Bodysurfing

Ian Livingston igrlivingston at gmail.com
Sat Dec 29 23:37:29 CST 2012


Okay, yes, it is an interesting little story isn't it? I think Jung would
surely have been inclined to do something with it, or von Franz, maybe.
Here's the story: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm019.html


On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> "The Fisherman and His Wife"   is an old  German folks story collected by
> the Brothers Grimm.   Jung may have done something with it.
>
> Bekah
>
> On Dec 29, 2012, at 4:42 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>


-- 
"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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