Ariadne Goes to the Movies

I saw Inception this afternoon and, like just about everyone else, left the theater wondering about what really happened at the end. The movie is purposely ambiguous, but I think Cobb was actually in "the real world" after he woke up on the plane. I read somewhere that you get confirmation of this if you stay through the end of the credits, which we didn't do, but I'm satisfied with that interpretation of things. It's emotionally satisfying and makes the movie feel complete. (From one perspective, no story is ever complete, so that may be why some people see the ending differently. Maybe it's a test of how postmodern you are.)

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't seen the movie yet, and you may want to forget about all this if you're planning to go. I hate to know anything about a movie before I go to see it and managed to miss all the controversy about the ending of Inception beforehand; I didn't know about any of it until I Googled the movie once I got home.

I had been told by friends that there were labyrinths in this movie, and indeed there are. There are many haunting images of narrow alleys and hallways, interlocking passages, and tricky escapes, in which city streets, buildings, and houses become complicated and labyrinthine; there is often a locked room or hidden place as the goal. And of course, the ultimate labyrinth is the mind itself. In the movie, dream architecture makes use of elaborate mazes, and the young architect recruited by Cobb is even named Ariadne. I agree with the movie's premise; psyche is a labyrinth, the prototype on which other labyrinths are all based. That's why labyrinths are so fascinating.

Before going to the movie, I was reading something I wrote a few years ago about James Hillman's views on psyche and the imagination. In Re-Visioning Psychology, he sometimes gives the impression that he believes the world of the imagination is more important than the "real world." Imagination is real and certainly shapes and informs our reality, but in the movie, tension arises from the inability to distinguish the layers of dream from the waking world.

From a practical standpoint, I can tell the difference between the dream I had last night in which an ex-boyfriend sent me a videotape of him and his new girlfriend at the beach, after which I went around putting tickets into the gas tanks of police cruisers, and the fact that in the real world, I had Cheerios for breakfast this morning. What's really intriguing is thinking about why I dreamed what I did.

Who are the people in the dream? Was that really my ex-boyfriend, or a helpful figure from my unconscious telling me something I need to know? Were those really tickets I was putting into the gas tanks, or a subtle reminder to watch where I invest my time and energy and to keep on eye on where it ends up? Why were there so many police cars in my dream -- does my psyche feel overrun by authority figures? Why was I the one "giving tickets"? Was I turning the tables on those animus figures and getting them to work for me?

I don't have any answers about last night's dream, just some thoughts. Sometimes I can look back on a dream months later and see it more clearly than I can when I'm still close to it, but dream interpretation is a difficult art. Another thing Inception got right about dreams is their deep and mysterious nature and the seeming impossibility of ever getting completely to the bottom of one.

Ride This

Yesterday I went to Kings Island amusement park with friends. It's been a long while since I was last there, and I surprised myself this time by being braver than in the past. I'm not addicted to adrenaline; you're more likely most days to find me reading Jane Austen and sipping tea than tumbling head over heels on something called Invertigo. Some of my friends, though, turned out to be bigger thrill seekers than I had expected, so I ended up on rides that I'm sure I would have bypassed if I'd been in more sedate company.

I realized at some point yesterday that when I'm faced with 130-foot drops and G forces of 5, my attitude these days is fairly philosophical. Why? I attribute it to life experience. In three years, I commuted by plane 30 times to school on the West Coast without ever once crashing. I stood up in front of my classmates numerous times without bombing, though I used to think public speaking was one of my worst nightmares. I have been through fires and earthquake. I survived a wild ride down an alleged "road" on an Idaho butte in my brother's truck with a storm on the horizon. I've seen a grizzly bear. I've worked with lawyers for 12 years. I have driven the L.A. freeways. I've chased the Minotaur.

Things like that harden you up a bit, though I have to admit I balked at the sight of the Diamondback, Kings Island's newest and tallest roller coaster. It was just a little too vertical for someone who hadn't ridden in a while, and if you've studied Greek mythology at all, its sky-climbing aggressiveness summons up instant thoughts of the hubris that brought people like Phaeton and Icarus to such a spectacular end. So I sat out the Diamondback and let someone else tell me about it, though I felt a little sorry afterwards that I had missed it.

Later on, we found ourselves at the Vortex just as it reopened after being shut down for maintenance. Although its having "had a problem" of an unspecified nature raised a sense of mild alarm, I was determined to ride it since I had done so in the past. So we all jumped on, and two loops, one corkscrew, a boomerang, a helix, and much head-banging later, we arrived back at the station in one piece. You feel proud of yourself after something like that; it's sort of like threading a labyrinth that has fallen apart in the air. One friend told me that if I could handle that, I could handle the Diamondback, which, aside from the first drop, she said, was less intense in some ways than the Vortex. OK, maybe next time?

After that, it was thrill rides all the way, though the Racer and Adventure Express involved perhaps more bumping and bruising than fear. We got on something called Delirium that even at this moment I have trouble believing I did. It looks like a giant potato masher with a disk that spins at the end of the handle, and it swings 12 stories up in the air while you rotate on the disk, your feet dangling. If you don't believe me, here's a visual:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLh-j_FCy2c

I wouldn't have thought anything could top that, but we went on to ride a couple more coasters that were so extreme as to be almost violent: those taught me my limits. I came off Invertigo with a headache, and I must say even my die-hard friends were a bit shaken. I may cross that one off my bucket list. As for Flight Deck, it caught me off guard since its rating was only a 4, but it was so much like Invertigo that it brought back the headache that had just started to wane. After that, I think everyone had had enough. I had one more wish, since I thought it best to end things on a gentle note. So our very last ride of the day was on a beautiful old carousel with rearing horses and calliope music and the world spinning at a demure, ground-level pace. And perhaps you only fully appreciate the charms of a carousel after spending an afternoon defying the laws of gravity and common sense.

Today, I was a little stiff but otherwise unscathed. I took some Tylenol and enjoyed my proximity to Mother Earth. Here are my conclusions about yesterday's adventures:

1. People may not be meant to fly, but you'll never get them to admit it.
2. Soaring 12 stories is actually less painful than getting banged around and bruised at lower altitudes.
3. Getting out of your normal comfort zone is not a bad thing.
4. Roller coasters aren't as scary as some other things you encounter in life.
5. Closing your eyes? Always an option.

Greetings from the Night Garden

A strange thing happened while I was writing this post, and it's never happened before since I've started the blog. I had most of the post written and was in editing mode when I noticed that the first two thirds of my essay had disappeared. Ouch! Horror! Fire! Calamity! No amount of hitting the back button has brought it back, so I have to conclude that all that Beautifully Constructed Prose is gone for good. I don't know exactly what happened, but of course word processors can be tricky. Trickster-y, too.

I was writing about the mysterious dark thing I thought I saw outside my window at work a week or so ago. Something fluttered by, and I only caught it out of the corner of my eye. I kept watching for it all week and kept seeing other things -- a leaf one day, a moth the next -- but I never saw what I thought I had seen the first time. Though only half-glimpsed, it had seemed bigger, darker, and more exotic somehow than a moth, like a creature from a night garden. What I really thought I had seen was a large black butterfly.

Since the butterfly is a symbol of psyche, and a black one carries implications of the shadow, the undeveloped part of our being that holds so much potential, this was a sighting guaranteed to spark the imagination of a Jungian. It might not be as exciting as the scarab beetle that bumped against the window of Jung's consulting room right after his client had dreamed about just such a beetle, but it was a break in the routine all the same. I was sitting there working, probably looking at news databases in Lexis-Nexis or doing something equally prosaic, when all of a sudden this creature appeared, hovering just on the edge of my vision and disappearing before I could get a good look.

But had I really seen it or had I seen something else, like that humble brown moth I spotted a few days later, and had my imagination turned it into something grander? That was the question.

I had somehow connected this to Jungian psychology, the quaternity, and the three men who appeared in my dream last night and dumped a yellow couch in my living room, but all of that has disappeared into the ether of Blogger's text editor. So maybe I should just say what actually happened.

On Friday afternoon, I was finishing up loose ends at my desk when something flew by my window, and I was quick enough to get a good look this time. It was a black butterfly, and an unusually large one, with big bold wings. I'm not sure where it came from, or even if it's the same one I saw a week ago. Now, the practical, rational side of me says, OK, a butterfly, you've seen one like it in the Arboretum. That's true. But my poetic side likes the contrast of midnight wings and bright sunlight, and the fact that it was flying so far from the ground.

Dessert and Metaphysics

Yesterday was lazy. I got very little reading done, even though I took a book with me when I went out to lunch. I was what you might call "out of sorts"; either that, or that Peanut Butter Honey Amaretto gelato did me in for the day. I came home and thought I'd lie down for a while and read about postmodernism. What happened was that I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke up, it was after 1 a.m., and I'd been dreaming.

Today, I buckled down and finished the chapter that's been holding me hostage for several days. In all honesty, not only is the material dense, but I also have a problem with the loss of the self since I'm kind of attached to my "self." The author of my book says that the way to deal with the "death of God" is to keep marching on until you arrive at a type of nihilism that is ultimately affirmative but causes you to lose the death grip you had on your sense of self. You lose the polar opposites of not only self and other, but also of life and death, and this leads to a strange sort of happiness (at least for philosophers). 

That's great, but on a hot July afternoon with an "everybody's out of town feeling," it's a little tough to hear that you're probably not even who you think you are. 

To think that the core of your being is in some sense quite insubstantial is not only disorienting, but it also goes against the way I experience myself. But as I've started thinking about the connection between Buddhism and this idea of the loss of the self, the whole collapse of inner/outer takes on a certain beauty.

In Old Path White Clouds, the life of Buddha by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha explains the principle of interpenetration (and the loss of the self) to his follower, Ananda, using the example of an empty bowl. Although the bowl contains nothing (except air!), the Buddha points out the presence in it of all the elements -- earth, fire, water, and air, as well as the hands and the skill of the potter -- that came together to make it. So, appearances to the contrary, the bowl is not an independent thing in itself, but the nexus of all these things. In the same way, I'm not just myself, separately and alone, but a dynamic matrix of many different forces that have come together in a specific place and time. 

Actually, this is comforting in certain ways. In some sense, we're never as alone as we think we are. I'm not just alone in my living room, typing this in tranquillity; I'm composed of long-dead stars that once breathed fire and now live in me: "The world in a grain of sand," as William Blake said. It's beautiful and profound, but I still like the idea of my uniqueness and the solidity of certain things. Call me stubborn, but I don't want to dissolve into nirvana. I'd rather stay here and try another gelato.

Home Before Dark

I drove back from Chicago today, a trip of about six and half hours, not counting stops. I had never driven there before and wouldn't be anxious to do it again, since it involved a complex chain of interstates beginning with I-75 and ending with I-290, a black hole of a tollbooth line, numerous construction zones, people losing their luggage in and by the road, and a weird little maneuver through a rusty corner of Gary, Indiana, that probably saved time but was not at all scenic. Yes, it sure sounds like a labyrinth.

Chicago itself was nice. I spent the weekend seeing the sights of Oak Park, listening to bands at a music festival, and visiting a Pacifica friend who lives on the North Shore. All of the neighborhoods I saw in the suburbs were decked out in their finest red, white, and blue, and the atmosphere was very festive. Chicago is a very proud and patriotic town.

I spent most of the afternoon yesterday touring the neighborhood around Frank Lloyd Wright's house and studio in Oak Park. Since I was on vacation, I had decided not to worry about looking for labyrinths (ha, ha), but lo, I was walking back toward Chicago Street after seeing the Unity Temple when I ran smack into a labyrinth on the grounds of a church. I went back later to walk it, and it was different from most other labyrinths I've seen because the path was made of crushed gravel that made a nice crunch under your feet. You could hear the sound of your own progress.

I drove out to visit my friend last night, and we ended up on her back deck, talking, comparing notes on our research, and just laughing. It's good to stay connected with other people doing the dissertation because the process does get lonely sometimes. You can certainly get lost in it.

Driving back home this afternoon, I realized that MapQuest had become my Ariadne's thread. I also discovered that you can have a thread and still get lost, as I did, trying to get back on I-90 East. I never meant to see the South Side, but I did -- at least a little piece of it. Going back was supposed to be the same as going in, but parts of the route didn't look familiar at all, maybe because there weren't a lot of memorable landmarks. After all that flatness, it was a relief to get to the rolling hills of southern Indiana with its dips and valleys mellowed by the afternoon light. Once I got back on I-275, I was on familiar ground again. After that, I knew my way.

Next time I go to Chicago, I think I'll fly. Even Daedalus didn't mind using wings to escape the labyrinth he had built, and I think the pilots can usually be trusted not to fly too close to the sun.

Escaping the Jaws of Saturn

I've been watching a DVD of a seminar James Hillman gave earlier this spring on the archetypes of the senex and the puer. I hadn't considered it before, but while listening to him speak, it occurred to me that they have a lot to do with the process of writing.

Hillman describes the puer as the spirit of spontaneity, creativity, and risk. The puer is a youthful figure, light on his feet and quick-moving. He has a certain heedlessness about him, maybe even a recklessness. He might be personified by Hermes, the stealer of Apollo's cattle, who manages to talk his way out trouble, charm the other gods, and invent the lyre all in one go.

The senex, on the other hand, is a somber figure associated with age and experience. He is steady, deliberate, rational, authoritative, and concerned with measuring and ordering things. His personification is Apollo, or -- according to Hillman -- Saturn, a somewhat cold and gloomy god, whose heaviness is in sharp contrast to the light-heartedness of the puer. (Saturn is also noteworthy for eating his children.)

Puer and senex characteristics are present in both men and women, at all times of life. They are more like patterns or types of energy than rigid representations of stages of life, though it is possible to see certain correspondences between puer and senex and the respective concerns of youth and old age. I'm wondering if they can also be related to the differences between right-brain and left-brain thinking.

Writing is a skill that requires the use of both sides of the brain, though not necessarily at the same time. When I write, the part I really like is playing with the words and ideas until they come out right. I might have a hunch about something that isn't substantial at all until I write it down, so I'm actually writing to figure out what I think. Writing itself is the way of discovery.

The other aspect of writing is editing, tidying up, and citation-checking, the part where you run the spell-checker and hunt for unmatched quotation marks. I am actually very good at this; I once worked as a copy editor and often had other people wanting me to proofread their work -- but I dislike it. I consider it the necessary finishing stage in writing and am meticulous about doing it but do not consider it fun.

I never thought of myself as a puer, but now I realize that that is exactly what I am when I'm engaged in the creative, exploratory part of writing. This is all risk-taking and not knowing if something's going to fly or not; it requires looseness and willingness to leap without seeing a net. The senex comes in later with the careful, deliberate editing, the consultations with the MLA style book, and the attention to structure and the length of paragraphs, things that usually don't occur to me until the end.

The puer-senex dimension actually explains a lot of things, not just writing. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said that I had more senex in me. I was usually the careful, reasonable, responsible one, always double-checking my work and being thoughtful about the way I approached things. I am still like that. But there was a whole other side of me trying to get out, which explains why I was always scribbling poetry at Starbucks, daydreaming, and driving around without knowing where I wanted to go. I was restless, but I tried to think I wasn't. What was really happening was that my senex was sitting on my puer and trying to eat him. My puer finally fought back and took such a flying leap that he landed on the other side of the country in graduate school.

I'm thinking about the wistful little boy from my dream, the one I wrote about in my first blog post in January. I think he's important on a lot of different levels, and I'm just now recognizing him as an infant puer. He showed up in another dream later on but was bigger and stronger and didn't seem quite so in need of protection. I didn't know I had him in me, but he did.

Practical Jokes from the Universe

Yesterday was really pretty nice. I woke up to the sound of rain and distant thunder, and it felt so cozy that I stayed in bed listening until I fell asleep again and woke up rested an hour or so later. The rest was a typical Saturday: yoga, lunch, writing, and shopping for chocolate and groceries. I even got a pedicure at the little nail spa run by that nice family and emerged with shiny toenails in a lovely shade that one of the little girls picked out for me. I was feeling pretty good after all that.

So I have no explanation for what happened today. I was planning to get some things done at home and then go to a movie, but it didn't turn out like that. It all started when I decided to wash a couple of loads of laundry. I had taken one load to the laundry room and was on my way back for the second one when I put out my hand to type in the security code on the front door and suddenly could not remember it. I have been typing this code in every day for 10 years, usually without thinking about it, but suddenly it was just gone. I could remember the first digit and the last but not the middle part.

This had happened once or twice before but not in a long time. I thought at first that it would come back to me if I waited a minute or so, but it didn't. I typed in what I thought was the right code several times, to no avail. Then I became convinced that I was just off by a single digit, so I tried various combinations without getting anywhere. Fifteen minutes went by and I was still locked out, so I decided to go back to the laundry room, wait for the washer to stop, and put the clothes in the dryer. Not thinking about it for a few minutes would almost certainly make the code come back to me, or so I thought.

I did all this and came back, but I still couldn't remember. By now, I was feeling less and less certain I knew what it was. I thought of ringing a neighbor's doorbell and just saying I'd forgotten it, but aside from feeling silly I was also reluctant to disturb someone on Sunday morning. After another frustrating quarter hour or so, someone came by and I followed them in. I was now back in my apartment but still had no clue, so I felt almost as trapped inside as I had outside. I knew I had the code written on a piece of paper at one time, but after searching the kitchen drawer, I had to admit that the piece of paper was probably long gone.

I decided to wedge something in the side door so I could go out and come back, praying that no one would remove it before I had a chance to throw my second load in. I finally ate a late breakfast, then went over to put my load in the dryer. I was so rattled that I didn't realize until I closed the dryer door that I didn't know where my quarters were. I thought I had the little envelope in my hand when I went to the laundry room, but they were nowhere in sight. I went back to my apartment and looked all over.

Now I was missing the means to get into my building as well as the means to dry a sopping wet load of sheets and towels. It wasn't quite as bad as the Fellowship of the Ring trying to figure out the password to get into Moria (no sinister gurgling lake at my back or ravening wolves), but there is something disquieting about being locked out of your home. I started to feel strange hanging around the entrance, as if I shouldn't be there. The only bright spot was that I kept noticing my pedicure and thinking that at least my nails looked great. 

I went back to the laundry room to hunt around for those darn quarters. If I could at least get the dryer going, that would be something . . . and sure enough, this time, I started moving things in the dryer and found the folded envelope at the bottom. I had thrown it in along with the load.

Having solved that mystery, I thought I would feel better if I took a shower and changed clothes. After that, the last load was dry, so I brought everything back, made up the bed, and put everything else away. It was now mid-afternoon, and I was still codeless (and clueless), but I decided I wouldn't be a prisoner in my own apartment and would go about my business in the hope that the code would reappear in my memory by the time I got back. 

As it happened, a young man from my building was coming out as I was standing at the door, gazing at the lock as if it contained the mysteries of the universe. I asked him, "What is our code?" and he told me what it was, saying he hoped they hadn't changed it. I said "No, I'm just typing it in wrong" . . . and then I tried it, and it worked. Once he said it, it sounded right, but I'm not sure when I would have remembered it on my own. It was like I had gone on a trip and been away so long that I had forgotten where I left my key. Greatly relieved, I went out to the car to run my errands -- but not before writing the code down.

Perhaps Jung would say there are few accidents. I wouldn't say that everything that happens has a deeper meaning, but it's hard not to muse over such an odd occurrence. I was writing about mazes yesterday afternoon, and the sense of being lost; the experience of being locked out was a lot like ending up in a blind alley. I won't say that this was a case of unconsciously acting out a subject I've been preoccupied with, but that's one possibility. Stranger things have happened.