Pilgrim

by Timothy Findley

  12

  At Küsnacht, the moonlight filtered through the curtains, falling across the foot of the bed where Jung lay awake with Emma.

  His hand was on her belly, having already felt one kick, to which he had replied by tapping out a message in Morse code with his fingers: hello in there! Hello!

  “The kicking only started just today,” Emma told him. “I love to think of her shouting: I need more room! I need more room!”

  “She?” Jung said. “With a kick like that, it has to be a boy. Our second son.”

  “It’s a girl. We’ve spoken—and I know it.”

  “Spoken? Please be serious.”

  “Believe me or not, Carl Gustav, a mother and her child converse. Not always in words, but in many other ways as well. I send down thoughts and I know she receives them. She sends back waves as answers—even as questions—and the waves flood all the way through me. It is true. It is true. Believe it. She is my little fish, and I am her ocean. She is my swimmer—I am her sea. You must remember what it feels like, floating in the sea, my darling. At Capri, how we floated hand in hand…don’t you remember? How we drifted out so far they had to come and fetch us back with a rowboat.”

  “We could have drowned.”

  “Nonsense. Not together. We had each other—hand in hand and it was all so warm and peaceful—blue and bright and safe. It seems to me that swimming in the sea is just like my little fish in here…whatever it is they call the waters of the womb—I always forget it…what?”

  “Amniotic fluid,” Jung muttered through his moustache, bending down to kiss Emma’s belly. Then he laid his hand out flat against her skin and made the shape of the child inside.

  “You ever hear the phrase ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?” he said.

  “I’m sure I’d remember if I had,” Emma laughed. “I couldn’t begin to tell you what it means.”

  “Man called Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel. Biologist. German. Long dead—but controversial in his time. We had to study him at university. He had a lot of theories, some of them useful—some of them not. In some ways, you might say he was a pupil—not a pupil, a disciple—of Darwin’s. Disciple and extrapolator. Went a few steps beyond the master, so to speak. Such as: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

  “Heavens—what huge words!”

  “Ontogeny—the origin and development of the individual.” Jung pronounced the words as a teacher might to a classroom—tapping them out on Emma’s stomach, the way he might have tapped them out on a desk. “Like your little fish in here,” he added. “Then: phylogeny,” he pronounced, “the evolutionary development of groups of organisms. You understand? And it was Haeckel’s notion—Haeckel’s theory that your little fish in there is passing through some of the same stages of development that, collectively, we all passed through in the evolution of the human race. From protozoa to Homo sapiens. Do you see?”

  “Not entirely, no.”

  “Let me start again,” Jung said, getting up and crossing the room to sit in a chair. “Haeckel said: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—but what he should have said is ontogeny repeats phylogeny. Still, he was a biologist—a scientist—and you have to forgive him a few self-important words. And so…”

  Jung lifted a box of cheroots from the table beside him and struck a match. In the moonlight, he looked like a Chinese Buddha in a cloud of incense.

  “What Haeckel suggested was that in the development of any individual, human or otherwise—a frog, for instance—from conception to birth, the embryo’s increasing complexity retells the evolutionary history of its own particular species. That way, your little fish began as a single cell—as a fertilized egg—which reflects one of the most primitive of life forms, namely the one-celled protozoa. Are you with me?”

  “Tell me protozoa.” Emma pushed herself higher in the bed, leaning in against the pillows. “I think I know it, but I want to hear you say it.”

  Jung adored the role of mentor and posed for a moment with the cheroot in his hand, his profile moonlit and his Prussian haircut standing at attention.

  “Proto-zoa,” he said. “First animals. Or, if you like, first beings. Now it gets exciting. As the fertilized egg develops, it divides and multiplies…”

  “Does it also add and subtract?” Emma smiled.

  “Don’t interrupt. As it divides and multiplies, what it is doing is forming a mass of cells—an unorganized mass, not unlike a sponge. Think of the sponge in your bath and all the different shapes and sizes it comes in. So…it passes on through stages that resemble a jellyfish. Later—after it’s started to elongate, its nerve cells migrate to the back and become encased in a sheath of cartilage. This ultimately stiffens into bone—a spine and a spinal cord—and this way, it takes on the characteristics of the earliest marine vertebrates. Gills develop, like those of a fish…”

  “My little fish.”

  “Precisely. And then these gills, over time, are replaced by lungs. Et cetera, et cetera. Do you see? All of these things have already happened to your little fish, and more and more and more until it is ready to climb up…”

  “…out of the sea. Which is, to be born.”

  “Which is to be born, my dear one. And thus—the whole process of embryonic development reflects the process of evolution. Ontogeny repeating phylogeny. And here endeth the lesson, as my father used to say from his pulpit. And yet, there’s more to be had from Haeckel’s theory than mere biology…”

  “No, Carl Gustav. No. Not more. I’m tired. It’s after two o’clock in the morning.”

  “But this is important. Immensely important. You don’t understand. It has to do with my work. It has to do with…”

  Everything.

  Oh, no. Don’t you start.

  I just thought you’d like to know I’ve been listening. And I agree with you: there is more.

  “Emma, please. Just stay awake long enough to hear one last thing.”

  “Yes, Carl Gustav. But tell it quickly.”

  Jung sat forward. He had—but why?—an erection.

  You get too excited, Carl Gustav. You get too excited about ideas.

  I can’t—I can’t help it. Oh, dear. Pray God she can’t see me.

  It wouldn’t matter if she did. She isn’t interested. Not now.

  I hadn’t thought I wanted to—but there it is. Jesus. Look at it.

  I don’t need to look at it. I can feel it. What you suffer from—amongst other things—is nothing less than intellectual priapism. It’s that simple. Get an idea—get an erection.

  Stop.

  Why don’t you say your piece? Emma has begun to drift—and if you don’t begin your dissertation, she will be gone before you can impregnate her mind with your brilliance. An image I think you rather enjoy…Remember Sabina Spielrein. Think of that luscious new intern you saw in the corridor with Furtwängler. Think of your traumatized pianist, whose lovely hands are longing to be busy. Say your piece, Carl Gustav. Say your piece. All of us are longing to hear it—begging you to undo your mental flies and flood our brains with your theories. Please. Please begin.

  You bastard.

  Well, I like to tell the truth. You just don’t like to hear it. Tell us, oh wondrous doctor of the soul, what it is you want to say.

  It was only…

  Say it aloud. Remember, it is Emma you want to impress.

  For the moment.

  “It was only…it is only that, given the obvious rightness of Haeckel’s theory, I cannot help wondering—pondering the possibility that if ontogeny repeats phylogeny in the biological sense, then might it not also repeat it in the psychological sense. Might not each individual inherit the psyche—or a portion of the collective psyche—of the whole human race? Don’t you see? If Haeckel is right—and he is—then doesn’t his principle suggest something more than merely one physical process reflecting and repeating another physical process? Could it not be that the individual’s nature—which is unique—also reflects and repeats to whatever degree the nature and
the experience of its ancestors? The whole race? Why not? Why not? Isn’t that why some of what we know we never had to learn? Emma? Emma…?”

  Too late. She was asleep.

  Jung stubbed the cheroot in the ashtray and hurried across the floor to the bureau, where he rummaged amongst the debris from his pockets for notebook and pen.

  In the bathroom, he sat on the closed seat of the toilet and, using his knees as a desk, wrote in his journal:

  I am my mother’s dreams incarnate. I am my father’s atavistic fears. In this cave where I am sitting…

  He looked up and blinked.

  The lights above and around the mirror were glaring at him, reflected in every tile and in all the glass and all the metal with which he was surrounded.

  What cave?

  Why had he written cave?

  In this cave where I am sitting…

  All at once, he wanted to weep and did not know why.

  A notion had taken hold of him.

  An intellectual erection.

  And its power was as overwhelming and all-pervasive as the power of the erection straining against the thin white cotton of his pyjama trousers.

  Out. Out.

  Could there be such a thing as an intellectual ejaculation?

  Why not?

  Stay out of this.

  I can’t stay out. I’m part of it. Conscience. Remember? Conscience and memory, pressing against the thin white membrane of your brain. This cave you are sitting in, Carl Gustav, is your mind. Look around you. What has been painted here? What animals are there? What other creatures—other men?

  Jung stared at the ceiling.

  Whose handprint is that? Whose gods were these? Whose totems—emblems—signs and symbols…? Don’t be afraid of it. Stand up and look at it.

  The notebook fell to the floor. Using the sink to propel him to his feet, Jung dropped the uncapped pen into the cavern of its white enamel bowl.

  He stood on the toilet seat and raised his arms.

  There were shadows in the corners—cracks in the ceiling. Did they form the shapes of beings he had never seen before? Or were they maps of rivers and mountain ranges—routes for the journeys made by others who had gone before him…

  Jung felt like a suppliant, his arms outstretched, his fingers splayed, his sight overwhelmed with tears.

  I have come such a long, long way, he thought in a voice he had never heard before. We have come such a long, long way. And I can remember it…

  I can remember…

  Ontogeny had just repeated phylogeny in a voice as clear and distinct as if it had spoken aloud.

  I can know what I never had to learn. And I can remember what I never, never myself, experienced.

  Jung climbed down and wept.

  He would never be the same.

  13

  There are some whose experience of life is so far removed from our own that we call them mad. This is mere convenience. We call them so in order to relieve ourselves of taking responsibility for their place in the human community. Thus, we relegate them to asylums, shutting them out of view and beyond calling distance behind locked doors. But for them, there is no difference between what we think of as dreams and nightmares and the world in which they live their daily lives. What we call visions and relegate to mystics—the miracles of Christ—the lives of the Saints—the apocalyptic revelations of John—are for them the stuff of common, everyday experience. In their view, there can be sanctity in trees and toads—living gods in fire and water—and a voice in the whirlwind to which, if only we would listen, they would direct our attention. Such are the conditions under which those who suffer dementia exist. They do not live in “other worlds,” but in a dimension of this world which we, out of fear, refuse to acknowledge.

  This had been written in 1901 by a man whose existence was rarely mentioned in 1912—or thereafter. His family had gone so far as to change its name in the belief that his disgrace was so great and so universal that even to speak of him amongst themselves was ruinous. The spectacle of his decline and death had brought catastrophe to everyone with whom he was connected.

  Robert Daniel Parsons was an American student of psychology. He had come to Europe in 1898 in order to complete his studies with the then pre-eminent teacher of psychopathology, Pierre Janet, at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and with Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich.

  Both Janet and Bleuler were regarded by their students with nothing less than awe. Together with the Austrian Krafft-Ebbing, these two men had broken the restraining skin that had separated psychiatry from the rest of the medical profession. Freud had not yet entered the larger picture with his Interpretation of Dreams, leaving the field largely to Janet and Bleuler. There were disagreements between them, but never a major schism. They were not so much the founders of different theories as the self-appointed spokesmen for different schools.

  Jung, as a student, had experienced the teachings of both these “giants”—giants, that is to say, in their own time. That Jung would outstrip them both was not even a subject of discussion prior to 1912. By then, however, it was becoming perfectly clear to Jung himself—and somewhat resentfully clear to his masters—that he and Freud were to claim the entire attention of the twentieth century where psychiatry and psychotherapy were concerned. While Janet and Bleuler tended to hang back in the safety of their established reputations, Jung strode forward fearlessly into what he would come to realize was an ever-widening sphere of understanding—sometimes alarming, sometimes even terrifying—but never to be rejected. From the night of May 12th, 1912, when he experienced his “bathroom epiphany,” there would be no turning back. Terror, yes—and terror, as we will see, is quite the right word—but no turning back.

  As for Robert Daniel Parsons and his place in history, he became an advocate of the “sorry mass of madmen” to whom he dedicated his life and, in time, his agony and his death.

  In Paris in 1901, he experienced an epiphany equal to Jung’s 1912 revelation, but more profound in that it was more political—and more revolutionary.

  By declaring that the mad are not mad but merely different, Parsons embraced the psychiatric equivalent of anarchy. If anarchism is the belief that all government should be abolished, Parsons’s version of this was that all governance of the mad should be abolished. Down with Sanitoria, down with psychiatric wards in hospitals, down with Bedlam and down with psychiatric experiments. Down, too, with all enforced medication, treatments and restraints. Down with laudanum, ether and chloral hydrate. Down with hydrotherapy. Down with straitjackets, locked doors and barred windows.

  At first, Robert Daniel Parsons was perceived as a kind of manic entertainment. He was barely twenty-two years old—a tall, lanky, curly-headed Westerner from Wyoming whose handsome figure and angelic boy-face, as someone described it, drew an immediate audience amongst his fellow students. They delighted in his antic interruptions of Professor Janet’s lectures, and even Janet himself thought him charming. At first.

  But Parsons’s ideas burned far too hot for them to be contained in a few eccentric outbursts in the lecture hall. They spilled out into the corridors and through the doors of the Salpêtrière into the streets. They took possession of student cafés and bistros. They started appearing in the press. There were soon disciples and fellow advocates—many of them women. The mad have rights became a rallying cry and raids were conducted in which groups of Parsonites attempted to release the mad from their “prisons and torture chambers.”

  In the long run, Parsons was effectively expelled from the Salpêtrière Hospital—no longer allowed entrance to its halls and disavowed by both staff and faculty. Professor Janet refused to acknowledge having him as a student, claiming only to be acquainted with Parsons’s extra-curricular escapades.

  Parsons then “disappeared” for two years, becoming a farm labourer near Rossinière in the high valleys of the Alps northeast of Montreux. His only correspondence was with his younger sister Eunice, who was then a
student at a women’s college in New Hampshire.

  Eunice Parsons was, at this point, probably the only friend her brother had. She was seventeen years old and on her way to becoming a passably good writer of what she called “journalistic fictions.” It was the time of Stephen Crane and Jack London, a time when Mark Twain was the American god of gods—a time when, perhaps uniquely, American writers were creating a new form of fiction whose impetus came from the journalistic careers of its practitioners. All this would ultimately peak in the writing of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

  What Robert Daniel Parsons achieved in his two-year “sabbatical” at Rossinière was a manifesto, written in behalf of the insane. He called it In Defense of Dementia and it can still be found in various university libraries, the Smithsonian Institute and in the archives of the Jung Institute at Zürich. Its epigraph was taken from the work of Christopher Smart, some of whose writing had been scratched on the walls of an eighteenth-century asylum. Parsons had been caught by a phrase from Smart’s religious testament: A Song of David:

  Where ask is have, where seek is find,

  Where knock is open wide.

  Parsons’s manifesto was a sensation. To begin with, it took Janet, Bleuler and Freud to task for having commandeered the lives of what he called a mass already deprived of the rights to their own integrity. The word mass seemed to appeal to Parsons, who used it often in his descriptions of the inhabitants of his chosen constituency, The Mad.

  Because of her faith in Robert Daniel, whom she called “Rad,” Eunice Parsons pursued publication of her brother’s manuscript with the zeal of John the Baptist proclaiming the coming of Jesus Christ. She abased herself to the degree that she gave up all hope of achieving her own academic goals, leaving her college to speak out in Rad’s behalf and to find a publisher of stature who would risk placing her brother’s radical beliefs before the public. This way, In Defense of Dementia was published in America by Pitt, Horner and Platt in September of 1904.