Getting a second opinion from Jung on the Battle of the Giants

There is a commotion outside. I go to the window and see an army is encamped along the edge of a body of water where a battle is taking place between a giant turtle (the size of a dozen men) and a giant crocodile. I call to the others to come and see. When I turn back, I see that the army has saved the turtle, which is being transported to safer waters. They have constructed or opened a kind of raceway and the turtle is swimming between walls. Now I see that there are actually two giant turtles.
    I look out to the water again. Beyond military lines, the crocodile stands on a headland, tail raised like a scorpion, apparently triumphant for now. I understand that the conflict will be resumed. It's part of life. The role of the army is to ensure that neither party destroys the other.

I woke from this first dream of the night feeling both excited and satisfied. In the dream, I was an observer. I felt that I was being shown something of huge importance in life.
    I know both Turtle and Crocodile as members of my personal mythic bestiary. I have swum with sea turtles and I am from a country famous for crocodiles. I know that in life there are contests between opposing forces and attitudes that must continue if life itself is to go on.
    Instead of spending much time in self-analysis of the dream, I made a quick drawing and decided to ask Jung for a second opinion. Who better? I had already had it in mind to do my daily bibliomancy with Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a book of seminal importance in my life and the most personal and accessible of his works. However, when I reached into the Jung section in a glass-fronted bookcase in my personal library, the shelf elves had other ideas. Another volume in Jung’s Collected Works came flying off the shelf, striking me lightly on the chest.
     Naturally, I changed my ideas about where to look for guidance and took this flying book to my desk. Its title is Two Essays on Analytical Psychology which seemed to match the revelation of the two turtles in my dream rather nicely. The volume is a dual edition of two of his early essays, Volume VII in the Collected Works. I opened the book at random and read this:

"There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind...Repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible…Just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites." 

I saw that there was no need to invent a snapper to carry the essence of my dream. Jung had given me one. Life is born only of the spark of opposites.

    This little incident from this dreamer’s life is a practical example of how we can turn to a book to give us a second opinion on a dream. Our curiosity may of course take us far beyond the initial passage we find when we open a book at random. I found myself drawn, irresistibly, to-read both the essays in that volume of Jung, in which we find his mind devising and developing theories of aspect psychology, the shadow and the relations between the ego-self and the collective unconscious which were to become fundamental to his approach.

Drawing by RM

Pixel Pixies and Shelf Elves

Charles de Lint’s story “Pixel Pixies” in Tapping the Dream Tree (Tor) was inspired by a friend’s suggestion that spirits now live in the wires, even more than the trees, travel through the internet, take up residence in computers and “live on electricity and lord knows what else”.

In the story, a used bookstore owner finds her computer playing up. She can’t exit her browser, and can’t switch to another window – and can’t log off without losing important data she had been working on but has failed to save. When she tries switching to sites on the drop-down “Favorites” menus she is switched to totally unrelated sites. A striking fey woman comes in and suggests she should try turning her sweater inside out. What has she got to lose? The bookstore lady tries it, and the problem disappears. The fey lady says, “If you’re lucky, they’re still on the internet and didn’t follow you home.”

This sets us up for a wild, entertaining story in which mischievous, vandalizing pixies – who can appear either as tiny men or as dancing lights the size of “the mouth of a shot glass” – come spilling out of the computer screen. What is to be done? The fey lady – identified now as an “oak king’s daughter” – has the solution: the primal, pre-church version of Bell, Book and Candle. The ritual requires a book that has never been read – in this case, a book with uncut pages. The bookstore lady finds one in her locked cabinet of first editions. And it is:


The Trembling of the Veil by William Butler Yeats, number seventy-one of a thousand-copy edition privately printed by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd in 1922.

The uncut book is placed on the sidewalk and used to trap the pixies – who are finally driven back into the computer and flushed into cyberspace when the bookstore lady boots up.

Yeats observed (in the preface to a collection of fairy tales gathered by his friend Lady Gregory) that pixies and similar “wild creatures and green things” tend to “creep towards our light by little holes and crevices”. So why not the passage of a computer screen – or even an incoming email?

"Pixel Pixies" gave me delicious shivers when I first read it, because on that same night I had been writing about Yeats for my Dreamer's Book of the Dead and had decided to give the prologue to that book a title curiously similar to that of the uncut book in the story: "The Night When the Veil Thins." In my night study, I felt the workings of a shelf elf, more than that of pixel pixies.

Charles de Lint has gone on to write a larger-scale treatment of this theme in Spirits in the Wires, one of my favorites among his Newford novels, in which he has developed a Canadian mode of magical realism. But I am sure he has noticed that pixies keep up with human technology - when they are not ahead of it - so a title for today might be Spirits Go Wireless.

Shelf elves and printer's devils

Arthur Koestler spoke of the Library Angel - that bookish spirit that makes texts appear at just the right time. I wish to speak now of a lesser, but highly active, spirit of stacks that we may call the Shelf Elf. His number is larger than the Dewey system. He not only makes books turn up in unexpected ways; he can hide them or even make them disappear. He may have been at work in the strange behavior of files and papers described in my previous post ("Rule of Three").

-   He is often at play in my preferred bookshops, which tend to be quirky independents and havens of twice-sold tales. One of these shelf-elf-haunted establishments is just down the street from my home, which is a mixed blessing because in the course of a year a significant portion of this bookshop's stock migrates up the street into my house.

-  It was in this bookshop that I found the meaning of a funny dream word (chantepleure) in a book placed at eye level from my point of vision at the door, so I could not fail to see it, and was thereby drawn into trans-temporal intrigues involving a poet-prince of Orleans in whose name Joan of Arc went to war.

-  It was here, over the holidays, that I repaired with the feeling that there was something of Jorge Luis Borges that I urgently needed to read that day, Newly arrived, casually dropped on top of a short stack in the literature section, was an English translation of The Book of Sand which I naturally purchased. I opened this collection of Borges' later stories and was immediately engrossed in a tale ("The Other".) in which Borges meets a much younger self on a bench. Borges tells his younger self what life will bring him over the forty years that divide them. The young Borges, who believes he is dreaming, will forget the information he has received from his older self, letting it fade like a dream. Thjs tale weaves together two of my favorite themes, the many varieties of the double and the relativity of time, and I was grateful to the shelf elf that put it in front of me.

-   The shelf elf has allies. One of them is the printer's devil, a term that I am using here in a different sense from what it meant for the young Sam Clemens, laboring over trays of type in print shops in Hannibal, Missouri or Keokuk, Iowa, before he became Mark Twain.

-

Last weekend, I detected fresh collusion between the shelf elf and the printer's devil. I had decided to return to my studies of the history and mythology of the Baltic, in preparation for new adventures in dream archeology in Lithuania in March. Settled in my favorite reading chair, I opened the Penguin edition of a book called The Northern Crusades, by Eric Christiansen. I had been reliably informed that this is the only accessible book in English on the last crusades authorized by the Vatican, which were directed not against Muslims, but against European pagans, in Lithuania and neighboring areas.

-   When I opened the cover, I found myself looking at one of those standard Penguin author bios that are printed at the front, not the back, of their editions. The odd thing was that this micro-biography was not of Christiansen but of Charlotte Bronte.

-

Mystified, I turned quickly to the title page, and read:

-Charlotte Bronte
THE PROFESSOR
-

I kept turning pages. Next came a scholarly essay on Charlotte Bronte's least-known (and by the admission of the scholar, least memorable) novel, followed by the author's own preface and the first pages of The Professor itself. The text of The Professor stops in midsentence at the bottom of page 48, but is continued quite grammatically by the text at the top of page 23 of The Northern Crusades so we read "My brother was/between kinship groups". From here until the end of the book, we are off into the narrative of unholy wars fought under the sign of the cross.

-   This is not the first time the the production department of a publishing house has screwed up. Just a coincidence, you say? Certainly coincidence, but the kind that feels both meaningful and personal. The title of Charlotte Bronte's novel spoke to me. My middle daughter, now a professor, was with us for Christmas. I myself am now a professor again - a visiting professor for the School of Consciousness Studies at John F. Kennedy University in California, where I'll teach a class on "Synchronicity: When the Universe Gets Personal".

-    As I read the excellent introduction to the Bronte by Heather Glen (now that sounds like a fine Scots name) my interest quickened. I learned that even after her novel Jane Eyre became a bestseller, Charlotte Bronte could not get The Professor published; it came out posthumously. So there's a story about a famous author's struggle to bring something to the public she believes in but the publishers don't "get". That speaks to metoo

-- Heather Glen discusses The Professor as a fictional cousin of the self-help books coming into vogue in England in the mid-19th century. The big bestseller in this emerging genre, that gave the genre its name, was Self-Help (1859) whose author had the wondrous name of Samuel Smiles and had been encouraged by previous publications in a series titled with equal felicity the Library of Entertaining Knowledge. This again piqued my interest; one of the new books I have in the works will probably be published under the "self-help" rubric, which I had previously believed to be an American invention.

-   Due diligence. I went back to the magic bookshop and asked if they had a copy of The Professor. They did. I carried home the old 1900 Harper & Row edition, its pages still uncut, and sat in my reading chair, knife in hand, slicing my way through. The first hundred pages gripped me in their account of tight-laced, caste-bound English society, and a young man setting off to make his own way as an English language teacher in Brussels. After that, the novel becomes dull and motionless, offensive in the chauvinist opinions of its narrator on the superiority of the English. Charlotte's male alter ego, whose preposterous name ("Crimsworth") is rendered even more so in the accents of Brussels ("Creemsvort") is notably prejudiced against the Flemish, and in this, no doubt, we may read something of Ms. Bronte's own disappointments as a teacher at a pensionnat in Brussels.

-    If there's a message here, it's not in the full text of The Professor but rather, I suspect, in the theme of two books bound in one set of covers. When we leave The Professor in the two-headed Penguin, we are in the mind of a young Englisman on a mill-owner's estate in the early 19th century. Then we are flung at once - in the second half of a sentence - into the situation of a king of Sweden in the high Middle Ages, facing jeers and stones from a violent and unruly assembly. Catapulted from one life into another by a printer's devil. Borges, knowing the magic and the deviltry of words on a page, as well as the inconstancy of time, would have enjoyed this.