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Thursday, January 22, 2015

Jung on the second half of life

Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem  in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.

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Are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

- Carl Jung

Friday, January 16, 2015

"Guidance Counseling" by Dean Young / Comment by Tony Hoagland

             Guidance Counseling

When the woman, her shoulders on the bed,
lifts her pelvis into the standing man,
it is called Dentist Office. When the man,
after an hour hiding in the closet, couples
with she of the silk flowered dress, snug
in the bodice, it is called Representational
Democracy. When the woman licks her burnt
finger, Tiny Garden Hose. Often as we grow
old, life becomes a page obscured with
too many words, like the sea with too many
flashes. Like my screaming may obscure
my love for you. How will we ever understand
each other? When the woman sits on the ladder
and the man churns like a lizard, stiff
in melting ice cream, it is called Many Dews.

     “How will we ever understand / each other?" Young’s poem is not obviously about the failure of speech, but tells a tale of comical disjointedness. Language is seen as a king of slippery impediment between people. Poetic attention has been shifted from the realm of nature (perception) to the realm of language, naming. The poem could be said to be celebratory, even erotic, in its playfulness – but it emphasizes the disturbing, nutty arbitrariness of the act of naming: Tiny Garden Hose; Representational Democracy; Dentist Office. If we listen closely, we can recognize that these coinages are in fact a parody, an echo, of commercial brand names, such as might be used to name perfumes, sell ice cream flavors, or catalogue paint chips.
     Young's poem celebrates the cornucopia of phenomena. It playfully suggests that there is a rich universe of experience to be encountered. But...our wonder has acquired a wry self-consciousness, and is directed not toward nature but toward the radical elasticity of language, and the stylistic dexterity of artifice.

Friday, January 9, 2015

from "Dies: A Sentence" by Vanessa Place

The maw that rends without tearing, the maggoty claw that serves you, what, my baby buttercup, prunes stewed softly in their own juices or a good slap in the face, there’s no accounting for history in any event, even such a one as this one, O, we’re knee-deep in this one, you and me, we’re practically puppets, making all sorts of fingers dance above us, what do you say, shall we give it another whirl, we can go naked, I suppose, there’s nothing to stop us and everything points in that direction, do you think there will be much music later and of what variety, we’ve that, at least, now that there’s plenty of pieces to be gathered by the wool-coated orphans and their musty mums, they’ll put us in warm wicker baskets, cover us with a cozy blanket of snow, and carry us home, walking carefully through the rubble and around the landmines, or visa versa...