Hermes is integral to hermeneutics; he is also at the center of Jung’s stone, and has played a central role in my dissertation and my life. He is the trickster who keeps me on my toes. He brings me hermenia—gifts of Hermes, and with him synchronicities abound. Hermes guides me in my efforts and all roads seem to lead back to him. My dissertation is the back and forth motion of a game of hide and seek, played with the god whose first act was bricolage—making a lyre out of the kaleidoscopic shell of a tortoise (Kerényi, 1976/2003). Hermes will visit us many times during this journey.
Alice didn’t think much of a book without pictures or conversations, and my dissertation is the result of many dialogues between the works I have chosen to see play through. I have been put into question by my topic and after much methodological lingering proceeded to put the question, “What are play’s cosmic dimensions?” to these different works of culture. These cultural creations, Chicago (Marshall, 2002, motion picture), Disneyland, and MaryPoppins (Stevenson, 1964, motion picture) have had quite a lot to say. These creations, along with all of the authors whose work I have read, and the teachers who have educated me, were my partners in dialog.
The dialogical notion of hermeneutics informs the form of the dissertation as well—the hypertext structure is an attempt to elude the despotic eye of linear book consciousness (Romanyshyn, 2002). As McLuhan (2003) said in 1964 said, “the medium is the message,” and the kairotic, and perhaps, at times, chaotic shuffling back and forth that the Internet allows will enable readers of my dissertation to experience the dissertation in whatever way suits them the best. Since participation and experience are important in play, the dissertation as web site allows for improvisation and bricolage “Internet style”—the ability to have it your way, not the way I wrote it. It will give some room in which to move about, so that a bit of spielraum or freeplay can occur and may even occasion a moment of synchronicity or two.
Ulansey (2003, lecture) posited that the Internet is an alchemical vessel at the threshold moment of kairos that we are currently experiencing. Hermes, the most playful of the gods is also the god of Alchemy. He shuttles back and forth between the gods, delivering messages, and presides over the transformational alchemical process where he is both the prima materia and philosopher’s stone. The god of communication, Hermes works by way of indirection and stealth. He is a trickster who specializes in synchronicity.
By using the Internet, instead of a purely linear textual presentation, I hope to be more true to the oral bias that Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) discuss. Conversations themselves are complex, they twist and turn, they go off on tangents and then come back to the point, or sometimes not at all, in this way being more like “complex knowing.” The web site allows you, the reader, to be stopped and to pursue your own way, to be able to explore as you fancy, and not necessarily in the order that I, as authorial ego, have discussed things. You, as the reader, may find yourself skipping over entire sections, or pursuing things beyond the scope of the dissertation, out onto the Internet and the larger world beyond.
By using the Internet, instead of a purely linear textual presentation, I hope to be more true to the oral bias that Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) discuss. Conversations themselves are complex, they twist and turn, they go off on tangents and then come back to the point, or sometimes not at all, in this way being more like “complex knowing.” The web site allows you, the reader, to be stopped and to pursue your own way, to be able to explore as you fancy, and not necessarily in the order that I, as authorial ego, have discussed things. You, as the reader, may find yourself skipping over entire sections, or pursuing things beyond the scope of the dissertation, out onto the Internet and the larger world beyond.
The artwork considered in this dissertation, Chicago (Marshall 2002), Disneyland, and Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964, motion picture) provided different horizons, and opened up worlds that allowed play’s cosmic aspects to come to light and show through. I played with the multiple images in a place of reverie, allowing them to speak through me. With the exception of Jung’s stone at Bollingen, all of these works are easily accessible and are a part of popular culture. By exploring them, I hope to have expanded depth psychology’s horizon as well, to the popular, the playful, and understandable. Just as Jung sought to make his thought more comprehensible to the average reader when he wrote Man and His Symbols (Jung & Von Franz, 1964), I too have sought to make depth psychology and play’s archetypal aspects more accessible to a wider audience than academia usually reaches.
Gadamer writes that “there is the question the text puts to us (we are called into question), a point that often gets overlooked when critics seek to demonstrate their superiority to the text” (Krajewski, 1992, p. 9). In contrast to critics like Derrida, who practice the hermeneutics of suspicion, we will follow a more Gadamerian, Jungian route and look to these various pieces of art as visionary or sacred windows to help us see through to play’s cosmic dimensions. Krajewski, in discussing literary criticism versus hermeneutics, points out:
Gadamer is the speaker for the horizontal, for horizons, for a broad historical picture that includes material considerations, and is very much concerned with the pedestrian, the plebeian, or as Gadamer would call it, the senus communis. One of the reasons some people criticize hermeneutics stems from the latter’s horizonal positioning. When everyone else is off to the Critical Crusades, bashing other critics, hermeneuticists seem to be lying down, relaxed, listening. Unlike the crusades of the Middle Ages, the Critical Crusades deliberately exclude “simple” folk, though those same critics claim to be speaking on behalf of those people. Generally critics talk to themselves. Edward Said has pointed out that new books of literary criticism reach an audience of about 3,000 composed mainly of academics, and that much of this criticism exhibits a “private-clique consciousness embodied in a kind of critical writing that has virtually abandoned any attempt at reaching a large, if not mass, audience.” (pp. 21-22)
By having my dissertation in the form of a web site, I have sought to be faithful to Pacifica’s motto, “Tending soul in the world,” not only moving out of the consulting room and into the world, but out of academia and onto the Internet, linking with the world, sharing these worlds of play with a wider audience.