NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Mrs.Rutherford now sells sky-blue porcelain mugs, for use on the premises, at the Cavendish Pie Shop. They are on offer to anyone, but we have only seen them in the hands of regulars since the campaign started in September. Our names are printed in white along the handles. Though stored somewhere under the counter. Pictures of each customer’s mug are on display in a crawl along the top of a large screen above the door to the back bakery. Customers can make an appointment with the videographer, on the first Saturday of the month and then if they wish, appear using their mug in a promotional vid which fills the main screen. “Promote Your Neighborhood Business”, says the slogan, periodically flashing across the screen between news clips and scores of recent games and other promotions. Those who pay the twenty-five-dollar cost of a mug are then members of the Maxwell Club, who get a discount on Darjeeling Castleton tea, when available and earn points according to some complex formula. All recorded and calculated on your phone and updated at the time of purchase.
Bel Vionnet tips her mug up over her nose to get a last sip of Darjeeling. She puts it down on top of an old tea-stained copy of, The Viking Portable Jung. Its broken spine was fixed with enough duct tape to make the book look like a battered package.
“Are you going to promote Mrs. Rutherford’s lovely Pie Shop?”
“No, I don’t want to look at another screen or be seen on one. I’ll support her by drinking her tea.”
“When did she start with all this high-tech stuff?”
“Not long ago. She told us it’s an experiment with one of her vendors.”
“Not, Snaz Promotions!”
“How did you guess, Fred?”
“First, they take over the gas station, now this!”
“Yeah! I believe Jake Trip wants to buy her out, and she is not getting any younger.”
“Mrs. Rutherford is old enough to know better.”
“Fred, we aren’t getting any younger either.”
“No, I better stop being so Geezerish!”
“Just don’t get hooked on opioids.”
“I am more concerned about the world seen by people who only look at screens.”
“There are no seasons in cyberspace, no weather, and no day or night. It’s a weird wired world!”
“Which has taken to the air, or RF, to be precise.”
“Can people still recognize a Carolina wren by its loud voice, a violet or Southern red oak, or a Monarch butterfly?”
“I don’t know, what is generally known of the natural world.”
“Aren’t we told our beautiful blue planet is under dire threat?”
“The commercial world tends to cast doubt these sermons.”
“If you aren’t aware of the natural world – I mean if it isn’t part of daily life, then why should you care about it?”
“Well, some people make a study of it.”
“Only a few, most of us are drenched in public relations even in here. Look at that screen!”
“And we used to come here to get away from it!”
“Speaking of screens. Did you see that vid I sent you from the Jung Society?”
“Thanks, bel, I did. You said it inspired you with a vision.”
“Well, that sounds a bit grandiose, but yes, it was inspirational.”
“To model the ideas, you mean?”
“Right, it is hard to get all that stuff into proper relation.”
“I have never fully understood Jungian terminology.”
“Well, talk of ‘complexes’, and ‘intrapsychic energy’, makes me think of something analogous to the relation of the earth to the universe.”
“A sort of solar system perhaps?”
“I was thinking of a bunch of spheres, one within the other.”
“Music of the spheres!”
“No, not orbiting spheres, in my model or diagram the biggest sphere represents consciousness. These are spheres with fuzzy borders. Interpenetrating spheres.”
“Spheres of influence?”
“In a way, the conscious sphere, like the universe, which is mostly made of “dark matter”, most of consciousness is taken up with another unknown matter, the unconscious.”
“Isn’t it an odd name, “Dark Matter”? When no one knows what it is. Why not call it Jim, for instance? “
“Ah, okay, or Janet perhaps?”
“Or, Wakan Tanaka is even better.”
What, or who is, Wakan Tanaka, anyway?”
“I just read about it, bel. Wakan Tanka is a Lakota term for energy existing in all things.”
“But who knows if dark matter is anything to do with energy?”
“That’s my point, if it is a mystery, then it seems misleading to call it matter, which takes me back to, ‘Jim’!”
“The dark horse!”
“The great celestial equine question!”
“Any way Fred, Jung requires a feminine name, Aphrodite, perhaps, because the feminine principle is the inexplicable generative force in creation.”
“Let her be a female then, but Aphrodite is too ‘Euro.’. How about, Inanna?”
“Fred, she is Aphrodite’s ancestor, back around four thousand BC.”
“Let’s recall the highest deity among Sumerians!”
“Does Inanna rule the unconscious too?”
“In this scheme of ours Fred, she rules the unknown.”
“By unknown rules!”
“Do we know there are rules?”
“We don’t, it is a presumption!”
“Unwarranted, it seems to me.”
“Okay then, Inanna is simply a name attached to the unconscious and the universe beyond the bounds of current scientific knowledge.”
“Agreed! Ah, no, wait a minute. If we decide that this unknown has no rules, we are saying it can’t be understood.”
“Yes, such things exist!”
“What, for instance?”
“Well, how about motivation, or chaotic systems?”
“Is it that they can’t be understood, ever? Or not yet?”
“How would we know?”
“There’s a point, Fred, the future is something we shall never know!”
“A dark matter, indeed. Okay, bel what about your spheres?”
“Yes, what about them? Ah, it is partly a matter of scale, the largest sphere containing everything else is the sphere of consciousness. Then most of that is the unconscious.”
Mrs. Rutherford has no help this morning. Bel gets up to fetch more tea at the counter and brings back a yellow pot with surprising celerity.
“Never seen one of these before!”
“Yet another sales gimmick! I have enough points on my Maxwell Club account to get a free yellow pot full, called, ah, where is it?”
Bel turns the pot slowly on the table, looking for the name.
“Well, I don’t see it! Anyway, I think it is Earl Gray by the aroma.”
“Doesn’t matter now, bel.”
“Yes, okay so, within the two spheres of consciousness is a locality, a much smaller sphere, a person’s piece of the action.”
“So, as you see it, each of us inhabits a sort of locality within the universe of consciousness.”
“You might say that. The first small sphere represents the self, and within that is the soul, and at the center, like a dot, or singularity, is ego.”
“You are thinking of ego as analogous of the universe’s original big bang?”
“Right, every birth is a big bang, a beginning at least, if not an explosion. A soul which comes into being and goes on becoming within the spheres of consciousness until the body dies leaving its influence behind in the larger spheres.”
“Bel, you are a bit of a mystic.”
“No, I don’t mean anything like that! I think this is all plausible enough within Jung’s model.”
“Well, isn’t the idea of a soul rather mystical and otherworldly?”
“Yes, it can be. Soul is mentioned in scriptures as immortal. But think of soul music.
Have you ever been moved by Aretha Franklin singing, “Respect”, or a Brahms symphony or a painting by Vermeer, or the ocean? Just to mention four, out of countless possibilities.”
“Yes, I have been moved, of course!”
“What do you think moved?”
“Me, of course!”
“I would say your soul was moved, the heart of your feeling.”
“So, soul is aesthetic in your model?”
“That is only one aspect. Come on Fred! Think about it!”
“Yes, okay, I have been joyful and suffered my share of indignities and other pains, and I have been in love.”
“There you are then.”
“So, you might say soul is a function of the nervous system and its headquarters.”
“You might, it sounds a bit reductive.
