Broke.
All within the last week:
- my cell phone [under warranty, but AT&T is sucking]
- the land-line phone [cheap; old; replaced]
- the windshield wipers (in the rain; fortunately, not on the highway) [replaced]
- the passenger side mirror [actually was duct-taped into holder; duct tape disintegrated. Re-duct taped.]
- J’s hospital bed [repaired, on Medicare]
- the toilet [plastic strap connecting flush handle to flapper; replaced]
What else? We both had a cold for a week [gone now; immune systems not broke]. The water gets shut off for repairs just when we’re getting ready to go out. J has ill-timed accidents. It’s all small stuff. We should be (and are) grateful that if we have to have a run of bad luck and breakdowns, it’s so small-bore. But it’s a little unnerving when it all happens at once. Things of completely different type, material, age, and provenance all choose the same week to break down?? What’s next? Me? I’m fine but frazzled, feeling behind the curve, stumbling over myself trying to get up to speed as the little things around me break down, both demanding my attention and spitefully sabotaging me.
Change of season shaking things up? Transition from hibernation? Adjustment to underemployment? Full moon? Why would duct tape and toilet flappers get drawn in to these things?
Jungian psychologist Arnold Mindell thinks he knows. As Stephan Bodian explains in the intro to an interview with him, Mindell came up with the theory of “the ‘dreambody’ — the unconscious as an active agent constantly expressing itself in our lives.”
Dreams, physical symptoms, relationships, accidents, altered states of consciousness — all are manifestations of the dreambody in action. […] Mindell believes that what happens to us in each moment is exactly what was meant to happen. Our task is to learn to follow this process as it unfolds and thereby help it to reveal its deeper significance. A physical symptom, for example, may force us to deal with a relationship issue, get us in touch with a mythological figure, resolve an old childhood dream, or guide us into a profound meditative state.
Mindell himself says:
There’s a flowing or dreaming process at the bottom of it all. This process manifests itself in many different ways, depending on the channel in which we perceive it. One of the channels is proprioception — you feel things inside your body in terms of temperatures, pressures, pains, aches, joys, sexual stimulation, and so forth. Or you experience things in terms of visual imagery, or in terms of auditory phenomena, like voices, or in terms of movement — the way you trip over your shoelaces or make certain kinds of gestures — or even in terms of relationship processes. Other people can act as sensory channels for you; you can experience yourself in terms of the behaviour of others. And the process also manifests itself through extrasensory or parapsychological channels: The trees do things; the sky appeals to us.
I remember reading Mindell’s book River’s Way decades ago and being particularly struck by the notion of the “world channel” — the idea that apparently unrelated things going on in the world can manifest your own state of mind. That may sound pathologically narcissistic (it’s clearly related to Jung’s famous concept of “synchronicity,” or significant coincidence), but have you ever had a burst of anger just as two cars collided or thunder exploded outside? It’s sort of the poltergeist effect. (Coincidentally — or not! — the Word A Day for April 2 is “poltergeist.”)
Bodian says, “What you’re referring to here, if I’m not mistaken, is what you call the ‘dream field’, in which people and objects take on the qualities of our dreaming process.” Mindell responds:
Yes. We dream up the world around us to behave like our own dream field. […S]ometimes things happen synchronistically that can’t be explained in terms of simple projection. For example, you dream that a huge bird speaks to you, and the next day you’re walking down the street and for the first time in your life a huge bird actually bumps into you. […] The world sometimes does literally behave as if it were a sensory channel, as if it were a part of your dreaming field.
Warning: it gets pretty woo-woo and new-agey, talking about a sort of conservation of the ignored, denied, and repressed:
[I]f you’re a good ecologist, you have to wonder where your signals and processes — the parts of you seeking expression — go when you disavow or let go of them. […T]he negativity doesn’t just disappear. It goes into your body, into a less tractable process, maybe a cellular or metabolic or cancerlike process. Or it goes into your partner, who hates you. Or it goes into accidents on the street corner or into the collective, for you and me to pick up. Devaluing certain perceptions and just letting them go is like tossing wastepaper onto the street. Somebody has to clean it up eventually. […C]ompassion also means having compassion toward all your perceptions, even the unhappy or unfortunate ones, and trying to process them.
Wow, like, quantum, man. I lose patience with the tone of this interview, and particularly with the new-age notion that your cancer is trying to tell you something (other than “Die, motherfucker!”). But there’s something to the “world channel.” We don’t interact with things (much less people) like another thing bumping into them in a straightforward Newtonian way. The observer bends and warps the experiment. We recruit duct tape, windshield wipers, and toilet flappers into our field of dreams.
A Vulgar Miracle
This is what I found when I opened my freezer this morning:
Pilgrims devoted to the god Priapus should be beating a path to my door about now.
And somewhere Ice Cube is saying, “I toldja so!”
If you think you can explain how this happened, have at it. Also: Caption Contest!
P.S. Is there some connection between Priapus and April Fool’s Day? Bet there is. It’s that time of year. But, believe me or not, I didn’t do this. I wouldn’t know how. If it’s an April Fool’s joke, it’s a (micro)cosmic one.
Ambiance 