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.

How to Be a Magician

“Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.” —Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

After watching the Syfy series The Magicians, I started reading the novels from which they were adapted and just finished the last of the three, The Magician’s Land. In previous posts I discussed The Magicians as an example of the Dark Academia genre, but it’s also a little bit science fiction and a little bit urban fantasy. The TV series diverged in many ways from the books but is true to it in spirit. 

It was ambitious of Syfy to undertake an adaptation of this multiverse-spanning work, but they pulled it off, actually adding complexity to an already complex narrative. The author supplies transitions that help you, the reader, keep track of where you are in space/time with regard to the plot, but the TV series sometimes meanders without ceremony from one space/time labyrinth into another. I kind of liked that about it, the way it could jump abruptly from one world to the next by way of very shifty portals and occasionally leave you wondering where exactly you were. It was very existential, though it sometimes had me wondering if I’d missed something I was supposed to know about the transition. Well, haven’t we all been landed at one time or another in the middle of a world that looked like the one we’re used to but very palpably wasn’t the same thing at all? Of course we have. This series gets you to feeling that that’s just the type of thing a reasonably intelligent magician has to get used to.

In the novels, Mr. Grossman gives a more explanatory diagram of how various segments of the multiverse are enmeshed, particularly in the episode of the prank in which Plum discovers interconnected worlds behind the walls at Brakebills. In the TV series, it’s often unclear, especially later on, if the characters are in Brakebills (where they appear to be) or somewhere else, some anteroom slightly removed from current reality. In my mind, Brakebills serves as baseline reality, which is actually a joke, since Brakebills is itself separated—by a thin membrane only, but still, separated—from the actual modern world of the northeastern United States in New York State. The Hudson River is visible from the campus, but no one on or near the river would be able to see Brakebills; invisible wards shield it from the eyes of non-magicians.

Some of the characters in the TV series are exactly as Mr. Grossman wrote them, brought to life by a talented cast who seemingly stepped straight out of the pages. Some of the characters have been changed somewhat, or bear different names or roles than they do in the books. One character, Penny, bears only a modest resemblance to Penny in the novel, being much more compelling and dynamic in the series (and actually one of my favorites); I mourned his fate in the series and never really got over his separation from Kady. Penny eventually becomes (in both the books and the series) a Librarian-Magician, and although librarians are not as benign in The Magicians as many people think them to be in real life (having a rather complex relationship with magic that sometimes places them in opposition to magicians), Penny manages both roles, though more satisfactorily in the TV series, I thought, where he was quite a bit more manly.

In previous posts I talked about the idea of magic as psychological agency, and The Magicians is possibly the purest example of this idea that I’ve yet seen. This idea first came to me after I watched a filmed production of The Tempest some years ago, and to my delight, that’s the way Quentin Coldwater, The Magicians’ central character, also sees it: he thinks of the world he wants to create using magic as a kind of Prospero’s island, where he can arrange things to be safe and peaceful. If you ask the question, “What exactly is magic?” I would say, as I think The Magicians does, that it’s a lot like creativity, and not only the kind that spins fantasy worlds and creates symphonies and paintings. It’s also the kind you use in homespun ways when putting together a home or cooking a meal. It’s you putting your stamp on the world, taking what it has to offer and making something out of it that wasn’t there before.

Most, if not all, of the characters in The Magicians are broken in some way or another, and learning magic constitutes a way for them to heal themselves while they are trying to heal the world. They often make things worse, at least for a time, since magic is a messy business limited not only by the magician’s skill but by the material he/she has to work with and the fact that magic has a mind of its own. If you want to get Jungian about it (you may not, but here goes anyway), it’s like the conscious mind, the ego, working with the unconscious, the invisible place of power from whence spring all manner of things, both good and bad. Ever wondered why that spell you cast created a prison world instead of the paradise you wanted? Well, what about that leviathan swimming around down there in your unconscious that shaped your intent in ways you weren’t aware of?

Of course, even going off course with magic can be beneficial in the long run, as Quentin and the others discover. The cliche about the journey meaning more than the destination turns out to be true when you’re jumping worlds as well. You keep trying things out and learning until something sticks, and you suddenly realize you’re home. In the world of The Magicians, it’s only those with an aptitude who ever even learn that magic exists, but I’m not sure Mr. Grossman and I are in disagreement over this. A lot of ordinary people in our world never truly learn what they’re capable of, either.

Seemingly Abandoned Places in the Mind

I’ve searched high and low for something else to blog about this week and couldn’t find anything other than what’s really arrested my attention, a video (now almost a year old) that came across my radar only recently. I’m speaking of Hozier’s “Movement” video, starring Ukrainian ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, directed by Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor. Occasionally, I get interested in something to the point that I end up studying it closely; this week, I’ve almost felt I was in film school, so many times have I pored over this short film, scene by scene.

I first heard the song, an ardent expression of sexual love, at Starbucks, and liked the music and Hozier’s passionate performance without really hearing all of the lyrics. When I found the video online, my initial reaction was, “This is an unforgettable performance, and some of the scenes really resonate with me in a strange way, though I don’t know why.” (The film itself is sensual but not explicit.) Mr. Polunin is the only actor in the film, appearing as three (no, make that four) different characters. 

The ballet sequences are extraordinary for their sheer physicality and expressiveness, and Mr. Polunin also has a remarkable ability to convey emotion even when he isn’t dancing. I’ve never seen a more mesmerizing performance by a male dancer. If you think of male ballet dance performance as sissified, this video will knock that idea entirely out of your head forever. While I recognize some classical technique in the video, there seems to be a mix of styles in the performance. (Bouncing off the walls, literally, isn’t something I’ve often seen in ballet.)

At the beginning, Mr. Polunin’s character, dressed in street clothes, appears to be having an internal debate of some kind and seems both troubled and weary. He gets out of the van he’s sitting in and walks up the steps to an abandoned industrial building. As he pauses on the threshold, another Mr. Polunin (seemingly out of nowhere) emerges from the van behind him, from the opposite door. The second character, in torn clothes and showing signs of some barely suppressed but strong emotion, follows the first character into the building. What follows is a series of solos, duets, and group performances as the characters dance their way through the building from the ground floor to the roof.

The first character appears most interested in dancing solo and at times seems unaware of the presence of any other characters. I related to the first character as someone absorbed in creating or expressing himself without reference to what anyone else is doing. His relationship to the second character is difficult to gauge; at times they dance in tandem, but the overall impression one gets is that the first character is continually moving away from the second one, while at the same time dealing with some strong, unresolved emotion concerning his presence. The second character is almost hungrily appreciative of the first character while also seeming angry; the first character continually runs away while seeming at times to be waiting for the second character to appear.

But then who is the strange, almost ethereal figure in white who appears in the second half of the video, seemingly anticipating the arrival of Character 1 while erecting a barrier between them? Why are there two Character 1s in the same scene, one dancing, and one sitting almost unnoticed against a pillar in the foreground? Why is Character 2 continually stumbling, recovering, and hitting the wall? Why does Character 1 suddenly seem fearful while fleeing to the roof in the final sequence, with Character 2 in hot pursuit? And if he is fearful, why does he, at the last, stand with his back to the other character, seemingly unconcerned as the latter approaches him at high speed with his hand outstretched?

You know enough by now to realize that I cannot answer these questions definitively and that there is likely a lot of layering going on. I think I saw myself in all of the characters at one time or another and possibly you would, too. My general feeling is that Character 2 feels a passion for Character 1 that is being both encouraged and rebuffed, which explains 2’s somewhat haggard appearance. He appears at one point in a doorway, not quite patient but certainly in command of himself and expectant, only to have Character 1 slip by him once more. 

The dreamlike quality of this video doesn’t lend itself to a clear, linear explanation. From a depth perspective, I can see all of the characters as different aspects of a single person, the ego, the id (the hungrily pursuing Character 2 who obviously thinks it’s time to come out to play), and the superego, the third figure. Perhaps what appears to be a duplicate of Character 1 is actually the Self, the fourth factor that completes the personality, although he does not appear to be altogether down with everything transpiring behind him.

I encourage you to watch the video and see for yourself. As a piece of visual, musical, dramatic, and dance art, it’s spectacular; as a type of shadow play depicting the workings of the unconscious, it’s eerily on point (or en pointe, maybe); and as a story of passion and sexual tension, it’s spellbinding. Character 2’s appearance in the doorway with all his tattoos on display as he watches and waits is the central image of the film around which all else is built. Character 1 seems to be leaving him behind after that, and yet the final scene on the roof tells a different story. While seemingly in a reverie, Character 1 has allowed Character 2 to erase almost all the distance between them. What will happen when Character 2 touches him with his outstretched hand?

"The Truman Show" -- A Fairy Tale for the Media Age

I've been thinking this week about Peter Weir's film The Truman Show. It's been so much on my mind that it seems right, without further ado, to share an analysis of the film that I once wrote for a class. I actually did two papers, one from a Freudian and one from a Jungian perspective. I thought both were good, but I got an A on one and a B+ on the other; the B+ paper is the one I'm excerpting here, with an ending taken from the other paper.

Director Peter Weir's captivating and quirky tale, The Truman Show, tells the story of Truman Burbank, the hapless hero who's totally in the dark concerning the truth of his own life. He's the subject of a 24-hour-a-day television "reality show" dreamed up by director-genius Christof. Truman's parents, his wife, his best friend, everyone around him, are all actors, and his life is a set-up. Viewers all over the world tune in to see Truman deal with such situations as the "death" of his father, his school years, his marital tensions, his job, and his escapades with pal Marlon, all of which are carefully scripted episodes. The real story begins when Truman starts to wake up to what's happening and tries to break out of the role that's been written for him.

At first, it's the dullness of a round of days in which each seems much like the one before that begins to wear on Truman. In the time-honored tradition of a situation comedy, he endures endlessly repetitious set-ups and pratfalls involving the neighbors, the local grocer, his mother, and his wife. Eventually, a series of mischances gives him an alarming realization that things revolve around him in a peculiar way. He's nearly hit on the head by a falling stage light. He tunes into a frequency on his car radio in which technicians and stagehands seem to be talking about him. His unscheduled appearance in a building leads him to a backless elevator and a glimpse of things behind the scenes, including caterers. He begins to put together odd incidents from the past in which bits of the truth are apparent. One day, he sees the man he thought of as his father, supposedly dead, now in the role of an extra walking down the street.

As the director tries more determinedly to keep Truman in the dark, Truman becomes bolder about testing reality for himself. Despite the attempts of the other actors to convince him that things are what they seem to be, Truman executes an escape plan leading to the last place Christof thinks of looking for him: the sea. For Truman's long-standing fear of the water, engineered to keep him from roaming off the set, seems to negate the possibility of his ever attempting to leave his island. Once he manages to break out, he finds that the world is both larger and smaller than he realized--larger in the sense that his life is his own if he chooses to seize it, and smaller because (literally) he has been living his life on a Hollywood set whose horizon is a painted backdrop.

Truman is a stand-in for each of us in our journey toward Selfhood. He suggests the archetypal Divine Child in his obscure beginnings. Though to himself Truman is nothing special, his smallest doings are followed by millions of viewers around the world, so that his power and reach are almost supernatural. He has retained a childlike quality even in adulthood, a sunny innocence in the face of the deceit practiced all around him. If, as Jung said, the Divine Child represents the future, Truman personifies unawakened potential in its purest form.

Truman's push toward Selfhood is nearly dormant in the beginning as seen by his acquiescence to the subtle and not-so subtle manipulations of the director and actors. He has been content to live in Jung's "unconscious identification with the plurality of the group." He is so far from knowing himself that when he looks in the mirror every morning, he doesn't realize he is looking into a camera, on the other side of which are the technicians and directors who are actually running his life. "Do you think he can see us?" asks one abashed technician when confronted by Truman's steady but unknowing gaze.

There is no fear of that yet, since Truman's ego is so split off from his unconscious that he is totally identified with his social role. There's an implication that any mild attempts Truman has made at independent growth or assertion have met with disapproval or even disaster in the past. He is oblivious to all the signs that indicate his predicament until he meets Sylvia, who goes against the script by falling for him.

Before being booted from the show (the director has recognized Sylvia's power over Truman), Sylvia tries to tell him the truth about who he is and what's happening. This scene takes place near the ocean, symbol of the primordial source of life and the unconscious. Truman is afraid of the water to the point of being unable to cross a bridge (representing both initiation and its hazards), and this fact has been largely responsible for his failure to realize that he is living on a set. Even though he and Sylvia are parted, he thinks of her constantly, and spurred by an intense desire to be reunited with her, he begins to dream of leaving Seahaven.

When Truman hatches a plan to escape the set, he goes to the basement of his home, where all of his childhood treasures and relics of the past are kept. It has been obvious for some time that Truman is most himself when he retreats to this private world, and it now becomes the springboard for his escape. Out of view of the camera, he makes a break for it by climbing a ladder. A means of egress between the unconscious, "basement" part of himself and his "daylight" ego has been found and moves Truman toward greater consciousness. But to truly change, he still has to cross the ocean that has always terrified him.

For years, Truman believed himself responsible for the death of his father in a boating accident. His realization that this is false now enables him to see a boat not as a symbol of guilt but as a transport that can take him to freedom. In crossing the sea, he is reborn to a more self-determined life, and the boat becomes a womblike vessel of safety that carries him through a special effects storm. Once he weathers the crisis, he realizes that the sea--as well as the painted backdrop he eventually crashes into--represent only the early stages of his journey. The ocean had seemed limitless to Truman when he stood on the shore, but he is just beginning. When he reaches the stage door, it leads into darkness.

In the act of passing through it, Truman enters the unknown territory of authentic life, where nothing is guaranteed. Sylvia, however, has been watching in suspense along with everyone else, and leaves her television, running out of the house to find him. Truman is about to enter her territory.

Though the imaginary television audience in the film--and we viewers of the film--have been complicit in the conspiracy against Truman by the very act of watching, another truth is revealed at the end of the story. We are each Truman in our own way, and our glee at his triumph expresses our own deep yearning for Eros and a more vital, authentic existence than the one we may have settled for. After all, if Truman can do it, so can we.

Shakespeare and Alice

I once read a novel called Mythago Wood in which a forest was a sort of otherworldly zone from which mythical figures occasionally emerged into the everyday realm. The main character saw this happening and kept trying to cross the barrier that kept ordinary humans out of the mythical space, which turned out to be a tough go. The idea of the forest as a sort of zone of the unconscious is a familiar one to most of us, so the existence of a patch of woods next to our local arboretum may help explain why walking there is often such an imaginative exercise.

Then, too, I've seen a number of Shakespeare plays produced in the arboretum in the past, which probably helps explain my penchant for peopling the park with his characters. I once had the idea that it would be fun to have a free-roaming theatre company enact scenes in various parts of the park instead of on a fixed stage, so that playgoers would stroll from one scene to another. Since the idea occurred to me, there's been no looking back. I'm sure this would entail a lot of logistical headaches, but just think how much fun it would be.

You might stage the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the parking lot to represent Athens, then move the bulk of the action to the park itself, with lovers, fairies, and rustics continually stumbling onto one another under the trees. Think how magical it would be on a summer's night to eavesdrop on the fleeing lovers in one leafy corner of the park and overhear Titania quarreling with Oberon in another, as the fireflies winked and the moon rose over the trees. I've been living with this idea for so long that I sometimes stage scenes in my head when I'm walking, picturing the mortals waking up in this particular grove, Puck flitting about behind that oak over there, and the rustics enacting Pyramus and Thisby using that low wall as a prop.

And why stop with A Midsummer Night's Dream? There's an open grassy area in back where I occasionally imagine Richard III stumbling about, calling out for a horse. That quiet corner with the arbor would do admirably for Friar Lawrence's cell, while the gazebo works for Juliet's balcony and bedroom. A patch of hilltop trees sheltering a shaded path translates in my mind into the gloomy corridors of Macbeth's castle, and over there, behind the hedge, is Ophelia's pond. That bowl-shaped meadow is plenty big enough to represent Agincourt and the meeting of Henry's army with the French. The garden, with its series of outdoor rooms, is the perfect spot for staging Much Ado About Nothing, while Julius Caesar could meet his murderers on that narrow walled court down by the roses.

Probably, the nature of the park itself--an open space of trees and fields shaped by human hands and filled with paths--situated next to a small but thickly wooded forest--contributes to my tendency to see it as a stage. It's part nature and part human and has, as a place set apart for no purpose other than leisure, a bit of a liminal feel. Your mind wanders as your eye roams over broad vistas punctuated with many intimate spaces, and there are numerous ways to explore aside from staying on the main path. Paths into and out of the woods provide access to a deeper imaginative realm. It's a writer's and an artist's dream.

The park tends to be well populated these days (see my post "Is That Really Necessary?") and much noisier than it used to be. It strikes me that the increased noise works to decrease the park's liminal qualities, making it harder to imagine Athens, Rome, Verona, or the English countryside. It's more of a neighborhood circus many days than a "thin place," but if you cultivate mental self-containment, it's still possible to have stolen moments of reverie, which gives walking there a sort of fitful charm.

I often encounter rabbits in and around the park, which takes me in a different but related direction, making me think of Alice drowsing on her river bank on a summer day--a subtle reminder that the world of the imagination is never far away, if indeed, there is really any distance at all. (Alternately, it's a reminder that any time spent in a public space these days, from the park to the shopping mall to social media, carries the possibility of falling down a rabbit hole--but let's accentuate the positive.) With the busy outside world surrounding the arboretum on all sides, the park still manages at times to fill the important function of providing room for imagination and untrammeled thought. For that, I thank it.

Mythologist Dreams of a Blue Fish

I don't know why I dreamed this week about a giant blue fish jumping over a house, but I did. A few nights ago, in my dream, I was sitting or leaning on the porch railing of a white frame house very much like one I actually lived in when I was young. It was an overcast day in a small town neighborhood, and there were a number of people standing in the yard between our house and the one next door. All of a sudden, an enormous blue fish rose out of the depths, leaped over our house, and landed in a pool in the front yard.

Where the fish came from is an open question, since we were nowhere near the sea but in about as landlocked a situation as you could imagine. Not that that matters in a dream, of course. The sudden appearance of this enormous creature was extraordinary, but the lack of an ocean didn't seem to signify. Perhaps there was a subterranean ocean underneath the house.

My first thought was, "It's a blue whale." However, it was not a whale, but rather a large, flexible flatfish with a big head. It was not a kite or a ray--its shape was elongated and sinuous. It turned itself around in the pool to face us, and it may be anthropomorphizing to say so, but it did not have a friendly look. (Actually, I'm not sure it's possible to anthropomorphize in a dream, even if it sometimes is in waking life.)

It may be good to mention that Jung compared the stages of consciousness with the chakras of kundalini, so that the Leviathan that swims in the unconscious is associated with the second chakra, svadhisthana. In this stage, Jung said, one moves from lack of awareness to a confrontation with unconscious contents, a tricky undertaking requiring considerable courage since the flooding one experiences can threaten equilibrium. It's no minnow you're facing; certainly the fish in my dream had the menacing aspect of a Leviathan as it turned to look at us.

Everybody seemed to know the fish was going to make another leap and probably land on the house. There seemed to be a collective impulse to move out of the way, even a surge of panic. But for some reason, no one really did anything except stand and watch. I remained on the porch, oddly disinclined to move quickly, though part of me thought it was a grand idea. The fish did leap and actually landed on the house . . . but all that came down were a few splinters.

This dream reminds me of one I had some years ago (and have written about before) in which I was lounging on a cliff high above the sea, a brief idyll that ended when the water began to rise. It was not a single creature but rather the ocean itself that threatened. Interestingly, it was not so much physical danger in that dream but the damage to my belongings that concerned me; I was urging people in the house on the cliff to help me move things inside before they got wet.

In the fish dream, there was no water visible except in the pool, which was somewhat shallow, and though the fish carried through on its destructive leap, the result was anticlimactic--though there was still some talk of adjourning to the neighboring house for safety. The situation seemed unresolved, some feeling of uncertainty still remaining.

Maybe it's too much to pair two dreams occurring eight years apart, but I do seem to see a kind of progression from one dream to the next: from a diffuse but overwhelming threat to a specific, visible one; from a beautiful but exotic location to homely, familiar ground; from a frustrated feeling of trying to rouse others to a shared (but measured) sense of danger. The contrast between the urgent activity of the first dream and the watchfulness of the second dream is also striking, though I am not sure what we all were waiting for. A fish fry, maybe?

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.

What Are You Doing After the Apocalypse?

I first became aware of the energy surrounding the apocalypse when people started talking about it my first year at Pacifica. I remember hearing about images of giant waves that were coming up in people's dreams and artwork. Not long after that, I heard about the Mayan calendar and the hype surrounding December 21, 2012. Over the last few years, I've seen so many references to not only the Mayan myth (misinterpreted though it may have been) but to other variations--involving everything from zombies to asteroids--that it seemed to amount to a collective obsession.

That first quarter at school, I had a dream that I did not connect at the time to any collective concerns because it seemed so personal. Still dazzled by the novel experience of commuting to lush, sea-swept Santa Barbara County, I dreamed that I was sleeping on the balcony of a house on a cliff, under a full moon. It was just before dawn, and there was a magic moment when the moon gave way to a newly risen sun. It was wonderful to wake up in the open air, but the feeling of incredible joy was soon interrupted by a realization that the sea was rising.

I went into the house--where a male relative and some others were hanging around--to get help moving the furniture inside, but no one was moving very fast, and in any case, the water was already at our feet. The perch on the cliff was now at sea level, and I was upset over the way the water was ruining everything. Then the dream ended.

Just the other day, I saw a picture of a young woman standing in a room with the end wall missing, looking down at the sea just below her feet. The caption was a quote from Rumi that said, "Listen to the sound of waves within you." The ethereal quality of the illustration, with the moody sky and the missing wall, was remarkably reminiscent of my dream.

At school, I was fascinated by the sea as a metaphor for the unconscious and explored it in several papers. Rumi advises listening for something the waves can tell us. In my dream, I was focused on the destructive quality of the water, which not only interrupted my idyll but ruined the furniture. It rose silently, for no apparent reason. When I thought about it later, I decided that the dream was a clue indicating that the new freedom and exhilaration I was experiencing had another side. It meant being closer to the place where all the myths and dreams well up and therefore in a good position to see whatever came into view, good or bad. The people in the house, by contrast, all seemed unmotivated, unable to act.

I think now that my dream was probably more like the dreams and artistic creations I heard other people talking about than I realized. Tsunami or rapidly rising sea; apocalypse or meteor strike; the specific forms no doubt have their own individual meanings, but there is a common theme of an overwhelmingly destructive force. Why were so many people captivated by these images? Why was everybody talking about them, either in jest or in earnest? Where did they come from to begin with?

These questions can probably be answered in more than one way. I tend to think anxiety over climate change might be playing into it, but there are other issues, economic, social, and environmental, that could also be playing a part. What interests me now is how people see the world beyond the wave. After it passes, what then?

Destruction and creation are two sides of a coin. Was all the attention focused on the idea of destruction somehow cathartic? Did the ending of 2012 sweep out the old and make room for a different kind of energy, something focused on creative change and new beginnings? All of that water and blood--were we having unconscious labor pains?

I want to think so. You might think that, as a responsible myth person, I spent December waving around the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols and advising calm, but I didn't. I have to admit that, other than observing the fray, I tried to stay out of it (I'd already lost one set of furniture in the dream). I spent the day of destruction baking cookies and trying to remember how to create an href tag. Modest attainments, but hopeful ones. Like Scarlett O'Hara, I guess I always believed that "tomorrow is another day." I'm glad we were right.

Remembering the Brontes

I finished reading a novel about the life of Charlotte Bronte, Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Bronte, this weekend. Although Jane Eyre is a favorite of mine, I didn't know a lot about Charlotte Bronte except that she and her siblings were all writers, that they lived in Yorkshire, and that their father was a minister. I pictured a strict household with few creature comforts set in a bleak, stormy landscape, where the only luxury was that of imagination. According to Miss Gael, that seems to have been close to the truth, although she paints a sensitive, nuanced portrait of the place and the people that lets you understand how such remarkable writing could have been produced under such difficult circumstances.

The author does a wonderful job of making Charlotte come alive, and I considered her as a real person for the first time while reading this novel. Gael based her book on extensive research, so that the main outline of the story is firmly grounded in real events. I never knew anything about Charlotte's love life, but she did eventually marry and seems to have found her soulmate after several stillborn romances. It seemed at first that she was doomed never to find what she needed in a single man, but love finally found her when it almost seemed too late.

The Bronte sisters became a literary sensation with the publication of their first novels, but their pseudonyms caused some confusion. Since some people initially believed Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell to be a single person, not only did Charlotte get notoriety for the (some said) scandalous nature of Jane Eyre, but she also took some heat for Wuthering Heights (her sister Emily's book). Since Wuthering Heights was even wilder and less conventional than Jane Eyre, Charlotte became quite a celebrity without anyone knowing who she really was.

When, in the novel, Charlotte and her sister Anne show up in London, Charlotte's publisher can hardly believe from her plain appearance and demure demeanor that she is the creator of the passionate Jane and her moody employer, Mr. Rochester. We as readers have been given a look at her inner life and past, so we know that the emotional content of her novel is taken directly from experience. Emily, likewise, is a genuine product of her environment and calls things as she sees them. Heathcliff and Cathy spring directly from the soil and rocks of the moors, and their raw, tempestuous qualities reflect the harsh elements, the wind, the weather, and the dirt, that Emily knew intimately and loved.

What is very striking in Romancing Miss Bronte is the way in which the setting, the impoverished village of Haworth (so unpromising and seemingly inhospitable in the opening scenes) proves to be such a rich resource for the sensitive imaginations of the sisters and their brother, Branwell. Like true Romantics, Charlotte and Emily elevate feeling and the power of nature, but the result is not castles in the air but unvarnished portraits of the human condition. It isn't hard to see the moor as a metaphor for the unconscious, where all of the shadow elements -- adulterous love, primitive passion, and violence, those things deemed improper to acknowledge in polite society -- roam about unfettered.

The poet John Keats, another favorite of mine and also a Romantic, was already dead when the Brontes were small children, and, like them, was a consumptive. I am wondering how he would have stood up against the personalities of these sisters had they ever met. I somehow imagine Charlotte and Emily, at least, as Maenads who could have easily torn poor Keats apart.

I am still waiting for a film production of Jane Eyre that does it complete justice. I have seen three or four productions, and they either get Jane right and Rochester wrong, or vice versa. I have seen a production of Wuthering Heights on PBS that scared the crap out of me and was probably closer to what Emily had in mind than any version ever made. I'd watch it with the lights on, if I were you. Come to think of it, I'd watch Jane Eyre the same way. These women cut things pretty close to the bone.