Douglas Mercer
August 14 2024
Hide your dark cards
If you are able but
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table
Carl Jung was a depth psychologist who posited the notion of the collective unconscious wherein lay a reservoir or pool of signs and symbols and archetypes which is constantly available and that one can tap in to at any time if one chooses. The manifestation of these signs and symbols in concert is synchronicity, defined as meaningful coincidences that can be noticed if one is paying attention.
In the book How The Beatles Knew the author gives long descriptions of how the symbol of the pool became fashionable in movies of the 1970s as a symbol for the mind. These descriptions occur in a chapter in which the author posits that the song Strawberry Fields is a reference to a cybernetic field which will replicate itself forever. The pools are often being drained or filled up.
In 1927 Jung had a dream about the city of Liverpool (a city to which he never traveled) in which he said that the city was the pool of life, that it makes live. He reported that in the dream there was a city above the city on a plateau (See The Swan’s Song, White Biocentrism, August 4 2024) and he went to take a look at it.
In the index for How The Beatles Knew T.S. Eliot is mentioned fifteen times, the author says “we keep coming back to him.” Eliot is a blood relation to Jane Asher, the woman that Paul McCartney was living with at the time he embarked on what the author terms his Identity Fracture Project (see The Poet’s Calling, White Biocentrism, July 23 2024). Charles Norton Eliot, literary scholar, and Charles William Eliot, the President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, were both common ancestors of Eliot and Asher. Jane’s mother’s name at birth was Margaret Eliot.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly
The surface glittered out of heart of light
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children
T.S. Eliot (Burnt Norton,1948)
In the story A Perfect Day For Bananafish the main character meets a young girl on the beach named Sibyl (prophetess) and speaks of memory and desire. The two wade in the ocean together.
April is the cruelest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
Mixing memory and desire
T.S. Eliot (The Wasteland 1922).
In How the Beatles Knew it is said that T.S. Eliot befriended Ted Hughes and his wife Sylvia Plath, and had them over for dinner, tea, and poetry readings in the early 1960s.
In Ted Hughes’ book The Goddess Of Complete Being the author posits that Shakespeare’s work taken in total constitutes a cybernetic or information field which lies at the heat of a network of all human signs.
Going through many incarnations in presentation the first that the Beatles adopted was that of Teddy Boys, a British subculture whose members wore Edwardian Era fashions.
In the book Nine Stories the final one is called Teddy in which a hyper intellectual child named Teddy discourses aboard a cruise ship on esoteric topics. The main character disengages form a discussion he is having and the person with whom he was talking follows slowly down the levels toward the swimming area when he hears the scream of a small child emanating and reverberating from within the empty and enclosed wall of the ship’s swimming pool.
Pool / loop
Loops / spool / weaving
Feedback loops are a cardinal feature of cybernetic fields.
Loom: 1. to come into sight in enlarged or distorted and indistinct form often as a result of atmospheric conditions 2. a frame or machine for interlacing
Not only is there a shadow on the door but something is crawling to the surface of a dark Scottish Lake.
***
Notes:
Jungian archetypes are a concept from analytical psychology that refers to a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious. Synchronicity (German: Synchronizitat) is a concept introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung to describe events that coincide in time and appear meaningfully related yet seem to lack a discoverable causal connection. Jung held this was a healthy function of the mind, that can become harmful should it veer into psychosis. I can connect nothing with nothing (Eliot, 1922); the one tuned into synchronicity believes the opposite of this, that he can connect everything with everything (everything is stuck together, Byrne 1982).
Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor
And running stags around a silver tray;
Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.
The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of is and seems
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica
T.S. Eliot (Animula, 1929)
I’ve gone to the other side with my encyclopedia (Tori Amos, 1994)
There is a recurring motif in Sixties and early Seventies films of an empty swimming pool. The 1972 the experimental film Chao! Manhattan, which was filmed at Leary’s Millbrook mansion, involves an ex-actress who lives at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The Millbrook Mansion was originally named Daheim (home) and the Castalia Foundation hosted retreats on the estate. For the Greeks Castalia was a sacred spring of the muses near Delphi (womb, umbilical, navel, Delphic Sibyl); Castalia is the fictional locale of the encyclopedic retreat in the Glass Bead Game which holds that the spiritual values of the world can be encoded in a complete musical score of notes.
The 1970 film Deep End starring Jane Asher the story is set around a community swimming pool. The finale takes place in the empty pool as it fills up with rushing and menacing water. Fear death by drowning (1922); the best place I have ever been was a little swimming pool, it was not close to any town, everything just floated around (1990); everything that was once in place floats loosely in space (1922).
In 1973’s Warlock Moon has an empty swimming pool scene in which the conversation turns threatening. It was filmed at the Livermore Sanitarium in Livermore, California.
The 1968 film The Swimmer has many pools. Burt Lancaster goes through the backyard of many homes swimming in the pools of each home, it is implied that he swam in all of them, he says he is swimming home that there is a river of pools all the way to his house (a crazy idea someone says though another says it is a brilliant idea, very original). The movie is based on a story by John Cheever in which the hero is said to be a new age explorer by going through the pools. The author started out making the protagonist a metaphor for Narcissus but soon expanded it to Arthurian legends and Homeric odysseys with references to the Fisher King. The narrator says of the main character that he might be compared to a summer’s day (Sonnet 18), particularly the last hours of one, he ends up at his own home only to find it deserted.
It appears that the Macy researchers were aware of the pool as a metaphor for the personality (gr. personae: mask). Various metaphors for the mind were going around at the time, and the pool began to be seen as a cinematic trope for the mind, but the pool also signified a an approach to personality formation, and MK Ultra activities. The swimming pool became a kind of shorthand for it’s all in your head. A swimming pool to be cleaned must be drained first and then filled back up with treated water, this is psycho catharsis, psyche being the Greek for life or breath. There is an intrinsic reference to the fact that in relation to the emptiness of a pool that people are just a conglomeration of sensations and programming. A pool when emptied looks more vacant than other places.
A huge and striking mural inspired by a pioneering thinker's description of Liverpool has been painted across some of its city center buildings. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote in 1927 that Liverpool, a city he had only ever dreamt of, was the Pool of Life. The Cavern Quarter mural has been created by a Glasgow-based artist. Bill Addy said it would show visitors the history that surrounds them. The Swiss psychiatrist, one of the founders of modern psychology, never visited Liverpool, but after a vivid dream about the city in 1927, he wrote an essay, in which he said it was the pool of life, it makes to live. The mural, on Harrington Street, was commissioned by Liverpool BID and Culture Liverpool on behalf of the Beatles Legacy Group. The spokeswoman said the work hints at the area's layered history and included references to the well-known nightclub The Cavern and the city's motif. The Cavern club is where the Beatles played, and a person who read Jung’s account believes that in his mind’s eye he was envisioning a locale near The Cavern. A spokeswoman for Liverpool BID said those reading the essay took a reference to a place into which many streets converged as being Mathew Street and Rainford Square in the Cavern Quarter. In the 1970s, poet and artist Peter O'Halligan popularized the use of Jung’s phrase to describe the area.
In 2012, a plaque to mark Jung's Pool of Life was unveiled nearby. The mural also includes a magnolia tree, which Jung mentioned in the essay, and a walrus, a nod to the titular subject of the Beatles I Am The Walrus.
I found myself in a dirty, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss—say half a dozen. I walked through the dark streets. I had the feeling that there we were coming from the harbor, and that the real city was actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where the market is down below and then you go up through the Totengasschen (Alley of the Dead), which leads to a plateau above and so to the Petersplatz and the Peterskirche. When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the center was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and were at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought, I know very well why he has settled here. Then I awoke.
Jung comments:
On one detail of the dream I must add a supplementary comment: the individual quarters of the dream were themselves arranged radially around a central point. This point found a small open square illuminated by a larger street lamp, and constituted a small replica of the island. I knew that the other Swiss lived on the vicinity of one of those secondary centers. The dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the grayish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque – just as I felt then. But I had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that is why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the pool of life. The liver, according to an old view, is the seat of life, that which makes to live.
This dream brought with it a sense of finality. I saw that here the goal had been revealed. One could not go beyond the center. The center is the goal and everything is directed towards that center. Through this dream I understood that the self is a principle and archetype of orientation and meaning. Therein lies its healing function. For me, this insight signified an approach to the center and therefore to the goal. Out of it emerged a first inkling of my personal myth. The dream depicted the climax of the whole process of development.
Today near the site is a school called the Liverpool School Of Language Music Dream Pun.
Jane Asher’s mother’s name at birth was Margaret Eliot. Margaret Eliot was born to Hon. Edward Granville Eliot (1878–1958) - a younger brother of both 7th and 8th Earl of St Germans - and his wife Clare Louise née Phelips (1883–1927). She was a great granddaughter of Edward Granville Eliot, 3rd Earl of St Germans (1798–1877).
Charles Eliot Norton Charles Eliot Norton (November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. Many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American academic who who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, the longest term of any Harvard president. A member of the prominent Eliot family of Boston, he transformed Harvard from a respected provincial college into America's preeminent research university.
Both Jane Asher and T.S. Eliot were blood relations of both Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot.
Burnt Norton is a poem by T.S. Eliot that refers to an empty pool filled up and then drained.
One of the great mysteries of Shakespeare arcana is who exactly the Mr. W.H is that the Sonnets are dedicated to. This person (or persona) is termed the only begetter.
To the onlie begetter of
These inusing sonnets .
Mr W.H all happinesse
And that eternitie
Promised By Our
Ever-living poet
Wisheth the well-wishing
Adventurer in Setting forth
Oscar Wilde, in his Portrait of Mr. W.H. has a fictional account of a theory of Shakespeare’ sonnets which posits that Mr. W.H was an actor named Willie Hughes. No such person in Shakespeare’s time has been found with such a name but the theorist, undeterred, maintained his belief on the grounds that if Willie Hughes did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, that in this case one must assume facts not in evidence, and that some things remain conspicuous by their absence. Thus one is ineluctably forced to posit the existence of Willie Hughes in order to save appearances.
Hue: Old English hiw or heow (also form, appearance, obsolete except in Scots), of Germanic origin; related to Swedish. Character or aspect (all stripes and hues). In painting a pure pigment one without tint or shade.
A man in hue all hues in his controlling
This is from Sonnet 20 and is the line most studied in all of Shakespeare as to the identity of the man who possesses all aspects and controls them. In the original publication the word hues is both capitalized and italicized in order to draw focus on it. W.B. Brown identified puns on Hughes in the repeated deployment of the words use and unused, usury, along with the words form, image, shape and shadow which he interpreted as variants of the concept hues. Thus these are the signs, symbols and archetypes of Jung, the overriding and umbrella term of shades or aspects always myriad.
Ted Hughes was born at 1 Aspinall Street in Mytholmroyd in West Riding of Yorkshire, to William Henry (1894–1981) and Edith (née Farrar) Hughes (1898–1969). One of his mother's ancestors had founded the Little Gidding Community. One of T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets (1948) was called Little Gidding in which the phrase the unimaginable zero summer appears.
Hughes wrote that Shakespeare had a comprehensive and organic image of England’s inner life in such a way that be became prophetic, as a computer model, accurately programmed, simulates (or stimulates) the entire future development and projects the outcome.
A Ted Talk is when public intellectuals speak on “big think” or “blue sky” topics; these talks are billed as ideas worth spreading and ideas that change everything. TED (technology, entertainment, design).
All ages are contemporaneous, Pound said. The future stirs already in the minds of a few. If a single thought characterized Pound’s thought it would be this one from The Spirit Of Romance: the passage of time is not so much a river flowing in one direction but a pool in which past men and modern men met and mingled freely
This game, you’re not ready for it. In terms of scale and substance there is nothing like it. It remains unmatched in its breadth and drama; you see intrigue, espionage, alliances form, the power shifts around, it is amazing to watch, simple actions have massive effects, you can cooperate or compete with people, make friendships or betray them, it is amazing to think that is all just other players, it starts this cascade of actions, and you don’t know what is going to happen, it is a free for all which you never see coming, it is a rush like no other, all the players are on the journey and writing their own stories, things continue to change and evolve, it is awesome it is war (without strife there is no creation, Heraclitus 530BC); when one delves to the center a final fugue state ensues and the danger looms, but the saving is power fatefully there.
Pol / ice / police: to monitor of regulate. Pretty little policeman sitting in a row / I quit the police department and got myself a steady job.
A phone call
Joins all
Star fall
Dream dance
Shared trance
Synchronicity
To pool: to gather resources from disparate sources into a common pool which is shared among the sharers.
Play, my song, Will Hews, and I will sing it to myself. So he did it most joyfully, not as the howling swan, which, still looking down, waileth her end, but as a sweet lark (see A Real Bird Sings, White Biocentrism, July 28 2024), lifting up his hands and casting up his eyes to his God, with this mounted the crystal skies, and reached with his unwearied tongue the top of highest heavens. It was at least something to have discovered that Will Hews was an Elizabethan name. Indeed the name Hews seemed to have been closely connected with music and the stage. The first English actress was the lovely Margaret Hews, whom Prince Rupert so madly loved. What’s more probable than that between her and Lord Essex's musician had come the boy-actor of Shakespeare's plays? But the proofs, the links - where were they? Alas! I could not find them. It seemed to me that I was always on the brink of absolute verification, but that I could never really attain to it.
My dear Erskine, I cried, not understand it! Why, I feel as if I had invented it. Surely my letter shows you that I not merely went into the whole matter, but that I contributed proofs of every kind. The one flaw in the theory is that it presupposes the existence of the person whose existence is the subject of dispute. If we grant that there was in Shakespeare's company a young actor of the name of Willie Hughes it is not difficult to make him the object of the Sonnets. But as we know that there was no actor of this name in the company of the Globe Theatre, it is idle to pursue the investigation further.
It was a horrible moment. I felt sick with misery, and yet I could not believe it. To die for one's theological beliefs is the worst use a man can make of his life, but to die for a literary theory! It seemed impossible.
Res Ipsa Loquitur is Latin for it speaks for itself.
One creates a second self of glass and casts an image or reflection in the mirror. And then one breaks the glass (cracked looking glass) by exchanging places with the reflected image and then one finds oneself in the field or pool which is ever being drained and filled; then the flooding begins or the mind races and one simply records.
Once I had a love and it was divine
Soon found out I was losing my mind
It seemed like the real thing, but it was a lie
Lost inside adorable illusion and I cannot hide
I'm the one you're using, please don't push me aside
One day we’ll make it cruising
Mr. W.H. Double U Huu Hues
Cthulhu
All in its controlling the only begetter, the only creator
As for the zero summer nothing is unimaginable, one can only imagine.
