It was as if future events were casting their shadow back by arousing in the child certain thought forms that, though normally dormant, describe or accompany the approach of a fatal issue. Although the specific shape in which they express themselves is more or less personal, their general pattern is collective.
C. G. Jung (Man & His Symbols)
HINTS FROM BEYOND the THRESHOLD
When I was a child, I was preoccupied for years with two doodles, drawn repetitively during class time at school. The first is “the chasm”:
While my schoolteachers carried on with their lessons of the day, I was engaged in furious warfare. On either side of an enormous chasm, soldiers fire at one another in an unending battle. Some fall; I did not know where they ended up, the pit seemingly bottomless, increasingly constricted. It was a battle with no victory to either side, no conclusion.
The second doodle that also occupied me for years shows a serpent winding itself around a dead tree, which has 3 major branches. The snake is suspended on the tree:
Of course, at such a young age (probably early teens) I did not interrogate these images or enquire about their provenance, and nor did anybody else. I simply enjoyed drawing them, again and again. They had nothing to do with the local Australian culture I was immersed in—beach, sports, alcoholic parents—you know, the usual existence today, as lived entirely on the surface. My doodle images in no way could be brought into relationship with what I knew about others and myself, at the time and I did not attempt to do so.
I do remember being in a more or less constant state of confused wonderment. Why couldn’t I make more friends? Why was I the one always chasing after a friend or two? Why didn’t anybody come to my house? I spent so much time alone, yet I hungered for a playmate. My social world seemed just out of reach. I kept hearing about the weekend parties but always too late. Now, looking back a little more objectively, I remember that in fact I did have some friends; I did go to some parties; I did try to have girlfriends; I did go on forays that led to occasional police calls at home. But I also remember my feeling “not quite there”, not belonging anywhere, somewhat like being in a parallel universe while participating in the usual adolescent goings-on.
My doodles suggest to me now that I was simultaneously living in an entirely different world from the ordinary one that I shared with others. I could not share it with anyone because I simply did not know it was a different world and nobody inquired. I could not even name it. I did not even feel the oddness of drawing such images when nothing in my ordinary life could resonate with them in any way.
This “oddness” can be amplified with a little story about my art class during my final year at high school. We had to take a final exam—paint something, anything, to receive a grade! I painted a man diving into the water—simple enough—I earned a C-grade. But no one paid any attention to the actual image, i.e. the odd manner in which I had drawn my diver. As I tried to recreate the drawing from memory I did a quick search on the Internet. To my astonishment I found an image that was very close to what I had drawn in 1967.[1]
Where my conscious intention was to simply draw a man diving into the water of a pond, I, in fact, drew a man, crossed legged, suspended in air, with one finger just touching the surface of the water. I knew nothing about Tarot and the Hanged Man, suspension, or self-sacrifice, nor did I know anything about Narcissus and the transformation of the narcissistic structure. Neither, it seems, did anyone else around me at the time.
I didn’t ask where these strange images “came from”. In fact, as best as I can remember, I did not evaluate them as strange at all. I just performed them and when they came to a stop, I forgot about them. I did not ask what they had to do with my life or whether they involved some kind of claim.
Several years then passed as I focussed on my undergraduate studies and late-blossoming social life.
CROSSING the THRESHOLD
Seven years later, I relocated to Sydney and became immersed in the 70’s human potential movement. I joined an encounter group, coordinated by an older man, a psychologist who had studied Perls and the humanist psychologists. He had invited Valerie Schutz from the USA to lead the group. She and Will Schutz were leading theorists and practitioners of the Encounter Group method, the purpose of which is to strip away the usual mechanisms of adapted social roles which protect us from a true encounter with the other and to submit the emerging psychological content to scrutiny. In this way participants come to see how much of their “normal lives” are defended against life, leading to an “inauthentic” existence, a life of masks or as Jung would say, personas.
In keeping with the purpose of encounter groups, the weekend began with a “cocktail party”. Everyone was to come dressed up and prepared to “chat” meaninglessly. The “cocktail party” was a device used by Schutz to highlight the nature of the “inauthentic” discourse that usually governs human social interactions. The encounter group is then introduced to demonstrate a more “authentic” form of human relationship. I however did not hear about this arrangement, as I was habitually “out of the loop”. I often found my social gaffes frustrating and embarrassing but could not account for it, nor change it.
I simply turned up in my customary jeans and T-shirt, naively accepted the cocktail party as a “given” and proceeded to engage others as I would normally do. I did not twig to the fact that everyone else was “game playing” or acting a role. Valerie later told others that she was quite impressed with my “naturalness” and ability to “go with the flow” in such an uninhibited way. She apparently had no idea that my connection to ordinary reality was quite tenuous at the best of times and had the quality of the Fool or a Parzival—I simply had little or no awareness of those ordinary aspects of human intercourse that others took for granted. As they said in those days: “his head was somewhere else”. This fact became more evident as the group proceeded.
We were to participate in a guided fantasy. This was my first such exercise with the imagination. The leader suggested certain images and everyone had to follow her guidance. She asked us to imagine someone approaching holding something or other. I accepted the suggestion and promptly forgot to stay alert for further directions from the leader. I began to “depart” from the group exercise. Valerie’s voice began to grow faint and the room receded into the background. I was in essence alone. I clearly perceived a hand reach down from heaven bearing a gift—a small box wrapped beautifully like a present. It had a tag on it too, and so I looked at the tag. He could see some writing on it but it wasn’t clear. It looked like a pen that was running out of ink or which was written on greasy paper.
At this point I became inexplicably gripped by a sense of urgency, an emotional intensity. I felt I had to understand what the writing was saying on the tag. My whole being was getting caught up and engaged in the activity. The reality of what was happening was not in question. It was totally real! Guided fantasy had become true imagination. I struggled to read the words on the little gift-tag. My whole attention was focused and as I exerted my will to read the message. I began to speak the writing on the tag. I had no idea why I was doing that. I just knew with certainty that I must speak those words which were originating from the gift-tag. I felt that something crucial depended on my doing so. But what was it? My speech began awkwardly, like the writing itself. I was uttering something not yet mine, speaking through me. As I began to speak more clearly so too did the writing become clearer. Or, was it the other way around? Did my speech get clearer as I saw the writing get clearer? It was impossible to tell.
I was in a very strange condition of having to exert my entire will simultaneously with having to surrender and let go completely. I struggled to speak, to become a mouthpiece for that silent language that was uttering. Finally, the words were spoken and the message delivered:
I love you!
With this spontaneous speech came an eruption of emotion and I began sobbing deeply, much to my utter astonishment. After the torrent had ebbed, I sat back up, feeling refreshed. The other members of the group were watching me in a mixture of astonishment and silence. I couldn’t remember what was said to me afterwards or what I thought about. The episode planted a seed in me, a mystery that lay in the dark for some further years.
BURSTING THROUGH the THRESHOLD
I was twenty-nine years old, and had recently landed in Los Angeles after inexplicably launching out from Sydney, Australia. The same reality that had quietly sent the trickle of my childhood doodles and painting and then, more insistently, a gush into my waking life as a message of love, finally burst through the threshold and flooded my waking life for the next twenty years. The chasm, the serpent, the sacrifice, and the message of love—all now came towards me in a sustained fury of violence.[2] My doodles now came alive as penetrating dreams, and what I call dream-visions!
During my first guided fantasy in Sydney in 1974, I had surrendered easily to the experience and so the “other side” could reach me at the threshold and speak its message of love. During the long years of my subsequent ordeal, fear came into play as I fought desperately to preserve my conscious identity. As one of my poems says:[3]
Until I Surrender
living a life of hopeful anticipation
but the foundation of the house was rotten
bursts of scattering activity
plunges into mindless blackness
edifice crumbles at last…
Everything that happened to me during those years was prefigured in my childhood doodles and painting, and my first guided fantasy in 1974. Everything was a message of love. No matter how bad things became, how terrified I became, I never lost sight of the knowledge that love was behind it all. I had to face the terrifying reality of the chasm, and the dreadful determinative power of the serpent but I never lost sight of the presence of love (at least for long) because I was so often shown unambiguously that whatever hell I was going through at the time had everything to do with love. I could not ignore that message even though my experiences went well beyond my understanding, as well as, at times, the limit of my endurance:[4]
For weeks I experienced a flooding of my body with a kind of nectar that produced an ecstasy in me. I could smell flowers or sweet fragrance in the air. I felt I had grown a pair of wings, palpably, concretely. The erotic intensity was such that I would lie down for hours as a fount of glorious liquid fire poured into me. Many dreams came, and visions, too many to recount here but the flood swept away everything that I had so far assumed about life, the human condition and its limitations. I was given experiences of a concrete nature, whose reality could not be questioned at all, and yet they could not possibly be reduced or interpreted back into known categories of experience.
LIVING AT the THRESHOLD
During the time of “bursting through the threshold”, one dream showed me facing the terror of the abyss and choosing to leap. As I did so, a rush of water, a fountain springing up from the depths, met me immediately and supported me in the void. For years I had suffered the split of our times, characterized as a total disjunction between inner and outer realities. I had tried to understand my experiences in terms of those fundamental categories while they were in fact being swept away in a flood.
Living at the threshold requires a totally different way of being, one that does not exclusively perceive such a disjunctive reality but rather, something else! My dream pictures this “something else” as a fountain gushing up from the depths of the abyss. I have tried to “speak” this new reality as the form of my writing and as a nascent cultural practice that I have been quietly developing in my daily life. [5] When I am in conversation with another, I surrender any attempt to privilege the inner/outer distinction and instead, bring my attention to the flow of imagery from within the other’s speech. We have in Australia, for example, a well-known radio host, Philip Adams (Late Night Live) who, whatever the topic, speaks in a way that generates an image of a balloon briefly filled with air and then released, becoming rapidly flaccid; or, when I talk with another colleague, machine gun bullets spray the room, no matter what he is talking about.
I am still learning how to respond to the flow of imagery that lies behind and within the overt content of any speech but I do know already that to respond on the basis of the inner/outer distinction or disjunction would be a wrong move, regressive.[6]
From childhood doodle to living at the threshold has been a long journey, the journey of a lifetime. I have devoted much of my intellectual effort to catching up, in consciousness, to where my experiences have transported me. Now it seem, the next move must involve fully living—living at the threshold and simply saying whatever wants to “speak” there. The message, if my first guided fantasy back in 1974 is any hint, is quite simple, but whether it can be heard in these darker than dark times we are all enduring is another matter altogether.
[1] With thanks to “spudsonfire” at Deviant Art © 2010-2017: https://spudsonfire.deviantart.com/art/hanged-man-Tarot-Card-163508962. Modified.
[2] This complex story may be found in my books.
[3] From Poems of Making, Poems of Death: https://www.academia.edu/17562943/Poems_of_Making_Poems_of_Death
[4] Ibid
[5] See my book, Speech of the Unknown Future: https://www.academia.edu/23182324/Speech_of_the_Unknown_Future
[6] Or any of the other linguistic disjunctions that have stabilized our culture for many centuries: spirit/matter; mind/body; subject/object, etc.
