I was at Smith each week for my writing class, so sometimes Lindy and I went to lunch together. Many of our exchanges were playful and low-key, but I had lapses into solipsism. One time, I berated her for her taste: Who would go out with a bourgeois reporter from a second-rate newspaper, some guy who would leave his wife and kids for a college girl—plus a job in an advertising agency of all things? She defended herself in a letter:
Cut the shit, kiddo, about the dilettantism. Just like everyone else you go along saying great things and then just fall on your face every once in a while by saying something like that. I’ve thought about the journey that’s ahead of me and of us. Because I am in love with a man who is more bound to the earth than I am does not mean I am a dilettante. For all my haziness, I am damn sure of what I must do to stay alive in this world by preparing for the next (and I don’t mean heaven), and if anyone or thing becomes a threat to that aim, he will fade out, as Steve did. Let me be free, and cut the “I told you so’s” and the “You’ll be sorryies.”
For two weeks after that I kept away, not calling or visiting, trying not to think about her … until, one day, walking from the parking lot to my class, I passed her riding her bike and waved cheerily. She looked at me, burst into tears, and sped off, a kelpie on tires.
“She must care,” I thought, “I must be special to her.”
With the graduation of the seniors ahead of us and the entry of a new sophomore class we were upperclassmen, no longer the greenhorns of Phi Psi. Tripp was back, but not as a member. He had dropped out of school, and his family wasn’t paying any bills. He had an old credit card that still seemed to work, so he would fill my car with gas and I’d give him cash. He lived in the woods east of Amherst in a cabin with that other renegade Eric the Rat. From there he was casting a new play.
His Porsche had fallen into disrepair, so, throughout that fall, I picked him up on the dirt road and drove him to his auditions with actresses. “I knew it was worth cultivating you, Grossinger,” he said. “You’re a man of compassion.”
Schuy returned as Scotty with a full mustache. I rarely saw him. Focused on building up his grades to apply to graduate school in psychology, he worked hard all week and on weekends drove into New York to see Dona.
“I’ve got to make every moment count,” he told me in a moment of rare volubility and candor. “I’ve got no more moves to spare.”
I was relieved to not be there yet.
My course material seemed to corroborate the summer’s vision—the alchemical metaphors of the sixteenth-century poets, the mind-flow through As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, the lunar pulses of William Butler Yeats. Amid cricket songs and linnet’s wings, I drank from the fountain of “I will arise and go now, / and go to Innisfree” while imbuing myself with Faulkner’s rhythms and themes. An omniscient voice spoke from beyond Miss Rosa, Quentin, and Charles Bon—perhaps Faulkner himself: “who even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked touch if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash …”
This was not only vaguely but precisely my life, the sort of precept I needed in order to act—brave enough, no special wisdom needed, the arras-veil hanging quite docile and even glad to my lightest naked touch, if only I dared.
Absalom’s valiant lyricism struck at my heart; it bore my sense of peril, of withheld apotheosis, of dark and coiled ancestry: “the prisoner soul, miasmal distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats?, creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth…. ”
At nineteen I too was living a constant and perpetual instant, careening before a mystery within another, striving for words where there were none, trying to give voice to a fleeting oracle, to dash my own breakwater syntax upon the fog-ridden lagoons.
Then there were higher churches sounding more ominous calls. “And what rough beast,” warned Yeats, “its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
I had the tarot matrix, but I needed a personal article of faith, something to tie my acts of soothsaying to the boy on 96th Street with his gift of a saucer. I required a different dream now, a more anchorable spaceship. Like Bridey, I needed a church with a human confessional and a priest to put Fabian and the Hierophant on a common wavelengths. Otherwise I was far adrift in my own labyrinth.
For years since my Horace Mann pals had posed Jung as a less colonialist alternative to Freud, I had been eyeing the black volumes of his Collected Works. When I first heard the name, I thought he was Chinese and imagined his texts as Confucian or Communist. Once I got who he was—none of the above—I tried to deduce what manner of symbols might be in them, how they could be different from those in the all-encompassing Interpretation of Dreams. “Symbols don’t have to be Western,” Bob Alpert had pontificated. “They can be Egyptian, Persian, African, even American Indian. No one made European logic king of the universe.” He insisted that Karl Marx and Carl Jung were reconcilable insofar as they both subverted the bourgeois belief system.
It made sense, but I was still faithful to Dr. Fabian. Wary of anti-psychoanalytic detractors. I found ample excuses not to explore a different take. After all what did Egyptian symbols have to do with my own unconscious? Now in the autumn of my awakening and discontent, an African detour was precisely what I craved.
In New York I bought two volumes, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Symbols of Transformation. I started with Archetypes’ color plates of mandalas, a patient’s representations of her inner world. In them I recognized some of Chuck’s motifs of tarot divination but transposed into a psychoanalytic context. Here were the Magician, the Chariot, and the Star, operating as preconscious personal symbols, yet projected onto a mytho-historical canvas.
Beneath familiar biographical motifs were layers of primordial forms and shapes, not limited to our experiences, even to our lifetimes. Jung dubbed this “the collective unconscious” to distinguish it from the mere subliminal mind of our egos. It contained primal material given shape by archetypes—transpersonal elements of the universe, the planet, and of course the human psyche. These transmitted certain shapes, many of which were symmetrical or geometric and entrained by archaic imagery from the Earth’s biological and cultural evolution. Their patterns broke through spontaneously as characters and themes in fairy tales, myths, and dreams, and were present subconsciously in the texts of early alchemists and astronomers, giving psychic as well as material form to minerals and constellations. Archetypal symbols were repeated in unbroken chains from Babylonian zodiacs and designs in Mediaeval European stained-glass windows to pictographs in Navaho sand-paintings and the integers of mathematics and particles of modern physics.
In a way I couldn’t have foreseen, the symbolic system into which Fabian had initiated me was primeval and vast in all directions. For Jung, psychoanalysis was not just a roll call of traumas or a set of protocols for treating neurotic symptoms; it didn’t epitomize bedwetting or other behavioral malfeasances; it was an excavation of the soul’s lost autobiography. Not only do we suppress, as Freud assayed, our instinctual drives—forbidden wishes and desires—we deny our genealogy in a fathomless universe, our connection to the psychophysical reality of Nature.
Each of us attempts to restore this link, to give form to Psyche’s unconscious narrative. Through everyday acts we animate a saga Jung called individuation—an assimilation of our ordinary experiences into myth-like dramas with ontological, even theogonic implications. Enhancing that process should be the true goal of therapy.
Had Fabian known this? And if he approved of Jung’s primordial representations, why had he not applied a complex like the Shadow to my metastasis of the dungeon stairs
or invoked a supernatural taboo-smasher like the Trickster or Clown to embrace my chimerical pranks? That would have been more in keeping with their augury and scope: the god Pan waking from his nap with a start and, not knowing where he was, giving such a startled shout that it stampeded the flocks.
Instead he aggrandized a minor social rift, my parents’ divorce; he must have been a loyal Freudian through and through.
Reading Jung was like drinking from the pebbled fountain in Central Park, quenching an old thirst. His texts reclaimed the world of Freudian symbolism as if I were a wide-eyed whelp back in a magician’s chamber, about to be shown the floating veil over the world but this time at an exponential scale.
Jung projected elementary symbols through a hierarchy of a priori meanings that had been dormant in them all along. The clue in the embers was the glyph in the papyrus, the rune in mosque, the angel in the stained-glass window, the Corn Mother in the sand-matrix.
Fabian and I never took the transformation of signs or its undercurrent of profundity into what it felt like or portended. A sacred kaleidoscope intimated throughout our five-year exegesis was never even addressed
In Symbols of Transformation Jung analyzed journeys of rebirth from New Guinea to old Cambodia, from the sages of India and Rome to the Tlingit natives of Alaska. As I worked my way through “The Hymn of Creation,” “The Song of the Moth,” and “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,” I began to understand my earliest panics differently. I had been involved in a primitive form of magical conversion, the same operation as shamans and alchemists, though at a level appropriate for a child.
Jackal-headed Anubis bending over a mummy, the sun pierced by the teeth of an alchemical lion and dripping blood—these were ciphers, fused layers of overarching meanings that transcended and encompassed their own images. They weren’t the sort of historiographic deconstruction we did freshman year either—they were an iconography preceding history.
I had been drawing on such hidden archetypes, individuating through them. They had guided me into publishing the Chirp during Color War. They had chanted through Buddy Holly and Dion & the Belmonts. They led me to the tarot, then to Jung himself. Even baseball had been an act of individuation—the negative charge of 1960 World Series converted through Melville’s Whale and the Kalin Twins singing “Forget Me Not” into my first pages for Mr. Ervin.
There was an exogenous intelligence and it was trying to provide me with a vehicle more germinal and lasting than a saucer, though it owed a boy a saucer too, to get him wending homeward via unknown stars.
The voice on the radio had posed a threat to my initial phase of consciousness. The sheer depth of the universe and our existence in it is terrifying, especially if encountered too young, if forced upon a child’s unshaped psyche by a lesion in its vicinity. Consciousness cannot handle premature revelations without fissuring and coming asunder. An ego formed under these circumstances is at continual risk of obliteration from an immanent source that feels both extrinsically real and to be emerging from its own unconscious. That’s why there seems no escape.
The unformed ghosts at my window, the custodians of the dungeon stairs were not remorseless antagonists and tormentors, they were symbols of transformation right from Jung’s logos, fugitives perhaps from my mother’s failed integration. And their abominations provided the precise energies needed for their transubstantiation.
The universe creates anathemas—as brutal and devious, malign and convincing, as possible—in order to fashion a pathway for angels. Without hell realms, there would be no ground for salvation, no cobble for creatures like us to tread a cosmos, no way to expiate karma. Our demons hold the seeds of transformation and metamorphosis before any conscious transmutation has been attempted. That is why they are so scary, so harsh and cruel—because they’re as seminal as they are unadulterated.
They stalk and terrify because they have nowhere else to go. Where else would (or could) the universe store such ogres? Where else would it harbor its germinal source-design? How else might it cipher and camouflage its own peaceable kingdom from too many unfinished monstrosities on the prowl, each with a blind salacity to sodomize, desecrate, and ravage heartlessly from its own unexplored shadow? It had to house them somewhere, for they are part of Creation, tossed in the same initiatory wave so that we tumble in each other’s goop.
We are in the diaspora, on the brink, in the wet sheets, together; we require each other to complete our missions and meanings.
I had long considered the Gorgon’s stare-down absolute, an imposition of her will for which there was no reasonable response but terror. When I sensed her presence, in my mother or the voice on the radio, I ran amok like a chicken without a head. In Jung I found ambiguity, even a wink. The demons were not malefically fixed; each had bottomless potential for transmutation. Each implacable gaze, each terrible agenda had another charge, a different interpretation entirely, not just in my psyche but in the universe at large. Even Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound at the dungeon stairs, could become a friendly mutt. But he wasn’t going to do it on his own. I had to convert him.
I am articulating knowledge that it took me decades to absorb, digest, and find language for, but it began that October as I rode the esoteric shock waves of my panic while absorbing the possibility that Lindy might be lost forever.
During that melancholy autumn of ’64 I intuited a new fortune for myself and for Creation. It wasn’t just a hungering darkness or hopeless wait for Godot that led, if not to atomic war, then a Malone-like death. We weren’t doomed. We were on a more enigmatic and wilder and more abiding journey. The entire shebang was up for grabs. We could reclaim it, maybe even liberate it, though, from its present incomplete manifestation and the sheer depth of the archetypes, the road ahead was long and zigzag and at a scale that dwarfed all of history.
Dream interpretation and science fiction gave me a jump-start in childhood. Tarot and writing took it to the next level. Then Jung extended permission and possibility, melding Yeats, Faulkner, and Freud with the greater trumps. He provided a way to integrate my traumas and inhabit my own ragged life. He snapped my vestigial trance of outer-space melodramas with their unstated burden that I had to daydream planets to get myself into outer space. The universe does not require rockets or aliens to take us to the stars. Its cosmic realms are astral and intrinsic; they belong to us by birth.
Back at P.S. 6 I seemingly made up a spaceship and interstellar landscapes whole-cloth from nothing. But not so—the confabulations of a child contain archetypes too, symbols already in circulation. There is no tabula rasa in the psyche.
When I daydreamed escapades in grade school it was more than a maudlin yearning for connection and self-importance, it was an expression of an internal depth and connection that I could evince no other way. It was my attempt to stay on the road to Oz, keep faith with the Tinman and Lion, instead of bowing to the stark secular regimes offered by my family, Miss Tighe, and Bill-Dave. I maintained a child’s version of ancestral spirits in the only form available at the time. I stubbornly held to it, not knowing what it was, only that I experienced its hypnotic power. These were all acts of individuation.
Jung conferred his absolute credential as a psychiatrist at a time when Freudians were still my authority figures and priests. Sixteen years later while studying dreams in San Francisco with Charles Poncé, a renegade seer in the Jungian lineage, I brought him the dream of a chemistry set:
I am returning to Dr. Fabian’s dark brownstone in Greenwich Village. I have to pee very badly, and I stumble into a bathroom so dark I cannot see the toilet. As the urine hits the “water,” I smell sulfur and hear hydrochloric acid bubbling in the bowl. I rationalize that it is not my pee but a substance in the toilet. In any case the gurgling stops. Then, as I am leaving the room, I hear the sound again, like sizzling rice soup. My upper lip is burning from having been splattered. I am wondering why there is a scalding element in my urine. I think I must tell this dream to Charles.
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br /> “You know what this is,” I remarked at once, “it’s a version of the first dream that Dr. Fabian interpreted for me. Now I’m going back to him not with a dream but in the dream. His office has become part of the dream. Back then it was an incident involving a chemistry set. Now it’s sizzling rice soup.”
Charles knew my original dream as well as Fabian’s interpretation, so he sailed right into a reinterpretation:
“You dreamed once of a chemistry set that spilled. You brought that dream to a doctor who told you that the substance in the test tube was urine, that you were dreaming of wetting your pants. I think this can all be viewed another way. You brought your first harvest of symbols to a wizard. He recognized them as symbols. He said, ‘What is happening in this dream stands for something else. It is not a chemistry set. It is an act of peeing.’ He also said, ‘Another meaning is speaking through you.’ He gave you a gift and initiation of symbols, but then he limited their meaning to a representation of the asocial act of wetting, mere household sabotage. Like your mother he grasped only the aspect of your wetting associated with misbehavior. He failed to recognize the mercurial waters, which you now bring back to him thirty-five years later to remind him that his earlier analysis was lacking but that he gave you the crucible of the symbol by which to complete it. You are repaying him for what he practiced instinctively, offering him an essence he passed on unconsciously to you.”
“So I am dreaming now in order to change the dream, the therapy then.”
“You are dreaming the same dream in order to change an authorized interpretation of it that you have been carrying around your whole life, and to fulfill your half of an ancient bargain made between a rabbi and a child.
“Back then you dreamed of mercurial waters too, but Dr. Fabian, again like your mother, could see only a wet bed. He could explain your wetting only as a form of rebellion, of primitive consciousness. You really came to a magus with a primordial dream of burning waters, of consciousness stirring to be born. He told you the burning waters were urine. But you were telling him, ‘No, they are the seeds of a sorcerer.’ He couldn’t see that. He couldn’t see you as an alchemist longing to get training, to receive his baptism, to learn to transmute. He saw a child needing toilet training, symbol containment. So now you want to show him the real dream in a way that can’t be missed. You participate in his own individuation even though he is no longer alive.”
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