When I wake up at three or four in the morning in a hotel room there’s not a hell of a lot to do except make coffee and read for awhile. I’m realizing that the combination of Cormac McCarthy novels and Carl Jung’s diary of his descent into the netherworld combine, but uneasily. Far below the window I see a ship being escorted by tugs toward the dock where, later this afternoon, we will board it and move out to sea.
The path to Hong Kong (where I am writing this) by air from San Francisco, passes over vast, frozen tundra, giving way to a pattern of brown and white as the earth is exposed. Then through a mist of clouds a sea of high rises appears below, like steel and concrete giants marching out of China toward the sea.
I am used to thinking of Asia as I knew it forty years ago, when I was afflicted with the thinking common to all untraveled people, a certainty that those of my color and beliefs were the heros, and the rest of the world character actors in my play. I wasn’t nearly as bad as a lot of others because I had read extensively, even if I had not traveled. I knew there was something not right about it when I heard another man heckle the actors on a foreign stage for discomfiting his expectations.
As I get older I hear the propensity in men to replay their stories, the kind ones improving on them and the others slathering them with tedious and undigestible detail. I have my stories of a year in Japan in my youth, of confrontations and assignations with foreign men and women. In each story I am the viewpoint character, and never in their construction have I stepped outside the assumption that I was the leading actor, and the others supporting cast.
I suppose that is what, in essence, Jung’s journey is all about: the recognition that we begin as the actor in a play, and pass through a process of disintegration in order to encompass the play itself, to ultimately get a glimpse of the director and behind the director, the playwright. The easy path is to simply do the lines and stay in character, collect your pay and hope for a long and successful run.
I am puzzled by the reaction to his work as religion, or by a profession of “believing him” or not. I have no reasons to not accept that he faithfully recorded his experience, which is the best anyone can do. He understood that it was the symbol which was the transformer of energy, and that before it passed through the symbol and gained emotional tone, it had no meaning. So the symbols, or archetypes, are transformers. Beyond them, outside the enclosure of them, energy is amorphous. It doesn’t mean anything. The only meaning is what we provide, or what is given to us by our culture. And inside this meaning we are either protected or imprisoned, depending on our inclination to encompass or exclude what seems to be alien.
McCarthy is a western man. He writes about the Mexican border, and about men who are self-sufficient and not particularly introspective. If one of them asks the other if he believes in God his answer is most likely that he’s not thought on it all that much. When one of his characters is shot in the leg he heats a pistol barrel in the fire until it’s glowing red and shoves it into the entrance and exit wounds to cauterize them. He makes a lot of noise, but he doesn’t die of infection on the Mexican desert. He does what he has to do to survive.
In, “The Crossing,” McCarthy writes:
“(The old man) said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence, but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is not great order in the world save that which death has put there … between (men’s) acts and ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them … ‘You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.’”
I am certainly imposing my own order on what I am reading to say that Jung and McCarthy would agree on anything. But in some alchemy unknown to me at a conscious level they are working together to shape something bigger than either by himself. Jung writes about his dream presaging the first Great War, and of the behavior of men and women (the shine on their eyes) as presaging human sacrifice. They do not realize that they are eager for the blood letting, thinking it will be other people’s blood. They believe the image of themselves as heroes. It is the death of the hero in the man which begins the journey to maturity. I recall Joseph Henderson asking me who the hero was slaying all those dragons to impress, and I realized the truth of it: that it was for his mother, and until he could move beyond that, he was as a child.
One of McCarthy’s ranchers observes that when wolves kill cattle they mutilate them more than when they kill wild game, as if there is something in their existence, in the way they are not bred to survive, that makes the wolf need to mutilate them. The reason is understood, if difficult to articulate. It is part of the order imposed on the world by beings of great order.
The McCarthy novels I will savor until they are finished, like other westerns that transcend the genre: “Lonesome Dove” and Pete Dexter’s “Deadwood” come to mind. Then I will let the shift in cultures strip away what I can bear to do without, and maybe see with new eyes for awhile. And I will get back into the rhythm of night and day, and not be writing in the early mornings, when, like McCarthy’s characters, I move back and forth across the southern border without papers and with only a vague idea of any purpose for the crossing.