This particular post is informed with a singular request from Oppermann: "Please, write more blogs!" -I am happy to oblige him. The request was genuine enough. It was in fact open and vulnerable in a profound way, and that is what drew me to it: the presentiments of vulnerability.
I wonder why I have taken some time to be silent?
At first I will try to reduce my silence to a family psychological interpretation about creativity in the Ayres family: passages in the rythm of my creative fury followed by silence, gestation, absence. And the gestation and absence, like in Kleist's "Story of 'O'" is all too important. My father used to work in creative paroxysms or spurts. The language is partially sexualized, and distasteful to me to think about, nonetheless I will write it: "he worked in creative spurts." Does this mean that he had at moments mad love affairs with his anima, which subsequently left her abandoned, or perhaps completed, with some figment or fragment of a "completed work."
My father achieved a fairly high degree of accomplishment as an artist. In fact he produced a film "Altars of the East" and then later edited it from its enormous length (six or eight hours) to a more condensed version of itself: "Altars of the World." I believe that his longer work, which to my knowledge is now lost, "Altars of the East" would have offered me a more interesting vision, were it available to this day. "More interesting," that is to say, than "Altars of the World," which, while retaining some incredible montage and general footage, still somehow seems too hurried: vignettes of great master teachers are reduced to less than 20 to 30 seconds. I would hope that instead of my father's voice giving an eternal "gloss" of what went on in a specific religion that it would be more interesting to spend time with the spiritual teachers and actually hear what they said to a much greater depth. But I digress: the point was that he had enough of a "spurt" of creative energy to make two motion pictures, the latter of which gained serious critical acclaim.
My father also made paintings and carvings. One of the carvings is depicted here of an "armored bird," as my father used to call it. Birds bones are hollow to conserve energy while flying: birds are highly refined adaptations in order to attain the ability of flight: but in one sense terribly fragile. I remember a comment from a historian concerning ancient suits of armor: that they were quite suprisingly comfortable to be worn. Nevertheless a bird (and my father always was guarded when he talked to me of "birds," meaning "women"), covering it's wings in im-pregnable (immune to creative spurting of any kind) armor renders the bird in all likelihood flightless.
Two nights ago I had a dream that I shot a man in armor. His armor could not withstand my point-blank shot. I thought for a while about Jung's dream of shooting Siegfried in the company of a savage. The man in the armor was in my dream a "betrayer," and there was no blood: the treacherous, defended complex was bloodless, just an assemblage of an empty suit of steel. I figure it may be like this: defenses, armored posturings are always treacherous, presentiments of treason.
But again I will write to Oppermann because of his pre-sentiments of vulnerability. Somehow we become able to deal with the fact that we are... pregnable (and this is the case with Kleist's Marquise of "O" as well). The painted bird, a beautiful title I have always thought, but one that is connected to a book I have not read ...and the armored bird: flapping about helpless or suspended in outer space: radiant, but somehow an entity that can only happen in a symbolic universe that does not obey the rules of... gravity.
My father's relation to women was always highly guarded. He put them behind armor or behind bars. Part of the result was that he died, in a sense, broken, profoundly broken. And I mean by "broken" in the midst of a kind of loneliness that was inconsolable to any attempt to break through.
My friend Professor (the name he is called is "Professor" or "Professor Marvin") has a way of speaking about the children we work with saying "kids don't know what love is," and in a sense that is what I felt my father finally struggled with, maybe till the very end: he somehow lost, forgot, did not know that he was loveable, that he was loved. He ceased to know what love is.
Of recent while speculating about becoming a Jungian Analyst I had to deal with bringing in this "Armored Bird" which my analyst dubbed "crazy anima figure" into the process of becoming a Jungian analyst. This has to do with the idea that I would actually bring the indictments of one woman who has judged me very harshly and unfairly into the process of my application for training as an analyst. I do not think I want to bring the armored bird in. I don't want to bring in my "crazy anima" either. I would rather leave her out here for the crazed experiements with my friend Oppermann, where we find ourselves wrapt for several weeks in terms of creative energy producing the phallic columns of the textual presentation, then pregnant, presentiment and silent, and then beginning again from out of some desert. The Desert, says Jodorowsky in "El Topo," "The Desert is a circle who's center and circumphrence is everywhere and who's center is nowhere. The way out of this desert is a spiral."
That is to say that the desert is a place that is no place. We have been burrowing in our "Wohnung" in some subterranean passage for some time now. Perhaps we will emerge some kind of silver gilded bird: a bird in a cage that is no cage: that has become an armour with its attendant impossible weight, so that once again we will be only found in a symbolic space, a space that is no place. Na koja abad.
