Parting Shots 3

The planetary archetypes certainly provided us with objects to think with here. Instead of being unconscious of, and “being done by” them, to paraphrase Laurence Hillman (1999, online), we can use Saturn’s power to structure our lives the way we want. Rather than experiencing only limits and constrictions—we can become our own authority, instead of letting others write the script of our lives, as astrologer Caroline Casey (1996, cassette) says. With Pluto’s transformative power, we can have more control over our lives if we are able to work with the chaotic and primal energies instead of repressing them, and being manipulated and controlled by others. We can enjoy the freedom and insights of Uranus to awaken to new and different realities and possibilities, instead of being tricked and disrupted by accidents, and with Neptune, we can cultivate a deeper connection with the unconscious through dreams, reveries, and other nonordinary states of consciousness, along with art, instead of succumbing to addiction, illusion, and confusion. By seeing these principles at play in the world around us as part of the Cosmic Game, we can play with the gods instead of unconsciously being played with by them.

TS: I almost forgot, many of the different elements of the web site are also bricolage. Different collages that occur throughout are bricolage, in partial tribute to collage artist Max Ernst, who inspired Levi-Strauss’s idea. The ability to bricole your way through the dissertation, too, is another example of the freewheeling playful spirit of bricolage. Not to mention writing itself.

RO: That’s right. Blake and Abrego (2000) demonstrate the Plutonic, transformative aspects of the writing process that have been a major part of this dissertation.

writing is very much a tearing apart of who I am, pulling me—who I was—into little pieces. It’s as if something was being worked inside me. The writing is trying to put certain experiences into order, but before it can put them into order it has to take me apart. This is why part of writing the personal is so agonizing . . . this process or struggle, where a piece of experience is worked on, is connected to the soul, connected to making soul . . . . You have to destroy, tear down, in order to put together and rebuild. That’s why writing has saved our lives, because it makes sense out of this chaos. (p. 226)

TS: Before we leave bricolage behind, we should mention kaleidoscopes again, because, for me this is one of the most important aspects of bricolage. Kaleidoscopes are mandalas, and Trungpa says that “the mandala principle expresses the experience of seeing the relatedness of all phenomena… the patterns or phenomena become clear because there is no partiality in one’s perspective. All corners are visible, awareness is all pervading” (Avens, 1980, p. 83). By learning about bricolage, by and through bricolage—which is another way to say the way the universe plays—we have also been given a new way of seeing.

Grof’s cartography, which came initially from his LSD research, indeed does allow us to see with “kaleidoscope eyes,” as the Beatles so poetically put it. Other depth psychologists such as D. L. Miller, Guggenbuhl-Craig, Hillman, Freud and Jung have all used the kaleidoscope as a metaphor. For me the most playful is, as would be expected, D. L. Miller (1998), who improvising on Guggenbuhl-Craig, remarks that therapy is “the jiggle of the kaleidoscope.” This is one of the big benefits of bricolage, because we are constantly bricoling with language, from the letters of the alphabet, to words, to music, we can likewise bricole our lives. We can form, reform, and transform our reality, by rearranging our personalities and complexes. Sometimes we have patterns that don’t serve us in one context, but if placed in another context, these patterns would be great. This is where Milton Erickson’s work comes in, he was brilliant at utilization. Sometimes Erickson would simply rearrange parts of his clients' patterns to make those patterns work better for them. Stephen Gilligan, in his work with Self-Relations takes aspects of the problem state and combines them with aspects of the solution state, so that the next time a client finds himself faced with the problem situation, the solution resources are present as well. Gilligan (1997) combines the energy of playfulness with fierceness and tenderness to work his semi-Ericksonian magic.

RO: Now that we have seen bricolage at play and as play, lets look at of the other big themes as they have played out in the dissertation. We saw in the different turns of the "Kaleidoscope of Culture" the transformative power, the promise, and the perils of play, as play’s archetypal aspects have played out in the three pieces, Mary Poppins, Disneyland, and Chicago respectively. At different times, different archetypal themes were particularly pronounced.

In Chicago, for example, we reflected on play’s shadow side and the archetypal themes of the planetary archetypal complex Saturn-Pluto took center stage. The perils of play were revealed in Chicago, the dangers of identification, of becoming inflated, and believing your own press.

In Disneyland, we saw play’s promise, the upside of the imagination, as it were, to create new things, to mediate between opposites, and to keep us in touch with our neotenous roots, as the archetypal themes of the planetary archetypal complex of Uranus-Neptune expressed themselves.

With Mary Poppins, through play old patterns were transformed, and relationships restructured. Through nonordinary states of consciousness and a bit of Ericksonian magic, lessons were learned that even changed the community. Being able to adapt to different situations is vital. Sometimes greater structure is needed to surf through the chaos of our lives, while at other times, too much order is present and we need to add a little chaos. We saw the power of laughter, too, in Mary Poppins. Paul Pearsall (1998), in The Heart’s Code, speaking of laughter, notes:

It occurs when we experience a “jocular epiphany” or cardio-coherence of the kind that seems to happen whenever the brain’s illusion of its ultimate control over our destiny is exposed and when its arrogance is juxtaposed with the reality that we all get "the" way and not "our way." (p. 194)

That is certainly what happened with George Banks! Play gives us adaptive variability, one of its greatest gifts, and although the liminality that play provides may feel unsettling to some, this joker, or wild card in the evolutionary deck, to paraphrase Victor Turner (1988) is one of the most important aspects for our survival as a species. Mary Poppins teaches us these things, which the Uranus-Pluto planetary archetypal complex portrays.

In these different cultural pieces and within these themes, other themes have been at play as well, which we will briefly allude to next.

TS: Unlike audioanimatronics, whose endless repetitions stay the same, our iterations don’t reiterate exactly, and small changes can lead to big differences. “Inconsequential things can have a huge effect in a nonlinear universe” (Briggs & Peat, 1989, p. 75). We saw this in Mary Poppins. But this reiteration is important, because it has been bringing us back to childhood, back to beginnings, back to illo tempore and the importance of renewal. Like chaos theory, we have been reiterating the same simple equation, the death-rebirth pattern of the Cosmic Game. This pattern is present in rituals which take us back to illo tempore, the magical, liminal time of beginnings and renewal. In Mary Poppins, Bert alludes to this when he muses: “I feel what’s to happen all happened before.” The narrator in Disney's Peter Pan (Geronimi & Jackson, 1953) makes a similar statement. Disneyland gives us the eternal return of audioanimatronics and the importance of returning to childhood. Disneyland's immense success demonstrates the importance of neoteny, and Disneyland provides us a place to experience of the charm of communitas.

RO: As we have hinted at previously, the eternal return of the Cosmic Game is liminal. At Disneyland, liminality has more utopian and communitas feel; roles are reversed and children are often in charge. Freedom is found, if only for a few hours, from old structures and statuses, providing a pause that refreshes.

In Mary Poppins liminality was more chaotic, but truly transformative, and we were treated to liminal adventures into art and a nonordinary pilgrimage, too. The liminality that George Banks experiences for most of the movie shows us that play's transformative power is not always pleasant, that play is "not all fun and games," after all.

Chicago’s liminality was different, it highlighted the Plutonic life- and death struggle, and reminds us that this chaotic time is sometimes dangerous and unpredictable, and it needs to be respected.

The different cultural pieces showed us different facets of the Trickster, too. In Mary Poppins and Chicago, tricksters and their tricks are differently inflected. In Mary Poppins, the trickstar and trickster, Mary and Bert use tricks in the service of saving others, or transforming the situation for the benefit of all. In Chicago, the trickster and trickstar, Billy Flynn and Roxie are only out for themselves, and Roxie almost ends up getting tricked by her own tricks.

TS: While we’re on the subject of Tricksters, I’d like to share a bit more about laughter and the trickster from Paul Pearsall (1998):

When something touches our “funny bone” and we “get” the cosmic joke of our brain’s arrogant illusion of power, we are bent over in humble acknowledgement of our place in the universe. Anyone who has been profoundly disappointed when their most carefully arranged objectives crumble because of some unexplainable and random cruel twist of fate knows that, when the brain plans, God laughs . . . . (p. 203)

The wise heart knows that the trickster most often appears at those times when the brain thinks everything is going just the way it planned. The trickster’s job is to be the jester of chaos, to remind us that nothing goes perfectly for too long, and to trick us into enjoying good times while they last.

If we are not open to the trickster effect, he will keep coming back until we learn what he has to teach us about humility . . . .

We need the trickster’s little jokes on us to remind us to pay more attention to the gift of being alive. He teaches us about who we are and what we can and can never be, even if his lessons are often clumsy and disturbing to our plans and image of who our brain thinks we are. Our brain would like to keep the trickster our of our life, but our heart knows well how to play, learn and laugh with the trickster. Dr. Larry Dossey writes, “we can never banish the Trickster. To do so would be to amputate a vital part of our self, including our need to create, to frolic, to love, to be—in a word, human . . . . (pp. 205-206)

The word “silly” derives from the Greek "selig" meaning “blessed.” There is something sacred in being able to be silly, living in tolerant peace with the trickster, and being aware of the heart’s wisdom as revealed by its humor. (p. 208)

RO: Tricksters are indeed vital to both of these stories, as they come in and upset the established orders, leading to greater freedom all around. And while we’re still on the subject of Tricksters, one of my favorite writers is Tom Robbins, a very playful writer and master trickster in his own right. In a couple of different interviews, he captures this vital part of play in the world and in his own writing:

There's a level on which life might be perceived as a joke, on which it literally is a joke, and this bothers a lot of people. The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom. (Kirby, 1999, online)

And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books — provided the reader does finish the book — I would like for him or her to be in the state that they would be in after a Fellini film or a Grateful Dead concert. Which is to say that they've encountered the lifeforce in a large, irrepressible and unpredictable way and as a result their sense of wonder has been awakened and all of their possibilities have been expanded . . . . I think the novels that are most important are those that are more on the order of those coyotes that howl on the hills outside of town. Something mysterious and wild and hypnotic. [I’m] cheerfully cynical. My view of the world is not that different from Kafka's, really. The difference is that Kafka let it make him miserable and I refuse. Life is too short. My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people. (Richards, 2002, online)

I’d also like to add that both of the tricksters, Bert and Billy are bricoleurs. Bert is more of an odd jobs man, who changes his occupation to fit the circumstances, while Billy creates a whole new identity for Roxie out of bits and pieces of information from her past, and is utterly unconcerned with the truth value of things.

TS: Speaking of creating things, we, too, "are all just making it up," as Tom Robbins (1995) has reminded us, but we forget this and begin to believe our own press—taking ourselves way too seriously. We could instead decide, in the best tradition of depth psychology to create "healing fictions" instead. Like the children learn in Mary Poppins, we could see things differently. In life, we can rearrange things and be able to recover, respect, and reintegrate things we have formerly repressed. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking the world is a certain way, when in reality, we’re just projecting our meanings upon it. We then become convinced it's real and that it’s the only way. Roxie in Chicago, who gets caught up in the reality of her fantasy, or George Banks in Mary Poppins, who is stuck in the rut of his routine, happily unconscious in his habits are examples of this.

If we do fall prey to becoming tricked by our illusions, we find that the unconscious gives us a balancing or curative experience to get us back into play. The real truth is that its all a fiction, we’re all making it up, it’s a story and we’re creating it. However, as we saw in the "Cosmic Game" chapter, like Harold and the Purple Crayon (C. Johnson, 1955), we frequently forget this, and then we find we’re in over our own heads, swimming in a mess of our own making.

RO: In all three cultural pieces we saw that fantasy affects reality. In Chicago, Roxie’s fantasies affected her world, in both positive and negative ways, and in Mary Poppins, the fantasies created by Mary ended up changing everyone in the end. Disneyland, too, has had an amazing effect on the world around us, as theming has become “the thing,” from the strip mall down the street, to the Las Vegas strip, and multiculturalism, as Brode (2006) argues, might just have begun with “the mouse.”

TS: With both Mary Poppins and Chicago, we saw the dangers of being too one-sided, of being de-luded, or out of play. Remember, Jung said that one-sidedness was what neurosis was all about? When this happens, the unconscious tries to bring us back into play by constellating the opposite. Roxie and Velma were each other’s nemesis when they became too one-sided and in Roxie’s case deluded. George Banks’s overly ordered Saturnian structure was just begging for chaos to come in. Cosmic Play is all about transformation and movement. As Roxie sings in Chicago, “nothing stays.” If we try to break the rules and remain rigid, we’re just inviting in the cosmic “2 by 4 experience,” –getting hit in the head with one, to shake us free.

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