DEEP SCRATCH

Category: 23 enigma

  • POEMMXXIII

    POEMMXXIII

    poemmxxiii
    Some scrawls from 2023.

    Love x

  • Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958 Edited by C. A. Meier

     

    Atom and Archetype:
    The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958
    Edited by C. A. Meier
    With a new preface by Beverley Zabriskie
    Translated by David Roscoe

    PAULI AND JUNGIAN ANALYSIS

    In his physics, Pauli sought a unified field. But his personal life was one of fragmentation and dissociation. Within one year, his mother poisoned herself in reaction to his father’s involvement in an affair, and Pauli plunged into a brief marriage with a cabaret performer. At thirty, he turned to Jung for help.

    Jung, in his 1935 lectures at the Tavistock, offered the following example of dreams effecting change:

    I had a case, a university man, a very one-sided intellectual. His unconscious had become troubled and activated; so it projected itself into other men who appeared to be his enemies, and he felt terribly lonely because everybody seemed to be against him. Then he began to drink in order to forget his troubles, but he got exceedingly irritable and in these moods he began to quarrel with other men. . . and once he was thrown out of a restaurant and got beaten up.16

    Jung saw that “he was chock-full of archaic material, and I said to myself: ‘Now I am going to make an interesting experiment to get that material absolutely pure, without any influence from myself, and therefore I won’t touch it.’” He referred Pauli to Dr. Erna Rosenbaum, “who was then just a beginner . . . I was absolutely sure she would not tamper.” Pauli applied the same passionate brilliance to his unconscious as to his physics. In a five-month Jungian analysis, Pauli recorded and spontaneously illustrated hundreds of his dreams. “He even invented active imagination for himself He worked out the problem of the perpetuum mobile, not in a crazy way but in a symbolic way. He worked on all the problems which medieval philosophy was so keen on.”17 For three months, “he was doing the work all by himself, . . . for about two months, he had a number of interviews with me . . . I did not have to explain much.” Jung believed Pauli “became a perfectly normal and reasonable person. He did not drink any more, he became completely adapted and in every respect normal . . . He had a new center of interest.” Jung had thirteen hundred of Pauli’s dreams as the basis for his research into alchemical symbolism in a modern psyche. “At the end of the year I am going to publish a selection from his first four hundred dreams, where I show the development of one motif only.”18
    The physicist F. David Peat believes Jung’s assessment of Pauli’s state after his termination with Dr. Rosenbaum was too positive. Pauli’s new “reasonableness” didn’t last, and later he again drank excessively.
    While Pauli’s work aimed toward a “psychophysical monism,” his intense inner tensions seemed to manifest physically in the so-called Pauli Effect, when his mere presence caused laboratory equipment to explode or fall apart.19 His internal “monotheism” and his sharp critical acumen and tongue earned him the titles “scourge of God,” “the whip of God,” and “the terrible Pauli.” Even in the midst of personal disarray, Pauli kept his stance as a scientist of such rigor that he was called “the conscience of physics.” Asked whether he thought a particular physics paper was wrong, he replied that was too kind–the paper was “not even wrong.”20 Heisenberg’s account of a 1927 conversation reveals that, in his youth, Pauli was concerned about the distinctions between knowledge and faith.21 Heisenberg saw that behind Pauli’s
    outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest, even in those dark areas of reality or the human soul which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli’s analyses of physical problems was due in some measure to the clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of the creative and spiritual processes for which no rational formulation as yet exists.22 For Pauli, the creativity of science included considerations of the psyche. In science, he subscribed to the quantum uncertainty theory that the position and presence of the observer changes the perception and reality of what is observed. To that thesis–that one cannot measure the wave and the particle at the same time–he added a psychological dimension, observing that insofar as the scientist must opt to know “which aspect of nature we want to make visible . . . we simultaneously make a sacrifice, . . . [a] coupling of choice and sacrifice.”23 Pauli demonstrated the value of intuition to science’s empiricism. As Weinberg recounted,

    physicists in the early 1930’swere worried about an apparent violation of the law of conservation of energy when a radioactive nucleus undergoes the process known as beta decay. In 1932 Wolfgang, . . . Pauli proposed the existence of a convenient particle he called the neutrino, in order to account for the energy that was observed to be lost in this process. The elusive neutrino was eventually discovered experimentally over two decades later. Proposing the existence of something that has not yet been observed is a risky business, but it sometimes works.24

    In a metaphysical leap, Pauli referred as well to “forms belonging to the unconscious region of the human soul” and stated that “the relation between a sense perception and Idea remains a consequence of the fact that both the soul and what is known in perception are subject to an order objectively conceived.”25 He acknowledged that he had realized in a dream that the quantum-mechanical conception of nature lacked the second dimension, which he found provided by the archetypes of the unconscious.
    It seems, however, that he could not find his way to the uncertainty, the “choice and sacrifice” that allows for reparation within analysis. While Pauli knew “that a truly unified view must include the feeling function, since without feeling there is no meaning or value in life, and no proper acknowledgment of the phenomenon of synchronicity,” M.-L. von Franz said that he later sought only a “philosophical discussion of dreams”:

    He wrote to me . . . [and] made it clear that he did not want analysis; there was to be no payment. I saw that he was in despair, so I said we could try. The difficulties began when I asked him for the associations which referred to physics. He said, “Do you think I’m going to give you unpaid lessons in physics?” . . . He wanted something, but he didn’t want to commit himself. He was split.26

    Van Erkelens speculates that Pauli would have had to submit to a transference and to a deeper Eros than “his inner urge to develop a unified view of matter and spirit.” For whatever reasons, von Franz and Pauli were not able to achieve the relational bond that holds and contains explosive emotional material and so allows surrender to one’s unconscious and to a suffered analytic relationship.
    Jung and Pauli corresponded and later met, not for analysis but for a comparison of ideas–Pauli pursuing Jung’s synchronicity thesis and Jung fostering Pauli’s understanding of the archetypal and collective factors in the psyche. Through their contact, William James’s two fields, to which both Jung and Bohr had been attracted, come together again. Von Franz writes that the

    notion of complementarity introduced by Niels Bohr to provide a better explanation for the paradoxical relationship between waves and particles in nuclear physics can also be applied to the relationship of conscious and unconscious states of a psychic content. This fact was discovered by Jung, but it was particularly elaborated by Wolfgang Pauli.27

    http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7042.html

    COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2001, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions. For more information, send e-mail to permissions@press.princeton.edu

  • The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review

    “The moon is frequently associated in the poem with creativity, while the sun is more often found in relation to the sphere of political and social activity, although there is frequent overlap between the two. From the Rock Drill sequence on, the poem’s effort is to merge these two aspects of light into a unified whole.–Wikipedia.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

    This article from the Guardian gives us some context for Pound’s impact, and gives us some insight into the creative explosion in the arts just before the first world war turned that creativity on its head. Some accents added and some removed–steve fly.

    The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World – review


    The Observer    , Sunday 19 June 2011.

    Tate Britain
      vorticist

      ‘A pile-driving vision of the future’: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein, 1913-1915. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/ Rex Features
      Rock Drill ought to be his name, not just the title of this long-lost work (this is a reconstruction of the dismantled original). He has terrible force of personality. And he is the most devastating creation in this show by some way, a sculpture from 1913 that seems to summarise all that vorticism stood for with its driving ambition for machine-age dynamism and shattering new forms. The Rock Drill ought to be the ideal host, the perfect symbol for both the movement and the show. Except that Epstein was never a paid-up vorticist.
      In the long march through modernism, vorticism is the quickest of steps. It flares up in 1914, peaks briefly in 1915 and sputters out towards the end of the first world war. There are only two shows. There are only two issues of its in-house journal, Blast. There may be only one full-time vorticist. “Vorticism,” declared Wyndham Lewis in the 1950s, “was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period.” The assertion may have infuriated the surviving members of the group, but it is not without its merit when you consider the diversity of their gifts, from the painter David Bomberg to the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, compared to Lewis’s single-mindedness as ringleader, recruiting sergeant, megaphone, exemplar and theorist of England’s only homegrown avant-garde movement. Lewis belongs to the first generation of Europe’s non-representational artists. His drawings are incisive, satirical, on the edge of abstraction. His paintings from this phase – angular, syncopated, explosive – are even better, which is some claim, given that scarcely any survive. In the 1912 illustrations for Timon of Athens, he begins to abandon depth for a flat pageant of forms that jostle like the elements of some unsolved puzzle. By 1915, in his enormous painting The Crowd, he shows quasi-cubist figures haplessly scattered in a system of grids that seems to prefigure the pinball machine. Workshop (1914-15) is a marvellous concatenation of geometric planes, in coruscating pinks and hot mustards, that almost resolve into windows, ladders, stacks and shelves, by day and yet also, as it seems, by night. It turns architecture inside out. And seeing it in Tate Britain‘s survey, surrounded by fading issues of Blast, old catalogues and invitations, typed manifestos and handwritten declarations of solidarity or hatred – period pieces of English art history from 100 years ago – it suddenly looks more modern than ever. With its graphic zip and register, Workshop conjures pop art half a century in advance. There are other masterpieces in this show, but not many. Tate Britain has David Bomberg’s terrific painting The Mud Bath, with its interplay of bent, reclining and zigzagging forms packed into a scarlet tank. It has Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, biting its mucklestone lip. From the front, it is Pound to a stylised T (was ever a poet more portrayed?) from his goatee to his bouffant quiff. From the rear, it resembles a circumcised phallus. “Make it virile,” was Pound’s bombastic command; contemporary critics found it merely pornographic. Nobody visiting this show could fail to spot the influence of abroad in almost every work. The Dancers, Les Demoiselles: Wyndham Lewis’s chorus line wends its way directly out of Picasso. Roger Fry had mounted his celebrated exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, back in 1910, the same year Marinetti delivered his futurist lectures in London. The trick with this show is to try and remain indifferent to the obvious strains of cubism and futurism that appear wherever you look. It is not hard, for instance, to deduce local figurative forms in all this accordion-pleated abstraction – piano keys and nightclubs, people and performers, London alleys and even the back-to-back terraces of northern mining towns. Lewis saw that cubism, for instance, could be more than a highly advanced visual language. It could be made to speak of life itself, with all thronging motion, humanity, incident. One of the strongest works here is his wonderfully acute Architect With Green Tie (1909), which skewers the self-importance of a particular man while sending up the profession’s characteristic fondness for that calculated spot of colour. The work isn’t abstract at all, in fact; it’s one of Lewis’s best caricatures. But it also predates vorticism, exposing an unusual dilemma for the curators of this show, which originated in North Carolina. Vorticism is such a brief movement and so little of the art survives (a huge tranche of it, belonging to the US collector John Quinn, vanished long ago) that it is quite a feat to assemble anything representative. The exhibition attempts to counter the problem by including a good many fellow-travellers, recreating both of the original vorticist shows and displaying the issues of Blast, with its upper-case insults, wonderful woodcuts and wild demagoguery, along with testaments of war, imaginary and real. Here is the row between Lewis and Fry over the Daily Mail‘s Ideal Home Exhibition, of all things, played out in aggressive letters. Here are the missives from the Western Front, including Gaudier-Brzeska’s final postcard before he died in the trenches. He was 23. By the time you get to the end of this vigorous yet melancholy exhibition, vorticism has dwindled into a graphic style. Anyone can imitate it by now and they do. There are still some startling works to come: Edward Wadsworth‘s fantastically concise woodcuts are among the best things here. Look at his Newcastle, as neatly condensed a sonnet to industry, ironwork, bridge span and community as you could find, all stitched together with saw-tooth zips: English printmaking at its sharpest. But even if its members had not lost their lives, the first world war had to kill off this machine-loving movement. Alas, because this show is so strictly vorticist, you do not see how the best of the artists responded, what Lewis made of the trenches in his war paintings, how he mocked his own brutal machismo, his own vicious energy, in the savage self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro. But what you do see is what became of Epstein’s The Rock Drill, once again an accidental symbol of the group. Legs gone, drill removed, hands lopped off, Epstein turned the torso into an amputee, vulnerable, disarmed, a victim of wartime violence. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/vorticists-tate-britain-review