The Collective Unconscious Is Not a Thing

 

Lived Experience

People have trouble understanding me when I say my poems are not autobiographical. We have this unfortunate fixed idea that poems should be autobiographical. For some reason, we do not have this problem when discussing prose, or plays. 

So recently I was asked if the voices in my poems come from the collective unconscious. I dismissed the suggestion. Someone else suggested that I am “channelling.” 

Jung’s concept of a collective unconscious seems to me to describe a real thing—a very real thing—but to be a contradiction in terms as he frames it. He sees it as something of which we are by definition unconscious. This is nonsensical as an epistemological statement. How then can we discuss it? He further defines it as a part of our self that is not our self; that is, it exists apart from our awareness, experience, or will, just as a tree might exist in the next lot. How then is it part of us, and the tree is not? A collective unconscious defies the very definition of self.

And Jung so far as I can tell offers no rational mechanism for how such a thing as a collective memory can exist. How can you inherit someone else’s memories? 

Jung’s problem, I maintain, is that he is trying to give a materialist explanation for a spiritual reality. He is trying to reconcile actual human experience with a purely materialist, scientistic world view. In the end, he cannot.

The thing he calls “collective unconscious” is better framed by Plato as simply the real world. In the real world everything exists in its perfect, ideal form. Were this not so, were we not pre-programmed, we could never make any sense of our sense experiences. 

See Plato’s cave analogy.

Or his dialogue “Meno”:

“ … SOCRATES: What do you say of him, Meno? Were not all these answers given out of his own head?

MENO: Yes, they were all his own.

SOCRATES: And yet, as we were just now saying, he did not know?

MENO: True.

SOCRATES: But still he had in him those notions of his—had he not?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: Then he who does not know may still have true notions of that which he does not know?

MENO: He has.

SOCRATES: And at present these notions have just been stirred up in him, as in a dream; but if he were frequently asked the same questions, in different forms, he would know as well as any one at last?

MENO: I dare say.

SOCRATES: Without anyone teaching him he will recover his knowledge for himself, if he is only asked questions?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: And this spontaneous recovery of knowledge in him is recollection?

MENO: True.

SOCRATES: And this knowledge which he now has must he not either have acquired or always possessed?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: But if he always possessed this knowledge he would always have known; or if he has acquired the knowledge he could not have acquired it in this life, unless he has been taught geometry; for he may be made to do the same with all geometry and every other branch of knowledge. Now, has any one ever taught him all this? You must know about him, if, as you say, he was born and bred in your house.

MENO: And I am certain that no one ever did teach him.

SOCRATES: And yet he has the knowledge?

MENO: The fact, Socrates, is undeniable.

SOCRATES: But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, then he must have had and learned it at some other time?

MENO: Clearly he must.

SOCRATES: Which must have been the time when he was not a man?

MENO: Yes.

SOCRATES: And if there have been always true thoughts in him, both at the time when he was and was not a man, which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him, his soul must have always possessed this knowledge, for he always either was or was not a man?

MENO: Obviously.

SOCRATES: And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal. Wherefore be of good cheer, and try to recollect what you do not know, or rather what you do not remember….”

The truth of all things always existed in the soul. Or as Blake put it, “man is born as a garden fully planted.” This is where poetry comes from. Memories are not formed by our experiences any more than our experiences are formed by our memories.

This truth is pretty universally understood, except by the modern West, blinded by the limited world view of materialism.

The Buddhists refer to this as the “storehouse consciousness.” Coleridge referred to it as the “primary imagination.” It is the basic assumption of all Native North American spiritualities. Ironically, everyone thinks they were deeply connected to nature. In fact, they saw nature as an illusion, and only the spirit world as real.

In Christian terms, this is the Kingdom of Heaven. Or rather, this is the entire objectively existing spiritual world, heaven, hell, and purgatory.

As to channeling: there are beings speaking to us from this spiritual world. Angels, saints, fairies, demons—literally and necessarily anything we can imagine. 

The problem is, some of them are demons. Channeling without caution tends to attract demons.

Truth and beauty are the test of the spirits. Are the words, is the image, beautiful? Not in a superficial sense, but does it evoke the aesthetic experience of awe? Is it, are they, true?

Bingo. Poetry.

Where Bad Poetry Comes From

 

Wordsworth

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I attended a poetry group. Each meeting, we decided on a theme for the next meeting. 

This one week, someone suggested “memories.”

And met with immediate objections.

I would not expect that. Poetry itself, after all, is all about memory. Memory is the medium of poetry, as text is for prose, or the human voice for drama. “It takes its origin,” Wordsworth said, “from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

But the immediate objection was that memories were “triggering.” They could cause “trauma.”

Another participant chimed in that he had no memories, and so could not participate. He had, he said, a form of amnesia called “anaphasia.” This was due, he explained, to a terrible childhood.

Another participant said that she could not discuss Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, because her abusive former husband used to play Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” when threatening to leave her.

This does not add up. The essential concept of psychotherapy has always been that reliving memories of trauma is healing. “Memory” is the essence of the Buddhist practice commonly referred to in English as “mindfulness.” It heals the soul. Poetry is the medicine that heals old wounds. 

I took the trouble to look up “anaphasia,” and find there is no such form of amnesia. I find the term online only in “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” meaning “the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions that have nothing left in common with each other.” He might have misspoken, and meant aphasia, the nearest medical term. But this is “a comprehension and communication (reading, speaking, or writing) disorder resulting from damage or injury to the specific area in the brain.” Nothing to do with memory.

And the Dylan story doesn’t make too much sense either. An abusive partner is not someone threatening to leave. An abusive partner wants control of the other, wants to nail the door shut, to ensure they do not leave. If an abusive partner leaves, the victim should rejoice—especially in memory.

Nor is there anything abusive in the tone of the song: “I ain’t saying you treated me unkind. You could have done better, but I don’t mind.” A rather gentle way to say goodbye to a lover, on the whole.

The next oddment is that anyone afraid of their own memories would take to writing poetry as a hobby in the first place. Poetry is intrinsically involved with memory, as Wordsworth says. And in the case of these poets, their own poems are most often talking about their personal past—memories. 

How does this make sense?

I imagine that recalling memories, although cathartic and healing, may be scary in prospect. 

But methinks these reactions are beyond the reasonable. Methinks they do protest too much. 

Who is most likely to be afraid of their memories?

Not be the abused, but the abuser. In the typical dysfunctional family, everyone else but the abuser is proverbially “walking on eggshells,” avoiding any mention of “the elephant in the room.” Memory is dangerous when one has a bad conscience.

That seems just what we see here. Obviously, these poets are not afraid of what memories they might stir in their poems. They are in full control of that. They are afraid of what others might say. 

They are in desperate need to control their memories, to ensure that the “narrative” does not drift to something they are actually writing to repress. So they write poems as a fabricated narrative of their past.

They are fleeing a guilty conscience.

Good poetry is written to reveal truth, especially hidden truth. Bad poetry is written to conceal it.

Simply the Best

 

Being materialists, we are inclined to think of memories as not being a real. Of course they are not material: but consider the possibility that the memory is a real, objectively existing place, where everything goes and stays when it is not present to our senses. Because, literally, we know that this is so. Nothing actually fades from memory; its existence is not dependent on our consciousness of it, on our perceiving it. This is what objective existence means. 

Yes, we may for the moment not remember. But we know that every memory is still there, and can arise again to consciousness unpredictably at any moment—perhaps inspired by the smell of lilacs, a tune on the radio, or the taste of a madeleine.

Can we then also remember things that happened to someone else? 

Why not, since memories are objective? And this could explain the many uncanny reports of remembering “past lives,” and the many apparently collective memories described by Carl Jung, which he calls the “collective unconscious.” The evidence is there; we only ignore it because it does not fit our prejudices.

We also know that people we remember can do things we do not will them to do, or that we do not expect. In dreams, for example; or in our waking fantasies. So in the case of remembered people, their consciousness, their will, also survives.

Most cultures have thought this. This is the foundation of their belief in an afterlife. In Korea, there is a mudang who channels the soul of Douglas MacArthur. She even has the corn cob pipe. MacArthur is not gone; he lives in memory, and occasionally speaks through her.

Properly speaking, all memories are immortal. They are in some vast storehouse somewhere. But there are actually two things we call “memory.” There is this storehouse, and there is our ability to recall items from it. If someone is not recalled easily, their existence in memory is lacking in energy. They are indistinct and wraith-like: literally starved for attention.

Some people, by the force of their personality or their talents, are uniquely memorable. They are not necessarily good people; just memorable people. And these are the ones Chinese Taoism, or Korean shamanism, will call “Immortals.”

This is why people keep thinking they see Elvis at the drug store, or Hitler in hotels in Brazil. They are too memorable to fade from immediate consciousness. 

This is why Roman emperors were commonly declared gods at death, and given sacrifices. This is why the Greek gods demand sacrifices. This is why the Chinese burn paper gifts for their ancestors, and put food at their graves. Our remembering them is their food.

I suspect that Tina Turner is immortal in this sense.

On Rhyme in Poetry

Minnesinger

As you no doubt have noticed, I am featuring a new poem here about every day. A reader writes that he prefers the ones that rhyme, on the grounds that “that is the challenge on poetry.”

Not really. A poem is not a word puzzle, not a test of technical virtuosity with the language. Nor do good poems need to rhyme. Yeats, Eliot, Donne, and Shakespeare have written some of the best poems in the English language without rhyme.

What then is the point of rhyme? Why has it been so dominant in poetry, if less so these days?

Poetry is sometimes called “spoken word.” This is wrong. If you want the art of the spoken word, you want the play. Prose, on the other hand, is the art of the written word. What about poetry? The proper medium of poetry is not writing, and not speech. It is memory. A good poem is written to be memorized, and reveals itself fully only when memorized.

This is why every word must count: because they are going to be endlessly repeated in memory.

Poetry is originally a pre-literate form. The ancient bards and original minnesingers were memory artists. Homer and those who performed his Iliad and Odyssey, or Valmiki's Ramayana or the Mahabharata, had to go on reciting word-for-word for days. Their audiences would hear it, word-for-word, at regular intervals. The epics and lyrics lived first in memory.

Troubador

There is, it is true, an aesthetic aspect to rhyme. It is semi-musical. But rhyme primarily gives a reason for each word to be exactly where it is, and so provides hooks that help the memory. The repetition with variation also helps memorize. But there is no essential need for rhyme; it is secondary to the primary task of making the passage memorable. In “The Second Coming,” Yeats does as well by linking vivid images. Repetition of the same words can accomplish the job, as Donne does in “No Man Is an Island.” Shakespeare can do it with meter alone.

The memory is magical and is closely allied with the imagination. The imagination is the window on the spirit world. We currently seriously undervalue the memory. Aristotle, Aquinas, Plato, and Augustine did not. They considered it the essence of the human spirit. Without it, we would know nothing. To remember nothing is to know nothing; essentially, all of our experience beyond a Euclidian point is mediated by memory.

This is why poetry is, with music, the highest of the arts.