Dreamtiger Journal

On the I-land of Lesbos

Swiss Dreams - Trans-Century Fox - The Blue Fairy - Shankara - Complexes

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While outside strangers praise old norms 
Inside us strangers take new forms

Swiss Dreams

In “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Carl Jung writes that inside each of us there’s an anima (in men) or an animus (in women). For men, the anima is the inner female, an archetypal figure that’s both a foil and a guide, both a deception and a redemption. 

In our dreams the anima presents itself in multiple forms, from a dangerous femme fatale to a goddess who can save us from fatality. In the most traditional of Christian forms, one might say that she’s both Eve and Mary:

Traditionally, the priest tells us to avoid the former and embrace the latter. Yet Jung counsels us to let go of the ego and to enter into the fantasies of the anima, from one end of the spectrum to the other. We’re to let loose her power and wisdom, without losing control of our mind.

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For many years now I’ve suspected that my inner female self is a Chinese lesbian sex-maniac. If this is true, I have no idea how to handle her. I’m also a bit worried that she’ll slip through my fingers. And I’m also a bit worried that she won’t.

In a dream I had lately I saw a female inside me take the sly form of a vampire:

In my dream a Chinese lesbian put on an upper row of false teeth. The two eye-teeth were much larger than the others.

I’m not sure where this female figure inside me came from, although I used to say (drunk at parties) that I wanted to be reincarnated as a Chinese lesbian. I was also pretty sure that I was a Chinese lesbian in a past life. But I was an agnostic back then, and didn’t really believe in reincarnation.

I did, however, write a short story about a Canadian girl who was going to university in Geneva, picked grapes on the slopes west of Lausanne, and ended up in bed with a Chinese lesbian, a fellow grape-picker on the slopes. Like my hot-blooded protagonist, I also went to university in Geneva, picked grapes on the slopes west of Lausanne, and ended up in bed at the vineyard. But the resemblance ends there. I slept in the main building (my sister knew the owners of the vineyard; I was just a tourist grape-picker), while the Sicilian peasants slept somewhere else (the fact that I don’t know where they slept speaks volumes…). But my point here is that there was no question of a Chinese lesbian. I would have remembered that part — and I would have reworked it endlessly in my brain. 

If you have a hard time imagining that, or if you suspect I’m a fraud for writing from a lesbian’s perspective, you can read it for yourself. It’s in Part 2 of 🇮🇹 “Roman Holiday” 🔸 1. Campo de’ Fiori - 2. Outskirts. I assure you the sex is neither gratuitous nor orientalist, despite the mermaids, flowing gypsy skirts, and Chinese silk. 😉

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Trans-Century Fox

My interest in lesbianism was fuelled by scenes in films like The Last Emperor or Vicky Christina Barcelona:

I began to think more deeply about the topic when I taught Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand (1995).

The novel is about a Chinese-Canadian lesbian student at UBC. She gets caught up in romantic relations and also in old Chinese stories about foxes and sexy women. Lai borrows here from Pu Songling, who in his Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (c.1700) wrote about the supernatural, fox spirits, entanglements of passion, and possession by sexy fox-women. I suspect that for about 3000 years now the Chinese have tried to get into bed with such creatures without losing their heads.

In my dream a Chinese lesbian put on an upper row of false teeth. The two eye-teeth were much larger than the others. She said something like, “They’re just slabs of meat,” and leaned toward me for a bite.

I’m drawn to this type of dangerous beauty — Rosario Dawson, Scarlett Johansson, the eye-teeth of Alexandra Ocasio Cortès… 

My obsession wouldn’t be dangerous if I was more wary and less easily mesmerized. A beautiful woman can lead me by the nose like a sheep. And unfortunately, the anima can be as clever as the fox in Collodi’s Pinocchio. 

In one episode, Pinocchio is being duped by the fox and the cat. A blackbird tries to warn Pinocchio about who he’s dealing with. In a split second the cat jumps into the air, catches the bird in its teeth, and gulps the blackbird down. The fox quickly explains the cat’s actions, justifying, as he always does, their thuggish ways.

Even when the ghost of Talking Cricket (who Pinocchio killed earlier in the story) acts as Pinocchio’s conscience and warns him not to go into the forest, Pinocchio ignores the warning. He tells himself that the dangers of the forest are tall-tales made to scare children from going where they want. Parents and Talking Crickets are always sticking their noses in his business!

Pinocchio ends his encounter with the ghost of Talking Cricket by daring the hypothetical assassins of the night to catch him! After pronouncing these brave words, he hears a rustling in the nearby bushes. He then happens upon two murderous robbers with bags over their heads. Beneath the bags are Pinocchio’s old friends: the fox and the cat. 

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I too have wandered willfully into forests. During my Ph.D. years at UBC I’d bring a few joints with me into the forest and just start walking. It was a big forest (the Endowment Lands) and I didn’t know where I was going. But I didn’t care; the fresh air, the complete escape from studying, and the crooked footpaths put me in another world. I’d turn up the volume on my Walkman, blast The Who’s Quadrophenia or Radiohead’s The Bends, and run for hours like a madman along the twisting paths. 

The whole thing wasn’t quite as reckless as it sounds, since I knew that sooner or later I’d reach a road. In my general haze, yet focused on the intricate footwork necessary to avoid fallen branches and watery ruts, it never occurred to me that I’d meet a pack of coyotes. 

It never occurred to me that sooner or later I’d find myself in a dark wood, and would need the Blue Fairy. But back then, even if Talking Cricket lifted himself from his coffin of grass and crushed insects in order to warn me, I’d have laughed in his sad little face.

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All that’s necessary for me to lose my right mind is to see a pair of dark eyes and a flashing tail. This can happen anywhere, sitting in a cafe or sitting in front of my computer, scrolling through X Hamster, where girls do things to girls that we’re not supposed to talk about, and that I would never allude to, even in print. Trysexual and bumper-to-bumper, upside-down and in between. And when they do those things I go round and round the hamster wheel, from desire to desire, without a thought in the world.

But at some point the pack of coyotes gets tired of the grad-school idiot rampaging through their realm, and they try a new formation.

The two eye-teeth were much larger than the others. She said something like, “They’re just slabs of meat,” and leaned toward me for a bite.

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The Blue Fairy

According to Jung, what we need to do is bring together the various versions of the anima and listen to what they have to say. Only this way can we move from a stage of frightening vampire seducers to one of peace.

If only I could get scarlet Johansson and Mary Magdalene on the same page! But what to do if the page is scrolling on the Hamster Mill, the old wheel of Fortune, of Dharma, and of every future life that I can imagine for myself?

How to live without that physical release? How to find release from the beauty that I find in the sensual form — in the neck that curves so smoothly from the breasts (those soft arcs!) to the fine nose and the dark eyes that send my brain into a maelstrom? A male storm of hormones that aren’t on the screen but coursing through my blood? 

How can I deal with such an anima? What fairy godmother, what mystical power, what dream-goddess of sleep, might come to my aid? Would Mary or Saraswati, my favourite deities, help me in such a murky scenario?

Jung says that the various versions of the Blue Fairy are in fact the same anima. Once we accept the physical incarnations, the Scarlett Johanssons and the scissoring foxes, are we ready to be visited by angels? On what terms can I come to an agreement with this anima who’s at once so like me and so different from me? Sex but no biting? 

In my dream she was about to bite me, but a man was cradling me in his arms, and I was free to raise my right arm. I woke up before I found out what happened next. Would I have punched her in the face? 

Sense impressions are hard to ignore. It’s even harder to keep them from slipping into our dreams. At Redwoods Golf Course I was once attacked by a coyote. As it was bounding toward me I ran to my golf cart. The only other option was to swing my club at its head. That seemed too brutal, too much a last resort.

In Collodi’s story, Pinocchio arrived at all sorts of agreements with the fox and cat. The cat even did the math, calculating exactly how much money Pinocchio would make in The Field of Miracles if he put his four coins into the ground, covered them carefully with dirt, and gave them a good watering. But the cat and fox were ahead of him every step of the way. 

Luckily, Pinocchio had the Blue Fairy, who saved him every time. 

On the golf course I had my club, my legs, and a cart. In my dreams I have none of those things. All I can do is hope to meet the Blue Fairy.

I also console myself that in my dream the woman put in false teeth. I take this to mean that her bite isn’t real, and that the danger isn’t either. The dream seems to tell me that it’s only the fabric of an inner vision. It suggests that the image of a vampire is just so much tinseltown movie drama, and that there’s another level to the story, another meaning to the encounter.

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Tantra 

Beyond the particulars, beyond the eye-teeth and Jiminy Cricket, I wonder if I could get my unconscious to accept that my anima and I want the same thing, deep down. The conscious and the unconscious both want sex. Both love the bodies of women. But can we agree that while there should be no boundaries on what’s holy, this doesn’t mean that we need to deal in violence? Can we agree with Blake that Everything that is, is holy? Isn’t sex just a part of us, and isn’t it generally wonderful, blissful, even Tantric? Where is the need for violence? 

Or am I fighting a futile battle, against a million years of survival, against the selfish self, the violent part of our human DNA, that part of us that made us the most violent creatures on Earth? 

Can I get around that violence by a combination of transcendence and imminence, that is, by deep experience of peace and stillness, alternated with experience of sex, thereby easing the unconscious at its core and also exhausting the unconscious to the point where it doesn’t have the energy to think about violence? Can I fill myself with bliss, both spiritual and physical, to the point where my mind and body reach a point of stillness and satiation? Can I oscillate between poetry and meditation on one side, and sex and sport on the other? To put this in Hindu terms, can I appease both the rajas of movement, and the stillness of sattva, and thus avoid the chaos and destruction of tamas?

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Shankara

In his “Confrontation,” Jung writes that he chanced to meet “a highly cultivated elderly Indian.” The “ghostly guru” of this man was Shankara, the 8th Century philosopher of Absolute Non-dualism. According to Shankara, everything is Brahman, God. All relativity, all matter, all this that we see and hear is in fact, in essence, That Greater Reality. 

Does this mean that no matter what we do in our beds and in our dreams, everything is holy? That all this is That? 

This was more or less the philosophy of Rajneesh, who was hung on the spit of Hindu puritanism for pointing out that we do in fact have cocks and cunts, and that while we seldom talk about it we often like to put these body parts in close proximity. We desire to see breasts and the smoothness of a thigh leading to …. you get the idea (I’ll refrain from adding a picture). 

All of this may seem like the product of a dirty mind. It is. And yet, as Procol Harum notes in “A Lighter Shade of Pale,”

If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen,
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean.

Even if I never find out that my foxy Chinese lesbian sex-maniac is holy, I’d still believe that all this, and I mean all of it, is That.

After frolicking in the fields 
with the sweet milkmaids, like Rajneesh,
All I can say to the stern pandits, 
with their never-ending frowns, is Sheesh!

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Complexes

This anima, this sex maniac that visits me day and night, may be a psychological “complex.” Yet she also seems to be psychological fact embedded in the complex structure of my mind and body. 

Allow me to explain. Part of me is an ascetic, having been baptized by Shelly in my youth, and part of me is a sensualist, having been later converted to The Church of Byron through its high priest, John Keats. The sex maniac inside me brings the three poets together, into a sort of Romantic Trinity, into a sort of Vedic sacrifice in which everything is the food of love and beauty — the high, the low, and everything in between.

In a leap of Idealism I try to join the ancient Vedic poets, tying together sensuality and spirit in the type of flight Shelley describes in “Ode to the West Wind.” 

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

The language of the Vedic poets is stranger than that of Shelley, yet still I imagine it as a sort of universal poetry, picking up on natural imagery that everyone can understand. The way the poets mix sense and spirit makes me want to join them in their soma-drenched visions of flight.

These ascetics, swathed in wind, put dirty red rags on. When gods enter them, they ride with the rush of the wind.

I imagine a heady mix of heavenly flight and earthly sensuality: I see her sitting alone at a bar at the same moment she sees me. At the exact same moment we seduce and are seduced. Three pitchers of mead later we’re fucking our brains out in a strange studio, on a bed of dreams. 

The stallion of the wind, friend of gales, lashed on by gods – the ascetic lives in the two seas, on the east and on the west. 

He moves with the motion of heavenly girls and youths, of wild beasts. Long-hair, reading their minds, is their sweet, their most exciting friend.

In brief, in bed, embedded, no crack divides my conscious self from her in all her conscious and unconscious forms. Trauma there may have been, yet not a complex, at least not of a problematic kind. Tantra there was, like religion and poetry wrapped up inside me, together dancing beneath the sugared sky.

They are like girls anointing themselves with perfumed oil to go to a wedding. Where Soma is pressed, where there is sacrifice, there the streams of butter are made clear.

She’s a fox, an apsara, a bargainer no doubt, but not a Mephistopheles — unless we’re hell-bent on conjuring evil in the Garden of Delight. Unless we see, like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, a devil behind every bush. Bacchus and Saint Francis would be appalled. To chase this joy from the Garden would require a host of priests in black gowns, rotating day and night with fig leaves in their hands, doing their rounds.

I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, calling it honey.

(Rg Veda 10.136, 4.58, 8.48)

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All in all, it’s a victimless sin that beggars its own noun. For if these smooth body parts, this honeyed skin and eyes so black, were in fact a sin, it were better we were not born. 

Prudes find strange fashions behind each tree
And inside each root that fashions you and me

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