Smiles of a Summer Solstice
Soul Men/Whole Men (And A Breather From The News) Father's Day Gallery 6.19.22
A newShrink summer welcome as we remember and honor our soul-makers: Treasured fathers of every kind, within as well as among us.
Monday carries that spirit with celebration of the Juneteenth national holiday marking the end of slavery, thanks to the federal law passed just a year ago.
And at 5:13 AM Tuesday the solstice begins what may be my favorite combo of day, night and season of the year.
For reasons of both news-week content and logistics, today’s edition is a bit of a seasonal Gallery crawl with the above illustration as starting guide.
connecting title themes and images…
Starting at the center column photos above:
June solstice (summer in the Northern Hemisphere)
🌀 Yes, I’m one of those weird ones. Love the heat, the humidity, the storms, the super-long daylight, even the bugs are OK — especially singing cicadas. Best of all from a soul-tracking standpoint is the associated seasonal art, music, myth, literature, drama, imagery and symbolism.
🌀(This article has some facts you may not know about June Solstice.) Pictured are the Northern Lights’ 24-hour daylight in Norway at this first of the year’s two solstices. That happens because the sun is directly overhead as far north as the Tropic of Cancer.
🌀Solstices arrive at the same time in every time zone — summer in the Northern Hemisphere, winter in the Southern. At solstice it seems briefly as if the sun has stood still, as the earth’s tilt then moves the sunlight in the other direction.
A Midsummer Night with the bard
🌀The Shakespeare play, of course, came first, one of his most-loved and often performed comedies.
🌀 The 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, showed at the Cannes festival in 1956 and has endured as a classic ever since. In 2005 Time magazine ranked it among its 100-best made since 1923. As recently as 2021 Smiles had a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics rating and 89% audience score.
🌀A Little Night Music is the late Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning 1973 Broadway musical take on the stor(ies), later adapted to film — its music, theater and film versions all also enduring, much-performed classics. (More on Sondheim in 12.3.21 newShrink “A Little Shadow Music”.)
Summer of Soul and the Disney animation Soul
🌀Both point to elements of the Juneteenth holiday celebration, the 2021 news about the new federal holiday and celebrations of it.
🌀Summer of Soul is also a documentary film profiled in newShrink 7.23.21 “Tale of Two Summers.” It has since won several awards, including both Oscar and Grammy.
“Soul Man”
🌀This 1967 hit recorded by Sam and Dave (Samuel Moore and David Porter), written and composed by Isaac Hayes and Porter, has more and unexpected significance than my usual ear-worms from the psyche — especially given the Juneteenth timing.
🌀In 2019 “Soul Man” was added to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress because of its “cultural, historic and aesthetic significance.”
🌀The listing recognizes the unique way the song highlights a practice that helped protect Black homes and businesses during the Detroit riots in the Civil Rights movement. In a practice reminiscent of the Old Testament Biblical Passover story, Black activists would mark their neighborhood properties with the word “Soul” to keep them from being destroyed.
🌀”Soul Man” rose to #2 on the charts and won a rhythm and blues Grammy in 1968. The song has been covered by groups ranging from psychedelics to Lou Reed and reggae.
🌀In 1978, comedians Dan Aykroyd and the late John Belushi spoofed the song in a wildly popular cold-open on Saturday Night Live, and they released a 1979 hit single. That version later became the theme song of Ackroyd’s ABC sitcom in the ‘90s.
(Reference for more: CBS News, “Soul Man Sam Moore reflects on his hit song.
🔵
Looking now at both left and right columns of images in the illustration:
“words, words, words”
The highlighted lines from both Shakespeare and poet David Whyte at bottom right point accurately to this edition’s direction.
🌀Between hearings and negotiations in both houses of Congress, gun lobbyists and the acrimonious, sex-scandal-plagued Southern Baptist Convention’s annual conference of its thousands of “messengers,” toxic masculinity is dominating the week’s top news even more than usual. And the wild and widely varied displays are not only by persons who identify as male by physical biology and body parts, functional role or adopted archetype. (The news, and news-focus, will of course return.)
🌀 I’ve opted to keep today’s soul-focus on the men, the fathers and the psychological masculine in our lives.
🌀This Gallery edition is mostly images, including some relevant newShrink revisits and fewer words, words, words of news. That’s partly because this Father’s Day celebration of dads with granddaughter Miz E is on the move, a quick trip to Asheville due to summer schedules and family transitions.
🌀And from a content standpoint, over the past newShrink year the themes of recognizing and tracking conscious, positive, mature psychological masculinity — which of course includes fathers and fatherhood — have been more connective thread and recurring subtext.
Today they’re the focus, highlighted text. In music this is the top primo part (to borrow one of the week’s pesky Wordle-solve words…)
The usual navigating details for accessing all links and references on the newShrink website are at the bottom of this post after closing comments.
…with the Gallery
Here images illustrate some qualities and the nature of soul via people who embody and bring it to life in the world — or fail to. Starting again at center column…
#1. The yin/yang symbol from Taoism and Jung’s quote remind of both the wholeness and the dance of dynamic tension between opposites at the core of living in a consciously animated soulful way. Jung uses psychological masculinity and femininity to describe this universal push-pull of opposite energies of the psyche. It’s that “acting/doing/delivering-executing ego lower-case-self” and the “relational/reflective/receptive-conceiving-creating-and-gestating” Self — both sides of all of us humans.
(Here, a Jungian scholar defines psychological masculine as simply the conscious ego-self, feminine the Soul-self — both of equal significance and practical importance in men and women of all gender identities and sexual orientation. This Jungian analyst further updates Jung’s psychology on gender for contemporary times both conceptually and in terminology.)
#2. At bottom center the three photos depict special aspects from the now-deceased fathers in my own legacy. From left: my lifelong-educator paternal grandfather; my multi-faceted thinker-artist dad (shown here in youth and with leather-creation tools of a later period); and my gruff-tough-tender-terrifically loving-and-terrible-tease of a maternal grandfather. (Each is described, respectively, in previous newShrink posts browsable on the website from late summer and fall 2021 and in the New Years 2022.)
#3. At top left, the selected photos recap ways that Ukraine’s emerging global hero of a President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — along with his wife, broader career and children — so literally illustrate what happens when our deeper authentic selves come from behind the curtains of type-cast roles, stereotypes and limiting scripts. (Browsable in Sunday 3.13.22 and 3.20.22 newShrink posts on the website.)
#4. The cartoon is a comic take on the psychologically masculine attribute of “(fact-based)-thinking-acting-executing-making things happen to make a difference in the world.”
#5. At top right, demonstratively affectionate surgeon husband and warmly present family at the Senate confirmation hearings of newly appointed US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. (NewShrink 4.1.22 and 4.3.22 editions on the website.)
#6. And at final bottom-right is a couldn’t-resist share circulating widely in social media. It’s a darkly satirical spoof combining former First Family members Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner with chillingly accurate text from the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. (In contrast, the New Year’s Day edition of newShrink excerpted and closed with 2022 wishes for “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” — a long-favorite phrase taken from the soul-stirring passage in which Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick Carraway eloquently and poignantly describes Jay Gatsby.)
🔵
Here are more examples of varying ways the dance of conscious, positive, mature psychological masculine-and-feminine play out on the world stage, within individuals, between couples and in the fathering involved for all of us.
#1. At top-right are Fred and Marley Shropshire, a midlife pair of newlyweds who blended their family including four children from their respective former first marriages. Having both experienced divorce, its painful effects on their children and a lot of self-examination and healing work, from the start they mutually approached their two-year courtship and engagement with a commitment to celibacy unless or until they married. No particular fan or foe of adult celibacy as long as it’s chosen not forced, I was moved by this case as an example of deep and intentional, conscious psychological relationship at work. (Browsable on the website 3.13.22 post section, “A TV news anchor clicked with her on Instagram. Celibacy helped them find true love.”)
#2. At bottom left are among many apparent dimensions of comedian and Late Show host Stephen Colbert. Here he’s first playful with wife Evie in delivering his show’s comedic take on Father’s Day with “First Drafts,” and the second photo depicts a moving 2019 interview on grief that brought Anderson Cooper (and many of the rest of us) to tears. As he often does with transparent ease and emotional agility, Colbert describes facts, experience and lifelong impacts of the loss of his father and two of his brothers in a Charlotte Eastern Airline crash when he was still in grade school. (Colbert’s work and guests show up in newShrink material, and more personal detail and reflection on the plane crash, his family, grief and comedy are in summer 2021 editions browsable on the website.)
# 3. Photos and quote from U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin at center recap dominant themes and stories in the 1.9.22 newShrink browsable on the website.
#4. And at bottom right newlyweds, Grammy winning musician Jon Batiste and widely read author Suleika Jaouad battling a ferocious cancer recurrence, profiled in the 4.8.22 edition browsable on the website.
🔵
By time-and-logistics necessity this last Gallery assortment — actually my favorite — must be limited more than I’d like, to photo images, names and a few references and comments.
Each with their lives, works and legacies these complicated people have embodied aspects of psychological maturity, increasingly conscious relationship and individuating— becoming “bigger” and more whole over the course of long lives.
In the left column are the late Jungian Marion Woodman with her Romantic-Poets Professor husband Ross — life partners of many decades and what both described as many different, at times jarringly alien, renditions of self and relationship. Both lifelong educators whose teaching I was gifted to experience, they didn’t parent biological children.
Joining Marion at center are recently retired legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski with his wife Mickie. All are highlighted or mentioned in various ways in 3.13.22, 3.20.22 and 3.27.22 newShrink posts browsable on the website.
From a psychological perspective I recommend the intensive ESPN profile “From Butterflies to Bobby Knight: The Mysterious Forces Behind Coach K’s Last Run,” discussed in the 3.13.22 Sunday Postcards edition. It’s particularly powerful regarding the coach’s (by all accounts much needed) growth and developed capacity for conscious relationship and psychological maturity both masculine and feminine. Much of it he has attributed in interviews to the exceptional emotional intimacy, mutual strength and loving connection apparent with his wife of 52 years and in continued, closely connected day to day work, community and family engagement with all three adult daughters and their families.
Finally the far-right column depicts several of the familiar themes and aspects of the late novelist and memoirist Vladimir Nabokov. These are cited and mentioned in various newShrink editions browsable on the website, from the initial Welcome/About page to posts last fall and at year-in-review.
Beyond the beauty of his language, the author brings several depth-psychological/soul-engaged perspectives to his reflections: On character, on the embedded influence and back-and-forth flow of memory over time, and on both his own childhood and love for his only son Dmitri. Most striking of all is the depth, complexity and astonishing psychological intimacy — across unimaginable vicissitudes of both world wars, as well as those of the internal-psyche variety — in his 52-year relationship with his wife Véra (also deceased since 1991, nearly 15 years after her husband.)
In the picture are two more recent discoveries not discussed previously in newShrink: The Pulitzer-winning Stacy Schiff 2000 biography of Véra Nabokov (described interestingly in this piece, “Hidden in Full Sight,” in The Irish Times — not exactly my usual news outlet!) And in this New Yorker piece, “Silent Partner,” Judith Thurman examines the Knopf-published first full release of all of the prolific Vladimir’s letters to Véra, with a lot of insights into their relationship.
Another article on it in The Guardian, “Scenes from a Happy Marriage” is also good.
This had to be a love match. Both pieces and biography make abundantly clear to me why their joke was that it was he who turned her hair prematurely white, albeit stunningly so!
It intrigues me that Véra was the author’s elegantly beautiful, multi-lingual, highly educated editor, keeper of the legacy, muse and by-all-accounts companion of near-hermetic constancy — especially through their several American decades he’s described as a third life-chapter. Yet over the decades Véra is intensely secretive, reportedly destroyed all letters to or with him from her. She even routinely blacked-out her own added comments in their shared postcards and other casual correspondence.
This is the same woman, who in 1923 Berlin would meet the brilliant and complicated fellow Russian-exile she would spend over 50 years loving deeply and mutually — surely at times also hating mutually with similar depth. Throughout their first encounter, walk and conversation way-back-then, Véra held a decorative black harlequin mask across her face.
And I’ve always thought he was interesting! (Is it as though she carried/he expressed the words for both of them?)
OK, this would be a book of never-seen published letters I’d love to read. Hers!
🔵
Speaking once more of solstice-week smiles, I’ll leave you now with one more. (This from Jesse, circa June 2016. A year or two I am happy not to have to re-live…)
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”
🔵
Navigating tips for linking all newShrink content:
• You can click directly to links from phrases that are underlined in the text.
• As there are new developments and updates referencing issues and stories we have looked at in previous newShrink editions, or if you miss an email edition, you can access everything that’s ever been posted by clicking the newShrink website here or the couch logo at the top of this email.
• You can also go directly from a browser to newshrink.substack.com.
• From the home page you can find all posts in Archives and About.
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙