Friday Kaleidoscope 4.8.22
First-Twist Views on an Ever-Shifting News-scape
Weekend greetings, and welcome to newShrink!
The title image of this kaleidoscope edition was a fleeting, rather puzzling, nudge from the psyche a few weeks back. It surfaced briefly with the zoom-in/zoom-out theme in last Friday’s post, only to nag more insistently ever since. So this is today’s visual starting-point.
The conclusion of the post will then revisit and further explore these as “central images.”
Meanwhile the focus is reading, watching and listening to this week’s news across different contexts with an emphasis on the creative dimension.
connecting themes…
🔷 Central today is Jung’s view of the creative instinct as a core universal, human drive of the unconscious soul or psyche.
🔷It shows up, in individuals and in society, as an innate drive toward order and wholeness. (The word itself shares common roots with ones like healing, health, and holiness.)
🔷 This creative seeking of meaning and patterns is erotically charged — that is, fueled by powerful psychological energy (which may, or may not, be sexual in nature.)
🔷As with many examples with the Ukrainian leader himself and general responses to Putin and Russian aggression, in this dynamic the opposite of chaos and disorder is not control, limitation, restriction, restraint or confinement… but rather the life-giving creative forces of eros, love.
🔷The news from many contexts has examples of psychological and other strengths demonstrated through the creative arts — from comedy, as discussed in recent and previous editions, to music, literature, visual arts, theater.
🔷And this pattern of creative arts and expression as a force for healing and wholeness shows up in stories from the individual and cultural levels as well as in history and its “first-drafts” in journalism.
The usual navigating details for accessing links and references here or on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments.
Particularly with the many video, audio and TV elements of today’s stories, where possible I choose links that offer a choice, embedding links that combine written text, video or audio versions. So today for example, with several stories you’ll see the network CBS News version that offers the option of links to both written text and video — because the You Tube version is just video. Some of us actually process and take things in faster and better by reading than watching or listening, while for others the neuroscience-linguistic wiring is the opposite. Please alert me if you need or prefer a different balance in newShrink on this. (I also aim for free or low-cost accessibility where possible.)
… with stories
As reflected in its length, detail and central positioning in the above illustration, this first piece from headlines has been by far the week’s most profound, complex and multi-dimensional from both depth (soul) and clinical psychological standpoints.
1. Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad
Considering these two it is difficult to imagine more complete expression, if not epitome, of the above elements of the healing, integrating, loving forces of creativity — and many of the other dimensions of soul-engaged life and relationship.
Some back-story:
🌀Last Sunday morning the year’s Grammys had not yet been awarded, and I am not much of a fan or follower in any case. By then I had pretty clearly identified and had fresh in mind this week’s general newShrink themes, plus some story examples, around the healing and core instinctual power of creativity and the creative arts.
🌀Long an appreciative admirer of Jon Batiste, I had experienced his very embodied music live in the theater and was long familiar with him and much of his story — including the stunningly talented love of his life and 8-year partner, Suleika Jaouad.
🌀I hadn’t read her award-winning blog of a few years back, or the best-selling memoir “Between Two Kingdoms.” It had charted her literal journey to relearn how to live after a long and aggressive form of leukemia that had arrived along with her graduation with honors from Princeton. (I did know somehow that she had not married the very supportive fiancé who was apparently a well-known and popular presence with readers of her blog.)
🌀But a year ago I had been riveted by Jaouad’s 2021 Valentine’s Day interview on CBS Sunday Morning — in which Jon Batiste’s 7-year-presence in her life appeared only at the end as a post-script.
🌀And I had happened to catch The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Batiste’s Stay Human is the house band, that aired on Batiste’s birthday, 11/11/21. They discussed how this 11th day of the 11th month was the day he’d received a record-setting 11 Grammy Award nominations.
🌀All of that said, this interview of last Sunday morning — before he’d won five of the 11 Grammys, including the top Album of the Year — just clobbered, yet also inspired. It is devastating. I highly recommend watching it, anyway.
🌀What Batiste had not publicly shared 11/11/21, or since, was the other milestone of that career-peak birthday: It was spent with Jaouad in an infusion center, where she was beginning her first chemotherapy for the aggressive return of cancer — as the calls with his multiple award nominations kept coming in.
Their stories in headlines and quotes:
Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad sharing life beyond cancer (CBS Sunday Morning, last week April 3)
The same day the "Late Show with Stephen Colbert" bandleader received 11 Grammy nominations — the most by any artist this year — the love of his life was beginning chemotherapy treatments for her second battle with cancer. Jon Batiste and bestselling author Suleika Jaouad ("Between Two Kingdoms") talk with correspondent Jim Axelrod about how their world was turned upside-down, and how they met adversity with “an act of defiance.”
Jon Batiste on creativity, his music and his view that “God gives us 12 notes”:
The music is already speaking to you [me]. It’s not what I am doing with it, but what it is telling me to do.
Suleika Jaouad, on their excruciating process as a couple holding both the most exquisite joy and profound grief:
Ir’s having to hold the absolute, gutting and painful heartbreak with the beautiful soulful things, in the same palm of one hand.
This is an eerily literal echo of depth/soul psychology’s holding the tension of the opposites… (the rest of which is that the creation of the transcendent third can emerge).
Reflecting back on Jaouad’s February 2021 interviews about her book:
“Between Two Kingdoms” Tells A Story Of Survival — And Of A Journey To Learn To Live (NPR) 2/9/2021
This is the inspiring, informative interview with the impressive Suleika Jaouad from Valentine’s Day a year ago, with a late cameo appearance identifying Batiste as her partner.
At Sunday’s Grammy ceremony, and in news coverage and appearances of all sorts afterward, of course there were many appropriate accolades for Batiste — beginning with the standing ovation he received for his heartfelt and humble acceptance speech in which he honored artists of all kinds and described his relationship with music as a spiritual practice.
May 7 will be his premiere performance of his “American Symphony,” which he describes as “combining the darkness and the light that is America.” Worth noting, Batiste is the first Black artist in 14 years — since Herbie Hancock — to win the coveted Album of the Year Grammy. (This despite the deep Black roots of so many genres of American music, including Batiste’s Jazz, soul/R&B, gospel, hip hop, etc.)
A couple of my thoughts here:
🌀Given all of these dimensions of this complex, psychologically evolved and gifted musician — and owning all of my obvious biases, plus current heightened clinical protectiveness toward both him and Jaouad during a dire traumatic time — I am finding some coverage of him cringeworthy this week. There is such an off-putting, “damning with faint praise” leaning toward snarky, tone to this piece on the Grammy by a NYT critic — and another example so similar from a Washington Post critic that there’s no need to cite both:
Why the Grammys Couldn’t Resist Jon Batiste (NYT)
The jazz pianist is an inheritor more than an innovator, but he puts the past to use in service of fun, blending genres and embodying the pleasures of his hometown, New Orleans. (etc.)
🌀There’s a conflating and dismissal of popular pleasure, feel-good fun, with deeper and more trail-blazing elements that I find misses a lot of what Batiste is about.
🌀In such reviews’ intense “horizontal” focus on “moving the music forward vs reflecting the past”… or even “expanding, broadening it with crossovers” (as even the range of Batiste’s nomination reflects), what seems glaringly missing to me is the “vertical” axis also prevalent in an artist like him. That is, a “heights” of the obvious spiritual dimension — Jung’s “archetypal pole”— along with the “depths” of the embodied and soulful — the “instinctual pole” in Jung’s view of things.
🌀As shown in the illustration above, Suleika Jaouad’s book title, “Between Two Kingdoms,” is from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor:
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.
Somehow, the facts that Batiste and even his just-making-people-feel-happy music actually come directly from, and straddle, both kingdoms — or their very universal existence — seem to have eluded these reviewers. They write of the need for musical courage and edginess. But it seems for them to cross that edge of holding mortality “in the palm of one hand” is a psychological bridge too far.
With heartwarming yet heartbreaking intimacy, last Sunday’s CBS Sunday morning interview with both Batiste and Jaouad shares the news that they’d secretly married in February, the night before she would have a second bone-marrow transplant to combat this new round of the aggressive cancer. Because of the omicron variant and her high risk of infection the wedding took place remotely as both were isolated.
She recounts how each night of their separate confinements he wrote an impromptu lullaby, shared via Zoom. Pretty edgy music, that.
About the marriage — long anticipated, not something triggered by the new diagnosis — Batiste says:
It’s an act of defiance. The darkness will try to overtake you, but you just turn on the light. Focus on the light. Hold on to the light.
This is an artist who knows and navigates wide-awake the difference between happy, playful contagiously shared mood… and joy that comes only accompanied by awareness of darkest depths and soaring heights as well.
🔵
Looking now at the left column in the visual, here’s a range of stories with themes of of creative healing at the cultural level
2. “The monumental success of Simone Leigh”
(from The New Yorker)
Recognition for the American sculptor, who is representing the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, may have come late but it seems foreordained.
Leigh, whose huge and stunning works now in bronze, like the “Brick House” ones pictured at New York City’s High Line, began much earlier in pottery traditions intertwined with themes of race and family complexities.
Here’s one account from the piece
“About ‘Sentinel (Mama Wata),’ my [Leigh’s] interpretation of a West African water spirit, a deity who has destructive powers as well as creative-generative ones”:
The Prospect New Orleans curators had wanted to install her sculpture on an empty pedestal in Lee Circle, where a statue of Robert E Lee had once stood. Leigh had balked at that. “With all the furor about Confederate statues being pulled down, I saw that I was being caught up in a big American problem that I hadn’t planned on addressing… I also realized that a sixty-five foot pedestal with a sculpture on top of it was absolutely ridiculous.” Her mama wata was installed at the base of the pedestal.
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3. A Nod to Leonard Cohen for April Poetry Month
Five poems to make you love leonard cohen even more (From The Globe and Mail)
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4. “Summer of Soul” documentary wins both Oscar and Grammy
In addition to these individual stories, both awards are included in general stories and listings in coverage of both award events. (Last July’s editions of newShrink thoroughly explore this film and its creation story.)
Questlove’s Summer of Soul wins Best Music Film at 2022 Grammys (pitchfork.com)
Questlove’s Summer of Soul takes him Oscar win for Best Documentary (black enterprise.com)
🔵
Looking now at the illustration’s right column, stories with historic and journalistic context:
5. Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks to Grammys audience in a prerecorded video.
(NYT)
Once again, the Ukrainian leader inspired both the in-house and television audiences with vividly presented contrasts — using images and language of the arts and music in America vs war-ravaged Ukraine — to plead for more, and more aggressive assistance from the West. This came amid this week’s news of atrocities in Bucha, credible international war crime proceedings beginning against Russia, and imposition of the latest sanctions. (One note on a nit in news coverage of Zelenskyy: I wish journalists who know better would refrain from dismissing this leader’s deep and varied education, experience and psychological complexity by type-casting him merely as “an actor-turned-leader.”)
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I present these next video links and pieces as I anticipate watching them — and by way of preparation and preview for future discussion. I haven’t yet, but will watch the new PBS two-part, four-hour Ken Burns documentary on Ben Franklin that premiered this week. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments.
6. Ken Burns' New Documentary Shows Benjamin Franklin in All His Contradictions
(From time.com)
Ken Burns on Benjamin Franklin & our nation's flawed identity: "Race is the central question" (From Salon)
This excellent piece from Salon includes great insights from Walter Isaacson, whose (2003 biography of Franklin I highly recommend):
I think the importance of Ben Franklin is that he was able to connect art and science, able to connect the humanities and the technology.He cared about everything you could possibly learn about anything, from art to anatomy to math to music to diplomacy. And his science helped inform the things that he did.
And this video is a lively treasure of a conversation capturing a lot of brains, heart and talent of three very different and gifted guys.
Now, speaking of history, exciting news on the phenomenal, wise and accessible political historian…
🔵
7. Heather Cox Richardson named a nominee for USA Today’s Women of the Year
(From USA Today)
This week along with her enormous work regimen of daily newsletter, podcasts, weekly Facebook video etc., Richardson also had a video interview with President Biden.
🔵
And a final piece of late-breaking, history-making news at writing time Thursday afternoon:
Jackson Confirmed as First Black Woman to Sit on Supreme Court
(NYT)
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We’ll conclude today’s newShrink with a revisit of the original photo illustration at the top of the post.
central images
The title word kaleidoscope, from its Greek roots, literally means “observer of beautiful shapes.” The Greek components kalos = “beautiful” + eidos = “form or shape.” And scope = “instrument of viewing beautiful shapes.” This search of definitions and etymology also turned up that the process of using a kaleidoscope has long been associated with having healing properties. (Despite its playful name, Useless Etymology is one good online source for this and similar searches. Another is the Online Etymology Dictionary.)
A. the invention
🌀 The original kaleidoscope like this, created by Scottish inventor David Brewster, was different from the more familiar cylinder type that came later.
🌀 Brewster created it in 1815, to such wide exposure and avid interest by opticians of the day that he received little compensation by the time his invention was patented in 1817.
🌀 Brewster also invented an early version of the viewfinder called a stereoscope — which I happen to have from my maternal grandparents, along with its World War II era photos for viewing.
B. symmetrical kaleidoscope-renditions of patterned color
🌀Online browsing turns up immense variety of these beautifully colored, symmetrically patterned kaleidoscope-renderings usually formed from colored shards of glass.
🌀The classic children’s toy version in plastic or cardboard achieves the effects with colored paper.
🌀 It was only on looking at these for newShrink that I realized these are examples of Jung’s mandalas, and vice versa.
C. myth and archetypal threads: statue and relief-shard of the nymph Callisto
🌀The Greek root kalos (beauty) is derived from the mythological half-immortal nature nymph Callisto (Callista in some languages.)
🌀According to the myth Callisto was consort of the most powerful immortal Greek god Zeus, the mother of his son Arcas, and widely considered the most beautiful and favored of Zeus’ many lovers (plus his conquests both willing and forced.)
🌀Her beauty and his favor provoke Olympian-sized female jealousies and retaliation that turns Callisto into a bear… after which (of course!) son Arcas accidentally shoots his bear-mother while hunting.
🌀The story concludes with Zeus rendering mother and sun immortal by placing them in the eternal night sky as stars.
🌀And voila: The constellations we know today as Ursa (the Bear), Major and Minor. (In the visual above the Statue of Callisto is at Parc de Versailles, France. Sculptor Anselme Flamen. The second photo is a piece of a stone relief depicting Greek-spelling Kallisto, for sale on Etsy.)
D. mandalas: art and symbolism of East, West and depth psychology
🌀Jung worked with and wrote extensively about these images common in many Eastern traditions. He considered them both symbols of and tools for wholeness, the integrating/integrated Self.
🌀The mandala pictured above (right of statue) also includes a cross, which Jung considered another powerful symbol of wholeness.
🌀Mandalas (pronounced with accent on the first syllable) for Jung capture the psyche’s natural instinctual drive to create order and wholeness out of chaos and fragmentation — both within ourselves and in the world.
🌀Previous editions of newShrink have explored this core concept of wholeness as healing as well as sacred, expressed through common roots in words like health, whole, holiness.
🌀In his analytic psychotherapy with patients Jung found working with, drawing, coloring and contemplating mandalas in meditation a useful tool and focal point for settling fragmentation of the unconscious psyche’s various parts for individual healing and individuation. Today many people find such practices as meditative coloring with mandala coloring books a similar mindfulness process outside the consulting room of psychotherapy (Some source links here are: Jung Utah.com and Carl-Jung.net.)
🌀Now, about that fleeting, still-puzzling-nudge from the psyche…
On 3/23 I wake with a clear visual dream snippet: A rectangular frame, similar to one of these color photo collages or any laptop screen. In the frame are dozens, maybe hundreds, of very small, brightly multicolored, tightly packed but separate, square and rectangular images and/or just solid-color shapes. The effect is like one of those portraits by recently deceased artist Chuck Close, where the frame is a human face and hundreds or thousands of tiny separate photos form the framed face itself.
(By daytime logic, neither of these dream images, the frame nor the artist Chuck Close shape, is round or a squared circle… or otherwise looks much like both a kaleidoscope rendering and one of Jung’s mandalas from Eastern traditions do...)
But on waking here I immediately get not only the visual images, but also the audible, clear and enthusiastic words: “Oh, look: It’s kaleidoscopic — like a mandala!!”
🌀Which is what provoked last week’s passing newShrink mentions of the kaleidoscopic zoom-in/zoom-out of the week’s two-part process and Jung’s mandalas.
🌀 But the dream’s contradictory visual-vs-verbal and lingering “what the heck is this?” vagueness still bugged me. Hence, this additional “Central Images” browsing…
I share this by way of illustrating a bit of what that soul-engaged “allowing some time and attention for how the psyche shows up” can look and feel like some weeks: Puzzling, inefficient and messy.
Welcome to my world!
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Now I’ll leave you with a favorite sign of the season. I hope that cherry-blossom time finds its way to you soon, if it hasn’t already.
In celebration I plan and hope to finish my first 10k race (however slow!) in the SouthPark area Charlotte RaceFest beginning absurdly early Saturday morning. A few events a year is a fun change from the saner day-to-day distance and regimen. But I think the sweet-spot distance for races is topping out at 8k; this one’s extra 6th mile is feeling like one too many! (The acute body-memory of every turn, house and feature along an all-too-familiar hometown race course probably doesn’t make this one less daunting…)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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Credits for non-stock photos in today’s post:
Simone Leigh story from The New Yorker: Heather Fox and Timothy Schenck.
Leonard Cohen illustration (The Globe and Mail) by Anthony Hare.
Zelenskyy via video at Grammy Award ceremony (NYT) by Valerie Macon, Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.