I have this taboo that says you can't write in books. It really upsets me to see things underlined and highlighted - partly because it seems disrespectful, but also because it influences my own reading by emphasising things I may or may not want to focus on.
I loaned my copy of Jung and His Symbols to my father many, many years ago when I hadn't even read it myself. I got it back a few years ago (he had a Scorpio ascendant so it was difficult to get him to relinquish anything at all) Imagine my outrage when I discovered the dreaded fluoro highlights throughout the book. After his death last year I inherited quite a few more Jungian books that he had purchased himself, also filled with similar scratchings and even the occasional exclamation mark.
Even though I had been studying Jung for many years already I started reading them because they were Jung's more mainstream writings. I tried to ignore the bits that were obviously important to my father. Once again I was trying to resist what I had always perceived as his cloying possessiveness - I didn't want him to influence me.
Fairly recently I have been directed - through my own research and injury - to tackle the last chapter of The Portable Jung: Answer to Job. It was fortunate that this was one of the chapters I inherited in one of my father's books. It deals with the very difficult question of the unloving version of 'God', an experience that is one of the later stages of individuation in Jungian psychology - real 'soul-loss' and 'loss of faith' on an epic level. The 'night sea journey' of the soul is the focus of my thesis - the 'aweful sublime' in nature, the dark face of God. At first I was surprised that my father had read it, it is the really spiritual end of Jung's philosophies, and then I started taking note of the bits my father had underlined. Suddenly it dawned on me that he knew about this stuff, that he had perhaps had the same struggle with a God who has no conscience as humanity usually perceives it. I knew he suffered from depression and great angst but I hadn't appreciated the depth of it.
Like a detective I have been trying to unravel his thoughts. I am guessing, maybe incorrectly, that the fluoro highlights were done earlier than the texta and pen underlining, simply because in the later stages of his life he had developed Parkinson's, was in a nursing home and may not have had access to highlighters. Some of the underlinings are also wobbley which seems to confirm that they were done when his condition had deteriorated. Suddenly these annoying textual disfigurements are providing me with an intriguing and unexpected insight into his life. I had prematurely closed the book on the chapter that was my father.
It is difficult to express why this is so significant but I feel I must. What do I feel? Terribly sad, and terribly guilty. I think I may have completely dismissed and underestimated him. When my parents separated and I went to live with my maternal grandmother an inevitable contamination of my father's character resulted. I suspect they blamed my father for everything, much of which was justified, but some wasn't. My mother had said that my father was 'shallow' and had little 'insight', which was corroborated by my own experience of his outrageous tantrums and violence. I willingly believed that he was the demon, even though we got on really well when I wasn't living with him. I still don't excuse his destructive behaviour, but I must now also admit that I may have missed something very important.
Today is my first father's day without my father. Last Thursday I went out to the Gap to do some more visual research and reconnect with my personal manifestation of the aweful sublime. Among the images that always flash through my brain when I am there was the 'body on the rocks'. Of course it wasn't really there, but I drew it because it sort of was there too. I wrote in my journal 'it's not alive, but it's not really dead either'. And I wrote on the rocks in black charcoal, close enough to the water for it to be washed away on the next big swell:
'Dad, I am so sorry. Please forgive me'.
page from The Portable Jung
image: Frantom, 'body on the rocks'
8 comments:
Joan Campbell said:
Your forgiveness ritual for your father is very moving and will obviously afford real healing for you.
Tears ...
Beautiful Michelle.
Thanks ST. It is the anniversary of my father's death this Thursday too. One of the sad things I discovered when I inherited his stuff also was a father's day letter I had sent him last year. It was never opened, he never read my last words to him. He had already had his fall and was in hospital by the time the letter turned up at the nursing home. He died in hospital a couple of days later. It all happened so quickly.
I suspect, MF, that it's your father who might need your forgiveness.
Your post here stirred up many of my own thoughts about my father who died nearly thirty years ago. Needless to say I'm older than you.
When you describe your father highlighting your books from Jung I thought first of my father's saying that only fools write their names in the frontispiece of books.
I remembered also that my father, when I was young and first started to explore psychoanalysis, not so much Jung because of my own religious anxieties, took up what was then all the rage: Transactional Analysis.
My father who had been such a rigid man, kept searching right up until his death.
That he came to devour the books of Eric Berne and the like tickles my fancy now but then I felt annoyed- my father encroaching on my territory.
My father once told me he wanted to join a therapy group but not as a participant more as an observer. The idea outraged me.
In the end, he never joined a therapy group and died all too soon when he was 65.
It sounds as though your relationship with your father is deeply meaningful for you. Imagine how it will be and how it will change in the next thirty to fifty years, assuming you live that long.
I'm even more intrigued by the sound of your thesis here. Thanks, MF.
Thanks for your feedback Elisabeth, and for sharing your own experience. I am wondering if your father was born in the year of the Rooster as well!
Yes, I agree the relationship was meaningful and probably even more so because I refused to engage with it. I was so angry at him for destroying my childhood, he didn't abuse me sexually, but was heavy handed with the strap on occasion. Strangely enough it was the psychological damage I resented more.
On another level, relationships with the 'Father' are microcosms of relationships with a 'God' figure. The reasons are too complex to expand on here. I have learnt that all relationships in the end reflect aspects of ourselves.
Wow deep!
Hi Michelle,
I feel it is you who need to forgive yourself.
Luv Dianne
Absolutely Di......and I'm working on it. I just needed to acknowledge my own 'fault' in being dismissive of him. It is something I do too often generally. Forgiving myself - I think that's more difficult, but asking for forgiveness also seems important.
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