Pilgrim (39 page)
Jung stepped aside and sat down on a bench. From there, he watched his patient, who was kneeling still on the gravel with an expression of almost religious ecstasy on his face.
So,
Jung was thinking,
we have come at last to the visionary. We have come at last to the visions.
They waited there half an hour, just so, with Jung on the bench, Pilgrim kneeling and Kessler leaning against a tree.
At last, Pilgrim rose and dusted his knees. There were toast crumbs still in his hair and he brushed these aside, collecting them in the palm of one hand. He turned then for one last look at the tree—the deserted pine with its empty crown shining in the sun.
I will come back,
he decided.
I shall return and mark it.
He then led the way, no longer limping, no longer
frail but striding forward down the path towards the Clinic, spreading crumbs as he went.
Jung rose and shrugged. What would it mean, this mystical response of Pilgrim’s? Man—tree—and bird.
Kingfisher.
There were few enough of these about the Zürichsee. At Küsnacht, Jung had seen only one—and that had been three or four years before. And yet, clearly Pilgrim had some affinity with this rare and beautiful bird. But why—and how?
Perhaps in England they were plentiful and Pilgrim was merely homesick for them. He lived, after all, beside a river—though of course it was a river devoted to commerce where Pilgrim had his home. Farther inland…where did it rise, this river, the Thames? Oxfordshire—somewhere—Jung could not remember the other counties northwest of London. Not that it mattered. It rose for certain in pastoral splendour away from all that cities implied of dead waters and a dying countryside. Somewhere there a man could boat upon the rivers and spy upon whatever nature still had to offer.
The image of Pilgrim—garbed in white, seated, even reclining in a punt on the upper reaches of the Thames—was all too easily conjured. A parasol, perhaps—a woven hat—a notebook open on the knee—and a kingfisher diving to its prey in some undisturbed backwater. Very English. Very true to England. Very Edwardian. Very secure. Totally unthreatened.
And there was more. On the outskirts of this manorial vision, country lads and lasses lolled against the farmland fences, suitably
déshabillé
so as to suggest
availability should one desire a roll in the hay with a dairymaid or a knelt encounter with a stable boy.
England, this England.
All of it a lie, which nonetheless is dreamt upon and mourned before its imminent death.
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad…
That Jung was familiar with A.E. Housman’s poetry was not unusual, given the clientele at the Burghölzli. The English upper classes always brought such poetry with them. It was, for them, a sentimental crutch—a way of dealing with the realities their privileged lives had denied them. Ladies fell back, fainting, into the arms of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. Gentlemen wept into the pages of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Keats—and positively sobbed into the pages of Housman. Many times, Jung had had to look away, he was so embarrassed.
The English! The English! God help the snob-ridden, long-nosed, God-chosen English!
All this from having sighted a kingfisher.
In this, you yourself, Carl Gustav, are showing signs of a certain Germanic Aryan superiority to which you have no birthright,
the Inquisitor said.
You are
—
and please remember it
—Swiss!
They had finally reached the portico. Jung watched Pilgrim climb the steps and enter the building, followed by the squeaking orderly.
As Jung himself achieved the upper level, he turned
back to look out over the serried tops of the trees towards the mountains. The Zürichsee was not visible. In fact, its absence in the viewable landscape was quite deliberate. In planting the trees that rose between the Clinic and the lake, the founders of the Burghölzli had determined that none of their patients should have access to the sight of water, since too many of them were potential suicides and death by drowning is so easily achieved. But the mountains were there—the heights and the sky and the distant other ranges, grey and purple and misted.
Kingfisher
, Jung was thinking.
Kingfisher. Visions. Visionary
.
Well,
he decided,
we shall see.
It did not take long for the next encounter with the visionary aspect of Pilgrim’s troubled mind.
Two days later, Jung was walking with Archie Menken on the same path where Pilgrim had knelt in the gravel. They were debating the rift between Freud and Jung, which had begun in the early months of 1912 and was now beginning to widen. In time, it would culminate in a complete schism, but this had not yet occurred. Still, the relationship was greatly strained and it wavered back and forth between tentative attempts at reconciliation and outbursts on Freud’s part of outrage that his
appointed deputy
—
his adopted heir
—
the crown prince of psychoanalysis
should
dare to contravene Freud’s universal law that all psychoses rise from a well of sexual repression, sexual frustration and sexual abuse. Jung was deeply troubled. His admiration of Freud was basically unshakable. Nonetheless, he more and more disagreed with him. The more Jung learned—the more he explored—the more he believed that Freud had stumbled.
“It is the very same as having a life and death struggle with your father,” he told Archie Menken. “There are moments when I cannot bear it. Worst of all, there are moments when—dare I say it?—I resent him to the point of hatred. In some matters, he is simply a tyrant—and that I will not tolerate.”
Archie Menken shrugged and smiled. “You’re something of a tyrant yourself, C.G.,” he said.
“Maybe,” Jung granted. “Maybe.” He knew it was true. But genius itself was the tyrant. That was the problem in both his own case and Freud’s.
They had reached the bench where Jung had sat watching Pilgrim two days earlier and Jung, all at once, pulled Archie Menken by the arm.
“Look at that,” he said.
“At what?”
“That pine tree. There. Do you see what I see?”
Archie squinted.
“Possibly,” he said. But he saw nothing unusual.
Jung approached the tree and bent towards its trunk, supporting himself with one hand.
“Here,” he said. “This.”
Archie stepped forward and examined the place at which Jung had gestured.
Someone had carved the letter
T
into the bark, and the wound was bleeding resin.
“Maybe there should be a heart carved round it,” Archie joked.
“I think not,” said Jung.
The tone of Jung’s response was so completely serious that Archie Menken gave him a sideways glance.
“Does it mean something to you?” he asked.
Jung said: “yes,” though he did not yet know what it really meant. He knew only that Pilgrim had put it there—and knowing that, for the moment, was enough.
It would be some time before Jung discovered more about Pilgrim’s mark on the tree—and why it had been put there. The explanation lay in yet another volume of Pilgrim’s journals—a story still unread by any eye other than its writer’s.
I began these journals in part with the notion that I might recapture some of what I have experienced deep in the past, as well as recording what I have experienced day by day in my present life. Sometimes, it has been appropriate to record the past as dreams, since dreams form such an important part of my consciousness. Other times, there is nothing for it but to set things down in the same way I would formulate an academic statement
—
never a theory (I detest theories!) but a statement of those certainties which I hold
to be the centre of all my beliefs
—
truths and yet more truths. Never anything more and never anything less.
The story I must attempt to articulate now, however
—
in spite of its many truths and multiple certainties
—
is one more suitably told in the fashion of a tale. Indeed, almost in the fashion of a fairy tale. There is something so magical, mysterious and mystical about this story that it might have been conjured by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault.
Where their tales may be metaphorically true, this one is literally true, drawing as it does on my memories of life as a poor shepherd, and on the scholarship of later times.
Thus, though akin to what has been spun by greater imaginations than mine, this tale is itself entirely.
In the hills of the Sierra de Gredos to the northwest of Avila in Castile, there is a river called
la Mujer, the Woman
. The countryside is dusty and olive green—not drab, but always in need of washing down, of rain. The dust itself has a golden hue, and it lends a patina to everything on which it rests. A man’s hair, a woman’s skirts, the roofs of all the houses and the leaves of all the trees are gilded. The sheep who graze in these hills and the cattle who graze in their valleys are stained with this hue to such a degree that their hides and wool are prized for the making of boots and the weaving of carpets.
Deep in the Sierra there is a place known as
Las
Aguas
—
The Waters.
Here, a certain landowner, Pedro de Cepeda, had created a small lake by damming la Mujer with a daub-and-wattle weir so that his sheep, his cattle and his shepherds would have a universal meeting place for the twice-yearly gathering of the flocks and herds, during which the twin ritual of shearing and of slaughter could be organized.
Those cattle and sheep who were destined for slaughter—mostly steers and ewes—were separated here and driven southward over the mountains to the abattoirs at Riodiaz, from which their meats would go on to grace the tables of Madrid. Both shepherds and cowherds were always somewhat saddened by this gathering of doomed animals, the births of which they had overseen, and the care of which they had assumed over the years. In order to accommodate the sad emotions engendered by these moments, Don Pedro de Cepeda always provided a quantity of wine and music and rode out himself to be with his people.
Amongst his shepherds, in the year 1533, there was an eighteen-year-old simpleton whose name was Manolo. That he was simple-minded did not in any way prevent him from fulfilling his duties. He was both devoted to the sheep in his care and to the terrain in which they grazed. These hills and valleys were all he had ever known and his experience of life and of the world was limited to the ten-mile radius of the land he inhabited—
la tierra dorada
—its golden hue and its green shade. He had no memory of his mother. The man who claimed to be his father, having taught the boy everything a simple mind could
grasp, had moved on to a neighbouring area—still in the employ of Don Pedro de Cepeda, but entirely separated from his son.
In the high summer months of July and August, Manolo’s greatest pleasure during the hours of siesta was to swim in the tiny lake at Las Aguas. He would leave his sheep in the shade of a grove of scrub oak and his clothes on the shore, where his dog, Perro, could oversee the care of both. Sometimes Perro would plunge into the waters and swim with Manolo, but he always returned to the bank and to the shade. The heat was so oppressive there was very little motivation to do more than doze.
Manolo was lanky, long-legged and sinewy. If El Greco, still unborn, had wandered into viewing distance of Manolo at that time, his eye would have fallen on the perfect prize—the very model of his attenuated version of the male physique. Even to the colour of its flesh and the dance-like attitudes it assumed.
If beauty is a quality unto itself and not dependent on artifice, then it would be fair to say that Manolo was beautiful. So long as he was seen in the context of water or of sleep. In sleep, his busy arms and legs were stilled—while swimming, floating or paddling with Perro and—once ashore—streaming with the long, shining lines of water falling from his frame, he was a masterpiece of elongated proportions that were nothing less than perfect. But once in search of his shirt, his ragged trousers and his sandals, he lost all cohesion—every muscle fighting every other for control of his movements. To say that he was
spastic
was
to understate the case—though he could control his spasms while leaning on his sticks.
These sticks had been made for him by Don Pedro himself, who saw in the boy such a willingness to stand upright that his appeal was irresistible.
As for Manolo’s speech, he had a stammer. It began in his brain, where words would flood his need to speak. He sometimes did not have the wit to realize the words were in the wrong order, and this way he would say:
want sleep do I.
Smiling at Perro, he would add:
sleep thou too thou? Now thou thee and I lie down. Yes?
And so:
On an afternoon in late July in 1533, Manolo was floating face upwards in the lake when Perro, who had been dozing on the shore, all at once stood up and turned to face the trees in whose shade the sheep were sleeping.
There had not been a drop of rain for more than two weeks and the golden dust was particularly heavy on the leaves and over the ground. Perro’s coat, as well, was thick with it.
Was there a wolf?
A wild dog?
A thief?
High above him in the sky, Manolo could see the outstretched wings of a pair of eagles. Or were they buzzards? Had there already been a death—or were the birds merely following the hunting track of whatever was out there, certain that in time it would lead them to a kill? Manolo had known this to happen—that
the birds had divined the consequences of a certain pattern in the behaviour of wolves, wild dogs and foxes and followed it through to its inevitable conclusion.
