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A curious postscript about a visit to India, with is snarled roadways, wandering cows and oppressed housewives, makes for another of these interminable ‘In Practice’ parts as in preceding sections of the book. Once again, way too much personal information that even Boal has to pull back on some of his soul-searching activities and get them working on more impersonal improvisation. Not all oppression gets met head on.

To be blunt, reading the last few chapters (sections, subheadings, whatever) was a slog. Intriguing techniques often followed by multiple muddled stages that don’t really connect to the others, and then way too often lengthy anecdotes that delve too deeply into the personal lives of participants. Yet every time I picked up this book after weeks unread, the very next paragraph contained a nugget of theatrical alchemy.

Nearing the halfway point in the novel and the titular destination is at least mentioned, and maybe a couple more chapters before we are finally there. It fits the type of story where big historical events like invasion of the Sudetenland or an Italian ambassador’s interruption get reported, so that the narrative focuses on the fictional underlings responding. Paul’s burning letters and photos of Hugh speaks volumes.

Two amazing articles that stand on their own yet support one another with insight on the pre-conscious state young children and certain adults experience. There are many important lessons to learn about the child archetype and mother-daughter relationship that are often mythologized, taken out of time and entered into a dream space precisely because they are the result of our connection to the collective unconscious.

Lookjng across many cultures and their religious beliefs, Jung lectures on the topic of rebirth and transformation, and my reading of this section comes at a very intriguing period in my life. Of course, all of it connects to the unconscious and even his analysis of the Islamic figure of Khidr has the most Jungian paragraph I have read so far, on “so-called telepathic phenomena” (p. 142) related to his synchronicity.

Back and forth in each chapter between Berlin and London sets up contrast for both protagonists: Legat is a paper-pusher with an uncertain personal life symbolized by the posh home he just keeps from falling into the Thames; von Hartmann, on the other hand, is a man of action who would rather slit throats than file notes. Such men as these are destined, I hope, to meet in Munich on behalf of their respective despots.

An elaboration of the anima archetype becomes so much more, a summary or highlight reel of Jung’s career, based largely on his encounters with female patients. The Great Mother is analyzed for her positive and negative aspects, almost exclusively female. A brief couple of paragraphs on male connection to the psychological type and briefer sentences on homosexuality is his push towards healing an atomic-charred world.

Saving all the sexy details until the end, Swingle proposed that touching and being touched by other humans is better than staring into a screen offering a wider array of visual stimulation. She then reverse engineers her assessment to include more child-friendly options for play and being in the world, with some stats to back up how she sees brain development happening, but hey, a little I-tech won’t harm all of us.

I have often wondered, while reading books by or about Jung, where are the first instances of such foundational ideas as archetypes, the collective unconscious and anima. It turns out that each of them are found in the essays and lectures making up the first three chapters of this book - seems obvious now but had to be written somewhere. Jung must take some pleasure in pointing out Freud’s faulty St. Anne assumption.

A disasterous prelude to war seen through the busy offices and bureaucracy on both sides, England and Germany. The events immediately leading up to WWII are less about posturing for peace but being caught in a web of international policy. Legat and von Hartmann seem to be mere secretaries to their countries’s leaders, yet Paul is at least positioned on the right side of history while Hugh’s conflict is with his wife.

It becomes more apparent in Artaud’s letters and essays how trying it would be as his friend to encourage him with advice on his very personal topics. At one moment, he rages against the medical profession for denying him opium, at another he attacks his fellow Surrealists for abandoning the greater purpose to meddle in politics, and then he switches tactics for an eloquent discourse on pure cinema. Truly exhausting.

Switching off the electroencephalograph (perhaps the only harmless digital device Swingle mentions in her book) for the next couple of chapters, field observations reveal her many stereotypes: the neglectful parents pacifying an infant child with a tablet at a restaurant, the schoolyard with overly-monitored children resorting to online modes of bullying. As Obama says, however, we can’t put technology back in a box.

i did not expect von Franz to be so much in support of Saint Thomas Aquinas as the author of Aurora even though she dropped enough hints in her introduction. The translations and commentary refer to an author who was too much the wiseguy to be writing under the guise of a more devout scholar. Yet her biography of a woman-hating saint makes sense that he had a grand vision of Wisdom so unlike his other works.

The obstacles on each hero’s journey have become each other, with mistrust growing between Edwin and Wistan, Axl and Beatrice, even Gawain and his Horace getting on each other’s nerves. Most alarming is Beatrice, who seems terrified of being left behind yet also of having her memories return. Wistan seems to know in advance how events will turn out and knows he is at his end, yet surprisingly still has hate to spare.

As best as she can interpret this curious text, von Franz only seems to be able to point out several hundred biblical passages while connecting them somehow to the collective unconscious and more intriguing psychological concepts most likely far from the mind of the author as he composed Aurora. It nevertheless demonstrates how far an intellectual will go into a mystery with just a glimmer of wisdom to find.

The chapters are becoming more and more retrospective where secondary characters like Gawain, Edwin and Wistan recollect moments from the present as if they were memories from a long time ago. Perhaps a sign of Querig’s last gasp, her attempt to hold sway over the nation, actually the two warring nations of Britons and Saxons; the brute force of the latter being no match for the managerial colonization of the former.

It comes as a relief that von Franz finds much of Aurora a challenge to figure out, but she applies her psychological interpretation to a text that is being pulled in two distinct corners even if it can be attributed to one voice. On the one hand is the alchemist-author who has no issue showing off how much he knows and on the other hand is the figure of Wisdom, the anima who warns him and us to know better.

A fascinating, wild ride through the mind of an eloquent Artaud and it is tempting to try and pick out the passage in his poems, letters and essays where his madness peeks through, but would miss the point of the wide-ranging quest for a new world, best summed up so far in a letter to Rivière: “an actual expansion of reality” (p. 44). By the time I got to his parody Limbo his Mind was too far gone?

The journey becomes more perilous as Beatrice and Axl take the outcast Edwin away from his former home. The knights Wistan and Sir Gawain may be there to help, but only seem to draw more danger their way: soldiers are multiplying and the monks’ safe abbey turns out to be a death trap. At the centre of this dread is the dragon Querig, not yet encountered, but at least is identified as cause of the memory-erasing mist.

Part of my mind understands and appreciates the perspective Dr. Swingle brings to current cultural shift towards agitation and arousal created by an abundance of digital devices. Her psychology practice lends her insight to how brains are rewiring themselves to breaking point. The other part of my mind, replaying classic Zelda games, hears her concern as same-old apocalyptic warnings for freaked-out parents.

The text continues as in the first six chapters: devout biblical quotations nesting the alchemical recipe for a philosopher’s stone, ultimately an allusion for becoming a better person as Jung and von Franz argue through self-knowledge. All fine until the last chapter starts comparing a woman’s breasts to grapes: “pulchriora ubera tua vino, soror sponsa” raises a red flag about for whom is this book written?

Diving off the cliff of spacetime, Rovelli’s Lamborghini sees the metaphorical sea of spinfoam fast approaching but time slows down into eons, much like witnessing the collapse of a star inside the black hole. Even Einstein’s relativity can be called into question by a calculating Catholic priest Lemaître. Rovelli quotes Shakespeare’s Hippolyta yet Rosalind’s “Time travels in divers paces” dialogue fits just as well.

When starting out of this textual journey I mentioned something along the lines of finding my individualized reality, hoping it to be a version of my self. Almost as if anticipation, the original author (most likely not Thomas) speaks to the ignorant fool, and it feels like that might be me. Neither the Latin nor the English translations make much sense other than introducing the level of devotion needed to press on.

As challenging as it was to read Mysterium Coniunctionis from cover to cover, it aroused my curiosity about what it would be like to decipher one of the many alchemical books Jung includes. Seems like von Franz went to the trouble of translating and commenting on such a text. It will be like a virtual transcription of my own journey into this labyrinthine literature, perhaps revealing individualized reality?

Not too sure who Susan Sontag is, asides from a feminist icon projected upon a wall in a recent show I worked on, but she certainly knows enough about Artaud to give a brief yet thorough analysis of the artists turned schizophrenic star. His impact on theatre and the avant-garde (until they turned their backs on Artaud when becoming Marxists) is profound yet Sontag points out his longest running show was three weeks.

The quanta chapters reveal so much about the smallest grains, and are based upon the simplest yet most complex ideas from the Roots and Beginning of the Revolution, how Democritus intuited relations between these grains that ultimately position you, the reader, somewhere within the endless yet finitely structured spin network. Along the way, Rovelli gives credit to the numerous unsung heroes such as Dirac and Matvei.

A brief epilogue compared to the thick preceding text that sketches out a “philosophical bridge” between alchemists’ practices and the science of psychology, soft as both may seem from the modern perspective. However, the following appendix of lengthy quotes in Latin and Ancient Greek proves Jung’s scientific sensibility (in an etymological sense of scientia, to know). Wish I could write so well and as much.

The closing part of his book, that attempts to demysterium the conjunction of alchemy and psychology, relies heavily on the writing of sixteenth century inquirer Gerhard Dorn who saw a spiritual awakening hiding within the arcane practices that usually did not produce any physical result. Much like writing this book in the final decade of his prolific career, Jung knows the alchemists could not write an entire truth.

Summing up the lecture series with a direct approach on synchronicity, von Franz goes to the source with her colleague Jung whose artistic creation shaped the world of psychology, here seen as the cage of reality and boundless freedom of eternity peeked at through an experience of Self. She even works in a personal swipe at the Red Book inquirer, amidst her research into chance, of his cheating at solitaire.

While I expected Rovelli to be speeding off into the future of loop quantum gravity, he instead shifts gears and backs up into the philosophical history of reality, from Democritus and Lucretius in one chapter, to a sensible reappraisal of Aristotle and Plato's contribution to science. Even by the time we see the beauty of Einstein's theories, Rovelli's rearview mirror shows how Dante already reflected a new reality.