What You Think, What You Know, What You Can and Can’t Have

[Longer trailer for The NeverEnding Story (1981); you can see the whole film on YouTube, if you’d like, broken up into nine or ten parts]

From whiskey river:

I see human beings as a self-regulating system that wants us to discover our own nature. Our imagination, our deep mind, so to speak, wants to help us to do this. In part, that’s why it gives us the thoughts and feelings and associations it does. That’s why we dream what we dream and “think up” the imagery that comes to us. When we take all of this seriously, when we use it, that is, and are willing to risk releasing our tight grip on ourselves by writing what we don’t yet know, to paraphrase Paul Klee, we demonstrate to our own imagination that we can be trusted with its gifts. Of course, our imagination likes this. It says, “Hey. She’s serious. Let’s give her more.”

But when we turn our back on this powerful inclination toward completion, we risk losing contact with the gift-giving nature of the imagination. We risk damaging the relationship we’ve developed. Think of it as a relationship to “the muse,” if you will. As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, “Be careful. It’s hers. She’ll take it back.”

(Peter Levitt, ZinkZine, Fall 2003 [source])

…and:

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. [*] A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

(Carl Jung [source])

Not from whiskey river:

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word — the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

(Philip Larkin [source])

…and (from a Navajo story):

Coyote was going along and as he came over the brow of a hill he saw a man taking his eyes out of his head and throwing them up into a cottonwood tree. There they would hang until he cried out, “Eyes come back!” Then his eyes would return to his head. Coyote wanted very much to learn this trick and begged and begged until the man taught it to him. “But be careful, Coyote,” the man said. “Don’t do this more than four times in one day.” “Of course not. Why would I do that?” said Coyote…

When the man left, Coyote took his eyes out and threw them into the cottonwood tree. He could see for miles then, see over the low hills, see where the stream went, see the shape of things. When he had done this four times, he thought, “That man’s rule is made for his country. I don’t think it applies here. This is my country.” For a fifth time he cried “Eyes come back!” But they didn’t come back. Poor Coyote stumbled about the grove, bumping into trees and crying…

(Lewis Hyde, from Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art [source])

…and:

When I was very young I would ask my mother to tell me stories about her own childhood. More often than not, I would already be in bed with the lights turned out and the warmth of my mother beside me filling the room. I loved to imagine her life, to hear her say the simple phrases that brought before my eyes the mythic landscape of what came before me. I loved to hear about the trolley car, the ice man, the milk buckets. It made me laugh against all reason to imagine my mother as a young girl shoveling coal, but it frightened me to picture her standing alone in a dark tenement hallway where she washed dishes at the sink that five families shared. Each of the phrases she used called deeply to my imagination and took on the power of a constellation in the sky of my childhood dreams. Milk bucket stood beside ice man. Trolley car was coming to take him home. And I was there, too, with my mother at my side, taking in the nighttime mystery of where I came from and what the world was like before I was born.

(Peter Levitt, from Fingerpainting on the Moon [source])

__________________________

* See Wikipedia for a brief, plain-English description of the term “numinous” as used in a context like this. For a thorough explanation this word, visit the Web site/blog of the C.G. Jung Society of Vermont. Briefly, it describes the numinosum (in Jung’s own words) as:

…a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will… The numinosum — whatever its cause may be — is an experience of the subject independent of his will… The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.

This sounds to me something like a New Age-style aura. But if so, it’s an active aura — one capable of making us do something (at the very least, making us simply notice it)… and it does so without even trying.

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