News Notebook Friday 9.3.21
Soul at Work: Salute to Labors-of-Love, Literature + Learning
Especially to those coping right now with floods, wildfire, illness and other crises, warm wishes for a safe and renewing Labor Day weekend. Here, again, is a holiday-greeting version of the Friday Notebook—a newShrink tradition that seems to be developing a life of its own.
Plenty of news, and full-length focus on it, will return next week.
Soon that will likely include what seems sure to be my next thorny, tangly, dread-but-can’t-avoid-addressing-it-personally issue—among challenges, right up there with religion, gender, race and sex. This time: Soul and psychological dimensions of abortion, particularly in the wake of this week’s U.S. Supreme Court inaction on draconian developments in Texas. For now will note only that my take on this is deeply consistent on all the soul aspects of our human sexuality—and the rest of our human complexity, especially the preciously sacred and profoundly private—that I’ve discussed so far in newShrink. (Another consistent thread emerges regarding end-of-life issues—which I dearly hope will wait just awhile to demand immediate probing, as well!)
🦋💙
tableau
Today’s holiday table again is inspired by 5-year-old artist-granddaughter, Miz-E, who’s off on a fun adventure with Dad, Mom and friends this weekend. Like a 3-D picture-poem (ideally with more physical objects than mine tend to have), this is a favorite sort of ritual-display-art we do together. She gathers all kinds of stuff, assembles it, then connects the dots through story of what it means, to explain her “tableaux.” All with dramatic flourish and a French accent of unknown origins.
My own tableau-efforts for newShrink are a pale substitute for hers—which she might tell you earnestly and kindly herself, as she did me awhile back:
“Tishie, you really might be able to do good art-work like I do—if you would only practice instead of spending your time writing down all your words to figure out where to put them.”
Touché!
Wise-girl is not wrong, based on both what we know about the brain’s continuing elasticity and the soul-psychology/individuation process that demands us to sometimes choose “going-against-our-own grain.” With that in mind, though I include explanations and comments here, I invite you also to look at the pictured table without the words—maybe as though it were of a genre somewhere between an illustrated poem and the classic children’s fare “Where’s Waldo” or “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”
Maybe all-different things will turn up for you (and speak).
Today with the seasonal shift ushered in by the national holiday, here are this week’s themes (appearing and pictured moving roughly clockwise from the top):
soul at work
We begin with Labor Day itself, with a few bits of refresher-history. (Brilliant Heather Cox Richardson is also sure to provide lots more of that through the weekend in Letters from an American if you want to check that out.)
“Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers and is traditionally observed on the first Monday in September, also marking the end of summer for many Americans. It was created by the labor movement in the late 19th Century and became a federal holiday in 1894. The annual celebration of workers’ achievements, it originated during one of American labor history’s most dismal chapters during the Industrial Revolution.”
This is from history.com, which provides facts about both worker-conditions and such pivotal protest-movement events as the first Labor Day Parade in New York City in 1882, when 10,000-unpaid-workers marched to City Hall. Then in 1886 both workers and police officers were killed in the Chicago Haymarket Riot.
This idea of soul—even linking Eros, love, with work—in today’s world probably sounds strange, or worse, to many. But to me that classic, more commonly known idea from Freud—that an essence or ideal of life is being able (both) to love and to work—has always somehow resonated and stuck. One of the things Freud got right.
I have wondered if this love-affair with work might be my fate as a “Saturday’s child,” born on Saturday and thereafter “works hard for a living,” according to the old rhyme!
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labors of love…
Now, some play with vivid examples of soul dimensions of labor at both ends of the psyche’s spectrum of ever-present, creative energy or libido, as discussed in some recent posts. At one end is the instinctual, erotically active creation and delivery labors of the animal-body—depicted here as literal, embodied (and in one example, slippery!) babies. At the other pole is the also erotically active, creative labor of the imaginal, archetypal, inspiring (ie involving of spirit)—demonstrated with power here in works of both written fiction and visual art.
Central to this section is Danielle Dutton’s breathtaking flash-fiction (ultra-short) story, “Acorn,” and its stunningly integrated illustration photo by Kyoko Hamada, from The New Yorker (August 26). I hope you can read past the paywall; if not, this one may be worth purchase of a pricey newsstand copy, if not a digital subscription.
Shared by favorite hawk-eyed hometown reader, Dutton’s may be the most accurate “inside-out” description I have read on how my own writing process (at least with writing I care about, that’s alive) feels: Like a living, embodied phenomenon—relationship more than product.
Dutton also describes vividly that soul psychological dimension of “witnessing consciousness” or standing outside oneself to observe, that I wrote about in relation to psychology, fishing (or writing) in last week’s Notebook.
This story arrived synchronistically—Jung’s core concept of acausal, meaningful coincidence—just as I had finished writing that piece. In the depth psychology tradition, synchronicities are those powerful, energetically charged points where an external event or fact occurs to match in time one in our internal experience, eg. an idea, something we are working on, image or dream. Basically they are “awake” moments, where conscious and unconscious, or soul, are connected.
With both its sparseness of words and viscerally powerful images, “Acorn” hits me more as poem than prose. (And I’ve come to understand, in my own wiring, that poetry pretty much has to “hit”, sneak up and catch me unaware to bypass logical brain and practicality, or it doesn’t move me much at all.)
The squirming, slippery, deliciously alive baby in the story is a laugh-aloud, kick-in-the-gut delight.
And, in the acorn, to me this piece has the surprise jaw-dropping guided missile of all title metaphors!
Many rich and varied soul and depth psychology themes come up with this story and its illustration, so I’m sure to come back to it in future references.
For now I’ll leave the rest so as not to spoil unfiltered discovery, other than to note the obvious connection with Hillman’s concept of the original soul-Self as the soul’s code. This he spells out as the acorn theory—and cites parallels with Vladimir Nabokov’s idea of an “original watermark visible through life’s foolscap.”
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literature…
Given a seasonal twist to this regard for writing, and reading, of the written word, here’s a nod to the launch of the Book Club Year, with many of us reviewing discussing, choosing (some salivating over) our monthly selections. I’ll be welcoming your contributions and reviews on what you, and your club if you have one, read in weeks and months ahead.
Though a different war, this month’s selection for my wonderful book club is especially timely in light of the past month’s ending of “our longest war” in Afghanistan. It’s The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried them Through a War.” In this memoir by Delphine Minoui and Lara Vergnaud, here again is a central theme from the soul standpoint of Eros, the living-animating-nourishing power in the written word—also, the tangible books themselves—even while attempting survival in impossible circumstances. Again, I’ll be returning with book review items and updates. I invite you to share yours, too.
For time and space reasons I’ll save more on Hillman for later, since I tend to mention and discuss him a lot, anyway.
Regarding Nabokov, particularly with the beautiful memoir Speak, Memory, I’m reminded of a line in a David Whyte poem about this piercing kind of writing from the soul:
“the blade is so sharp—it cuts things together, not apart.”
Even with the memoir title, Nabokov conveys that memory speaks the language of soul… (and the converse, soul speaks with the language of memory.) In the writing itself I think of the difference between soul-time, kairos, and how it loops back and forth and around again, vs chronos, which is linear, more like a resumé.
Mythologically Nabokov is evoking Mnemosyne, Titan Goddess of Memory, mother of Zeus and of the 9 Muses responsible for the arts.
I’m tickled by noticing, with this very 2021 revisit, the cover of this 1989 volume of the Nabokov book (which has many dogeared prior renditions and excerpted versions amid his stuff on the shelves). On this one, Memory seems to be speaking through a filmy filter. Like a mask. (Which is pretty much how memory, and soul, talk—even in non-pandemic times.)
Aside from the beautiful writing (and his strong opinions often curmudgeonly expressed), I’m intrigued and touched by a different kind of soul-association with Russia-born Nabokov. That is, his expertise as a self-taught lepidopterist and his passion since early childhood for the butterfly—which is of course a fairly universal symbol for the psyche. As this 2011 New York Times story describes, Nabokov was curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. His earlier experimental theories on evolution of certain blue butterflies have later been validated as correct.
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learning…
And finally come the back-to-school cadences evoked by images such as all of those school buses this time of year.
Along with changes in the light and shortening days, returns to school at all levels are part of bittersweet rhythms of September probably embedded in our collective neuro-cellular memory, if not DNA, by now.
With next week’s return to news focus, an element of updates on the Covid surge under way will be much school-year coverage of concern and studies regarding effects on children’s and teens’ development, academic performance, brains and mental health as a result of the pandemic. All, of course, critically important topics.
Meanwhile, at the table this week I introduce the late Barbara Strauch, former science editor and journalist from The New York Times, whose earlier books exhaustively examined and distilled then-emerging research findings on the adolescent brain from extensive studies using functional MRI and other technologies.
More recently, Strauch compiled and distilled the similarly exhaustive studies on adult and aging brains. Her resulting book on those findings, The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, was valuable in my 2014 dissertation research.
Most compelling, the neuroscience here confirms the continuing expansion and elasticity of our brains—absent compensation for injury or lost function, actually “lighting up” previously “dark” (shadow!) areas—well into the aging process.
Consistent with individuation toward greater wholeness per Hillman, Jung, (and even granddaughter Miz-E!), our aging brains, and we, gain holistic, strategic, multi-faceted and multi-level functioning.
This occurs even as we do lose some speed and acuity with details that were so essential and well-served the needs of our ego-defining/resumé-forming years.
Ie, despite all of the very real potential disease processes and inevitable deteriorations, neurologically we are also wired with potential and capacity for that out-of-style aspiration: “increased wisdom with age.”
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speaking of labors-of-love…
Before closing, a note of gratitude to you, dear thinking, varied, funny, caring, surprising and soulful readers, from newShrink. This 3-month-old, steadily growing, inquisitive, wiggly, lively, engagingly, demanding labor-of-love toddler tells me week-to-week what is next! I especially appreciate the many steady, “work that is happening behind the scenes” and soulful ways you are connecting (and expanding) our version of the “parade of elephants” in the Stafford poem below. Our procession is nearly 50 percent longer (now about 125) than at the Memorial Day start—to me a just about perfect parade-pace to move and expand, yet stay well-removed enough from the masses’ thundering herds to allow for breadth and depth. So I hope you’ll keep reading and being in touch, whenever and how you’re moved to. In that spirit, do also keep inviting and welcoming anyone you choose to join us.
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”
Post Notes:
Dutton, D. (2021, August 26). Acorn. Retrieved 28 August 2021 from https://thenewyorker.com
Hillman, J. (1996.) The soul’s code: The force of character and calling. New York, NY: Random House.
Nabokov, V. (1989). Speak, memory. First Vintage International Edition. New York, NY: Random House. Originally published, in different form, by Harper & Bros., New York, in 1951.
Minoui, D., & Vergnaud, L. (2020.) The book collectors: A band of Syrian rebels and the stories that carried them through a war. Purchased from iBooks.
Zimmer, C. (2011). Nonfiction: Nabokov theory on evolution is vindicated. Retrieved 2 September 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html.
Whyte, D. (1992), “No one told me.” From Fire in the earth: Poems by David Whyte. Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press.
Strauch, B. (2010). The secret life of the grown-up brain: The surprising talents of the middle-aged brain. New York, NY: Viking.