In this, my final post in this series, I want to address a subject that was in fact the catalyst for my doing the whole series in the first place. One inspiration, as already mentioned several times now, was Margaret Charlston’s series of lists of book covers. But another was an incredibly potent series of dreams I had, on the Friday night before I commenced the series of posts here.
These dreams were so vivid and compelling they eventually woke me up. My mind remained, as it had been in the dreams, a roiling, churning, tempestuous sea of fragmented images and thoughts for some considerable time – several hours – as I lay half-awake in bed. Usually, on awaking, the conscious mind asserts itself more quickly. But on this occasion I was revelling in the post-dreamscape state of mind, and wanted to prolong that transitional state as long as I could manage. Amidst all the chaotically jumbled images and feelings, as a more conscious mode gradually ate into inchoate, the phrase ‘free your mind and your ass will follow’, derived from Funkadelic, became a motif. Rather bizarrely, as is the way in the dream-world, as I slowly returned to a more normal fully awake state, this morphed into ‘comb your mind, and your ass will follow’!
Rather than evoking an Alan Partridge-esque side parting (cue hands-free note to self; get haircut!), this was, in my mind at least, derived in part from an image on the spine of a book – Destructive Emotions – in which Bhuddist style meditations are suggested as a means for transforming a wildly chaotic and distressed mind into an ordered and calm one. Also feeding into all this were a series of Hitchcock movies Teresa had been watching at the time, all of which had pronounced psychological themes of a rather heavy-handed nature (but no less entertaining for that), from Marnie and Vertigo to Spellbound. ‘That Freud stuff’s a lot of hooey!’ Peck opines, rather over emotionally, in the latter!
Suffice to say that in the end, all of this got me thinking that, having written Frued, Jung et al off, as at best whimsical and at worst merely themselves obsessional and deluded, I ought instead of dismissing them outright, to revisit their writings. So, I’ve come full circle; as with Walt Whitman, there are, in Jung, Freud, and doubtless many others, thinkers and writers whose thoughts I want to return to, and re-examine. I’d like to conclude by thanking Margaret for her series of book covers, which acted as the catalyst motivating me to make these posts.
