The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

One of my favorite stories about C.G. Jung is a reported dream where he was drowning in a vat of human waste and calling "Help me out!" to his therapist, who stood on the rim of the vat. Instead of taking his outstretched hand the therapist pushed Jung's head down into the liquid, saying, "Through, not out."

That's often what it feels like when I commit to greater self-awareness and then see what I've gotten myself into: "Get me out of this!" No matter how innovative my efforts, there's a quality of struggling in, yes, a vat of shit.

In an episode of "John Adams," he teaches one of his sons about the virtues of manure, insisting that the young man mash it around with his hands. Adams' recipe for compost would delight today's organic gardeners -- seaweed, marsh mud, dead ashes, rock weed, livestock waste, kitchen scraps.

My own dung has a similar variety -- scraps of history; ashes I thought were dead; a deep sea of muddy droppings from unconscious creature selves; weeds I'd imagined pulled forever; the waste of years spent serving an ego-image.

I keep in mind this quote from William Bryant Logan's Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth: "Not only the grain in the mealbag, but the full-blown rose are, in one sense, the gift of turds."

What "The Big Picture" May Miss

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, drawn from Jungian psychology, groups people by cognitive function, and the starkest contrast lies in two broad ways of gathering information: Sensing and Intuition. 

Sensors―interested in facts―are good observers, focusing on the present, on facts, on what can be processed through the five senses; concrete, literal thinkers who value realism, common sense, and ideas with practical applications.

Intuitives--interested in frameworks--are introspective, looking for possibilities, patterns, impressions, imagination, reading between the lines. I test as high as possible on Intuition.

Neither is better than the other; however, the stronger the difference in cognitive style, the greater the tendency to disparage such a different way of seeing the world. I grew up in a family where both my parents and my older brother had a Sensing preference, so in spite of my good grades in school and college, I thought I had something missing until I was in graduate school in my thirties, where big picture thinking was a great asset and I learned about these cognitive differences. What a relief!

My deficit in the cognitive pathways of Sensors, however, continues to haunt me, most recently in a poetry workshop where we're learning to model our poems after Sharon Olds, Dorianne Laux, the teacher, and former students--all writing "accessible, detail oriented, image-driven poetry," of course following poetic principles, but focused in tight on a moment that can be visualized. As excited as I've been to be involved again with a critique group, I was really struggling until I found an article about the Sensing/Intuition difference in creative writing. 

Writers and poets tend to be drawn toward creative work that matches their cognitive preferences and, of course, their own writing reflects their way of perceiving the world.

Sensing Poets:                                                                Intuitive Poets:

are detailed, empirical, and concrete	are abstract, symbolic, and figurative
prefer plot-driven themes	prefer concept-driven themes
employ similes	employ metaphors
like to stay on-topic	are comfortable with fracture
tend to be explicit	tend to be implicit
tend to be linear and chronological	are comfortable with split timelines
prefer scenes to summary exposition	use scenes as a jumping-off point to explore larger themes
point to what’s present to the eye	bring to mind what’s absent from view
They ask: What happened? Were police cars light or dark blue in Wichita in 1970? Does this stanza progress logically line-to-line? They may be wary of speculative leaps and abstractions in a poem.	They ask: What larger question about the human experience does this poem explore? Which opposing forces create tension?  They may look for hidden patterns between the lines of a poem.

 
I can't change the wiring of my brain, but I can develop new neural pathways with practice, and because I want so much to learn this way of writing poems, I'm determined to give it my best effort.

 

Grace and Grit

"Friends and family often wondered, is she being unrealistic—shouldn't she be worrying? fretting? unhappy? But the fact is, by living in the present, by refusing to live in the future, she began exactly to live consciously with death.

Think about it: death, if anything, is the condition of having no future. By living in the present, as if she had no future, she was not ignoring death, she was living it. And I was trying to do the same." Ken Wilber, Grace and Grit.

After I finished reading Grace and Grit I couldn't sleep, not sure what was going on, but when I told someone about the book I started weeping. Then I knew what was going on.

Treya Killam Wilber fought so hard and died anyway within five years. I had a good prognosis and knew I could easily live another twenty years after my December 2010 surgery. Or not. The Buddhists tell us to live our death. This doesn't mean worrying all the time. It means living NOW, whether you have twenty minutes or twenty years left. 

I try to do the same.