SIXTH ISSUE: The Volcano - Part Four

The Final Installment - Encounter with The Giant One Leads to a Task, Reward. Plus, Psyche, The Ants, and The Fear of the Blank Canvas - Bonus Essay!

Friendship

Gestures across the misty Blue Mountain treetops
Pulls me back in a slingshot
Aims me toward the island
I land loudly, leaves between my teeth

And looking for a woman, I'm surprised
To see a bear who sees me back
Both curious intentions at war
A black bear is a scavenger but this one is brown
I run anyway
I'll find his bride another time
Because I've yet to die dreaming

I can see his silver sillhouette above
As the darkness breaks
Orange augury of awareness
Against the Manzanita leaves 
What is the opposite of twilight?
Snorts and snaps of trampled sticks
Breaths and groans that trail behind me
Blood and Mercury
Feet on fire

I reach for lower branches
Limb by limb by limb by broken limb
Scraping splintered brittle fingernails
My friend my friend!
Brother, a bear!
Come, come up now! he shouts
But I slip when the tree shakes
I feel like a ripe plum

Curse my friend
Doubled over laughing
Greets my death angel with kisses
Impassioned sets her fur a flaming blue
Scruffs her, holds her wild
Makes contact 
By his leathery conduit
Ties his copper strands to her posts
Completes a circuit for his a charge

Lifts the curse
By supernatural electric
Liberates incubating prisoner Venus
Scoops her up in his oceanic arms
Capsized light
Turns to me and whispers:
"Allow."
"Allow?" I say.
"Don't compel."
"Allow, then."
"Allow."
I don't know what I've done, but I thank him for the chance.
I've done enough to feel good about leaving
And so I do
So I can go on living 
And wait for some kind of meaning

Tuesday, March 12th, 2024

Inner Ants

In addition to my daily experiments with Active Imagination, or the kind of waking dream that Jung suggested was a relatively stable way to encounter elements of the unconscious, I’ve also been doing a lot of reading and passive listening. Podcasts, video lectures, and audiobooks are all great accompaniment for monotonous tasks around the home and in the car. Below I’ll leave a list of links to some of my favorites for those looking for further info.

I’m very grateful to have tapped into a subject that stimulates me to no end, but I feel somewhat like Psyche facing the Venus’s sorting test. The myth has it that Psyche was given mere hours to sort, into separate piles, what I imagine to be about a shipping container’s worth of jumbled grains and seeds. Psyche was so daunted by the scope of the errand that she lost hope of ever reuniting with Eros and actually considered jumping to her death.

That’s a typical pattern for me when it comes to creating anything. I feel like I must sort a shipping container’s worth of random ideas. Now I don’t consider physical suicide but I regularly react by considering artistic suicide. I’ve heard writers describe their terror of the blinking cursor or the blank page. I think it has to do with the misperception that I’m going to have to create something from nothing. This is never the case in actuality as I’m always just rearranging pre-existing matter.

There’s also something to be said for the fact that in order to finish a piece of work, every creator will inevitably settle for a lesser version of the image that initially inspired them. While my favorite artists seem still to strive for the perfection of their vision, its a universal reality that the physical representation can convey only a fraction of what happens in the artist’s heart and mind.

What I and others would do well to remember are that we have inner ants. I’m referring to the mythological colony of ants that are moved to Psyche’s aid out of their pity over Psyche’s despair. They wind up doing eighty percent of the sorting for her, just in time for Venus to return, surprised, suspicious, and enraged.

Psyche’s ants were external, but our ants are made up of our taste and experience. They respond by instincts and intuition, make rapid fire decisions that work one hundred times faster than logic and rationale. They trust their animal instincts and therefore waste no time trying to be perfect. This ability has kicked in right when I needed it over countless past projects. I just convince myself it won’t happen again, but it always does.

This mythic way of thinking about creativity in terms of Psyche’s four tasks comes from Linda Schierse Leonard’s book, The Call to Create: Celebrating Acts of Imagination (2000, Harmony Books/New York, pp. 44-47). I first heard of Leonard while listening to Lisa Marchiano, co-host of This Jungian Life Podcast. Together these multi-hyphenate women share incredible insights on creative archetypes, dreams and depth psychology. The Call to Create is one of those books that sort of spontaneously and unsuspectingly popped into my awareness, and contains insights that I can tell will be a part of my thinking for years to come. Specifically, it gave me archetypal language to express some of my challenges, and presented me with down to earth solutions.

For the favored translation of the story of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche, see Books 4, 5, and 6 of Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) by Lucius Apuleius (Note: NOT the classic text by Ovid of the same name).

It feels good to have finished The Volcano series, I have plenty of other more detailed daydreams recorded as possibilities for next week. I also have some other ideas brewing. Please comment if you have any requests, suggestions, or anything you’d like to see illustrated in the style above. As usual, thanks for reading!