Campbell: Symbol2

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There is an important contrast to be noticed between the attitudes of

Joyce and Mann toward the night world and the light: the abyss into which

all pairs of opposites disappear, and the day where they subsist, "common

to all men." As already remarked, these two masters, in the stages of their

progress, though largely unaware of each other, were on parallel courses,

step by step. Both commencing at the turn of the century in the mode of the

realistic sociological-psychological nineteenth-century novel of the world

of Waking Consciousness, each told through his young characters of his own

youthful separation from the economic, social, and political interests of

his folk: "to find," as Stephen Dedalus put it, "the mode of life or of art

whereby his spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom." Tonio

Kroger's formula of "erotic irony," stated in his letter to Lisabeta, and

Stephen's theory of aesthetics - of proper and improper, static and kinetic

art - represent equally, though from different sides, the sense of

aesthetic arrest, where all the faculties of sensation, thinking, feeling,

and intuition are dissociated from the service of the artist's personal

will, so that, like the Buddha on the Immovable Spot, he is released from

fear and desire, because free (for the moment at least) of ego: "beside

himself," transfixed by the object. The eye, which normally, biologically,

is an organ in the service of an aggressive, lustful organism - scouting

the world for prey and estimating dangers - is in the aesthetic moment

cleared of personal concerns, so that all is beheld as by the World Eye of

Apollo with his Iyre on the summit of Mount Helicon. The World Song, the

music of the spheres, then is heard ("silent Thalia," singing), and, as

Goethe states in a famous poem: "Then life-joy streams from all things."

_Ulysses_ and _The Magic Mountain_ are such world-eye visions of our

present much-maligned humanity. The personages and events, ostensibly

separate from each other - as in the field of vision of the sociological,

psychological, realistic novel - are by the alchemy of art shown to be, as

in a field of dream, at one: in Stephen's terms, "consubstantial":

essentially the vision is of the Mahayana Buddhist "Net of Gems," the

universe as a context of "totalistic harmony mutually relating and

penetrating," one in all and all in one; each gem, each jewel of a being,

reflecting all, so that "even in a hair there are innumerable golden

lions." Or one thinks again of Wolfram's comment on the battle of Parzival

and Feirefiz: if one likes, one can speak of them as two, but they are one.

Musically developed and manipulated motifs of explicit mythological

association, echoing and re-echoing, serve in both novels - in the way of

the anamorphoses suggested by Schopenhauer in his essay on the cosmic dream

in which all the dream characters dream too - to reveal within all, within

each, the image whole that on the waking plane is apparently in pieces:

Hans Castorp's _Homo Dei_; Stephen Dedalus's "Florry Christ, Stephen

Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ."

The order of the world of Waking Consciousness disintegrates in these

novels and that of Dream breaks through in the scenes, respectively, of

Hans's vision of the Greek landscape and of Stephen's brothel orgy.

However, Hans then is carried further and more deeply into the awesome

sphere of night when, at a later stage of his adventure - in a chapter

labeled by its author _Fragwurdigstes_, "Highly Questionable" - he allows

himself to participate in a series of stances, where, at a climax, Joachim,

who has died some months before, returns, reappears on the summons of Hans

himself, garbed prophetically in the uniform which it was to be Hans's

destiny to wear, of the German Army of World War I.

The dilettante seances had been organized as an upshot of the lectures

of Krokowski and the chance arrival in the sanatorium of a stoop-shouldered

little Danish girl of nineteen who "had things about her of which no one

could have dreamed." She proved to be possessed of occult powers, and at

first simply to pass the time, but presently more and more seriously, the

old guard of the Mountain, of whom Hans now was one, discovered and

exploited these, until, at the climax of a most amazing sequence of

increasingly eerie apparitions in that darkened room, Joachim, who had long

been dead, was summoned and indeed appeared: in that as yet unknown

uniform, he was seen sitting in a vacant chair. Hans stared, appalled. It

seemed for one moment as though his stomach would turn over. His throat

contracted and a four-, a fivefold sob went through and through him. He

leaned forward. "Forgive me!" he whispered to the apparition, his eyes

broke into tears and he could see no more. He stood up, strode in two

strides to the door and with one quick movement turned on the white light.

Stephen Dedalus, on the other hand, overcome by a similar visitation

- of his mother - had struck the light out and gone wild.

Thus the abyss that Hans refused, and together with Hans his author,

Joyce and his characters entered: so that in the following majestic

masterworks, _Joseph and His Brothers_ and _Finnegans Wake_, where the

implications of the dream in the snow and brothel orgy open to full flower

and the plane of Waking is let go, to drop to that of Dream (which is to

say, of myth), we are presented with opposed experiences and

representations of the archetypes of our lives: that of the soul of light,

so to say, and that of the soul of darkness; in the language of the Bible:

Abel and Cain, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers.

Mann identified with Jacob and Joseph, Joyce with Esau and Cain; i.e., Mann

with the one who wins in the light world, Joyce with the one who loses

there, retreats to his hole, called "The Haunted Ink-bottle, no number

Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland," and there, "dejected into day and night

with jesuit bark and bitter bite,noondayterrorised to skin and bone by

an ineluctable phantom,wrote over everysquare inch of the only foolscap

available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous

present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded

cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual

person, life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of

consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh,

human only, mortal)."

Jacob and Joseph in the novel of Thomas Mann, as well as in the Book

of Genesis, gain God's grace and become a destiny (or, as they think of it,

a "blessing") to the world: Hans went down from the Magic Mountain to

engage in the course of history. But "history," declared Stephen in

_Ulysses_, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." And when the

schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, grandiloquently proclaimed, "All history moves

towards one great goal, the manifestation of God,God," was Stephen's

answer, "is a shout in the street."

In Sanskrit, the term _desi_ (pronounced "day-shee"), meaning

"local, ethnic, of the region," is used (as remarked in the first volume of

this study) to designate the necessarily various historic forms of

mythology and ritual: the "ethnic ideas" of Bastian; while the term

_marga_, "way" or "path," is used for the transcendence of these, the

passage of the gateless gate toward an experience of the formless forms of

Dreamless Sleep. In _Joseph and His Brothers_ the sense of enacting mythic

roles is brought to the support, magnification, and sophistication of a way

of life. "The artist eye has a mythical slant upon life," Mann declared in

his address on Freud and the Future, "which makes life look like a farce,

like a theatrical performance, a prescribed feast, like a Punch-and-Judy

epic, wherein mythical character-puppets reel off a plot abiding from past

time and now again present in a jest. It only lacks that this mythical

slant should pass over and become subjective in the performers themselves,

become a festival and mythical consciousness of part and play, for an epic

to be produced such as that of the 'Tales of Jacob.'... Joseph, too, is

another such celebrant of life: with charming mythological hocus-pocus he

enacts in his own person the Tammuz-Osiris myth, 'bringing to pass' anew

the story of the mangled, buried and arisen god, playing his festival game

with that which mysteriously and secretly shapes life out of its own depths

- the unconscious. The Joseph of the novel is an artist, playing with his

_imitatio dei_ upon the unconscious string."

In _Finnegans Wake_, on the other hand, the mythic forms point,

rather, downward. In the final chapter of _Ulysses_, following Stephen's

disappearance into the outer night and Bloom's into the inner, the lead has

passed to Molly, Gaia-Tellus; in Hesiod's lines:

 

Gaia of the broad breast,

the unshakable foundation

of all the immortals who keep the crests

of snowy Olympus.

 

She is the mother of all beings: "the holy stock of the everlasting

immortals came into being out of Gaia," even "starry Ouranos," Heaven, her

son and spouse. Figure 56 is from an Indian eighteenth-century manuscript

illumination, showing the male divinities of the Hindu pantheon - who

neither singly nor together had been able to overthrow a buffalo-demon who

had laid waste and was ruling the world - sending back their energies to

their source: the Mother Dark, Mother Night, from which, then, the

personification appeared of Maya-Shakti-Devi, the Goddess Creatrix of All

Forms, who, having taken back from her progeny of sons the powers

originally hers, now, with many arms in token of the qualities of those

powers, strode forth and in a battle of great fury and many miracles

overcame and slew the monster, restoring to the world laid waste its life.

"Yes because ..." begins Molly Bloom's earth-mother recollection

(after Bloom, her spouse, had gone to sleep) of the many males in her life,

no one of them her match. Yet she is remembering, too, her Leo and why she

had liked him (because she had seen he understood or felt what a woman is)

and how she had thought, "well as well him as another": "and first I put my

arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all

perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will

Yes."

Molly Bloom is the "Yes because" of the world. The minds of her lovers

severally may not be able to understand and feel what life, what a woman,

is, nor their deeds to fulfill the adventures of their promise (so that the

world of Waking Consciousness in which they hold control is indeed a Waste

Land: a world, as we are told in the Bible, of dust), yet, as told in

_Finnegans Wake_: "This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being

humus the same roturns."

Anna Livia Plurabelle, the counterpart in _Finnegans Wake_ of Molly

Bloom in _Ulysses_, is the living source becoming, as Molly is the source

become; she is of the world of Dream Consciousness, the world as vision, as

Molly of the world of Waking, the world as fact. Nor is she a compound of

all women; rather, an _a priori_ archetype, primordial image of their being

- and matched, furthermore, by an adequate consort in the _a priori_

tragi-comical manliness of her consort, Here Comes Everybody. Moreover, as

in dream, so here: all is here and now, in flux; not in progress, "moving

towards one great goal," but kaleidoscopically revolving. "The oaks of ald

now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.Teems of times and

happy returns. The seim anew.All's set for restart after the silence."

The atom "explodotonates"; no minutes, no seconds later, the two

annihilated parties are shaking hands again. "Mere man's mime: God has

jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first.Weeping shouldst

not thou be when man falls but that divine scheming ever adoring be" . . .

"in the multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end."

And through all this revolution, the more one labors and broods upon

its enigmatic "funforall," its "Hereweareagain Gaieties," the more

impressively and ubiquitously do the presences of H.C.E.

and A.L.P. come to view as the inhabiting - creating, supporting, and

disintegrating - substance, consciousness, and bliss of all things. Dante's

idea of Purgatory, as the condition of a soul being purged of its pride and

so readied to respond to the radiance of God's love (as Parzival, following

his conversation with Trevrizent), is matched in the Orient by the idea of

Reincarnation: through many lifetimes release from egoism is achieved and

so from the sorrows of rebirth. Joyce, in _Finnegans Wake_, brings the two

mythologies together as alternate symbols of that state or plane of

experience in which the daylight illusions of separateness dissolve and a

single Syllable - Voice - Presence - begins to be heard and perceived

through all.

But there is a further depth to be known and realized, within,

beyond, before and after that night into which Bloom dissolved-

* [large filled blak circle] - and whence the goddess of many arms,

beauties, talents, and names, Anna Livia Plurabelle (Figure 56), arises;

that of, namely :

 

_The Fourth Element of AUM: THE SILENCE:_

As the last pages of _Ulysses_ were of the monologue of Molly Bloom,

so the last of _Finnegans Wake_ are of Anna Livia Plurabelle - in her

character of Old Age, passing out: the river Liffey at the end of its

course, sweeping out to sea, to the All-Father, "moananoaning": Manannan.

"A way a lone a last a loved a long the " The last sentence of

_Finnegans Wake_ breaks off abruptly, in a blank. Thus the ring is broken -

if you like! However, turning back to the start of the book, we find there,

at the head of the first page, the cut-off remainder of that last sentence,

beginning all anew "riverrun ... brings us ... back to _H_owth _C_astle and

_E_nvirons," i.e., to H.C.E., and the round rolls on.

In Deep Dreamless Sleep, Absolute Consciousness, the Omniscient One,

is buried, like a treasure, in darkness. "Just as those ignorant of the

spot might pass, time and time again, over a buried treasure of gold and

not find it, so do all creatures go daily to that Brahma-world in sleep and

not find it." Creatures go there in death also, without finding. The goal

of wisdom is to arrive there awake and alive: to carry Waking Consciousness

through dream realizations, while awake, to an experience, awake, of

identity with THAT (_tat tvam asi_). In _Oriental Mythology_ there is a

picture (page 335, Figure 21) of the mythic "Isle of Gems," the womb of the

universe, showing the world goddess seated on her spouse, who is there

beneath her in two aspects: one upward-turned in connubium, the other

turned downward and away. The reference of the first is to Consciousness in

the state of Deep Sleep, which, as we have read, is "the Source (_yoni_:

the Generative Womb) of All: the Beginning and End of beings." Here the

world is created, not in the way of an act at the beginning of time, but

continuously, forever, as the ground of being; for there was never a

beginning of time, there will never be an end, the creative moment is now,

in

Deep Dreamless Sleep, the sphere of bliss, of Shiva-Shakti, H.C.E. and

A.L.P., Molly Bloom's Yes. Whereas the figure turned away from the goddess,

downward, is called Shava, the "corpse," and represents Consciousness

transcendent, the fourth portion of the Self, symbolized in the SILENCE.

"What is known as the fourth portion," we read in the Upanishad, "is

neither inward- nor outward-turned consciousness, nor the two together; not

an undifferentiated mass of dormant omniscience; neither knowing nor

unknowing - because invisible, ineffable, intangible, devoid of

characteristics, inconceivable, undefinable, its sole essence being the

assurance of its own Self: the coming to peaceful rest of all

differentiated, relative existence: utterly quiet: peaceful-blissful:

without a second: the Self, to be known."

 

2.

In our classification of symbolic forms, all four orders of

experience represented in the syllable AUM will have to be recognized. On

the first level, A, of Waking Consciousness, the references (ideally, as

charged by Wittgenstein) will be directly and precisely, a) to facts, and

b) to thoughts. Other symbols on this level (apparently not recognized by

Wittgenstein) will be references, however, c) to feelings, and d) to

intuitions of subliminal relationships (analogies, homologies, et cetera);

still others e) will be to imperatives: stop, go, back up, sit down!

For a symbol to function as intended, certain conditions must be

satisfied. First, the code must be understood by both the sender and the

receiver. Codes are of two orders: 1. inherited (instinctual) and 2.

learned; and of the latter category there are a) code elements triggering

conditioned reflexes, and b) code elements consciously controlled. The code

channels generally are of sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch. The sender

and receiver may be the same or not the same; and anyone who has forgotten

what his own jottings meant on his date pad will be likely to appreciate

the possibility of misreading symbols, even when they are one's own.

On the level of U, Dream Consciousness, this possibility of

misreading one's own communications is of high significance. For the sender

of the message here would be one's own unconscious, and the receiver, the

conscious personality. Read in the Freudian way, as allegories symbolic of

forgotten events, the symbols of dream would then be comparable to the

messages on one's date pad in forgotten or illegible script; while myths

would be like that soiled and mangled letter scratched up in _Finnegans

Wake_ from an orangeflavored mudmound by a hen.

But, on the other hand, when the message is not of an occasion

registered in the past, whether of oneself or of one's race, it will be of

another order altogether. It is then something like a bubble coming up from

the bottom of a sea. What or who is the sender? The sender is oneself. What

can the meaning be?

What is the meaning of a bubble from the bottom of the sea?

Well, in the first place, such a message is instinctual. Its source,

ultimately, is of the consciousness below waves, the light folded in the

dark of Deep Sleep. It is not of the order of Waking Consciousness, nor to

be read as a conscious thought. Professor Thomas A. Sebeok, of the Research

Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics at Indiana University, in

an article in _Science_ on "Animal Communication," has enumerated a number

of types of instinctual message, of which at least four might be of

relevance here. The first is the Monologue, a "vacuum activity" in the

absence of a recipient, delivered without regard to the ability of other

individuals to receive the message: a display, a sort of spontaneous song

of life. The second has been dubbed (following Malinowski) "Phatic

Communication": messages that serve merely to establish or prolong

communication: a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a

mere exchange. "This," we learn, "is the first verbal function acquired by

human infants and commonly predominates in communicative acts both within

and across species." Next are "Emotive Messages": messages that are action

responses to visceral and sensory stimuli, and which chiefly serve to alert

recipient individuals about the condition of the signaling individual. And

finally, "Vocatives and Imperatives": messages oriented toward the

addressee, devoid of truth value, having a chiefly conative (or appeal)

function: "Look at me!Let me out the door!"

The message of our bubble, then, will be the announcement of a

presence, possibly intentional, possibly addressed to the waking world, but

certainly referring to no conscious context of concerns. Its only meaning,

finally, is the announcement of its own presence -

which can have no more "meaning" than the presence somewhere of a stone, a

flower, a mountain, or a winding stream. The value of the message to our

Waking Consciousness will be to alert us to an unknown aspect of ourselves,

which, if we are to "know ourselves," and so realize our destiny, our

_wyrd_, will have to be recognized.

Dream Consciousness, then, to summarize and terminate, is the channel

or medium of communication between the spheres of M, Deep Dreamless Sleep,

and A, Waking Consciousness. In its upper, "personal" strata, the messages

are of a code and context derived from the Waking Consciousness of an

early, perhaps long-forgotten date, and may be read - though with

difficulty - as referring to light-world themes. In its lower strata,

however, the messages and codes are of the instincts, the archetypes, the

gods: vacuum, phatic, emotive, vocative, or imperative announcements of

their existence - requiring to be recognized. And their language is of

both-and, neither-nor: like the image of God set up for the brothers by

Cusanus, regarding all ways at once.

Figure 57, from a sketch by Picasso, made four years before his

"Guernica," for the cover of the first issue of an elegant surrealist

review entitled _Minotaure_, provides an interesting supplement to the icon

of Cusanus's thought. The moon, the moon-bull, and the dead and risen god,

whether as the mild and loving Christ or as this savage mixed monster of

the abyss, are of an order of symbolization the "meanings" of which cannot

be reduced to light-world, even "dream-world" terms. The knife here is of

the form of a leaf and Picasso has arranged beside his sketch three leaves

of the same form. The death-life oxymoron is suggested. In Figure 58, from

his etching called _Minotauromachy_ (1935), the same monster appears from

the watery abyss, shading his eyes from the light, in polar contrast to the

figure of the sage at the left (Nietzsche's "Socratic Man"), climbing aloft

to escape the reality of the Dionysian terror, while the Graces Three with

their dove (the bird of Venus-Aphrodite) calmly regard the apparition: the

youngest of them, innocent Thalia, holding in one hand the flowers of

life-abundance and in the other the light of consciousness, which are here

the foci of the composition, equidistant from the eye of the sage and left

eye of the bull. The sword of the overcome matador is pointed not at the

bull but at the eviscerated horse, and the matador is revealed as a woman.

Clearly the "Guernica" (1937) is a reorganization of the same mythological

motifs, recognized as implicit in a monstrous act of war and rendered as a

moment equally of rapture and of pain (terror-joy), with the figure in

flames at the right marvelously falling and rising at once, both from and

toward the window at the upper right, which, like the end of _Finnegans

Wake_, opens to the void.

"O sweet fire!" sang the Spanish mystic Diego de Estella (1524-1578).

"The flames of Thy holy love in Thy most sacred passion mount on high. Thy

torments and afflictions are the wood

wherewith this holy fire burns." And from John of the Cross (1524-1591):

"This flame of love is the spirit of its Spouse - the Holy Spirit. And this

flame the soul feels within it as a fire which burns within it and sends

out flame.... In this flame the acts of the will are united and rise

upward, being carried away and absorbed in the flame of the Holy Spirit."

"The bull is a bull and the horse is a horse," Picasso is reported to

have said. "These are animals, massacred animals. That's all, so far as I

am concerned." Which is obviously untrue: horses are not of papier-mache,

nor do bulls have an eye in the middle of the forehead. Such deliberate

prevarication is justified, however, by the fact that mythic symbols point

beyond the reach of "meaning," and even in the sphere of meaning have many

"meanings." To define and fix authoritatively any consciously conceivable

set of final "meanings" would be to kill them - which is, of course, what

happens in dogmatic and historicizing theology, as in both didactic and

pornographic art. Symbols of the mythological order, like life, which they

unfold from dark to light, are there, "thus come" from beyond "meaning," on

all levels at once.

Accordingly, as James Joyce's title, _Ulysses_, refers us from the

Waking level of the action of his novel to the mythic, so Picasso's title

"Guernica," from the mythic order of his imagery to the Waking of

historical event. Such double-talk, uniting history and geography (_land

nama_) and the archetypes of the psyche, is of the essence of creative

art-as-myth; the prime function of the Muses being to serve as the channel

of communication (U) between the spheres of daylight knowledge (A) and the

seat of life (M): in Figure 13, between the earthly order below of silent

Thalia, and that aloft of Apollo and the Graces: the Lord of Light

(consciousness) and the Goddess of Life (creative energy) in her triadic

manifestation as future, present, and past: "Anna was, Livia is,

Plurabelle's to be."

In art, in myth, in rites, we enter the sphere of dream awake. And as

the imagery of dream will be on one level local, personal, and historic,

but at bottom rooted in the instincts, so also myth and symbolic art. The

message of an effective living myth is delivered to the sphere of bliss of

the deep unconscious, where it touches, wakes, and summons energies; so

that symbols operating on that level are energy-releasing and -channeling

stimuli. That is their function - their "meaning" - on the level of Deep

Sleep: while on the level of Waking Consciousness the same symbols are

inspirational, informative, initiatory, rendering a sense of illumination

with respect to the instincts touched, i.e., the order subliminal of nature

- inward and outward nature - of which the instincts touched are the life.