writings
. . . .
academic writings from pacifica graduate institute 2020
Island bodies
leaves as words
healing the split
. . . .
A River Sutra 2001
. . . .
island bodies
“Someone standing at the mouth had the idea to enter. To go further than light or language could go. As they followed the idea, light and language followed like two wolves ~ panting, hearing themselves panting. A shapeless scent in the damp air… Keep going, the idea said.” from, The Cave by Paul Tran
Moving from my home to a cottage on an island was originally planned as a place of refuge and recovery for myself and my seventeen year old daughter. Due to circumstances beyond my control I am now living by myself on an island for this next year of my life. This has been a time when all my stories seem to have failed me.
Living on a landmass where edges are defined and redefined daily by the tides, my relationship to place and to my life as I have known it is being transformed daily. I have surrendered to the ebb and flow of life, to the changing of the tides. Not only is this a time of personal transition but what lays beyond the seas that surround me are the changing tides of our country and, more broadly, the world. The most dramatic change was brought on eight months ago by an ongoing worldwide pandemic. More recently in this country, we have been experiencing the chaos and disruption of a relentless political battle and now a cautious sense of relief with the new President elect: “[We] stand in the margins of what is behind us and look out across the threshold of the future…the brink of possibilities….” (Blackie, 2017).
With all of these personal and collective experiences in mind, I began creating a new collection of drawings, Island Bodies. These began as a single drawing imagined as a cross-section of a rhizome. A rhizome is a continuously growing underground stem which puts out roots and shoots on nodes which lay at intervals along the stem. This becomes an endless roadway of interconnecting systems. In A Nomad Poetics, Pierre Joris (2003) refers to the concept of the rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari. A rhizome is a subterranean stem that differs from roots and radicles in the plant kingdom because there is not a singular origin of plant growth. The rhizome becomes a metaphor for a “ceaselessly established system of connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles….” (Joris, p.x). This notion is what I wanted to carry into my art. What was revealed to me through my initial drawing, intended as a rhizome, was a blackened island body exposing the random and deliberate markings of paths. They appear as ripples, as footprints that have come before and lead beyond where I stand. Like a rhizome, these paths have no beginning or ending. There is no singular origin but a multiplicity of connections between things: “…always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (Joris, p.x). In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung (1963) also wrote of the rhizomatic nature of life itself, of the unconscious, saying, “Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition” (p.4). Considering Jung’s assertion, I began to see this dark charcoal sphere as a representation of the unconscious, of the soul-body, one described by Joris as “A truly open field, visualizable as a rhizomatic space with lines of flight shooting off in all directions, with no up/down, front/back or left/right spatial hierarchization….” (Joris, p. 91).
Our conscious nature, exposed on the surface, conceals the rhizomatic pattern hidden below; and it is between the conscious and the unconscious where psychic growth occurs. For instance, Inna Semetsky (2012) observes, “Jung insisted on a multiplicity of inner spiritual meanings for the unconscious….These deep evolving meanings express themselves through the archetypal images that act as symbolic transformers capable of making the unconscious contents manifest at the level of conscious awareness” (p.70). Jung further states, “….I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains” (Jung, p.4). In this first charcoal drawing, therefore, what we see below the blossom is imagined as an organic circular form, a tight passage leading to a deep well: the depths of the unconscious.
Extrapolating on this concept of the rhizome, I look to the multiplicity of my creative influences which I consider as the chorus of voices - past and present - who have significantly influenced the creation of this drawing. The drawing is an extension, an “adventitious root” of the long lineage of influences in my life where all texts, all works of art, are expressions of past, present and even future texts and /or works of art. The recognition of our interdependence and where we overlap and influence one another has been a sustaining undercurrent of my creative practice, “…a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” (Julia Kristeva quoted in Martin, p.148).
It was with mixed media artist, Michelle Stuart, that I specifically found a kindred spirit. I saw a large exhibition of several bodies of her work in 1985 just as I was beginning my Master of Fine Art degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. We shared an interest in ancient and indigenous cultures and their imprint on the natural world; and we both find inspiration in collecting objects from nature and thrift store memorabilia: old books, maps and botanical drawings. Stuart’s work from which I have been influenced explores the passage of time - historical, geologic and archeological. In researching her creative rhizomatic roots, I discovered the work of Georigius Everhardus Rumphius, a 17th century German naturalist who created an expansive collection of newly-found plant and animal life on the island of Ambon later to be catalogued and published in his seminal work, The Ambonese Curiousity Cabinet. Rumphius lived at a time when the boundaries between disciplines had not been clearly drawn lending his botanical research to become a mix of fact, folklore, legend and speculation much like the interdisciplinary creative practices that both Stuart and I employ. Looking back, now 35 years since my introduction to Stuart’s work, I see just how much conceptual and material influence has taken place. For instance, we both have worked with the photograph as a means for documenting the natural world, and we are both drawn to the use of foraged minerals and earth materials such as ochres and beeswax to use in a variety of ways to create art objects and handmade books. Stuart’s influence led me to the thinking of James Hillman (1983). He writes in Healing Fiction, “The land of the dead is the country of ancestors, and the images who walk in on us are our ancestors.” He goes on to write that these ancestors or images, “If not literally the blood and genes from whom we descend, then they are the historical progenitors, or archetypes, of our particular spirit informing it with ancestral culture” (p. 60). Further research into Stuart’s work then led to the rhizomatic text of art and cultural critic, Lucy Lippard. In her essay in Michelle Stuart: Sculptural Objects: Journeys in & out of the Studio, Lippard (1990) writes that, Stuart’s “touchstones, raw materials, artifacts and their origins in time and space…they touch her; she touches them; and eventually we too are touched by the expanding resonance of their presences in her art“ (p.9). The marks Stuart makes have spatial implications far beyond the object. This is something I aspire to in these drawings of Island Bodies.
Additional influences of mine that make for the rhizomatic pattern below the blossom, include visual artists such as performance/mixed media artist, Ana Mendieta; twentieth century painter, Hilma af Klint; and black and white photographer, Linda Conner. In Mendieta’s work I was exposed to a feminist voice who explored her personal experience of her body and its relationship to land, place and culture. Her work also opened me up to the idea of working in a cross-disciplinary way dependent upon the message to be delivered. Af Klint’s paintings are a visual expression of a transcendent and spiritual reality beyond the observable world; and, Linda Connor’s large format black and white photographs explore the places where the human and the natural world intersect, and where cultures have connected with the sacred. Connor “responds and reflects our human experience of the natural world as both sacred and transcendent” (Solnit, 1990, p.15). Furthermore, I see the rhizomatic reach of the written word of contemporary writers such as Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez and Rebecca Solnit. They each possess an unquenchable engagement with our human relationship to the natural world and what we might learn from nature Herself as well as from those cultures who have strayed less far from Her. Although these writers are stylistically unique, they share many interests, and, I would extend, a shared worldview. Each of these authors is still active in their craft, in interviews and annotated bibliographies, and I find each of them referencing one another throughout their books and essays. Gretel Ehrlich published The Solace of Open Spaces in 1985 and Barry Lopez publishing Arctic Dreams in 1986 are two such examples, and I share in their attraction to wild, open vistas and inhospitable landscapes inhabited by native peoples and fragile ecosystems. Each of these authors, including Rebecca Solnit, explores the changing relationship of humanity to the natural world and our increasingly negative impact on the changing climate. They share an empathic understanding of the more than human world as well as an awareness of the numinous qualities of the Divine as She continues to present Herself in the world.
An overlapping influence found in each of these three authors biographies, as well as my own, is the classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki published in the west in 1949. A primary precept of Buddhism is that of impermanence: “Finally the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life” (Ehrlich, 1985, p.63). From this first drawing came a series of drawings. Island Bodies could also be considered images of emptiness, absence, despair, a visual reflection of the kind of personal and social isolation that we are encountering as human beings living through this moment today. We are each living our own experience of island-ness surrounded by transformative and at times destructive seas. However, it is important to remember that the separateness of an island is really an illusion as islands are ultimately, at their depths, rhizomatic and connected to the earth as we are connected to one another. Lastly, cultural critic, John Berger, was found to be another secondary influence surfacing for several of my creative influences. His book, Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, was one I was introduced to in 1975 when I first fell in love with the making and meaning-making of photographic images. In this book, Berger explores the ambiguity of meaning for a single image in relation to others: “The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it” (p.29). Thus the rhizomatic nature of images shows that “…we carry the images of all those who came before us, and all those who exist alongside us. Our meanings are shifting and theirs, too, with ours.” (A. Tetto)
All of these creative “texts” form a rhizomatic network that shape the tradition in which I am working. They have also informed the way I think, the way that I choose to live, and my worldview. The exploration of this network is a perennial gift, one where I continue to uncover the layers and depths of understanding of my own work by discovering the layers of influence that reside deeply within me.
References
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London, U.K.: Penguin Books, Ltd.
Blackie, S. (2017). If women rose rooted: a journey to authenticity and belonging. Kent, U.K.:September Publishing.
Connor, L. (1990). Linda connor: spiral journey. Chicago, IL: The Museum of Contemporary Photography Columbia College.
Ehrlich, G. (1985). The solace of open spaces. New York, N.Y.: Viking Penguin, Inc.
Hillman, J. (1983). Healing fiction. Woodstock, CT.: Spring Publications, Inc.
Joris, P. (2003). A nomad poetics. Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press.
Jung, C.G., Jaffe, A. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections. New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books.
Martin, E. (2011). Intertextuality: an introduction. the comparatist, volume 35. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press.
Semetsky, I & Delpech‐Ramey, J (2012). Jung's psychology and deleuze's philosophy: the unconscious in learning, educational philosophy and theory, 44:1, 69-81, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00670.x
Stuart, M. (2010). Michelle stuart: sculptural objects: journeys in & out of the studio. Milano, Italy: Edizioni.
Tetto, A. (September 21, 2020). from Emancipate the ideas, module 3, HMC 130. Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.
. . . .
leaves as words
The River
where you set
your foot just now
is gone ~
those waters
giving way to this,
now this.
~ Heraclitus (Fragments, Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus)
On July 1st, 2020 I began the practice of writing a haiku a day. This practice was inspired by the book, The Healing Spirit of Haiku by Joel Weishaus and David Rosen (2004). Weishaus and Rosen’s (2004) book began as a collaboration between two friends and fellow poets, and although I found myself working independently, I was clearly in collaboration with an outside source. These outside sources included the American poet, Walt Whitman (1855) and his prose poem Leaves of Grass and the traditional haiku master, Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho (1952) “as well as” my own excursions into nature.
Haiku is a practice of using three linked and interactive verses to create archetypal images. “Archetypes are inherited structuring patterns in the unconscious with potentials for meaning-formation and images….these images are the visible representations of the archetypes” (Rowland, 2012. p. 174). These images represent a “union of intuition and sensation, past and present, self and other, the present and the ancient past” (Rosen, 2004, p. 2). When a poet juxtaposes different images, “one idea set on top of another…the poet has juxtaposed disparate items so that the reader can reintegrate them….to create a new matrix of meaning” (Shirane, 1998, p. 82). This alchemical practice over thirty days was one of solve et coagula, a breaking apart of the old Self in order to make meaning of separation and the re-integration towards wholeness. Along with the haiku I have created mixed media visual works to companion with each verse. Each panel an image which has been divided into three parts, much like how we have come to know a traditional haiku verse. This practice of combining visual and verbal images is called Haiga, where the experience of the two is distinct from either element taken by itself. Jung referred to this function of the psyche as bringing together the conscious and the unconscious; in the tension created, a third thing is formed. Jung called this the transcendent function.
In these works I explored my daily lived experience and its relationship to the natural world which I encountered during those days. I re-read Whitman’s (1855) Leaves of Grass. An ambling verse of his daily life and the interconnection of his experience with the cultural and natural world of the time. In this seminal work, Whitman (1855) wrote of the “leaves of grass” as a symbol, not of a species but of a system, a complex system within a larger complex system.
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you (Whitman, 1955, p. 19).
…..
Whitman sought the full integration of Self and other in his relationship to the conscious and the unconscious; to both animate and inanimate beings.
…..
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers….love root…silk thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration…the beating of my heart…
the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore
and dark colored sea rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice…
Words loosed to the eddies of the wind…. (Whitman, 1855, p.19).
When Jane Hirshfield (1997) refers to Reginald Horace Blyth’s haiku translations, he speaks of “something that belongs to the Japanese mind…this ‘something’ is a certain continuity, a lack of division, a feeling of the whole when dealing with the parts” (Hirshfield, 1997, p.105). This something supports what is called complexity evolution. This is when the relationship between the parts are not so much about competition but about cooperation. Where the sum of the whole is greater then the sum of the parts, something new emerges from this connection with one another. Blyth described haiku as:…utterly attentive, each to its moment, each to its part, the best of them do have….a way of including wholeness of life within a brief glimpse. These poems show us that a single moment’s perception is more than enough to hold a world. It glitters, both beautiful and transient, amid the words’ leaves (Hirshfield, 1997, p.105-106). The traditional practice of haiku is meant to record an immediate experience of life and often was to accompany a piece of art. Like the practice of Carl Jung’s (2005) active imagination, the process of writing haiku is supported by setting the ego aside so that the unconscious can emerge.
In Living in the Borderland, The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma, Jerome Bernstein (2005) suggested that the Borderland is a phenomenon of thecollective unconscious when the “hyper-developed and overly rational western ego is in the process of reconnecting with its split-off roots in nature” (p. 8). This is an evolutionary dynamic, and Bernstein (2005) believed “that we are presently in the grip of this unfolding” (p.9).
On a macro level, the grip of this unfolding could potentially be our growing awareness that we are in fact interconnected as human and non-human beings in a complex adaptive system. Complex adaptive systems are systems that change by interacting with one another. We can see an event like Covid-19 impacting all segments of the worlds’ human populations with scientists suspecting that the virus originated from a mammal. The unleashing of the virus has exposed a plethora of instabilities and injustices in all ecosystems around the planet.
In this haiku (Appendix A; Goldman, 2020) I use the symbolic image of the bridge as a “message from the underworld of the psyche…[a symbol] not decipherable in ego terms. Symbols are a way we perceive the multiplicity of nature’s animistic voices” (Rowland, 2012, p.158). What I am suggesting in the use of the word psyche is the totality of conscious and unconscious psychological life. These two worlds in suspension. What is the shape and color of grief? What is the song that is created in the midst of disruption? What is the creative potential?
Here the psyche is, (Appendix B; Goldman, 2020) both cultural and personal, opening to our darker natures, looking for direction, language, the adaptability of water and the solidity of stone. “We are always beginning, sometimes unconsciously, something, and getting over something else. This is the process of life” (Weishaus, 2004, p. 3).
In the time before waking, (Appendix C; Goldman, 2020) we reside in that liminal space between kairos (circular time) and kronos (linear time). In this haiku, time is symbolically represented by the transience of an apricot sunrise and the shock of the roosters crow!
This collection of nine haiku verses and companion images were created at a time of personal and cultural transformation. I find myself at a crossroads…a crossroads where ideas and expression meet. I have attempted to not only represent what I am looking at or experiencing as an observer but also to thoughtfully see. To contemplate the relationship between things and between things and ourselves. This is not simply the act of observation but rather that of imagination. “Here, as subtle as it is, is the difference between knowing and understanding, between knowing and believing, between being touched and remembering” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 29). I want to live in a world “where the wall between imagination and reality comes down and becomes a flexible boundary” (p. 243).
As William Rueckert (1996) wrote in Literature and Ecology, An Experiment in Ecocriticism, “…the function of poetry…is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle. We have only to lower our standard of dominating nature and to raise our standard of participating in it in order to make the reconciliation take place” (p.10).
We are living in a time of enormous planetary and cultural disruption. Seeking ways to find stability in the midst of this disruption as well as creating a map of moving forward into the unknown is at the root of this work.
A confronting truth,
white wing tips and outstretched neck
reclaiming the Self.
References
Bernstein, J. (2005). Living in the borderland: The evolution of consciousness and the challenge of healing trauma. New York, NY: Routledge.
Blyth, R.H. (1952). Haiku, in four volumes, vol.IV, autumn-winter. Tokyo, Japan: The Hokuseido Press.
Glotfelty, C. & Fromm, H. (1996). The ecocriticism reader: Landmarks in literary ecology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Haxton, B. (2001). Fragments, the collected wisdom of heraclitus. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam, Inc.
Hirshfield, J. (1997). Nine gates: Entering the mind of poetry. New York, NY: HarperCollinsPublishers.
Rosen, D., Weishaus, J. (2004). The healing spirit of haiku. Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Rowland, S. (2012). The ecocritical psyche: literature, evolutionary complexity, and jung. New York, NY: Routledge.
Shirane, H. (1998). The art of juxtaposition: cutting and joining. In Traces of dreams: Landscape, cultural memory and the poetry of Basho. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Whitman, W. (1855). Leaves of grass. Brooklyn, NY: self published.
. . . .
healing the split
“There are many ways to arrive, but each arrival, though it may announce itself as a novelty, is a stream of returning as a strand of remembrance that weaves the world together.” - C. Morse, We Shall Drink the New Wine
Two and a half years ago I embarked on my journey at Pacifica Graduate Institute. What began as an exploration of both the nurturing and thedevouring mother and an attempt to understand the grip this archetype held on me, became, with the accompaniment of my cohort and coursework, a deeper understanding of the unspoken nature of the unconscious psyche. In this paper, I will explore my personal evolution as it co-existed alongside a body of visual work developed over the past 8 months. I will also reflect on three courses taken during my tenure at Pacifica. It was in the container of these courses where I discovered new knowledge about myself contributing greatly to the generation of this body of work. Over these past months, my artistic practice became a kind of pilgrimage. And like all pilgrimages, an inward transformation is sometimes sought through external, physical movement resulting in an expanded sense of the self in relationship to the world.
Circumambulation
“The feet move, the mind wanders.” - G. Ehrlich, The Islands, the Universe, Home
There is a long history of writers and artists who offer perspective and validation that their creative exploration of landscape and psyche is enhanced through the practice of walking. Whether it is thought of as ritual or as a disciplined practice, walking creates a slow but steady evolution of a way of seeing oneself in relationship to the whole: what begins as personal cantake on universal significance. Contemporary writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit and the well-known land-based sculptors, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, are just a few of the artists who are drawn to the act of walking as a vital component of their creative practice.
The evolution of myself, as in the evolution of this body of work, has not been linear. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung (1965) wrote, “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.” (p. 196) In this statement, Jung suggested that to circumambulate means to look at the self and see it from many different angles. As I embody the act of circumambulation, I mean this in the most literal sense. On my meanderings of local trails and roadways, I often walk with purpose but with no destination. I have even developed a methodology of walking in circles as I begin a new creative project. I move. The mind moves as the body moves, and it is in the movement that I welcome psyche into a dance with the myriad of voices, images and experiences of my life. These all ultimately coalescing in this new iteration of an image that speaks to this particular moment in time.
What is unique about my use of walking as an integral component of this particular body of work is that I see these resulting image-diptychs with accompanying text as a form of Jungian Arts Based Research. Jungian Arts Based Research (JABR) provides an expanded framework for the work of art to deepen in its multiplicities of interpretation. New meaning and knowledge are created by extending artistic practice from psyche to material form and ultimately to a broader cultural significance.
My instinct has long been that when something in me grows restless, or the current structure of my life cannot expand enough to allow change to happen, I must move. Sometimes this means a geographic move of location, other times it is enough to physically move through a landscape. It was both of these impulses that compelled me to relocate to a nearby coastal island and begin a daily practice of walking. Mirroring my own experience of solitude in this adopted island community, the outside world was experiencing a global shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The request that all citizens around the world stay home has come to be known as sheltering in place. Having moved to this island home just a few months into the shut down, I was living my own self-abduction. Where I had intended the abduction of my teenage daughter to accompany me to this island home for her own continued healing, I instead found myself living on this landmass alone, where the edges were being defined and redefined daily. This became a time of deep personal reflection. What lay beyond the seas that surrounded me were the changing tides of myself, my country, and more broadly, of the world.
island bodies
“The most valuable thoughts which I entertain are anything but what I thought. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.” - H.D. Thoreau, Journals, March 1,1860
These handmade charcoal drawings, a series I have titled, island bodies, were initiated through the practice of active imagination. Active imagination was developed by C.G. Jung, “…to enhance and develop one’s relationship to unconscious material…intending the individual to take a receptive but active role in encountering and confronting various unconscious elements within the psyche” (Hopcke, 1999, p. 34). I deliberately chose to work with charcoal because of its organic and primitive mark making ancestry. There was an immediacy and intimacy to the material particularly in contrast to the separation from my experience in the camera made island landscapes. In the drawings, I embody the experience of making marks on paper, moving back and forth, a close up and a long view. I alternate this practice with my exploration on foot, photographing significant and not so significant moments within the landscape. Eventually these two bodies of work were paired into a series of eleven diptychs, each with an accompanying text. In bringing together these two disparate images, the original autonomy of each is shattered becoming a dissolution of the ego in the creation of new meaning. The uniting of these two opposites represents what Jung (1960) called, the transcendent function. In Volume 8 of Jung’s Collected Works he wrote,
The transcendent function arises from the union of conscious and unconscious contents…the confrontation of the two positions generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing…a movement out of the suspension between the opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation. (p. 90)
The transcendent function is at the core of Jung’s theory of individuation, a defining theory of depth psychology. The process of individuation is the psychological growth by which one is led towards the life one is meant to live.
Accompanying these paired images is a small body of text. The text is not meant to explain the images but instead to amplify their meaning through a poetic inquiry. It is in this new meaning that the psyche is brought into relationship with the mysteries of the self and the self in relationship to the collective. Here I intend a depth psychological definition of the self. “The self is when the ego is thrust aside,” as Jung (1969) wrote in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, “…and makes room for a supraordinate factor, the totality of a person, which consists of conscious and unconscious and consequently extends far beyond the ego” (p. 304). This place between the conscious and the unconscious is what I am exploring in the creation of this work. The prima materia, the primary material of the unconscious, became the image materialized and made visible in this series of paired images. These diptychs are my way of exploring my direct experience - the experience of my external landscape in relationship to the metaphorical landscape of the psyche. There is a synchronicity that arises in the pairing of these two images: “outer and inner events collide in significant ways that open us to perceive what Jung calls the unus mundus, a wholeness where matter and psyche are revealed to be but two aspects of the same reality” (Ulanov, p. 329). Jung believed that the infinite, psychic field of the unus mundus suggests that “the world itself has a soul and all phenomenon within it are ensouled” (Coppin & Nelson, p.120).
Symbolic Imagination
In Jung on Art, The Autonomy of the Creative Drive, Tjeu van den Berk (2005) examined Jung's perspective when he wrote, “The symbol is the major connecting factor between our consciousness and the unconscious.” (p. 45) They are projections of the contents of the unconscious. As symbols are often expressed in images, they are not necessarily rational but remain mysterious, suggesting meaning. van den Birk went on to quote Jung, “To be effective, a symbol must be by its very nature unassailable…the best expression of the prevailing world view, an unsurpassed container of meaning” (p. 56). Symbols become archetypal elements working in relationship with one another. Archetypes are experiences which have occurred across human history in all cultures and since primaeval times. These are repeating motifs that are inherited at birth and can be seen in myths, fairy tales, literature and in the arts - in our dreams and in our fantasies. Archetypes reveal themselves in images and in actions and are most often brought to consciousness through symbols. In the island bodies drawings, the circle is instinctively experienced as a symbol of wholeness, there being no beginning or ending. It is within this wholeness where a pattern of rebirth and renewal can occur. The island is often portrayed in creation myths as, “…split-off portions of consciousness, animated by psyche’s watery depths… [and as]…the beginnings of consciousness, small, vulnerable bits of earth fetched up from the bottom of the cosmic sea that are easily resubmerged” (ARAS, p. 124). The blackness of the charcoal drawing suggests, “…the terrors and the beauties of the underworld and its … precincts of healing and initiation” (ARAS, p. 658). In contrast, the luminosity of the white circle evolving from blackness refers back to the tension of the opposites. To the alchemists, whiteness was an essential aspect of the journey to the self. The second whitening, the albedo is a state of illumination as one moves towards individuation.
A Rhizomatic Reach
Near the end of my studies at Pacifica, in the course, Creative Influence Across the Humanities (HMC130), where study, creative practice, and psychic investigation seemed to collide. In the first charcoal drawing in the island bodies series, the drawing became an extension, an adventitious root of the long lineage of influences, the chorus of voices, where all texts, all works of art, are expressions of the past, present, and even future texts and/or works of art. “…we carry images of all those who came before us, and all those who exist alongside us. Our meanings are shifting and theirs, too, with ours” (A. Tetto, HMC130, 9/8/21). Through a deeper understanding of what I now know as JABR, I have begun to see the intersecting threads of the humanities and depth psychology as they have revealed themselves to me in my graduate coursework. I recognize the rhizomatic pattern of my influences and the possibilities for where this can lead.
In the course, The Healing Power of Creativity (HMC230) I had an experience of “rememorying,” a term used by Toni Morrison (2019) in her seminal book, Beloved. “Rememory as in recollecting and remembering…the family, the population of the past…the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting” (p. 21). This is a story I have always told myself: when I was nine years old, my bedroom had a small closet with sliding doors. I recall spending many hours there, in what I thought of as my private club, the ro tun da club. I have no recollection of why I called it the rotunda club but I clearly remember dividing the word between the syllables; “1. A building, or part of one, that is round in shape, and often has a dome (rounded roof) on top” (Cambridge Dictionary). Mostly I remember drawing there with a faint memory of laying on the floor looking up into the darkness. My closet taking on the temple-like radius of a blackened circle with the infinite depth of the universe. I believe this memory of my childhood is a foundational story, remembering this inner image as a temenos, a sacred container.
In The Genius Myth, Michael Meade (2016) wrote, “We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble…” (p. 96). Meade (2016) expanded on this as he suggested that our calling, or in his words, our genius, hides close to the wounds we suffer, and in this genius there is a dream trying to come to life. Was it here in this solitary refuge that I became drawn to the depths of the underworld? The underworld or the unconscious being a realm of souls and the place of psyche. The drawings I produced then and in the ensuing years since have all held in common an attraction to darkness and to what lays beyond and behind what we can see, what we can fully understand.
Abduction and Recovery
Dream ~ I am walking down a road with my daughter. We deliberately dismantle a “manhole” cover. Then we disassemble a flexible pipe, bring it up from underground, and let the gushing water run out the pipe and down the street. The cover accidentally falls back into the hole; I want to recover it, but the hole is far too narrow to reach inside. Suddenly my daughter crawls inside, down, underground and into the hole retrieving the cover. I notice two dry cigarettes tucked up under a pipe and she reaches for them before I can say anything. She doesn’t smoke them but consumes them, swallowing them up. Then just as effortlessly she hops back up and out of the hole.
This dream contains a number of archetypal symbols that parallel life-changing events that occurred in our family’s life over the past three years, compelling me to investigate further.
As I discovered in the course, The Expressive Power of the Archetypes (HMC140), I had been embodying the archetypal mother as witnessed in the classic Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. The mythic Demeter, the mother who holds the tension and paradox of the earth’s consciousness, fertility, and growth in the upper world as well as the strong pull of Persephone, drawn to the depths of the underworld. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is a collection of C. G. Jung’s essays on archetypal patterns in the human experience which include the archetypal myth of Demeter and Kore. The figure corresponding to Kore is both mother and daughter. Most often we are familiar with this myth as the story of Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone after her abduction by Hades, god of the underworld. Jung (1990) wrote,
Demeter and Kore [Persephone], mother and daughter, extend the feminine consciousness both upwards and downwards…[they] widen out the narrowly limited conscious mind bound in space and time, giving it intimations of a greater and more comprehensive personality which has a share in the eternal course of things. (p. 188) Here Jung suggested that every mother contains her daughter as daughter contains her mother, extending backwards and forwards, bridging generations across time thereby resulting in an escape from the isolation of the individual life and restored to the wholeness of an ancestral human lineage.
This seems to summarize the expansive quality of these past two and a half years of study and creative practice. What began as a memory or a mythology of a childhood story became that of a mother/daughter myth where the daughter’s underworld abduction and resulting initiation became my own. In The Wisdom of the Psyche, Ginette Paris (2010) wrote, “The psyche really is like a poem: it has evocative power…the field of depth psychology can now move back to the original goal, which is to evoke…to bring to mind a memory or feeling, especially from the past…” (p. 80).
In 1922, C. G. Jung delivered a speech in Zurich where he proclaimed that,
…the special significance of a true work of art resides in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of the creator….the forces which are operating in this creation…those are the archetypal forces, dwelling in the collective unconscious (p.71).
Image as Soul
In A Blue Fire, James Hillman (1989) said, “Stick to the image” (p. 50) he wrote, “This means not translating images into meanings, as though images were allegories or symbols…if there is a latent dimension to an image, it is its exhaustibility, it’s bottomlessness” (p. 50). Hillman did not believe we should limit an image with interpretation. I concur, as I believe that an image is experienced uniquely dependent upon an individual’s life story, “a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself…” (Hillman, p. 20). Island bodies could be considered images of emptiness, absence, and despair - a visual reflection of the kind of personal and social isolation that we are encountering as human beings living through this moment today. They could also be images of wholeness and connection showing the intersections inherently found between the human and other-than-human worlds.
Depth psychology supports this resistance of interpretation drawing one beneath the surface of things, pointing towards the impulse of the soul in which the image is rooted. We have all been living our own experience of island-ness surrounded by transformative and at times destructive seas. However, it is important to remember that the separateness of an island is really an illusion, as islands are ultimately, at their depths, rhizomatic and connected to the earth as we are all connected to one another. Living on this island, the island has become a temenos, holding the development of myself during a time of isolation and disruption. I believe the creative result of this body of work has the capacity for healing both personally and collectively as we have all been given the opportunity to shift our gaze from outside to inside during these unprecedented times. “And the end of our exploring…will be to arrive where we started…And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate” (Eliot, Little Gidding).
References
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a river sutra
I am thinking about water,
of the river as a sutra.
All rivers depict a story of the universe.
The river barely moves, cold and shallow,
sometimes only a thread breaking through hard soil.
Seemingly effortless and still.
I have the urge to lay back in these shallow streamlets and float,
the parched sun overhead.
Sand so high now and waters so shallow
that to drift would be impossible.
Like our memories, all inhabitants,
plant, animal and human have their consequence upon the river.
The river becoming a sort of map;
maps not of destinations but of directions and currents.
From times of antiquity the river has ben called a body of water,
the flow of the river being likened to the blood
circulating through the body.
Rivers transcend the mundane,
the sound of a river becoming a lamentation,
speaking of impermanence.
Constantly moving as in a prayer or chant.
Stands of cottonwood trees lining its’ edges
it comes in and out of view.
Closer inspection of the banks reveals a deliberate nest,
a tangle of woven and matted grasses and rivers sludge
or is it just nature’s waste brought up with the current
of last years fast moving spring river?
At the banks of ancient rivers rituals of cleansing and
redemption evolved.
The river acts as a recordkeeper of all peoples,
animals and birds who have traveled through,
Today I saw a black-crowned heron, mergansers, coots
a Kestrel, multitudes of gulls and migrating Canadian Geese.
My father’s ashes spread then settle and
find a home in water.
A friend tells me of Buddhist monks ‘stamping’ prayers on the river,
to move, whispering, downstream.
The subject of these photographs might be grief,
but certainly not despair, seeing the river as
both metaphor and revelation.
Rivers are much like our memories.
Sometimes wide and deep, roaring and fast,
sometimes only a faint trace cutting through our hearts.
A river is not so much a lamentation but a
hymn to what living demands.
Dawn and the trumpet of cranes. Lift off.
First in pairs and families of three.
Briefly seen through fog leaving their night time roosting place
on the river, and then descending into surrounding cornfields
to feast on last years dried corn.
The river is a mirror of migration.
Fossil records show that the sandhill crane has been traveling
through this corridor of eastern Nebraska for nine million years.
I pass another transient population,
homeless men sitting in solitude or in groups,
all drawn to the rivers edge.
Both birds and humans seem to be driftless
and purposeful at the same time.
What attracts them? Movement or freedom?
Perhaps an empathy that only water knows.
These days of drought have brought some parts of the river to a
standstill, where do the waters go?
Miles downstream they begin to seep up
through sands and burnt reeds.
I reach a pie shaped slice of land and
unceremoniously the Platte moves
east across the Iowa border to meet the Missouri river.
Like an endless stream of consiousness.
Water and breath forever changing, forever falling away.
(This text was written to accompany a series of photographs taken as I walked along the Platte River as she winds her way through Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska between May 22, 2001 and August 4, 2002)