Perspective and the art of living

I am taking a drawing class. I have drawn and painted from as far back as I can remember; dreams, gardens, faces, trees of every season—for the most part unaware of what I was doing, outside of knowing it was not art.

Our first lesson was on perspective, a technique for creating the illusion of depth and spatial relationships on a flat surface. Our teacher introduced the terms horizon line and vanishing point, showing us how through determining our viewpoint, eye level on the paper, the angles of everything we represent can fall in place.

The drawing exercises I have been doing got me thinking about the word perspective, from the Latin perspicere, to look closely at, to see through.

In drawing what we see depends on from where we look. What is above the horizon line reveals the bottom of an object, what is below the horizon line reveals the top. What is to the right reveals the left and so on. If we sit on the grass we see a tree through a child’s eyes.  

A memoir offers the reader the author’s perspective on parts of her story. Like a drawing, it is a line in the sand.

As we move through life our horizons, our vanishing points may shift, and with them our perspectives, though a bowl of lemons remains a bowl of lemons, and an experience of love, what about that? Does that remain etched in the heart? No matter how or when we look at it.

We may look at a dream or into a dream. We may speak of illusions. And suffer them.

What we see looking inward and looking outward, the relationships of things and situations, whether in a dream, in a drawing, in a memoir, or in myriad forms of relationship, speaks to who we are. Our perspectives on life, measured, shifting, emotional, offer us mirrors that reflect our souls. Or so it seems to me.

From what perspective do you see things? And there are so many.

(I will be away for a few weeks and will return to this blog once I am back.)

On Love

 

When I was a child I carefully printed onto an unlined white piece of paper the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13. For years I kept that paper on my bureau between framed pictures of my uncle and my father. “Love bears all things… endures all things.”

At the age of twenty-two I discovered in Jung’s autobiography that same verse to which he’d added, “In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love…. Here is the greatest and the smallest, …the highest and lowest…. Whatever we can say, no words express the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful.”

I particularly like reading Jung’s thoughts recorded from the later part of his life. In these “Late Thoughts” on love, he tells us that he is not talking about desire and preference, but about God. He says that when man names love by the name of God it “is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.”

At times it can be no small thing to name the difference between truth and error, particularly when one is called to violate ideological and collective truths by choosing the truth of love.

More than anything, Jung’s vision of love and truth was and is what makes me call myself a Jungian.

Story

Stories are windows that open to the soul. In memoir we dig for memories. Unwrap them. And follow them.

 
“What is your book about?” someone asked this week. I said it was about me.

 “And?”

I said it was about being a psychoanalyst and about falling in love with one of my patients who is now my husband. “Is he still your patient?” the man said.

We are each other’s patients, I said. We help to heal each other in the sphere of patience, suffering and endurance.

When I told him that my husband had been in analysis with me for only nine months before we ended what some call “the treatment,” he laughed and said, “So you had a baby!”

He got the soul of that story, that which is born out of holding the tension of the opposites. The symbol, Jung said, is the best expression of what we cannot know.

 

My memoir cuts a path along a psychological and spiritual edge in the territory of soul. What I’ve always loved about Jungian psychology is that place is its home. Generally psychology serves an effort to decode, to understand and bring consciousness into our lives, while spirituality opens us to mystery, to the ineffable. Its consciousness is of a different order. To join the personal with the transpersonal is, I believe, an act of love.

My story follows my soul’s journey over sixty some years. I offer it because it seems to me that in the sharing of our truths we inch closer to The Truth.

 

A Question of Ethics

 

If you had asked me twenty-five years ago what my memoirs would be about, and even then I imagined that someday I would publish them, I would not have included in my list of themes, ‘a question of ethics.’

I would have included the subject of my interracial relationships and my fight against the immoralities of racism. I would have included Jung and the way his teachings about being true to one’s Self have informed my life. I would have named the joys and trials of motherhood. Trauma, sexual healing, the mystery of psychoanalysis and the even greater mysteries of love, these were the topics that filled years of journals that I would, I imagined, someday share.

But then in my early forties I fell in love with one of my clients. And out of that analysis was born a mutually healing and humanly flawed coupling—my partnership with the man, my husband, whom I’ve been with for the last twenty-two years.

This part of my story comes up hard against the ethical edicts of the psychological community whose blanket condemnation of a romantic relationship beginning in analysis casts a pall over those couples who share this complex fate. And there are more than you might imagine. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ is the unwritten policy, and behind that is a significant threat that holds the livelihood of these analysts and psychotherapists in check.

And so this question has become a major theme for me, as I follow In the Tracks of the Unseen the ethics of love and the ethics of owning my life.

Self-Portraits

In Jung’s essay, Concerning Rebirth, he tells this story.

“There was once a queer old man who lived in a cave, where he had sought refuge from the noise of the villages. He was reputed to be a sorcerer, and therefore he had disciples who hoped to learn the art of sorcery from him. But he himself was not thinking of any such thing. He was only seeking to know what it was that he did not know, but which, he felt certain, was always happening. After meditating for a very long time on that which is beyond meditation, he saw no other way of escape from his predicament than to take a piece of red chalk and draw all kinds of diagrams on the walls of his cave, in order to find out what that which he did not know might look like. After many attempts he hit on the circle. “That’s right,” he felt, “and now for a quadrangle inside it!” –which made it better still. His disciples were curious; but all they could make out was that the old man was up to something, and they would have given anything to know what he was doing. But when they asked him: “What are you doing there?” he made no reply. Then they discovered the diagrams on the wall and said: “That’s it!” –and they all imitated the diagrams. But in so doing they turned the whole process upside down, without noticing it: they anticipated the result in the hope of making the process repeat itself, which had led to that result. This is how it happened then and how it still happens today.”

Jung spent a good part of his life trying to explain what the individuation process looked like. Self Knowledge, he said, is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts. As a creative psychological process, as a spiritual art, he likened it to alchemy. Using the metaphor of gold making, he drew his own diagrams on the inside of his cave. He created his truth, his story, while holding the tension between the personal and the archetypal. He left us portraits and maps.

Truth, Jung said, needs a language that alters with the spirit of the times. Each person’s story, it seems to me, contributes to that venture. There are of course the gifted, whose creativity appears, while not without work, as instinctual as the spider’s web-making, or The Red Book of Jung, or the horn-playing of Myles. Here meaning is not found in explanation but in essence. Art and archetype appear as one. 

And then there are the rest of us. Like the mythical Psyche, we rely on the aid of the ants that arrived in her story to assist in the task of sorting through inextricable minutiae. These tiny creatures that in the song we sing to our children, “go down into the earth to get out of the rain,” are social insects. In the myth, they are the agents of Eros. It is Eros, Psyche’s lover, that principle of relatedness and self-care, that mystery within every psyche, which we await when creativity eludes us.

Through the lens of Jungian psychology, our self-portraits employ our efforts to portray our deepest truths, claim our shadows, and celebrate our daily lives in the service of what Jung called the Self, or the image of the divine within. There is no formulaic sequencing of how many times and ways one must fall apart and come together, no necessary pacing on this journey toward wholeness. Whether we descend and ascend with revelatory intensity, or crawl like a snail, or simply sit, the way my father often did, the way I love to do, we become who we are.

I believe, one way or another, we are all laboring with the birth of our world’s ever-emerging consciousness. Our self-expressions appear in our faces and in our eyes. Sometimes we write them. Or sing them, or dance them, or paint them. We laugh them. Weep them. Pray them. And dream them.

 

In the modern allegorical love story of Avatar, the feminine Natiri says, “I see you,” to her beloved masculine counterpart, Jake. “I see you,” he replies.

 

Individuation is a love story, because without love, love as a depth of self-knowledge and compassion, and a depth of self-knowledge and compassion shared, we don’t get too far.