Campbell: All (cont.)

[Guest guest]

It has been one of the really painful problems of the modern Western

individual to gain release for his conscience from this Levantine assurance

of a separation of spirit and nature (mythic dissociation), together with

its correlative totalitarian dogma (social identification) of "society" -

almost any quorum, it seems, will do: a "people," a "Church," even a trade

union, or anything calling itself "the state" - as the only vehicle of

value, through association with which an individual life can achieve worth:

when actually the truth is the other way round, that whatever human worth a

social group may claim, it will have gained only by grace of the great and

little individuals of its membership.

It was consequently for Hans a moment of the greatest spiritual

consequence when, together with his cousin Joachim, entering the laboratory

to be X-rayed, he was allowed to see the skeleton of death in his own

living hand held over a fluoroscope. He there gazed, as it were, into his

own grave, but in the normal light of Settembrini's world, when he again

examined his hand, the grave had closed. And it was after that, that he

spontaneously turned from his Italian friend's sociological rhetoric to a

study in solitude of the sciences of life, inspired not only, or even

principally, by the wonder of his own interesting body, but by that, more

fascinating still, of the irritating Russian woman who had slammed the door

- and repeatedly did so - at the fish course.

The first phase of the Magic Mountain epic terminates in that

grotesque little tragicomic scene, labeled by its author "Walpurgisnacht,"

where Hans, on his knees, at the end of a silly carnival contest to see

who, blindfold, could succeed in drawing a pig, declared to his Circe with

the braided locks his love in the knowledge of the whole science of her

body - which he understood to be one with the science of the earth and

stars. "I love you," he told her in French, eyes closed, head bowed to her

]ap. "I have always loved you; for you are the Thee of my life, my dream,

my destiny, my wish, my desire eternal...." She caressed the close-cropped

hair at the back of his head and, beside himself at her touch, he went on:

"Oh love... the body, love, and death, these three are together one. For

the body is delight and disease: it is what delivers death. Yes, they are

carnal both, love and death; therein their terror, their grand magic!..."

20

The first volume ends in this Walpurgisnacht of loss of control -

which is, in its way, analogous to the scene of Bloom's disintegration when

he saw himself as a pig, and of Stephen's collapse in the same

Walpurgisnacht event, when, following a mad caper and street brawl, he was

struck down by a cursing British Redcoat in the role of the Roman who

pierced Christ's side or the pagan who struck Anfortas.

"Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber," reads a

passage from a sermon of Saint Augustine. "He went out with a presage of

his nuptials into the field of the world: he ran like a giant exulting on

his way and came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there in mounting it

he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the

creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride,

and he joined himself to the woman forever."21

Here, as in Stephen's mind, the mysteries of marriage and the

crucifixion - Tristan's crystalline bed and the altar of the sacrifice -

are the same. The state suggested is of the Solar King and Lunar Queen

(Figure 43) united in the tomb. That is the ultimate consummation - where a

deathlike stillness reigns - of the mystic _coniunctio oppositorum_. "When

Adam sinned his soul died," states Gregory the Great;22 however, in the

words of the alchemist Senior: "What had been given over to death, comes

again, after great tribulation, to life."23 As in those words of Paul that

are the secret of _Finnegans Wake_ - "For God has consigned all men to

disobedience, that he may have mercy upon us all" - so in the silence of

the tomb, the retort, the cave (again Figure 43):

 

There falls the heavenly dew, to lave

The soiled black body in the grave.

 

And in the same order, in both _Ulysses_ and _The Magic Mountain_, at the

end of the journey into night a change occurs: the dew of divine mercy

falls, _caritas_, compassion, _karuna_, and the ever deepening descent

turns into illumination from above.

Stephen's brief impulse of compassion for his mortified elder, Bloom

(compare that of Parzival for Anfortas), and Bloom's reciprocally, for a

tortured youth struck down by a soldier in the street, break the reign in

both lives of the law of death, and each gives to the other in the mutually

sympathetic brief fellowship of the following two hours of the night (the

only completely undefensive moment in the course of either's long day) the

keys to the resolution of his impasse and the passage of the difficult

threshold.

In the brothel the ghost of Stephen's dead mother had appeared to him:

 

THE MOTHER

(With lhe subtle smile of death's madness.) I was once the

beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

STEPHEN

(Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman's trick is

this?

THE MOTHER

(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted

ashes.) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men

in the world. You too. Time will come.

STEPHEN

(Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) They said I killed

you, mother. . . . Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.

THE MOTHER

(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You

sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.

STEPHEN

(Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The

word known to all men.

THE MOTHER

Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey

with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad

among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the

suffering souls in the Ursuline manual and forty days' indul-

gence. Repent, Stephen.

STEPHEN

The ghoul! Hyena!

THE MOTHER

I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that

boiled rice every night after your brain work. Years and years I

loved you, O my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my

womb.

ZOE

(Fanning herself with the grate fan.) I'm melting!

FLORRY

(Points to Stephen.) Look! He's white.

BLOOM

(Goes to the window to open it more.) Giddy.

THE MOTHER

(With smouldering eyes.) Repent! O, the fire of hell!

STEPHEN

(Panting.) The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones!

THE MOTHER

(Her face drawing nearer and nearer, sending out an ashen

breath.) Beware! (She raises her blackened, withered right arm

slowly towards Stephen's breast with outstretched fingers.) Be-

ware! God's hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks

deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.)

STEPHEN

(Strangled with rage.) Shite! (His features grow drawn and grey

and old.)

BLOOM

(At the window.) What?

STEPHEN

Ah non par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all

or not at all. Non serviam!

FLORRY

Give him cold water. Wait. (She rushes out. )

THE MOTHER

(Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately.) O Sacred

Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O di-

vine Sacred Heart!

STEPHEN

No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I'll bring you

all to heel!

THE MOTHER

(In the ngony of her deathrattle.) Have mercy on Stephen,

Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring

with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary.

STEPHEN

Nothung!

(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the

chandelier. Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following

darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling ma-

sonry.)

THE GASJET

Pwfungg!

BLOOM

Stop!

LYNCH

(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen's hand.) Here! Hold on!

Don't run amok!

BELLA

Police!

(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown

back stark, beats the ground and flees from the room past

the whores at the door.) 24

 

It was then that he met with the Redcoat and, when knocked down, was

rescued and taken in charge by Bloom, to be restored in Bloom's kitchen

with a cup of cocoa, enriched by the host with "the viscous cream

ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion (Molly)."25 Then

on Bloom's side it was to be the bit that he would tell his bedmate Molly

of this nighttown adventure with Stephen that would turn her thoughts,

eventually, from her galaxy of lovers to himself.26 And in _The Magic

Mountain_ it was the gentle touch and sympathetic response of Frau Chauchat

to her smitten carnival lover that enabled him to win from her in her

grotto, at last, the resolution of his yearning.

In the sanatorium Berghof there were two cynically jovial, rather

questionable doctors, one always dressed in shiny black, the other in a

surgeon's white belted smock, who controlled the population of that castle

of the living dead. The black one, Dr. Krokowski, was a broad-shouldered,

short psychiatrist, fleshy and pale as wax, about thirty-five years of age,

with a black beard parted in two points. The other, Dr. Behrens,

surgeon-director of the institute, three heads taller than his dark

subordinate, had unhealthily purple cheeks, goggling bloodshot blue eyes,

and wore, under his snub nose, a close-trimmed white mustache. It was he

who had introduced Hans to his skeleton at the fluoroscope. And Krokowski,

through a series of lectures delivered in the dining room on "The Power of

Love as an Agent of Disease," had then turned his thoughts even further

inward, to the problem of his strangely thumping heart. For already on

arrival, when he stepped forth from the railroad car, his heart had been

set racing by the Alpine air; and his associated sense of a general

excitement had lacked a proper object until his mind, of itself, after a

few days on the mountain, began to return irresistibly and persistently to

that female with the reddish-blond braided hair and Asian, Kirghiz eyes.

"All symptoms of disease," Krokowski had declared, "are but disguised

manifestations of love; and disease, but love transformed."27 Repressed,

Krokowski explained, the power of love infects the entire system through an

effect upon some unknown substance in the body, which, disintegrating,

liberates toxins. "One could even believe," Hans later remarked to his

cousin in comment on this point, "that there might be something after all

in those legends of love-drinks and the like, of which the old sagas

tell."28

It was Behrens, however, who made clear to Hans - some time after his

glimpse of his own body as his living grave - the line between death and

life. Living, said Behrens, consists of dying; for living as well as

putrefying is a process finally of oxidation, the combustion of cellular

albumen: hence the temperature of which one sometimes has too much.

"However, there is nevertheless a difference: _Life is the keeping of form

through change of substance._"29

And so it was that, toward the close of Hans Castorp's curiously

pedantic carnival exposure to Clavdia of his erotic intoxication in the

wonder of her dying body, behold! like the sun of a new day, this saving

term of Apollonian light came up - sainte merveille de la forme! - to be

developed to the end of his speech:

"The body and the body's love," he declaimed, "are indecent affairs

and troublesome. The body, in fear and shame of itself, blushes and pales

on its surface. But it also is a grand and adorable glory, miraculous image

of organic life, holy marvel of form and of beauty: and love for it, for

the human body, is furthermore an altogether humanitarian interest, a force

far more instructive than all the pedagogy in this world!"30

Thus, at the high noon of his years, hermetically sealed from history

and its occasions, played upon by the vapors of science and philosophy,

Life's Delicate Child, as Mann calls him, incubating the fevers of his own

body's mystery and devotion, came in his own sweet way to an experience of

spiritual centering and dedication. Mann terms such a process, "Hermetic

Pedagogy." And the second part of the novel then treats of its hero's

maturation around this central ordering point of a life-furthering,

self-consistent wisdom; following which - as a "wheel rolling of itself" -

Hans voluntarily departs, with a full knowledge of what he is doing, to a

literal giving of himself on the field of battle (1914) to his people in

loyalty and love. (Compare Dante's age and act of "bestowal.")

Now Carl Jung, during the years when Thomas Mann was at work on _The

Magic Mountain_ (c. 1912-1921), was arriving in his own way, independently,

at interpretations of both the psyche and its mythic symbols that accorded

remarkably with those of the novelist - as the latter acknowledged

generously in his address on "Freud and the Future," delivered in 1936. For

the two were of exactly the same age (Mann, 1875-1955; Jung, 1875-1961) and

so were crossing together, in those catastrophic years just before, during,

and after the First World War, the meridian of their day. So too, in a way,

was Europe itself: or so, at least, thought their contemporary, the

historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), whose masterwork, _The Decline of

the West_, appeared in 1923 - just between _Ulysses_, 1922, and _The Magic

Mountain_, 1924.

Moreover, in the year 1921 Leo Frobenius's _Paideuma_ had appeared: an

anthropologically documented study in historic depth of the psyche and its

symbolic forms, which had opened (both around and beneath the Magic

Mountain of Europe) a new and mighty prospect of the spiritual dimension of

man.

 

The typical motifs in dreams [wrote Jung] ... permit a

comparison with the motifs of mythology. Many of those mytho-

logical motifs, in collecting which Frobenius in particular has

rendered such signal service, are also found in dreams, often with

precisely the same significance.... The comparison of typical

dream motifs with those of mythology suggests the idea -

already put forward by Nietzsche - that dream-thinking should

be regarded as a phylogenetically older mode of thought....

Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic develop-

ment, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing sur-

prising about the possibility that the figurative language of

dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought.31

 

In _The Magic Mountain_, the culmination of Hans Castorp's

noon-meditation on the mystery of death in life is rendered in the chapter

called "Snow," wherein the no longer innocent or young voyager, with both

head and heart now full of experience, put on skis and, with a boldness

greater than his skill, set forth alone. In the vast Alpine silence he

presently realized he had gone astray and, frightened a little, drank a

charge of port to give him strength, which, instead, put him to sleep

leaning for support against a snowbound mountain hut. And there a beautiful

dream came to him, of a landscape he had never seen: a lovely sunlit

Hellenic world of people solemnly, gracefully moving among tall Ionic

colonnades.

It was a dream that Mann had derived from the last paragraphs of

Nietzsche's _Birth of Tragedy_, where it illustrates that work's central

theme of a reciprocal relationship between Dionysus and Apollo: the powers,

respectively, of the dark impersonal will (Figure 3, at Station 10) and

beauty of form (Station 16). "Only so much," wrote Nietzsche, "of the

Dionysian ground of existence can enter into the consciousness of an

individual as can be controlled by his

Apollonian power of transfiguration. These two prime principles of art

consequently unfold their powers reciprocally, according to a law of

eternal balance.... And that this reciprocity is inevitable, everyone will

intuitively know who has ever (even if only in dream) found himself carried

back to an Old Hellenic scene."32

Like Nietzsche's imagined dreamer, Hans too was carried back to a

scene of idyllic nobility and beauty. And as the earlier dreamer had been

taught by an Aeschylean guide to realize how great the terrible force must

have been of the god of dithyrambic madness, where such radiant beauty was

needed to hold it in control, so Hans, exclaiming in his heart at the

beauty of his vision, was given to realize that behind him was a temple of

darkness, death, and blood, where two gray hags, half naked and with

hanging witches' dugs, were in savage silence tearing a child apart over a

caldron. And as he waked horrified from this revelation, spellbound still

by its beauty, its meaning leapt to his mind, epitomized in a term that he

had first heard in his conversations with Naphta and Settembrini, but now

in a sense not known to either: _Homo Dei_. "Myth," states Jung, "is the

revelation of a divine life in man";33 and so was this dream, for Hans.

It is Man, Hans thought, _Homo Dei_, who is the lord of both life and

death: he alone is noble, not they. More noble than life is the piety of

his heart; more noble than death, the freedom of his thought. And love, not

reason, is stronger than death. Love, not reason, gives gentle thoughts,

and love and gentleness render form: form and civilization - in silent

recognition of the feast of blood. "I shall keep faith with death in my

heart," he concluded, "remembering, however, that keeping faith with death

and the past becomes malignant, ominously sensual and misanthropic, the

instant we let it govern thoughts and deeds. _For the sake of gentleness

and love, man shall let death have no sway over his thoughts_. And with

this I wake."34

"The dream," states Jung, "is a little hidden door in the innermost

and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night

which was the psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which

will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousess may extend....

All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that

more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of

primordial night. There he

is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature

and bare of all egohood."35

In the ancient world, following Hesiod, Parmenides, Socrates, and

Plato,36 the deity symbolic of the creative energy of that whole was Eros:

 

Who breaks the limbs' strength

who in all gods, in all human beings,

overpowers the intelligence in the breast,

and all their shrewd planning.37

 

"Eros," Jung writes, in comment on this classical idea,

 

was considered a god whose divinity transcended our human

limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended

nor represented in any way. I might, as many before me

have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon,

whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the

heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task

of finding the language which might adequately express the in-

calculable paradoxes of love. Eros is a _kosmogonos_, a creator

and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel

that Paul's words - "Though I speak with the tongues of men

and of angels and have not love" - might well be the first condi-

tion of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself.

... Love "bears all things" and "endures all things" (I Corin-

thians 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing

can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the vic-

tims and the instruments of cosmogonic "love." 38

 

In the Orient the Bodhisattva represents this principle in its

aspects both of time-transcending wisdom (bodhi) and of time-regarding

compassion (karuna), while Shiva, as both the archetypal yogi and

personification of the lingam, is an earlier representation of the same.

Dionysus, Orpheus, and the other figures of the mysteries are variant

aspects in manifestation of this cosmogonic power, whose mythology in the

Christian sphere became focused in the crucified Redeemer (Figure 9). ("Who

sees me sees Him who sent me.I and my Father are one.")39 Through our

humanity (we have been told), we are related to that of Christ, who through

his godhood relates us to divinity. In the Bodhisattva, on the other hand,

each is to recognize the mirror-to-nature of his own intelligible

Buddhahood. "Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty

Christ, Lynch Christ," Joyce wrote in the brothel scene. Feirefiz,

Parzival, and their father Gahmuret are one: so Wolfram von Eschenbach. The

_Imitatio Christi_ proper to the non-dual knowledge of _Homo Dei_ must be

to recognize the personality of the god or goddess Eros-Amor, Kosmogonos,

not where it can be neither sought nor found, "out there" somewhere, in

transcendence, but - as Christ did - in oneself. And not oneself alone, but

all things, all events: in every individual, just as he is - crude, fine,

or superfine - God's mask.