New Moon (66 page)

It made sense, but I was still faithful to Dr. Fabian. Wary of anti-psychoanalytic detractors. I found ample excuses not to explore a different take. After all what did Egyptian symbols have to do with my own unconscious? Now in the autumn of my awakening and discontent, an African detour was precisely what I craved.

In New York I bought two volumes,
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
and
Symbols of Transformation.
I started with
Archetypes’
color plates of mandalas, a patient’s representations of her inner world. In them I recognized some of Chuck’s motifs of tarot divination but transposed into a psychoanalytic context. Here were the Magician, the Chariot, and the Star, operating as preconscious personal symbols, yet projected onto a mytho-historical canvas.

Beneath familiar biographical motifs were layers of primordial forms and shapes, not limited to our experiences, even to our lifetimes. Jung dubbed this “the collective unconscious” to distinguish it from the mere subliminal mind of our egos. It contained primal material given shape by archetypes—transpersonal elements of the universe, the planet, and of course the human psyche. These transmitted certain shapes, many of which were symmetrical or geometric and entrained by archaic imagery from the Earth’s biological and cultural evolution. Their patterns broke through spontaneously as characters and themes in fairy tales, myths, and dreams, and were present subconsciously in the texts of early alchemists and astronomers, giving psychic as well as material form to minerals and constellations. Archetypal symbols were repeated in unbroken chains from Babylonian zodiacs and designs in Mediaeval European stained-glass windows to pictographs in Navaho sand-paintings and the integers of mathematics and particles of modern physics.

In a way I couldn’t have foreseen, the symbolic system into which Fabian had initiated me was primeval and vast in all directions. For Jung, psychoanalysis was not just a roll call of traumas or a set of protocols for treating neurotic symptoms; it didn’t epitomize bedwetting or other behavioral malfeasances; it was an excavation of the soul’s lost autobiography. Not only do we suppress, as Freud assayed, our instinctual drives—forbidden wishes and desires—we deny our genealogy in a fathomless universe, our connection to the
psychophysical reality of Nature.

Each of us attempts to restore this link, to give form to Psyche’s unconscious narrative. Through everyday acts we animate a saga Jung called individuation—an assimilation of our ordinary experiences into myth-like dramas with ontological, even theogonic implications. Enhancing that process should be the
true
goal of therapy.

Had Fabian known this? And if he approved of Jung’s primordial representations, why had he not applied a complex like the Shadow to my metastasis of the dungeon stairs or invoked a supernatural taboo-smasher like the Trickster or Clown to embrace my chimerical pranks? That would have been more in keeping with their augury and scope: the god Pan waking from his nap with a start and, not knowing where he was, giving such a startled shout that it stampeded the flocks.

Instead he aggrandized a minor social rift, my parents’ divorce; he must have been a loyal Freudian through and through.

Reading Jung was like drinking from the pebbled fountain in Central Park, quenching an old thirst. His texts reclaimed the world of Freudian symbolism as if I were a wide-eyed whelp back in a magician’s chamber, about to be shown the floating veil over the world but this time at an exponential scale.

Jung projected elementary symbols through a hierarchy of
a priori
meanings that had been dormant in them all along. The clue in the embers was the glyph in the papyrus, the rune in mosque, the angel in the stained-glass window, the Corn Mother in the sand-matrix.

Fabian and I never took the transformation of signs or its undercurrent of profundity into what it felt like or portended. A sacred kaleidoscope intimated throughout our five-year exegesis was never
even addressed

In
Symbols of Transformation
Jung analyzed journeys of rebirth from New Guinea to old Cambodia, from the sages of India and Rome to the Tlingit natives of Alaska. As I worked my way through “The Hymn of Creation,” “The Song of the Moth,” and “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,” I began to understand my earliest panics differently. I had been involved in a primitive form of magical conversion, the same operation as shamans and alchemists, though at a level appropriate for a child.

Jackal-headed Anubis bending over a mummy, the sun pierced by the teeth of an alchemical lion and dripping blood—these were ciphers, fused layers of overarching meanings that transcended and encompassed their own images. They weren’t the sort of historiographic deconstruction we did freshman year either—they were an iconography
preceding history
.

I had been drawing on such hidden archetypes, individuating through them. They had guided me into publishing the
Chirp
during Color War. They had chanted through Buddy Holly and Dion & the Belmonts. They led me to the tarot, then to Jung himself. Even baseball had been an act of individuation—the negative charge of 1960 World Series converted through Melville’s
Whale
and the Kalin Twins singing “Forget Me Not” into my first pages for Mr. Ervin.

There
was
an exogenous intelligence and it was trying to provide me with a vehicle more germinal and lasting than a saucer, though it owed a boy a saucer too, to get him wending homeward via unknown stars.

The voice on the radio had posed a threat to my initial phase of consciousness. The sheer depth of the universe and our existence in it is terrifying, especially if encountered too young, if forced upon a child’s unshaped psyche by a lesion in its vicinity. Consciousness cannot handle premature revelations without fissuring and coming asunder. An ego formed under these circumstances is at continual risk of obliteration from an immanent source that feels both extrinsically real and to be emerging from
its own unconscious.
That’s why there seems no escape.

The unformed ghosts at my window, the custodians of the
dungeon stairs were not remorseless antagonists and tormentors, they were symbols of transformation right from Jung’s logos, fugitives perhaps from my mother’s failed integration. And their abominations provided the precise energies needed for their transubstantiation.

The universe creates anathemas—as brutal and devious, malign and convincing, as possible—in order to fashion a pathway for angels. Without hell realms, there would be no ground for salvation, no cobble for creatures like us to tread a cosmos, no way to expiate karma. Our demons hold the seeds of transformation and metamorphosis
before any conscious transmutation has been attempted.
That is why they are so scary, so harsh and cruel—because they’re as seminal as they are unadulterated.

They stalk and terrify
because they have nowhere else to go.
Where else would (or could) the universe store such ogres? Where else would it harbor its germinal source-design? How else might it cipher and camouflage its own peaceable kingdom from too many unfinished monstrosities on the prowl, each with a blind salacity to sodomize, desecrate, and ravage heartlessly from its own unexplored shadow? It had to house them somewhere, for they are part of Creation, tossed in the same initiatory wave so that we tumble in each other’s goop.

We are in the diaspora, on the brink, in the wet sheets, together; we require each other to complete our missions and meanings.

I had long considered the Gorgon’s stare-down absolute, an imposition of her will for which there was no reasonable response but terror. When I sensed her presence, in my mother or the voice on the radio, I ran amok like a chicken without a head. In Jung I found ambiguity, even a wink. The demons were not malefically fixed; each had bottomless potential for transmutation. Each implacable gaze, each terrible agenda had another charge, a different interpretation entirely, not just in my psyche
but in the universe at large.
Even Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound at the dungeon stairs, could become a friendly mutt. But he wasn’t going to do it on his own.
I had to convert him.

I am articulating knowledge that it took me decades to absorb, digest, and find language for, but it began that October as I rode the esoteric shock waves of my panic while absorbing the possibility
that Lindy might be lost forever.

During that melancholy autumn of ’64 I intuited a new fortune for myself and for Creation. It wasn’t just a hungering darkness or hopeless wait for Godot that led, if not to atomic war, then a Malone-like death. We weren’t doomed. We were on a more enigmatic and wilder and more abiding journey. The
entire shebang
was up for grabs. We could reclaim it, maybe even liberate it, though, from its present incomplete manifestation and the sheer depth of the archetypes, the road ahead was long and zigzag and at a scale that dwarfed all of history.

Dream interpretation and science fiction gave me a jump-start in childhood. Tarot and writing took it to the next level. Then Jung extended permission and possibility, melding Yeats, Faulkner, and Freud with the greater trumps. He provided a way to integrate my traumas and inhabit my own ragged life. He snapped my vestigial trance of outer-space melodramas with their unstated burden that I had to daydream planets to get myself into outer space. The universe does not require rockets or aliens to take us to the stars. Its cosmic realms are astral and intrinsic; they belong to us by birth.

Back at P.S. 6 I seemingly made up a spaceship and interstellar landscapes whole-cloth from nothing. But not so—the confabulations of a child contain archetypes too, symbols already in circulation. There is no
tabula rasa
in the psyche.

When I daydreamed escapades in grade school it was more than a maudlin yearning for connection and self-importance, it was an expression of an internal depth and connection that I could evince no other way. It was my attempt to stay on the road to Oz, keep faith with the Tinman and Lion, instead of bowing to the stark secular regimes offered by my family, Miss Tighe, and Bill-Dave. I maintained a child’s version of ancestral spirits in the only form available at the time. I stubbornly held to it, not knowing what it was, only that I experienced its hypnotic power. These were all acts of individuation.

Jung conferred his absolute credential as a psychiatrist at a time when Freudians were still my authority figures and priests. Sixteen
years later while studying dreams in San Francisco with Charles Poncé, a renegade seer in the Jungian lineage, I brought him the dream of a chemistry set:

“You know what this is,” I remarked at once, “it’s a version of the first dream that Dr. Fabian interpreted for me. Now I’m going back to him not
with
a dream but
in
the dream. His office has become part of the dream. Back then it was an incident involving a chemistry set. Now it’s sizzling rice soup.”

Charles knew my original dream as well as Fabian’s interpretation, so he sailed right into a reinterpretation:

“You dreamed once of a chemistry set that spilled. You brought that dream to a doctor who told you that the substance in the test tube was urine, that you were dreaming of wetting your pants. I think this can all be viewed another way. You brought your first harvest of symbols to a wizard. He recognized them as symbols. He said, ‘What is happening in this dream stands for something else. It is not a chemistry set. It is an act of peeing.’ He also said, ‘Another meaning is speaking through you.’ He gave you a gift and initiation of symbols, but then he limited their meaning to a representation of the asocial act of wetting, mere household sabotage. Like your mother he grasped only the aspect of your wetting associated with misbehavior. He failed to recognize the mercurial waters, which you now bring back to him thirty-five years later to remind him that his earlier analysis was lacking but that he gave you the crucible of the symbol by which to complete it. You are repaying him for what he practiced instinctively, offering him an essence he passed
on unconsciously to you.”

“So I am dreaming now in order to change the dream, the therapy then.”

“You are dreaming the same dream in order to change
an authorized interpretation of it that you have been carrying around your whole life,
and to fulfill your half of an ancient bargain made between a rabbi and a child.

“Back then you dreamed of mercurial waters too, but Dr. Fabian, again like your mother, could see only a wet bed. He could explain your wetting only as a form of rebellion, of primitive consciousness. You really came to a magus with a primordial dream of burning waters, of consciousness stirring to be born. He told you the burning waters were urine. But you were telling him, ‘No, they are the seeds of a sorcerer.’ He couldn’t see that. He couldn’t see you as an alchemist longing to get training, to receive his baptism, to learn to transmute. He saw a child needing toilet training, symbol containment. So now you want to show him the real dream in a way that can’t be missed. You participate in his
own
individuation even though he is no longer alive.”

“So even then it was an alchemical dream,” I exclaimed, “because Dr. Fabian’s real interpretation was not that the chemical was urine but that
it was a symbol at all,
that it stood for something else—anything else. Before I brought him my dream I had dreamed unknowingly, as a child dreams, never thinking of my sleep journeys as transmissions or texts, as anything to decipher. His act of asking me to bring him a dream to interpret changed the way I thought of my dreaming and my life, it changed everything. Then my unconscious dreamed alchemically, and it came out as a toy chemistry set. We never had a chemistry set—our mother wouldn’t have allowed poisons in the house—but we did have dangerous wood-burning tools that gave off a chemical smell, that we were told to keep away from moisture; you know, electricity and water. And its coils sizzled toxically one time when we disobeyed. I apparently turned them into a chemistry set, and Dr. Fabian converted the chemistry set into an alchemical one by turning its secret potion into urine, something much closer then to my heart.”