Notes from a Reading Life: Wendy Doniger's Implied Spider

"When Kevin Costner wanted to learn an Indian dialect for his film Dances with Wolves, he didn't realize that there were different grammatical forms for men and women; he learned the language from a woman, and hence, apparently unknowingly, throughout the film referred to himself as 'she' and 'her'."

This delightful anecdote in Wendy Doniger's book The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth reminded me of my first attempts to learn the Mohawk language on and off reservations. In Mohawk the primary nouns and pronouns are feminine. So Okwari is Bear but in English it is also she-bear. If you want to specify you are talking about a male bear you must add a prefix and say Rokwari.

Doniger's Kostner anecdote comes in a discussion of how women's voices have been suppressed in the literature of many cultures. Throughout Doniger displays the fruits of her omnivorous reading and proves herself a worthy successor to Mircea Eliade as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Myths are her passion but she declines to give any fixed definition of the word "myth". You can catch her on the fly, however, saying things like this:

"A myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it."

And this:

"Myths from other people's cultures often provide us with useful metaphors that are more refreshing than our own."

I strongly endorse the last statement. Doniger gives an example of what it has meant to her in another provocvative book, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Here she describes how she found her “seed text”, bija mantra, in the story of an Indian goddess, Saranyu. This goddess, little-known in the West, cloned herself in order to get away from a husband she detested, leaving a compliant Hindu version of a Stepford Wife at home while she ranged free as a wild mare. This story kept after Doniger for decades, prompting her to reach deeper and deeper into its well. Whenever she heard it, she would say, “That’s the story of my life.”

I weave  myths from every culture accessible to me into my courses, refreshing old stories as they refresh us. To touch our lives a myth must come vitally alive in our imaginations and our experience of the world. 

 

Subtle Bodies and Astral Sex in Killing Commendatore

 

Notes from a Reading Life

"An image of a color I should add came to me. The idea sprang up suddenly, all on its own. The color was like that of a tree with its green leaves dully dyed by rain. I mixed several colors together and created what I wanted on my palette..I was simply following ideas that sprang up naturally inside me, with no plan or goal. Like a child, not watching his step, chasing some unusual butterfly fluttering across a field."

This is how Haruki Murakami captures the moment a burned-out artist gets in the zone in his novel Killing Commendatore. While the book title might suggest a mob movie, it is the name of a painting inspired by a figure in Mozart's "Don Giovanni".

Amomg its many gifts and surprises Killing Commendatore gives us a wildly interesting perspective on the nature and travels of subtle energy bodies. It also dramatizes processes of materialization by which entities from realms beyond human perception can take up residence in  forms created by humans.

I thrilled to this observation by Menshiki the son of a great Japanese artist: "There's a point in everybody's life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes you have to grab it by the tail. Grab it hard and never let it go. There are some people who are able to, and others who can't."

The action of the novel gets under way when a thirty-something commercial portrait artist leaves a broken marriage and an uncreative life to live in borrowed space, the mountain house of a famous artist who is now in a nursing home with dementia. He discovers a previously unknown painting by the artist hidden in the attic and tightly wrapped. Inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it depicts the stabbing of The Commendatore with amazing vividness, adding a figure sticking his long head out of a hole to observe.

The discovery of the picture, and a little grey horned owl in the attic, triggers a strange series of events. A bell-like sound from the woods behind the house before 3 am every night leads to major excavation -organized by the mysterious rich man in a white palace on a peak across the valley – that opens a pit with slick, unclimbable walls nine feet deep.This leads the narrator to recall a classic horror story of a Buddhist monk who had himself buried alive, ringing a  bronze bell to indicate he was still there until he wasn’t (but something else now walked the earth in his semblance).There is an old bronze bell in the pit. Who or what was buried here and why were all those stones and boards placed to hold it captive?

The question is enlarged rather than answered when a two-foot high character, the spitting image of The Commendatore in the painting, starts appearing to the narrator.

Late in the novel there is an astonishing description of the protagonist having astral sex with his estranged wife, flying from his eyrie on a mountain to her bedroom in Tokyo. It’s so real that he worries that he raped her while she was asleep. Nine months later she has a baby for which there is no physical father in ordinary reality since she had stopped having sex with her boyfriend.

A Limbo of Unfulfilled Creative Spirits

Notes from a Reading Life

"You are awakening the little man," the Gypsy queen announces to Simon Darcourt, the professor-priest. He fears she is referring to his neglected male organ but soon we learn that the little man is E.T.A. Hoffmann. The deceased composer and storyteller has been roused from his torpor in a Limbo of unfulfilled creative spirits by a plan to complete his unfinished opera "Arthur of Britain".

I am rereading Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, the final book in The Cornish Trilogy. It makes me laugh and tremble and shiver with excitement, sometimes in the space of one paragraph.

In the previous novel in the trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone, Davies gave us a daimon reviewing the life dramas of a character he is supervising with the Angel of Biography, the Lesser Zadkiel. They are seated comfortably in the wings as the play goes on. Simon Darcourt, a continuining and simpatico charcater throughout the trilogy, can't eavesdrop on their conversation but intuits how they operate:

“Of course you know what Hesiod calls daimons: spirits of the Golden Age, who act as guardians to mortals. Not tedious manifestations of the moral conscience, like Guardian Angels, always pulling for Sunday-school rightness and goodness. No, manifestations of the artistic conscience, who supply you with extra energy when it is needed, and tip you off when things aren't going as they should. Not wedded to what Christians think of as what is right, but to what is your destiny. Your joker in the pack."

In The Lyre of Orpheus. Robertson scares us with a vision of what happenss to creative spirits that won't give their best work. Here's how the dead Hoffmann describes his current situation:

"I find myself now in Limbo, in that part of it reserved for those artists and musicians and writers who never fully realized themselves, who never quite came to the boil, so to speak. Limbo: not the worst of hereafter, for it is free of the chains of space and time, and permits its denizens a great deal of versatility and, shall I say it, some posthumous influence? Still, not to be too delicate about it, Limbo is a bore."

He confesses, "We never really did our best and that is a sin of a special kind".

Yet there is hope of release. When someone among the living - even the dullest academic plodder - takes an interest in the work of an unfulfilled creator, that stirs things up. The creative spirit in Limbo may now seek to join forces with the person who is reviving or enlarging his work. So Hoffmann now plans to "stand at the shoulder" of Schnack, the feral, dirty young musical prodigy who wants to complete his opera (and has the budget for it) "and push her in the right direction, so far as I can."

In a conversation about The Lyre of Orpheus for The Camelot Project,  Robertson Davies said, "I write novels that I hope will be interesting just as stories, but they also have implications and byways which I think would interest people who have more information. That may conceivably lead them to form conclusions about the persistence of myth in what we are pleased to call real life. I get awfully tired of people who talk about real life as though it had no relation to the life of the imagination and the life of legends and myth. They would do better to look again, though the trouble is they don't know enough in order to know where to look."

Hoffmann's Arthurian opera is fiction but the Arthurian triangle plays out in the novel. The idea that secret working minds can reach to each other across death is no fiction to me. Yeats spoke of it as the "mingling of minds". Imagine that.

Art:  Léon Spilliaert, The Silhouette of the Artist (1907),. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent. 

Notes from a Reading Life: Salute to Pat Controy

I love to read about writers reading. I devoured The Road to Xanadu, an immense scholarly study of Coleridge's vast literary diet on his way to delivering "Kubla Khan". I delight in Jorge Luis Borges' accounts of his passionate lifelong love affair with books, and in the bookish essays that stud Mircea Eiade's journals and autobiographies. 

Pat Conroy's memoir My Reading Life has prompted me to publish more of my adventures in reading and how they spill into my experience or the world, and the roads I travel in dreams. Listen to Pat Conroy:

 "Writers of the world, if you've got a story, I want to hear it. I promise it will follow me to my last breath. You will hearten me and brace me up for the hard days as they enter my life on the prowl. I reach for a story to save my own life."

Conroy's word magic never falters as he gives us his memoir of his life as a reader. He made it his practice to read at least 200 pages a day. "Reading," he insists, "is the most rewarding form of exile and the necessary discipline for a novelist who wants to get better."

Shifting to his own fiction, he declares, "I do not record the world exactly as it comes to me but transform it by making it pass through a prism of fabulous stories I have collected on the way."

Reading was always his approach run to those wild day-nights when he wrote his heart out, completing The Great Santini by writing in a Georgia cabin for 24 hours straight. "The idea of a novel should stir your blood, and you should rise to it like a lion lifting up at the smell of an impala."

Yes.

Yes.

June 3, 2021

Thomas Wolfe's Magic Apple

I have been using A Reading Life for morning bibliomancy. I opened it at random today and found this:

"Why'd you want me to eat this apple, Mr Norris?" Mr Norris drove fast along the curves of the mountain road, pausing, selecting his words with care. "It's high time, boy, that you learned that there is a relationship between life and art."

Mr Norris was Conroy's English teacher. He had introduced Conroy to Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel when he was 16 and the boy had fallen in love with his first literary hero. They had just been to visit the boarding house in Asheville, owned by Wolfe's mother, where Thomas had grown up and watched his brother die. Mr Norris had plucked an apple for Conroy from Thomas' favorite tree.

Now that is a teacher!

Conroy writes: "Wolfe hovers over a blank page like God dreaming of paradise. With every word he writes he tries to give you a complete and autonomous world. Because he cannot do otherwise, Wolfe takes you high up into the mountains, past the tree line, to those crests and snowy peaks of the highest points of the earth. He stammers, he murmurs, he hunts for the right words, and words spill out of his pockets and cuffs and shirtsleeves as he tries to awaken us from the dream of our own barely lived-in lives."

That magic apple delivered some juice. Follow the sweetness and it could lead you back to Thomas Wolfe, writing in Look Homeward , Angel

“And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?”

How the dead look younger after they die

In most dreams, the deceased appear to be living, and very often the dreamer is unaware that the person he or she encounters is “dead” until after waking. The reason is that the deceased are indeed alive, though no longer in the physical realm.

    The dead may appear as the dreamer remembers them from their last days of physical life, especially in the first dream encounters.

    Over time, it is quite common for the departed to alter their appearance, to shrug off signs of age and bodily ailments, and to present themselves as healthy and attractive. People who died in later years frequently reappear looking around 30 years old. In the west of Ireland and in Scotland, it is widely believed among country folk that the departed grow upwards or downwards in their apparent age until they look 30 years old. Lady Gregory wrote about this memorably in her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland.    After my mother's death, she revised her appearance a number of times until she appeared to me as a lovely young woman on a beach, seemingly about 29 years old.
    A woman in one of my workshops wanted to know why her father continued to look aged, bent and ill in her dreams. I suggested that she should ask him directly. She made it her intention to reenter the most recent of her dreams of her dead father, and found herself with him right away. His appearance began to shimmer. She saw him transforming into a handsome young man dressed for a night out. She asked him why it had taken him so long to change. "You were the one who needed time," he told her, hugging her tight. "I didn't think you would recognize me if I changed faster than you could handle."

    The departed may change their appearance and personal style even more radically, as they evolve in understanding and come to realize that they are now living in energy bodies that are quite malleable.   

    Jung dreamed of the two central women in his life, his wife and his “junior wife” and life companion Toni Wolff, after their deaths. Toni appeared looking much taller and younger than she had been when she died, and exceedingly beautiful, wearing a lovely multi-colored dress in which the wonderful blue of the kingfisher was the dominant hue.
    After Emma’s death, Jung saw her in a vivid dream in which she appeared in her prime, “perhaps about thirty” but with a depth of wisdom beyond youth or age. Jung concluded that his wife’s dream persona was “a portrait she had made or commissioned” for him. “It contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three years of marriage, and the end of her life also. Face to face with such wholeness one remains speechless.”

In one of my own dream excursions this week, I spent good times in a pleasant village of the dead where everyone looked 30ish apart from the elder of the group, who looked to be a healthy 40 years old, less than half his age when he left his physical body. He has been a dear friend, before and after his death, and I was intrigued to find him presiding over an agreeable consensual afterlife situation for educated, upper crust Brits who delight in games of many kinds, from croquet to riddling and verbal competition. It became clear that some people here are rehearsing for their next transition on the many roads of the interlife.
   

Photo: Jung with Emma (née Rauschenbach)

Tracking the Dream Traveler

Sometimes, lying in the drifty state near sleep, I sense that as I grow drowsy, a second self, back to back with me on the bed, is stirring awake, ready to prowl. I call him the Traveler.
    I can only keep up with him by becoming him. When I come home from our travels, I am not quite myself and no longer him. When we part company, I am left to pore over scraps of memory like the things I find in my pockets and on my phone after a regular plane trip: a boarding pass, a bus ticket, a foreign banknote, a scribbled love note, random photos of far-away cities and beaches and train stations.
    I track the Traveler by recording his exploits – the ones I manage to catch – in my journal. In one report he seems to be very like my present self, just two days ahead of me, on my present probable event track. Sometimes he is much further ahead, or on a different – mildly or radically – event track, or he is in another body in another time or another world.
     When I am the Traveler the journey often begins at a certain threshold, a gap between the worlds, in a twilight of the mind. I may find myself floating upwards. I roll over and as I do so I feel something pulling loose from my physical body. Lights flash at the top of my head and I find myself being drawn up into a cone of light, like a pyramid with an opening at the top. There are days when, flat on my back under a tree, I fall upwards into the bowl of the sky, like Rumi. There are nights when I feel I am about to blast off like a rocket, or be blown from the mouth of a cannon, through circles of red within black. Or I find myself stripping off, shedding the body like a snake skin, dropping it like an old overcoat. When the travels begin, I often find myself looking at a geometric pattern. It may be a glowing energy grid. It may resemble the weave of a carpet, or the strands of a net.

     This has been going on for as long as I can remember. You might say I got a jump start by being thrown out of my body and into other worlds at an early age. At age 3 and again at age 9 I was pronounced clinically dead in hospitals during crises of illness. Today we talk about near-death experiences but I still think of this as dying and coming back, which is what Australian doctors told my parents I had done. During one of these experiences, during a few minutes under a surgeon’s knife, I seemed to live a whole lifetime with a different people in another world. So I have always understood that there are worlds beyond the physical world that are no less real – and possibly more real – and that we can travel there by shifting consciousness.

For many adventures in dream travel, see my book Mysterious Realities:Tales of a Dream Traveler in the Imaginal Realm. 

Art: "Flying into the Blue" by Peter Sis.

Night Gardens of Forking Paths

 

I try not to rush to organize my dream memories as a linear narrative. I love stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. However, I am also aware that in dreaming we may shift from one scene - or one world - to another. Dreams may be nested inside each other, or playing on many screens at the same time. Dreaming, we can act and observe simultaneously in multiple realities on multiple tracks.

My dreams from the last cycle of sleep overnight remind me of Borges' story “the Garden of Forking Paths”. Riffing on the detective genre, Borges anticipates the Many Worlds hypothesis in physics with his account of a legendary unfinished Chinese novel whose plotline is quite different from most narratives. In fiction, as in ordinary life, a character typically comes to a point of decision, makes a choice, and then the paths not taken fade away. In Borges’ fiction within a fiction, all possible outcomes of an event are manifested simultaneously, opening different event tracks. The proliferation of possibilities is enacted again and again along each track. The constantly-diverging paths may converge again, as the result of new circumstances.

In the Borges story, the stakes include life or death and vital wartime intelligence. My brief report from a dream excursion last night involves small decisions without scary consequences. I find it entertaining as a dream introduction to the forking paths of the Many Worlds.

Four Tracks to Prague

I deliver a wildly popular lecture to a big crowd in a castle near Prague. In the forecourt afterwards, I notice there are hundreds of Czech coins on the ground. I bend down, pick up a 20 korun piece, and present it to a young woman. She is embarrassed, pointing out that the coins were left as an offering. I tell her she can  use the 20 crowns (about $1) to make an offering in support of something she wants to manifest in her own life.  There is a wonderful sense of abundance, service and simplicity.

After many hugs with people from the group, I am alone and need to find my way from the castle to a hotel near the city center.

I explore at least four options. Though they are laid out here as a sequence, I think I travel on all four tracks simultaneously in the spacious reality of dreaming.

1. I follow the crowd from my lecture. I see lots of people walking to the city center along railroad tracks. I walk parallel to them, across the tracks. Then

2. I am on a train. A laughing girl puts a hat on my head that isn’t mine as we come to a station. I retrieve my hat from an overhead rack. It is soft tweed like an Irish walking hat. Someone has removed the leather band. When I try it on, the hat is too small for me and the crown has changed shape. It now looks like the "topper" on a cartoon leprechaun. I forget the hat because now

3. I am walking down the hill from the castle to a pleasant shopping district. I meet an elegant lady in furs from Vienna. She is sampling several fine wines and may be a dealer. She tells me, "I am here for the wine". We discuss sharing a taxi. Before this happens

4. I manage to hail a cab in a different neighborhood Solo again, I wait for the driver to make room for my packages. The taxi morphs into an armored military vehicle bristling with weapons. The soldiers are friendly and soon we are speeding along the highway towards Prague.

Feelings:  Entertained. Glad to have some new material relevant to one of my favorite themes: living consciously in the multidimensional universe.

Reality check: I was scheduled to lead a retreat in northern Bohemia this week, before the pandemic forced me to put a hold on in-person workshops and international air travel. I have taught and traveled in the Czech Republic many times over the past decade. Transit issues involving the Czech Republic are not an exotic element in my dreams.

I have taught and traveled in Ireland, have some Irish ancestry and am not a stranger to leprechauns.

I like good wines but not as much as the lady from Vienna, known only to me in the dream.

I love trains, though I rarely ride them these days. I am alive to the symbolic resonance of a train (as in training) and a track (as in line to a certain destination) in dreams.

The switch to a military vehicle in #4 may reflect security concerns in relation to literal travel.

My dream travel agent, also no doubt my dream scriptwriter, gave me at least four ways of getting to my destination As I noted, I don't think options 1-4 are a linear sequence. They appear to be glimpses of events unfolding on four parallel tracks in alternate realities, between which the focus of my dominant personality shifts back and forth. I am arriving at the station, amid the funny business with the hat, at the same moment I am speeding along a highway towards Prague, in the armored car.

Maybe this isn’t so different from life anywhere – except that in ordinary reality we are often quite oblivious to the fact that we walk in many worlds.

Top Photo: View from Nové Město nad Metují by Robert Moss