Pilgrim (61 page)
His foibles, if I may call them that, were endearing. His rejection of certain foods—his insistence on having his bath be of a certain temperature—his bad-tempered letters to
The Times—
his unfailing loyalty to friends, et cetera, et cetera. His discipline was exemplary and he wrote every day. He could be wonderfully rude to people of whom he despaired and equally patient and polite with people, however boring, who felt they had something of importance to say to him. He never required me to shut the door in anyone’s face—a form of rudeness he deplored—but he did instruct me on some occasions, having ascertained who had rung the bell by looking down from above, not to open the door.
That will save you from slamming it,
he would say
.
As to Mister Pilgrim’s demise, I can only say this: that I
was absent in the Auberge for no longer than ten minutes, during which time I arranged our luncheon as instructed. When I emerged to inform Mister Pilgrim of this, he was nowhere to be seen.
A young person came and told us someone had driven an automobile into the Loire. I knew at once that it was him. Mister Pilgrim.
Everything was done that could be done to recover him, but he was gone. Now we are without him. I will grieve until I die. Though he was, of course, my employer, I believe he was also my friend.
You and I did not meet, but I got what I know of you from Lady Quartermaine, who had the utmost faith in your care of Mister Pilgrim. As it turned out, she was mistaken; and while I do not intend that as an insult, the truth remains—we all lost him.
In a few days, or many, we shall no doubt hear of the discovery of Mister Pilgrim’s body, in which case, I shall return to France to reclaim it. It will then be my sad duty to see him properly dealt with—cremated, as he wished, and scattered in the garden at Cheyne Walk, where he was happy.
In the meantime, I wish to say that I discovered the enclosed letter in Mister Pilgrim’s luggage. It is addressed to yourself and so I must assume that he meant you to read it—which, of course, I have not done. I have kept his fountain pen as a memento. It is blue—his favourite colour.
I remain,
Sincerely yours,
H. Forster, Esq.
Pilgrim was never found. Forster never returned to France. A lifetime had ended. Or one of them.
Jung set Forster’s letter aside and sat for a moment mourning the loss of Pilgrim and also, as he sat there, mourning his increasing awareness of what had been lost to him forever in Pilgrim’s imagined recreation of the past.
He flirted with the phrase
creative recreation of the past
—also,
a decisive recreation of the past
—and even
a definitive recreation of the past
. But he could not settle on any one of these. What was it that Pilgrim had achieved with such supreme confidence?
Madness is always confident of its own resources
, Jung decided.
Madness always knows its own boundaries and never wavers. It speaks more truly from its own heart than I am able to speak from mine…
He smiled.
Madness knows itself through and through
, he went on,
and we who are not mad know nothing through and through. We guess—we stumble towards truths—we disguise our uncertainty with apologies and silences, claiming politely that we “know” nothing, while giving the appearance of knowing everything. Mister Pilgrim never once stepped back from being himself. He lived entirely on the brink of everyone’s acceptance, while suffering the endless deprivation of anyone’s belief. He was never allowed to cross the line…
Who had ever said to him
: I believe you.
Only Lady Quartermaine, so far as Jung could tell—and even with her, there was a wariness. She wanted to believe. At least that much was true.
Jung took the second letter and unfolded it.
It was no longer than three and a half pages. Its salutation said:
My dear Herr Doktor Blockhead…
Jung smiled yet again. Here was Mister Pilgrim, intransigent to the end—ever pressing forward with his attack on reason.
“You don’t have to believe this, but you should,” Jung whispered—echoing Pilgrim’s voice.
My dear Herr Doktor Blockhead,
As I near the end of my journey, I remind you that you once said to me that if you were to believe me, I must imagine myself in Galileo’s shoes, or the shoes of Joan of Arc or of Louis Pasteur. You made the point that each of these visionaries had faced tribunals entirely made up of sceptics but that none had retreated from the need to be believed. Each had pressed forward, even after death, until in time they were proven right. The earth does revolve around the sun, God does seek to be heard through His saints and inoculation does prevent disease. An eclectic trio of believers, to say the least.
But I am wary, now, of tribunals. Wary and weary. You have pondered the question of whether there might be what you called in my presence once:
the collective unconscious of humanity,
a phrase I believe you coined
.
Clearly, Herr Doktor Dunce, the answer is yes—for I am living proof of it. I have been
present at every turning of humanity’s fortunes and, as I have attempted to impress upon you, the burden of the
collective unconscious
has been, for me, doubly unbearable—since in all my time the human race has steadfastly turned away from the gravity of its own warnings, the integrity of its own enlightenment and the beauty of its own worth.
The evidence is overwhelming. At every given opportunity, we have rejected the truth of our collective memory and marched back into the flames as if fire were our only possible salvation.
I have been much and often aware over the past few years of yet another conflagration standing in our immediate path. I cannot tell what form it will take, but it is there and it awaits us. Sooner rather than later, we shall be impelled to embrace it. All because we have refused yet again to pay attention to the educated voices inside of us that have called out universally:
STOP
!
And of course, neither you nor anyone else believes that what I have foreseen will actually come to pass. Not to be believed is part of my eternal punishment—my life sentence, that extends through so many lives and so much time.
The point I am making is this: your
collective unconscious
is already proven worthless. You, Herr Doktor Bumble, turned your own back on it when you confronted me and refused to believe. But is it not true in science that a theory is nothing until it is proved? When you interrogated me, you stumbled and fell because you refused to accept me as proof of
your own theory. You have failed because you cannot differentiate between the consequences of being right and the consequences of being wrong. You forget that in between these two, there are the consequences of being neither—but merely lost.
You are lost, Herr Doktor. You have yet many miles to go and I have few. I have prayed for this moment all my life. In the years that confront you, bear such prayers in mind.
Perhaps I will become a part of the mythology you are attempting to create. It seems likely. You may call me The Old Man. For after all, the image of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true.
As I say goodbye, I think it is important that you know why I never speak of my existence, but always of my life. Passing through it all was the spirit of one human being—one spirit shared by many. Soon, I trust, that spirit will achieve its due rest—a universal privilege too long denied me.
The so-called Mysteries have been with us forever. There is not a society on the face of the earth nor of time that does not and did not have its own version of what these Mysteries reveal of the Great Spirit, God, the gods and their relationship to our lives—and our lives to theirs. Sun-dancing, circumcision, birth itself, animal and human sacrifice, virginity, Ra, Raven, Tarot, Voodoo, I Ching, Zen, totems personal and tribal, the cult of Mary and the cult of Satan—the list is endless. In modern times, we call such Mysteries art. Our greatest shamans of the moment are Rodin, Stravinsky (much as I hate his music) and Mann.
And what else are they telling us but:
go back and look again
. In time, these shamans will be replaced by others—but all speaking in a single voice. It was ever thus. But no one listens.
What life requires of one is that one live beyond the endurance of it. It asks of us that we accept both its limitations and its possibilities, while at the same time demanding that we push beyond its own frontiers in search of eternity. I want no eternity. I never did. I don’t believe in eternity. I believe in now.
If I am the embodiment of anything, I am the embodiment of enduring truths—and of the blindness of my fellow human beings. And yet, I trust in your intuition to this degree: I can say to you without qualm—be brave; press on. If you do so, you stand a chance of closing the circle of your understanding.
P.
Jung stood up, gathered Forster’s and Pilgrim’s letters and put them into the music bag. Then he added his illicit brandy in its bottle and his notebook and his pen. He stripped off his smock, put on his jacket and patted his pockets to make sure his cheroots and matches were in place. Then he opened the shutters, turned out his desk lamp, stubbed the last cheroot he had smoked and went out into the hallway.
Walk or ride?
Ride.
He climbed into the elevator, muttered
up
and stood back.
The implacable operator, as always, said nothing. His placid, seemingly immobilized expression could not be read. And yet, his passengers were exclusively the mad and those who cared for them, and his daily lot was to ferry them between one hell and another; nonetheless, he appeared to remain entirely unconscious of either.
The gate opened—the gate closed. Inside his cage, he lived in limbo.
In the third-floor corridor, Jung stood for a moment utterly still.
So many memories. Expectations. Defeats.
The penless writer. The silent pianist. The bear pit. The Moon. At number 306, he knocked and entered.
Doors.
Doors.
Doors.
Nothing.
The wicker furniture smelled of dust.
He coughed.
Then he went briefly and stood looking into the bedroom, where the bathroom door stood ajar.
He opened windows.
He fed the birds.
The doves crooned. The pigeons danced and Jung remained with them for more than an hour—lost, as the elevator man was lost, in an emptied world.
For a year after Pilgrim’s demise, Jung continued to be hounded by his own failures. In his private view, these were many. His relations with Bleuler and Furt-wängler deteriorated almost daily. The schism with Freud deepened and widened. Freud had renounced and even denounced him. At the heart of the schism lay Freud’s insistence that theory and method could be codified and offered as dogma. Jung deplored dogma, believing it would destroy the essential value of analysis.
All the doors must be left standing open
. In 1913, Jung published
Psychology of the Unconscious
, in which he argued the difference between Freud’s psychoanalysis and his own analytical psychology. He might as well have declared war.
In the psychiatric community, Jung was now branded a mere “mystic.” He became isolated from his former colleagues, who once had championed his rising star. Even Archie Menken backed away, in spite of the fact that their companionship had always fed on creative argument. For Archie, the argument had finally soured and was no longer worth continuing.
There was no more joy in Jung, no more effervescence, no more daring. He had turned a corner and, in
many people’s eyes—including Emma’s—gone off into the dark.
It felt this way to Jung himself. His affair with Antonia Wolff had brought him nothing but anguish—the double anguish of being unable to give her up while he clung like a drowning man to his marriage. He insisted, with increasing vehemence, that it was his right—not his privilege—to live under one roof with two women who would never be reconciled to one another, in spite of their awkward public avowals that “reconciliation” had long been concluded. Toni’s visits to Küsnacht during this time not only multiplied—they lengthened from days to weeks.
The children returned and were sent away again. While living at home, they regarded their mother with increasing disdain—that she should be so seemingly compliant—and their father with increasing bafflement. Why did he play, as they had once done, with stone cities on the beach and with empty graves in the garden? Why did he hand them pebbles, saying as he did so:
pay attention?
And who was this too often silent, overly serious lady they were required to call
Aunt Toni?
The atmosphere at Küsnacht was tense and wearing. Meals were silent. Comings and goings were abrupt and unexplained. It was a house of closed doors.
In the summer of 1913, while the children and their nurse, Albertine, were away yet again at Schaff-hausen, Jung had a series of dreams that would prove to be the nadir of his depression and withdrawal.
In the first, he dreamt that Emma’s bed—they no longer slept in the same room—was a deep pit with stone walls. It was a grave, and somehow had a suggestion of antiquity about it.
Then,
he wrote in his journal,
I heard a deep sigh, as if someone were giving up the ghost. A figure that resembled my wife sat up in the pit and floated upward. It wore a white gown into which curious black symbols had been woven.