Red Book, Red Sun

I have a book, in tatters now, called Memories, Dreams and Reflections. It was given to me in my teens by a fellow-vagabond in Munich. He was shining like an angel, having just that week visited the curious castle described in the book. Here the author had transposed his apocalyptic visions into a cave-ish medieval reclusion of wood and stone. (Imagine what Wagner, Thoreau and Frank Lloyd Wright might build together on the shore of Lake Michigan.) I keep the book not just because of its long influence over my life and work, but because, in the flyleaf, there’s a drawing my Munich friend made of a map. It would guide me to a remote cave on the western edge of a Greek island. I found the cave and lived there for a month or so.

Lynne and I recently went to see the Red Book, Jung’s private and, like his castle, quite medieval-looking manuscript of obscure fantasy and psychic experimentation, on display at the Rubin Museum in New York. In it Jung drew many versions of circles and mandalas which, as mandalas traditionally do, served to center his mind during those months and years of induced turbulence, darkness and (by his own account) proto-insanity.

They brought to mind another circle. My cave was a 2-chambered socket high in the face of a cliff that rose straight from the smooth carpet of the Mediterranean. It faced west and as evening fell the sun became more outlandishly large, more fire-scarlet, more solar-god-like than it had ever seemed before, or has since.