A Rhythmic River - the Wild Party

The Wild Party

by Joseph Moncure March
Drawings by Art Spiegelman

Except for the exceptional, like Homer, I rarely have patience for long poems: I don't look for them and I put it down quickly if I've started one accidentally. Now thanks for Dean's recommendation, I enjoyed another "exceptional". I even read it twice in a row.

The Wild Party runs like a happy river. Rhythmic and rhyming, it flows effortlessly and "naturally". And the reader willingly jumps in for a ride. In that eventful evening. Intrigued by its daring wild species here and there. Startled by its violent undercurrents now and then... And finally immersed in a tenacious scenery of the ninteen twenties.

The drawings are quite good, too, but often too dominating and too much --- the narrative is already vivid with incredible power. The artist over-did himself to match the poet.

This poem inspires mimics and I have been waiting to get one since....

Here is one "less wild" part:

9

Some love is fire: some love is rust:
But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.
And their lust was tremendous. It had the feel
Of hammers clanging; and stone; and steel:
And torches of the savage, roaring kind
That rip through iron, and strike men blind:
Of long trains crashing through caverns under
Grey trembling streets, like angry thunder:
Of engines throbbing; and hoarse steam spouting;
And feet tramping; and great crowds shouting.
A lust so savage, they could have wrenched
The flesh from bone, and not have blenched.

the irrationality of a rational mind

The Basic Writings of C. G.

Jung by Carl Jung

(darn - doesn't he know it all?!)

From the standpoint of the rational type, the irrational might easily be represented as a rational of inferior quality; namely, when he is apprehended in the light of what happens to him. For what happens to him is not the accidental -- in that he is master --but, in its stead, he is overtaken by rational judgement and rational aims. This fact is hardly comprehensible to the rational mind, but its unthinkableness merely equals the astonishment of the irrational, when he discovers someone who can set the ideas of reason above the living and actual event. Such a thing seems scarcely credible to him. It is, as a rule, quite hopeless to look to him for any recognition of principles in this direction, since a rational understanding is just as unknown and, in fact, tiresome to him as the idea ofmaking a contract without mutual discussion and obligations appears unthinkable to the rational type. p270 (from Psychological Types).

finding faults with Freud - of course, of course :-)

The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung

by Carl Jung

(not one of his occasional courtesies to Freud. To me, Jung is everything what Freud is not. for the latter, here is my favorite quote: "what is true in his theories is not new; what is new is not true" by whom?)

The judgement would entirely devolve upon the observer -- a certain guarantee that its basis would infallibly be imposed upon the observed. To my mind, this is the case in te psychologies both of Freud and of Adler. The individual is completely at the mercy of the arbitrary discretion of his observing critic -- which can never be the case when the conscious psychology of the observed is accepted as the basis. After all, he is the only competent judge, since he alone knows his own motives. p262 (From Psychological Types).

spiritual or instinctive? one and the same - says Dr. Jung

The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung

by Carl Jung

Opposites are extreme qualities in any state, by virtue of which that state is perceived to be real, for they form a potential. The psyche is made up of processes whose energy springs from teh equlibration of all kinds of opposites. The spirit/instinct antithesis is only one of the commonest formulations, but it has the advantage of reducing the greatest number of the most important and most complex psychic processes to a common denominator. So regarded, psychic processes seem to be balances of energy flowing between spirit and instinct, though the question of whether a process is to be described as spiritual or as instinctual remains shrouded in darkness. Such evaluation or interpretation depends entirely upon the standpoint or state of the conscious mind. A poorly developed consciousness, for instance, which because of massed projections in inordinately impressed by concrete or apparently concrete things and states, will naturally see in the instinctual drives the source of all reality. It remains blissfully unaware of the spirituality of such a philosophicla surmise, and is convinced that with this opinion it has established the essential instinctuality of all psychic processes. Conversely, a consciousness that finds itself in opposition to the instincts can, in consequence of the enormous influence then exerted by the archetypes, so subordinate instinct to spirit that the most grotesque "spiritual" complications may arise out of what are undoubedly biological happenings. Here the instinctuality of the fanaticism needed for such an operation is ignored. p98 (from On the Nature of the Psyche)