The Double Refuge ☯️ Herr Jung
Animal Dreams
I: Potions for Foxes
Constructions - My Chinese Lesbian Vampire
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Constructions
On this page I stress how difficult, even unnatural it is to make dream images conform to set figures, meanings, or patterns. Half in jest, I poke fun at the idea of constructing personas within one’s own mind. In this case I turn my anima, my ‘inner female,’ into a Chinese lesbian vampire who’s also a Chinese fox-spirit! Yet there’s a serious method behind this madness: implicitly I’m arguing that we shouldn’t mess around with our unconscious dreamworlds. Especially, we shouldn’t isolate, exaggerate, and personify the violent or disturbing aspects of our dreams.
What I suggest isn’t a clear mythic typography of characters, but rather a practical empirical interpretation: the images are just re-workings of our fears and desires, and also of the outer influences of a world that contains a great degree of violence and uncertainty. And when it comes to disturbing images that we can neither explain nor forget, I suggest that we place them 🔹 within vague patterns that self-destruct, 🔹 within eclectic fusions of patterns that lead into the vaguest of positive infinities, or 🔹 within time-honoured paradigms of peace, order, and love.
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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. One could imagine her as 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 our egos 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 own minds.
I have all kinds of problems with Jung’s counsel, although I don’t have a problem with his general direction, which is to look at the images and scenarios in our dreams, and think about why they’ve emerged. Yet his idea that we should create personas from these images and scenarios works better in the breach than in the observance. This is why I start this page by constructing an archetype, and end by blowing it up into a free flow of concepts.
I take a real scary dream image — a woman puts in a set of false vampire teeth and leans in to bite me — and interpret it in a Jungian manner, connecting it as best I can to other aspects of my life and to other images and personas — especially to the sexy foxes of Chinese myth and literature. Then I turn Jung’s method on its ear, doing to it what I do with all mysteries: throw it back into the bigger Mystery that theists call God, scientists call Wonder, and poets call Beauty. What Jung would call an anima dissolves in the fusion of two positive general concepts: Tantra and Soma. The former allows for an integration of sexuality and spirituality, while the latter induces a fusion of sensual and spiritual bliss.
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My Chinese Lesbian Vampire
While outside strangers praise old norms
Inside us strangers take new forms
A dream I had lately made me wonder if my anima wasn’t a Chinese lesbian vampire.
A Chinese woman put on an upper row of false teeth. The two eye-teeth were much larger than the others.
If my anima is a lesbian vampire, I have no idea how to handle her. I’m a bit worried that she’ll slip through my fingers, and I’m also a bit worried that she won’t. Her beauty and her icy demeanour have got me in her spell. And yet she doesn’t seem to want me, only my blood. She’s like the women in Bryan Ferry’s video:
I’m not sure where this anima comes from, although I suspect that she’s a lesbian who’s angry with me because I’ve insinuated my way into her exclusive Chinese dreamworld of sexy foxes and multiple incarnations. In the dream I didn’t have time to tell her how much admiration I have for her and her kind. But I suspect she wouldn’t have cared about my reasons or my feelings. Let me explain.
In the mid 90s I was invited by the poet Goh Poh Seng to his birthday party on Commercial Drive, a.k.a. Lesbian Central. Later in the evening I ended up in a back room with a group of young Vancouver writers. The lesbian writer I admired at the time, Larissa Lai, was there, and so was Goh Poh Seng’s son (he later wrote Surviving Samsara: A Memoir of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and Mental Illness). I remember being fascinated by Larissa: she had just came out with a novel about lesbians, Daoism, and Chinese myth, all of which were down my alley (I did my M.A. thesis a decade earlier on Daoism). But in talking to her I got the feeling that she couldn’t have cared less about my lesbian sinophilia.
It wasn’t her fault; I’ve always been a bit too enthusiastic about lesbians and Chinese women, although I can’t see how these preferences are bad. It’s a preference, not an exclusive contract. For years the blue eyes and perfect white skin of Scarlett Johansson was on my iPhone screen. Hell, she was even on my (now defunct) iGoogle homepage:
It’s possible to love Scarlett and also love Bhartrihari’s couplet, The clear light of man’s discernment dies / When a woman clouds it with her lamp-black eyes. In any case, when I was drunk at parties, I used to say that I wanted to come back as a Chinese lesbian. Yet I was an agnostic back then, and didn’t really believe in reincarnation. I just said that to shock people. In any case, everybody just ignored me and went on to the next round of mescal.
It was around that time — during those crazy grad school years — that I met a gay student who was keen to convert me. He took me to all the gay bars downtown, but I still lacked enthusiasm. I made it clear to him that I was strictly an observer, not a participant. In one final attempt he suggested we go with a mutual lesbian friend — and her pretty Chinese girlfriend… — to a bath-house on Hastings Street. How could I say no? What I saw there — two naked lesbians kissing two feet in front of me — is burned into my mind so deeply that I can’t tell if it caused my obsession, or if it merely shone a light on what was already there. Needless to say, my gay acquaintance realized the futility of his efforts, and I was left to imagine what I could never experience.
I did, however, write a short story about a bicurious young woman who went to university in Geneva. She 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 protagonist, I also went to university in Geneva, picked grapes on the slopes west of Lausanne, and ended up in a bed at a vineyard. But the resemblance ends there. 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 all that, or if you suspect I’m a fraud for writing from a lesbian’s perspective (I may well be), you can read it for yourself — in Part 2 of 🇮🇹 Roman Holiday 1. Campo de’ Fiori - 2. Outskirts. I assure you that the sex isn’t gratuitous and that the imagery isn’t orientalist, despite the mermaid, the flowing gypsy skirt, and the Chinese silk. 😉
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My interest in lesbians was no doubt engendered in my teens by Playboy and Penthouse, and by films like The Last Emperor and Vicky Christina Barcelona:
Yet I only began to think more seriously about lesbianism 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, Daoism, and sexy women. Lai borrows here from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (written around 1700), which features supernatural fox spirits, Daoist dissolution of dualities, entanglements of passion, and possession by sexy fox-women. I suspect that for about 5000 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.
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I’m drawn to this type of dangerous beauty — Rosario Dawson, Scarlett Johansson, the eye-teeth of Alexandra Ocasio Cortès…
My obsession with beautiful women wouldn’t be dangerous if I wasn’t such a dupe. And yet it almost seems unfair. You’re lying asleep, frozen on your dream-bed. Your sublaterodorsal nucleus has injected gamma-aminobutyric acid and glycine into your spinal cord and paralyzed your muscles. You’ve lost awareness of where you are and even who you are: sometimes you’re yourself and sometimes you’re thirteen years old; and sometimes you’re even someone else. In any case, you’re powerless to do the things you’d normally do.
For instance, you’re powerless to pause the replay button of the teacher dream:
You can’t find your classroom, you don’t have the book, you don’t have any pants on, you don’t know what the topic is, you don’t know who your students are. A gorgeous student offers to show you to your classroom. She takes a detour and opens the door of a staff washroom.
You’ve never experienced anything like that in 33 years of teaching. Yet in your dreamworld the part of you that you’ve forbidden just walks across the gangway into the floating world of your neurons, usurps the ship of mental state, and closes the door behind her.
In my dreams any beautiful woman can lead my dream-self by the nose, like a sheep in a long poem by Roger Waters. I repeat, any beautiful woman, even one who has no clue what novel we’re reading because she’s in fact not even a student in your class.
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Next: ☯️ II: Forests