C.G.Jung on Emotion

You see, whenever you make an emotional statement, there is a fair suspicion that you are talking about your own case; in other words, that there is a projection of your emotion. And you always have emotions where you are not adapted. If you are adapted you need no emotion; an emotion is only an instinctive explosion which denotes that you have not been up to your task. When you don’t know how to deal with a situation or with people, you get emotional. Since you were not adapted, you had a wrong idea of the situation or at all events you did not use the right means, and there was as a consequence a certain projection. For instance, you project the notion that a certain person is particularly sensitive and if you should say something disagreeable to him he would reply in such-and-such a way. Therefore you say nothing, though he would not have shown such a reaction because that was a projection. You wait instead until you get an emotion, and then you blurt it out nevertheless, and of course then it is far more offensive. You waited too long. If you had spoken at the time, there would have been no emotion. And usually the worst consequences of all are not in that individual but in yourself, because you don’t like to hurt your own feelings, don’t want to hear your own voice sounding disagreeable and harsh and rasping. You want to maintain the idea that you are very nice and kind, which naturally is not true. So sure enough, any projection adds to the weight which you have to carry. 

– C.G.Jung Nietzsche’s Zarathustra 2: 1494-8 

Wind on the Heath

 There's a wind on the heath brother, who would wish to die ?

Norwich's connection to the Romantic movement is embodied in the figure of the author George Borrow (1803-1881). As a teenager Borrow studied languages, in particular the German language, under the tutorship of William Taylor (1765-1836). Taylor was the scholar who personally  influenced and encouraged Coleridge and Wordsworth to read his translations of German romantic literature. Together Coleridge and Wordsworth in the early poetry of their Lyrical Ballads (1798) inaugurated romanticism into English literature. This was in no small measure due to both poets being introduced to German authors such as Goethe and Lessing by William Taylor, a name nowadays scarcely known either inside or outside the medieval walls of Norwich.

George Borrow himself cuts as a dashing Byronic-like figure. Of athletic build and over 6 feet tall with a shock of white, not blonde, hair, as a young man he roamed the length and breadth of Britain in gypsy fashion as an itinerant tinker. He also travelled extensively through Spain, as well as visiting Morocco and Russia. Borrow was in near equal measure, an intrepid traveller,  a scholar and polyglot  and  on occasions, a rabid anti-papal preacher and belligerent pugilist. He's depicted above contemplating the splendid view of Norwich from Saint James Hill, adjacent to the large expanse of heathland known as Mousehold and is accompanied by the hat-wearing gypsy Petulenegro, an equally colourful character who, in addition to making his life-affirming statement, adopts the youthful Borrow to teach him the Romany language and traditions. 

George Borrow recounts his semi-autobiographical adventures on the highways and byways of England in Lavengro (1851) and in its sequel Romany Rye (1857). When the adventures of the self-styled scholar, gypsy, priest in Borrow's first book, The Bible in Spain (1843) were first published, such was the travelogue's popularity that its sales exceeded those of Charles Dickens' latest tale, A Christmas Carol  (1843). 

Borrow's homage to Norwich, the urban setting of his youth, and his acknowledgement of the city's civic pride can be found in Lavengro - 

A fine old city, perhaps the most curious specimen at present extant of the genuine old English Town. ..There it spreads from north to south, with its venerable houses, its numerous gardens, its thrice twelve churches, its mighty mound....There is an old grey castle on top of that mighty mound: and yonder rising three hundred feet above the soil, from amongst those noble forest trees, behold that old Norman master-work, that cloud-enriched cathedral spire ...Now who can wonder that the children of that fine old city are proud, and offer up prayers for her prosperity?

The classic panorama photograph of  Norwich looking south from Saint James Hill. From left to right above the horizon-line - the Norman Castle, the church of Saint Peter Mancroft, City Hall bell-tower and the Norman Cathedral (centre). On the right, the tower of Saint Giles and the Roman Catholic Cathedral are in view.

Wiki-links   -  George Borrow  -   William Taylor

Diana and Actaeon

From March 3rd until April 15th as part of a Nation-wide tour organised by the National Gallery, Norwich Castle Museum is show-casing Titian's marvellous painting Diana and Actaeon. 

The painting captures the moment when the hunter Actaeon stumbles into a woodland grotto where the goddess Diana is bathing. For his transgression seeing the chaste goddess of the hunt naked, Diana in a fit of embarrassed fury splashes water into Actaeon's face and transforms him into a stag. Unable to make his former identity known to his hunting pack Actaeon is chased and devoured by his own bloodhounds.

The Venetian artist Titian's late masterpiece Diana and Actaeon (1556-59) is the work of an artist at the very height of his powers. Commissioned for Philip II of Spain as one of a series of six mythological scenes, its worth remembering that Venice like Spain was during Titian's era, the centre of a vast Empire; included among the many goods which the sea-port traded were rare and costly pigments and dyes used to colour fabrics. Titian's masterful skills as an artist themselves became a highly sought-after commodity, in his life-time he was commissioned by Popes and Emperors.

On a canvas measuring 185 x 202 centimetres, Titian (c.1490 -1576) portrays the fatal moment of Diana and Actaeon's encounter. What captures the eye immediately is its rich colouration and detail. Against a vivid azure sky with a mountainous background, the action depicted in the woodland grotto includes various textures. An orange-striped sarong worn by an Ethiopian nymph alluding to the exotic, is contrasted to the domesticity of a lapdog which yaps at Actaeon's hunting hound. Water trickles and reflects the bathing nymphs startled at their intrusion.  A mirror and gleaming drinking goblet hint of famed Venetian exports. Resting upon a stone column there's a stag's skull, a portent of Actaeon's tragic fate. But above all else it's Titian's ability to paint the drama of the moment,  its the varied human postures and realistic skin tones which makes the painting come alive.

A quarter century after Titian completed his masterpiece, the Hermetic and Neo-platonic philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) in an essay entitled On the Heroic Passions (1585) interpreted the myth of Actaeon and Diana as a parable on the process of knowledge, stating-

'Here Actaeon represents the intellect, on the hunt for divine wisdom at the moment of grasping divine beauty'. 

Just when Actaeon thinks he grasps Sophia (wisdom) in the glass of outer nature, lifting the veil from her lunar mystery, he himself becomes the victim or object of his own striving. Bruno philosophised on Acteon's fate -

'He saw himself transformed into that which he sought, and realised that he himself had become a much-desired prey for his hounds, his thoughts. Because he had actually drawn the godhead into himself, it was no longer necessary to seek them outside himself'. 

For Giordano Bruno the hunter Actaeon is the new heroic man who, killed by his many hounds, is radically inverted. Actaeon's encounter with Diana, at first seemingly his down-fall and the end of his mortal life is for Bruno a transformation which allows Actaeon to experience the life of the gods and immortality. Actaeon's mortal life and final fate are interpreted by Bruno thus-

'Here, his life in the mad, sensuous, blind and fantastic world comes to an end, and from now on he leads a spiritual life. He lives the life of the gods'.

The consequences of mortals accidental caught up in the affairs of the gods and the resulting tragedy  places the Greek gods as being supremely indifferent to the fate of mortal man. There's no forgiveness, regrets, redemption or second chances available to those who encounter them and their implacable will. Bruno's optimistic interpretation of the myth of Diana and Actaeon is contrasted to Diana's more frequently acknowledged dark side. The English scholar Robert Graves noted that Diana in ancient Roman means 'bright' or 'heavenly', and that another name for Diana was Nemesis (from the Greek nemos, 'Grove') which in Classical Greek denoted divine vengeance for breaches of taboo.

The twentieth century psychologist C.G.Jung described the goddess Diana's dark nature thus  -

Diana's hunting animal the dog represents her dark side. Her darkness shows itself in he fact that she is also a goddess of destruction and death, whose arrows never miss. She changed the hunter Actaeon, when he secretly watched her bathing, into a stag, and his own hounds, not recognising him, thereupon tore him to pieces. This myth may have given rise first to the designation of the lapis as the cervus fugitvus (fugitive stag), and then the rabid dog, who is none other than the vindictive and treacherous aspect of Diana as the new moon. [1]


A  possible Jungian interpretation of the myth of Diana and Actaeon is that of a fatal encounter with the anima. The hunter Actaeon's sudden, unprepared vision of the anima, that is, the feminine dimension within the masculine psyche, is one in which he's overwhelmed by its contents. Unable to assimilate or integrate the anima into his psyche, he's transformed into animal and devoured by his failure.

The element in the myth of Diana and Actaeon of the chaser being chased as vengeance is in hindsight somewhat applicable to  events of the modern era - as regards the activities of the papparazzi who once hounded Diana the late Princess of Wales. I'm sure H.R.H. Diana (1961- 1997) would have wished herself able to transform her own hunters into being the hunted. I think if I remember rightly, this myth was alluded to at her funeral in 1997.

Cupid's Dart

And sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.

           ♥         ♥         ♥        ♥                  

And therefore in reference unto Man, Cupid is said to be blind. Affection should not be too sharp-Eyed, and Love is not to be made by magnifying Glasses.

 

-Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich

As the Elephant Laughed - An evening with Peter Rodulfo

Recently I had the pleasure of an evening with the artist Peter Rodulfo. Modest and soft-spoken, Rodulfo is a gifted, prolific and visionary painter who is equally adept in portraiture as in fantasy as in landscape. His paintings are by turns graphic, witty and mystical.

While in conversation with the artist, over a bottle or two of wine, and in between reminiscing about 1970's Norwich, the setting of our youth, and while listening to recent songs by Lou Reed and Kevin Ayers, Rodulfo insists there's a strong element of the charlatan within most artists. The public these days, he states, demand a constant pulling-rabbits-out-of-a-hat conjuring act from artist's and are required to provide ready-made meanings and answers to all of life's questions. Some artists, more than others are willing to fulfil this role of conjurer, often compromising their artistic integrity with financial reward. Rodulfo's’s art however speaks strongly of independent creativity. He is indebted to nothing other than the combustive energy of his own industriousness and imagination.

There’s more than a little of the rebellious and eccentric about Rodulfo who exhibits archetypal Aquarian characteristics in his personality and art. Reticent and even downright self-depreciating at times, a casual glance at his book-case reveals favourite authors such as Honore de Balzac, who was no mean occultist and physiognomist, and the autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections by the seminal psychologist C.G.Jung. Almost all the available wall space at his home is given to a kaleidoscopic gallery of his art, recent work and older personal favourites are all mixed together - Tolkienesque landscapes, animated portraiture of sharply-observed character and dream-like imagery jostle for the viewer's attention. Such a cornucopia of paintings gives a strong impression of a life-time's productivity and testimony to an industrious and disciplined creativity.

Although he’s travelled the globe, it’s the city of Norwich which Peter Rodulfo has chosen as home for decades. Here in an ancient, almost forgotten corner of the English psyche, the mysterious east of England,  life moves at a Do Different pace. Many artists have appreciated Norwich's relative calm; its been the home to gifted artists throughout the centuries, from the days of medieval stained-glass designers to nineteenth century 'Norwich School' artists, John Crome, John Sell Cotman and Joseph Stannard, who celebrated Norfolk’s ‘bootiful’ landscape. Norwich has often quietly nurtured creative artists with it’s relatively stress-free urban living. The city is encircled by an expansive, yet intimate landscape; a not quite flat, but undulating rural county; which makes the city geographically remote and not easily accessible, to the delight and consternation of its inhabitants.

It’s easy for Rodulfo to give a nod to the art of Paul Klee, Max Ernst and De Chirico for example, while remaining very much his own man. Although his art utilizes some of the techniques and motifs associated with surrealism, as well as magical realism, he retains his artistic integrity. Labels are often misguiding and Rodulfo wisely eschews any eager and simplistic labelling of his still evolving creativity. But although comparisons can be misleading, there is one British artist whose art is worthy of note in both technique and imagination to Rodulfo's - that of the self-exiled British surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Like Carrington, Rodolfo acknowledges the role the unconscious psyche plays in his creativity. Like Carrington, Rodulfo's symbolism is home-grown and capable of striking a deep chord in its unconscious association. Finally, like Carrington, Rodulfo is equally adept at draughting a layered field of perspective to showcase his artistic vision. His paintings, like the best surrealist or magical realist painters can be a vivid encounter with the unconscious psyche, or more correctly in Rodulfo's case, a polite enquiry into the viewer's relationship to their own unconscious psyche.

Rodulfo's canvas As the Elephant laughed (above) exhibits a rich vocabulary of symbolism evoking a panorama of life on earth. The relentless march of time is depicted by the eroding cliffs of the Norfolk coast framing the composition. Its detailed brushwork includes stars and the ocean, perhaps the most common of all symbols of the unconscious psyche. Protozoan marine-life, animals and ageing humans are also depicted in a skilfully layered composition evoking the cosmic nature of time. It's a canvas lush in colouration which instantly transports the viewer to internal landscapes of the imagination where as in much of Peter Rodulfo's art, imagery, technique and imagination coagulate to form an absorbing viewing experience.

Through decades of hard work Rodulfo has now become a grand-master of magical realism; his creativity has yet to reach its zenith. One cordially wishes the artist will enjoy many years more of painting to the delight of his growing number of admirers.

In January 2012 Peter Rodulfo released no less than twelve photographic images of new paintings to public view. I've chosen just two of his paintings from a total of over 60 in his facebook portfolio for 2011/12  alone. With such a varied and expansive back-catalogue and with many paintings quite different in subject-matter, but equal in terms of technical virtuosity, its well worth checking out more of Rodulfo's art-work.

                    An Intruder in the Forest by Rodulfo. 

See also -

Rodulfo's Mandala of Loving-Kindness

 more of Peter Rodulfo's paintings here

Wikipedia entry for Peter Rodulfo

As the elephant laughed - A panorama of evolution

Romeo and Juliet

A scene from Moscow City Ballet performing Romeo and Juliet

Last night I attended a performance by the Moscow City Ballet of Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Composed in 1935 during the dark days of Stalin's iron rule of Russia, the story of the tragic lovers of Verona is of course originally the subject of a play by William Shakespeare.  The ballet Romeo and Juliet is the musical work which established Prokofiev's fame as a composer upon his return to Soviet Russia - its become firmly established in the ballet repertoire. Written for a large orchestra including 6 horns, mandolin, violin d'amore, piano, organ and an extensive 'kitchen-department' of percussion, an unusual aspect of the musical score is the addition of a tenor saxophone. This single instrument adds lush colouration to the orchestral timbre. Prokofiev was not averse from occasionally re-cycling earlier musical material, and in Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet  inthe Ball room scene, the Gavotte of the Classical symphony (1917) is used to great effect.

Romeo and Juliet  has been choreographed a number of times. When Kenneth MacMillian re-interpreted it  for the Royal Ballet company in 1965  the leading roles were danced by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev to great critical acclaim, re-launching and extending Fonteyn's dancing career. In 1977 Nureyev himself choreographed a new version of Romeo and Juliet for the London Festival Ballet company.

The Moscow City Ballet company was founded in 1988 by Russian choreographer Victor Smirnov-Golovanov. Their performance at the Theatre Royal Norwich, was marked with vitality and sensitivity. With lavish costumes and designs by Natalia Povago, the dance company  added gaiety and humour to the essentially dark tale of tragic love. In particular the company's leading female dancer Oryekhova Liliya in the role of Juliet, and Kozhabayev Talgat as Romeo, carry the success of the night's performance. It's a fairly long ballet with the best pas de deux of the ill-fated lovers occurring in the last ten minutes of Act I. If there is a weakness to any choreographing of Romeo and Juliet, it occurs in Act III which demands a lot of scene changing and coming and going during night-time in the plot. Indeed I noticed the love of my life glancing at her wrist-watch more than once during this final act. One highly original aspect of Golovanov's choreography of Romeo and Juliet is its very beginning coinciding with its ending. The bodies of all three tragic deaths are  presented to the audience carried in bier-fashion as if upon an  upside-down cross.

Not lost, simply for a time mislaid

And suddenly this surprising earth,
No longer clouded, was known again,
And all you had thought lost you found
Was simply for a time mislaid.

(from a poem by Brian Patten b.1946)

La Strada

La Strada by the Italian film-director Federico Fellini (1920-93) is the story of the relationship between strong-man performer Zampano (Anthony Quinn) and his assistant Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina). It's the film which won the first ever Oscar for Best Foreign Language in 1954 and in which Fellini subtly side-steps the agenda of Italian Neo-realism to develop his own unique perspective upon  human nature.

Zampano, arriving at a remote coastal hovel, offers 10,000 lira to Gelsomina's impoverished mother to take her daughter away with him. Together Zampano and Gelsomina traverse Italy on a motor-cycle caravan making a meagre living by Zampano's performing a strong-man act in which, expanding his chest he breaks apart the links of an iron chain. However Zampano is also an unfeeling bully who, although training Gelsomina as his assistant, treats her little better, if not worse than a dog, speaking little and expressing no feelings towards her. Yet Gelsomina endures her cruel treatment, having no other person, home or income. When she and Zampano join the Circus troop of one Senior Giraffa, the real tragedy begins to unfold; soon during their brief time as circus performers, they encounter the Fool, a daring tight-rope walker with an unexplained antipathy toward Zampano. The Fool admits that he himself does not know the reason behind his dislike of Zampano and with a frequently irritating giggle needlessly taunts and ridicules him. The Fool's teasing of Zampano leads to tragic consequences upon the lives and destiny of all three central characters.

It's been suggested that the character of the Fool is a voice-piece for Fellini who experienced a serious clinical depression during the production of La Strada, in particular the romantic heart-to-heart moment  when the Fool confesses to Gelsomina -

Everything has a purpose. I don’t know the purpose of this stone, I’d have to be God to know that. But it has one. Because if it’s useless all is useless, even the stars.

In contrast to the Fool's sensitivity and understanding of human nature (except his own) the brutish Zampano when finally pressed by Gelsomina about the contents of his inner life boorishly declares - there's nothing to think about.

Fellini’s La Strada (The Road) is unusual in its casting of two American actors, starring Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) as the bomber jacket clad, motor-biking strong-man Zampano and Richard Basehart (1914-84) as the enigmatic Fool. But it is the Italian actress Giulietta Masina (1921-1994) as the innocent dreamer Gelsomina who steals the limelight. Masina's rapid, highly expressive and fluent facial features speak swifter than words throughout the film. As the unloved and maltreated Gelsomina, Giulietta Masina, with a nod towards Charlie Chaplin's world-famous tramp, creates her own clown-like pathos. Masina who was Fellini's wife for fifty years, spoke of  the English-born comic genius and Hollywood's first superstar thus  -

‘Chaplin deeply moves me. My husband and I cannot watch any of his films in it entirety. We are always so stirred that we have to leave the theatre before the end of the projection. He’s a great artist. He saw our film in England and declared during a press conference that Gelsomina was his spiritual daughter’.

The back-drop to La Strada includes shots not only of Italy's varied landscape but also the numerous apartment blocks which sprang up in towns throughout Italy in the 1950's. It's against the back-drop of a desolate mezzo-montano landscape that Zampano finally abandons Gemolina to her fate, even though she is  seriously mentally traumatized by events. For many years after making La Strada both Federico Fellini and his wife Guiletta Masina would regularly receive fan-mail from women who declared their lives and destinies were similar to those of Gelsomina or of being trapped in a  loveless relationship with a Zampano-like person. 

The soundtrack to La Strada is composed by Fellini's life-time musical collaborator, Nino Rota (1911-1979) who also composed the soundtrack to The Godfather. Nino's score is not merely incidental, but integral to the film and features some very modern-sounding Mambo-style music in a cafe scene, in which Zampano abandons Gelsomina for a one-night affair, collecting her from the street the next morning without a word of explanation for his behaviour. It's the Fool who teaches Gelsomina to play a slightly melancholy melody upon the trumpet. Not wanting to state spoilers, Gelsomina's poignant trumpet tune lives on to become a sharp prick upon Zampano's conscience, haunting him when hearing it several years later. The importance of this melodic theme for the actress Gulietta Masina can be gauged by the fact that when Fellini  died at the age of 73, a day after their fiftieth wedding anniversary, she requested the theme music of  La Strada entitled Improvviso dell'Angelo by Nino Rota to be played during her husband's funeral ceremony held in Rome.

Shortly after making La Strada Fellini became fascinated with his own inner world of dream imagery which subsequently became a rich fuel for his creativity. He also began to take an interest in parapsychology and the psychology of Carl Jung, reading his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). Fellini once stated-

In dreams there is nothing without significance. Every image therefore also has significance in the film. There is no such thing as coincidence, there is nothing unwanted, extraneous in a dream. Nothing is without significance. Each colour, each picture means something, nothing has been put there in order to resemble reality, or in order to copy something pre-existent. This is the thing that gives film its heraldic, aristocratic identity, which puts it on a level with all other forms of art.

Along with a growing interest in dreams, parapsychology and the psychology of C.G. Jung, Fellini in 1964, under the supervision of his analyst, experimented with the drug LSD. For many years he was reserved about what happened to him one Sunday afternoon after ingesting LSD, however in 1992 a year before his death, Fellini  spoke of his experience thus-

'objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisical awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

The leisurely pace of La Strada, surely one of the earliest of all 'Road-Movies', allows Fellini to introduce curious scenarios and settings which anticipate his predilection for dream-imagery, the surreal and even the grotesque in his later films. Examples of Fellini's 'dream-imagery' are abundant throughout 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969) and in Roma (1972). The near-obsessive excesses of Fellini's dream-imagery are manifest in less critically acclaimed films such as his homage to Casanova (1976).

Fellini's La Strada goes beyond the constraints of Italian neo-realist cinema with its insistence upon realistic depiction of the lives of ordinary, working-class Italians struggling in the economic conditions of post-war Italy. Fellini's  portrait of the socio-path Zampano and the weak and indecisive Gelsomina, shifts far from the rigid agenda of Italian neo-realism into the realm of psychological portraiture and motivations of the psyche. But above all else La Strada besides including a sometimes disturbing pathology of a man who is unable to express his feelings, explores  the mystery of love and the deep need inside the human soul to both give and receive love.

Stargazer Lily and Sonnet

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in ordour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell.
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

Sonnet 98 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)