Tim,
I want to get back on this before the room fills up with the acrid smoke
from Wei's night lamp. Your perception of Pound's idea of the artist's being
"true to himself" is of course exactly what I read also. But I do believe
there is more to be added to it, and from Pound himself. He said, "A man of
genius has a right to any mode of expression." On the surface this may seem
an elitist remark, but in truth it only works when there is actual genius to
be found there in the first place. "The proof of the pudding" as has been
said. Adding even to this I think there is a muse lurking behind the best in
poets. Here is where Pound and Graves do meet on common ground even though
Graves had little use for Pound. I don't know what Pound thought of Graves.
Does anyone know? But it was Graves, the author of "The White Goddess", a
book chuckfull of good trees (even made a calendar out of them) who told us
that "the concept of a CREATIVE GODDESS was banned by Christian theologians
almost two thousand years ago, and by Jewish theologians long before that."
She is a spirit who dwells in the anima and can only be invoked through
the anima. She is lunar, she can be dark, a "belle Dame sans Merci", but
great poetry is impossible without her blessing. Pound helped to make the
atmosphere more congenial for the anima to manifest itself and find the
voices of poetic genius. Jung did her no harm.
That said, I find it more difficult to agree with you on your analysis
of Jung's statement which I provided to illustrate the reaction of the
animus to the darker manifestations of the anima, those aspects which erupt
as the result of being pent up deep within the psyche.
You say that Jung was misguided in two ways. First, he was mistaking
"the archetypal experience for an "abyss of impassioned dissolution" rather
than "a Kind of crystalline transfiguration, an achievement of new form and
definition; an emergence from flux." I understand what you mean, but I
believe you are confusing the results with the cause, and Jung was
delineating the cause of the Dionysian chaos coming from an abyssmal
source, a primordial chthonic urquell of Erde. No doubt that after an
upsurge from this well of the eternal return and the waters subside the
resulting consequences are the clear metamorphosis of a cathartic,
transfigured, and newly defined form.
Your second objection to Jung's characterization that war and its
attendant iniquities are rationally planned and not "an eruption of raw
irrational violence" needs a closer examination. For one thing you mention
the holocaust and imply that the rest of your analysis is based on events of
WWII. I must remind you to note that Jung's statement was written in 1935,
and while it is a general assessment of an "orgy of bloodshed" by which
Jung must of course mean war, it is not about events which had not yet
happened. The Swiss psychologist may have had an entirely different
interpretation of these. i have to say that I think you are right when you
say that "it would be fairer to Jung to say that his interest lies in the
psychological factors that cause individual men and women to participate in
atrocities." A lynch mob is quite different from a planned genocide, and
Jung is talking about irrational actions of the primordial psyche not
rationalized scapegoat programs. I can not agree with you that Jung makes a
leap from "blood lust" to "mechanized warfare". He never makes that leap but
merely states that there are certain rationalizations "well-meaning people"
use to explain why all the madness is once again loosed upon their world.
All of these "reasons" Jung implies are inadequate. Once in war, yes, the
generals and politicians apply all the rational animus they can muster to
their cause, and truth we know becomes the first casualty. But I think you
may have read too much into Jung's statement. As I see it Jung is saying
that the animus by itself cannot subdue the anima entirely and must be swept
along with the collective flow of its force. I do not offer this as a
rationalization for cruelty and murder nor I think would Jung, but it may
serve to help us understand why these things happen.Jung calls the people
"well-meaning". This is the tragedy that like Pound we loose our center
sometimes "fighting the world".
"A mere fifty generations ago many of us in Europe were no better than
primitives. The layer of culture, this pleasing patina, must therefore be
quite extraordinarily thin in comparison with the powerfully developed
layers of the primitive psyche. But it is these layers that form the
collective unconscious, together with the vestiges of animality that lose
themselves in the nebulous abyss of time." Jung from "Civilization in
Transition"-"The Role of the Unconscious".
CDM
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