Parting Shots 4

Limitations and Difficulties

RO: I hate to switch subjects, but this hasn’t been all fun and games you know.

TS: Tell me about it. There have been many difficulties and limitations, which interestingly enough mirror our subjectmatter here. Since play is a universal process, it can’t be contained very easily and play is very tricky. Spariosu (1989) said that “play is one of those elusive phenomena that can never be contained within a systematic scholarly treatise; indeed, play transcends all disciplines, if not all discipline” (p. xi).

RO: Now you tell me. No wonder things keep on getting out of the nice little categories that we like to impose and become so complex. It is because play is that way. Also, in the "Prelude" we said that play is indefinable. One reason for this, Brown (personal communication, February 3, 2005) notes is because it precedes linguistic capabilities so it can’t be captured totally by language, and play isn’t always easy to talk about. Besides, because play has a galumphant nature, Brown adds “it has a sweeping spectrum, and is hard to study because it is so broad. It is difficult to measure play because it has so many components and if you analyze play too much, you lose it." Here, we have only dealt with three cultural creations and look at what we have come up with!

TS: We also have the previously mentioned fact that since we’re dealing with archetypes, there is a tendency for a bit of tangling to occur, since archetypes are constantly intertwining. It makes a systematic discussion problematic at best, and also due to this intertwining interconnectedness, we seem to always come up with a lot of things in our net. Play has been tricky in this way, it is constantly upsetting any order that we have tried to impose, especially limits of any kind. Play merely skips over boundaries, laughing all the way.

Future Study

RO: What about areas of future study? Wasn’t this dissertation supposed to be about the Bolllingen Stone?

TS: Yes, but, once again, as the spokesperson for the stone, since I am featured on the middle of it, I have once again eluded another researcher. Jung told Maud Oakes that volumes could be written about his stone, yet she ended up talking mostly about her experiences, and here we have mostly been talking about popular cultural creations. I have no doubt at some point, volumes will be written about the stone, and I’d also like to explore a few more cultural creations to try and find a few more archetypal aspects that didn’t get covered as deeply as I would like to have seen, such as the relationship of play and the transcendent function and play as the mediator between opposites. You know that Jung was writing Aion (1951/1979) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56/1977) at the same time that he carved me, and I feel that this is an area of fertile research, especially in today’s polarized world.

I’d also like to look into bricolage a bit more, as well as seeing more how Object Relations fits into the picture. I think that more mathematical or computer minds than ours, might explore play and chaos theory or virtual reality, too. Some of the other cultural creations I’d like to explore are Pleasantville (Ross, 1998) and The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939), as well as Tom Robbins’s (1995) novel Skinny Legs and All.

RO: I know that you say that the Bollingen stone has proved elusive once again, but I think that many of the lessons of the stone are indirectly contained here. For example, although Jung ordered a more triangular shaped stone, for his wall at Bollingen, what is now the Bollingen stone was sent by mistake, and its shape was a perfect cube, a dice shape, if you will. And interestingly we took a lot of time talking about Shiva’s cosmic dice game! We looked a bit at some of the aleatory (chance), or Uranian aspects of the play as we went along, to which this dice shape could allude. And the eastern side of Jung’s stone, the one you’re featured on, contains three different sentences, some of the lessons of which have been alluded to here.

First of all, the stone is very obviously a bricolage, carved in stone, but a bricolage nonetheless. It also contains all of the astrological glyphs, pointing to astrology as an ever-turning kaleidoscope, because it also has a circular shape inside it. Jung was a bit of trickster himself, and enjoyed shaking things up. He also played with the things of his childhood, as we did here with different parts of the dissertation. Mary Poppins and Disneyland are two childhood favorites, and both Walt Disney and the writer of this dissertation were born in Chicago.

TS: Now that you mention, it I can see what you mean. Jung told Maud Oakes that the “Axiom of Maria” was expressed by the three zigzag lines and the one wavy line (Wagner, 2001). The "Axiom of Maria" is a saying from alchemy which essentially says: the one becomes the two, which becomes the three which becomes the fourth, as the one. The myth of Shiva’s dice game seems to have a similar structure, now that I think about it. Also, the dissertation itself perhaps mirrors this. If we consider one to be bricolage, what the entire dissertation is, two are the two parts of the dissertation—the "Cosmic Game" and the "Kaleidoscope of Culture," three are the three cultural pieces, Chicago (Marshall, 2002), Disneyland, and Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964) that show different archetypal aspects of play, and the fourth as the one, is that its all the Cosmic Game, Shiva’s dice game, the way the universe plays—what the cartography of the psyche shows us, the death-rebirth process, and again, it's bricolage!

RO: I’d like to take a stab at the different sentences. The first one is a Heraclitus fragment—“time is a child, playing like a child, playing a boardgame, the kingdom belongs to the child” (Jung 1961/1989, p. 227). This possibly sentence alludes to the Saturnian aspects of play, being rule-bound and having its own time and space set aside for it. Also it could be pointing to the importance of neoteny. This sentence alone has much more to reveal, but that will have to wait.

The second sentence is “This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths" (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 227). Jung tells us that this sentence alludes to the Mithras liturgy, a mystery religion that at one time rivaled Christianity. The central Mithras mystery was thought to be the precession of the equinoxes (Ulansey, 1991), and shows the power of astrology in a more ensouled cosmos. These mystery religions also had very powerful initiation rites which were very liminal, and a study of this side of the stone would reveal many amazing things, and it seems that this sentence points to the Plutonic realm. This sentence also introduces you, the Telesphoros, the little hooded assistant of Asclepius, who is thought to have helped in bringing dreams, and which Shulman (1997) briefly alludes to as possibly representing the healing power of the irrational. I’m sure that you could “say more” about this, but we’re almost through here, so it, too, will have to wait.

The last sentence on the stone is from the last book of the Odyssey: “He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.” (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 227) The gates of the sun are the constellations of Cancer and Capricorn, which are the signs in which the solstices occur. Again we have astrological significance shown, and the solstices also represented the death and rebirth of the Sun, and the king. Odysseus was a trickster hero, too, bringing in a bit of Uranian flavor, and so we can see that many of the themes that we discussed throughout the dissertation could become the basis of a study of this one side of the stone. The land of dreams could possibly be the age of Aquarius, again reflecting the planetary archetype Uranus, or it could refer to a more Neptunian kind of dream, or as Erickson was so fond of saying, “Maybe its both at the same time.” And there are three other sides! No wonder Jung said that volumes could be written.

TS: Speaking for the stone, I know that it would not be content to share the stage with others, because it deserves a work of its own. The stone still remains an enigma, on the quiet, contemplative shores of Lake Zurich, awaiting future study.

Like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) we may never be able to understand all of the mysteries that the Bollingen Stone holds, but the stone has definitely served, as the Monolith did, as a vehicle for the creation of consciousness, and that’s probably why Edinger (1984) picked the stone for his book The Creation of Consciousness, which is what got this whole thing started in the first place. As Dave Bowman said in 2010 (Hyams, 1984) said of the Monolith: “My God, Its full of Stars,” and so is the Bollingen stone. Who knows what the significance of Jung’s placement of these glyphs signified? Perhaps the transcendent function, perhaps something more alchemical . . . .

By the way, in case you didn’t notice, this side of the stone is part of the top section of the web site, in the top left-hand corner, and the stone is also present in the "Prelude" icon.

Wrapping it up

RO: Well, this dissertation began with an allusion to Tinker Bell in Peter Pan (Barrie, 1928), and so it seems fitting to end that way. Tinker Bell and Peter Pan have been with us all the way through, whenever we talked of neoteny, we could almost feel the pixie dust. J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan was written near the turn of the Twentieth Century in 1904, near the time of Walt Disney’s birth in 1901. The Disney classic movie Peter Pan (Geronimi and Jackson) came out in 1953, while plans for Disneyland were being made. The animated movie begins over London, the same scene that will be used a decade later in Mary Poppins, and in both movies, illo tempore is invoked: “it happened before.” Then Peter Pan play took to Broadway as a musicl at the same mid-1950s time, and neoteny was making news then, too, as “the Peter Pan effect.” And finally, as the dissertation was in process, Peter Pan (Hogan, 2003) again became a movie and Finding Neverland (Forster, 2004), told the story that inspired the creation of Barrie’s play. Play’s importance is breaking into consciousness with these doublings, as we and Von Franz (1977) have previously noted.

TS: You know, when we were watching Finding Neverland, I realized that Walt Disney had indeed given us Neverland with Disneyland, a place of neoteny, where we can realize play’s amazing promise; where we can share in the communitas and revel in the renewal, as we get a respite from our ordinary world. Disney's movies give us a trip back to imaginal illo tempore, too.

TS: Disneyland’s logo is Sleeping Beauty Castle. Located at the hub, it is where Tinker Bell flies down from and where fireworks illuminate the night sky. Tinker Bell and the Castle also brought the Wonderful World of Disney into our homes in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Tinker Bell moment at Sleeping Beauty Castle is animatedly stylized in the Disney Motion Pictures Logo. The importance of the imagination and of neoteny is pointed to by these things, just as I am pointing to the land of dreams on the stone. Ancient peoples realized the power of the imagination and of liminality. Their rituals took them back to illo tempore, as a place of renewal, where they could play with the things of their world, in bricoleur fashion. With Disneyland, we remember the importance of neoteny, of beginnings, of illo tempore, of believing in magic, not to be superstitious, but to believe in the possibility provided by our neotenous roots.

RO: Depth psychology has from its beginnings, been concerned with origins. With Freud, the focus was on the personal unconscious, and with Jung it was the collective unconscious. With Grof’s cartography, our playground has assumed cosmic proportions. As we saw throughout this dissertation, this pattern of renewal, of death and rebirth and the endless cycle of the eternal return, recurs everywhere. The only time we get into trouble, which is often, is if we forget this cosmic pattern, and try to hold on, and not go with the flow of transformations.

TS: Whoa, boy! Let's get back to Tinker Bell and wrap this thing up.

RO: Okay, but first lets just set the stage a bit, for the finale. Remember, on the DVD, of Finding Neverland (Forster, 2005, DVD) we took advantage of all the extras and watched the Magic of Neverland Special and also the Red Carpet and the director commentary? Well, I’ve pieced together, or more appropriately bricoled together some of my favorite lines from all of those places that for me express our theme here. David Magee, the screenwriter said that the quintessential part of the movie was that Barrie was attempting to give Peter back his childhood. We also learned that the preface to the play Peter Pan tells the actors that the “only important adornment they need bring with them is a child’s outlook.” Some of the people involved in the production shared their insights:

Producer Richard Gladstein: Not only is it important to rediscover your childhood, its more important probably to stay a child.

Dustin Hoffman: Never grow up, never be a grown up, be an adult, be mature, but don’t be a grown up.

Johhnie Depp: I think what Barrie was saying is do your best not to grow up so quickly—you can grow old and be an adult, but maintain those beautiful qualities . . . . What I feel is important is the freedom to invent things however ridiculous—don’t be afraid to take risks, to be creative, and try things.

Producer Nellie Bellflower: These are children who are allowed to be children and play and have imagination. There must be something in people that makes them want very badly to keep in touch with the child inside them. (Forster, 2005, DVD)

Lastly, Andrew Birkin (2003), author of James Barrie and The Lost Boys captures the moment that we began the dissertation with. The Tinkerbell dying scene:

On December 27, 1904, the curtain finally rose and Peter Pan was rapturously received. It was done for a first night West End audience made up of adults and Barrie up to the last minute was pretty convinced that there might be a problem when Peter turns to the audience and says—if you believe in fairies clap your hands, but the audience started clapping. Nina Boucicault playing Peter Pan couldn’t finish her line and the response was such that she burst into tears and ran from the stage. From that day to this, as far as I know in the live theater, that line never failed: "Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands. Clap louder." (Forster, 2005, DVD)

TS: Now, more than ever, we need to keep the spirit of play alive. Do you believe in play? Say quick that you believe. Take your hand off the mouse and clap your hands. Clap louder!

Cosmic play is the way the universe works, and we need to play with it instead of playing against it. The creation of consciousness is object of the Cosmic Game, and as we have seen it’s the only game in town, and how it happens is the death-rebirth process. We can become more conscious players by heeding the lessons that we have learned here, and the possible strategies proposed, or we can look more deeply into other aspects of the kaleidoscope and find still other lessons to be learned, to quote Chocolat’s (Hallström, 2000) narrator, “ by someone else, next time.”

RO: Well, in parting, I’d like to leave us with one last quote, from The Fantasticks (Jones & Schmidt, 1990), the longest running Off Broadway musical ever which began in the 1960's: “There is a curious paradox that no one can explain who understands the secrets of the reaping of the grain? Who understands why spring is born out of winter’s laboring pain or why we must all die a bit before we grow again” (p. 106). Ask Jung, Rank, Campbell, Grof, Briggs and Peat, or Mary Poppins—they could tell you.

TS: By the way, in case you were wondering—It’s ALL about play, Alfie!

END OF CHAPTER AND FINALLY, END OF DISSERTATION. NOW I'M GOING TO DISNEYLAND!!!