I'll Show You the Life of the Mind!

Sara Corbett has written a wonderful story for The New York Times Magazine that I almost finished. It tells of the capture and publication of Swiss shrink and mystic Carl Gustav Jung's Liber Novus. This big and heavy red-leather book with thick pages was Jung's notebook through a 16-year exploration of the life of the mind (the mind, sadly, being his own). It contains full-color Blakean vision paintings, dreams and hallucinations written out in a careful Motörhead-type script, and the seeds of all Jung's best-known ideas. Variously described as the "nuclear reactor for all [Jung's] works" and something to read "cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely," the notebook has been locked up in a Zurich bank safe deposit box for decades but will be published by W.W. Norton in time for Halloween.

When I hear the name "Jung" I generally back quickly toward the nearest exit, making a cross with two index fingers, taking the safety off my pistol and mixing myself a stiff drink all at once. (I do it by summoning the anima of six-armed Kali from the collective unconscious, a trick I picked up one night in an abandoned nunnery in Avignon.) Also Corbett, in her heroic efforts to anthropomorphize the book, deploys fancy words I'm not sure she knows the definitions of, so that the Red Book has been "cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend," but while there it has "fulminated as both an asset and a liability."

That having been said, the Jungians I have known, almost to a woman (for in my experience Jungians are almost always woman, though Corbett's story, maybe because it treats the top echelons of a religion, features only males), have been good, thoughtful, more or less honest people. I'm very excited that Jungians have their own real holy book now, and wish them the best in promoting their faith. In fact, I hope the various American Jungian institutes, even in these hard times, will put some money toward getting Corbett a movie deal. (Prestige all the way: Anne Hathaway as Corbett and Jean-Louis Trintignant as the ghost of Jung.)

Finally, I find the Red Book concept itself to be the grooviness of the fabulicity. Why doesn't everybody have a Red Book?