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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Thank you for the warning. I'll try to avoid this "Work."
Reality is an important and busy word with a full appointment calendar, and doing face-to-face with me would be a waste of its precious time.
lol and yes, that consensus that some call reality is a busy word and I am ready to retire from work as we know it. Is work fun or is fun work? Can we have our cake and eat it too? And if so, is anybody going to listen if we are really saying anything with our silence?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mike, I thought "Judgement at Nuremberg" was a terrific movie. I watched part of it a couple of weeks ago, maybe on TCM. Did you know that Robert H. Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg and a supreme court justice, was not a certified lawyer (in the modern sense)? He only had one year of law school.
I wonder if there are instances of actors who in essence lose their own personalities and become human chameleons, going from one role to another? Or what of actors who make their lives about portraying a famous person, like Mark Twain or Winston Churchill? To what extent is our individual psyche a mix or blend of characteristics rather than a unified whole? The expression "having it together" assumes a more ominous tone.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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"Judgement at Nuremberg" What an excellent movie with Spencer Tracey. A kind of "the banality of evil" story. Sometimes your own wrongdoing appears to be appropriate and keeping the proper perspective in order to see/understand that requires remarkable discipline. What's more noble than to be human and to struggle for virtue?
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WBraun
climber
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Mind is World Series Baseball game 7 .....
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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If a character appears in literature how likely is it that they are based on a real person with whom the writer is familiar? Or a composite of several such persons? Can there be any other way a fictional (real life - not fantasy) character emerges upon the page?
And, yes, I was well aware Hal Holbrook didn't meld into Twain. Thanx. Us labcoats not bein that stoopid. We not bein Ducks.
;>\
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Hey don't disparage ducks. They're smarter than turkeys.
I'm sure I've written on shamanism before and noted that the interpretations of it reflect the academic fashions of the time (shades of MikeL's argument) but have not solved what has been a topic of controversy in Anthropology for over 150 years now. They have been explained as tricksters out for power, as schizophrenics though many acquire their special abilities long after the age at which that disease appears, and finally, as a real phenomenon that science doesn't know about. The latter started in the 1960's when anthropologists started apprenticing themselves to shamans, some of whom used mind altering drugs and most of whom did not. A co-relation has also been made between social outcastes such as Untouchables and women and the likelihood of being possessed by locally known gods who then raise the status of the person.
In some cases, possession is used as a personal or social weapon. Such was a woman in my Hindu village who became so possessed that her husband had to spend a lot of money on her for shamans and the young second wife he had just taken, had to do all the fieldwork. She shook continuously night and day yet stopped long enough to give us a big smile when we asked who did her work now and she said "the second wife".
I have many other stories of shamans and possession from Nepal. One of the more intriguing happened to the son of the local schoolteacher who was a high caste Hindu with a master's degree who didn't believe in such superstitions until his son became possessed. The parents had an arranged marriage. He was educated and his wife was illiterate. He ate chicken and eggs which are taboo to orthodox Brahmins, so their kitchen had a line down the middle and he had to sit on one side with the children while the wife and his aunties sat with the sacred fire on the other. Food was passed over the ridge but could not be handed directly as then the polluted person's impurity would pass through the food into the pure person and onto the sacred fire.
The little boy began shaking every full moon and then more often, his pulse and a high fever went up and down during this time. He was taken to local clinics and then the international teaching hospital in Kathmandu which could find nothing organically
wrong.
Finally, in desperation, the father called a reknowned shaman of a tribal ethnic group called Sunyasi. The shaman chanted and went into a trance and then he and little boy began speaking in a tribal language completely different than Nepali. No one could understand them but they understood each other.
Later, after coming out of his trance, the shaman told the father, "Your people stole this land from a tribal group called Rai, and your son is possessed by the ghost of the Rai man who used to own this property". Rather than doing an exorcism, he negotiated with the spirit, explaining the father was educating all the boys in the village, treating all castes and tribes fairly and alike, so he should not attack that family but find another one instead.
After that, the little boy became an orthodox Hindu, went through a purification ceremony and now eats with his mother and aunties in the pure half of the kitchen while father and daughters and guests eat in the other half.
Analyse away!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jgill:
I’ve looked all over for the movie and have only found it on YouTube in poor shape. I didn’t realize or remember it being such a long film (179 minutes).
MH2:
Yes! Peter Sellers is a great example. Perhaps the exemplar par excellence. He always struck me as a sad individual. Peter Sellers and Robin Williams . . . two very strange beings.
Jan: Analyse away!
Ha-ha.
Were you trained in the UK or by UK-trained personnel? (That spelling is not an American convention.)
Thanks for the story. It’s nice to hear from someone who’s of the field. Like I said (I think), I’m interested in the extent to which the practices could be used as an avenue to the creative unconscious for artists (or at least for those with artistic intentions).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Analyse away!
To analyse or to analyze?
Either way, I think your story is a good answer to:
Can there be any other way a fictional (real life - not fantasy) character emerges upon the page?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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I hereby confess to mixing British and American spellings, feet and meters, fahrenheit and celsius, while frequently unlocking the front door on the right of my car expecting the steering wheel to be there, turning on the windshield wipers when I wanted to use the turn signal etc. Such is the fate of a long time expat who has lived in British colonies and Japan for most of my adult life.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mh2, here's another story from Okinawa.
An American student of mine went to the beach and found a very large clam shell which he brought home as a souvenir. Shortly after that he began experiencing a sense of dread and then involuntarily went into a kind of trance and began painting. He brought the painting to class and it looked like the silhouette of a baby in the womb. I asked him if anything had changed in his life and he told me about his good luck in finding the clam shell. I then told him that the Okinawans used to float victims of infanticide and abortions out to sea on the tide in those large clam shells. He returned the shell to the ocean and had no more problems.
Another personality asserting itself on the stage of life?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Well . . . just a little bit of fantasy there perhaps. Even then, the characters didn't simply appear out of no-thing.
;>)
(Oh oh. Didn't mean to use that dreaded expression)
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Clearly they come through the unconscious symbolic mind. The question as always is whether or not that mind is connected to any other form of consciousness. Meanwhile, I could probably come up with 50 such stories - 10 or so from Nepal and another 40 from Okinawa where it is thought normal to see and feel other conscious beings, who sometimes appear tp people though not in the physical form that we would regard as normal. They even appear as people are walking down the street texting on their phones.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan,
This used to be a funny story to me, until I got into my mid 60s a few years ago. Now it’s not quite so funny.
As my father succumbed to his deathly illness in his last few months, he would report to my mother that he would see his mother now and then (who was of course long passed on). Upon hearing this, my mother (who was watching my father wither away) would exclaim, “Oh No You Are Not!”
I’m not ill, and I’m not seeing my father or grandparents or anything, but I must admit that ever so occasionally, I think I see what might appear to be a person just out of my sight to the far left or right of me.
My mother is remarkably able and cognizant 21 years my senior.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Interesting stories Jan. I encourage you to write a larger collection of same.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Clearly they come through the unconscious symbolic mind
Jan, Jung's "Original Patterns" - like The Hero - seem to me to still require the writer to identify actions so implied with either actual humans or the portrayal of such human characters in prior ways. I'm doubtful that The Hero exists as a symbol from the unconscious transmitted through some evolutionary process, and that the creation of a heroic fictional character depends only upon this mysterious process. At least that's how I see it. We need Ms Sycorax to chime in here since she is the resident expert on literature.
And here, of course, is a reference to JL's insistence on the mind's effect on matter:
"It was this psychoid aspect of the [Jungian] archetype that so impressed Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Embracing Jung's concept, Pauli believed that the archetype provided a link between physical events and the mind of the scientist who studied them" (Wiki)
Interesting turns this thread has taken recently.
My mother would tell of the time she visited a fortune teller while she was attending the University of Alabama. The woman told my mother she would "meet a handsome, dark haired young man with blue eyes whose name was John soon, and that they would marry and have a single child - a boy"
If you can believe it, at that time a music education major required introductory calculus, and the class in which she enrolled was taught by a handsome, dark haired young man with blue eyes whose name was John. The rest is family history.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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The theories of Jung and Freud are interesting in that both theories represented bold and opportunistic attempts at fashioning overarching descriptions of what both men regarded as the essential functioning nature of human consciousness: Freud with his tripartite self and Jung with his collective unconscious.
Fraud's theories went nowhere and Jung's seems to be going nowhere, but in a much more interesting way.
I've mentioned this earlier on one of these threads but my reasoning on Jung's archetypes is very simple: the archetypes are, or were, pure cultural entities. In other words, the hero myth in no way represents a fundamental structured template of the human psyche-- but rather an adaptive mode of social organization determined by fleeting environmental and evolutionary demands, carried over into survival narratives, persisting by cultural iterations into the current day.
The archetypal forms have had a long and persistent life in human cultures only to the extent that the conditions spawning them persisted in some way-- into the industrial and post-industrial consumer age-- even if a bit quaint and antique. This is precisely why Joseph Campbell, in his florid attempts to describe the various generalized mythologies, such as the hero that embarks upon a quest, seems to be at a loss to find credible,analogous examples in contemporary life. He tries a few times but doesn't quite pull it off; a reference to Star Wars notwithstanding. That's because these mythologies are no longer required by rank and file psyches fighting paying bills and navigating freeway back-ups. They are now convenient modes used to good effect by modern storytellers. Especially since most contain sex and violence.
Jung detailed scores of dreams that included these recurring themes and their attendant forms-- such as the serpent tempter. From patient to patient the serpent would slither into their dreams. This fascinated Jung but he could never quite convince himself that what he was observing were cultural legacies from mans long hunter/gatherer history-- kept vigorously alive in religious texts and popular culture. Hence the collective unconscious, which for him explained processes at the very core of human consciousness. Jung was a very creative scholar and did a brilliant job of exploring these various subjects.
One would be hard pressed to detail such dreams today. The serpent tempter might slither into someone's dream but closer inspection usually discovers such a person might be spending a little too much uncritical time at the local Pentecostal meeting. But in Jung's time such dreams were quite common, kept active through cultural proxies, when the signal to noise ratio in culture was much much greater. The serpent of the Bible, or its numerous forerunners, inhabited the dreams of ordinary people, as they once did many a human ancestral group.
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