Thoughts inspired by Dennis Patrick Slattery, “Dionysus, Apollo, and Asklepios: The Road from Dis-ease to Recovery, A Bio Mythic Narrative,” Jung Journal: Psyche and Culture 12:3 (Summer 2018): 45-53.
In a painfully detailed account of his battle with a blood-borne infection, Pacifica graduate Institute emeritus professor Dennis Slattery describes his experience as bodily visitations by the Greek gods Dionysus, Apollo, and Asklepios–Apollos’ son, represented by the snake on the well-known symbol of medicine. Of the three, he writes:
“Dionysus demanded that I give up, yield, and surrender to a process that was imposed from without, driving self-determination into limbo and parking it there for an indefinite period. Fighting this powerful god’s presence and direction risks further dismemberment, which would inevitably insist on a longer recovery.”
“I credit Apollo the purifier for allowing me to put the pieces of my life back into alignment.”
“Asklepios furthers his father’s work as purifier.”
I was curious–does Slattery literally believe he had been visited by gods, or was he using these concepts as metaphors for otherwise indescribable feelings?
So I asked him, and here’s what he said:
“The gods like myth itself, as James Hillman phrases it, never happened; therefore they are always happening. A bit paradoxical, to be sure.
“As to literal, no; but concrete, yes. They are parts of the psyche that stand for different propensities, patterns, presences that are active in our lives. They are imaginal creations but not to suggest that they are not “real” in the way that joy, resentments, love are real.
“So, yes, they are not to be taken literally but psychically as presences”
I wonder . . . what metaphors could I find to express the things that I find otherwise inexpressible. Water flowing under melting ice on the first warm day after winter. A falling star. The smell of spring.
Thoughts inspired by Rachael A. Vaughan, “Last Traces of the Pagan Imagination: The Cultural Unconscious in British Magical Children’s Books,” Jung Journal: Psyche and Culture 12:3 (Summer 2018): 15-25.
I’m thinking about air. And water. And how the fish never notices the water and we never notice the air, because it is always around us. Always. And it is full of stuff we don’t notice. Lies and truths and everything in between. But we don’t notice because … it’s always there.
Imagine a time before agriculture. Nine thousand years ago. No cultivated land, no fences, no crops, no ownership. Just earth and your ability to gather what you can from it to survive. How would your relationship with that earth be different from the way we live now? Would you not ascribe magic, mysterious powers to the sun, the moon, the changing seasons, the rain, the sky?
Of course you would. We live now not just post-agriculturally, but post-industrially. Things happen we don’t understand and we behave like it’s magic. Few of us really know how computers work, or our phones, or social media. It just does and it’s like magic, and when it doesn’t work we panic and feel deeply, personally offended, and we feel like the gods are mocking us. The Gods of the Silicon Valley.
In Vaughan’s article, she describes how remnants of the magic created to understand the natural world persist today, but we not only don’t understand it, but we don’t even perceive it. It’s just the air. It’s just us. To understand it, to perceive it, we have to work to adapt our consciousness to see our existence as an object, not as a thing becoming, but as a thing that is. But this air is already polluted by all of these motes of lie and superstition and prejudice, as well as truths, many of which are too painful to admit.
Vaughan also describes how universality is part of this mythical world. We live like everything is universal, like we all experience things the same way, but we don’t. Her example is Joseph Campbell’s famous writing on the hero’s journey. Citing Hayao Kawai’s book Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan, she writes: “The hero’s journey may not be so universal after all: Japanese folk tales, for example, tend to end anticlimactically, with no denouement involving the overcoming of monsters, capturing of treasure, and subsequent triumphant return. Teh hero storyline may be a specifically Western one, and its apparent universality a result either of empire and colonization, or of the cultural assumptions of Jungians in the West, blinded by an ahistorical, universalist focus.”
But this is the air we breath. Western air, where every story requires a hero (usually male) overcoming obstacles on a quest, which (usually) he ultimately achieves.
Or consider this, from Anastasia Basil’s essay “Relax, Ladies. Don’t Be So Uptight. You Know You Want It”: “No one thinks of themselves as a byproduct of a generation. Your parents and grandparents, sure, they’re byproducts. (Exhibit A, your grandmother’s helmet-shaped perm.) But not you. You’re aware of the trends and social attitudes of your generation, but your thoughts, proclivities, and the votes you cast are entirely your own. Or are they? Every generation is a slop-sink of prejudices, norms, and ideologies, and since we humans are more sponge-like than rock-like, we naturally absorb our share of generational sludge. Tobacco-smoke enemas were all the rage in the 18th century. Stomach ache? Heart stalled? Typhoid? Doctors blew smoke up your ass. The United States performed over 40,000 lobotomies between the 1940s and ’50s, more than any other nation.”
So we live in a slop-sink that we don’t see or hear or smell or taste or even acknowledge, until something comes along to make it stop working, and then we are mad. Oh, Lord, how we are mad! We panic and feel deeply, personally offended, and we feel like the gods are mocking us. And that’s when we start looking for others to blame and new stories to tell so that it all starts working again. And sometimes people in power understand this, and they know how to manipulate it and us so that we do their bidding.
But we don’t notice, because that’s the air we’ve always been in.
One of my verbs for 2018 was “read”. And I have read, a lot, but mostly only for pay, except for my brief foray into Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and that night in Colorado when I read almost an entire issue of the Missouri Review cover-to-cover. The other night, though, I finally finished Jeffrey Toobin’s book American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. True, I had to renew it three times, and it’s eight days overdue from the library, but still … finished.
Midway through the book, this passage stopped me:
Patricia was alive only because of several improbable twists of fate. If, back in San Francisco, Cinque had not assigned Patricia to the same team as Bill and Emily . . . If Bill weren’t going stir-crazy in the Fifty-Fourth Street house and thus volunteered to run errands . . . If DeFreeze had accepted Mizmoon’s recommendation that Angela, rather than Patricia, join the Harrises on the errands in Inglewood . . . If Bill hadn’t been caught stealing the bandolier at Mel’s, causing the split with the other comrades . . . If the other comrades had met up at the drive-in, as planned, and persuaded Bill, Emily, and Patricia to rejoin them . . . If the comrades had all stuck together, as they had done from hideout to hideout, month after month, then Bill, Emily, and Patricia would also have been inside the house on Fifty-Fourth Street. And they would all be dead.
The passage introduces many of the characters in Hearst’s story, members (the “comrades”) of the Symbionese Liberation Army who kidnapped her in February 1974. Donald DeFreeeze, aka Marshall Cinque, was the group’s leader, and Bill and Emily Harris, Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik, and Angela Atwood were other SLA members. It captures the moment after an FBI raid finally caught up to the group. DeFreeze, Mizmoon, Atwood, and three other members were killed by flame and bullets in “the house on Fifty-Fourth Street” in Los Angeles, on May 16, 1975. Patricia and the Harrises were on the lam at the time, having been involved in a shootout at Mel’s sporting goods store. They watched the raid on television in a motel room.
But it was the first line that stopped me: “Patricia was alive only because of several improbable twists of fate.” If Toobin’s book has a fault, this is it: the belief that there is anything unique in this statement. We all can look back on our lives and see our present situation as nothing but the end result of a series of “improbable twists of fate.”
However, at the end of the book–after Hearst has gotten a slap on the wrist for her involvement in a bank robbery that resulted in a bystander’s death, had her sentence commuted by President Carter, and received a pardon from President Clinton–Toobin writes that the socialite-turned kidnapping victim-turned-revolutionary-turned criminal “led the life for which she was destined,” “notwithstanding a surreal detour in the 1970s.” By living out a life of relative wealth, privilege, and comfort after her ordeal and crimes, her story, “as extraordinary as it once was, had a familiar, even predictable ending.”
For some reason, the idea of “privilege” is triggering for some, but Hearst’s status as an heir to William Randolph Hearst–the 19th-century publishing magnate who created the Spanish-American War and was the model for Orson Wells’ Charles Foster Kane–clearly influenced her “familiar, even predictable ending.” So how about people with fewer means?
I’ll offer myself as an example. In the fall of 1985, I was a sophomore in college in Kansas City. The previous summer I had worked full-time in the coffee shop of a hospital, and I kept that job on a part-time basis into the first semester. But there were complications. I had moved off-campus and had no car, so getting back and forth was a challenge, as was school–so I quit the job.
That fall I had also enrolled in a French literature class, and in that class I met Laura. A few weeks later she set me up with one of her sorority sisters, with whom I shared another class. Both of them worked at an independent drugstore on the Plaza.
Around mid-October, I looked at my finances and realized that I needed to find a job by mid-November at the latest. One day the delivery driver at the drugstore was fired, and the second sorority sister–whom I was, by that time, dating–suggested I apply. So in early November I marched myself to the Plaza, met with the manager, and was hired to start working the same day.
Laura and I, studying hard October 1985
Getting to and from the Plaza was a longer walk than the hospital, but it was a fun job, delivering prescriptions to mostly older folks in the Plaza’s postwar high-rises and the surrounding area’s stately homes. It more than sustained me through the following summer.
Now: “Improbable twists of fate”? Yes. Taking the right classes at the right time, meeting the right people at the right time … but there is more at work in this story. Being in college to start with is number one–an option that is still not available to all, even less so with today’s tuition rates. But also having been raised with the skills needed to present well in an interview and the gumption to go to that drugstore out of the blue played a role. And being a preppy white college kid certainly didn’t hurt.
In the longer view, where I am now–building a writing business while job hunting–is not where I thought I’d be at 52, but it’s not terrible, and I think it is leading to something, though exactly what is not clear now. Ellen’s job, supportive relatives, lots of friends–they help me in my quest. Maybe whatever this is leading to will be my “familiar, even predictable ending”–another member of the scribbling class, recording what I see around me, and within me, to share with others while surrounded by family.
It wouldn’t be a bad outcome, especially since I didn’t have to be kidnapped or rob banks on the way to getting there.
Ellen always tells me, “You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to interpret your dreams,” and she’s right. The unfinished school paper, the forgotten class, the phone that will not work … these are all classic dreams for someone who’s personality looks like this:
But more abstract dreams and the unconscious have always fascinated me. I was interested in psychology in high school not because I wanted to help people but because I was interested in subliminal messaging. In 1972 Wilson Scott Key published his book Subliminal Seduction. He followed that up with Media Sexploitation (1976) and The Clam Plate Orgy (1982). I found all of these books in the St. Joseph Public Library, my second home, and devoured them, though they all had the same message: the media, especially advertisers, were using subliminal messaging to manipulate us into buying products.
About the same time I was reading Key’s books, a movement was afoot to identify hidden messages in rock songs, especially songs by heavy metal bands. The main method for delivery was said to be “back-masking,” or engineering phrases into albums that could only be heard when played backward. I spent a lot of time trying to find hidden messages in songs like “Stairway to Heaven,” though I was skeptical about the idea of being affected in any way by a message you couldn’t hear.
Subliminal?
Key’s idea of subliminal messaging in advertising is now so obvious, and I never did find anything as scandalous as even “Please patronize our snack bar” hidden in “Stairway to Heaven.” As lyrics became more explicit in every way, the idea that any song needed a “hidden” message became absurd. When Ozzy Osbourne was taken to court because his song “Suicide Solution” allegedly influenced a teen to kill himself with the barely discernible phrase “Do it! Do it!” whispered over and over, the lawsuit ignored more obvious (again, played forward) lyrics like:
Evil thoughts and evil doings Cold, alone you hang in ruins Thought that you’d escape the reaper You can’t escape the master keeper
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been reading Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Not the real thing, yet, just the introduction by the editors of the Barnes & Noble Classics edition I picked up kind of randomly last week. (I can’t leave a bookstore empty handed.) Freud started as a regular doctor with a special interest in neurological pathology, physical problems with identifiable physical causes. However, he became interested in physical problems that didn’t have physical causes. His research and thinking and studies led him to his revolutionary theories of the unconscious–for example, the id, the ego, and the superego.
What interests me so far about Interpretation of Dreams is the idea that dreams are the mind’s way of sorting out what has happened during the day, and making sense of it by attaching the day’s events to similar events from our past. It’s much more nuanced than this, and again, I’ve only read the introduction, but my understanding now is like this: Since the events rarely match up perfectly, the mind invents connections that seem to us bizarre, but in dream language make perfect sense. Freud’s addition is to say that those previous similar events are rooted in long-suppressed memories or traumas, so the things that we see in a dream–a lobster, for example–is not really a lobster, but a representation of, say, an angry parent. Even the most bizarre dreams make sense, it can just take a lot of imaginative work (Freud’s method was “free association”) to figure them out.
Of course, Freud is not fashionable these days, even though late in life he did reject one of his kookier ideas, the “seduction hypothesis.” The answer to most psychiatric problems today is medication, augmented by some form of talking therapy. But Freud literally opened our minds to the reality that even today, with all of the technology we have at our disposal, our minds are universes we will likely never fully understand. We look into the night sky and see the void, and we look into the void and see ourselves.
As anyone who has read my blog over the past year or so knows, I try to keep my posts short while I explore the deeper meaning of things. A music review or thoughts about running are portals to ways I make sense of the world around me.
Since I launched the blog in 2016, it has been an on-again, off-again project. When I was not working full time last summer, I posted a lot. When I started working full time at WashU, my posts grew more infrequent. Well, I’m back to not working full time, and one of the benefits of semi-employment is relaunching my blog as I relaunch my Write Fox business.
The past 15 months have been months of tremendous trial for me and my family, much of it my own doing and responsibility. Perhaps some of those details will be gently revealed in the fullness of time, as will things about my past as I work on my memoir project, but for now I want to mention three books I will be reading to guide me on the way. I believe they will inform things I write here.
One of my deep interests now is the line between explaining our actions and excusing them. I hope to gain insight on this puzzle by reading Daniel Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will. If consciously controlling our actions is an “illusion,” what role does personal responsibility play in our daily lives? Are we machines, responding to our accidents of birth, quirks of our upbringing, our race, our social class, and so on? Wegner’s 2002 book takes a scientific approach to these questions; I am hoping that 15 years later he has much to teach me, despite the all-out assault on science and rationalism currently under way.
Last week I went to a bookstore hoping to find books by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. I have been interested in existentialism’s challenges to our assumptions about meaning, existence, and what it means to exist (or not) since high school. The chain book store I went to (sorry, friends at Left Bank! I was out of my usual flight path) didn’t have anything by Sartre, but they did have At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It appears to be a less weighty introduction to Sartre’s thought and that of his contemporaries, like Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. My hope is it will refresh my memory of the basic tenets of existentialist philosophy and prepare me to dive into weightier things like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Finally, Marcel Proust’s Swan’s Way has been on my nightstand for a long time. I started this novel once, got distracted, and didn’t get back to it. My hope is that as I meditate on my own childhood experiences and how they shaped who I am and what I have done, both good and bad, I will find inspiration, recognition, and parallels in Proust’s “novel of childhood.”
So here’s to new adventures, professional and otherwise.
In the late 1970s, my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, was a hotbed of pop music criticism.
The reason was two young reporters at the St. Joseph News-Press and Gazette, Conrad Bibens and Terry Jordan.
For a couple of years, I faithfully clipped their album and concert reviews from the paper’s weekend Spotlight magazine, which published the television listings for the week, and other sections of the paper. I recently found the collection while cleaning out my dad’s house.
Bibens’ album reviews compose the largest part of the stash. Each review is a little gem, starting with background on the artist, including previous recordings if he or she had any, before launching into a thoughtful critique of the work itself.
For example, his review of Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps opens with, “There’ve been times when Neil Young represented all that’s good about rock ‘n’ roll,” before summarizing Young’s years with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, and his solo work. “His output was erratic and often sloppy, sounding like a man trying to work out his personal problems on vinyl,” Bibens writes. (Which, of course, he was.)
Of that album’s acoustic side, he states, “Young sounds as if he’d be at home at a folk festival,” while cuts on the electric side “are fierce enough to blow any punk group right off the stage.”
His closing claim that the album shows Young to be “a vital performer who seems ready for whatever changes the 80s will bring” didn’t turn out to be quite accurate, as Young would flounder to find a style before returning to form at decade’s end with Freedom and its early ’90s follow-up Ragged Glory, but based on the promise of Rust Never Sleeps, it was a sound statement.
At the turn of the decade, Bibens wrote “A personal top ten of rock in the 70s.” Some of his list is predictable–Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (“Stairway to Heaven,” etc.) is #1, followed by The Who’s Who’s Next–but there are surprises from a 35-plus years perspective: A Yes album? Eagles? Poco?
Jordan, at least based on what’s in my collection, wrote more concert reviews. Kansas City was the place for concerts, and the headlines alone tell the story: “Boston gives smoking concert.” “Concert overshadowed by bad location” (Ian Hunter). “Tarnished Legend” (Stephen Stills). “Styx wows 13,000 at Kemper.”
When heavy rain came to Summerjam ’79, the headline wrote itself: “REO rides the storm out.” However, Jordan followed that bit of predictability up with a clear-eyed overview of the proceedings. REO, “a band from the Corn Belt that was eager to please,” catered to its “predominantly high school crowd.” Pat Travers’ “Ted Nugent-inspired heavy metal was sluggish.” Santana’s “traditional favorites . . . were dispensed with rather perfunctorily.” One-hit-wonder Jay Ferguson (remember “Thunder Island”?) was canceled.
Sometimes I fantasize that I’ll be asked what the most influential book I ever read was, and I will say, without missing a beat, “The first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide.” Now I think I’d have to follow that up with, “Oh, and the pop music critics at the St. Joseph News-Press and Gazette.”
I wrote this review of a novelization of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Scott v. Sandford several years ago for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but it never appeared in the paper. The book is Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane’s Recollection of Dred Scott and the Supreme Court Case that Started the Civil War. The review is a remnant of my “postmodern” phase.
“Historical fiction” is a slippery genre.
Dred Scott. Oil on canvas by Louis Schultze, 1888. Acc. # 1897.9.1. Missouri Historical Society Museum Collections. Photograph by David Schultz, 1999. NS 23864. Photograph and scan (c) 1999-2006, Missouri Historical Society.
On one hand, postmodernists might claim that the term is redundant. All “history,” they would say, is to some degree “fiction”—facts conveniently rearranged and reinterpreted to suit the political aims of history’s “winners.”
On the other hand, traditionalists would hold that fact and fancy are mutually exclusive. There is a world that never was and the world that was, and never the twain shall meet.
Complicating matters is one simple fact: most of what is marketed as “historical fiction” is neither good history nor good fiction. Sketchily drawn characters and anachronistic speech, attitudes and actions—to say nothing of the bodice-ripping raunch of the “historical romance” subspecies—have marred some of the better-selling examples of the genre.
Wisely, novelist Gregory J. Wallance avoids these pitfalls in “Two Men Before the Storm,” his novelization of “the most consequential legal case in American history,” Scott v. Sandford.
Wallance’s imaginative contribution to the well-known case of Dred Scott, the slave who sued unsuccessfully for his freedom in a series of court cases between 1847 and 1857, is to bring lawyer Arba Crane out of the shadows of history and into the center of the story.
Wallance first encountered the “real” Arba Crane in a footnote to a book about the Scott case. The note cited a letter sent in the early 20th century to the head librarian at the Missouri Historical Society.
The letter described how Crane—then working for Roswell Field, the prominent St. Louis attorney commonly regarded as “Dred Scott’s lawyer”—met Scott, whom Field had hired as a night janitor. The men began talking, and Crane soon became convinced that Scott had sound legal grounds to seek his freedom.
“After I read that footnote I decided to write this book; indeed, I had to write it,” Wallance writes in his “Author’s Note.” Wallance, also an attorney, explains that he could understand the young lawyer’s loneliness working late at night. He could see how a friendship could develop between the young Crane and the slave Dred Scott.
From that morsel of information and personal identification, Wallance grows Crane into a strong, credible character. Crane narrates the novel in the first person, beginning with his arrival in the city in the early 1850s as a brooding man escaping a domineering father, limited future and troubling past in Newfane, New Hampshire—the “real” Roswell Field’s hometown.
Crane finds St. Louis to be a both a vibrant and violent place, full of disease, muddy streets, prostitutes and death—but most of all, it is a place where human beings were bought and sold on the steps of the city’s new courthouse, now known as the “Old Courthouse.”
After meeting Scott, he becomes immersed in the politics of the city’s pro- and anti-slavery elite, falling in love with a fictitious Southern belle, Kate Fox, along the way. Wallance uses Fox to both explore the conflicted worldview of the Old South and to add another dimension to his imagined abolitionist, Arba Crane.
Wallance’s crisply written novel moves quickly. He wisely avoids getting bogged down in legal minutiae, providing just enough detail for the reader to understand the legal issues at hand.
Historians and legal scholars will have some quibbles with the liberties Wallance takes with the facts—for example, he uses court documents to construct a dialogue between attorneys and the Supreme Court judges, something he admits did not happen, to say nothing of the diminished role he gives to Roswell Field.
My own quibble is that Wallance seems unaware, in his “Historical Notes,” that his Southern belle shares a name with one of the 19th-century sisters who started the “spiritualism” craze, Kate and Maggie Fox. Spiritualism plays a role in the novel—could he have missed, in his research, Barbara Weisberg’s 2004 book on the Fox sisters, “Talking to the Dead”? Would he have named his character “Kate Fox” had he been aware of the “real” Kate Fox?
But such nits are truly quibbles. Fans of history and fiction alike will be unable to deny the power of Wallance’s story, which calls a truce between the warring armies of fact and fiction—at least for now.
My Freshman year of college, I wrote a journal entry for English class that started, “I have been a Stones fan forever.” That may have been hyperbole, but it is true that I–like millions of others–have never lived in a world without the Rolling Stones.
Richard Cohen takes that fact as the premise of his forthcoming book, The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones. It’s one of two music-related books I’ll be reviewing together for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch next month.
The title comes from an interview with Keith Richards. When Cohen asked the guitarist what it was like to live in a world always starring the Rolling Stones, he (typically) turned the question back on the interviewer: “You tell me. I don’t know. . . . For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”
Cohen was 26 in 1994 when Rolling Stone magazine asked him to cover the group’s Voodoo Lounge tour. In 1994 I was 28, so we’re roughly contemporaries–late entries to Generation X. His entree to the Rolling Stones was “Honky Tonk Women.” Mine was, like so many other people’s, “Satisfaction.” But what we share more deeply is a vague feeling of being “born too late.” “Time would always separate me from these guys, from this generation,” he writes. But he soldiers on.
Cohen obviously did more than cover a tour. His book is another history of the Rolling Stones, but he promises to re-tell those familiar tales of music and madness and Altamont and decadence through the eyes of a Gen Xer rather than a Boomer. Will he see another, baby, standing in the shadows? I’ll keep you posted.
My sister taught me how to read the summer before kindergarten. Not so remarkable for lucky kids these days who have access to academically progressive preschool programs, but in the ’70s it marked me as advanced. I still remember the Sunday night my mom got a call at home saying that the next day I would be leaving my first-grade classroom at reading class time to go to the second-grade room for reading. (more…)
Last week I went to a bookstore hoping to find books by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. I have been interested in existentialism’s challenges to our assumptions about meaning, existence, and what it means to exist (or not) since high school. The chain book store I went to (sorry, friends at 
At the turn of the decade, Bibens wrote “A personal top ten of rock in the 70s.” Some of his list is predictable–Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (“Stairway to Heaven,” etc.) is #1, followed by The Who’s Who’s Next–but there are surprises from a 35-plus years perspective: A Yes album? Eagles? Poco?
