Bodysurfing

[Ian Livingston]

I have heard that story of the fisherman and his wife before, but I'm not
sure where. I am pretty sure it wasn't in Jung, but he might readily
comment on it. I'll take a brief stab at the major symbols of the sea and
the fish. The man and the woman might get too involved for me at the
moment. As David  posted earlier in this thread, the sea often represents
the personal unconscious, but it more often is representative of the
collective unconscious, which constitutes all the factors that influence us
psychologically of which we are unaware. Fish are visitors from the
unconscious that can make us momentarily dimly aware that there's a lot
going on that we don't know, or maybe that we are part of something greater
than we know. That the woman wants more the more she learns, or acquires,
is interesting. Virgin / whore / mother, whatever, greed is not typically
one of the characteristics credited to women in the big stories of the
West, except in the case of the gods. But if the fish is symbolic as a
messenger from the unconscious delivering increasingly subtle
understandings of things, that might make sense. It might relate, in a way,
to the Zen ox herding pictures, which depict the meditator in increasingly
subtle stages of acquiring the mental attributes of enlightenment. In the
penultimate picture, the meditator is either nonexistent or pictured as an
ouroboros, signifying his having developed beyond ego, and in the last
picture he is portrayed as a beggar entering the marketplace with his hands
open and extended to offer what he has acquired. The piss pot, by such a
reading, might be the ground and goal (to use Meister Ekhart's terms) of
the pursuit of God.

As to understanding alchemy, well, people have been trying that for
thousands of years. One thing that seems to make Taoist and Buddhist
alchemy somewhat easier for me to grasp is that it uses fewer symbols and
talks about various 'energies' (for lack of a better word at the moment).
Western alchemy, though, is deeply moving in its imagery. Jung is probably
the best authority on Western alchemy, so if you really want to learn more
the easy way, Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studies, Aion, and
Mysterium Conionctionis are superb inquiries into understanding alchemy
from a quasi-scientific psychological perspective.

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 12:51 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> This is real interesting. I wish I understood more clearly the role of
> alchemy in exemplifying this Mother Son transformation. My natural
> association for this archetype is more Catholic( albeit that is certainly
> laden with an earthy peasant spirituality) than alchemy. But I feel my
> understanding of the purpose and historical practice of alchemy is vague at
> best. It seems to mean very different things to different people and that
> throws me off.
>
> There is a  story of the Fishermans wife where a couple starts off living
> in a pisspot  by the ocean, He catches a magic fish who speaks and asks to
> be released. He does so. But the dissatisfied  wife sends him to ask the
> fish to grant wishes and moves with each wish toward greater comfort and
> power from cottage to castle, emperor to pope   as the sea gets more and
> more stormy and finally foul  dark and boiling. She goes too far, asking to
> be God and they are back in the pisspot.   I take it as both the course of
> ambition and as a dissident folk version of the history of Christianity.
>  The correspondence between the state of the ocean and the state of the
> soul has an intuitive and powerful psychological heft, a mythic cinematic
> grandness that is not the normal folk tale.
> On Dec 29, 2012, at 1:37 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>
> > > The sea in Pynchon seems an aspect of the concept of underground. In
> ATD there is a cavern which holds  a >secret sea under a desert. In IV the
> sea holds the menace of inherent vice and the possibility of Lemurian
> >redemption.
> >
> > This struck a chord, so I went grubbing and came up with pages 23-4 in
> Psychology and Alchemy:
> >
> > "The point is that alchemy is rather like an undercurrent to the
> Christianity that ruled on the surface. It is to this surface as the dream
> is to the consciousness, and just as the dream compensates the conflicts of
> the conscious mind so alchemy endeavours to fill in the gaps left open by
> the Christian tension of opposites....The historical shift in the world's
> consciousness towards the masculine is compensated at first by the chthonic
> femininity of the unconscious. In certain pre-Christian religions the
> differentiation of the masculine principle had taken the form of the
> father-son specification, a change which was to be of the utmost importance
> for Chritianity. Were the unconscious merely complementary, this shift of
> consciousness would have been accompanied by the production of a mother and
> daughter, for which the necessary material lay ready to hand in the myth of
> Demeter and Persephone. But, as alchemy shows, the unconscious chose rather
> the Cybele-Attis type in the form of the prima materia and the filius
> macrocosmi, thus proving that it is not complementary but compensatory.This
> goes to show that the unconscious does simply act contrary to the conscious
> mind but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent or partner. The son
> type does not call up a daughter as a complementary image from the depths
> of the 'chthonic' unconscious--it calls up another son. This remarkable
> fact would seem to be connected with the incarnation in our earthly nature
> of a purely spiritual God, brought about by the Holy Ghost impregnating the
> womb of the Blessed Virgin. Thus the higher, the spiritual, the masculine
> inclines to the lower, the earthly, the feminine; and accordingly, the
> mother, who was anterior to the world of the father, accommodates herself
> to the masculine principle and, with the aid of the human spirit...,
> produces a son--not the antithesis of Christ but rather his chthonic
> counterpart, not a divine man but a fabulous being conforming to the nature
> of primordial mother. And just as the redemption of man the microcosm is
> the task of the 'upper' son, so the 'lower' son has the function of a
> salvator macrocosmi.
> >     "This, in brief, is the drama that played out in the obscurities of
> alchemy."
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 2:25 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > nice..very.
> >
> > From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> > To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 8:49 PM
> > Subject: Re: Bodysurfing
> >
> > My sense of the Biblical meaning is  that the sea functions as a
> metaphor for the whole of humanity and also for death and transience( as in
> Jonah or the parting of the red sea, Moses out of waters).  There is a
> psalm that says the voice of the Lord is upon the waters.  Jesus uses the
> surface of Gallilee to amplify his voice. Also I think in Rev. his voice is
> as the voice of many waters. In Jung the waters are the subconscious.  In
> IV there is that scene in the seafood restaurant where we are asked to
> consider what we are dumping into one of the world's primary food sources
> and how long we can poison the waters we swim in). And Jesus was a sailor
> when... ............
> >
> > Okay so  this is a pretty big metaphor-  transformation, language, flow
> of life, death and resurrection, primordial soup, beginning and end of all
> flow( all the rivers run into the sea , but the sea is not full .Eccl.)
> arena of naval power and colonialism,  3/4ths of the body of living things,
>  subconscious/ sleep/dream  . This is such a big metaphor it is more like
> the reason that all language is metaphoric, slivers of fast fish (As Alice
> would say) in a big blue dream, not so much a symbol as a source of the
> symbolic.
> >
> > The sea in Pynchon seems an aspect of the concept of underground. In ATD
> there is a cavern which holds  a secret sea under a desert. In IV the sea
> holds the menace of inherent vice and the possibility of Lemurian
> redemption.
> >
> > I like the comparison to time. In that sense we all walk on the sea for
> a moment and carry all time with us. Everything we know is as eternal and
> ephemeral , as solid and un-supporting as the waters we walk on.  No
> miracle in board or body though; just harmonious physics, skill, saltwater
> and waves.
> >
> >
> > On Dec 28, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Ian Livingston wrote:
> >
> > > Hm. Odd I never made that association before. My Pa was a minister and
> I, in my anti-faith, researched the literature well and I don't recollect
> coming across the sea as the body of the church. I was taught that Christ
> was the body of the Church and that he was a fisher of men, i.e., one who
> pulled men out of the sea and to himself.
> > One must never be so inconsiderate at that point to ask if Jesus then
> proceeds to sell the fish in the market, grill and eat them, smoke them or
> hang them up to dry. A fisherman , after all, is not the fishes best friend
> or savior.  It could be better argued that the fish saves the fisherman
> than that the fisherman saves the fish.
> >
> > > Jung, of course, a theologically literate type, associates water in
> general with the chthonic, pre-conscious darkness. From that perspective,
> walking, gliding, or sailing over it, while a dicey bit of work, is
> precisely the business of the conscious (awakened, enlightened) people of
> the world.
> > >
> > > Surf's up!
> > >
> > > On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 4:46 AM, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> > > Yea! Well, there are many different priesthoods in our complex modern
> society, whose collective motto might be: "Obfuscating you is just the
> nature of our game."
> > > Science and literature as much as religion, in that regard. But the
> sea is still the sea, and we shall see whose left standing, or swimming as
> the case may be, come Lemuria- a garden for octupi.  Occupying octupi, one
> would hope...
> > >
> > > Happy New Year!
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: lee momonin <momonin at gmail.com>
> > > To: bandwraith <bandwraith at aol.com>
> > > Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > > Sent: Fri, Dec 28, 2012 7:07 am
> > > Subject: Re: Bodysurfing
> > >
> > >
> > > therefore happy new year!
> > >
> > > Following the mood of bodysurfing
> > > http://www.zuguide.com/#Being-There
> > > the garden will make you happy too
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>


-- 
"We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid--it reflects the
face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect,
friendliness softens its features."
--C.G. Jung
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