Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  The actor recounts that, four years before his trip to Hollywood, he and his wife Merula purchased a painting by the Ukrainian-English painter Bernard Meninsky called Two Irish Girls , which “showed two solid-looking females in shawls, confronting each other in some place of bright green bushes and withered hedgerows.” Guinness writes that there was “something enigmatic” about the painting, however, and one night when he entered the room where he and Merula had hung it, he was seized by an inner voice obsessively reciting a Bible chapter and verse, “Luke, Chapter XXIII, Verse 31.” He had attended a religious school in his teens, ending up at age 16 a “confirmed atheist,” so he had to scour his house to get his hands on a Bible to look up that verse. Eventually successful, he read the following: “For if they do these things in a green tree what shall be done in a dry?”

  “It was obvious,” Guinness wrote, “that the words could be applied to the painting, which I was staring at with fascination. For the first time I noticed that the green bushes were loosely painted, round, self-satisfied faces and the twigs agonized, screaming, figures.” 33

  Here, a skeptic will interrupt to point out that his years of religious schooling had given Guinness ample exposure to the Bible, and that his unconscious mind could have simply connected a subliminal perception of the faces and figures in the green foliage and twigs in Meninsky’s painting with a Bible passage he had once read and whose sense he had somehow retained, along with the exact chapter and verse, despite no conscious memory of it—what Theodore Flournoy called cryptomnesia. Yet we now know that memory does not work as Freud or Flournoy believed. We do not retain every experience pristine and unaltered in our memory; in fact, quite the opposite—most memories of our past, including memories of things read or seen in books, are extremely fragmentary and inaccurate. 34 Even if that Luke passage had somehow stuck in Guinness’s mind, how would he have retained the exact chapter and verse? As I suggested previously, the superpowers of the unconscious as formulated in the Victorian era really seem like a deflection away from a much simpler (but of course, temporally obscene) explanation for these kinds of experiences. Precognition simply orients us to pertinent information latent in the landscape of our near future.

  In this case, the Luke passage was only part of what Guinness precognized. He writes that after his discovery of hidden, unsettling depths in the painting, he took it off the wall and replaced it with another. When Merula entered the room, she didn’t notice the new painting but said immediately that the room had “regained its innocence.” Then comes the kicker: “A day or two later we learned it was the anniversary of Meninsky’s suicide.” 35

  A day or two later we learned … While Guinness implies something spookily haunting about this picture, which had perhaps been created in one of Meninsky’s bouts of depression that led to his suicide in 1950, the reality is likely much more straightforward—er, straightbackward . Learning that it was the anniversary of Meninsky’s suicide—perhaps in a newspaper or magazine retrospective on the artist (Guinness unfortunately does not say)—was clearly surprising and unsettling, precisely because Guinness and his wife had recently purchased a work by the artist. Guinness’s close encounter with the painting a day or two previously under the influence of Luke XXIII:31 oriented him to this learning experience as well as amplified its uncanniness, according to the time-loop logic we have seen again and again in this book. Reading a perhaps sad or disturbing story about Meninsky and his mental illness and suicide seems to have pre-oriented Guinness toward the painting a few days earlier, via the passage in Luke, but in turn that would have primed Guinness to pay attention to information (perhaps in a magazine) about Meninsky and his death. The apparent coincidence of dates (the year anniversary) is itself nothing special. Humans, and the media, like to mark anniversaries, and in this case it was probably such a commemoration that provided the occasion for the unsettling learning experience.

  The detail of the Gospel of Luke is, in a way, the most bizarre and ironic aspect of Guinness’s story. The actor does not mention the coincidence in his memoir, but of course by the time he had written of this event (in 1985), he had become world famous for precisely a line in which his character, as the spirit of a dead man , addresses “psychically” a young rebel by that very name: “Use the force, Luke .” The line is delivered in the moments before Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star, and is probably the single best-known, best-loved, and best-remembered line Guinness ever uttered on stage or screen … and Guinness hated that fact .

  To become most famous for a role in what he regarded as a children’s film was an embarrassment to Guinness—who in 1977 was the only “movie star” in Star Wars —hence he barely mentions the film in his writings other than being forced to acknowledge that it had made him financially comfortable in his middle age. That blow to his artistic self-respect, while granting comfort and fame, is itself arguably a kind of equivocal “survival”—another kind of existential gain set against the backdrop of a loss, even a kind of “castration.” One can only wonder whether this is why his precognitive unconscious, all the way back in 1951, fastened upon a line from Luke’s gospel awaiting discovery in his library, to help represent his premonition of learning how he had, in effect, survived Bernard Meninsky’s suicide. As when he learned of James Dean’s death, it was the other guy who got hit by the arrow.

  PART FOUR

  LIVES OF THE PRECOGS

  “Warry, seriously, everywhere’s Jerusalem, everywhere trampled or run down. If Einstein’s right, then space and time are all one thing and it’s, I dunno, it’s like a big glass football, an American one like a Rugby ball, with the big bang at one end and the big crunch or whatever at the other. And the moments in between, the moments making up our lives, they’re there forever. Nothing’s moving. Nothing’s changing, like a reel of film with all the frames fixed in their place and motionless till the projector beam of our awareness plays across them, and then Charlie Chaplin doffs his bowler hat and gets the girl.”

  — Alan Moore, Jerusalem (2016)

  11

  A Precognitive Seduction — Maggy Quarles van Ufford, Carl Jung, and the Scarab

  Woman is invading man’s sphere more successfully every day; but there are still certain fields in which man may consider that he is rightfully entitled to a monopoly—and the purloining of scarabs in the watches of the night is surely one of them.

  — P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh (1915)

  C arl Jung awoke one morning in 1920 with a crick in his neck and a realization: He had fallen in love with one of his patients.

  The recognition of his feelings about Maggy Quarles van Ufford, an argumentative but alluring 25-year-old aristocratic Dutchwoman who had been seeing him for a few months in his Zurich clinic, came from a vivid dream. He had seen Maggy sitting high above him atop a temple tower, some Asian temple, so high that he had to crane his neck all the way back just to see her (hence the crick in his neck when he awoke). Although the dream had an Asian ambience—clearly referring to Maggy’s childhood in the Dutch East Indies—it was a line of Christian devotion that ran through his head as he lay there thinking about her, a fragment of libretto from the composer Schenkenbach about the Virgin Mary:

  She sits so high above us,

  No prayer will she refuse. 1

  The “love” Jung felt for Maggy had a specific name in the business: It was the countertransference , a common hazard first identified by Jung’s erstwhile psychoanalytic “father,” Freud. It was the clinician’s counterpart to the strong feelings—often sexual—that patients develop toward their therapists. The theory of this bond, the transference, remains another of Freud’s enduring contributions to psychotherapy. Freud came to feel that these feelings were a crucial lever in the treatment, even the central object of analysis. 2 He even suggested that the doctor’s reciprocal feelings could serve as a kind of radar, helping the doctor discern the contours of the patient’s unconscious by investigating the feelings the patient aroused in himself
.

  Jung agreed, and he also came to feel that these feelings offered an important opportunity for the doctor’s growth too, not just the patient’s, so long as they were handled with proper care. Maggy’s case would prove to be extremely important in the evolution of his thinking about the transference and countertransference. She also would prove influential on his thinking about other topics that came to dominate his interest during the 1920s and later, such as Eastern religion. And most importantly, it was one of Maggy’s dreams, probably early in her treatment—likely also sometime in 1920—that was at the heart of what became, decades later, Jung’s most famous and memorable anecdote, the specimen case of his theory of synchronicity.

  During one of her sessions, Maggy told Jung that she had dreamed that someone gave her a costly piece of jewelry in the form of a golden Egyptian scarab beetle. Just as Maggy was telling him her dream, Jung heard a tapping on the window behind him. He turned to see an iridescent green-gold beetle butting its head against the glass “in the obvious effort to get into the dark room.” 3 Recognizing the insect as a rose-chafer, a European relative of the Egyptian scarab or dung beetle, he opened the window, cupped the insect in his hands, and handed it to Maggy. “Here’s your scarab,” he said. 4 Jung described that this remarkable moment had a transforming effect on his hyperrational, closed-off patient—it “punctured the desired hole in her rationalism” 5 and enabled her therapy to make new headway.

  It is the most enchanting story in Jung’s writings, and probably one of the most oft-retold psychotherapeutic narratives. It is also probably the most famous Dunne dream in modern times: In the dream, someone handed the dreamer a beetle; that “someone” turned out to be her doctor the next day. Because it was the telling of the dream that led the doctor to notice and admit the beetle into his office, it was also a time loop—like so many other examples of self-fulfilling prophecy we have seen already in this book. Also, like other precognitive dreams, this one seems to have contained a representation (or pre-presentation) of the moment’s significance to the dreamer: The wriggling, hapless insect in Jung’s cupped hand became, in the dream the night before, a “golden … costly” piece of jewelry.

  Yet precognition and time loops are not what come to most readers’ minds when they read either Jung’s descriptions of this event or any of its many retellings in metaphysical or parapsychological literature. There are various reasons for this, including that confusing time-looping aspect. We mistakenly suspect that tautologies are the same as paradoxes, and (to paraphrase J. R. R. Tolkien in the epigram for this book) we are especially liable to disbelieve in a prophecy when we ourselves had a hand in bringing about its fulfilment. There is also the distracting matter of the insect’s apparent connection to ancient Egyptian religion—which we will examine momentarily. But it has also not helped matters that until just a few years ago, all we knew about this event or this patient was limited to a few paragraphs in Jung’s published writings on synchronicity. That, fortunately, has changed.

  In a 2014 paper in the Journal of Analytical Psychology , Vicente de Moura, a Jungian analyst and Curator of the Pictures Archive of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, for the first time revealed Maggy’s identity and details of her biography. He also presented correspondence between her and Jung that reveals other precognitive episodes in her therapy, as well as identified other places in Jung’s writings where she appears. 6 We are now at last able to place the famous scarab episode within the larger context of the dreamer’s life and treatment. 7

  The fascinating story of this once-anonymous Dutch precog can help us to formulate and apply a new, much more powerful theory of meaningful coincidence. “Synchronicities,” I argue, are probably not the product of ancient archetypal patterns imprinting themselves on our lives, as Jung claimed. They appear instead to be misrecognized time loops, arising from our hitherto-unacknowledged precognitive natures. Yet, like whirlpools in the fabric of social reality, such time loops often draw the meaningful stuff of culture into their vortex, confusedly making cultural symbols—in this case, an ancient Egyptian symbol of rebirth—appear to wag the dog of physical events.

  Puncturing the Desired Hole

  Maggy, whose full name was Henriette Madeleine Quarles van Ufford, had moved to Zurich from her home in Holland in early 1918, along with her two younger sisters, Lizzie and Mischa. 8 Mischa, the youngest, had developed some psychological difficulty as a result of the rigid, puritanical upbringing the girls had received from their grandmother, who had raised the girls since their mother’s death in 1908; so Maggy, who had read about Dr. Jung’s new psychotherapeutic approach, arranged for Mischa to be treated by him. 9 For Maggy, though, it seems to have offered a chance to escape the stultifying aristocratic atmosphere she and her sisters had endured their whole lives up until that point.

  According to de Moura, the Quarles girls came from a family that could trace its ancestry back as far as the Middle Ages on their father’s side and had reaped enormous wealth from the spice trade with the Orient. Their grandfather had owned an indigo plantation in India. Their father, Charles Gerard Quarles van Ufford, was a former high officer in the Dutch Navy and had been a successful administrator in the Dutch East Indies, where the family had been living when Maggy was born. The family moved back to Europe in or about 1897, after the three-year-old Maggy fell ill with malaria. This is possibly an important detail, as precogs often suffer some sort of childhood illness or trauma. (J. W. Dunne, for instance, spent three years confined to a movable bed following a serious accident at age six.) In Holland, Charles Gerard became very wealthy in the stock market and continued to generously support his daughters. 10

  Maggy never fit in with her aristocratic European life. Jung mentioned in an unpublished lecture about this patient (where she also appears anonymously) that she was extremely intelligent and sensitive and did not share the interests of her peers or her culture. She insisted on behaving unconventionally and, as a young woman, refused to marry 11 —though with her wealth, her looks, her passion (Jung wrote that she played the piano with such intensity that her body temperature quickly rose above 100 degrees 12 ), and her brains, she ought to have been quite a catch for any man of suitable quality. He would have to put up with her independent-mindedness and argumentativeness though, a product of her keen intelligence and education. In her conservative social world, these qualities did not contribute to her being happy. 13 But now, in Zurich, freed from the stifling atmosphere of her youth, in an intellectually exciting milieu dominated by the psychiatrist-mystic Jung, all that was changing. 14

  Her sister Mischa’s treatment apparently did the trick. A year after starting treatment, she married a Swiss artist, Ignaz Epper, and followed the artistic path of many of Jung’s female patients, becoming a sculptor and eventually settling with her husband in Switzerland’s countercultural capital, Ascona. 15 It was in late 1919 or early 1920 that Maggy herself began treatment with Jung 16 —and it is hard not to think that this may have been part of her intention all along when she packed up and moved from Holland to Zurich with her sisters in tow. It was Maggy who had arranged Mischa’s treatment, and Maggy was, in her own way, as much in need of what Jung could offer.

  When she arrived in Jung’s clinic, Maggy had already seen two other therapists—one for two months, another for just a week—but had, in Jung’s words, “exploded” both of the poor souls. 17 Maggy told Jung that at the beginning of both of those aborted therapies, she had had the same dream: being dropped off at a frontier railway station and facing an impenetrable dark forest. Neither of the first two therapists had been up to the task of leading her through that forest—and both later gave up being analysts. 18 Maggy was a tough case. Could Jung succeed where his predecessors had failed?

  Although he publicly played the scientist role his whole life, Jung was more than (although some critics would say less than) a psychologist. He wanted to be, and increasingly saw himself as, a spiritual teacher, a guru. 19 It was his increasingly su
bjective and mystical approach to the unconscious and its world of what he called archetypes that had precipitated his break from Freud seven years before Maggy entered his care.

  Although he publicly claimed (wrongly, as we will see) that Maggy’s scarab dream was unique in his experience, 20 Jung was no stranger to uncanny coincidences, as well as other experiences and events we would now call paranormal. Nearly as storied as the scarab episode are the mysterious “exteriorizations” Jung experienced in Freud’s Vienna office while on a visit in 1909, during a dispute precisely over the question of psychic phenomena, acceptance of which somewhat divided the two men. (The difference was not as stark as sometimes claimed—Freud just urged greater caution.) Jung described feeling a burning sensation in his diaphragm, followed by a loud crack from Freud’s bookcase. As Jung described the incident, Freud was shocked when Jung said it was about to happen second time, and it did. Freud’s initial puzzlement at this experience later waned when he found that the bookcases kept making the sound even after Jung’s departure. 21

  Jung also reported ghostly apparitions as well as dreams and visions that would have fit perfectly in the case files that had been amassed and studied since the late 1800s by researchers at the Society for Psychical Research. Their theoretical rubric to account for these occurrences, again, was telepathy, a kind of mental contact between people across space and, to some extent perhaps, even across time. In their 1886 volume Phantasms of the Living , Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore presented hundreds of examples, along with a catalogue of “meaningful coincidences” that they also explained via the telepathy concept.

  But the telepathy theory, built on the metaphor of long-distance electronic communication that had been linking up people between countries and even between continents in the latter half of the 19th century, did not help much to explain how something like the scarab episode could occur. Telepathy implied mental contact between humans—or at least, between a human and a fairly sentient creature. A beetle hardly fits the bill as the sort of being who could be “summoned” by some unconscious telepathic call. And the comprehensive framework of ESP developed by the Rhines in the 1930s also did not seem adequate to account for the symbolic meaningfulness of some psychic experiences.