The Red Blog

As I noted in my last entry, I am very interested in the immanent publication of Jung's famous Red Book. It appears I am not alone in this, as The New York Times has just published a long article about this very event.

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.

These Are My Dramas

So, now and then I get into a Moleskine state of mind. Even though I already have a few blank ones, I feel a need to buy more. I write poem drafts in them, and if I were to keep a journal I would journal in them. This week was very eventful insofar as I bought a couple of ruled ones for the first time. Moleskine or not, all of my writing journals, for both home and out-and-about use, have always been unruled. Maybe you think this is unimportant. However, I must have spent an hour or two the other day trying to decide whether to make this switch.

Maybe it’s because, as a poet, I am very sensitive to white space on the page. Maybe it’s because my Zen training has made me especially sensitive to the use of white space in some varities of traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. Whatever the reason, I’ve always felt a strong, visceral preference for unruled paper. It feels spacious, open, vast. And I can draw on it, too.

But now the ruled paper has called to me. It feels more “literary,” in a 19^th-century sort of way. For instance, I’ve seen Whitman’s notebooks from the first drafts of what would become Leaves of Grass; his notebooks had ruled paper. And the resistance the lines provide—the anti-spaciousness, if you will—is kind of nice to work against. It just feels more writerly. Plus, I can draw on ruled paper, too, if I really want to.

(Of course, it could also be that the ruled paper just gives me a handy excuse to buy new Moleskines. Can’t use those unruled ones, no, no, no.)

Perhaps some of you may scoff at my disproportionate concern for such things. What can I say? I am a writer. These are my dramas. (Actually, I have other dramas, but this is not that kind of blog.)

On a related note, this book is being released next month, and it just makes me so f-ing happy. (Seriously.) C.G. Jung is probably my central intellectual/cultural influence. His ideas are fundamental for me (however much I may have strayed from them in my actual life. Damn you, grad school!). Finally, someone is publishing a facsimile of his famous Red Book. Many of Jung's central ideas derive from a period known as his “creative illness,” which sounds euphemistic but really isn't. He had a sort of mid-life near-schizophrenic crack-up, but he climbed out of it and forged this psychic raw material into ideas. He kept a journal (not a Moleskine, alas) of his “active imagination” dialogues with symbolic figures in his own psyche. He then reworked these journal entries into this beautiful Red Book, combining the dialogues and ideas with fascinating and often beautiful little paintings of his own. It is a modern holy book of the soul.

This book has always fascinated me. I consider it representative of what I’d like my body of poetic writing to be.

It's actually on exhibit in New York this fall. I’m sorely tempted to go, even though I can't really afford the trip. I mean, it’s the Red Book! For me, this is like seeing the True Cross, if there were a True Cross. At any rate, I’m damned well buying the facsimile, even if it is very pricey. His insights are like talismans than I can use to ward off the evil spirits of banality and nihilism that devour our culture so rapaciously. It is my hope that reading this book, and just looking at it, will propel me back into the Jungian waters that used to nourish me so well, and which gave birth to my sense of poetry vocation in the first place.

As far as that vocation is concerned, I guess I’ve once again accepted that it is just my fate, no matter how horrified I am by many of the trends in contemporary poetry. Maybe my work has a place here, or maybe not. (I did get a nice acceptance e-mail recently from a very fine journal, the subject line of which read “Your wonderful poems.” Maybe the ice is beginning to crack.)

One of my current projects is an essay/presentation called “That I was blessed and could bless”: Toward a Poetics of Joy. Let’s just say that I am very concerned about what poetry has become, especially since I’ve resigned myself to the job. It seems so narrow now. I was talking recently to a non-lit, non-creative-writing professor at a local university, and when I mentioned that I was a poet, she said, “I like Billy Collins. He gives me a chuckle.” Of course my first impulse was outrage at her (inwardly, anyway; outwardly, I just smiled and said, “He is very popular.”) But then I thought, can I really blame her? Why would any sane person who isn’t already fully embroiled in the poetry world submit to the grim, often-petty, hair-shirt “interrogations” of language that constitute a good chunk of contemporary poetry?

At any rate, I didn’t get into poetry to confess anything or to subvert the relationship between signifier and signified. So, currently I’m trying to develop a poetics that makes, or regains, some room in poetry for the sort of experiences I consider worth having as a human being. (This is not to say that I find there to be no room at all for such experiences in contemporary poetry. As with any polemic, I guess I’m focusing very strongly on the side I disagree with.)

I will continue to fuss with these thoughts—possibly in a Moleskine!

(This blog entry is not brought to you by The Moleskine Company, though it might as well be.)