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0:50: A dream:

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“Big” [or significant] dreams are often remembered for a lifetime, and not infrequently prove to be the richest jewel in the treasure-house of psychic experience...They reveal their significance quite apart from the subjective impression they make by their plastic form, which often has a poetic force and beauty. Such dreams occur mostly during critical phases of life, in early youth, puberty, at the onset of middle age (36-40) and within sight of death." (C.G. Jung, The Nature of Dreams. CW8, par. 558)

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The dream depicted in the film occurred two weeks before I began my graduate studies during a period of momentous change in my life. I was 39 at the time.

 

2:02: Greenfire out of stone:

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The dream image of the mossy bonfire, the green fire out of stone, is one I have returned to again and again through art and active imagination. "We work on the dream, not to unravel as Freud said, to undo the dream work's undoing, but to respond to its work with the likeness of our work, all the while aiming to speak like the dream, imagine like the dream." (James Hillman, Dream and the Underworld, p. 130).

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2:27: Upon the great plains:

 

My Morse ancestors immigrated to the colony of Massachusetts in 1635 from the town of Dedham, Essex. Records indicate that the Morses have been farmers dating back at least to the 14th century, the time of the Black Death. My essay East of Eden: Wildness, Domestication, and the Psyche explores the historical impact of the advent of agriculture on humanity's psychological and spiritual orientation.

 

2:44: My father moved west:

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In 1959, my father moved from the small farming village of Odell, Illinois to Palo Alto, California to study electrical engineering at Stanford University. He spent his entire career at Acurex Environmental, which, in the 1970s, designed parabolic solar collectors.

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3:14: Years of draught:

 

“Droughts are a recurring feature of California’s climate, and the four-year period between fall 2011 and fall 2015 was the driest since record keeping began in 1895. High temperatures worsened its effects, with 2014 and 2015 being the two hottest years in the state’s recorded history.” (PPIC https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-latest-drought)

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I worked as a farmer and educator at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur from 2012 - 2016 during this time of severe (and increasingly common) draught.

 

3:29: The edge of the edge:

 

Clinging to rocky cliffs between the Santa Lucia mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the Esalen Institute playfully refers to itself as being situated at "the edge of the edge". This comment points to California's complex nature; it is a land of polarities and extremes geographically, politically, socially, and psychologically, polarities that often rub up against one another and commingle (as in the case of the near simultaneous origination of the logos-oriented computer revolution Silicon Valley and the often Dionysian 1960s counterculture movement).

 

“Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovation by the convergence on one site of new technological knowledge; a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area; generous funding from an assured market with the Defence Department; the development of an efficient network of venture capital firms; and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of Stanford University.” (M. Castells, 1996)

 

3:43: The soil is desperate with thirst:

 

In a healthy soil, particles (clay, silt, and sand) hold together through adhesion. Adhesion is made possible by water’s properties of surface tension and meniscus tension. Healthy soil is characterized by a loose, crumblike structure of soil aggregates that prevents runoff of nutrients vital for plant life and creates the preconditions for a vibrant soil ecology. Parched soils are particularly vulnerable to erosion.

 

4:00: I sense that my inner landscape is parched, too:

 

Although in many ways I had never been happier with the external circumstances of my life, the draught seemed to mirror a gradual drying out of my inner life.

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"We must therefore realize that despite its undeniable successes the rational attitude of present-day consciousness is, in many respects, hostile to life. Life has grown desiccated and cramped, crying out for the rediscovery of the fountainhead. But the fountainhead can only be discovered if the conscious mind will suffer itself to be led back to the "children's land," there to receive guidance from the unconscious as before." (C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 74)

 

4:42: Synchronicities:

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Jung's formulation of the concept of synchronicity is perhaps his most controversial and revolutionary idea because it calls into question Western modernities core beliefs concerning causality. Jung did not publish his ideas on synchronicity until after his friend, Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli, encouraged him to do so. Jung observed that with some of his clients, only a powerful synchronicity would allow them to soften their rationalistic orientation towards life.

 

"The causality principle asserts that the connection between cause and effect is a necessary one. The synchronicity principle asserts that the terms of a meaningful coincidence are connected by simultaneity and meaning... We must remember that the rationalistic attitude of the West is not the only possible one and is not all-embracing, but is in many ways a prejudice and a bias that ought perhaps to be corrected." (C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle)

 

5:35: To correspond:

 

The psychologist, artist, and educator Howard McConeghey viewed art as an important means of facilitating fruitful connection between what analyst Edward Edinger called the Ego-Self axis. “Those who are interested in the service of psyche--both the personal psyche and the anima mundi--see art as a correspondence with soul... Such nurturing of the image is necessary for gaining the sensitivity to adequately respond to the needs of the natural world and to the cultural needs of humanity." ( H. McConeghey, Art and Soul, p. 11)

 

4:49: Larme du pere:

 

The short film Zoe et l'homme de verre is just such a correspondence as articulated by McConeghey. Stunned by a synchronicity involving my friend's daughter Zoe and the music and imagery of the film Amelie, I began working on the film Zoe by "corresponding" with soul in the language it had approached me with: music. I wrote the song l'homme de verre using the same opening chords as the song from the film I was playing when the synchronicity occurred, Comptine d'un Autre Ètè. The lyrics of the section featured in Parched translate as:

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Tears of the Father

For the Mother

For the Earth

L'homme de verre (man of glass)

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All the world is broken,

L'homme de verre.

Let yourself be broken,

L'homme de verre.

 

5:40: Apollo, god of light:

 

This quote, from the introduction of Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, evokes C.G. Jung’s emphasis on the necessity of finding balance between psychological polarities and also James Hillman’s “pantheistic” archetypal psychology. Here, Le Guin playfully positions Apollo as an archetypal expression of logos and Dionysus as the countervailing energy of eros. (U. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 11)

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7:03: Dream one: stairway of descent:

 

A visual and narrative amplification of a dream image which speaks to my own dark night of the soul. I am accompanied by my two children who move through their own descent.

 

7:53: Spontaneous images from the unconscious:

 

 “All I knew with any certainty was that the dream indicated an unusual activation of the unconscious….there remained nothing for me to do but wait, go on with life, and pay close attention to my fantasies.” (C.G.Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.172)

 

8:00: Archetypal images and artistic expression:

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“….so far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with archaic or - I would say - primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest of times.” (C.G.Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p.4-5)

 

8:34: Accompaniment:

 

Pacifica and cohort as alchemical vessel

 

8:53: Dream two: man hole cover:

 

A visual and narrative amplification of a dream image which reflects the process of transformation and the ability to move between worlds, the conscious and the unconscious psyche. Also speaks of descent and rebirth. “Rebirth may be a renewal without any change of being, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement.” (C.G.Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p.114)

 

9:40: "There is no way out of a myth... only a way more deeply into it."

 

(P. Berry, Echo’s Subtle Body, p.28)

 

9:57: Demeter:

 

The myth of Demeter and Persephone. “For the mother’s depths are the Underworld. Gaia’s original realm included both the upper realm of growth, nurturance, and life and the Underworld realm of death, limitation, and ending.” (P. Berry, Echo’s Subtle Body, p. 21)

 

10:04: Persephone:

 

"For [Gaia} the Underworld is also a part of nature….we can then see Demeter and Persephone as a pair, that is, as aspects of each other - so that when one of them does something, the other also shares in the activity.” (P. Berry, Echo’s Subtle Body, p.25) 

 

10:38: Pomegranate:

 

“Persephone is at home with Underworld essences….Demeter’s realm of nature is also a perception of essence in Persephone’s realm - where essence is the “unseen,” the hidden seed of the pomegranate, or the “invisible”. (P. Berry, Echo’s Subtle Body, p.26)

 

Even in the dream image, her action of swallowing up the cigarettes might be seen as her consumption of the pomegranate seeds in the myth, an act ensuring her return to the mother and the upper world but in a changed relationship to both.

 

10:55: The power of myth:

 

“….what human beings have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance….We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.” (J. Campbell, B. Moyers, The Power of Myth, p.4)

 

11:07: Darkness:

 

“In the middle of our life journey I found myself in a dark wood. I had wandered from the straight path. It isn’t easy to talk about it: it was such a thick, wild, and rough forest that when I think of it my fear returns….I can’t offer any good explanation for how I entered it. I was so sleepy at that point that I strayed from the right path.”

(Dante, Inferno, Canto I)

 

 

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12:49: Hours of a year, adrift

 

This phrase alludes to the poem “The Colossus,” by Sylvia Plath. In the momentous poem, Plath wrote,  “Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. / The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. / My hours are married to shadow,” (S. Plath, “The Colossus”).

 

12:57: The hourglass of time:

 

“The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!” Nietzsche proposed the “heaviest weight” as  the question of continual suffering. “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” The dreams collected from my year prior to Pacifica felt endless, and ancient; existing from a multitude of years of lives past (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 194).

 

The hourglass, turned sideways, resembles a communicating vessel. C.G. Jung believed the best way to explain the distribution of unconscious energy within the psyche, was to describe the continuous and dynamic movement as a communicating vessel (C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of A Soul). Andre Breton depicted the science experiment of communicating vessels, as the basis for Surrealist thought. Dreams and wakefulness ebb and flow back and forth, the psychic value changing forms but always consisting of the same potency (A. Breton, Communicating Vessels).

 

13:25: The deep sea of a cornflower blue fish:

 

In a meaningful dream I envisioned that I was an outer-pod connected to a giant spaceship, or perhaps even the smaller capsule anchored next to a submarine. The theme repeated; a smaller round shape connected to a large round shape, a thin line tethering us together. The object itself was initially unclear, but was soon revealed as a cornflower blue fish—a glimmer of Self.

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Edward Edinger explained the Self to be “the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as the ego is the center of the conscious personality” (E. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p.3). The Self is the central force that contains the ego, the focal point of all we as humans encompass, the north star that guides us from within. 

 

14:03: The ache, the pothos for that which we call beauty

 

James Hillman reinvigorated the Greek term pothos in his writting. The word connoted a specific libidinal feeling of nostalgic yearning, sometimes for a distant object….”that which cannot be obtained: the yearning for a lost child, or a beloved, longing for sleep and death.” Pothos also related to the flower commonly placed a grave sites. (J. Hillman, Senex and Puer, p. 53). “The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

 

The golden thread of longing, which manifested in my dreams, was directly related to an unknown nostalgia; a longing for the unattainable and the incomprehensible. Hillman wrote, “tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering (J. Hillman, The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, p. 286).

 

14:22: Hoping for a spark

 

I began experimenting with natural plant dyes at the beginning of my Pacifica journey. The process helped me to understand the art and science of ancient alchemy, as well as the role the psyche of the alchemist played in the art of transformation. The prima materia would not turn black without the much needed heat, the combustions from within. James Hillman believed one of the most powerful gifts of alchemy was the therapeutic language it garnered. The loss of psychic “spark” at the onset of my dreams was notable and bled into my waking life in the form of undercooked food, wet matches, and a leaky roof. 

 

14:36: An anchor, a soaring heron, a deep sea king, a firing star

 

Edward Edinger speaks of the cycles of inflation and alienation associated with the continual progression of aligning the ego and the Self. The dream images of the anchor and the firing star represent the ultimate highs and lows that unfold in my year adrift, as I oscillated between inflation and alienation—all in an attempt to connect to an inner calling.

 

As it related to the anchor specifically, Jung argued that one’s “anchor” must be something beyond reason—“a superordinate principle capable of resisting the hypnotic power of the unconscious.”

 

15:27: Feel the weight of something, anything

 

“The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” (M. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 5).

 

15:36: The leap becomes a soar

 

Gaston Bachelar believed absurdity was a concept of the intellect. G. Bachelard, The Totality of Root Image, p. 87). In The Myth of Sissyphus, Albert Camus argued that absurdity was not in human kind, nor in the world, but in their unification of togetherness. Camus believed, “the absurd becomes god (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything. Nothing logically prepared this reasoning. I can call it a leap” (A. Camus, The Myth of Sissyphus, p. 33).

 

 

15:59: Amidst the rubble is your murmuring gem, singing to you from below

 

“My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister…without a bend for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play” (J. Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, p. 4). According to Marie-Louise von Franz (1970), Jung believed that “to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of finding one’s authentic self and true voice” (M.L. von Franz, The Interpretation fo Fairy Tales, p. 4). The gnarls of stuckness are enveloping. But just as momentous is the journey out from the middle of the mud. 

 

16:10: There is a tiny kingdom under the sea

 

“It goes down deeper than any anchor rope will go, and many many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of the other to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is said that the sea folk live here, in this deep blue sea” (H.C. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Stories, p. 51).

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16:33: The great poet says

 

“You who do not remember / passage from the other world / I tell you I could speak again: whatever / returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: from the center of my life came / a great fountain, deep blue / shadows on azure seawater” (L. Glück, The Wild Iris, p. 1). 

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