I'm ambivalent about this publication, as well as a bit excited. I'm ambivalent because I don't want the Red Book to become just one more consumer product. Granted, the book is priced at about two-hundred dollars, so it's likely that only committed Jungians (and, perhaps, especially-committed anti-Jungians) would purchase it. I don't know to what extent libraries will make it available. So it's not likely to be seen at all by most people, even by most book-reading people.
Nevertheless, though I am excited to finally see it, in a way I kind of wish it were still a legend rather than an available commodity. Its former hiddenness somehow seems more . . . well, more Jungian. Enough has been said about it in the autobiography and in the various biographies, and enough images from it already published, that I already kind of feel I "get" what the book is all about.
Of course, I'm going to buy it when it comes out, anyway.
Being even quasi-neo-Jungian (as I am) in this culture is an uphill battle. The inner life is under attack from every direction. The right prefers that people surrender their souls to the tyrannies of "traditional values" and naive, projection-based militarism. The left suggests that there are no true individual selves, only "subjects" whose supposed inner lives are merely the inscriptions of a variety of state socio-economic and political agendas. And then there is capitalism, which looms above and seeps into everything, from all sides, luring people into a fixation with what they can put into their mouths instead of what they put into their souls.
Then there's the internet, which becomes more and more distracting every day. As a Buddhist, I have trained to let go of the minutiae of petty, confused thoughts that flutter through my mind throughout the day. As a participant in Twitter, on the other hand, I've evidently committed myself to not only holding onto such thoughts but also sharing them with others, so that a weird, collective jabbermind is birthed into cyber-being. I love the internet, and obviously I still find it worthwhile (hence, this blog), but I am very aware of how distanced I have become from my own deeper feelings and thoughts since I went online (or, perhaps more accurately, since I started spending way too much time online).
Worst of all is the everpresent, soul-crushing irony that pollutes every atom of our culture. Jung's work in general, and the Red Book in particular, is a sort of mega-dose of anti-irony. It's impossible to read something like this and get anything valuable from it unless one checks one's irony at the door. I know that literary people are always very proud of themselves for using irony, because it does demand a certain degree of intelligence. And it is possible to use it in such a way as to deepen one's emotional response. But that is not the way it is usually used in contemporary life. It's a way of achieving and maintaining distance, of not letting anything in, not feeling anything too deeply or acutely, or at all. At this point in my life, I tend to view it as the coward's way. And, of course, I say that as someone whose own daily discourse is fully saturated with irony.
Reading the above-mentioned NYT article makes me wonder if I should have become a Jungian analyst instead of entering this strange literary netherworld of mine. There was a time in my life I could have gone either way. Joseph Campbell said that Protestants who lose their religion become psychologists, and Catholics who lose their religion become poets. I guess he was right. For better or worse, I'm on the poet's road. (Damn you, Robert Bly, for presenting an example that suggested this dream is possible!) My job is to figure out how to write poems that say what I want while still somehow being relevant to people in this culture.
I suppose this blog entry makes me sound like a cranky old man. I admit, I do think the culture is going downhill in terms of its devotion to irony and materialism. (It's going uphill in other areas, such as progress being made against sexism, racism, etc.) However, really, I guess, I am just a fringe dweller, and probably would be no matter what era I lived in. Granted, I suspect I would have felt more at home in, say, 1840s New England, hobnobbing with people like Emerson and talking about the Soul (with the capital S, baby). But even they were more fringe in their own time than is commonly realized.
What all of this blather amounts to is the realization (which I have semi-frequently and then forget about again) that I really need to take my soul life--that is, my soul's life--more seriously. Living in the internet age is not an excuse. I buy and buy and buy the books, but I've already known what I need to know for about a decade and a half. I could at least keep a damned dream journal, or something. I have one life, and it's already almost half over. When, on my deathbed, I look back on my life, I hope I will be able to say "I did everything I could to find meaning," rather than, "I made fun of shit and said snarky things."
Please let me live as I know I need to, O my unconscious.
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