Jacques de Beaufort: Presentation
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Jacques de Beaufort: Presentation
- 7. Hieronymous Bosch, THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, 1503-4
- 8. Tintoretto, FINDING OF THE BODY OF ST. MARK, 1548
- 10. • Eugene Delacroix, THE DEATH OF SARDANAPALUS, 1827.
- 11. • Henry Fuseli, THE SHEPHERDS DREAM, 1793.
- 13. Gustave Moreau, THE DAUGHTERS OF TESPIO, 1882/83.
- 14. Edvard Munch, MADONNA, 1894-95.
- 15. Max Ernst, THE EYE OF SILENCE, 1943-44.
- 16. Salvador Dali, SOFT CONSTRUCTION WITH BOILED BEANS, 1936.
- 17. Ernst Fuchs
- 19. Frank Frazetta
- 24. Los Angeles
- 40. 2003-2005 In The Shadow of a Mountain Your Chaos Frontier Terrible Ecstasy
- 41. In The Shadow of a Mountain
- 62. Terrible Ecstasy
- 70. 2006-2008 The Cut Worm Forgives The Plow Wherefore Every Solid Substance Doth Teach
- 71. The Cut Worm Forgives the Plow
- 76. Wherefore Every Solid Substance Doth Teach
- 96. 2009-2011 Black Evil Object Flowers
- 116. 2012-2014 Strike Through The Mask Eye In the Triangle
- 117. Strike Through The Mask
- 118. John David Ebert “Dead Celebrities Living Icons”
Notas del editor
- Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- Kalki, the rider, and the tenth incarnation of Vishnu is yet to appear on earth. It is believed that Kalki will ride a white horse and wield a flaming sword with which he will destroy all evil. The coming of this fierce horseman will mark the end of this present age of evil, the Kali Yuga, after which purity will reign once again in another Treta Yuga. In Hindu traditions, Kalki (Sanskrit: कल्कि; also rendered by some as Kalkin and Kalaki) is the tenth and final Maha Avatara (great incarnation) of Vishnu the Preserver, who will come to end the Kali Yuga, (The Age of Darkness and Destruction). The name Kalki is often a metaphor for "Eternity" or "Time". The origins of the name probably lie in the word Kalka which refers to "dirt", "filth" or "foulness" and hence denotes the "Destroyer of Foulness", "Destroyer of Confusion", "Destroyer of Darkness", or "The Annihilator of Ignorance". Other similar and divergent interpretations based on varying etymological derivations from the ancient Sanskrit language, including one simply meaning "White Horse", have been made
- Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear; I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns, For somebody hid hatred and hope and desire and fear Under my feet that they follow you night and day. A man with a hazel wand came without sound; He changed me suddenly; I was looking another way; And now my calling is but the calling of a hound; And Time and Birth and Change are hurrying by. I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest. William Butler Yeats
- If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience as it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications - Neoplatonic, Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate. One part loses its raison d'etre and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops. The other part goes we know not where. Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does not exist; but then one has the problem of trying to explain life. And, though science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic systems, the idea that science can make any statement about what life is or where it comes from is currently preposterous. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life. The metaphor of a vehicle--an after-death vehicle, an astral body--is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance. Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth--the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment--a crisis of passage--and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position... Terence McKenna
- In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. She who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The cut worm forgives the plow. She whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
- JG Ballard WW II confirmed that the whole of reality was some sort of stage set that could be cleared away at a moments notice. I do tend to write a fiction of extreme situations, there's no point in denying that. But then, life on this planet for the most part is fairly extreme….the life I led during the Second World War was not untypical at all, in fact it was completely typical of the way most people on this planet have lived during the 20th century and in previous centuries…what is the untypical corner of the planet has been the sort of secure suburbia of England, Western Europe, and the United States. I have a suspicion that some sort of institutionalized violence which we see in the violent contact sports like boxing, American Football, [Soccer Hooliganism] etc, are not "outlets" of violence but rather means of prompting and provoking it because we need to get that sort of violence into our systems because they are energizing and they do have a virtue because they sharpen the moral sense of ourselves…. You could make the point that in a way the great dream of the Enlightenment- of a sane and humane society, where we all respect each other is in a sense hopelessly idealistic and does not accord with our real natures. That we are a race of partly-civilized hunter killers who've adapted loosely to living in large enclaves. If we are going to be truthful about our real natures and that we are rather violent creatures who enjoy violence…it might be necessary to administer small doses of not just violence, but psychopathic behavior.
- Rousseau: It is difficult for one to whom the state has been sold not to sell it in his turn, and recover from the weak the gold which the strong have extorted from him. Sooner or later, under such an administration everything becomes venal; and the peace which is then enjoyed under kings is worse than the disturbances of interregnums. ... [T]he greatest good of all, which ought to be the goal of every system of law, ... comes down to two main objects: freedom and equality: freedom because any individual dependence means that much strength withdrawn from the body or the state, and equally because freedom cannot survive without it. I have already explained what civil freedom is; as for equality, this word must not be taken to imply that degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same for all ... no citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself ... To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties. There is no quid pro quo for one who renounces everything ... if you take away all freedom of the will, you strip a man's actions of all moral significance.
- Margolis is the current day champion of the ancient Protagoras in that he takes the latter’s dictum “Man the Measure” to its logical conclusions, showing how, strictly adhering to such a measure, all fixities and changeless first principles must give way to consensual, though not criterial, truth claims. Since “man”, the measure, is himself a creature of history, no modal claims of invariance can possibly be sustained. Margolis however avers that there need be no fixities either de re or de dicto or de cogitatione. The world is a flux and our thought about it is also in flux. Margolis sees the whole history of Western Philosophy as a struggle between the advocates of change and those who either, like Parmenides, deny that change is intelligible at all, or those, like Heraclitus, who find some logos or some law which allegedly governs whatever changes are admitted. Contrary to “postmodern” philosophers like Richard Rorty or Jean-François Lyotard, he shows that our lacking cognitive privilege means that the need for a philosophical justification of our choices and programs becomes more, not less, pressing now than at any previous time. Joseph Margolis
- "I can only conclude that I am indeed like a visitor from non-Euclidean dimensions whose outlines are perplexing to the Euclidean inhabitants of various dogmatic Flatlands. Or else, Lichtenstein was right when he said a book "is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out." Of course, we are living in curved space (as noted by Einstein); that should warn us that Euclidean metaphors are always misleading. Science has also discovered that the Universe can count above two, which should make us leery of either/or choices. There are eight--count 'em, eight--theories or models in quantum mechanics, all of which use the same equations but have radically different philosophical meanings; physicists have accepted the multi-model approach (or "model agnosticism") for over 60 years now. In modern mathematics and logic, in addition to the two-valued (yes/no) logic of Aristotle and Boole, there are several three-valued logics (e.g. the yes, no and maybe Quantum Logic of von Neumann; the yes, no and po of psychologist Edward de Bono; etc.), at least one four-valued logic (the true, false, indeterminate and meaningless of Rapoport), and an infinite-valued logic (Korzybski). I myself have presented a multi-valued logic in my neuroscience seminars; the bare bones of this system will be found in my book, _The New Inquisition_. Two-valued Euclidean choices--left or right of an imaginary line--do not seem very "real" to me, in comparison to the versatility of modem science and mathematics. " Robert Anton Wilson
- The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dali, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game - these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia - preside over his life, as over ours. "Introduction" to Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali (1974)
- Kicking around the galleries lately I've been seeing alot of faces. Paintings have been staring back at me..following me as I walk around the room. It's spooky. Aside from an eerie humaness, what seems to be operative in all of these pieces is a visual trope in which the parts and the whole of the picture are in a Phyrric contest for dominance that finds no resolution. This reminds me of the frisson between the philosophical concepts of Nominalism and Realism. The doctrine of Nominalism holds that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. This would be contrasted to Philosophical Realism, which holds that when we use descriptive terms such as "green" or "tree," the Forms of those concepts really exist, independently of the world in an abstract realm. The paintings in question refuse to be accepted either as parts or as wholes(named objects.."faces"), but instead vibrate between the two-which curiosly recalls the nature of light, alternately described as a wave or particle..some physicists have even referred to it as a "wavicle". Remeber that Arcimboldo famously made faces out of vegetables, and Dali made skulls out of nudes..both image systems operate on the same principle. Getting back to my point, what's exciting about nominalism and it's relationship to pareidolia (the tendency to see faces in random stimuli), is the illustration of one of the perennial problems of philosophy. For example, I often wonder how "society" can phenomenologically be experienced, if it is nothing more than a loose collection of individuals with various beliefs, attitudes, and values. "America" is just an idea, held in various terms by all those who engage in this peculiarly amorphous concept. Conversely, in crude, literal terms one could point to the geographic border of this country for an answer, but this would be ignoring all of those "Non-Americans" that reside within it's borders and contribute to the operation of the concept of "America". It's a problem in perception that's not going away any time soon, but mostly it illustrates that people see really what they wan't to see...what is convenient to them, and what doesn't contradict with the beliefs that they have curently found truth in. So you can see the face or you can see it's parts..or hopefully you can see them all at once. By doing so you recognize that no "thing" that one can point to and name in the world can really only be that thing. Nothing can be taken at "face" value (excuse the lame pun). It's better to acknowledge the trap door behind every belief or phenomena that leads to the pre-linguistic nuomena that ultimately is closer to the source of all that is. Buddhists call this shunyata..and we could clumsily translate this as "void"..although the connotation is negative only in verbal form. Looking into random patterns we see faces staring back at us because we are human. This is why the Christian God is an old man with a white beard, and also why teleologists believe that this is all going somehwere. As an artists and thinker, my message becomes more and more clear..to point out that although nature is not a mirror..we are nature..and the universe is us. When you look into the void..the void stares back, and this reminds me of what my friend Steve Canaday usually says about Voids: it's best to confront them head on by raising a knife, screaming at the top of your lungs...and running straight at them.
- That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations - at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. William Butler Yeats
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais" (selected verses) Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. -We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled! - Rome's azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
- The myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into matter, that we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us, that we must make our meaning. This is what Sartre, Kierkegaard, all those people are saying, that we must make our meaning. It reaches its most absurd expression in Sartre's statement that nature is mute. I mean, this is as far from alchemical thinking as you can possibly get because for the alchemist nature was a great book, an open book to be read by putting nature through processes that revealed not only its inner mechanics, but the inner mechanics of the artifex (person performing experiment)-the person working upon the material, in other words, the alchemist. Imagination. I think this is the first time I've used this word this evening. The imagination is central to the alchemical opus because it is literally a process that goes on the realm of the imagination taken to be a physical dimension. And I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three dimensional space. We are polluting it. We are overpopulating it. We are using it up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and re-encounter the mind and we can do this psychedelically, we can do this yogically, or we can do it alchemically and hermetically. Now there is present in the world at the moment, or at least I like to think so, an impulse which I have named the archaic revival. What happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble, and you can use this in your own life-when you really get in trouble-what you should do is say "what did I believe in the last sane moments that I experienced" and then go back to that moment and act from it even if you no longer believe it. Now in the Renaissance this happened. The scholastic universe dissolved. New classes, new forms of wealth, new systems of navigation, new scientific tools, made it impossible to maintain the fiction of the Medieval cosmology and there was a sense that the world was dissolving. Good alchemical word-dissolving. And in that moment the movers and shakers of that civilization reached backwards in time to the last sane moment they had ever known and they discovered that it was Classical Greece and they invented classicism. In the 15th and 16th century the texts which had lain in monasteries in Syria and Asia Minor forgotten and untranslated for centuries were brought to the Florentine council by people like Gimistos Placo(sp?) and others and translated and classicism was born-its laws, its philosophy, its aesthetics. We are the inheritors of that tradition but it is now, once again, exhausted and our cultural crisis is much greater. It is global. It is total. It involves every man, woman and child on this planet, every bug, bird and tree is caught up in the cultural crisis that we have engendered. Our ideas are exhausted-the ideas that we inherit out of Christianity and its half-brother science, or its bastard child science. So, what I'm suggesting is that an archaic revival needs to take place and it seems to be well in hand in the revival of Goddess worship and shamanism and partnership but notice that these things are old-10,000 years or more old-but there was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn, persists right up to the present. Terence McKenna
- Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. This verse is recited at the end of Nicolas Roeg's stunning 1971 masterpiece "Walkabout".
- The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title. The word "evil" (the French word is "mal," meaning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death. But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre. The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's "twoness." He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other.
- one of my artist friends says that painters should make at least 35 paintings a year-which is also about the amount that Vermeer made in his entire life it's important to make art for the right reasons otherwise it's a drag history is not made by the living
- Le Poison Le vin sait revêtir le plus sordide bouge D'un luxe miraculeux, Et fait surgir plus d'un portique fabuleux Dans l'or de sa vapeur rouge, Comme un soleil couchant dans un ciel nébuleux. L'opium agrandit ce qui n'a pas de bornes, Allonge l'illimité, Approfondit le temps, creuse la volupté, Et de plaisirs noirs et mornes Remplit l'âme au delà de sa capacité. Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui découle De tes yeux, de tes yeux verts, Lacs où mon âme tremble et se voit à l'envers... Mes songes viennent en foule Pour se désaltérer à ces gouffres amers. Tout cela ne vaut pas le terrible prodige De ta salive qui mord, Qui plonge dans l'oubli mon âme sans remords, Et charriant le vertige, La roule défaillante aux rives de la mort! — Charles Baudelaire Poison Wine knows how to adorn the most sordid hovel With marvelous luxury And make more than one fabulous portal appear In the gold of its red mist Like a sun setting in a cloudy sky. Opium magnifies that which is limitless, Lengthens the unlimited, Makes time deeper, hollows out voluptuousness, And with dark, gloomy pleasures Fills the soul beyond its capacity. All that is not equal to the poison which flows From your eyes, from your green eyes, Lakes where my soul trembles and sees its evil side... My dreams come in multitude To slake their thirst in those bitter gulfs. All that is not equal to the awful wonder Of your biting saliva, Charged with madness, that plunges my remorseless soul Into oblivion And rolls it in a swoon to the shores of death. — translation by William Aggeler
- PERSONA: The word persona means actor's mask (from personare, “to speak through”). The persona belongs more to consciousness than to the unconscious; it denotes the various masks one wears when relating to the world outside oneself, the social roles we all learn to play. It mediates between one's individuality and the expectations of others. The persona is a necessity, but it should be flexible and adaptable; it is important that the ego does not identify with the persona. The Process of Individuation
- Excerpts from A Vigilance of Desire: Antonioni's L'eclisse by Jonathan Rosenbaum Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy—that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy. Sexist pronouns and all, this prognosis is tied to the issue of art and business coexisting in the modern world, with the specter of selling out a near-constant in the trilogy’s first two films. Sandro is a former architect who becomes rich by forsaking his art in order to make cost estimates for other architects’ buildings. Giovanni, a successful but bored novelist, is offered a job by a wealthy industrialist whose party he attends with his wife, Lydia (Jeanne Moreau). Sandro lusts in turn after Anna, Claudia, and a hooker, while Giovanni responds to a nymphomaniac hospital patient, to the teenage daughter of the industrialist (Vitti again), and, eventually, to Lydia, who no longer loves him. But in L’eclisse, Antonioni started regarding Eros more positively, without the same overlay of guilt, and capitalism a little less monolithically as a vehicle for compromise or corruption. These changes become the first intimations of what appears to be a new attitude. Apart from a few throwbacks to treatments of Eros as illness—most notably in Red Desert, his next feature, where Vitti plays the most neurotic of all his characters—the celebration of eroticism has continued all the way up to Antonioni’s episode in the recent Eros, while his view of business, in spite of remaining critical (especially in Zabriskie Point), would also become a little more appreciative, as in his wonder at the vitality of the stock market in L’eclisse and the beauty of certain industrial landscapes in Red Desert.
- Goethe: The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.
- The Symbolist Manifesto Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto ("Le Symbolisme", Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886) was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. Moréas announced that Symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal":
- It's not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them…and that is what poetry, and painting, and literature, and filmmaking is all about. It's as simple as that. I make films because I have not learned anything else, and I know I can do it to a certain degree, and it is my duty, because this might be the inner-chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field...Werner Herzog, Burden of Dreams
- ....because the brighter a light shines, the more darkness it reveals Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected. "Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131 How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man's perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration. "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part 1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 187 The hero's main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. "And God said, 'Let there be light"' is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious. "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.284 If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. "Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140 Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it. The Integration of the Personality. (1939). The Shadow
- But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” (Ahab to Starbuck)
- Madison Avenue. Crowds swirl by. A tugging on my sleeve, I turn. A madman, gaunt, cloaked, forlorn, saying, "Tell me about your true love's hair." I impale him on my vacant stare, vacant because now I am looking inward, feeling my loss. "My true love's hair," I say, "is a silken fall of glimmering lights, a dark wood with glints of autumn, coffee and cherry and chocolate brown, and fallen leaves all around." "May God have mercy on your soul," the madman says, and vanishes in the crowd. Allen Wheelis
- narcissism and desire: Narcissus expired through his delusory desire "because he could not lay hold of himself, and yet perceived himself as other. (Ovid) Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage follows both Ovid and Freud in stressing the basically narcissistic relation of the subject to his counterpart, the specular ego. In this way Lacan also sets up the erotic attraction or aggressive tension as a relation to a counterpart ("another who is me"), who can only exist because the ego is originally another. (See " Imaginary" in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis) The collapse into the self enacted by Narcissus is transformed for prototypically narcissistic female subjects into a fundamentally alienated relationship to her external image.