Anticipation of Jung's Red Book

All of us have had a glimpse of the red fire spurting from the kitchen floor in an image from Jung's Red Book.

I will say this as a person who is in the midst of analysis, who himself is not analyzed to the point of becoming an analyst himself, but one who has made the attempt, the gesture at becoming an analyst (therefore initiate, therefore in authority to comment on the Red Book).

We have all wanted to know what these images mean. We have all wanted a deeper sense of the context of these images, and to know if there are more of these images that we have not seen. This is the sum total of the astonishing interest in Jung's Red Book, a dialog and commentary with the unconscious in florid red ink.

Beyond this it is difficult to say. There are those who will have biographical interest in Jung, but will prefer to remain on the safe, clean white side of the biographer's proof-sheets. There are those for whom the blood of this red opened pommegranite will invite more struggle and suffering into the midst of our lives: that the biography of Jung means something.

Everyone knows that he was not very faithful. Everybody knows that there was something of a meter on his bed that read the lullabies of more than one lady. All this could be nothing more than the litany of human neurosis and fallibility. What could be astonishing in this? What could be astonishing would be to have some way in which the soul speaks, candidly and truly of this situation. That the soul articulates some article of embroidered tapestry, or at least a fragment, a shred of gilded thread and cloth.

"What could be astonishing" writes Heidegger, "is that we still do not know what is called, and what calls thinking." For those who arrive empty handed, devoid of tools, will find themselves astonished. This is a deeper, all encompassing, religious sense of astonishment. It may not be appropriate to the nature of the "Red Book," which must be glimpsed at humbly, and itself an acknowledgement that it is just a humble tablet from one man's life, not the newest Gospel.

Yet we read our dreams, we Jungians, we read our dreams as if they were the Gospels of our lives. Here in the Red Book a man stands forth and offers testimony of his life, in beautiful colors and letters. It is enough to say that the testimony of his life will read into the Gospel of his dreams for him. Insofar as we have built the Gospels of our own dreams on the Gospel of Jung, we will be affected by this, no matter what our intellectual defenses might offer in terms of "academic interest."

Jung himself writes in Mysterium Coniunctionis that the essence of having a secret is not that some element has offered itself as some great mystery. The mysteries are already known by all, but only in a manner that is unconscious. The mystery is known consciously by those who regard it as having some secret, sacred resonance with the part of themselves that is itself secret and sacred. Those who have "mysteries" are announcing and making conscious these elements of themselves, and enduring the paradoxa pertaining thereto. Such too would be the case with Jung's biographical data, which has been kept at a shadowy distance from the community of Jungians. Certainly he is no L. Ron Hubbard, sailing the high seas of tax evasion, a man without a specific country. Jung is Swiss. He belongs to the Swiss homeland, which is notoriously neutral. It is a home of chocolate, golden watches, and Calvinist thought. What Jung always had was a stretch of Swiss lakeside. He kept himself near to the water that was related to the land, but not to the water that seemed unbounded, international. I have not yet heard Jung's thought analyzed from the perspective of his Swiss ethnicity, at least not yet sufficiently so. I am not Swiss enough. nor do I have Swiss friends, to permit myself to do so.

What I have written here, will in all likelihood fail to capture any of the deeper esssence of Jung's work. I can say that the Red Book was, as they say, a document of Jung's encounter with the unconscious, which is to say it must be a relic of the time when he separated from Freud, when his standing with the rest of the world was terribly in question.

I can write that in many instances my own life seems to be the same. I am a man who has dreamed of belonging to the Jung Institute as an analyst for most of his adult life. I am not aware of anything that would permit me to do so at this time. This makes me sad and it makes me mad. But it does open me to the Unconscious. It opens me to my own unknown, so I have continually to sit and make peace with it: and therein is the sadness of water: "Utterly worn out, Utterly clear," writes Ted Hughes (concluding my first article on play). I anticipate there will be a significant amount of Jung's relationship with "not knowing" going on in this Red Book, and analysts hence will continue to analyze the shape of Jung's "not knowing," and weighing it, at least in their own private, intimate, and probably undocumented moments, against the weight of their own.

In a recent reading of Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, the analyst reading mentioned the work of Sam Francis as a sudden exclamation of color in the Swiss psyche. A sudden explosion of color in the psyche, shown at a gallery not far from Jung's home. Jung's work in the Red Book contains a much more contained version of this color-explosion, nonetheless promises a structural understanding of this explosion of color that is available to be digested by the scientific communities. Structures exist so long for the unconscious, before the energy of the libido must burst through, "rend the books lest they should rend your hearts" (Attributed to Dorn). But Jung's structure is something special. He took it quite far, and offered, evidently in this instance of the Red Book, as much of his heart as he could. So there is color, and we must enjoy the color as deeply as possible, and there is form, and we must intimately engage the barbs of form and context as deeply as possible.

Play & Nothingness

I'll start out with nothing. That is the religious "aught" of nothingness, that is a blank un-notable, "fully abstract" element of empty existence.

Take nothing. Do the hands grasp at nothingness as if grasping for it's own lack, or do they sit open in the lap, in an expression of giving: just the giving of what you are.

Religion is just one response to nothingness. Religion asks: what am I worth? Play as a response to nothingness throws an unlikely shape: uncasts the mind that was cast even in the direction of the fall and descent of nothingness into form. Let things fall where they may. Play is the "overcoming of the spirit of gravity" without the cruel, harsh demiourgic philosopher asserting his "Will to Power (!)" over existence.

"'What is play?'" responds the zen master to the direct inquirer. --the tinkling crash of a porcelain vase with pink cherry blossoms on it.

Play is the perfection of form: like being taken away with the Beatles into the Kantian sublime of their Limousine. That is play.

My wife Deborah interrupts me to show me a video of a man lighting his own pubic hair on fire. He is accompanied by howls of chimpanzee like laughing in the background from the subtle dormitory-style educated photographer. He douses himself as soon as his little tuft is ignited: so no harm there. But these chimpanzees, playing at their profound stupidity poses a problem for this play: there is always an outside to play. This "outside" or "margin" of play then constitutes the Hermeneutic obligation to bring it into play. We always need to bring into play: in fact that is the task of the father in the best instance: he brings the outside into play. He knows how to guard against it. But he also knows how to invite pieces of it in that will be helpful and nourishing to the children and their mother. This is not playing here (where before I might have asserted that I struggled with a grief of not having a father who could let enough in for me to adequately grasp and understand it, now I can only assert that good fathers must protect their families and admit a little of the other in: begging for kindness and loving. This too is a kind of extremely painful admission that I can find no other way than this dogma, which itself might limit play: but there is always a wound, a tender spot in play, where the play needs to ease up: where the play needs to recede so the wound can heal a little better. Play plays until it gets to the edge of the wound: the lady in the lake ("farcical aquatic ceremony" Holy Grail, Monty Python, but this is to extend to another very wonderful limit of play, for a brief, shining instant): the lady in the lake plays out of the wound of the lake: she is the anima of the wound: and she hurls forth the blade of Manjushri.

There is always an outside to play, thus the problem of play at the expanding horizon. I try to incorporate my wife's discourse: be it horrible or different from the Beatles getting in their limousine (notice how the last sentence borders on the insensible: this is where we are up against the limit of "sense").

The outside of play: outside of the garden (there are always walls to the garden, even to the ovum itself): presents the problem of the exteriority of Levinas' Other.

This is how Levinas plays with the history of philosophy: he suspends it in the face of the Holocaust. It is a single suspension or bracketing. It says: "Now we deal with the unknown."

The closest thing to nothingness is the "unknown." These terms then relate deepest to the term "unconscious." Nothingness is the full range of possibility in a given evening.

A response to nothingness is religion, and a response to nothingness is play. But when we use the term "religion" we must be speaking of our anima attachments to the "history of philosophy." Play in contrast has none of the anima attachments, and in this respect remains the poorer of the two. For religion is the full blown, most articulated expression of a collective culture, whereas play can easily be done in a ditch with sunlight and a few children in early summer. This may be the best of play, for play can be in the sewage of despair in the bombed out ruin of a once shining city as well. Play acknowledges possibility. The danger of play is that somehow the sweetest hint of the candor of the hour will be forgotten by brazen and uneducated children.

And we might let them! Let it be! Let the lot of my tutelage be cast into the ocean for the sake of play. What I held to was love. Love to make it through this brief transition from my intimately fallible "meaning" to your play with nothingness.

Religion is needed, particularly for those who have shed something: some part of their relation to the world. Religion is good for births, for those who have shed the experience of birth. Religion is good for adolescence, for those who shed secure childhood and are just stepping into the radiant nucleus of adolescent life. Religion is good for marriage, for those loving the nucleus enough to help to make it stick. Religion is for death, for those who have shed the task of living.

But Religion is also a response. Pick it up or put it down. It is always the best response, and the response with the most meaning: "offer it all back to God." The thing with play is that it experiences the innocence of nothingness, whereas Religion dwells in experience. Religion articulates the sound, the name: "Nothingness." Play has ever taken our worth, our essence, our work as something novel. Play explores. Religion praises.

The charity behind allowing play is the ability to sit back and let another play or speak. The charity listens. It does not promote cruelty of play, and always stands to conscientize the expression of pain if pain is caused by play moving too close to the wound.

It is not enough to just play. One has to play consciously. One is aware that one has to let oneself and the Other... go. But the play has it's boundaries in the gentleness of the act. Without this gentleness cruel play, Dark Eros (referring to Thomas Moore's book) threatens to overthrow, capsize the fragile instantiations of play. May I say simply that I have seen enough of cruel play and wish to work against it, knowing it haunts another aspect of the work, at least among those who are adults. The child however is always present in the shadow of adulthood, as innocence and experience give way to each other in a constant play, as in the play of land and sea.

Play wants to be "One," but there is always an outside. This outside becomes a parenting, "adulting" force. It is wrong to ask all play to be conscious, but one must negotiate consciousness where it arises in the midst of play. And one must ask for some gentling of the play beyond its blindness. Blind play is not enough. A shout, a vision, something coming in and shaking one's very soul but leaving it whole, aching, asking to help and to be helped.

Play

लीला

Lila is the play of the universe. The universe plays, and in this play all events tragic and comic come to pass. The play of Lila is the most open play of all and contains the rest of our dramas, epics, pastorals... I will begin by mentioning the play of Lila so as not to forget. Such play relates better to the ideal that possesses me in the image of a golden mandala. Such play also relates to children and to clinical work since it is a part of the broader focus of play. It is the expansion and contraction of focus that creates a more supple, possibly kinder form of play than remaining in the sublimated or in the overly particular forms of play.

This "article," if you will, like an "article of clothing," or perhaps an article that one points to with spectacles, bi-focals, standing by the fire in a colonial brick fireplace, in a post-colonial world, as in the "Articles of the Federation." This article of the law, so earnest and explicit, is a document about play.

The article plays: that is to say that it it rambles. It can play with an outline of itself, according to a strict didactic addressing the following points of conversation:

1. Play and its shadow: abuse
2. Play and "making conscious"
3. Play and the garden of eden
4. R.D. Laing, play and the "double Bind"
5. Play and alchemical gold
6. Play with the "universe" and a digression into mysticism (Kabir/Bly)
7. Play through Donald Winnicott
8. Play and the golden Mandala of Jungian Thought
9. (Play and inflation as commented on by E. Edinger "anthropos rotundus" originary inflation.")
10. Play and spiritual development: renunciation of afflictions/cardinal sins: anger, greed, envy
11. William Blake's commentary on the spiritualization of the garden as the suffocation of play: "binding with briars"
12. Commentary on a non-naive conception of the garden of play: Werner Herzog's commentary on the Amazon: natura as suffocation and fornication.
13. African American term: post abuse: post colonial discourse: "I ain't playin and I ain't mad."
14. Good old Hans Georg Gadamer and the Play of the Hermeneutic Circle
15. Jacques Derrida and "free-play" in the shibboleth of grief and the poem: Edmond Jabes.
16. Play and the Poets: Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash and Ted Hughes.

Web logs are articles. In them we play with meaning. There is no more serious topic that one can address than the issues of the "articles" of "play." --- Of what it means to play in a world after auschwitz and the concentration camps, in the light of a sure knowledge of abuse, in the light of no longer being a denier, and therefore of no longer being a complicit abuser.

This very serious instance of play is when play becomes conscious. This is the very essence of the metaphor of the Garden of Eden in Genesis. The myth speaks of innocence and play, and the importance of unconscious play becoming conscious, and the terrible price we have to pay for such consciousness.

The shadow of play is abuse. Play is the healing of abuse, turning into metaphor an age of blind violence. Abuse is evil. Abuse is a short cut to intimacy that turns the innocent into frogs.

In a terribly lamenting poem really about the abuses made in the name of the psych-iatric profession R.D. Laing writes:

We are playing a game.

We are playing at not playing a game.

If I tell them we are I shall break the rules and I shall be punished.

I must play the game, of playing that I do not play the game.

Nowhere else does the play of play and betrayal and play and abuse come to pass than in the mental health profession. We are constantly at the threshold of the Gates of Eden. We play but we must become conscious of play. Play has a tendency to remain asleep, it remains "unconscious play." From unconscious play, like the image of my friend Oppermann sitting at his desk and using a pen or pencil to tremble the air about him: is the image of genius. Unconscious play is as productive as two teenagers in a ghetto without birth control. They will make babies if they are fertile to start with and the right gender combination. The homosexual alternatives represent at least one inhibition from the mindless urge to procreate, the blind self appropriation of Schopenhauers blind will. Or else we can choose to individuate beyond this: for the sake of relationship, for the anima's capacity to spiritualize instinct, beyond our stereotypes.

Can we refuse to see people as belonging to a specific gender? I do not see my spouse as a woman with whom to propagate the species. She can be this, but it would be cruel to the intentions of this woman to live her own life, whatever that may be.

Now what I have just written is a matter of nakedness and exposure. "You want to see cleavage?" So, yes, between the two round or flat breasts is a chest exposed. Exposure of unconscious play. A matter of hasty covering. The gates of Eden are closed for business, why? Because the play is made conscious.

Now "consciousness" to me is a pious word. I see in the word "consciousness" the image of an Eastern Orthodox monk praying, possibly with his eyes closed, focusing not on this world but on the next. Consciousness is the most pious word, and extends and demonstrates the "piety of thinking," which is in the purity of play. Consciousness itself is a crown of thorns, a dawn in the truest sense of the word, that raises first from the heart, and lifts itself from mud toward the heavens: a sacred bleeding heart, crowned with thorns. Consciousness is the birth of consciousness, and one might ask if consciousness as birth precedes play? ... or if it is important to ask this question. Play as unconscious play remains imperfect until it meets the aesthetic of imperfection: the dawn of consciousness: the perfect tea kettle is chipped or possibly broken. It is then this philosophical alembic that is mended with gold, that makes it invaluable, priceless.

One of the important properties of gold is that it is amorphous, formable, and yet infinitely capable of retaining form (part of the wonder involved in the discovery of the horde of Anglo Saxon gold:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/staffordshire/8272058.stm

This gold might take on a more profound and lasting communication about a human time such as the anglo-saxon period, than, say a web log (noting here that the play of "blogging" itself is at least offered for conscious perusal, but also noting a style of my own personal play: which is to provoke and then dismiss a scandalous subject: that is the fear that this web-log will somehownot mirror a time in the way that golden shards of sword-hilts and biblical inscriptions might. This play might want to be discovered!

All play wants to be dis-covered, the Gates of Eden thrown back and shut finally for all eternity. You get one glimpse, and that's all you get! Those who seek for more are false or they abuse themselves or others. You get one glimpse, and at first you do not even know what you are looking at. Later, by the time you have seen it, it is already gone.

Nostalgia and sentimentality are poisons. They set us back at the thing glimpsed and witnessed, and they claim that it's the best. All else in the present failed to meet that, failed to reach into it's fidelity. So the hermeneutic play of translation stops, and something is lost forever.

"All one has to do is tell a story," writes Sartre in a passage spoken to me from the years of my college existence, now half a lifetime ago. Ellie Wiesel joins him in the opening lines of The Gates of the Forest: "God made man because he loves stories." The metonomy of the story of love is enough for the love spoken of and lost. A story is not enough. "Defeat is the price agreed upon" (Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions) "We are playing at not playing a game." This shows that there is an inner battle between the part of me that seeks to believe a story, that we can go back in some way to our innocence, to believing in the play of a story, to the cautious realist: "Defeat is the price agreed upon." But such cautious pessimism essentially forfeits it's right to play with the universe: "The Universe Wants To Play" writes Hakim Bey in an "article" on "Sorcery." The "Universe!" The largest set of sets, with its whirling lights, like pin-wheel fireworks, spiral galaxies, palpatations of galactic milk and paroxysms of unknown, hidden violence, flares of a dozen, nay a hundred super-novas.

Between the conscious and the unconscious

A third thing has put up a swing

And all earth creatures

Even the super-novas

Sway

And they play.

And they PLAY.

(but soft, now, forgive me, please, sotto voce):

Indeed, to their very essence, to their roots (before they melt into and consume the dark sustenance of the earth, of the richness of nothingness) they play.

So far this "article" has relied on the sheer abundance of play to announce itself. The article has simply played, full force and without reservation, and without my capacity of even telling you that I have of recent taken up seriously-- the issue of play.

But there are some elements to outline, and maybe even to delve into here. Namely, and principally Donald Winnicott's ode to play, his "Playing and Reality." I do not know Winnicott's work to such a depth that I could say it is his best work. There is some element in it that resonates with me as feeling unresolved: it is my own ambivalence to the face of the child on the cover: the art presents art as play for children. The images are humble and clinical in nature: and betraying a sentimentality that I find painful and difficult to tolerate in the clinical tradition focused around the play of children.

I want the play to be a Jungian play. I want the image of "playing and reality" to be that of golden Tibetan mandalas, flaming wheels, points and counter-points in a vast universal topography charting the lines of a golden map in the heavens. I want the letters of play to be the letters of the alphabet inscribed in gold on a back black-board background of space itself: emptier than slate, burnished nothingness, a transparent screen.

But this abases the validity of the child's perspective, and it diminshes my relation to a specific kind of home-spun, home cloth, gingham kind of sentimental femininity that goes into the counseling of children. Or someone or something that can tolerate this. But it goes to the heart of depth psychology: which is the syncretism of all religious belief under the symbol of the symptom, the wound (Hillman speaks of this)... This would then be a realm of the mother which can tolerate such sentimentality and reign in the brutal force of splitting and individuation: a force which is capable of integrating the crushing, suffocating power of incest: every one a good boy and girl under this gingham clad school marm, and at the same time be capable of holding the resenting force that seeks to pull away from this intolerable embrace: not mother but lover, not lover but child, not "mere" child, but the child of one's most cherished beliefs, the very "god" that one's child has born.

Somehow it is important that life is supported by the mother, so that it can continue. Somehow the gaze of the sorcerer and astronomer, the bearded Moses: all these must glimpse the holy land from afar, far glimpsing and far-gazing. (Far seeing Apollo may be too young, but the god of sight is not so far from the twice-born God of Birth, the god Dionysus, for when you open your eyes it is like a birth. 開眼.

Opening one's eyes is no guarantee that one will see what one sees, or that one will be conscious of the eye-opening, let alone see from a far distance what the truth may hold. It is simply opening, and receiving sensory input without judgement, and possibly without form. We are not yet to the part of doubt about the re-constitution of the momentary noontide vision: here and gone in the same breath. Everything is gone. Done gone and moved on.

Winnicott writes:

When I look I am seen, so I exist.

I cannot afford to look and see.

I now look creatively and what I appercieve I can also perceive.

In fact I take care not to see what is not there to be seen (unless I am tired)[sic!]. (p.114, Playing and Reality)

How closely does this series of lines resonate with R.D. Laing's expression of the double bind in his poetic-lyric work, "Knots!" Existence depends on another, and that is a humiliating thing. In the end of both of them one acknowledges the tragic strain of complicity with deception, the essence of the depressive position: one knows that the optimistic solution is a lie. What rises above this is the spirit of the sublime in both sets of phrases: it is a "third thing" that Kabir talks about, it is Jung's "Transcendent Function." All earth creatures, even the universe that wants to play, swings in this balance of seeing and wanting to be seen. I am seen in my play. And play is the antidote to the wound, and to the poison.

The need to "ex-ist" (to pull out and extend Winnicott's use of language) is the need to stand out from a background of general "strain" confronting parents dealing with bringing up children. --Not to merely be a part of an enviornment but to be a conscious, functioning piece, somehow seperate from environment or landscape. I ex-ist for a moment means that I am different, I make a difference. Death, by comparison, makes no difference. So this amounts to a basic fear of annihilation?

In Tibetan Buddhism one finds the basic formulas for dealing with the basic fear, and maybe even the facticity of complete annihilation. The Dalai Lama suggests that approaching a willingness to work toward truly selfless acts is the only true form of awakening and enlightenment from the ocean of human suffering, caused at the root by the afflictions of: Greed, Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust. The only way to overcome annihilation is to choose the mode of annihilation: even if annihilation is inevitable.

But here I find myself in a terrible war between the spiritual element of life: the seeking to avoid the cardinal sins, and the subsequent spiritual repression, the inflation that threatens to overcome. William Blake himself says that the effort to spiritually control one's desires results in an act of utmost cruelty:

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

What would that garden of desires be but the garden of our play: our natural, spontaneous, authentic gestures, that are seen, mirrored, by "the good-enough-mother."

Here too the gates of Eden are shut tight. The garden of Eden and the Return of the Repressed: The interpretation frequently runs: the creation of institutions in general and religious institutions in particular are the source of human suffering. But this interpretation itself seems nothing more than a pleasant garden, "Seen from up close it's a pleasant garden; climb up higher and you'll find plunder and murder," says Bob Dylan. We know the natural state of human beings to be many times intolerable and cruel. In point of fact we are caught between the suffocating institutions of stereotypical morality and the suffocating fornication of the jungle (a paraphrase of Werner Herzog commenting on the Amazon jungle).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0

"We in comparison to this horror look like bad and poorly finished sentences of a cheap novel."

The Garden of Eden, created by God in anger. All this is said in the face of something so painfully ...seeing. What is going on. The articulations remain beautiful, sublime, in form in GESTALT as their content explores unbounded and unknowable horror. Is this voice correct? It is not always the negative voice that is correct.

I do not know if what I am about to say is correct, since I live in the post-colonial epoch very much in my heart, and I still find myself every day wondering stung by something to my core, wondering if my actions presume some kind of entitlement granted to a white male dominator over those of a different color skin and a different gender, or a different age. Still I will continue to write despite these unassuageable wounds: In the African American community I learned a phrase:

"I ain't playin, and I ain't mad!"

It is one of the hardest phrases I have ever heard, born of centuries of abuse. There is just no way to play around that abuse any more: no way to pretend that it didn't happen. There is no way that "white folk" can pretend like it is all well and good. There is no way that "black folk" can look at you and say "yes sir," or "yes ma'am" without it reverberating back through this appalling cacophony, a litany of utterly brutal "ex-istence." "I ain't playin, and I ain't mad." I ain't mad. Being mad would be a sign of weakness. Revenge is a dish best served cold. But this is a cold of utter dissociation, the hell of ice. The hell of betrayal. The only thing to do with betrayal is to be betrayed: or to wake up from this betrayal and call it the bad dream that it is: to be conscious that the play that is happening has somehow gotten caught up, twisted and perverted. I ain't playing. I ain't gonna play. And I ain't mad.

There is an important aspect to differentiate here is the play of abuse: the unconscious play that simply remains asleep, and the alarm that wakes in the mental health profession: you fool! Wake up before they kill the child! You fool, wake up before they kill you. Perhaps it is akin to the extremely disturbing vignette offered by Carl Jung where he speaks of a fellow whom he refused to analyze on the basis of a dream that the fellow had had of playing with his own feces. Jung suggested that analysis would only constitute a means of de-composition for the client, that he needed to return to his very restricted neurotic life. Playing with one's own excrement in this instance constitutes a fear of madness, and a fear of going mad. Analysis would only wake up disturbed and possibly un-integrable aspects of the self: it was better in that instance to keep the man in his stereotypes, his neurosis, his self-division, and not foster the individuation process.

I thought I could quote Derrida in Writing and Difference about the voice of Edmond Jabes: "Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book." I thought I could tell you that he writes: that the task of the scholar is to find a way in which to close the book, to acknowledge that all play must finally come to an end, that we must judge and decide, and move on. (This may be the terrible religious aspect of the judging function.) Poets open the book. I cannot say this because I have not found the passage I was looking for. This distances me from the genius of Derrida which I have taken to be heroic in the truest sense of the word: that his writing attempts to deal the best he can with what cannot be said. I had the sense that to speak from Derrida was to speak almost from a seraphic echelon of academic nobility and complexity. Now I find that I am unable to quote him because what I thought was in the text and the text itself are seemingly completely different. No matter, though I suffer being removed from a grace that might do well to complete this essay.

The depth psychologist is accused by James Hillman as being a syncretic bumbling fool: mixing traditions indiscriminately in a pastiche, a piebald harlequin of the self. Fools are fools, no doubt; and James Hillman is no fool --to his discredit.

Strict scholarly approaches continue to maintain a tradition of knowledge, and to not fall into syncretic, or intuitive connection. Structures are maintained. Logical boundaries are delineated.

But they lack life. Not just any cheer-leader "life," but Life as bubbling botanical reliquary that is green and growing, full of signs and significations, and maps of mysteries that we still cherish if there are any left. Life, an evocative story played with the plucking of gypsy guitars pizzicato. I have to say that I doubt this very much at every turn, but still something in me will say: maybe they are just playing a regular song. Regular songs are beyond our contempt as aficionados of music:and how sad it is that we are aficionados of anything at all. A regular song is just sad enough and just real enough to enter us despite ourselves. That's all. That is all we ask.

Play in our essays runs around and hides itself from us as we speak. Hide and seek, one of the oldest games. We make conscious play when we can manage it from your and my heart. Play needs the imagination to suspend it's disbelief: a tight-rope act. All this is played out and over again with the heart of each player. Will I join you? Will I pretend that that rope ladder really is a ladder too?

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Spirit comes from the heart. The spirit of all good mirth comes from the heart. So long we have held the gospel of tears, so much we need the laughing of adolescents on midsummer’s day! So long we have struggled with the priests in black gowns making their rounds

Blessed are the rich in spirit already because theirs is the abundant laughter of heaven.

You think they're laughing in heaven? -I think that they are having a good time, wherever it is. Sometimes its a good time together and sometimes it's a good time alone. Can laughter be kind? If it can be kind, then it can change a life, it can help you or me to see God? Can laughter come from those who are not playing? Can the game be good or kind?

Choice is the highest matter here. What we do not make conscious we will be forced to live out unconsciously as fate. Choice is golden. Thus it is adamantly denied by skeptics as well as over-seers of how quickly we can turn choice into “freedom of choice” in a strip-mall. Choice is the most commodified and commodifiable element of our existence. Freedom of choice will allow us to believe we can choose over death. We have death in the choice of games we play, as the laughter we use to belittle our own kind. Choice goes with hope, hope for a choice, and the choice of hope. Choice involves decision, judgment, exclusion and death for the sake of what we hope will be a better thing. But hope always stands on the verge of the positive.

Forgive me for throwing this element in. It may be entirely Dude-ish to do so. It would betray my own superficiality not to think more deeply of the musicological implications. It may betray more than a small amount of “dabbling” that I have heretofore been accused of. I am not speaking with anything but religious syncretism (slovenly, reprehensible academic hygiene) when I say that Jim Morrison and the Doors played “The End,” “Beautiful friend the end.” The music set to this begins definitely “Eastern” in its influence, perhaps a little heavy-handed, but it is the warmth of the sun creeping up the morning at dawn.

Who are these “Beautiful friends?” Johnny Cash sings to his friend:

what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you could have it all
my empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

Are these just addictions? Both of them allude to addiction to the needle, the devil's glass johnson. I don't think that they are simply telling us that they are any more fucked up junkies than the rest of us.

Make me become something?—well “became” you did: you rotted and the fabric of your existence tore. Yes, we all want transformation, but none of us really know what the hell it's for.

Is there an end to play? Morrison chants, "Father, yes son, I want to kill you." Johnny Cash tells us that "I will make you hurt."Bob Dylan just ends up telling us it's “plunder and murder.”

We can only hope that “the end of play” is the beginning, the place where paradise will truly begin. If the end of play is paradise then our suffering and sadness will (even if doesn’t have any meaning) at least be forgotten... and this will tear the soul and break the heart.

Thank God you don't have to believe me or it.

I will publish this now only as a fragment. Forgive it’s very fragmentary nature. You deserve better than this. But I want so much to take these fragments and to publish them, and to possibly punish someone in the publishing, possibly I punish myself for creating such “played out” written-play on “play.” But I am dodging the bullet with my name on it. I am also dodging the one labeled “bullshit.” Maybe I am just publishing this because I am wondering if I still can publish anything. I gave up composing on the web-log site and put it on electronic document form. Maybe I can come back and edit it.

A final word from Ted Hugues on Play. I won't try to interpret it. But it evinces the terrible polarity that is set up between play and abuse. Of course it results in exhaustion, but it also hints at something unspeakable insofar as we want to say it at all. Of course this is the destiny only for water, but who would prefer the hideous disfigurations intended in inflammatory inflation?

From "Two Eskimo Songs."

"How Water Began to Play"

Water wanted to live

It went to the sun it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back

They rotted it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back

It wanted to live

It went to the womb it met blood

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met knife

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it went through the stone door

It came weeping back

It went searching through all space for nothingness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

Till it had no weeping left

It lay at the bottom of all things

Utterly worn out utterly clear