Dry Bones

by Richard Beard

  I should start with the clothes. Bending to get behind the wheel, I’d noticed what I was actually wearing. Should have looked in the mirror. In my haste to end all connection with relics, I’d managed to put on one red sock and one yellow, the Chaplain’s judo trousers, and a blue and white striped pyjama top I’d mistaken for a shirt. I looked like a lunatic.

  Helena was spot-on. I was a fucking mess, and I needed help. Fearing for my own sanity, thinking I probably needed to see somebody, I placed Jung’s knee-cap on the passenger seat beside me, and pulled out into the ambient traffic of Geneva. As I set off for Moholy’s gallery in the Rue de la Croix d’Or, I was the most scared I’d ever been of breaking up, of cracking apart. I blamed it on my age, and loneliness, and Geneva. And the fact that from a standing start I’d now twice brought back a body from the dead. This had to stop. I was far from home and my distance from cake-bakes and other anchors was sending me doolally.

  Giving way to one of the day’s first trams on the Rue de Candolle, I glanced down at Jung’s knee-cap in clingfilm on the passenger seat. The precaution of the plastic wrapping was a madness in itself.

  A car behind beeped me. I was as mentally solid as the next man. I hastily unwrapped the white shell of Jung’s knee from its clingfilm, and moved on, Carl Gustav Jung skittish and free on the seat beside me, a person of undoubted distinction, raised in the European provinces and son of a Protestant pastor.

  That was more like it. He was someone I could relate to, even if, two years ago at the age of thirty-two, he was already Oberarzt in a white coat and high collar at the Burghölzli clinic, second-in-command to Bleuler, and a pioneer of meaningful associations between words, objects, memories, names, institutions, the Red Cross, Switzerland, cheese, holes, ground, mine, bones, gold, and questions, questions, questions.

  Jung took special responsibility for those poor deranged souls whose every belief and action was an expression and search for the self, the destination always the same, only the journey which changed. Any path could be the one path, the direct route to self-realisation, but for those who ended up at the Burghölzli, stone-silent or raving, the true path most probably wasn’t the one they’d taken.

  The analyst in Jung still found that interesting, in fact life-errors were always interesting, but they did make driving conditions difficult.

  – If I am understanding you correctly, Herr Mason, you are entertaining a Middle Aged belief of human relics haffing some mysterious power? Hein?

  – I never said that.

  – You are sinking proximity to dominant bones can be modifying behaviour?

  – I’d like to believe in life after death.

  Carl Gustav Jung had eight uncles who were also parsons, on both sides of the family, and like all children from religious households he grew up with the dragback that what people actually thought and believed was of some significance. Later, as stepfather of Psychology, he encouraged everyone to tell their own intimate story, which could then be analysed to explain them.

  – The vays you are being since coming in Genf is telling me you are haffing a problem.

  – I have no problem.

  – I sink Herr Mason you do.

  – I don’t.

  – So.

  – I don’t.

  – (And the voices?)

  – (What voices?)

  – Do not be vorrying. It is alles quite normal.

  – I’m very glad you think so.

  Jung rejected Freud’s mechanistic approach to identity, and speculated on the collective unconscious. This allowed everyone access to the same pool of mythical archetypes, bringing us one and all together. We are all everybody. What one person was, everyone could be, which made it more plausible, just as a random example, that a single moment of intense suffering somewhere in the Middle East, say 2000 years ago, could be a valuable lesson to us all.

  For the individual, becoming a complete human being was a matter of integrating all the different possibilities. The individuation process, or Menschwerdung, created the spiritual Übermensch.

  I thought of Becket’s brain spilled across the flagstones of Canterbury Cathedral, Davy doped and alone in his Geneva hotel room, and Burton crawling in his vomit, public as a dog in the lobby of the high-class Dorchester. I wasn’t convinced that a spiritual Übermensch was what I really aspired to be.

  Jung also spoke to the dead.

  As a young man, moustache still in patches, he was introduced to séances by his mother’s side of the family, the Preiswerks. In the family darkness, Jung was enthralled when his cousin Hélène took on a second personality named Ivènes. She then became her own grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Preiswerk, reproducing his precise tone of voice before passing through many other incarnations scattered through the centuries. She was Seeress of Prevorst and the Countess of Thierfelsenberg, she was Madame de Velours, and she suffered a Christian martyrdom under Nero in Rome.

  In 1916, as a non-combatant in neutral Switzerland, Jung reconsidered the collective unconscious, and renamed it the land of the dead. The two terms were interchangeable, as were other phrases in Jung’s vocabulary of analytical psychology. ‘Splinter personalities’ or ‘complexes’ were the same as spirits, which were so common a presence in human experience that they accounted for the astonishing range of behaviour open to each and every one of us. The interplay of the ego with alternate complexes (or, in other words, the influence of spirits) was what made each human personality dynamic and unique.

  From this time on, the spirits themselves increasingly chose to speak through Jung’s patients, and his particular talent lay in believing whatever his patients believed, in the living dead and synchronicity and secret orders of invincible Teutonic knights (who kept tight the secret of the Grail). I am Napoleon. I am an American heiress and I am deeply unhappy. I am the Messiah. The secret of Jung’s compassion was that in everybody else, whatever their story, he saw himself.

  These spirits talked to Jung at length, in a detail scarcely believable, as if genuinely they were people and beings from other times. One possible explanation was life after death. Another was cryptomnesia.

  Secretly, we know everything.

  At that, I had to laugh. Alone in the car, not being mad, driving to Moholy’s gallery with Jung’s knee-cap on the seat beside me, I had to say that I felt I knew very little, if anything at all. Nothing, in fact.

  – Secretly.

  – You’re bonkers, aren’t you?

  – I am never using that word. My personality sometimes is disorientated. It is normal. I haff never been denying it.

  In his research into the phenomenology of the self, Jung discovered he was quite a phenomenon. He sometimes believed he was Jesus. Christ was his culture hero, the psychological image of wholeness. He was the ultimate and unspotted archetype of the self, unique and occurring only once in time. Or perhaps twice. Switzerland could be the new Eden, where the four rivers meet, and Jung a selected vessel of grace for the conveying of certain revelations which would enrich the lives of the ordinary. There was no great mystery to it. Jesus was a Pisces, according to Jung, and not a Capricorn, which was quite clearly the hidden clue to his character.

  Jesus wasn’t Jung’s only madness. He spent hours training a dachshund to whimper in the presence of demons. He walked in his garden talking with Philemon, an invisible spirit. He kept a loaded pistol next to his bed, and swore he’d blow his brains out if ever he felt he’d entirely lost his mind. How sane was that? And in that state, with the pistol cocked at his bedside, how could the second-best doctor at the Zurich Burghölzli ever hope to help? Jung could be paranoid, and fly into fits of rage, ranting like one of his patients in need of the standard restraints, pads and chains, electrotherapy and opiates, and as a last resort a good therapeutic wrapping in a clammy wet bedsheet.

  There, that ought to dampen the spirits.

  I was still in the van, and still driving, but I was a long way from Moholy’s gallery. I’d ended up somewhere out
by the airport, or maybe not. I was utterly lost. I saw a sign to CERN, and another to France, and one which simply said East. I opted for Centre-Ville, driving back in past a refugee camp, the United Nations, and Geneva’s Museum of Human Atrocity. I considered paying it a quick visit, looking at what was possible and going quietly mad, but on Tuesdays the museum was closed.

  I drove past a barracks, the headquarters of several multinational corporations, and many walled consulates. It was a city I hardly recognised, of secrets and contradictions, of much spying, like a psychoanalyst’s view of the brain.

  Without knowing quite how, I ended up in front of the Church of All Saints. I bumped the van on to the kerb, and sat for a while doing nothing. At least I knew where I was. I had the padded steering wheel firmly in my hands at ten to two, and I started softly to bump my forehead against twelve, frightening myself, as if I were somehow possessed.

  Get a grip. Get a hold of yourself.

  Jung would have concluded that I’d driven to the church for an obscure purpose, but Jung was dead and the relic business was nonsense. I needed to put it behind me, and sever all connections. I went into the church for the circle of purple silk which had once wrapped Becket. Get rid of everything. The emptiness of the church made it cold, and unwelcoming, and I didn’t want to linger. I opened the safe and pulled out the silk from beneath the unused wafers, the body of Christ, hold you in eternal life.

  On my way back out, I stopped at the bags of jumble. I couldn’t go to Moholy’s looking like this, and in the bottom of the second bag I remembered an old grey suit. It was several sizes too stout, and also too long. I tried to fill it out, feeling heavy and Germanic on a comforting diet of sausages and dense brown bread.

  Back in the van, flopping about in the suit, I kept Jung unwrapped. I was feeling a little unhinged, and needed all the help I could get.

  In the window of his gallery in the Rue de la Croix d’Or, Joseph Moholy the seller of legitimate antiquities had a fist-sized statue of Tlazolteotl, eater of filth and goddess of unbridled sexuality, in the act of childbirth. And Napoleon’s pinnacled hat.

  I left the van on the kerb and pushed through the doorway, activating an old-fashioned bell, perhaps even antique. A suited boy sitting behind the sales desk stood up and politely asked me to wait. He said Mr Moholy had been expecting me, and went through a screen at the back.

  I’d rearranged the suit, rolling up the sleeves and turning up the trouser-legs, and if it still looked unusual it could plausibly be a fashion. This time, I’d concentrated on the correct and most direct route to Moholy’s, and altogether I’d regained a measure of control. My earlier behaviour I dismissed as the natural consequence of a huge hangover and not enough sleep, two nights in succession. As for my mood-swings, everyone behaved like this, and people changed and adapted all the time. It was a common pattern, and this was what it meant to be me, to be alive. I wasn’t ill, and Mum had never been ill, either.

  I was fine.

  After the energy of relics, I was frankly disappointed by the still lifes of the artefacts and art objects in Moholy’s gallery. I sensed that they were important, of course they were, but in a secondary and slightly unsatisfactory way, as if none of them was quite important enough. It was as if these objects were stepping stones to relics, and relics in turn were suggestions of something else, the one thing everyone was actually looking for, and for which all other remains of the dead were just substitutes, or shadows.

  Moholy came in, without the boy. He was wearing holiday clothes, a beige suit and a shirt in sea-blue linen, open by a single button at the neck. He made a point of shaking hands, his grip firm, his palm much drier and cooler than my own.

  ‘And how’s my friend James?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. A bit on the tired side.’

  ‘I meant James Jesus Joyce.’

  I’d almost forgotten. Joyce seemed such a long time ago. ‘I’ve done better than that,’ I said, holding out the knee-bone, wrapped now in Becket’s beige silk. ‘I have a valuable extract of Carl Gustav Jung.’

  Moholy was cautious, and didn’t immediately reach out for the bone. Nor did he visibly betray any excitement. ‘That’s most interesting,’ he said, holding himself back.

  ‘Carl Gustav Jung, the world-famous thinker and psychologist.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know who he is, thanks. It’s just that this wasn’t what I was expecting. And with Jung, in particular, there are certain problems. As far as his relics are concerned, he presents a specific level of difficulty.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He was cremated.’

  My heart glided from my ribcage, not touching the sides. ‘That can’t be right. He has a gravestone, in Küssnacht. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘He was definitely cremated. They buried the urn.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. It’s the kind of thing I always check when adding to the catalogue. Where did you get the bone?’

  For the first time since our afternoon with Liz Taylor’s dogs, I remembered that Rifka had mentioned it was probably a fake. Probably, she’d said. Or that there was something doubtful about it. I couldn’t remember.

  Moholy reached out his hand, took the knee-cap and the silk cloth, and examined both more closely at his desk.

  ‘It’s Jung,’ I insisted. ‘It is Jung. I know it is.’

  I was surprised by my own certainty, but it had to be Jung. I’d sat in the car while it analysed me, and gave me false directions. It had encouraged me to examine my inner uncertainties, and engage fully with my recent disintegration. Only Jung could have done that.

  ‘Perhaps he left instructions with one of his juniors,’ I suggested hopefully, ‘one of his disciples. Maybe he authorised a mock cremation while keeping back at least some of his body-parts for another purpose.’

  It didn’t seem impossible. Jung had started his career as a doctor, a junior assistant specialising in anatomy, and he had no latent sentiment for corpses. Not even his own.

  ‘Yes,’ Moholy said. ‘I like your reasoning. Go on.’

  Strangely, I noticed he was now showing more interest in the circle of purple silk than he was in the bone.

  ‘I don’t know what that purpose would actually be,’ I said. ‘But obviously something important. Some kind of secret, maybe, which Jung thought was worth protecting. Then the bones left behind become the key to the secret. The fake cremation would certainly confuse anyone in pursuit of whatever it was he wanted to hide.’

  I hardly knew what I was saying. Either the knee-bone did belong to Jung, and I had a rare sensitivity to the well-recorded phenomenon of relics. Or it didn’t, and I was mad as a rat with a gold tooth.

  ‘Do I seem like a person of sound mind?’

  ‘It is widely accepted that Jung was cremated.’

  ‘But the knee-cap. What about the effect?’

  I was pleading. I wanted desperately to know if I was the only one, the only person since medieval times so intensely sensitive to relics. Jung too had considered himself unique, a religious prophet with extraordinary powers who alone could do what he did. In his opinion, there was no one quite like him.

  ‘That would be a bit mad, wouldn’t it?’ Moholy said, turning the circle of silk thoughtfully in his hands. Inspecting one side then the other. ‘To think you were unlike anyone else. That would truly be close to madness.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘it would. What exactly are you saying?’

  ‘You’re not the only one. I get it too.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank God for that. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. I’ve been acting like I’m everybody.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Moholy said. ‘What you’ve been feeling is quite normal. It happens to everyone.’

  ‘So we’re not mad?’

  ‘That’s normal, too. At some stage, everyone alive thinks they’re mad. Even me.’

  ‘But this could still be Jung’s knee, right?’

  He picked
up the circular cloth by two fingers, letting it hang like a flag, turning it under the broad flood of light from an antique desk-lamp. ‘Try and think more laterally. Jung was also an adept of mandalas.’

  He twisted the lamp to point diagonally upwards, and held the circular cloth so that the light picked out the lines woven inside it, each corner of the square touching the circumference, and then the smaller rectangles blocked inside the square. ‘To my mind,’ Moholy said, ‘the pattern on this cloth looks not unlike a mandala.’

  He laid it flat on the leather inlay of his desk-top, and flipped the lamp-light back down. ‘Buddhists use them as an aid to meditation. What a mantra is to the ear, a mandala is to the eye.’ He turned the cloth by small degrees through a full circle, each time moving his head to get the advantage of different perspectives. ‘It’s a kind of cryptogram depicting the state of the self. Where did you find this?’

  ‘It was in the church. With Becket.’

  ‘It’s not that old,’ Moholy said. ‘I wonder why it was used to wrap up Becket?’

  ‘Maybe it has some connection with Jung.’

  ‘Not maybe,’ Moholy said. ‘Definitely.’

  Jung’s fascination with the mandala came at a time in his life, ten years from now, when he needed to recover from non-combatism and expressive sausage-dogs and the cocked revolver on the bedside table. All over Europe, then as now, civilisation and Christianity were in crisis, our mental state and outlook restless, nervous, confused. Our religion seemed stale, our politics tired, and we looked elsewhere to replenish our grounds for hope.

  There was a brighter future to be had in exchanging our poisonous individualism for the Indian concept of atmen. Our notions of God the Creator and of human beings living single lives could be replaced by cosmic law and a cycle of rebirths. We were not living unique lives, but just one turn in an ongoing cycle of birth and birth again. It was a solace I could repeat to myself like a mantra. ‘I am not my own man. Thankfully, I am not.’