Humans and their Symbols

~ 500 words

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acerbic - adj - of sour or astringent taste/severe temper.

vivisect - v - to dissect the living body of an animal.

codicil - n - an addition, appendix, post script, or afterthought.

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Carl Gustav Jung, an influential early 20th century psychologist, came up with a number of interesting theories, some of which have been misinterpreted and misrepresented over the years. I find it informative in such instances to go back to the source (as my regular readers are no doubt aware).

To set the tone for this post, I'd like to share a quote from Jung's 1948 essay "On Psychic Energy"

"We must always bear in mind that despite the most beautiful agreement between the facts and our ideas, explanatory principals are only points of view, that is, manifestations of the psychological attitude and of the a priori conditions under which all thinking takes place"

Man and His Symbols (aka Mankind, aka Humankind) serves as a magnificent compendium of his life's work, though he didn't live long enough to see the volume compiled.  The book is comprised of five sections, the first written by Jung, and the remaining four written by his closest colleagues (those he trusted to accurately relate his theory of psychology). These topics range through discussions of the nature of the unconscious mind, the importance of myth and symbol, the process of achieving psychological maturity, symbolism in the visual arts, and a case study.

Despite being written by five people, the book is unified by the importance of symbology.  There is an enormous gulf between the subconscious of Freud and the unconscious of Jung.  To quote Jung,

"The ideas of Sigmund Freud confirmed for most people the existing contempt for the psyche.  Before him it had been merely overlooked and neglected; it has now become a dump for moral refuse.

This modern standpoint is surely one-sided and unjust.  It does not even accord with the known facts.  Our actual knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like Nature herself, it is at least neutral.  It contains all the aspects of human nature--light and dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly.  The study of individual, as well as of collective, symbolism is an enormous task, and one that has not yet been mastered.  But a beginning has been made at last.  The early results are encouraging, and they seem to indicate an answer to many so far unanswered questions of present-day mankind."

It's the sort of book that, once you start quoting, it's hard to cut him off.  That by the way is the last bit of Jung's own section.  

Anyway, very interesting read.  Very accessible, too, which is not commonly said of books of psychological theory.  Worth a look for anyone interested in myth, symbolism, dream interpretation, or theories of mental functionality.

You can expect more posts on Jung.  I know I've said that before, but this time I mean it. 

Today's mildly disturbing graphic is the middle of "The Spirit of Geometry" by René Magritte (1937).  Surrealists like Magritte are lauded in Man and his Symbols for their unparalleled combination of realism and dream-like symbology.  

Also, just as a side note, I have decided to stop contributing to Blogcritics for a couple of reasons:

1. They have "rules"

2. Their interface is a pain in the ass.

3. Their site is chock full of trolls and it's even more of a pain in the ass to get them to remove trollish comments.

4. I published an apparently decent article on The Brothers Karamazov with them and it has redirected all my traffic for that post away from my actual site.  They said posting with them would increase my site traffic, but they lied.  Not that I'm making any money off of you (I do this purely to slake my colossal ego), but I like my site better.  You get the pictures, you get my interesting words and quotations, and most of all you don't have to put up with me trying to sell you anything!  We can talk about books without commercial pressure and I rather like that (exceedingly uncommon these days).  Also, I like to see my counter go up.  Thanks guys!!!

4. I'm not sure I even like the idea of being a member of a sinister cabal of (self-evaluated) superior writers. 

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

~ 900 words

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efface - verb - to wipe out; destroy; do away with.

timourous - adj - full of fear, fearful.

multifarious - adjective - having many different parts, elements, or forms. Numerous and varied, manifold.

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My subject for today's blog post is The Brother's Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The book is generally considered among the best books ever written by mere mortals, and in my opinion it is well deserved of the distinction. Being unacquainted with Russian (and perhaps Russia generally), and with an author as idiomatic as Dostoevsky I can't overstress the importance of a decent translation. Mine is the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which in fact won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club translation prize in 1991. Dostoevsky generally, having read a couple books by him before, can be idiomatic, colloquial, and perhaps even redundant in places. Take for example this line from the author's introduction to the Brother's Karamazov:


Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.

Certain translators will cringe at that sort of thing, feeling it their duty to make Dostoevsky more palatable to our modern sense of grammar by busting out the thesaurus and shaving off seemingly redundant clauses. The problem with this, however, is that there is a sort of gait of thought that Dostoevsky had well developed by this, the last book of his career. The spacing of the active elements of the thought are given almost a rhythm, I find. As a poet uses syllables, so does Dostoevsky use thought. And all that elegance can be cut to ribbons by translators who feel it their duty to protect the reader from how the book was actually written. This is a problem that Pevear and Volokhonsky are thankfully not afflicted with. These two also provide a highly informative introduction and footnotes that provide much more fluid descriptions than this blog post, not only of the contents of the book but the context of Dostoevsky's life.

At any rate, The Brothers Karamazov is a book that is almost too big to describe, but the story is largely about (unsurprisingly) the brothers Karamazov. I shirk from describing any of them with mere adjectives because of the sheer depth of the characters, it would be about as insulting as if one starting running around applying epithets to ones friends and neighbors.

Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, the eldest and half-brother to the other two, is accused of killing his father. He is sensitive and impulsive, very much in love for most of the book, a downright scoundrel at times but has the noblest sentiments of any character in the book.

Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, the middle child, is an atheist who struggles with his disbelief. He is the most intelligent and educated of the brothers, and he is the cause of two of the more interesting digressions, which are worth reading even if you don't read the rest of the book.

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, the youngest in his early twenties, is a novice at the local monastery, and perhaps the most ambiguous of the brothers. He is faithful, but is not immune to crises of faith. He is the point of view character in most the scenes he appears in.

Alexei (Alyosha, Yoshka, or similar diminutives) is more often than not a conduit for the thoughts of other people, rather than a source of thought himself. Through most of the book he channels the wisdom of his Elder at the monastery, who dies fairly early on (relatively speaking), but this is also true symbolically, because he spends most of the book delivering messages to people. That being said, at the end of the book he recognizes the need for himself personally, and really shows his power of thought, of understanding, of empathy on the second last page. I really don't want to spoil the ending because it is worth reading the 800 tome just to get to the last page.

Alexei is also a point of stability in the lives of most of the important characters regardless of allegiance. He represents an ideal to most of the characters, of faith, hope and love, though he is far from perfect in these areas. It is the needs of others that pull him more into this role as things go on. On the elder's deathbed he tells Alyosha to go out and live among the people, rather than sequestering himself in the monastery, because of the real psychological need for him, almost as an extension of religion generally. In the introduction to Notes From Underground (introduction by and translated by Pevear & Volokhonsky) Dostoevsky says that the Russian sensors allowed him to abuse the entirety of Russian society, but when he tried to explain the need of religion in the human soul they cut it out. To me it seems that Alyosha is the embodiment of this principal he was not allowed to explicitly state. Perhaps that people need something to look up to. They need a carved snake on a pole to look for when live ones bite. Speculation.

It's also the sort of novel that doesn't dissect well. In order to convey the correct sense or feeling or reason for an action or statement, I would pretty much have to drag you back to chapter one and work my way up. I will revise that to say that it doesn't vivisect well, because The Brother's Karamazov is as close to a living inanimate object as I have ever seen.

Today's art is an onion. If this piques your curiosity, please look up "Dostoevky's parable of the onion." Many thanks to Scipio21 of www.deviantart.com for so delightful a photo of so un-delightful a vegetable.

Article first published as Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky on Blogcritics.

So yeah, I'm now a contributor on BlogCritics. Pretty cool, pretty sweet gig. we'll see how it goes.

Reflections on Crime and Punishment

~ 1300 words !!!Major Spoilers!!!

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bravura - n - a display of daring, a brilliant performance

sacrosanct - adj - sacred or inviolable

conspectus - n - a general or comprehensive view, survey

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I finished Crime and Punishment this week, and I have to say it is definitely one of (if not the) best book(s) I have read.

In the first place the ending was fantastic. This man, crippled by ambition, intelligence and circumstance, finds redemption. If you've read the book this comes as no surprise, and you might even have thought it a bit corny. Love saves him in the end. Well, I'd just like to point out that love is not what saves him. At the end of the book (after going to prison), Raskolnikov falls ill, a sort of lack of will or purpose in life. Psychosomatic illness occurs frequently throughout the book. He misses his visit from Sonya (who followed him all the way to Siberia) because she is ill (notable because it is one of only two occurrences of illness caused externally in the book. The other is Katerina Ivanova's tuberculosis). She has a cold. At this point he realizes how much he relies on her for emotional support, he had been snubbing her up to that point, more or less. Of course, realizing his love for her is only the first step. On her next visit, when none of the guards are looking, he throws himself on her feet. In the end, he overcomes his pride, which up to that point had prevented him from making public (or any) displays of emotion. I thought that was a very good ending. Raskolnikov learns that just because you have an idea, that doesn't make it a good idea, even if you can rationalize it. It takes him the murder of two innocents, incarceration in Siberia, and him causing the death of his mother for him to realize this. Lots of people, young people in particular, could benefit from this wisdom I think.

I would also like to share with you a paragraph that appeared near the end. It really stuck in my mind for some reason.

He lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week. As he began to recover, he remembered his dreams from when he was still lying in feverish delirium. In his illness, he had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish except for a certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men's bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgements, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, and could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into whole armies against each other but, already on the march, the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another. In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious. The most ordinary trades ceased, because everyone offered his own ideas, his own corrections, and no one could agree. Agriculture ceased. Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part--but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and spread further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; they were the pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and new life, to renew and purify the earth; but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words or voices.

The first time I read this I thought, this is Dostoevsky's vision of a world consumed by the philosophical forces he sought to counter. As I read this again, however, I'm not so sure. Certain elements certainly have an anti-rational lean (such as the epidemic having the ability to reason), but in general it's almost like the tower of babel all over again. For those in my listening audience unfamiliar with the story of the tower of babel, it occurs in the Bible after Noah's flood. Essentially, a bunch of people band together after Noah's flood to design and build a gigantic tower that would protect them from another great flood. In punishment for their insolence, God makes it so that no person can be understood by any other. To a person "love" may mean "hate", and "war" may mean "peace". Stymied by their inability to communicate with each other, they all sort of meander off and went back where they came from, and that explains why all sorts of different languages exist in the world.

Among Biblical stories, this one (in my humble estimation) is extremely influential. Off the top of my head, "babble", our word for incoherent nonsense, bears striking resemblance to "Babel". The organism that slips into your ear and translates for you in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the Babel Fish. In Final Fantasy II, one of the core environments is the tower of Babel, which supposedly reaches all the way to the moon. It's an interesting game, what with the whole walking on the moon thing, but final fantasy almost doesn't count in this regard. It seems to me as if the people who make those games actively pursue world mythology to integrate into their content, no matter how obscure the source. Granted the old testament isn't exactly obscure, but I've seen references to Homer's Odyssey (in the form of Scylla).

Here is a picture:

Not exactly congruous with the description in the Odyssey (something about seven heads), but undeniably final fantasy material.

Oh, and while I have you here, I'd just like to mention that my good friend Jeff Chapman (his blog) has a short story in an anthology up for preorder! The anthology is The Midnight Diner Volume 3 and the story is "The Princess and the Vampire", which I believe I mentioned actually. Jeff has a sample of his story up on his blog, so check it out if you have a taste for astounding tales!

Also, he has had another short story accepted, "The Master and the Miller's Daughter". I haven't read it myself, yet, but Jeff given the quality of Jeff's fiction (and the fact that it was accepted after all), I have reason to believe that it is very good. Check it out if you get the chance!

The image today came from a pop art blog if you can believe it. It's unfortunately been derelict for more than a year, but still has an interesting archive of pop art. I don't know if it's really art, I'm not exactly an expert, but here's the link anyways.