Jung's Tower

Toward the end of his life, C. G. Jung dictated and wrote a memoir called Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It was published in 1961. I'm reading it now. The book is strange, intriguing, disturbing, and provocative, for Jung refuses to write a "typical memoir," as he defines it, placing his life in the context of a time and particular events in history. Instead, he says, his life has been almost entirely an inner one, so what he recalls are the memories of that inner life: hence the title. He can remember dreams, in detail, that occured when he was a little boy, and he recounts the elements of his fantasy and dream life, and how he analyzed himself and his own unconscious in order to better understand how the unconscious works in all of us. I've never studied Jung, so much of what he speaks about is pretty new to me - and I had no idea he was so "out there" himself -  although his terminology and major ideas have become embedded in our language and knowledge of the psyche, and so a familiarity exists.

In himself, he identified two personalities - one the scientist/philosopher who traveled and worked and wrote in ordinary time, and another personality that seemed drawn to, and at home in, the seventeenth century. When he built a home for himself, he added a tower where he could "withdraw" from daily life:

In the Tower at Bollingen it is as if one lived in many centuries simultaneously. The place will outlive me, and in its location and style it points backward to things of long ago. There is little about it to suggest the present. If a man of the sixteenth century were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamp and the matches would be new to him; otherwise he would know his way about without difficulty. There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestor's souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down through the centuries, were peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on...

This struck a chord. My little "studio" in Vermont is a quiet place that I created to give myself a rest from the technology and lights and sounds of normal life, and in making it feel comfortable I used old things that had important associations with my past and the past of my family, as well as symbolic importance to my particular individual interests and periods of my life. None of this was especially "intentional," but I now see what I was doing more clearly than when I made it. A visitor (and that is strange to write, since I've rarely shared that room with anyone, and even my husband only goes there if I've invited him) might experience it as an unfinished, even shabby room, and focus on the easel and paints and canvases rather than the small oak desk which was mine as a child, and where I've spent most of my hours in the room, meditating or reflecting as I looked through an old lace curtain onto my garden. I've always liked that the room is cold and usually unheated, that the lamps are old glass kerosene fixtures set onto wrought iron brackets, that the curtains are handmade, different combinations of white linen and antique lace. I too have written on the walls, or left drawings pinned up - or objects in view - for years without knowing exactly why. Jung has made me want to think more closely about this room and what I put into it, and what I might do to replace it if we move from that house someday. Clearly it is more than its function as refuge or retreat; it is deeply personal and symbolic.

Tomorrow I'll write more about Jung's ideas on progress and the psychological state of humanity.

Comments

[Marja-Leena]

This is very interesting, Beth! I've not read Jung either, except for some excerpts here and there, even though I keep meaning to. I'm attracted by his interest in the artist, archetypes and myths. I look forward to reading more of your comments on his memoir!

[St Antonym]

You know, Beth, I wonder if Jung isn't referring specifically to the shade of Montaigne here. The reference to the sixteenth-century gives it away though it's possible it's all just a wonderful coincidence.

Montaigne was noted, in later life, for the amount of time he spent in a private tower on his property in Bordeaux, a tower he had filled with books and solitude. For many years (and maybe even still now), Montaigne's tower was lodged in my mind as an image of the happiest possible life. A place for the mind to roam freely, and develop itself, far from prejudice and chatter. I'm sure you know his essays. They show up 15 long centuries after Marcus Aurelius, but they have the same nourishing effect on my spirit.

I love your photo and your paragraphs in this post. Very evocative. And, taken by themselves, even without the Jung quotation, they too very much remind me of Montaigne and his tower.

[beth]

That's really interesting, and maybe he'll say something about Montaigne later. The person he speaks of identifying with is Goethe, even describing how Faust and Mephistopheles were combined in his (Jung's) own person.

I thought you'd like the idea of the tower, too.

[zhoen]

I have been intrigued by Jungian ideas, without actually going to the source and reading him. I guess it's time.

I would love your room.

[St Antonym]

I have a quotation and two links for you, Beth:

"In 1571 Michel de Montaigne, suffering increasingly from melancholy, retired to the library tower on his estate in the Périgord, and began to write his Essays. He was 38. From the windows he could see over his estates and check if his men were shirking their work. Inscribed on the walls and beams of his tower room were about 60 maxims in Greek and Latin taken from the philosophers. He replaced and augmented them as his moods and his reading led him."

http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,1082801,00.html
http://wings.buffalo.edu/litgloss/montaigne/more.shtml

But don't stay all cooped up on this beautiful weekend.

[beth]

Zhoen, Marja-Leena - yes, I think both of you would be intrigued by Jung for the same reasons I am. He has a lot to say about the creative act and how creativity and the unconscious are linked; painting and stone-carving/cutting were his two mediums. I plan to follow this book with another becasue I do want to know more.

St. A.: thanks so much for the links. He MUST have been thinking of Montaigne, that's just too close a parallel. Jung was also very intereted in alchemy and assembled a large library of old alchemy texts - based on a dream he had - and that was all part of this "other world" he created for himself to live in. Those of us with lesser means and ambition can't exactly follow suit, but the idea of this sort of refuge is something that has always appealed to me.

[mary]

(o)

[Natalie]

I was also very interested in Jung's"Dreams & Reflections". It is somewhere on my bookshelves and now you make me want to read it again, Beth. Like so many "movements" which grew out of a particular individual's life and thoughts, the original is far more interesting than what came later. Jungian therapies, therapists and offshoots proliferate but the man's own story is the real McCoy.
I love the description of your tower room but am surprised that you prefer it un-heated - especially remembering Vermont winters! I could never be that stoic though I can see how it could have beneficial effects on the spirit.