“Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.”
–Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, page 4
All posts by Joanna
The Secret Life of a Glass of Wine
Once upon a timeless time, on an island called Crete in the Mediterranean Sea, there lived a woman named Ariadne. One day she fell in love with a guy named Theseus and gave him a skein of string. Her idea was to have him unspool the string as he wound his way through a labyrinth to kill a monster at the center, after which he would turn around and follow the string back out to safety. Theseus was all for it even though concocting the scheme would have been far beyond his mental powers. Alas, when the deed was done, his valiant but scanty brain cells forgot to take Ariadne with him when he sailed back home to Athens.
Ariadne was standing on the beach, watching the ship disappear and wondering how she had fallen for such an outrageous airhead, when a gleaming chariot swooped down from the sky drawn by a pair of panthers. Holding the reins was no mere pin-up boy, preoccupied with flexing his mortal thews, but instead it was a god. It was Dionysus, one of the twelve great shining ones of the mighty Greek pantheon, and he was thrilled to find Ariadne. He leaped from the chariot, took her hands in both of his, and spoke in a voice that made her bones tingle. Come with me to Olympus, love. That’s where you belong. She replied, Are those panthers?? He gave her a wink and said, They’ll carry us to heaven if you’re willing. She cast one last glance over the empty ocean, turned back to the glory of Dionysus, and then she said, Yes.
He kissed her hands and off they went. As a wedding present he gave her a fabulous crown which he later turned into stars. As the story goes, they loved each other ever after. You heard that right. Dionysus was the only one of the Greek gods who was able to handle commitment. What’s more, there are those who believe that in earlier times, Ariadne was a powerful goddess in her own right. If that’s the case, the story shows Dionysus raising the diminished goddess back to her rightful status. He’s also the god who gave us the gift of wine. So when you swirl a pinot noir in the belly of a wine glass, you’re swirling more than just a beverage. You’re swirling the spirit of Dionysus.
Who exactly is this swirling spirit? Well, Dionysus relishes life. He’s fun and he’s intense, with a spontaneity and exuberance that the other gods lack. He’s playful, faithful, raucous, ebullient. And remember, he’s immortal, so all his traits have divine proportions and nothing about him is bounded by time. We’re talking about spontaneity so powerful that it’s a religious experience, exuberance so profound as to become holy, and playfulness so deep as to render the passage of hours irrelevant. Dionysus can lift our moribund moods with his sacred zest, the way he lifted Ariadne.
Wine, however, like Dionysus, is strong, and it’s complex. It’s not a beverage for quenching thirst. It’s an elixir that demands respect. The right amount is an infusion of joy, but too much is a plunge into oblivion and regret. Wine can heighten celebration, stimulate conversation, and deepen friendship, but it can also deaden feelings, darken depression, and damage relationships. Remember the panthers who drew the chariot? Harnessed, they speed the journey of the soul. Unchecked, they can kill. Dionysus demonstrates the knack of harnessing.
A glass of wine is a living thing, in the literal, biological sense, animated by the microorganisms that fermented the juice. It’s also a living thing in the senses of the imagination, exactly the way Dionysus is, so it doesn’t matter whether you actually drink wine or not. The idea alone honors his spirit and makes it easy to imagine partaking of life with the same enthusiasm as the shining one who cherishes and champions the goddess.
So whether the glass in your hand is literal, imaginal, or maybe even both at once, look into those jeweled tones. Inhale the bouquet. Swirl the wine until it’s dizzy, but most of all, listen. Can you hear the sacred question posed, to you and you alone? Can you hear the invitation? If you’re willing, if you say Yes, then lift the glass. Sip that spirit into yourself and savor the liquid epiphany, because the true gift of Dionysus is that he can take us all to heaven anytime we let him.
“By manifesting the sacred…”
“But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.”
— Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, page 12
“Myths, or mythic moves, open spaces…”
“Myths, or mythic moves, open spaces. Rational accounts limit them. This is necessary. Both are necessary.”
– Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel, p 9
Àshe, Itutu, and #BlackLivesMatter
Unarmed black men have been dying in the streets at the hands of cops who are supposed to protect them. This betrayal of justice, civil rights, and fundamental morality has been going on since forever, but now it feels like things might actually change, and I think it’s in part because of how eloquent and effective so much of the protest response has been. These protests, coincidentally, have also been deeply resonant with the spirituality of the Yoruba people of West Africa, from whom many slaves in the Americas were descended. All the quotes in this post are from a scholar named Robert Farris Thompson, whose work I highly recommend.
The Yoruba might describe recent events as àshe in action. Àshe is difficult to translate into English, but Thompson describes it as “spiritual command, the power-to-make-things-happen, God’s own enabling light rendered accessible to men and women.” In other words, àshe is the capacity to bring about change. It’s active, energetic, and bright.
By itself, àshe is morally neutral. Change can serve all kinds of different agendas. You could even say that the cops who killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown were exercising àshe at the cost of Mr. Garner’s life. Protestors who lie down in public places are also exercising àshe, but theirs has to do with another spiritual value of the Yoruba, this one called itutu. Itutu is also difficult to translate, but it’s a mystic kind of coolness, an unflappable calm, a “transcendental balance.” It’s associated with the colors blue and green, so it’s quieter than àshe, more contained, darker. It isn’t active so much as it is reflective and receptive. The expression on this sculpture is a great example of what a person with itutu looks like:
The Yoruba have rituals to restore coolness to situations that have grown too hot. The rituals often involve water and fresh herbs, and they seek to access “the divine source of the power to heal,” or “the center from which all harmony comes.” This divine source, this harmonious center, is, quite simply, love. One person can cool the heart of another through love, restoring her to serenity. A group can calm another group through love, and loving wisdom can even cool an entire nation. Yoruba coolness also links healing with good government.
So far we have àshe, or the capacity to change the world, and we have itutu, or the mystic blue coolness of wisdom and love. Light and dark, hot and cold, active and receptive. Each of these dualities begs for balance. But now let’s add one more ingredient: generosity. For the Yoruba, generosity is the highest form of morality, and good character combines coolness and gentle generosity. What happens when we put it all together? Thompson says:
To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with… we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is àshe. This is character. This is mystic coolness.
This is also spiritual maturity. It’s missing in a justice system that protects institutionalized homicide. It’s missing in an economic system that widens the gap between rich and poor by under-taxing corporations and rich individuals, and by refusing to raise the minimum wage. This system promotes poverty, which promotes crime, which promotes racism and police brutality. It suffers from a lethal deficiency of itutu and generosity.
But change is stirring, right now. By lying down in public places, raising their arms in the air, and using the words “I Can’t Breathe,” protestors are mirroring back to the police, the nation, and the world what is going on. A mirror is receptive and reflective. It reports what’s in front of it calmly and coolly. It has itutu. The action, or àshe, of these protests is guided by that wisdom, and as a result the protests send a profoundly powerful and moving message, and all of us watching the news fall in love with all those gorgeous protestors. This is not to say there is no rage involved. Far from it. Rage fuels the action, and wisdom channels that energy into spine-tingling, galvanizing communication.
Video cameras can also balance àshe and itutu. Like a mirror, a camera is calm and receptive, and it records action so that cool heads and hearts can make wise decisions about how to deal with it. Body cameras on cops might help, but not if it’s cops who decide when to push the “record” button. I’m thinking more of smartphones and social media. Unlike any other time in history, basically all bystanders have the technology in hand to record high-quality evidence of police action and make it available to the world instantly. Also, by “cool heads and hearts,” I mean independent prosecutors for police crime. Àshe can’t be expected to regulate itself, and if it flares out of control, the restorative wisdom of itutu needs to come from an outside, unbiased perspective.
At this point àshe and itutu have worked their way into my imagination, and the imagination is a conduit for change, the way wire carries electricity: first your ideas change, then you start acting on them and turning them into reality. In this case the electricity behind the words àshe and itutu is changing the way we respond to state-sanctioned murder. Now it’s time to imagine that electricity making this nation a place where the Declaration of Independence is as true in practice as it is in spirit, and black men really do have full rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Because YES #BlackLivesMatter, and YES this bullshit from the cops has got to stop.
Mythological Online Dating
Once upon a time awhile ago, I downloaded the dating app Tinder and set about swiping through photos of Gentlemen and Neanderthals. The next day, one of my “matches” texted. He was more articulate than the knuckle-draggers out there, but it seemed we weren’t going to connect. I thought, Whatever, and I didn’t text him the following day. The day after that, he sent this:
“Dear Daphne, I want you to know that i understand you try to maintain a respectable distance, but remember what happens: ‘a heavy numbness seized her limbs, thin bark closed over her breasts, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots, her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left’ your choice is to face my ardor or become arbor. Yours in hot pursuit, Apollo”
Well. I don’t receive texts like that every day, let me tell you. He made me laugh, that’s 10 points right there; he cited a book, that’s another 10 for a total of 20 so far; and the book he cited was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for a cool 10,000 points, enough for him to sail past the threshold required for a return text, with even a few points to spare. It was like the old Olivia Newton John song: “Let’s get mythical, mythical, I wanna get mythica-a-a-l…”
So yes, let’s get mythical. Especially since “Apollo” typed only seven lines of a five-page story. What he left out is that, having just slain the Python, the Roman god Phoebus (Apollo to the Greeks) swaggers around with his bow and arrows and makes fun of Cupid’s arrows for merely being able to “spark a bit of love.” Cupid takes umbrage at the sun god behaving like such a jerk and shoots two arrows: a golden one at Phoebus to fill him with love for the nymph Daphne, and a lead one at Daphne that makes her reject love. Phoebus chases, Daphne runs, and just when he’s about to grab her, she prays to her father, a river-god, to change her shape. Dad turns her into a laurel tree, but Phoebus loves her still. He kisses the tree and claims it as his own, and declares that it shall never drop its leaves the way other trees do, but will always keep its loveliness.
Juicy stuff. But the story is not about humans, right? In the text, the characters are taller than mortals and more beautiful. Their skin glows and their eyes don’t just reflect light but actually shine. They represent deep energies at work in the psyche. They are inhabitants of the domain of soul, aka the imaginal realm.
In this place of larger-than-life and more-than-real, Cupid is the god of love, or, the energy of divine love. This energy operates from above — outside the scene of most of the action. And don’t powerful forces sometimes work on us from outside? Phoebus, meanwhile, is a god of light, shot by a golden arrow (bright, beautiful, incorruptible) which gives him a passion for connection. And yet he moves around on the ground, so he is an image of the divinity of earthly love. Daphne is a nymph, a nature spirit, and she is shot by a lead arrow (dull, heavy, toxic) which fills her with alarm at the thought of connection. She is an earth-dwelling ego driven by empty fears that slow her down and stop her in her tracks.
Those are the players. Here is their play: Cupid (divine love) sets in motion a scenario where Phoebus (earthly love) pushes Daphne’s (the ego’s) resistance to the breaking point. Phoebus won’t take no for an answer, because sometimes the soul doesn’t care about the ego’s fear. And what happens then? Transformation! Ego can handle only so much of its own nonsense before it’s ready to change.
So Daphne turns into a tree. A tree? Yes, a tree! In a forest, a tree’s leaves and roots mingle with those of the other trees all around, exchanging chemical messages and forming a network of connections. Trees also connect heaven and earth: they take sunlight from above, turn it into sugar, and send it down into their roots; they take water from the soil and send it up into the leaves, where it evaporates into the air. Trees are a profound image of connectedness, side to side and up and down. That’s what Daphne turns into: a connected being.
Where are we so far? Divine love makes earthly love push the ego into an experience of its own connectedness. And then, when the ego transforms, the eternal radiance of the soul remains — eternal not in the sense of a clock that will keep running forever, but eternal in the sense of timelessness, of This, Right Here, the boundless Now that is the Always and the Ever. It’s the space where trees are beautiful, and where we’re present enough to realize it. That’s where Phoebus sees Daphne’s real beauty.
Phoebus changes too. For one thing he will probably think twice before making fun of Cupid again, but also the golden arrow pushes him into a deeper experience of love. Initially he just wants a hot date, but at the end of the story he loves Daphne’s essence, and his love is now nourishing; it’s a feast of photons that feeds her leaves every day. Although we should note that it was shining on her all along, regardless of her ability to relax and enjoy it.
I do wonder about Cupid’s take on the whole thing. Does he look down with self-satisfaction? Does it play out the way he knew it would, or does the tree thing surprise even him? By watching the events unfold, does he participate in them through his imagination, the way we vicariously experience our fictions? The way we participate in the great powers through our mythologies?
And what does all of it have to do with “real”-world relations? Maybe nothing. Divine energies roil and churn through us, but we’re also just people, with all our flaws and beauties. Then again, to glimpse the events of the world through the filter of myth a) is so much fun! and b) can open up the possibility of revision. Myth is always subject to rewriting, and recognizing the pattern at play is the first step in trying something different, such as pulling out the lead arrow and soaking up a little sunshine. Who knows how the story might go then?
All of which brings us back to “Apollo.” I should have sent him the preceding paragraphs the minute his message showed up, all in one gigantic text. Believe it or not, that might have simplified things! Instead I thought, Hmph! He thinks he’s a god and I’m a nymph? And I’m going to turn into a tree if I don’t cavort? We will see about that! Which meant the game was on. We met for lunch.
My mythology fetish didn’t seem to frighten him, but then again I didn’t unleash it all at once. At this point, though, we can consider it unleashed. The key thing now is that I have the intel I’ve needed all along for world domination. If anyone out there has any idea how to program things that will work on phones, let me know. It’s time to build a Mythic Tinder.
“Reason and understanding…”
“Reason and understanding must unite with unreason and magic.”
– Claire Dunne, “Carl Jung’s Red Book,” Parabola, 35:2
“Image-making is a via regia…”
“Image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things…”
– James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p 23
Viewer’s Guide to The Book of Mormon, FAQ
Q: Oh my heck. Am I ready for this?
A: Yes your heck! You are so ready for this. Here, have a latte. That’ll fortify your spirits.
Q: But isn’t it all singing and dancing Mormon missionaries?
A: Yes yes yes! And so much more!
Q: All right, all right. I’m ready. Tell me who among us should see this show.
A: Everyone! Absolutely everyone, all over the land. By which I mean everyone except Mom, due to extremely naughty words and extremely naughty deeds, all enacted with extremely naughty, gleeful abandon. I’m thinking in particular of the Spooky Mormon Hell Dream, which includes a marvelous scarlet Lucifer and giant dancing Starbucks cups. (How’s that latte? Sinfully rich? Wickedly energizing?)
Q: Luci-who?… What on earth are you singing?
A: “Salt–a-Lake–a-Ci–ty, where life is–n’t shit–ty…”
Q: Jesus.
A: Yes, him too! But this is Jesus like you’ve never seen him. He marches around in a glowing white robe, clearly having a terrific time. He tells one of our heroes to quit being such a dick, and he inspires another hero to man up and grow a pair.
Q: He can’t say stuff like that!
A: Hello, he’s Jesus! He can say whatever he wants! And he obviously relishes the potent imagery of male genitalia. (Get it? Potent imagery?)
Q: For pity’s sake. Is nothing sacred?
A: It’s all sacred! This show pulls off the ultimate religious feat: it suspends judgment. It sets aside both approval and disapproval, and instead celebrates human weirdness by singing and dancing and swearing like a sailor. Most of all, it is just so fucking funny!!
Q: And evidently its potty-mouth vocabulary is contagious. Well isn’t it time for one of your diatribes about liminal zones or the numinosum or similar?
A: I’ll do better than a diatribe. I’ll bear my ex-Mormon testimony that this show is doing God’s work here on earth, and I am not even kidding. The story is all about myth-making and the collision of myths; it engages in myth-making of its own; and it allows myth to be spiritual and silly, both at once. Did I mention that the villagers teach the missionaries about metaphor, and about not taking scripture literally? I literally felt dizzy with joy.
Q: …Okey-dokey. That was the last of my latte. We’re done here, yes?
A: Yes, as soon as I send a great big MWAH to Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and every single player in every single cast and crew, for channeling such affectionate and rambunctious Trickster energy. They’re culture heroes, one and all. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but Viva la Book of Mormon!
Viewer’s Guide to La Belle et la Bête (1946), FAQ
Q: Sorry, no French movies. I’ve had bad experiences with French movies.
A: Relax, it’s Beauty and the Beast. You love Beauty and the Beast.
Q: In black and white? From the olden days when there was no such thing as CGI?
A: Yes, when there were such things as imagination and Jean Cocteau. Besides, the world didn’t magically become a magical place with the advent of modern film technology. Did Shakespeare’s vision rely on computers? Charlotte Brontë’s?
Q: I know the story. It’s about seeing with the eyes of love, check. Why watch it again?
A: Oh I don’t know, maybe because IT’S AWESOME! Plus this version has its own delicious details, trust me. And it’s not just about seeing with the eyes of love. It’s also about embracing enchantment, and having the courage to live your own life, and —
Q: Yes, but —
A: But what? Why are you being so difficult about this?
Q: It’s a romance. Romance is not the stuff of serious minds.
A: Wha — serious minds? Seriously?? Whence this drivel? Shall we discuss what Shakespeare and Brontë did with the tropes of romance? Didn’t they have serious minds? And didn’t their serious minds know how to relax and have fun too? Wait a second — are you afraid of what people will think if you talk about a romance? If so, you really need to watch this movie. You’ll see what happens when you care too much about what people think. You lose the key to the treasure house.
Q: I’m not afraid of what people think!
A: Prove it. Put the disc in the computer and press play. Right now. NOW!
Q: Fine! Geez! Bossy Bessie… Wow, that is a hairy beast.
A: He’s a heads-up for the uninitiated, an advance memorandum that men can be disconcertingly furred. Like, all over.
Q: By that logic, men have claws too.
A: Or, claws can be illusory and cause illusory fear, when actually things are fine and wonderful.
Q: Is it illusory that the Beast holds Belle hostage?
A: It’s an image. Think of the Beast as the outer self, wounded and distorted by life in the world, and Belle as the inner self, the incorruptible soul. The outer self (Beast) mistakenly keeps the inner self (Belle) prisoner at first because it knows it needs the inner self to survive. Meanwhile the inner self is shocked by what the outer self has become but learns that the two of them are the same — Belle discovers her own beastliness as well as the Beast’s beauty. And then, Houston, we have the inner union! Yin and yang, heart and mind, light and shadow, together at last, glory glory all day long.
Q: Shhh, please! These subtitles are not going to read themselves.
A: (But it’s also a romance and love conquers all.)
Q: Did you see that? The Beast just called Belle “strange.” Isn’t he supposed to call her the sun in his heaven, or some such? Are you sure this thing is a romance?
A: “You are a strange girl, Belle,” he says, “a strange girl indeed.” Translation: she’s authentic, she’s her true self, she doesn’t conform. He sees who she is and that’s who he loves. What’s more romantic than that? Come on, admit it, you love this movie.
Q: I admit nothing. And I still say it’s about seeing with the eyes of love, check.
A: You’re absolutely right. It’s all about seeing with the eyes of love. Check.
Cosmic Morsels from Fall Quarter So Far
From The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight, by Robert D. Pelton:
The trickster speaks — and embodies — a vivid and subtle religious language, through which he links animality and ritual transformation, shapes culture by means of sex and laughter, ties cosmic process to personal history, empowers divination to change boundaries into horizons, and reveals passages to the sacred embedded in daily life.
From Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, by Marie-Louise von Franz:
Psychologically here, there is what the alchemists call the union of the cosmic world, which means getting beyond the microcosm of the human being and being open to life itself, in itself — to be related to the whole of life through watching the process of synchronicity.
From Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, by Maya Deren:
In Voudoun the cosmic drama of man consists not of a dualism, a conflict of the irreconcilable down-pull of flesh and the up-pull of spirit; it is, rather, an almost organic dynamic, a process by which all that which characterizes divinity — intelligence, power, energy, authority, wisdom — evolves out of the flesh itself.
Postcards from Summer Myth Camp
Overhead in the dining hall, early in the week:
“Unicorns are in now, didn’t you know?”
Text message from Michaelle during lecture break:
“What’s name for creature that evokes lust? ;;) not a succubus… Not Dionysus follower… Must be something like that”
Jeffrey Kripal, on a semiotic approach to the paranormal:
“Anomalies mean something. They’re messages. If you believe them, you’re in trouble. If you explain them, you’re in trouble. If you listen to them, you’re on the right track.”
A student talking on her cell phone, smiling:
“Love is always more fun.”
A neuroscientist named Tulving, quoted on a PowerPoint slide:
“The imagination of the future can override stories of the past.”
In the dining hall, Thursday afternoon:
Amber: Persephone’s a little ditzy.
Rachel: Uh, I don’t think so!!
Olivia: Well becoming the Queen of the Underworld kind of negates the ditziness.
Rachel: Excuse me, were you guys not listening?? She didn’t BECOME the Queen of the Underworld, she always WAS. Chris was very clear on that!
Olivia: Oh, I have a bone to pick with that.
Rachel: Ok I did my fucking paper on fucking Persephone and there’s a whole book on how Persephone was ALWAYS the Queen of the fucking UNDERWORLD!!
This Side of the Veil, with Lipstick
My local library runs a program that matches people like me with senior citizens who want library books but can’t get out and about on their own, so I’ve been the book courier for a woman named Barbara since last year. I visit her in the nursing home every few weeks to pick-up and drop-off, and to sit and talk for awhile. Normally it’s a light, friendly, pleasant exchange, but last week when I stopped by, I think I visited a different plane of existence.
Barbara is all alone in the world, although you’d never know it from her cheery disposition. Her husband died years ago, her two children both died as young adults, and she has no other family left. I’m not sure how old she is; she’s mentioned being 92 and 94. She gets around with a walker, and she always wears three or four rings and bracelets. She never bothered trying to learn my name, and instead just calls me “honey.” She loves reading, but for the last few months I’ve watched age catch up with her. Her sentences often trail off into foggy distraction, and she’ll repeat herself a dozen times in one conversation. I just keep smiling and answering her same questions again and again: “Now, how have you been?” and “What are you working on?” One day almost all she could say was the title of the book I’d just brought her, And the Bridge Is Love, by Faye Moskowitz. “The bridge is love… the bridge is love… the bridge is love…”
I went to see her last Thursday. It was a day when things seemed to click and sizzle. My hair looked good, I was loving my new lipstick, and stoplights turned green as I approached. On a hunch, I decided not to take a new book with me, but just to drop by and see how she was doing with the previous title, Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis. When I arrived, Barbara was sitting in her chair and reading. She looked up and beamed with delight, as though to say, “Oh, it’s you, whoever you are!” She seemed revivified, magically restored to something of her former self. In addition to her rings and bracelets, she wore a silver-spangled Fourth of July necklace, a yellow top and capris, and lovely cherry-red lipstick. My lipstick was more of a dark rose, but it was fun that we both looked sassy.
I sat down and asked how she liked the Lewis book. She said it was wonderful, just wonderful (huge smile), but she wasn’t going to want any more books because she was going on a trip. I knew perfectly well she was doing nothing of the kind, but I asked where she was going. “I’m going home,” she said, still beaming, even though we were sitting in her only home. She looked so beautiful that I couldn’t help smiling too, but the back of my neck tingled. I said, Oh, when? “Tomorrow,” she said, then she looked around the room, eyes sparkling. “I’ve loved it here, but it’s time to go.” My smile froze a little.
She said she loved life, she just loved it! She loved life, but she wasn’t going to hold onto it much longer. I asked what her favorite thing about life was. She said her favorite thing was that God is at the center. She looked around the room again and said she didn’t know what she’d do with her stuff, because she knew she couldn’t take it. Then the smile spread wide across her face and she said, “You just have to enjoy every day, every day! Well, some days you can’t enjoy, but still… Life is to be shared, shared! But people don’t spend enough time with themselves.” Then she looked right at me and said, “Do you spend time with yourself?” I nodded and said I did. She studied me for a few seconds, seeming to see me for the first time, and said, “Yes, I think you do.” Then she looked down, obviously alarmed. “What’s that blue thing on the floor?” I followed her gaze. “That’s my purse,” I said, and held it up so she could see it. “Oh!” She laughed and laughed and laughed, and kept on laughing until I laughed right along with her at the blameless blue purse I was still holding up. I’m sure the purse wondered what it had done that was so hilarious.
Soon it became clear she was done talking, so I said I’d return the Lewis book to the library for her. I asked if she was sure she didn’t want another one, and she said, “No, because of the trip. I’m going home. I won’t be able to take anything.” I said ok, but I’d check back with her next week. She ignored that and said she’d walk out with me, so I helped her stand and get situated with her walker. We hugged in the hallway. Her arms felt as light as the wings of a four-and-a-half foot bird. We parted, me heading toward the elevator and she heading deeper into the nursing home. I heard a song of some kind, so I stopped and turned around. She was traipsing down the hall with small, rapid steps, humming a tune, bobbing her head back and forth to her own music.
Was she really about to start across that last great bridge? If so, what a way to go, looking good and feeling jaunty! Or was she having an age-induced delusion, a waking dream in which she had just chatted with her own personal book-delivery woman who wore rose-colored lipstick? Who’s to say I hadn’t just dreamed of her, too? In some sense, we all dream of each other in all our encounters. And what was her meaning of the word “God”? I’ve heard that God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. I’ve heard that God is love. If both definitions are right, then love is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. Maybe Barbara was dreaming something like that. Maybe we can all dream that dream, any time of the day or night. In any case I meant it that I will check back in on her this week. I am keenly curious about what’s next for her, and I’ll take a book along, just in case.
Sisters, Strangers, and Serendipity
My sister Julie and I just got back from a week and a half in France and London. France was a whirl of beautiful abbeys, fabulous food, and the lilt of a lovely language. London was… something different.
Julie had to work in London, so I was on my own, and I had no agenda for my visit. Every day I got up, headed out in search of coffee, and listened for suggestions from the surroundings about what to do next. The sidewalk unrolled in front of my feet, and somehow coffee led to a museum, which led to a boat ride on the Thames, which led to the mythological marvel that is St. Paul’s, and so on, all day long.
My last day, last Saturday, was no exception. I went to my favorite coffee shop and squeezed into a seat at the communal table. I pulled out my copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, thinking I might get some homework done, but the book sparked a long and lively conversation with some retired locals at the table who had been at Oxford for English and history and philosophy. Not one of those wonderful people asked why I was studying myth, and for that I’ll love them forever. When our coffee was gone, someone said, You should go to the British Library. A chime rang in my head, the musical tone that tells me to sit up and pay attention: ting! Yes, I thought. I’ll go to the British Library.
It was a quick Tube ride; the train blinked three times and I was there. From the outside I wasn’t impressed. The building seemed boring and modern after the gorgeous piles of sculpted stone I’d grown accustomed to, but I went in anyway. The visitors’ pamphlet informed me that the Sir John Ritblat Gallery contained “some of the treasures of our world-class collection.” Manuscript treasures. Bookish treasures. I headed that way and paused at the threshold of a cool, dimly lit room.
Now, I need to tell you that once upon a time, when I was ten years old, I read a book that shaped my life. Actually my sister Jane tricked me into reading it, much against my will. She was twenty-four (therefore bigger than I), and one day she sat on me to keep me from escaping while she read the book out loud, starting with page one. I writhed and yelled and fought this fate with all my might for many pages, and only quieted down when I couldn’t struggle anymore. I lay there, spent and squished, and finally started listening because there was nothing else to do. Soon I was listening because I wanted to, and then because I was ensorcelled. The story felt so strange and so familiar, both at once. The rest of the world fell away until Jane reached the end of a chapter and said, casually, “That’s probably enough for now.” I caught the book as it fell from her hands. I ran away with it. I devoured it. I dreamed about it. I read it and re-read it, dozens of times. It’s the reason I studied literature, and a big reason I’m preoccupied with myth-making today.
So, back to the library. I stepped inside Sir John Ritblat’s room and my eyes adjusted to the low light. Everyone spoke in whispers if at all, shuffling from display case to display case to see the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, Shakespeare’s first folio, and original copies of literary works from long before typing. The pages themselves were the only things lit in the shadowy room, which gave them the effect of glowing. And sure enough, there it was, the book for which my sister sat on me, the keystone of my personal mythology, glowing brighter than everything else: the fair copy manuscript of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s handwriting. The first one. The original. Over a hundred and fifty years ago, Brontë traveled into the land of imagination, and this was the grail she brought back. This was the artifact that would carry generations into imagination along with her.
A small placard on the wall cleared its throat and mentioned that seeing a manuscript in the author’s hand could be an emotional experience. Leave it to the Brits to post a warning of impending emotion, but yes. Reading words formed with pen and ink makes the author’s voice almost audible. And the manuscript was open to the page where Jane (Eyre) says, “Excellent!–Now you are small–not one whit bigger than the end of my little finger.” Of course we’re going to get choked up there. Just think if it had been open to Chapter 23: “A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant…” That might have been too much, even for me. (No, I could take it!) But the best part was a deletion Brontë had made, four or five lines crossed out with neat backward slashes. Reading the passage with and without that section, I felt like I was experiencing her thoughts and responses: the calm certainty that the text was stronger without those lines, a hiss of exasperation that they had made it to the page in the first place and had survived until so soon before publication.
As I walked away, a shiver ran through me. I’m a fan of libraries anyway, but wow, this one took it to a whole new level. The documents there have shaped all of us, and they were displayed like the sacred relics they are. London may lack the elegance and culinary grace of France, but I felt like I found a spiritual home there, a place of shared and celebrated values, thanks to the finely choreographed cooperation of sisters, coffee-drinking strangers, and Sir John Ritblat. I wonder if they operate in some sort of cabal. If so, might they be hiring would-be conspirators, entry-level shapers of serendipity? Not that they would ever tell, and not that it matters. I will go back someday, with or without the sponsorship of a secret society.
Love Letter to Blue
I’ve been encountering the color Blue with some frequency lately, especially in dreams, and something happened when I was in California for class last weekend that changed the way I relate to Blue. I’ve always loved Blue, but until last weekend, I would have said, “I’ve always loved blue.” Feel the difference? I’ll try to explain.
Last Saturday I attended a lecture about dream work by Stephen Aizenstat. Dr. Aizenstat is a psychologist for whom not only the waking world is animated by soul (i.e. a tree is a being with soul, a house is a being with soul, a rock is a being with soul), but the dreaming world also is populated by soulful beings. For him, dream images exist as entities in their own right, fully as much manifestations of the natural world as you or I, and fully as much ensouled. His dream work is less about analysis and interpretation than about establishing and tending relationships with the images in dreams.
The lecture was in one of the school’s classrooms, with maybe twenty people attending. Early on, Dr. Aizenstat asked if anyone had a dream image they’d like to talk about, and I raised my hand and asked what it meant if a color recurred in dreams. He asked a few follow-up questions. I told him the color was blue, and that I loved it. He asked about my childhood associations with it, and I said the sky, birds, a blue crayon. He asked what it felt like in the dreams, and I said there was a sense of vastness and spaciousness. Then he asked if I wanted to work this image, to help him demonstrate his method of dream work to the group. Not knowing what I was in for, I said sure. He had me go up to the front of the room and sit in a chair beside him. Our chairs were situated at angles, directly facing neither the audience nor each other. In spite of that, he locked onto a tractor-beam eye contact with me that he only broke a few times to turn to the audience and say something like, “See what just happened?”
My memory of the conversation isn’t linear or temporal, not in the way of clocks and calendars. It’s more oceanic and dreamlike, but I think he asked me to imagine what blue felt like in my body. I described it as an invisible sparkle in my torso. He brought up the vastness and spaciousness again, and he mentioned the title of the Joseph Campbell book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space. I said I loved that. He said Why? I said, Because it reminds me of the spiral, which is my favorite symbol, the way it shows the path to the infinity within and the infinity without, all the way out into the universe. It goes forever in both directions. It’s my map to the eternal.
At some point during all this I began to feel the presence of blue not just in my body but in the room. It was a palpable field all around but strongest from the floor up, about to the level of my waist, and Dr. Aizenstat was speaking a language of shamanistic wisdom: Meet blue in the way of blue, and Blue moves things, it has a life of its own, and Water turns all things to soul. I was in a wide-eyed and multi-layered mode of consciousness — tingling, vibrant, but calm, too. He asked me what I could offer to blue, what I could give it. Without thinking or planning, I heard myself say, “I would give it everything.” The presence of blue grew stronger, more tactile, more blue. I was awash in it, and I was staring into Dr. Aizenstat’s eyes, and he was staring into mine, and he said, “Wow.” Everything held still except for blue breathing its blue breath. I said, “Do you feel that buoyancy?” He said, “Yes.” That was the moment when blue became Blue.
If you’ve ever read this blog before, I hope you know about my love of the imaginal realm, and how deeply I value the invisible dimension of experience. But I’m telling you, this was altogether different, this mutual imagining, soul to soul, and sharing the experience with the souls of other people. It was intimate. It was erotic, by which I mean Eros burst in and emptied his quiver into my open heart. There was no way to keep from falling in love, with Blue and Dr. Aizenstat and everyone in the room.
Afterwards, one of my first “normal” thoughts was, “What the hell did that mean, I’d give Blue everything?” I think I was afraid Blue would want my car, or my house, or God forbid, my stash of notebooks. But on the way home — during a long layover at the San Francisco airport, in fact — I realized Blue isn’t interested in that kind of everything. Blue wants to imbue. It wants to touch and tint all the magic that always happens: play, desire, pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow, love. Blue’s everything is life itself, and I strongly suspect that whatever it’s given becomes a reciprocal gift, poured back and forth and back and forth, a thousand times a thousand times, in a thousand luminous shades of Blue.