Gods and Goddesses, Icons and Idols Series

jI am currently working on a new series of artwork including acrylics, encaustics, oils and watercolors on wood, canvas and paper. After reading more by Carl Jung and on Jung, I decided to return to this series which I started over ten years ago. Ever since junior high I've had a fascination for mythology which has been strengthened by my 20 plus year study of Jung, Joseph Campbell and more. I'm including Icons because they serve the role of mythology in conciousness and leaps in awareness due to their archetypal power. Psychologists, artists, poets, authors, comic writers and film directors have long mined the powers of archetypal images and how their immediacy can enrich a story as people identify with and acknowledge their inherent qualities. In Jung's Red Book and his concepts, he encourages us to explore our own personal archetypes with both their positive and negative qualities. Even though I've been painting this way for years, I am shocked when I discover a new archetype. In my new series I explore these themes as a guide to personal discovery but as with all archetypes, they invite universal speculation. I ran the gamut from Greek and Egyptian mythology to relatively contemporary icons such as characters from the T.V. series, "Fringe," and James O'Barr's comic, "The Crow." I only realized weeks after completing these latter two, that they related to the theme of a figure who continued after death. First is the character,Eric Draven, who came back from the dead as the character, the Crow. And secondly, the scientist, William Bell, from Fringe who avoided death by going to an alternate universe. I realized that I was choosing these subjects as I tried to comprehend aspects of my life and my changing psychology after surviving cancer. It only dawned on me a few weeks later that I was trying to make sense of my mood swings from euphoria at being alive a feeling good to fear and trepidation every three months before the neccessary CT scans to see if the cancer has returned. I am typing this post from my phone so can't upload photos but will as soon as I can.

Figure Painting, Jung, the Subconcious and Emotion

While I enjoy all types of painting and collage, I have to say that figure painting is my favorite.  I'm

not quite sure why artists are so fascinated with the human figure but I guess for me it's the act of creating a piece of art that communicates emotion. Because I've had little training in painting, I don't really know techniques for painting faces with emotion.  Most of my work is to paint, sort of letting my subconscious take over, then stand back and see what the painting is telling me.  I examine it and if I see an emotion, I stop painting.  If I don't feel anything, I keep messing with it, often ruining good eyes or faces and having to start over.  Since I paint with heavy oils, untouched my thinning agents, I end up with heavy layers, not the smartest method to capture such a sensitive subject as emotion.
Here is where my studies in Carl Jung help because he  believed that art, as shown in his Red Book, tapped into his subconscious.  Through a highly transformative and prolific period, he discovered that paintings reveal things the artist isn't aware of at the moment, but which is revealed in the painting.  This happens to me all the time.  Not a professional way to paint utilizing proven techniques but the main reason I paint.

I feel as if Edvard Munch painted this way which is one reason he's one of my favorite artists, along with Modigliani,   Sir Edward-Coley Burne Jones, Waterhouse, and. Dante Gabriel Rossetti  I'm also, to my surprise, coming to respect Pablo Picasso more and more.  I'm not into his cubism much, bur love his blue period for the emotional content as much as his talent. 
The piece I'm working on now, "Diana," an oil on wood 36X18, is one of these, but I'm trying to employ better and new techniques, as well as just painting and allowing it to flow once I'm in the zone.  I don't know if it's going to work or not, since I'm trying out new techniques. I'm not sure if  they'll ruin all the work I've already completed.
My art is not what one would call good art.  My figures are not formed in a realistic or accurate manner and portions are often out of proportion.  However, as Carl Jung discovered in his psychoanalytical practice and in his personal life with his creation of The Red Book, , the creative act of producing art is often an act of the transpersonal, taking the personal aspects of the finished piece and adding to it the universal aspect where it raises an emotional reaction in the viewers.  Often this reaction can't be explained,  but the viewer knows immediately whether they are drawn to a piece of art or are not,  The transpersonal arises from the subconscious of the artist and is in communication and collaboration with the subconscious of the viewer. This is a reason art has such an impact, and

paintings we might not fully understand on a conscious level still touch us emotionally. Jung also believed that creating and viewing art was more than just an aesthetic experience relating to beauty, but rather an important transformational opportunity for both artist and viewer.
The artist go into a zone, allowing what Jung called participation mystique, where the artist lets the ego step out of the way, releasing the inner awareness buried in the subconscious and communicating to the viewer via the symbolism found in the art work,
In the paintings I've included on this blog, I actually set out to try and paint more realistic portraits, but my subconscious was more powerful and I ended up with paintings that are combinations of people I know with emotions, I didn't plan to include.  The first one, "Francois Burgogne" is the combination of an ex-boyfriend, an actor and one of the characters in my novel, Shaman  Circus. The second one, "The Philosopher," is the combination of an artist friend and a famous cellist, the third one, "The White

Queen" was supposed to be a self-portrait but ended not even close and appears to me as both a queen and a motorcyclist.  The symbols at the right, were pieces I elaborated on which seemed to appear in the mixture of colors I used in the background.  I just fleshed them out.
The fourth painting of the woman with red hair on the left is my unfinished piece, "Diana."  I'll be painting more on her this weekend. She is a glorified self portrait as me as a much younger woman and the goddess Diana or Artemis has long been a pivotal figure in my personal mythology.  I actually shot archery in high school and then again when I was in my later thirties and was a pretty good shot, winning some competitions using a recurve bow. I plan to paint her dress today and may include a bow. 
I now consider these types of figures to be interpretations.  They are in no way portraits but rather a view of these people and their influence on my work, from the perspective of how my subconscious views reality. I have my personal interpretation of the emotion they evoke, but prefer to leave the interpretation and experience of those emotions to the viewer and how they view their own reality.
These oil paintings were  completed at different times in the past seven years or so but were still painted in the same type of zone where I lose all awareness of anything but applying paint.  As much as I've tried to focus on techniques I've learned about through reading, You Tube videos or art history, all is overshadowed by what my  rush wants to do as it is driven by my subconscious.

Magical Realism, Jung, Picasso & the Circus

Without the marginal or liminal world, we are not able to experience the numinous - the mystical experience, the feeling we are in the presence of the gods or a universe which fills us with awe and wonder. Often this happens in nature, sex, meditation and dreaming, but are also primary concepts in both art and the writing of Magical Realism.
The marginal or liminal world which exists outside of the constructs of society, has been named in the past in other cultures: the Celtic Sidh, the land behind Maya, the veil, in East India. It is the place between the real world and the ethereal realm, a magical world, where we confront archetypes, gods and spirits.  Both numinous experiences in liminal or marginal peoples and locations  are where we confront our own inner archetypes, the hidden inner gods, spirits and even the demon or the shadow, as Jung called it. In our dreams we meet dark and dangerous entities and helpful guides. But we can also encounter them in our waking life, by using our lunar mind in creating fantasies and active imagination; in writing, painting and meditation. 
Recently the Asheville Jung Center, presented a webinar called, Tending the Lunar Mind, by Dr. Murray Stein, a noted Jungian analyst who is also a professor at the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP) in Zurich, Switzerland, the same university where Jung taught. Dr. Stein spoke about two important aspects concepts of the lunar mind: the marginal and numinous.
 The liminal is the place outside of the practical, organized structured world, but it is real. Gypsies and Circuses both live marginal lives: moving from place to place, and it was interesting to discover that Picasso had an affinity for both, as well as a keen interest in primitive art, creating much along those lines in his sculptures and some of his paintings, but also in little fetishes he hid in his studios. By living as marginal life as a starving artist, not following conventional rules, he could enter the liminal realm, become very much in touch with his lunar mind. This highly evident, as if we had the visual images of his dreams, in many of his paintings where he evokes archetypal motifs: the most obvious the bull, which he felt represented himself, and which he learned to identify with form his youngest days when his father an art teacher, took him to bullfights. Picasso said that he at times, painted his women as the horses on which the bullfighter rode and who were sometimes sacrificed to the fight, as seen in paintings like Guernica, his anti World War II German Invasion of France painting. All of these searches, through the expression of his art, was his search for the Sacred Fire, that powerful act of revelation which comes through creative acts. Picasso's youngest son with Francois, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, claimed Picasso told him how he often didn't realize the symbolism in the images he painted were relevant to his personal life until later, a while after he finished his paintings, such as in Guernica.  
And so he could be close to the deepest depths of the liminal - in touch with the numinous, driven by his left brain/lunar mind thinking. To facilitate this, he chose other people to manage the practical side of his life, his many mistresses, eating in cafes and hiring managers to sell his art.
He was so fascinated with the gypsies who brought the circuses to his childhood home, that he often portrayed himself or others in Harlequin clothes. In the early 1900's in Spain at Carnivale and later to a lesser degree, in France, the Harlequin was not a funny clown, he was more Mercrurial, much like Hermes, whose jokes could often be sinister, cruel and confusing and sometimes even dangerous and terrifying.
Picasso called the circus,The Vague Terrain, as if he was already so entrenched in the lunar mind, that he could name it - a landscape which to him was another place and time.   
I found this all to be rather comforting, and revealing after I watched the brilliant video biography: Picasso: Magic, Sex and Death, which I found at the library. One of Picasso's close friends and his biographer, John Richardson, narrates and interviews members of Picasso's family, people he knew, and their descendants, as well as primary sources.

The books I write and am editing, fall in the category of Magical Realism. Parts of the books are based on fact: locations, politics and weather events (Katrina in Shaman Circus, the n'or easter and tornadoes in Mass. in Shaman Exile, and the flooding in Australia in Fireworks, Interference Equation. The magic is not full out fantasy, but a sort of an escalation, an exaggeration of real events which become magical, often, as lived and viewed by the characters. 

Jung discovered the lunar mind in the 1920's, when he began listen to the fantasies of a patient named Miss Miller, this was before neuroscientists found it in the laboratory and named it the left brain, which he found was emotional, fantasy oriented, and worked in childlike with images and stories. At first, Jung believed the lunar or right brain was inferior to the solar mind, the left brain, which was directed, organized, logical, practical, and followed the rules of society, as taught in the schools and lived in the cities. But as he worked with Miss Miller more and more, he discovered that the lunar mind was a story teller with purpose, it's ability to hyper associate, work in images and storylines, quite different from the real world, but relating to the real world, proved more informative and valuable to the sanity of a person. Recently, neurscience has confirmed Jung's interpretations of the lunar mind and found in clinical research that without sleeping and dreaming, people are be unable to thrive and even survive.Their health suffers, they are unable to regulate their body temperature, make decisions, judge other people as trustworthy, and be correct in the flight or fight syndrome when danger arrived. They end up with their immune system challenged, their anxiety high and become unable to handle their emotions.

I'd often wondered why I called my first novel Shaman Circus, since there's no circus in the novel. Just a rather confusing round of Shamans who can't quite figure out how to live their destiny and more often fail or are punished by circumstance for their failures or perhaps as tests of their commitment, but also manage to create incredible forces of power for good in unusual ways.  My second novel in the Shaman series, Shaman in Exile, does include plot aspects within the liminal world of the Circus in the countryside of France, on the outskirts of a city. I chose to include a circus, because of the amazingly bizarre circus we have in Greenville, SC called, The Inner Circus. Beside scheduled performances, stilt walkers, poi spinners, mimes and other performers dressed in odd, not conventional circus costumes, and sometimes frightening masks, often show up at the park, on Main Street, or art fairs and our first Friday Gallery Crawls in the Pendleton Arts district. When I lived in my studio in that area, 2007 and 2008, it was a highly liminal world. At night, due to crime at that time, the area was deserted, not a car parked anywhere, not a person in sight. This was when I was writing Shaman in Exile. At that time, I had no idea the circus was considered a liminal realm, or that appeared in Magical Realism novels.
 So it was an act of synchronicity to watch the Picasso video after the Tending the Lunar Mind webinar. Now I finally get some of Picasso's cubist works, not my favorite, I prefer his blue period, but now I understand more of what his paintings mean, but also why he kept morphing his style in more and more bizarre styles. Due to the way he felt inclined to paint himself in Harlequin costume, he allows his solar mind, his massive ego, to take the liberty of entering the lunar mind when he stepped in his studio. In fact, eve3n with his solar side, the Bull, when he entered the liminal realm in his studio, he became a shaman, and often thought of himself this way, according to his son, as unpredictable as the Hermes/Mercurial Harlequin.Pierrot. Picasso is one vibrant testimony, among the many in the artists and writers to lfind the lunar realm through creative acts, at the very time Jung was discovering the liminal worlds in the minds and dreams of his patients. 

Jung - healing journals and soul building

 As part of my therapy and the concentrated  Jungian studies I'm involved with now, I've been encouraged to address my disease through an art. journal.  Like Jung with his Red Book, it's an unpredictable journey - and an often shocking revelatory outcome. Much of it not understood during the process - the cryptic answers only to evolve and reveal themselves later - when we least expect it.
I haven't spoken about my disease much, it's difficult to comprehend and to explain in words and sometimes my cognitive abilities aren't up to the task. All of this is part of the Fibromyalgia disease, along with it's bedfellows, depression and anxiety.
I was diagnosed early last year and experienced an abrupt escalation of many of the symptoms of this chronic neuroimmune disease in July
So when I launched this project it was an experiment and a longing - a chance to create, perhaps stimulate my taxed brain with colorful paper scatterings. Rather innocently, I thought...
The Good Trigger:   Two months ago, I was thrilled to stumble upon a you tube video tutorial by Steffogal1 for her super cute and easy journal.
For my project, started in the a week ago in the midst if Christmas preparations on the unusually balmy days in south Carolina, I simply started off with  a sheet of the 12X12, not knowing how important this simple step would be to the path of my healing.
The Sad Trigger:  The tragedy and loss of so many lives once filled with happiness, hope and potential, in Newtown, Connecticut, is a trigger for everyone with access to a TV or computer to address their own issues of loss, as well as their value systems, humanitarian philosophies and meaningful roles in society. I couldn't bear to address the issue head on. since my nine-year old granddaughter learned of terrifying act from the news. She's an introspective girl, one who observes and broods and I know she has lost some of her innocence because of this. Each generation has it's tragedy, one they never really put away. I suffered through nuclear bomb drills when I was in middle and high school, although I didn't realize why my mother cried all night and let us sleep with her on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis until I was and adult. then came the shock of assassinations of President and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, while I was a senior in high school and shortly afterwards, the death of my cousin who was shot by a sniper on Hamburger Hill the first week he parachuted in Viet Nam.  The 30 to 40 year-olds saw their world forever changed and lost their own innocence due to 9/11 and now those who are under twenty have now lost their sense of safety, security and innocence due to the mass murders we've suffered through over the past few years.  I can't barely think of what my life would be like now, if Kendall had been in that school.  I can't hardly bear to hear her talk and ask questions about it and both her mother and I have a hard time often break down when it comes on TV.  WE can't take the pain away and we bring those angels back, but the first steps of healing the world, begin with healing our personal wounds.  This journal ended up being a healing process, although I didn't envision it that way when I began. but it was even as I worked on it but more so  afterwards as I contemplate it.  I would hope that each and every family and towns person of Newtown can find a way to heal and also pay homage to those children's, teachers and school administrators lives as well as the first responders who need a way to get those initial scenes out of their head. Whether it be art or humanitarian efforts or politics - action relieves anxiety and creativity fosters healing.  
The Start of the Project: To start I chose a paper from a paper stack entitled, Engraved Garden, aptly titled, although i didn't know it at the time. I chose it due to my affinity for the crow as a bird and perhaps for even more powerful reasons in relation to the cultural themes of a highly pivotal time in my life. I was very moved by   The Crow, the graphic novel by James O'Barr as well as the movie The Crow directed by Alex Proyas based on O'Barr's masterpiece. The film with it's itself was profound and powerful enough but with the tragic loss of Brandon  Lee during it's filming in North Carolina, a part of my spirit was reminded of the entwined meanings of death and loss, love that reaches beyond the grave. He's a messenger between this world and the next, this world and the depths, this world and our subconscious.
He suits and guides me in my interest mourning practices, perhaps because my father died when I was 5 years old and I wasn't allowed to grieve. My mother thought it best not to talk about it, so I endured with my only connection left to my father - a photo of him sitting on an iron rail fence beneath a fruit laden grape arbor at the home of my aunt and uncle in Lawrence, Mass.
The Inner Dialogue: I've come to believe America is amiss in rushing the grieving processes. The idea is to bear up, smile so as not to make others uncomfortable and return to work or whatever your everyday life entails as soon as possible so as not to stop the flow of commerce. This is a grave mistake. It produces a near impenetrable wall to soul building, if tragedy and loss is never explored, and the discouragement of grieving not stopped. 
Death loss and grief,  major transformational stages of life, while painful, lead to revelations, depth of character, and a fully engaged spirit. Ignored, parts of us are bidden to some unseen land of forgetting, only to emerge suddenly, as shocking as a jack in the box, "the joke's on us," implies that leering sadistic grin.
Instead, if we understand how periods of grief tend to teach us a great deal about ourselves through loss; about love, depth, and the true value of our time here, we have the chance to become a fully authentic individual.  The inner struggle and journey through the dark places eventually lead to to open doors at the tops of stairs where an essential soulful life await.  - If only we have the courage and are not stopped in our tracks by those who are afraid. Waking up to grief  is a necessary step and a means of waking up to life. .
 So back to the first page, I added a charm of the cemetery sculpture of a veiled mourning woman - the beginning stage of my personal journey. On the mauve colored flower, a very Victorian color since it was invented in the late 1800's, are tiny black spiders, symbols of the web of life.

On the second and third pages, I started out with a pocket made from a 2001 note card by Robert Frederick Ltd. that I couldn't bear to mail away. It depicts depicting John William Waterhouse's beautiful Pre-Raphaelite painting The Lady of Shallot (1888) - this has long been an important painting in my search for soul and meaning as it represents one must set forth into the unknown despite the dangers which might be encountered.  The painting was based on Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem, written in 1832 -  The Lady of Shallot, where a maiden is locked in a tower and can only view a knight who rides by in a mirror. Once the mirror cracks, she feels she must go seek him our and sets of in her boat, dressed in white, floating through water lilies (both symbols of innocence seeking Camelot.
Throughout this journal are pockets and tags - places to record  dreams or save insights, jot down lists or add photos symbolic of the journey.
Our red-headed young woman does encounter love but loss, as well, as we all do.
On the next page is an journaling area, although the winged pens seem to represent my the fast flight of my thoughts into the aether these days. Below, is a photo of a statue which is in my garden - She stands amidst the camellia and azalea, her feet hidden in ivy, representing Demeter or Ceres - the goddess of growth and fertility, but also the mother of Persephone or Hecate. Demeter/Ceres must bear witness to her daughter being abducted to the underground (our subconscious) by Hades or Pluto.
The fourth and fifth pages are about growth, blossoming, blooming to full flower and adulthood,  Life is vital and vibrant, alive and alluring.  The poppy foil and gilt envelope and a photo book highlight the promise of abundance, the call to lose oneself in nature, the summons to immerse oneself in the senses, the enchantment of new experiences, offerings, pleasures. On the 5th page the botanical tag barely hides one of my sketches of a nude woman with her back turned towards the viewer in the first stages of her learning to be vulnerable, but perhaps not quite open and carefree. 



On the 6th and 7th page, I chose an Art Nouveau  woman holding a crow. This woman, mature and unafraid, decides to live a bohemian life given over to art, writing, reading, music and love. She holds the crow, a reminder that death must be acknowledged, and how its acknowledgement proves life is sweet and precious - gift so important, it should be savored each and every day.
On the 7th page, the art noveau tag is made from metallic copper card stock - copper is the element , which in the Hermetic traditions of alchemy was connected with love, and later in chemistry with connectivity, electricity, cauterization.  The copper and blue paisley border reinforces the gypsy element of this stage of

The 8th and 9th pages represent two more stages of a woman's life, first her abduction again to the underworld, an experience which is re-enacted over and over through fathers, boyfriends, lovers and husbands.  Because woman is emotional with a rich internal life, she fear she must give up parts of herself to be committed to a relationship or to marry.  The 8th page with it's hues of reds and oranges is passionate - demonstrating all the emotions connected with these colors: passion, lust, anger. I cut this illustration from a label of Trader Joe's Apple Cider as it represented these emotions in a unique and powerful way - as the man leads the woman up a ladder - to the heights of passion and life experience, yet she refuses and struggles to escape, afraid of loss of self.  The tag further illustrates her confusion filled with promise and guises she doesn't know whether to trust or not.  The tag is tucked into the bottom border of a bowed Cupid's mouth, serious, closed and silent.
On the 8th page, our woman does indeed lose herself - in bearing children. this page is an explosion of life and the joys of motherhood and how losing oneself to the innocence of children, is a life giving experience. This theme is emphasized by the botanical card in the background of a lily, an long time symbol of innocence. The other tag, tells a different story made of lime green cross-hatched card stock, while it depicts the shade of new life, it also has a more important message - the interconnection, the weaving of lives and souls and futures.
The final two pages represent the woman who has come to terms with her life.
This tag: with a journaling tag like a mirror into the soul, and an additional tag of luxurious, deeply-hued magenta flowers, voluptuous and inviting, the red of passion altered, but not muted, instead enriched with the depth of experience - of love and loss, but now rampantly the reds and pinks are deepened into mauve and burgundy through experience, reflection, insight and resolve.
On the 10th page, once again, I used a Robert Frederick note card of Proserpina by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This goddess, also know as Persephone, Rossetti saw as the empress of Hades - queen of the underworld, who has become adept at exploring her subconscious depths. She is no longer an unwilling victim, but  now a mature and resolved woman, aware that to be fully authentic, she must also reside in the liminal world of Hades for half of her each year to become a fully authentic individual in her own right. She is adept at delving into the past and her subconscious through dreams, stillness, silence or meditation, and she'll continue to partake of the pomegranate because such journeys to the depths are imperative to soulmaking.
I tucked a tag I found at the side of the road once while walking - a scientific specimen card of the lunar, a perfect addendum to tuck into the Proserpina pocket as a symbol of a being whose greatest insights are discovered in the depths of the dark., while at the same time illuminating the night with its luminous life-colored wings and its observant golden eyes.
The Revelation and Resolutions: Now the journey is ended.  While working on this boudoir journal, I was too busy to pay attention to the pain, too involved to feel like I needed to go sleep, too frantic to stop.  Once I started, I couldn't stop working, laying out, reaching into the scraps and broken pieces of my life trying to fit them together.
I finished it in one day and although I felt the pain big time after I finished, the trek through my own personal underground or Hades was worth it.
And now as I write this, I discover things I didn't know - the paths of my life so obvious laid out this way, shrouded in mist until now, as I put the fragments together.
Issues came to light, past decisions were explored, questions arose and some answered. More importantly, I found resolution -  without any assistance from my conscious mind at all.  It was all delivered one through my hands and a part of the brain I can't access on command. But now I know it's there and waiting - a higher self, an inner guide, a wiser deeper voice - one that says - yes there's loss and abduction, refusal and abandonment, but also, also there are so many gifts, so many illuminating numinous moments to savor, treasure and tuck away, once released from this Pandora's box we call life, but with attention - waiting to wrapped in the healing ribbons, the themes of our lives, until ready to be tucked away for safe keeping in pockets made of shreds and tatterings.
As of yet, I'm still too confused to confront the myriad confusing emotions I'm feeling after Newtown. I do appreciate each moment with the people I love more, and more emphatically believe that each individual has the power to alter the world.  I'm just not sure how.
For now all I can is speak from the narrow pocket of the universe where I'm sequestered, due to my current struggle with fibromyalgia and it's unpredictable symptoms. 
 

For anyone interested in knowing more about fibromyalgia, Dr. Oz did a two part series on the disease and there are many research studies ongoing with the ability to scan the brain's activities and there's even been some talk of stem cell research for fibro. One recent brain study, reported and updated in a paper, February 27th, 2012, by neuroscientists at the University of Michigan.
"In the patients, that same mild pressure also produced measurable brain responses in areas that process the sensation of pain," says Clauw. "But the same kind of brain responses weren't seen in control subjects until the pressure on their thumb was more than doubled."
Though brain activity increased in many of the same areas in both patients and control subjects, there were striking differences too. Patients feeling pain from mild pressure had increased activity in 12 areas of their brains, while the control subjects feeling the same pressure had activation in only two areas. When the pressure on the control subjects' thumbs was increased, so did their pain rating and the number of brain areas activated. But only eight of the areas were the same as those in patients' brains.
So while the many people who suffer from Fibromyalgia, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lyme Disease, struggle everyday, trying new medications and methods, don;t forget to look at some form of art therapy to express your pain, coconfusion, eventual comprehension and acceptance and even an ability to try and rise above it.

Jung and the novel - Powder Dreams

I just finished Powder Dreams by David Ward-Nanney and I found it to be a riveting tale, which I hope to see more of as contemporary individuals search for a life of meaning. It's a deceptively complex book and pushes so many buttons, - so many things to address. The reader can't help but connect with Bo, despite his flaws, despite his mistakes. We want to be him when he's on the slopes, not just with him (until a certain incident); but when he entered analysis - that's when I saw his real strength. There were times I had to put the book down for a short while because I felt squirmy, as if I were sitting in that chair across from Dr. Attfield - I was terrified on a visceral level. 
This book is packed with so much, it starts off kind of laid back, like Bo's lifestyle. But when it picks up, there's so much going on your head is spinning, all these undercurrents: from dangerous deep powder skiing to dealing with for floor of The Chicago stock market' from drug dealers to corporate business and the Martha Stewarts of that world; from fragmenting to finding to pull back together again.

There's commentary galore, but what it's really about is people, how people screw up, how people struggle, how people enter those liminal zones, those transitory grey areas where they don't know what's right for them anymore. 

We come to like and really care about so many of the characters, Dr, Kalb, Pearson, and Claire, Abbie, even Marty, who tries to get what he wants via the wrong methods.  

Bo embarks on lifestyles, a number of diverse lifestyles, widely different from each one previous, lifestyles most people envy, yet he tosses them away, a feeling that "something's not quite right, a yearning for something more, a way to feel authentic and yet still function in the adult world which he avoided longer than most. All set against a rollicking contemporary journey across the United States and beyond, into the internal world, the world of Jung, archetypes and powerful forces: tricksters and puer aeternus, the anima and the hero.When the fissures appear, and everything comes crumbling down  - Bo emerges as someone who can and can't take it - he has bouts of disillusionment with those who he trusted (friends, father, bosses) or those he should respect, he feels regret when looking back on things he would change.

I come to this novel from a variety of viewpoints, early on as the mom of a son who goes for the risk taking  sports, although my son chose car racing and skateboarding - he had the same yearnings, the need for freedom, for speed, for risk and the power of the human body tor endure and outwit them.   


I also approach Nanney's tale simply as a reader who wants to be swept away to another kind of life (which he did) and since I'm also an author and from my experience as an editor at Shadow Archer Press and Fissure Magazine, I read with a more critical eye looking how he connects with an audience, writes technically well, handles plot.  As an editor, I'm always searching for a great story, but most of all,  how he treats and develops his protagonist and characters, giving them obstacles and rewards to ensure their growth as human beings.  


And then I come to his novel as another seeker on the path of Jung.  I've read his books, as well as books about him for 29 years or more.  I've gone through therapy (not with Jungians) three or four times in my life, during crisis periods and loved it, I've studied my dreams and learned to live my life using the Jungian Types, archetypes and techniques most of my adult life.
As I write,  I discover my novels act as stages where my personal archetypes speak from somewhere in my subconscious, even before I realize it. Are we not all enduring the same human struggles going on over the centuries, power, will, the desire for fame, the desire for freedom, love, temptation and regret, forgiveness, hope and trust?
  All of these are human realities, lived and explored from ancient times, exploding or culled form the deepest reaches of our innermost selves.  A self often hidden, rejected and feared.  Yet Bo, rises to the challenge, ever an adventurer, one who learns to manage fear one step at a time, he takes the more difficult path in the office of Dr. Attfield, the most challenging task he will ever attempt, one which could bury him, like Nietzsche, like Goethe, like Morrison and Cobain.  he takes up the task of getting to the other side, a place he sought along,  and is wise enough to seek out a guide, A Jungian analyst.  My only disappointment with the book is how Bo left Dr. Attfield's sessions so abruptly, unfinished, I felt - perhaps there was a complicated transference with the father figure - which he didn't want to address, thereby leaving the therapist before he fully dealt with the father figure. I didn't want the sessions to stop - as I read them, I learned about myself, recognized some of my own repressed complexes, my own resistances. 

The complex and hard to pin Jungian type of therapy is hard to explore in a contemporary novel, without getting the reader lost in terminology or abstract dreams. There are aspects which date back to the archaic, not compatible with  what we would consider everyday life even when it enters such urban  pressure cookers as the stock market and drug world, yet Nanney pulls it off.  He has already led us down the fool's path on the journey and we're helpless to step off, until we too, as readers, endure the trials and powerful transformations of a system compared to the Eleusinian mysteries. I read this over the course of a few very busy days, savoring it, yet wanting to get back to it, even as my mind spiraled reassessing my own path in life.  Don't miss this thought provoking contemporary novel - it could have a  powerful and profound on the way you think and experience life.

A birthday dream from Jung

What a way to start a birthday - a guest appearance in my dreams with Dr. C. G. Jung himself!  Heady stuff!  And I remembered it!  It was a simple, but an unusual dream, not quite pleasant.  I was at the Burgholzi Clinic in Zurich and Dr. Jung asked us to all bring our "patients" into a room so he could see how we were doing.  At first we were all worried, what would all these unusual people do with each other?  Would there be trouble?  Would they get along?
So I left and got my patient (I never saw myself in the dream, I just know it was me in my own skin walking around and doing things. I never talked.)  I came back with my "patient" who was a large teddy bear sort of man, mute, who carried a large mason jar fulls of lightening bugs.  He moves very slowly - as in a dream within my dream, sort of  "not with it," a lumbering giant.  There wasn't much action after this, even when other people brought in their "patients."  We were all rather mesmerized by the beauty of the light in the jar, but also the bittersweet sadness of them being trapped in a jar.  The man, himself, was sad and poignant, not quite sure what to do.

Well, if this isn't a call from Dr. Jung for me to wake up and get my archetypes ("patients") to get together and have a chat! But it's frightening to think that if all these patients are my archetypes, then are all the individual analysts who treat these patients split off too?  That's why I need Jung to get all these analysts to talk to each other before they can help their "patients!" I see the jar of butterflies  as "illumination/enlightenment" trapped in the jar, beautiful but sad and wrong.  The man - I guess a big lumbering part of me, my "depressed, confused" self  isn't sure what to do - he wants to keep the illumination so it won't go away, but he too is sad they are trapped. 

I am in one of those transitional times, turning 61 today, walking the road to individuation, charting my dreams each morning, taking time to ruminate and figure them out, reading lots of books, by, on, about Jung. It's a time when I feel as if I'm running out of time.  I need more time to work with my clients, to spend with my daughter, son and granddaughters, to teach my oldest granddaughter more about art and writing, to finish two novels and edit three, as well as write a fifth which is already in my head, to draw, to paint, to visit far away friends.
 I've been reading Pilgrim now having finished Powder Dreams (review to come soon I promise) and Jung is a character in Pilgrim, who is treating a mute.  The lightening bugs in the jar came from a movie I took my granddaughter to see on Saturday, Journey to the Center of the Earth 2, where there were lightening bugs in jars.  The large teddy bear man I do not know.  He's not one of the archetypes I recognize.  The patient in Pilgrim is not a large teddy bear like man, although he is tall. My father was not a large teddy bear like man. Since I'm very short, I have never dated very tall teddy bear like men - so this part has me stumped.

Could this be an aspect of my Self?  I know a bit about Jung's techniques but only from reading books. I know I've been a wee bit fractured (well, maybe more than that lately)  Jacob - my animus, a Hermes, trickster, a witty instigator and courageous change-monger type figure, who has been popping up in everyday life when I least expect it, saying things I'm not smart or courageous enough to say, sometimes shocking people, sometimes causing trouble.  And then my editor archetype, bossy, controlling but really wanting the best for people - only from her perspective has been flashing her persona as well.  But Ishtar prevails in the evenings or early mornings, when I'm alone, reading, thinking, going into the depths, writing my dreams down and using active imagination when I'm awake, which sometimes even appears when I'm not looking for it. (which is one of the best gifts while I'm writing a novel, but I'm only writing in spurts now, mostly just thinking).
 I wish there was a Jungian analyst in Greenville, because I'd be there in a heartbeat. But the nearest one is in Asheville, NC and I've researched them and may try and start with one.  But it would be so much easier in Greenville?  Why can't this city be as progressive as Asheville.  More than 100 people showed up for George Frein's talk on Jung's Red Book at our museum!  So now I throw a tantrum like a spoiled child.  I am however also looking into a dream group and hope to start when they begin their next session.

So my plan is to keep thinking about this dream, do research on lightening bugs and their metaphors and symbolic meanings (I learned from Pilgrim that the goddess, Psyche is symbolized by butterflies) and hope that a future dream will help me talk to the silent man and see if he thinks the lightening bugs might be even more beautiful flying free around all of us in the room. I may even have to draw this one to make it even more graphic in my mind - get the two hemispheres of my brain to figure this all out.

Maybe, Dr. Professor Jung will grace me with his appearance once again!
  p.s. Anyone who knows me, knows I am addicted to pomegranate seeds  (recovering Persephone)  and yesterday (before this dream) my granddaughter and I had an adventure at Trader Joe's. And guess what she found for both of us? Dark chocolate covered pomegranate seeds! Is this git or temptation from the synchronisitic universe?

Powder Dreams by David Ward-Nanney

My Amazon package arrived with three great books on Thursday.  I just started Powder Dreams that night and have only had evenings to read it after work, but I'm already along for David Ward-Nanney's wild ride. Be forewarned, there are a few mild spoilers in there. The style is more straightforward than I've been reading lately (what with rereading some of my favorite books by A.S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch.  So I was in for a bit of a culture shock, but the story is a great story so far and I haven't even reached the Jungian part yet (a realistic section about the protagonist undergoing analysis, form what I've read in the reviews by Jungian analysts), which was why I bought it.  Since my son is a skateboarder, I can relate to how he writes about skiing to a degree - I know it;'s not the same but there's an element there that draws people like my son to being able to ride the "air," not to mention the whole aspects of speed and control.
Ward.-Nanney's description of being buried beneath an avalanche was a revelation and frightening at the same time.  I can't believe his ability to reason while in such a situation.  The one part of his brain was so professional, so oddly detached, allowing him to think and find a way to let his skiing buddy rescue him.  A brilliant piece of writing so far - gonna go off and see how much I can read today in between movies with my granddaughter, Kendall. 

Jung's influence on the Novel - a plan

I've devised a new plan of study which I think will be highly entertaining and enlightening for me as a novelist (attempting to finish two novels and edit another.)
 I can't believe I've never though of it before. But it will be a study of novels influenced by Jung o the type of thought Jung taught. The idea came to me thanks to an amazing confluence of events, books, music influences brings the spiral around to one of those pivotal transitory times.  In the past few weeks, I've attended the Jung webinar on the film, A Dangerous Method, read a ton of books on Jung and by Jung, taken my granddaughter to art shows, cello concerts and have just had fun playing with her and her Monster High collection - all circling around, as Jung liked to do in his writings to view a concept from every possible angle.  Of course, with me the astrological and alchemical aspects are always flitting through my mind as I dive in and then attempt to stand back and observe. Books are once again fining their way to me after being referenced in some other, sometimes obscure volume and some quite by accident. New authors and old friends.  So now I also have a cache of Jungian style novels waiting for me even as I attempt to catalog and perhaps review the many in the past I've enjoyed and the particular stand outs (most notably, The Magus by John Fowles (unrevised edition - by far what I consider the best novel using Jungian approaches ever written - the novel which changed my life and which I read every year), Cymical Wedding and Alice's Masque by Lindsey Clarke in addition to The Virgin in the Garden and a number of other books by A.S. Byatt, not to mention books by Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing. These all led, or sometimes even shoved, me onto my own particular journey into Jungian though and my own subconscious.  It helps that my dreams are cooperating as well, and I've once again started a dream journal, which I'd out away for a number of years.
The books I have waiting for me at the moment are Lindsay Clarke's, The Water Theatre, Timothy Findley's,  Pilgrim (where Jung is an actual character in the book) and Powder Dreams by David Ward-Nanney, where one the characters enters analysis, a topic which often defies description).   
Reviews and perhaps comparisons to come.

The Soulkeeper - Jung And Sabrina Speilrien

During a discussion on A Dangerous Method on the Asheville Jung Center, the movie The Soul Keeper, was mentioned and given a review by David Thompson. I found the movie broken up into six parts, of 14 minutes each, on you tube in English.  The original is in Italian. It depicts Sabrina Spielrein and Jung's relationship without Freud, and I think better represents their relationship than does A Dangerous Method. 
I don't think both of them are historically accurate and wonder why each movie would change some of the scenes which were dramatic in the histories.  I felt neither film addressed Sabina's strength as a psychotherapist following her graduation and her work with the Analytical Society.  Not once did they show her presenting her work (some of it quite revolutionary) in a meeting. So now these films represent her, almost as badly as the male analysts of the day did. The Soul Keeper did have a scene where she breaks into a meeting where Jung is speaking but shows her more as the betrayed lover than as a fellow analyst, researcher and analytical writer.
Although, in other ways, I found this movie to be much more to my liking and mostly what I had hoped to see in a treatment of Jung. It is not so flat or clinical, but is richer in atmosphere, emotions and the acting of Ian Glen as Jung and Emilia Fox as Sabina are far better than that of Keira Knightly and Michael Fassbender. Both of the latter seemed flat and lifeless, and didn't represent two emotional people in the midst of a pivotal and ultimately traumatic relationship. 
In Soul Keeper, there were a number of little touches that I recognized coming from other books on Jung, such as the oblong dark stone, which Jung called his soul, which he gave to Sabina, telling her it was his soul. I don't know if this is historically accurate, but it was a nice touch, obviously by someone more versed in Jung's biography.  In Jung's mind the stone was his soul. He'd kept the stone in his pocket when he was young and then later kept it in a little box with the a small figure of a man he carved in black coat and hat, who he called Philimon and who he later considered his #2 personality.  His "self" as opposed to his ego, the Seigfried of his his heroic ego journey as opposed to the self he came into later in life. 
At least The Soul Keeper tried to document Sabina's symptoms when she entered Burghölzli,better and even though they shied away from her playing with her feces, they did show her sitting on her heel, although the regular movie goer won't get what she's actually doing and they at least implied she played with her feces with the small little sculptured animals, which may have been dirt or feces. But they shied away from the reality on that too. 
I also like the part where Jung was drawing then carving a head on a stone and then later smashing it.  I wonder if it meant to represent the Seigfried, the ego, he needed to smash up to make way to unleash his true self.   I took it that way and wonder if anyone knows if this is historically accurate?  I thought his stone carving came later when he worked out at Bollingen, can anyone tell me the timeline on this?
While The Soul Keeper, showed Sabina in her work with children once she had returned to her native Russia, they once again neglected an opportunity to show her greater influence on the field of psychology.  They didn't show her offering analysis or training other therapists when she was the first person to introduce in person the joint works of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy of Freud and Jung to Russia, as well as train new analysts. 
And  while I think The Soul Keeper showed more of her strengths and more of the "poetry" between she and Jung, it didn't show why or how "the poetry" occurred, such as how they thought alike, prodded each other explore other avenues of their field and came to same conclusions.
However, A Dangerous Method did attempt this, although too briefly and too subtly I think, for anyone who had not read John Kerr's book or the letters of Jung and Spieilrein. I wanted to applaud at the scene on the bench outside her apartment when Sabina (in her true Athena style, as Len Cruz on the Asheville Jung Center discussion so beautifully put) spoke of her ideas on the death instinct in the sex act, as well as laying groundwork for Jung to consider which would bring him to some of his most fruitful concepts.
I do think, however, that both films did psychotherapy an injustice in the way they depicted the sexual scenes.  Event though I expected that be overblown because it must appeal to the general public, wasn't it enough to show them having a private affair, especially since we don't know for sure if it was ever physically consummated?  A Dangerous Method totally blew my believability in the film, with it's emphasis on the spanking and the scene in The Soul Keeper after the Wagner concert in the lobby of the Opera House is  unbelievable. No way would the affair have been kept secret until the discovery of Sabina's journals if  they'd had sex in the lobby of a Zurich opera house. And there was plenty of drama in their real life missteps and experiences, to have to use these shallow methods to make a point.
I guess I shouldn't expect such historical accuracy in a movie, but the letters, journals and biographies to me seem such a goldmine of material, that  why bother making anything up?  I know they had to cram a lot into less than two hours, but still, I'm waiting for the ultimate movie to reveal the truth of the birth of psychotherapy.
And I have to wonder, which audience were either director appealing to? They way they both dropped only subtle hints that those who read up on Jung, Freud or Spielrein would get then why gussy it up?  And if their audience was just the general public, why bother with the subtle hints? 

Shaman Circus, Jung, Sabine, Freud

Just having seen the movie "A Dangerous Method" in addition to devouring John Kerr's 600 page book over a period of ten or twelve hours, has taken me round on the spiral again.  Thank goodness.  I need to be here, due to the change happening around me, some of which is due to my own change-mongering nature.
I saw the movie in the best of circumstances, with a great friend who is addicted to the concepts of the mind, the ethics of the individual ) not quite the same as the morals of a society) and the amazing potential for the individuation and growth of the Self. 
It was sad there were only five people at the 2 pm matinee which we attended.  Especially since the film is not even playing in Greenville, but by some odd synchronisitc moment, I found out about the film only the day before it was released (having thought it had already gone by) when Westgate Mall in Spartanburg popped up on a Google search.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, I attended the Greenville Chautauqua lecture where Dr. George Frein spoke about  Jung's Red Book. His lecture also offered me the gift of the movie, but even better the book, A Most Dangerous Method on which the screenplay and movie were based.  Now in addition to get to see Dr. George Frein as Carl Jung in the Chautauqua series in June  this year, I am lucky to be offered a long term study of Jung, learning about an entire treasure load of new books including one made into a documentary on Sabina and Jung, My Name Was  Sabina Spielrein, and an additional film, Soul Keeper and even better the two webinars and the very passionate and enlightening discussions offered on  the The Asheville Jung Center's website.  I read the discussions, take a breath, then go and read a chapter of the brilliant and user friendly On Jung by Anthony Stevens and finally stop to sit and think. I now see so many correlations between the inner aspects of my characters in my novels, Shaman Circus (published in 2010) and Shaman in Exile (nearly finished) in the concept that a trinity is helpful in individuation in the form of the animus in a female's case, the shadow and the self.
Even though I knew I employed a great deal of Jungian thought in the two books, I hadn't quite come up with the concept in such simple concrete terms.
I'm not going to do any spoilers here.  I have a feeling the film will be viewed by a lot of people interested in Jung when it comes out on DVD.  Many might not hezf of it until it's already out of the theaters. But of course it is lacking compared to the book. You just can't jam that much info into a film.  But it did not have to be so inaccurate.  I think there's plenty of drama which could have been played up with the real dynamics and emotions between these three entangled real people. Sabina was not honestly portrayed as the very strong woman she had  become after her therapy and education. Instead of the film showing her present her powerful paper in front of  Freud and his Vienna psychoanalytical association, a very brave thing for the first woman in this group, they simply show her in Freud's office discussing her work, as if she is still simply a student or follower.The film doesn't reveal much about how her work impacted later analysts and therapists, either. 
And the way the relationship between she and Jung was approached was very shallow and surface level, hardly intimating the "poetry" between them as she called it, that mystical union of mind, spirit and archetypal power. I still leave it open in my mind as to whether Sabina and Jung physically consummated their affair.  The letters and diaries don't tell us this.  And I'm enthralled with many of Jung's alchemical correspondences with the process of individuation.  The stages of solutio, sublimation, nigredo, calcinatio, etc. and how when viewed through the alchemical lens, the libido, when unable to be enacted in the physical world becomes more powerful in the inner world leading to the same "destruction/death" aspect Sabina offered, offering a chance for a rebirth in some form. I am interested in of creative initiatives (writing, art,music, dance, film, theater) such as both of them going through the alchemical stages to deliver (as Sabina wrote) "their son" in the form of papers and books they wrote as they they tried to deal with the consequences of losing each other. I regret A Dangerous Method portrayed their love more as a common affair and not the very complicated connection it was.
Even the relationship, the powerful, father/son aspect between the two fathers of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy , let alone the lover aspect, followed by the public and personal break up was downplayed in my view.  I could see it downplayed if the film focused on Sabina but instead, I felt it focused more on Freud, who I think could have been played better by Viggo, who has long been a favorite actor of mine.  I would have loved to have seen him rip into the anger and angst which attended their breakup and the following vacancy in both of their lives.
 I wouldn't want to have seen the film with someone who had not read some of the literature by and about either of these major influences on the world psyche. My friend who watched the movie with me, is more of a scientist, highly knowledgeable of neuroscience and a student of many more life experiences, as well as someone who leans towards Freud's developments of the actual brain. While I lean towards Jung and the explorations of the soul.  So this has led us into some enlightening series of discussions, disagreements, conclusions, realizations, conclusions, which I hoped the film and book would offer and I can see both forms of media now become an integral part of how we learn from each other - a great gift indeed at of course, a synchronisitc change as we both go through very real transitional periods in our separate lives.
I'd been looking for more books about the trinity of these three great psychologists, one could say, the father, mother and holy spirit of the psychoanalytical movement when I chanced upon the notice the movie was playing in Spartaburg but not the larger city where I live, Greenville. And I find it wonderful and strange that after 29 years of searching for another Jungian, I should find a friend and mentor, who is not a Jungian but a Freudian, more versed in various aspects of the brain and unconscious than I am.  But I see it as a gift that he tends towards the investigative and I towards the mystic, since this is how we best learn - through our opposites, the homeostatic way we achieve balance.
I hope anyone interested in Jung will read the book first, then see the film. And then check out the Asheville  Jung Center's website to fully round out their experience of the film and book. 

Synchronicity and a A Dangerous Method

Synchronicity has been an underlying them for decades of my life.  I always see it as a sign to follow a particular path, being a voracious student of Carl. G. Jung's works. Recently,  I experienced another one of those exhilarating moments, some of them minimal, some of them life changing which I see as synchronistic. Too many of them over time for me to ignore. This one falls in a the high end.  And at a primal time when I've been trying to achieve balance in my life.  In one afternoon, one swooping series of realizations, thank so Dr. George Frien's Chautauqua presentation of Carl Jung at the Greenville Art Museum, the series was set into motion.
I've been struggling over the past few months with my writing, not so much that I couldn't write, but more than I couldn't find a way to end either of two novels, my steampunk novel, The Foxglove Broadsides and my 3rd magical realism novel, Fireworks, Interference Equation, when two I witnessed two seemingly unconnected experiences within the span of less than two weeks.
I have not been out much in months due to work, the holidays, making Christmas presents, writing and the birth of my second grandchild.  Now that I've begun to socialize again at the insistence of my friends. The first event was an art show at the Village Studios.  Mark and decided to go at the very last moment and I'm so glad we did for in the marvelous show, way beyond what we see as far as risk taking, was one by a brilliant young artists, Jeromy Ross, who was given a show as a present when he graduated from Winthrop.  The works are anthropomorphic,  human bodies, bearing animal and bird heads.  I've been attracted to this type of art ever since I saw my first example at an Art  Fair a few years back, research it, and found the Victorians even did it using the bodies of their family members and various animal/creature heads as commentary.
After the show I started writing a new piece, another section to my ironic whimsical tale about the West End, Two Ruffians and a Rat, and was using the concept of this type of art in my work.  The scene was very Jungian: a maze, a descent into darkness, revelations.  It is a them I enjoy exploring as it presents to me the very act of venturing into one's own subconscious. 
The day I wrote the scene was the day I found out about the Carl Jung appearance.  That is not sheer coincidence.
And then last night I came up with the true ending, the only ending for Fireworks, which has fooled and eluded me, some ideas were to simple and shallow, others too complex requiring another entire volume and each one crafted to simply end the book, not tell a tale that only I could tell.
And then last night it came to me. In my job as a rehab support specialist for adults with traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries, I am learning how to be an efficient advocate for my clients, especially two of them, one man in his 30's with a brain injury and the other in his 40's with a spinal cord injury. Despite their traumatic injuries they are struggling to build new, productive, meaningful lives.  Both of them are fascinated with philosophy, one of whom earned a degree before his injury, the other working towards one now.
And I realized that I must speak to this issue.  The whole purpose of magical realism to me is to introduce a societal/political issue to the general public in a way that is easily accessible The current most crucial issue I struggle with everyday in my life is my work with adults with brain and spinal cord injury who cannot find accessible housing in the community where they can live productive and rewarding lives.
So now these recent meaningful coincidences remind me of my how I can use my writing (as well as advocacy) to inform the public of this huge and often unknown issue. 

Dragon Con 2011 Debriefing/Postmortem Part 1

I've decided that Dragon Con is a mini quest, sort of along a geek/freaky hero's journey with many trials and rewards along the way.  My friend and author, Brian K. Ladd, found an apt metaphor for the first trial which requires standing in a ticket line as it circles and snakes around the Sheraton Hotel in order to start the adventure.  The first treasure -  a valuable 2011 Dragon Con 25th anniversary pass. When he called the line an ouroroboros, I should have realized we were in for major character building adventures and mishaps, despite the rush of getting that pass.
I was graciously invited  by Megan and Brian to join them at the con. Brian was presenting a panel for the Academic Track on how women were depicted on comic book covers by three companies, so our first mission was for Brian and I to set off in search of the academic lunch at at Ted's Montana Grill. This proved to be quite interesting in many ways and I met a variety of presenters and their significant others and we shared rambling conversations. The man who started the entire concept of the academic track is the well known Professor Awesome who regaled us with stories and by the entire evening asked about purchasing the entire catalog of Shadow Archer Press books for a second publishing line he's developing.  Alas, this is probably not in the stars, because I don't own the copyrights, I just obtain one time rights and then they revert back to the poets and authors. But it was an amazing offer and a very good omen. And something totally unexpected.

After lunch we set off again on another trek. Megan, who chillaxed at the hotel was our personal oracle looking up directions etc. A great help since I'm a first time Dragon Con novice and Brian had only been once.  
Dragon Con is 50% trudging, along with 40,000 to 65,000 other people during the four days, spread over 5 hotels and 4 downtown Atlanta blocks. At this largest Sc Fi/Fantasy Con in the world, there are numerous subcultures and genres trudging up and down hills, around, in, between, over and under hotels, up and down escalators and elevators and staircases, out the wrong door, back in, channeled through the airwalks, burrowing into the lower levels, all while suffering dehydration nourishment. Dragon Con is heat and sweat, the din of 40,000 excited or exhausted voices punctuated by a spectacle like none other on earth - a freak show extraordinaire and a test of your senses so complete, you're in sensory overload within one minute after stepping into the lobby of the Hilton, Hyatt or Marquee. (The Sheraton and Westin being more staid and peaceful, until the Sheraton staff decides to perform their dance routines).
My first impression is the costumes, of course and the first hour or so of walking is spent in a sort of trance looking this way and that simply following Brian through the labyrinth of lobbies, hallways, and vendor rooms. I learned getting lost, many times for hours, (I heard of one person lost for 4 hours)  is a common initiation stage for the novice. All due to watching costumes and not which entrance to which hotel I had started at. The glassed over airwalks where you shuffle in a congested but polite line over the roads, gives you a better view of the scope of your mobius strip journey, but offers few clues on how to avoid getting lost. 
Being late is another initiation ritual. Finding that panel or fellow traveler (frequently dislocated as if they'd been kidnapped by the wooden Tardis stationed in a corner of the Brit room) is part of the gauntlet flung at your aching feet.  Suffering, travail and at times, panic, are prerequisites before you can be fully assimilated into the Dragon Con mindset and able to appreciate the full smorgasbord of freaks, monsters, scantily clad women, steampunkers, super heroes, Dr. Whos, Darth Vaders, Transformers, mechanical creatures, cutsey and villains.

It occurred to me, thanks to a valuable discussion with Brian and the night before on comics and graphic novels, how these creations are similar to myths, and the acting out a passion for discovery of all creatures, human and otherwise is part of our own journeys, even to the point of acting it out.  When Brian explained to me that Joseph Campbell was one of George Lucas' professors, it started to all make sense.  As a student of Carl Jung, I knew how the various archetypes are always lurking just below the surface in our subconscious awaiting recognition and release. In the Bacchanalia/All Souls/Dragon Con Disco/ there are times they erupt. We must respect their oddities, quirkiness or terrifying appearances as sublimated parts of the human psyche.
Every culture has held festivals of a sort to let these creatures run free, or even amok, lest they harm or control us the remainder of the year. So is it any wonder, that the only photo of me from the con is one I begged from Darth Vader?  Anyone who has worked with me on Fissure or Shadow Archer Press, would not be surprised.

Dreams, the soul & Jung collage

I'm a huge fan of Carl Jung and his writings so finally got around do creating a collage regarding his concepts of dreams, the subconscious and the soul.  I chose a Julia Margaret Cameron photo of Esther, circa late 1800's as the dreamer, imposed along with a photo of Carl Jung over his natal chart since I once was a professional astrologer and enjoy looking at charts of authors and scientists.  The fish in the collage represent the dream, since water, the undersea and even the black swan are all symbols of night according to the Italian philosopher, Ficinio.  Plus I'm a Pisces so fish are cool with me.  I used a number of techniques, including the taping off of lines the use of gesso and gel mediums, and composition I learned from both Claudine Helmuth's Collage Discovery Workshop and Bee Shay's Collage Lab, whose books are great on collage.
This is a small piece, 8X10 so I kept it simple. The main images besides the natal chart and vintage photos are all Graphic 45 papers form the Steampunk Debutant Collection.  I accented with stamped words which read, "The Soul Must Be awakened, using a stamp letter collection and also added the Nick Bantock saying"To Be Read Between the Lines."  Nick and Dave McKean were the firs artist to inspire me to work with collage.
And I was very excited to try a new technique I learned form a Tim Holtz video using his fragments to make the tiles.  I love this technique and it's so easy and my adult son thought they were the coolest part of the artwork.  So I'm planning on using them a lot more. -

on Transparency & Ripping the Veil

While on one hand I am entering a period which requires me to be social, on the other, the subconscious calls again.  I will have to maintain balance.  I agree with John Fowles observation that "Time is not a road, it is a room," and as my time fills up with social activities, I am pulled away from the visions, concepts, poems, writing which is bubbling up form the subconscious. Some of it valuable information, it may have taken years to process. some of it which needs to be thought out, recorded in poems, the novels, art. I'm tempted to shut myself away again, become hermit like and create, but it's also a time of reaching out and sharing, meeting and learning from others. What will happen when these new influences converge with the steam of observations, with those little awareness moments?  Will I rebuild, transform, rebirth? As I read the journals of Anais Nin, go back to Fowles and The Magus, and feel pulled to rewatch movies like "Stay" and "The Libertine" (movies where the plot involves an individual who must live outside society, both in their personal extremes. And as society and some of its systems summon, I feel pulled to do just the opposite, retreat into the worlds I know, the second reality, the world behind the world, which so many other authors, poets and artists have seen, Salman Rushdie, Carl Jung, Thomas Moore,  Fowles, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Keith Flynn, Anais Nin, Neil Gaiman, Umberto Eco, Brian K.Ladd.  More and more I see the mentions, the hints, the nods, in films, in contemporary novels.  I am just now noticing or are they trying to tell us something beneath the story lines and song lyrics?   
As I embark on my lunar moth series in the novel, poetry and art (the lunar moth as a sign of the veil's transparency,) I go deeper and deeper and like Jung discover even more layers, even after I thought I had gone as far as I could.

Lunar Moth Lessons

In emergence

from hermitage,

I hide behind costumes, hats,

names - run away to

sideways cultures

sub-societies,

only to learn

I’ve taken that first

hard-to-reverse step. Summoned

by yet another system.

I seek the awake moments, 

(as fragile as mist on an Atlantic breeze,

as it dissolves when I look away),

to reteach

me to avoid

such betrayal -

stay handbound

with the subconscious.

Remain aware

by looking in:

deeper than ether.

Reminder:

side step reality’s hypnosis,

indoctrination,

loss of self.

Become transparent

luminous

more illusive

than a lunar moth on a cloudy day.

Only then can one walk through

the glass doors of reality,

                       find the numinous self -

                                                    take wing.