Sage of Underwood
(with new Preface 2024)
In 1939, Klee composed twenty-nine works that feature angels, having in earlier years only sporadically depicted them. His angels were not the celestial kind but hybrid creatures beset with human foibles and whims. Klee’s angels are ‘forgetful,’ ‘still female’, ‘ugly,’ ‘incomplete,’ or ‘poor’—as the titles he gave these pictures indicate… Suffering from an incurable illness and sensing himself hovering between life and death, Klee possibly felt a kinship with these outsiders.
Klee’s angel pictures are personal records of his condition (scleroderma), which at times speak of hopelessness, but also of confidence, and above all of an awareness of transition and gradual disengagement from life.
Klee suffered from an incurable skin condition of what I have elsewhere called the ineluctable body. Our bodies can be subject to all manner of intractable illnesses, symptoms and yet remain impervious to any psychological interpretation that may assist in the cure. We need to consult a third party who can treat the illness purely from a physical or technological standpoint, a peculiar fact that did not escape C. G. Jung:
[O]n the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious (i e , dreams and other products from the “unconscious”) refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i e , through highly “symbolized” images. For a long time I have considered this fact as negative evidence for the existence of a subtle body or at least for a curious gap between mind and body. Of a psyche dwelling in its own body one should expect at least that it would be immediately and thoroughly informed of any change of conditions therein. Its not being the case demands some explanation.
My story here offers such an explanation! It is a true story in the sense that it carries and elaborates the truth of my experiences and of psyche which presents to consciousness images that carry the weight of truth within themselves—truth that is sometimes available to consciousness.
I have suffered from a chronic, incurable skin condition for the entirety of my life, including, like Klee, a version of the frightening condition of scleroderma. I worked for decades to find my way to the “inner” or soul aspect of my skin condition. The wealth of language associated with skin, or dermatitis, provides for a rich harvest of psychic imagery in the service of bringing soul depth to our normally opaque, quotidian linguistic world.
The a priori of this valuable depth psychological work is, of course, an already given linguistic world of appearances from which such word work may spring. A consciousness capable of entering a state of (etymological) reverie can begin to be penetrated by the hidden depths of psyche lying “within” our everyday, normally hardened, prosaic and instrumental language.
As I showed in my essay Dreams and The Ineluctable Body, Jung’s extraordinary capacity to make his soul available to the depths of psyche also rested on the a priori of our already given linguistic world. In the matter of the ineluctable body, he remained perplexed. His account of how psyche and body could be related through dream resulted in contradictions or aporias. This outcome must be so because the ineluctable body and its illnesses as treated every day at medical clinics, has no interiority at all. It is completely inaccessible to the psyche and image. This claim needs some elucidation.
Lockhart writes:
A common medical view is that there is no psychosomatic aspect in cancer. It is not an underestimation to say that the psyche is left out of treatment, nor is it considered a factor in the genesis of the disease.
Lockhart goes on to describe some powerful counter-examples that demonstrate a close association between dream and bodily illnesses, such as this one:
Prior to his wife’s diagnosis [i.e., a patient’s wife—my insert], she had nightmares filled with conflagrations and vicious, pursuing animals. She woke in the night screaming in response to dream images of dogs tearing at her stomach, fires burning her flesh, and other horrors. These nightmarish experiences lasted about two weeks. Several months later she was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, and within three months she was dead. The old man told me: “You know, those dreams were the beginning of it. The cancer was announcing itself. I feel the truth of this in my bones. But people won’t listen to an old man.” He was echoing the tradition growing out of man’s experienced connection between his dreams and his bodily afflictions.
This is a powerful exception, much like those few reported by Jung. For the purposes of my claim here it is crucial to note that both Jung and Lockhart are working from the a priori of our already-linguistic world in order to come to their conclusions about the association between body and psyche, as I said above. They start with image (our given linguistic world) and associate that imagery with possible or actual bodily conditions (both researchers of course avoiding the mistake of predicting bodily conditions from dreams or symbols, etc.)
If our a priori, on the other hand, is the ineluctable body and its illnesses, we are immediately struck dumb. The ineluctable body today is mute! We get our silent bodily illnesses treated by equally silent physicians, working away technologically on what they call our physical substrate. Speech is not required beyond a brief description of literal symptoms, which leads to diagnostic understanding and standardised treatment. No soul depth (image, symbol) required here. If the illness can be treated in this manner, well and good, but woe betide those individuals with chronic illness—such as Klee and such as myself and many others who suffer from intractable and maddening skin diseases. Even as I write this preface (2024), my head and shoulders are a searing pain of fire and pin pricks—which words are indeed images but, note well, these are images that my reflecting consciousness brings to bear on the otherwise mute body of pain that I also am. These images of reflection imply that I had not descended deeply enough into the mute ineluctable body which lies beyond reflection. Such reflections have no bearing on any physical “cure”.
For decades my ineluctable body remained thus silent, while the blind and dumb pain increased to crippling proportions, as happened to Klee too. I have written many essays in a failed attempt to bring psyche and mute body linguistically together, beginning with my reflecting consciousness. Klee produced his Angel Series out of the same need, I believe. My “failure” is a result of my starting point. I began with my reflecting consciousness, i.e., my already-given linguistic world, just as Jung and Lockhart have done. My reflections alone could not possibly cross the logical abyss to the mute body and its illness. The logical abyss between reflective consciousness and mute body informs any attempt to linguistically unite them. My soul life however has been immeasurably enriched by these efforts.
And so I had to wait—wait for what? My task it seems was to sink into the horror of the sheer unremitting intensity of the pain of my skin, leaving reflecting consciousness behind, and becoming that pain completely, blindly, dumbly, with no instructions, guidance or advice coming from anywhere. I had no other direction to go. My ontological status could best be expressed by a dream I had in 1990 in which my symptoms reached an unbearable peak:
The bomb: I am to suffer and endure consciously the effects of the heat and radiation of a thermonuclear bomb. It goes off near me and I feel the heat on my blood and it pours out of my mouth. The heat is tremendous. It was also extremely sexual.
An impossible task of enduring the fires of a “nuclear bomb” as matter transmutes into energy, while remaining conscious! I was at least beginning to perceive a link between my symptoms and the inner world of image. The mute body had begun to “speak” in its own terms—and it was, at first, “blood speech”! At that time I had to withdraw from all public activities as the speech I was uttering began to generate unpredictable effects in others. In subsequent visionary experiences, this speech acquired a more poetic quality.
I slowly came to understand that I was being conscripted into service—-to bring the mute body into language or soul, i.e., in terms of its own originating speech. Elsewhere I give examples of this strange alien speech as it exploded through my vocal chords from the depths of horror into which I had descended. This speech has the telos of transforming horror into love. I had been drawn ruthlessly down into the horror of the mute ineluctable body which became a living crucible for a new ensouled speech of the body—an embodied speech of love simultaneously expressing both the phenomenology of ordinary and extraordinary dimensions of existence.
My true story below is one outcome of such excruciating experiences of participation in cosmic processes of transformation, along with subsequent reflections. I begin with a dream that burst in on me at the height of one of my periodic episodes of agony. In brief I can now say that this human task concerns a process in which the invisible realm (negative reality) is seeking to actualise its reality in the material world (positive reality) through the living vehicle of the ineluctable body, typically mute as it is like every other appearance today. Negative reality is seeking embodiment in speech and the ineluctable body is the living crucible for this speech, moving from mute body to living mouthpiece.
But there is a difficulty of cosmic proportions. My dream below and the story that sprung from it reveal its character: our bodies’ modern lack of transparency to spirit is colliding with spirit’s ‘demand’ for entry in the world through the crucible of the ineluctable body. The nature of this “negative reality” is cosmic love, pictured as an angelic form and the convolutions of this love entering the matter of the ineluctable body are experienced on the human side as sheer, unmitigated horror. This graphic description of this cosmic difficulty is said beautifully by Wilhelm von Humboldt:
Language is the eternally self-repeating labor of spirit to make articulated sound capable of being an expression of thought.
Let’s now see how my story now unfolds…
SAGE OF UNDERWOOD (with a new Preface 2024)
