Thursday, June 01, 2006

Tao (Part ??)

A Jungian therapist (if such a person still exists) would approve of what I'm doing. They call it active imagination, which is the self-therapy I've been doing for years. Of course, having said that, I have to opine that Jung was part brilliant and part full of shit. Still, one can learn from the master, if one can endure his frequent excursions into some obscure point of medieval alchemy or the occassional phrase in greek writing. But it's neat, noticing the archetypes welling up from the subconscious, the archetype being just a tendency to think a certain way; generally, a tendency to organize experience in a certain way. Think of it this way: why is it that every bad teenage poet uses disturbingly similar, cliches, light-dark imagery, self-absorption, phrases, themes, etc. Certainly not from any non-existent literary training. One could say it's kind of wired into our psyche (except, of course, modern mass communnication confounds the picture, so if globalization succeeds in dissolving cultural barriers, we may never know for sure, just like the near-extinction of our closest primate relatives, if it happens, will hopelessly obscure the origins of "humanity" evern more than it is now).

Talked to a friend about one of the most popular and well-known archetypes: the anima. That is, the man's "soul-image". I don't know what that was supposed to mean, but I take it to be this powerful constellation of ideas that a person (almost always a man) seeks. It is characteristically hard to describe, but it involves essentially developing the faculty of feeling, of being able to assign value and quality to the constituents of experience; the idea is more extensive than that, and I don't have it grasped in my mind sufficiently to write about it at any great length. Suffice it to say that it pops up in literature all the time: it seems the poets come closest to pinioning it. Dante always spoke of Beatrice with such passion--there was his anima baring itself, imposing itself on him. I don't know what mine is, but I feel some of my posts have been attempts to chase it through the receding corridors and blind alleys of my mind. It only seems to manifest itself attached to specific people or seemingly arbitrarily chosen attributes which I need to list or write up in some long, discursive monster of a paragraph or semi-hallucinated run-on sentence. But not just now.

Consider: "“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.”

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