A few nights ago, I started and finished a book, Twisted Years, by John Smith about his time in the 1st World War. I do not think this book is on Amazon, or anywhere in bookstores. It was a manuscript dug up from John's attack by his granddaughter after his death, one that her mother had read to her as a child. The book was published for friends and family, and is largely unedited, straight from John's mouth. It came to my hands from another of his granddaughters, my neighbor.
The beauty of the book is its complete lack of pretension, something that would be nearly impossible for me to write. It does not get into deep inner thoughts, but rather, sums up hard emotions with a few choice words, like "it was pretty bad." I did learn a few things, but mostly, it read like a chat with an old timer at the local breakfast diner.
It did get me to thinking, though: this man went through some horrific events. The WWI battlefields were often left strewn with corpses, because the front lines remained static, sometimes for years, and it would have been suicide to collect them. The freshly dead fed the rats that crowded the field, their (the human's) guts and brains and severed limbs scattered about, while the older dead remained rotting or partially mummified, sometimes held up in ghastly poses on the barbed wire defenses. Horrible, disease ridden, a nightmare.
This is all well known. What seems impossible is that people like John then went back home, took up simple jobs, married and had families. They went to the Polka fests and danced and listened to the new craze, radio shows, and struggled through the depression just like everyone else. They pushed hard on the President to not get into WWII, knowing how bad it could be, but once in, joined the fight with either their own presence or that of their sons. Their life in America went on, apparently seamless.
We know now of Post Traumatic Stress and how many returning soldiers are plagued by it, sometimes for years, sometimes for life, but most get over the worst of it quickly and get on with their lives. My dad, a WWII vet, was one of these, as were most of his friends. But you just know that such experiences never really go away.
In the book I am currently reading (more on it later - I forget the title and author at the moment), the author discusses the Jungian map of the human psyche. There is the conscious - the ego, or what we know in waking life as ourselves; there is the personal unconscious; then the collective unconscious; and finally the open field, the point of the template of being. I will get into the last two in another blog. What is relevant here is the personal unconscious.
According to this author, Jung claimed that the power of the conscious world, the waking consensus reality, was so strong that it often over- road personal experience, to the point where the individual felt certain outlandish (but real) memories were nearly irrelevant (such it is that PTS sufferers feel that they are living in a nightmarish dream). However, the unconscious NEVER loses those experiences. Instead, they continue to live out a life in the unconscious, often recalled in dreams. In any case, Jung found that these "forgotten" events continue to move the ego, the conscious self, in ways that are unknown to it. Thus we are products of our experiences in far greater ways than we think.
Add to this, that the deeper levels of the unconscious also push the ego in a certain direction - that is, towards individuation, or "being" integrity - and we find we have a destiny, and self, constantly at work that we know little or nothing about. We are, in many ways, both captives of our past, and puppets of a master blueprint beyond time and place.
Keeping, again now, to the ego and personal unconscious, it is easy to see why we look for signals in dreams, in fortune telling, or in psychiatry to find out exactly who we are - for we know that we do not know, that something strange is pushing us on. That this is so, only look to John Smith; regular guy, good community man, comfortable in his own skin, yet also filled with visions of death stalking him at every turn, leading him in ways he cannot know and, in many ways, does not want to know. FK
The beauty of the book is its complete lack of pretension, something that would be nearly impossible for me to write. It does not get into deep inner thoughts, but rather, sums up hard emotions with a few choice words, like "it was pretty bad." I did learn a few things, but mostly, it read like a chat with an old timer at the local breakfast diner.
It did get me to thinking, though: this man went through some horrific events. The WWI battlefields were often left strewn with corpses, because the front lines remained static, sometimes for years, and it would have been suicide to collect them. The freshly dead fed the rats that crowded the field, their (the human's) guts and brains and severed limbs scattered about, while the older dead remained rotting or partially mummified, sometimes held up in ghastly poses on the barbed wire defenses. Horrible, disease ridden, a nightmare.
This is all well known. What seems impossible is that people like John then went back home, took up simple jobs, married and had families. They went to the Polka fests and danced and listened to the new craze, radio shows, and struggled through the depression just like everyone else. They pushed hard on the President to not get into WWII, knowing how bad it could be, but once in, joined the fight with either their own presence or that of their sons. Their life in America went on, apparently seamless.
We know now of Post Traumatic Stress and how many returning soldiers are plagued by it, sometimes for years, sometimes for life, but most get over the worst of it quickly and get on with their lives. My dad, a WWII vet, was one of these, as were most of his friends. But you just know that such experiences never really go away.
In the book I am currently reading (more on it later - I forget the title and author at the moment), the author discusses the Jungian map of the human psyche. There is the conscious - the ego, or what we know in waking life as ourselves; there is the personal unconscious; then the collective unconscious; and finally the open field, the point of the template of being. I will get into the last two in another blog. What is relevant here is the personal unconscious.
According to this author, Jung claimed that the power of the conscious world, the waking consensus reality, was so strong that it often over- road personal experience, to the point where the individual felt certain outlandish (but real) memories were nearly irrelevant (such it is that PTS sufferers feel that they are living in a nightmarish dream). However, the unconscious NEVER loses those experiences. Instead, they continue to live out a life in the unconscious, often recalled in dreams. In any case, Jung found that these "forgotten" events continue to move the ego, the conscious self, in ways that are unknown to it. Thus we are products of our experiences in far greater ways than we think.
Add to this, that the deeper levels of the unconscious also push the ego in a certain direction - that is, towards individuation, or "being" integrity - and we find we have a destiny, and self, constantly at work that we know little or nothing about. We are, in many ways, both captives of our past, and puppets of a master blueprint beyond time and place.
Keeping, again now, to the ego and personal unconscious, it is easy to see why we look for signals in dreams, in fortune telling, or in psychiatry to find out exactly who we are - for we know that we do not know, that something strange is pushing us on. That this is so, only look to John Smith; regular guy, good community man, comfortable in his own skin, yet also filled with visions of death stalking him at every turn, leading him in ways he cannot know and, in many ways, does not want to know. FK
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