Bodysurfing, sometimes Floundering

Ian Livingston igrlivingston at gmail.com
Mon Dec 31 16:17:05 CST 2012 

I thought mice were the masters.

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I admit they have serious responsibilitiies in this. Tricky little things.
> Happy New Year to all of them and to you also.
> On Dec 31, 2012, at 2:08 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
> > Maybe Earth is the planet of the microbes, and we humans evolved as a
> faster transport system (cross continental in mere hours) for our bacterial
> masters.  The onus is on them!
> >
> > LK
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> >> Sent: Dec 31, 2012 2:00 PM
> >> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >> Subject: Re: Bodysurfing, sometimes Floundering
> >>
> >> So I'm just wondering if anyone else finds a resonance in the idea that
> this might be a dark parable from the collective unconscious of the
>  organized church as Fisherman's wife.   Many see Christ as the initiator
> of the age of Pisces. We do seem to be hooked to a dualistic worldview like
> the 2 hitched fishes in the sky. Astrologers say we are at the end of that
> age.  But what does that mean if anything?  Weirdly, aquatic life itself is
> threatened  by Carbolic acid and overfishing- symbols clash. There are so
> many ways in which we do seem to be at the end of all our paradigms with
> neither science, capital nor faith able to fulfill their promised
> salvation. The chosen God people as mythic paradigm has become an imperial
> force, but instead of peace the seas roil, full of poison and churning. The
> Abrahamic divisions have shaped an agonistic war in the world and the soul
> of humankind that threatens everything. Perhaps in a Jungian interpretation
> the collective conscious is at a point where  reconciliation , renewal and
> transformation is not only natural and wise but is  needed for any chance
> of survival.
> >>
> >> Death shmeath , take another breath. We look at the fossil record and
> one of the striking things is the scarcity of transitional forms. The
> biggest  things happen and leave no schematic for change. Keep breathing.
> If I think of the earth as an organism I find myself asking if humanity is
> more like a  cancer or  a necessary transformative enzyme?  Are we a rift
> in the Tao or an infection with an easy cure. Some needles. some plants
> from the garden, birdsong, a paddle down the river, let go , take the gun
> down to the smith, tune up the guitar, let it all go.
> >>
> >> The fisherman's wife asks to be God and returns to her original place.
> Maybe her request was answered.  Perhaps a transition to God consciousness
> is not about power and control but a modest place of interdependence. Can
> we be boat-makers without being rulers of the planet?  Maybe we need to try
> a different boat, start looking for the good guys instead of the bad guys.
> Stop with the fucking saviors and the magic fish already. Learn to build
> buildings that store energy like trees.  Find out what DMT can tell us.
> Playmore music, playmore everything, walkmore, bikemore, driveless, stop
> paying any taxes till the wars stop, listen to each other, the spirit
> songs, hear the leaves rustle. Dance.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Dec 30, 2012, at 10:48 PM, Bekah wrote:
> >>
> >>> From:
> >>>
> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fisherman_and_His_Wife
> >>>
> >>> The Fisherman and His Wife is a German fairy tale collected by the
> Brothers Grimm, tale no. 19. It is Aarne-Thompson type 555, the fisherman
> and his wife. Its theme was used in The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,
> a 1835 poem by Aleksandr Pushkin.   Mrs Ramsey reads the story to James,
> her son in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.   Günter Grass's The
> Flounder is also loosely based on the story.
> >>>
> >>> Bek
> >>>
> >>> On Dec 30, 2012, at 10:06 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I was raised on this version:
> >>>>
> >>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Fisherman_and_the_Fish
> >>>>
> >>>> Plagiarism?  Homage?  Or just part of that Jungian consciousness
> thing?
> >>>>
> >>>> Laura
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>>> From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> >>>>> Sent: Dec 29, 2012 11:37 PM
> >>>>> To: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> >>>>> Cc: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>, P-list List <
> pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >>>>> Subject: Re: Bodysurfing
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "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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