Bodysurfing
Kai Frederik Lorentzen
lorentzen at hotmail.de
Sun Dec 30 05:54:39 CST 2012
It's telling that the wife's name Ilsebill is a regional variation of
Isebel which is the German name - see Luther bible and Zürich bible as
well - of Jezebel from the Old Testament (1 Kings, 16.31 till 2 Kings,
9.37), Ahab's wife. She also gets mentioned in the Revelation (2.20) of
the New Testament. For more information see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezebel
On 30.12.2012 06:37, Ian Livingston wrote:
> 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
> <http://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/grimm019.html>
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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
> <mailto: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 <mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> > > nice..very.
> > >
> > > From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>>
> > > To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org <mailto: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
> <mailto: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 <mailto:momonin at gmail.com>>
> > > > To: bandwraith <bandwraith at aol.com <mailto:bandwraith at aol.com>>
> > > > Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org <mailto: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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