic, rolled-up carpet shape, but it was still jaw-dropping, like other sights in nature you come across once in a great while. I wish I had taken a photograph, but lightning was striking in both the far and middle distance, and for safety’s sake, I stayed in the car until it all passed.

Besides thinking people wouldn’t believe me, I admit that I was so amazed by the appearance and timing of this cloud dragon that I started to wonder if it was some kind of a trick. Now, I know I once posted a blog about wild weather events I’d been caught up in and my speculations about whether someone (AKA the government) might be experimenting with cloud-seeding, etc. Even if someone is working on that, in some obscure bureau or other, I can’t imagine that anyone’s weather experiments have advanced to the level of cloud-sculpting on that scale, even if they know how to make precipitation fall.

I suppose I was trying to put the whole thing out of my mind, but I saw a program on The Weather Channel about “The World’s Wildest Weather Events” in which various phenomena like this were documented and discussed. One of the meteorologists was discussing the very rare phenomenon of straight-edge clouds, something she herself had witnessed, and she said that she had a difficult time believing the evidence of her own eyes even though she could explain the science behind it. It was, truly, an incredible sight, but no more so than what I had seen. I have to thank the meteorologist for sharing her story, which gave me the impetus to think over what I had seen and decide that, no matter how fantastic the event, not sharing it because it seemed unbelievable was precisely the wrong tack. After all, this blog exists as a forum for exploring the presence of mythology in everyday life, and if a cloud dragon appearing over your head is not an irruption of mythology into everyday life, I don’t know what would be.

When something like this happens, I’m tempted, as possibly you are, to try to come up with an explanation. I’m not sure there is one. Of course, Jung called this type of thing synchronicity and believed that it was evidence of a sort of dialogue between the human psyche and nature. Even if this is true, how it all works is still a mystery. I consider myself a capable writer, but I’m not at the level of conjuring up castles and dragons in the air, no matter how in tune my brain waves may be with the atmospheric vibe on a given day. Maybe it’s just a matter of having your eyes open and noticing things. The more active your imagination is, the more there is to see. And then, of course, you have to remember to look up.

Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke It

Several years ago, I visited the Menil Collection in Houston, where I first saw René Magritte's L'empire des lumières (The Dominion of Light). I was very taken by it. I was one year into my Myth Studies program and had a new interpretive lens for making sense of the emotional impact of stories, images, and art. So when I looked at this painting, I immediately recognized the mysterious interplay of opposites that makes it such an arresting image.

Magritte had a way of fearlessly combining the impossible, or the incongruous. In this painting, it's broad day in the top half of the frame and night in the bottom half. What I thought of first on seeing it was the parallel to the conscious and the unconscious, an obvious Jungian interpretation. 

What I think makes the scene so striking is the lamplight in the midst of the darkness, which focuses your attention on the shadowy region. The bright sky above seems empty in comparison with the layers of light and shade in front of the building, and the sense of depth is emphasized even more by the reflection of the lights, trees, and building (but not the blue sky) in the softly rippling water below the trees. Even within the darkness, there is a lower level of unconsciousness in the mysterious pool, of which we only see the surface. 

There are many opposites in the painting: sky and water, nature and civilization, day and night, above and below. They blend into one another in subtle ways, although the painting seems at first to present two starkly separate realms. The trees reach up from dark roots into the bright blue sky, and the light from the lamp and the window echo the daylight above. The painting almost seems to map consciousness, from the everyday, somewhat vacuous persona to the ego to the personal unconscious to the deeper collective unconscious underneath it all.

I wasn't really planning to write about this painting, and the way it came about was this: I was thinking this afternoon about synchronicity and pure coincidence and the difference between them. That brought up an association with the famous statement that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," attributed to Freud (which he probably didn't say, but that's a different story). That got me to thinking about Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images, with its iconic pipe and inscription, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." ("This is not a pipe.") That led me to thoughts of L'empire des lumières, probably for the mere reason that it's also by Magritte and happens to be my favorite.

Back to the question that started all this, about the difference between synchronicity and coincidence: I think they're both real, but I'm not sure I can define what separates them. I would say that synchronicity seems meaningful, whereas coincidence doesn't, but who's to say what meaningful is? Some might argue that there really aren't any coincidences. I'm not sure I'd agree. It's a large metaphysical question, and I don't have the resources (or the chocolate) to puzzle it out at this time. Was it synchronicity that led me to this painting? Or just a rambling series of thoughts?

I don't know, but I do know that Magritte painted a series of Dominion of Light variants, so for some reason the image seems to have captured him. Another interesting fact: Jackson Browne's 1974 album Late for the Sky has a cover image inspired by Dominion of Light, and when you look at it you can easily see the influence. I just discovered that. Apparently, the photo was shot in South Pasadena. Huh, somebody was just talking about Pasadena yesterday. Do you think that means anything????

I would say no. I just watched a video of Mr. Browne singing "Late for the Sky," a song I don't believe I had heard before. I don't know what it has to do with metaphysics, or Freud, or cigars, but I'm glad I came across it. It was lovely.

Don't Panic! It's That Fake Synchronicity Again

I cannot explain everything that happens around me, but I can vouch for an uptick in strange occurences and odd synchronicities going back several years now. As a Jungian, I shouldn't be bothered by this, since synchronicity is the stock-in-trade of Jung's philosophy -- except that I don't believe most of it is genuine.

I wrote recently about the car accident I was in back in April. The next week, my cousin sent an email saying that my brother, who lives in another state, had been hit by an SUV driven by someone who was upset with him (my brother isn't saying anything, and neither is anyone else in the family). We haven't been able to verify what happened, which in itself is odd. Did it happen, or didn't it? You wouldn't think establishing the simple truth would be so difficult, but it is.

I've long been accustomed to noticing people hanging about who seem out of place. The first time it happened, I was in an upscale sandwich shop having lunch and reading the life of Buddha for a class. I was so engrossed in the book that I didn't look up for a long time, and when I did, there was a rather thuggish young man sitting directly across from  me, engaged in . . . not much of anything, except sitting there looking thuggish. The thought instantly came into my head that there was something unwholesome in his manner and that he just looked wrong. I left a few minutes later, and he didn't bother me, but the incident stuck in my mind. Many odd things were happening at my workplace then, and this item seemed bracketed with them somehow.

He was only the first of many others . . . the man who stared so persistently as I had lunch at yet another sandwich shop and then followed me outside, talking animatedly on his cell phone and staring; the weird guy with the ferret face who tried to engage me in a conversation about pie as I was leaving Gumbo Ya Ya; the slickly handsome but vaguely demonic stranger who arrived at the elevator in the parking garage of my hotel at the same time I did; the oddly abrasive chick who crashed the Jane Austen Book Club and then skulked around the entrance as I was leaving the store; the low-rent Michael Fassbender look-alike who showed up at Starbucks the day after I watched Jane Eyre on video.

That's just life in the city, you say -- you're bound to meet with all kinds of characters. Well, maybe. If it happened once in a while, I'd agree with you, but all the time?

Speaking of look-alikes, I've also noticed, more than once, people who looked remarkably like other people I know. One of the most striking incidents occurred a couple of years ago as I was waiting for a train with two friends in San Francisco. I had been to a performance by Dave Alvin at Slim's a night or two before. When the next train pulled up, a man who looked incredibly similar to Dave, down to his height and facial hair and cowboy hat, got off right in front of us. It was not Dave, but it's hard to believe anyone could look (and dress) that much like him without doing it on purpose (unless it was Dave Alvin night in San Francisco and no one told me). Why would someone do such a thing, you inquire? Don't ask me. It was freaking weird, though.

And then there's the classmate of mine (or her twin), who has popped up in the oddest of places. I might think I was imagining that, since the hair was always different, except for that time in New Mexico at the all-night gas station when the fellow with her looked like the boyfriend she'd introduced me to one time. Well, if it was her, why didn't she acknowledge you, you ask? Why did she speak to you like you were a stranger? I don't know. You might as well ask why her hair was that strange shade of pink.

Then there's my "haunted" apartment. I know it's not really haunted, but there are enough unexplained cracking and pinging noises, sometimes emanating from innocent objects, to make you wonder about poltergeists. The lights blink mysteriously, although they never used to. And strangest of all are the popping and trilling noises in my ears. I've had ringing in my ears for a long time, and I always put it down to congestion or something mechanical like that, but the chirps and trills I hear nowadays are different, like electronic pulses. It's like something out of James Bond, only less fun.

I've lost count of the number of times perfect strangers spoke to me almost as if they knew me. I used to wonder if some of them were trying to tell me something, but I no longer bother. If someone has something to tell me, they'd better just straight up say it.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is the tradition of the bardo, a liminal state reached by a person who is in between two earthly lives. In this state, the person encounters all kinds of gods and demons, some of them benign in appearance and some of them hideous, but they are in fact all deceptive. Before death (and while dying), the person is given instructions on how to handle them and is reminded above all of their illusory nature. Some of the people I've encountered remind me of these bardo beings. I'm thinking also of Dante's Inferno, where things get progressively freakier the further Dante and Virgil descend. Before they know it, they've even reversed directions, so that instead of climbing down they're climbing up, emerging into the cave in Purgatory head first. It's all very matrixy, as life in general seems to be these days.

If anything like this has happened to you and you want my advice, the only thing I can say, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, is "Don't Panic!" It's just the bardo, and we assume it will pass. Rest assured there is a logical explanation, and accept no substitutes. I have no idea what's up with all the derring-do, just as I have no idea why the young women in the downtown grocer's seemed to think it was uproarious when the Hall and Oates song "Private Eyes" was playing (at an earsplitting volume) while I was in the store this morning. But store clerks are not the boss of me, just so you know.

I don't remember signing up for a spy caper, although that's what I feel like I'm in. A family member told me the other day that she's scared and doesn't feel safe either at home or in public. I say this so you know I'm not treating this as a joke, even though it sometimes feels like one. Bardo-spy caper-matrix-inferno-whatever -- all things must pass. I may not know the answers, but I know when someone's acting the fool.

Bookstore Logic

Just today I noticed a bookmark that I've apparently been carrying around for more than two years. I remember the day I visited the bookstore in Louisville and the book I bought, a guide to Los Angeles. I've used the book many times but don't recall seeing the bookmark, which includes a quote from Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist: "To carry a book in your pocket or in your bag, particularly in times of sadness, is to be in possession of another world, a world that can bring you happiness."

I've always been a reader. When I was a little girl, I didn't read books so much as immerse myself in them. It was an effortless, unselfconscious way to enter other worlds that immediately became my own, as if I were just another character, looking over the shoulders of the other characters or sitting quietly in a corner. The books I read up until the age of 12 or 13 live for me in a way that few books have since then. At some point I became a more critical reader, which sounds like a good thing but in reality meant that stories lost some of their immediacy for me. It became harder to get lost in them as I became more aware of things like style, literary value, etc. The Nancy Drew books I loved at age 8 then became "formulaic," and I was no longer enchanted by the "silliness" of Dr. Seuss.

I had crossed an invisible border, leaving a magic world and stepping into a more pedestrian reality in which books still called to me, but more softly. My imagination still craved the luminous realm of fairy tales, of King Arthur and Robin Hood and the Little Golden Books, but I could no longer get there. I don't know if this happens to other people or not. Once in a while, a book would still sweep me into its world, a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Hobbit or some of the novels of Mary Stewart. On the whole, though, as reading became a more intellectual exercise, my capacity to feel its magic became less.

I actually remember telling a friend years ago that I was tired of reading about life and wanted to experience it directly instead of just in books. Be careful, oh, be careful, what you wish for! The god of libraries (Sesat? Thoth?) might have had a hand in what followed, possibly intending a corrective measure to curb my attempts to flee the library (which turns out to be bad form for a librarian). Let's just say I learned my lesson and am perfectly content now to spend the entire winter curled up with a good book, sipping hot chocolate and eating plates of cookies.

One thing that has somehow never waned is the irresistible lure of a bookstore. I remember sadly the days when all we had were chain stores at the mall, which carried bestsellers and paperback classics but not a lot else. Since then I've developed a pretty high bar for what a bookstore should be, and there are actually some stores that meet it. One criterion is that it should be possible to just walk in and feel yourself attracted to titles at every hand, without having to scour the shelves. (I know some people enjoy rummaging around to uncover gems, but I don't want bookfinding to be like work -- it should be like play).

This is a true story: I was in Northern California six years ago, touring the wine country of Sonoma County and environs. I found myself passing through a small town, no more than an eyeblink, which somehow appealed to me, even though I was on my way to somewhere else. I drove for another 45 minutes or so through an idyllic landscape but kept thinking about the little town I had seen. For some reason, I turned around and drove back, stopping to get chai at a little cafe, and then moving down the street to visit the town's little bookstore.

There was a table in the middle of the store loaded with books on a variety of topics, in no particular order. I picked up a book with an interesting title and opened it at random. The first word my eye fell on was the word "maze." Not surprising that I would notice this, since I'd been interested in mazes for a while. I picked up another book, on a different topic than the first one; again I opened it at random, and again, the first word I saw was "maze." A third book; again, at random, again, the word "maze."

I wasn't even thinking about myth studies at that point, but I knew enough about Jung to recognize synchronicity. I had always bemoaned the fact that that type of thing never happened to me, and now, shazam!, here it was. Of course, three is a magic number in fairy tales, and looking back, I see this incident as the opening by which I fell into the rabbit hole of a whole series of adventures, good and bad. At the time, I wasn't sure how to interpret this bookstore experience, but I kept wondering about it, until six months later, I was in graduate school, the last place I thought I'd be. I wrote about mazes and labyrinths several times, but resisted choosing it for my dissertation, not really accepting that the topic had already chosen me.

I now know a word I didn't know before, which is numinous, the quality of divinity or magic that shines through certain events, places, and things, revealing a pulsating significance where something very ordinary appeared only a moment ago. A good bookstore deals in the numinous, as does a good library. That's why it's important to be within reach of one or the other, and preferably both, if you are, say, thinking about relocating. I spent an afternoon and two frustrating evenings in Los Angeles looking for the one (there are several good used bookstores, but you also need one that deals in new books). I approached the last bookstore on my list feeling nervous, since I hadn't yet seen anything at all like what I had in mind. Would I end up having to move to Northern California (or Portland? or Seattle?) just to be near a good bookstore?

Fortunately, this bookshop turned out to be just the right size. Browsing yielded a good number of interesting titles. In one corner was a little boy surrounded by a pile of books, whose mother was threatening to leave without him (when last seen, he was still reading). There were thoughtful staff picks. I chose a book to buy, then changed my mind, picking up the one next to it, and thought to myself, this store could be the difference between my moving here or not moving here.

I didn't get to start the book until last night. I was finishing another book I had become engrossed in, a book about, of all things, a bookstore and a writer. (I had found it at Powell's, the Paradiso of bookstores, in Portland.) I picked up the new book last night, intending to read a little before going to bed. I liked the way it started, with a musing on the power of scent to hold memories; its setting in Provence; the romance combined with a touch of Gothic; the lyricism of the writing. Then, at the bottom of page 11, at the beginning of chapter 3, I came across the words: "Dom and I met in a maze." You're kidding me.

It was Bilbo who said, "the Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead, the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can . . ." 

Like a Bolt Out of the Blue

Yesterday I was on my way to Cincinnati to hear a lecture on Jung and alchemy when I had an unexpected visitation. I had just started down the big hill on the slow glide into Cincinnati when I heard a loud bang coming from somewhere very close. I knew I hadn't hit anything, and after a few suspenseful seconds I could tell the car was running normally . . . but something had definitely happened.

There was a vehicle several car lengths behind me, and a truck with a tarp about 50 feet ahead, but no one near me. It was a seriously scary and sudden bang, and so mysterious that I was completely bewildered; I was even more perturbed a minute or so later when I spotted a semicircular crack in almost the exact center of my windshield.

I got to the church where the lecture was being held still in a little bit of shock. I literally didn't know what had hit me and was now facing a windshield repair, so I was feeling pretty cross -- not to mention rattled -- when I left my car and walked down the street. Once I got inside and sat down (safe for the time being from falling objects), I felt a little calmer and better able to reflect. It seemed highly coincidental to have such an experience on the way to a talk about Jung, who said so much about synchronicity and the way outer events sometimes reflect inner reality.

Jung once defined God as "the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse." Whatever cracked my windshield certainly had some of those qualities.

Our speaker, Richard Sweeney, talked about Jung's research into medieval alchemy and his interest in the way its processes mirrored the psychological processes of individuation. There are fancy names for these stages, including calcinatio (burning), coagulatio (hardening), and separatio (separating). Of all the processes, the one that seemed to resonate most for me was coagulatio, which has to do with getting down to earth and solidifying what has been overly conceptual or ephemeral. This stage evokes images of rocks, stones, and other solid things, such as mysterious objects that might smash into your windshield while you're driving.

According to Dr. Sweeney, coagulatio eventually leads to another stage, mortificatio (killing or destroying), in which the ego or one of its attitudes is defeated by the Self, which always persists in pushing us in the direction we need to go. The idea is that something that's holding us back, an attitude or belief that we cling to, may have to die before we can move ahead. I'm sure there are many ways in which this is true for me, and maybe the weeks and months ahead will reveal why I needed to be brained by falling rocks to realize it.

Whatever the real explanation for the incident, there's definitely a lot the imagination (my imagination, anyway) can do with a bolt from the blue. Debris from the road that somehow bounced up and smacked my glass? Possibly, but kind of boring. A tiny chunk of ice from a passing plane? Oww! The hammer of the gods? OK, they have my attention. Dust from a falling star that I once wished on, finally come to earth to find me? I like that one, but I have to say I somehow imagined stardust to be a little lighter and more delicate.

I'm just glad I don't have a sunroof.

When You Wish Upon a Star (Louis Armstrong version)

Thin Places

I've been thinking about an article I read yesterday by Jungian analyst Jerry Wright called "Thin Places and Thin Times." The title refers to the Celtic belief that there is but a curtain separating the everyday world from the world of faerie. The otherworld is the realm of the Tuatha De Danann, the magical people of legend in Ireland. Although Celtic spirituality holds that the everyday world is interpenetrated with spirit, some slight separation occurs, largely for practical reasons. It's said that because mortals found the constant mingling of the visible and invisible worlds distressing, the curtain was created long ago to separate them.

This curtain is really an illusion, since the two worlds always coexist, but the division reduced stress among the mortal folk, who must have been a little bedazzled by constantly bumping into mythic personages in the pre-curtain days. They wanted someplace a little more solid in which to carry on their everyday affairs, and they got it.

Still, there are certain places where the curtain is especially sheer and the passage between worlds is particularly easy. Certain wells, shrines, or crossroads, certain "fairy mounds" in the woods, are known to be "thin places" in Ireland. (There are also "thin times," like Samhain, which we call Halloween.) All kinds of wonderful things can happen in and around these thin places and times; one is apt to go for a walk and encounter a god sitting on a stile or be kidnapped by the faerie people and end up living for years in the otherworld.

Although the faerie people are often benign, they can be dangerous, especially if not given their due. In Jungian terms, the otherworld corresponds to the unconscious, so a particularly fluid connection to the unconscious corresponds to a Celtic thin place.

It might have been thinking about thin places that made me restless this weekend. I was walking through the neighborhood yesterday, enjoying the weather and the flowers and the blue sky, when I had the urge to go somewhere. I was a little frustrated when I couldn't think of a place that seemed right. I thought of driving to the Abbey at Gethsemani, where I have sometimes gone to sit and think, but in the end, it seemed too far to go.

Without putting a lot of thought into it, I ended up at the cemetery, which sounds like an odd place to be on a pretty April weekend, except that the cemetery here is beautiful in early spring. It's like an arboretum, with ponds, geese, tulips, flowering trees, and birdsong. A cemetery certainly is a borderland between life and death and would be considered "thin" by any standard -- not that I encountered anything there except sunshine and mild breezes.

Sometimes you can walk into a thin place without knowing it. I visited a bookstore last week, on a little street where Santa Monica and Venice come together, a few blocks from the sea. I had been there two years ago, when I bought a used copy of a novel by Kate Mosse called Labyrinth, Jorge Luis Borges' collection of writings called Labyrinths, and an anthology on Jung in literature. I liked the coziness of the small, crowded space and the kind, low-key manner of the proprietor, who exuded a sort of counterculture faerie king persona with his flowing hair and sage manner.

Last Saturday, when I walked in, the proprietor was sitting in the same place as before, and he greeted me in the same calm way. As I drifted toward the poetry section, I was startled to hear the opening chords of a moderately obscure pop song from the 1960s that carries a special weight for me. At the cash register, when the proprietor pointed out that one of the books I was buying was signed, I opened it to the inscription and saw my own name: "For Mary, wishing you bliss." The book, which I bought largely on the strength of the title, is called Bliss, Danger & Gods: Quotes of Risk & Passion, and it was signed more than 20 years ago.

Synchronicity, a little slippage between the visible and invisible in a liminal place, the curtain blown aside by a slight breeze from the sea? Or mere coincidence, a little trick of the mind to pass the time? The Irish say that when you have a numinous experience, a visitation from the gods, the appropriate thing to do is bow. So here is my bow, acknowledging a bit of bookstore magic on a sunny afternoon by the sea.