Spring ramblings, big Red book, distant Vibes

[Joseph Tracy]

I’ve been looking at and reading in Carl Jung’s Red Book. Only for 2  
weeks on loan from the library. One important element of  the process  
he went through in creating the book were premonitory dreams of  WW1  
and the collapse into violence of European civilization. Somehow  
there was an element of relief to see that these dreams were not an  
indicator of personal  but rather collective madness. But the  
prescient imagery called him to go deeper, sensing that the journey  
could produce value, and understanding that what could be mined from  
his inner world would be greater than a merely individual insight.

  The illustrations frequently circle around  Pynchon’s magenta-green  
theme. Green is hard to work with and many painters avoid it. This  
color combination adds to the hallucinatory quality, Pynchon evoking  
similar territory. My favorite image  from the Red Book(http:// 
www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-red- 
book11-2010apr11,0,6550201.story ) is built around primaries but with  
a magenta core. It is a serpent rising in a triangular coil from a  
fiery red mountain-like shape, also triangular. A little over halfway  
up his open mouth is at the tip of the dark base that surrounds the  
red triangle and emerging into the blue is his magenta tongue which  
branches like a five pronged tree and is in fact sheathed in a  
thicker brown , like a tree.  Both visually and symbolically the  
whole thing rocks with that heat where life begins , where dark meets  
light and male meets female, earth and sky, fire and water,  
consciousness and form meeting unconscious desire and reshaping the  
universe.

It is both aesthetically seductive, symbolically multivalent, and  
disturbingly raw and, let’s say, trans-human. Territory that neither  
Jung nor Pynchon shy away from but that is easily overwhelming and  
inclined to spin out of control.

Actually Pynchon’s control of the uncontrollable can as be droll and  
hilarious as it is disturbing. I have been listening to ATD and had  
forgotten the scene where Scarsdale Vibe is in Venice to buy up  
Squarciones and goes down in a diving suit to see a miraculously  
preserved painting of the sack of Rome. Talk about a visit to the  
collective unconscious. It is a vision of the end of a former  
civilization and Vibe sees its genius. What he doesn’t see is his own  
coming end, as Traverses observe him  and Foley’s fingers toy with  
his air supply. Pynchon is observing in this scene from the life of  
Scarsdale Vibe the relationship of  the self (or the all important  
and eternal story of  me) to the subconscious, to art,  and  
ultimately to the other as  self. For Vibe the relationship is one of  
denial, of assessing value only in terms of ownership and return on  
investment.  This denial is the essence and source of the violence  
now expanding via the death of other life forms  on the planet.  WW1  
marked a transition from thrones to nation states and captains of  
industry, WW2 from nation states to  global corporate interests. Is  
this progress? There is also something a little bit oily about Jung’s  
serpent .

This sounds glum but I think big systems may have reached their  
limit, have sown the wind to reap the whirlwind and watch their house  
of paper blow away.  Spring keeps returning, and spirits must soar,  
and soaring find grace. I smell honey.