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.
13
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.
EPILOGUE
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.
Jung awoke and went to wake Emma. He asked her to be his witness by verifying the time. It was three o’clock in the morning.
Jung went back to bed convinced that a warning of some kind had been delivered by means of his dream.
At seven o’clock, the telephone rang to inform them that a beloved cousin of Emma’s had died at 3:00 a.m.
Prescience.
It was one of the most contentious concepts in the world of psychiatry. Freud had always fought against it, claiming there was too much flummery in the notion of mediums and others claiming to predict the future. But Jung believed—though his belief was cautious. He had so far never managed to speak his belief aloud with conviction.
This was not the first nor the last time prescience was to play a role in Jung’s darkened life that year. Other deaths and accidents had been foreshadowed, either in dreams or in “waking visions.” A drowned boatman had washed ashore after a storm that had occurred only in Jung’s mind as he sat at the foot of the garden. The body of a dog had appeared in a dream the night before the animal itself was killed on the road nearby. Expected visitors had called to say they would not arrive. Moments before, as Jung had stood contemplating their pre-set chairs at table, he had suddenly acted on impulse and gathered up the silverware from their places and returned it to the sideboard, without knowing why.
After the publication of his book in the autumn of 1913, Jung received two visions which were to haunt and trouble him for th
e rest of his life.
In the first he was on a journey and, as happens to anyone riding on a train, his mind wandered away from the scenery beyond the windows to other mountains, other valleys, plains and rivers; other landscapes altogether than the real one at hand. All at once, these pleasant reveries were disturbed by a distant sound—a series of sounds—that Jung found so real he peered from the windows on either side of the carriage in which he rode in order to verify them.
But he could not. Nothing he could see offered any explanation. Something gigantic was cracking apart at the seams. A wall of unimaginable dimensions and height was collapsing somewhere to the north. The sky darkened and the noise increased until it was unbearable, made up as it was of animal and human cries and of falling buildings, surging waters and torrential rains.
In his journal, Jung wrote: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour…
Two weeks later, when Jung had returned from his journey, the vision was repeated—more vividly, as he wrote. The blood was more emphasized. On this occasion, he heard an inner voice which told him to look at this with care, it is wholly real and it will be so.
These visions receded, but they presented themselves as full-blown dreams one year later, in the spring and summer of 1914.
An Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice, Jung wrote. All green things were killed by frost. I saw the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region deserted by human beings…
Waking, on this occasion, Jung put on his robe and walked out into the garden in a mood of absolute despair.
And it will be so, he thought. It will be so.
It was then he remembered his final encounter with Pilgrim, and the words that had left him so shaken.
And though we never gathered at the height of battle, we met on the ramparts beneath our parasols and fans when amusing skirmishes were taking place and always when two heroes were to meet in combat, man to man—or, as some would have it, god to god.
Before Jung’s inner eye, the figures wavered on the Trojan ramparts, standing in their smoke and rain above the battlefield below them.
And he thought: if this were true, it had happened so long ago that even archaeologists could make no true accounting of their presence there.
To which he reluctantly added: it will be so.
It was a clear moonlit night as beautiful as one could imagine. Frogs and crickets called and sang to one another. An owl of gigantic size sat up at the top of the chimney and surveyed his kingdom. Far, far away, a dog barked. The nightingales were singing in the woods, and out over the lake, the nightjars were plunging through the moonlight in search of insects. Jung almost wept at the perfection of it all.
And yet…
“And yet,” he said aloud. “And yet, we are all imperilled. How and by what means I do not know—but it is true. We are.”
It was in his dreams and visions—the cracking walls, the tidal waves of blood, the floating corpses, the debris of civilization and the frozen landscape.
Prescience.
Yes.
It was coming.
Something.
He stood there and wavered for a moment, watched by the owl. For the first time in his whole life, he considered killing himself. The weight of his depression was unbearable—yet what other answer was there but this terrible certainty? It was all too clear; the world is going to end. Why wait?
In his bedside table, he kept a loaded revolver against the possibility of intruders in the night. He so rarely remembered it, the thought of it now surprised him.
It would be cold in his hand.
Out on this lawn, with my feet wet with dew…
He turned towards the house.
The owl spoke.
Jung looked up.
It might have been The Old Man—Pilgrim himself—grey in the moonlight, watching.
Don’t, he seemed to say.
Wait, Jung thought. There is always time for death.
He went down then to the shore, where he sat on the bench there, smoking a cheroot and holding a small stone in his left hand.
Let us see what happens, he said to himself. Let us wait and see what happens.
This all occurred on the night of Wednesday, July 31st, 1914.
On August 1st, the whole of Europe woke to the sound of gunfire.
The war that battered its way into everyone’s daily life by way of headlines, proclamations, hysterical emergencies and the presence of refugees was everywhere in evidence. Switzerland, though neutral, was not neutralized. The horror came like a fog and settled over every life. A person could not escape it.
The number of patients at the Burghölzli proliferated. Cases of dementia tripled—quadrupled—and then got entirely out of hand. The mad, it seemed, were everywhere.
Men with eyes that seemed never to have looked on anything human sat catatonic before Jung—voiceless—yet begging for his assistance.
Assistance that Jung no longer felt capable of giving.
He no longer had confidence in his theories—or in their application. As well, he had developed a fear of the blank page. Apart from the casebook notes he was obliged to keep, he stopped writing altogether. Even his journals were abandoned.
Added to all this, in 1914, Emma gave birth.
A new life—perhaps the result of Toni Wolff’s increasing presence and Emma’s increasing panic that she was losing her husband not only to his mistress but to his “madness.”
Well.
The child was a girl. Emma named her Emma. Mine. Jung called her nuisance. She stood in his way.
Jung might himself have been a battlefield. Inside him, all the guns went off. There was not a soul—with the possible exception of Toni Wolff and, pray God, his wife—who was not an enemy. He could have been divided like the map of Europe—every day he woke to wade through Belgian rain and mud and every night lay down in what he called Germanic darkness—a Götterdämmerung of sound and fury.
This lasted all through the spring of 1915.
And then, one night…
For the first time since the outbreak of war, Jung picked up his pen and began to write.
Are these not wonderful words? he asked, in his journal. And then, one night…
And then, one night I had a dream. And in this dream I saw my old friend, Pilgrim, my Old Man—standing over against a wall that lay in ruins all around him. And he said to me: will you not join me where I stand? Seeing the ruins, I of course hung back in the dark. Yet surely he was standing in sunlight or moonlight—I could not tell which. It seemed not to matter until I came to understand that all around us both there was the darkness in which I stood, myself—and so it must have been by moonlight that I saw him there.
This, he said, is where everything begins. Please, he said, come and see what I have to offer you.
I stood quite still. Afraid. After all, I knew that he was dead. Did he mean that everything begins with death? I could not—and did not want to believe that.
And then he said: there is this and I would give it to you.
I hardly dared look. But I did—and in his hand I saw that he held a stone—something red and squared. I could not quite tell what it was.
The wind blew.
The Old Man wore a long, pale robe—a seeming prophet—Job himself—Elijah, Isaiah—how could one know?
And he said: all things are forever. Nothing shall be that has not been.
I stood forward—still afraid. I did not speak.
The world, he said, ends every day—and begins the next. But not for you unless you accept this gift.
I went towards him. The air was frigid
. There was, it seemed, ice over everything.
Please, he said.
I was astounded. He was asking me to forgive him his endless intransigence—his endless refusal to live.
I put out my hand. And into it, he placed a building stone. Squared and fired and red with life.
It is only one, he said. You will need more.
It seemed to burn in my palm. Yet it had no weight.
It was just a stone.
And I wondered: after so many beginnings—can there be another?
And then I woke and it was now.
Now. And now is all we have. Now—and now again and nothing more.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It has been suggested that readers might like to know which of the characters and events in this novel have an historical basis. Here are some of the realities in the fiction you have just read.
LONDON AND PARIS
Oscar Wilde (Irish playwright and poet. Proudly, but with some trepidation, I have had my photograph taken sitting on Wilde’s bed in the Paris hotel where he died.)
Gilbert (his newest young man, a French marine)
Robert Ross (Wilde’s Canadian friend and one-time lover, whose loyalty to Wilde is legendary. I am often asked if the character of Robert Ross in my novel The Wars is a reflection of this man. He is not—being entirely fictional.)
Auguste Rodin (French sculptor, whose studio Wilde did visit)
Gertrude Stein (American writer)
Alice B. Toklas (her companion. Each time I’m in Paris, I pay homage to them at the atelier they once occupied in the rue de Fleurus.)
Pierre Janet (French psychiatrist at Salpêtrière Hospital—along with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, one of the only real characters mentioned in the wholly fictional story of Robert Daniel Parsons)
Pilgrim Page 47
