Notes on "Liber Novus"

Continuing to read "Liber Novus," and I've gotten through the introduction by the translator and onto the actual text.   I'm on chapter iv -- the chapters are short, almost Biblical in length.   The original text is mostly straight caligraphy, with the start of chapters indicated with illustrated initials in square blocks.  

Jung uses an evangelical tone to describe a mid-life- crisis at age 40 and relates disintegrative fantasy/meditations wherein he has dialogs with The Spirit of the Times (The rational ego?  "Zeitgeist" ? ), The Spirt of the Depths (? the shadow self?), and his Soul (? the animus ?).   The language is very dualistic, and has a religious flavor, with references to divine madness and children of light who will illuminate the darkness.  

The most interesting passage from these Dark Night of the Soul chapters is from the end of Chapter i: "The image of the world is half of the world.  He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul is poor and has nothing."   This reminds me of the tarot card, "The Devil," and makes me wonder how much Jung was in contact with metaphysical societies.   I am also waiting for Jung to say something about cinema, since he spends so much time focused on symbolic meanings behind images.

Dream Plans

The other day I had a "Return to Arcosanti" dream.  It was fairly classic:  I'd driven there on a whim in under six hours (it's more like a twenty hour drive); when I got there the canyon below the site was filled with a lake (it's normally dry); my transport home was problematic (new twist, I'd fallen asleep driving there, and couldn't recall where I'd parked my car -- so at least it wasn't an airport anxiety dream).  What was new was that Smokey had stowed away in the car and had come to Arcosanti with me.  

But now that I'm  reading Jung,  I'm remembering dreams with a distinctly Jungian feel to them.

In a dream this morning, I was an assistant to a photographer, and I was hanging a mask on a large, knotty pine tree so that he could photograph models coming up to face the mask.   The pine turned into a smaller vine maple, and the mask turned into a circular, golden medallion that I wore over my sternum.  A circle appeared around the tree, and I sat in the south.  A young woman, possibly wearing a crescent at her breast, sat on the circle opposite me.  An old wise woman spoke; sometimes her words came through the younger woman.  

I kind of have to laugh about this dream; about the only thing missing was a Hero's Call to Action.  If I'm going to stay on track with this sort of thing and go beyond just dreams filled with significant imagery, I'll have to make an effort to ask characters in my dreams who they are and what they want.  This may take a while, since the three or four lucid dreams I remember usually involved a dream authority figure informing me that I was dreaming.  

Birds, Movies, and the Dog

We're still in Winter: a cold snap, 15F, is predicted for the middle of the upcoming week.  

Meanwhile, we've been enjoying the comparatively balmy mid- to upper-forties.  Saturday, I went to the Cascades Raptor Center; the sun was direct and at a low angle, which always makes photography difficult.  I was able to photograph two resident birds outside of their aviaries:  Jake, a peregrine falcon,  and Taka, a swainson's hawk.  

The new thing I learned on this visit is that Eowyn, the ferruginous hawk, is aggressive about her food and is fed through the grating on her carrier.  Over the last two or so years that I've been visiting, the birds typically will alight on a perch or hover at a handler's direction for food; this was the first time I'd seen a bird strike at a falconer's glove.  It was yet another reminder that the center's residents are not tame pets. 

I suppose that some day I'll have to engineer a weekday visit to the center -- my intuition is that there's fewer visitors during the weekday, and a wider variety of resident birds are more likely to be outside of their aviaries for enrichment.  

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Saturday, Mark and I had the house to ourselves, so we watched the remake of "The Boys in the Band."  I'd seen and read excerpts of it way back in the eighties when I was at Reed, but never the whole play or movie.  It's supposed to be one of those things that Every Gay Man Should See.  We laughed at the witty repartee, especially at the beginning; but (most of) the characters became meaner (and more drunk) as the story progressed -- which did make me wonder why the characters spent time hanging out with each other.  I would have to agree with one review I'd read:  "a historic reminder of sadder times."  

While we were discussing the movie, Mark and I decided that "The Boys in the Band," "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf," and to some extent, "The Lion in Winter," all have Dysfunctional Party Games in them.  We weren't sure if this was a reflection of party/cocktail society at the time, or if "contests as a means of self-discovery" was a theme of sixties culture.

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Sunday morning we took the Aoife out to Zumwalt Park.  The reservoir is still quite low; it feels like we could walk along the bottom of it all the way to the marina.  

I took my camera hoping for photographs of various raptors or waterfowl, but none put in an appearance.  So I took pictures of the dog among the violets instead (lightly lamenting that nature had pulled a mean trick on the violets and that in two days all the blooms would freeze to death).  

Jung's Red Book

The other day I had the opportunity to purchase a copy of C G Jung's "The Red Book (Liber Novus)."  When it first came out, I had wanted a copy, but felt like it was out of my budget.  I would read summaries of it in news articles and wonder at some of the more striking illustrations of trees and dragons and sailing ships.  

I hadn't realized until I was hefting it out of Tsunami Books that it's a massive, oversized tome.   Holding it is like being six and opening a large, unabridged dictionary; or like retrieving some sorcerer's tome.  I was momentarily transported to my parents' study in in the seventies, which at the time had a eight foot by twelve foot bookshelf filled with books, books, books, books, books -- really big books of Egyptian antiquities, old US History books, dictionaries and encyclopedias and atlases, and old college course books (okay, and reel-to-reel tape recordings of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians...).  Owning the book is comforting and pleasurable, and I'm pretty sure I need to make a little shrine for it.

I've only sat down with "The Red Book" for a few sessions so far.  It's such a large book that I've had to improvise an archivist's lectern for it out of small pillows in an attempt to protect the spine.  

The first part of the book is page after page of facsimiles of Jung's carefully ruled and executed calligraphy and the luminous paintings of his dreams and self-guided participatory meditations.   

When I first learned of "The Red Book," I thought Jung had been having sessions in his attic where he would write and paint the images in it -- but in reality he transcribed a first draft of notes and drawings before laying out the calligraphic text and illustrations.  

He wanted his book to be a work of art, a precious book.

The next part of the book is the translator's introduction and brief biography of Jung.  This is followed by an English translation of the German in the facsimile.

The best question that Jung asks is from an excerpt of his writings in the translator's introduction: "What is the myth you are living?"

What's struck me so far is that Jung seems to have developed a method of self-guided, participatory meditations similar to what some Tarot card readers suggest to their students:  look at or imagine a scene, then insert yourself into the scene and interact with what or who you find there.  I can't help but be reminded of how Dion Fortune says she would enter the astral plane by lucid dreaming herself there using symbols (established by the Golden Dawn) as signposts for her progress; or how other occultists suggest imagining traveling up the Tree of Life and conversing with the angelic beings at each station.

In Jung's case, he seems to have developed the Hero's Journey as a symbolic method for circling around different aspects of his Self.  

What's also struck me is how binary Jung's system is:  primitive/civilized; dark/light; lexical/symbolic; rational/insane; male/female; science/art.  I'm guessing this is a product of him being a European man before World War I. I think I can detect traces of Egypt-mania in the work, too.

 From what I can gather from the introduction, it sounds like he decided he wanted to be a lexical, logical, rational scientist instead of someone more grounded in the humanities.  I'm inferring his artistic talents seemed to come from a symbolic, illogical, irrational space that was confusing (or troubling) to him, so he experimented on himself with the tools of psychoanalysis in an attempt to integrate different parts of himself.  

But his focus on the rational and on words and logos does make me wonder what he thought of improvisational music and musicians.  I guess I'll have to find out as I read more.

Trestle Creek Falls

Saturday, Mark and I ditched The Child and The Dog, and took a Valentine's Hike to Trestle Creek Falls.  The falls are located in the foothills of the Cascades Mountain range about an hour's drive away.  

Although the parking lot, shadowed in a river valley, was shivery, the day was pleasant, but unseasonably warm and dry.   The trail wasn't thronged, but we did see lots of folks (and their dogs).  The heavy snow in December and January had battered the woods.  We met a four-year-old and seven-year-old and their (presumably) father on the trail twice; this was amazing, as I can think of a handful of adult friends and family who would have been challenged by scrabbly bits where one had to hop over winter-storm-downed trees, or navigate the edges of where root balls had pulled away.

We saw mostly firs, with some vine maple, big-leaf maple, cedar, and madrone trees mixed in.  Ferns and Oregon Grape formed the underbrush.  There were cliffs that looked like they were basalt; other placed I'm not sure what the geology was -- we saw some pale green rocks that I'm guessing had copper in them (or maybe they were greenschist; I don't know).

We overdressed slightly.  

The fall itself is two-tiered: about halfway the spill from the top of the ridge hits the basalt cliff and cascades the rest of the way into a narrow gorge.  We managed to visit when the sun was shining on the upper fall, which resulted in a rainbow in the cascade.  

On the return loop, something prompted me to touch some of the larger tree trunks along the path.  I usually don't do this, but I felt a connection -- being-to-being -- doing so.  Getting out into the forest rejuvenated both of us.

We descended from the warm sunlit ridge trail into the shaded valley and came to where Trestle Creek meets Brice Creek.  There's a rock in the confluence that looks like a person turned into a stone animal or troll and forced to drink Trestle Creek's overflow.  I think there's an obligatory love triangle story here.

Brice Creek was clear with a pale green color, sort of a mix between copper and jade.  Our cameras compensated for the low lighting by making everything much bluer than it was in reality... except for the moss.   The river valley was nice to visit, but I think the darkness during the winter months would make it a difficult place to visit.    

Mark went looking for interesting pebbles in Brice Creek and managed to freeze his hand, so I had to hold it for a minute or two to warm it.  

Fog and Brains

Foggy days lately.  The other day the fog never lifted and it was so thick we couldn't see across the dog park.  

Possibly related, in a brain-chemistry kind of way, the scintillating scotoma has made a come-back.  I'd been mostly good about limiting my dark chocolate intake, but it seems like three days over the last fourteen or so I've been getting the lightning staircase in my vision -- this time more in my left eye than my right.   At this point I'm wondering if changing light levels play a role.  

There's usually not much of a headache, but it does make reading difficult.  And whenever I experience several of these in a row, I wonder in the back of my head if this is indicative of my brain slowly self-destructing.  Unfortunately, the auras don't actually appear to be related to anyone's astral body, nor do they appear to be earthbound entities or geologic ley lines.  Will I spend my last months with holes in my vision, with lightning staircases providing an uneven break to the dullness, unable to look at computer screens, and forced to write longhand (or on a typewriter)?  Oh well, I guess what this means in the short run is that I'll have to give up really dark chocolate and limit my black tea intake.

"We'll Go Masked."

The last few months have not been conducive to writing, but there's been a recent shift, and I'm hoping that the mental energy spent on various distractions and stressors will be available for more creative endeavors.  

Last week I went to a public outdoor ritual.  The organizers had done a lovely job putting out a circle of candles; light blazed from more candles set up on a long altar.   I was looking forward to it--even if I might have to use an umbrella--but the longer I stayed the more apparent the COVID masking and vaccination check protocols I thought were going to be followed weren't.

After some mental risk-evaluation gymnastics involving the number of unmasked folks there, their proximity, and the efficacy of my own mask, I thought I'd be able to stand on the far side of the circle from the unmasked.  Then an unmasked woman came up and handed me song lyrics, and someone else started perambulating the circle's boundary with his nose poking out over his mask and I realized I'd spend the entire time A) wondering if I was going to catch the omicron variant and pass it to my folks and, B) judging people instead of celebrating the station of the sun.

So I left.  

During the walk home, I wondered if I might have said something like, "Who do I show my proof of vaccination to?" or "Is this a masked event?"  I might have if I had recognized anyone else other than the ritual's leader.  The whole thing reminded me of a passage in Starhawk's "Truth or Dare," where women self-censor and have a Disney Ritual instead of something possibly deeper.

When I got home, there was a garden stake with a lit candle over one of the small tables I use as an outdoor altar set up in the center of the backyard circle.  It was like coming home to a sanctuary, and I spent a grateful moment enjoying the flickering flame.  

Presently, Mark (and the dog) came out; the setup was an outdoor bistro for his dinner.

I went in, attempted to write, and wound up making some edits on a various works-in-progress.

Day of Producing Art

It's been a while since I photographed the planets.  Saturday, we had a break in the weather:  the morning sky was clear and cold, which meant that Venus, the Moon and Mars were visible in the pre-dawn sky.  Venus is approaching its greatest brilliance, in a few days it should be visible during the day.  The Moon was three days before being new, and rose something like 5 AM.   Mars was dim compared to the Moon and Venus.

All three objects were fairly low in the sky, which necessitated crossing the street with camera and tripod. After contending with some awkwardly placed power lines, I managed to frame the sky over the eaves of neighbors' houses.  It would have been nice to have a tree's silhouette in the photo, but the rooflines looked like mountains or possibly pyramids.  

After a quick jaunt to the store for tea, I set up the camera and tripod in the backyard against the arbor vita trees, focused on the fountain, and waited for the hummingbirds to appear.  Of course, the first hummingbird to appear came while I was futzing with the tripod and I only managed a blurry photo of it flying off.  I finished set-up.  I felt a little like some early twentieth century British Naturalist, as I had set up a small end table, chair and cushion, and had wrapped myself in faux leopard skin fleecy blanket.  

As I was sipping my rapidly cooling tea, a fierce humming signaled the sudden arrival of a bright red hummingbird.  It peered at me down its long and pointy beak, and, as I Tweeted later, I was pretty sure it was challenging me to a duel over ownership of the fountain ("Hello.  I am a hummingbird.  This is my fountain.  Prepare to die.")  

The light meter on the camera helped me to gauge the sun's progress, as I would have to adjust the shutter speed to compensate for the increase in light.   When the hummingbirds came to the fountain I was mostly ready.  I took many photos, fiddled with fine-tuning the camera's focus, and managed a number of good shots and one excellent one (the first one).  

By the time my tea had defrosted the glass top of the end table, it was too cold to drink.  

I spent the rest of the morning processing photos, and then it was time to go to my folks for a socially distanced celebration of my Dad's birthday.  We brought gluten-free cupcakes as a alternative to a socially closer birthday cake with candles.  Mark and I (okay, mostly Mark) had painted a sign for his garage, which he's converted into a combination wood shop, gym, and indoor dog play area.  It looked a little like a medieval manuscript, with the H in his name outlined and a medieval dog at the bottom.  I'm pretty sure he liked it, or at least appreciated it.  His ginormous German Shepherd and Aoife played together; we played "Apples to Apples."  

Then it was time to run home and feed the cats.  

The evening wound up with the finishing touches on a the latest geometric Math Art.  

If Saturday was the Day of Producing Art, Sunday was the day of Relative Sloth.