"The Red Book", by C. J. Jung: The Hammer Museum

 Exhibit at UCLA Hammer Museum until June 6th, 2010. Jung, beloved psychologist of creativity, experienced a waking vision on a train in 1913. He beheld Europe in catastrophe, rivers filled with blood, and moved into severe melancholy, thinking he would lose his mind from them. A similar incident is told about Munch in the 1890's; from it came the famous painting "The Scream". Europe's nightmare zeitgeist was sensed by many with open psyches but Jung's is most special because from it he conceived a psychology of creative individuation which became a foundation for modern thinking about the self. Jung's Red Book is actually a journal of development of his psychology. He worked on it from 1914-1930, then abruptly abandoned it, saying it was "...an aestheticising elaboration"...which he no longer valued as he did his formal published work, which he described as "...scientific elaboration".

The book's text is calligraphic, and appears Medieval, rich, and decorative. Images of coiling, self-reflexive snakes, trees, and sun, and abstract decorative motifs are lovingly painted in saturated rich colors. It feels like reading a Bible, and the meditative, insightful and transcendent writing leaves little doubt that Jung moved in deeply spiritual and reflective ways.

In 1916, he began to draw mandalas. They are cross-cultural appropriation, part of the huge influence of Orientalism upon European Romantic thought. I see the shape as situating a self in a void, creating structure with linkage, mapping, and connection, a kind of early Structuralism. A circular design suggests to many a focused, purposeful energy directly radiating from a constantly renewing center, surely a meaning with which the positive-minded Jung would naturally align. In "Mandala Symbolism", Jung analyses his patients' mandala drawings. He thought making them a method of creating "a safe refuge of inner reconciliation and wholeness."

But, I began as a neo-Freudian, drawn to the fierce refusal to deny unpleasant truths, even with seductive defense mechanisms provided by the "culture of narcissism" and the wide acceptance of material consumption it condones. Suspicious of self-realization, disappointed with traditional religion, disillusioned with politician and preacher, the Forum, Dream Therapy, Wikka, Reborning, scrapbooking, Zen, blogging, yoga...

As I studied, I became convinced that I had reasoned in overly-scrupulous ways, missing the door of arching transcendence for the simply practical and prosaic. In Ireland I stood in Yeat's castle, thinking of Georgie communicating telepathically with a man who wrote about wild swans. In Dublin, we stood in line for 45 minutes to see the Book of Kells, able to glimpse just one page, yet what a thrill to see the open book in the case. Same same here - the REAL book! It's been in storage and almost no one has even seen it. Rare, rare privelege. To see Jung's labor and energy pouring out in these papers is another open door, so many keep opening, so many to open.