escarpment

reconvening with Carl...

...Jung, that is. C.G. Jung.

Proceeding from yesterday's serendipitous re-encountering of the titan of analytical psychology, my long Saturday afternoon constitutional took me past the SFPL Main where I found Jung's quasi-autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

It's "quasi" because he didn't actually write the whole thing himself, and mostly dictated it to his friend, editor and interviewer, Aniela Jaffé; he did much of the writing in key early chapters, though. It's more accurately characterized as a 'collaborative autobiography.'

Starting to read it in the Library, I found it immediately entrancing. From the Prologue:

My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.

What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life.

Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only "tell stories." Whether or not the stories are "true" is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.

Jung's words here resonate deeply for me, particularly within the context of my Index Mirabilis project, on which I've designated this year as the one during which it will find reification in the world. For posterity, or for forgetting... who knows. I shall just put it out into the universe and see what time and the cosmos does with it. ::chuckle::

Thus it is, in the journey towards my 67th year, I have now undertaken "to tell my personal myth" in a form and modality unique to this moment in human technological development.

Interestingly parallel to Jung's work at hand, it is also an act of co-creation... not with a friend or human editor and interviewer, but with a synthetic mind that has emerged from seemingly out of nowhere, providing an extraordinary substrate of story-telling the likes of which has not existed previously in human literary space.

I am soon going to find out whether it knows to ask just the right questions, for this project to truly be manifest, and to abide.

[ Left: looking down the Main Library's atrium, from a perch on the 5th floor. Right: looking at the plaza outside, and glimpsing my fave statue, of Ashurbanipal... ]