The Berlin Zoo/1965
I first met Carl Jung in front of the chimpanzee cages at the Berlin Zoo in the summer of 1965. Of course, he had already died, and so the meeting was a bit peculiar for someone like me who, at 22, did not have much experience with the dead. Having grown up in a house with few books, I was nevertheless blessed with an Irish mother and a Ukrainian father who, at our Sunday ritual dinner table, opened the world of imagination to me. They were good storytellers, especially my father, and sitting between them I soaked up the richness and beauty of words and their power to create unseen realities. When the stories began on those Sunday after-dinner afternoons, a curtain would rise, and in place of the quotidian world of plates and pot roast, knives and forks, teacups and cakes, a drama would begin.
My two favorite stories, and the ones that had the most magic for me, were the tales my father told of his orphan wanderings in the post-World War I landscapes of Eastern Europe, and the one my mother would tell of sitting beside her mother’s death bed, thinking her mother had fallen asleep and trying to rouse her to attend to the visitors who had come to the house to mourn her passing. She was four at that time, and that day was a Sunday. In these stories death and mourning, loss and grief, being an orphan, abandonment, and the issue of home were my teachers. These images were the forces that raised the curtain and transformed Brooklyn, New York of the 1950s into those worlds. No camera, of course, could record that change, and yet there it was, as real and present as the dinner on the table.
At the Berlin Zoo, in the summer of 1965, another curtain was raised, and behind it stood Carl Jung. My ticket, as it were, to that drama, which has lasted now almost fifty years, was my copy of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Jung seemed amused, and I think he even chuckled a bit as he noticed the book under my arm. He was avuncular, and I had the distinct feeling that this uncle of the soul had been waiting for me in some place beyond time. He was a mood, a quality of the moment, a figure present in his absence, and in that presence, I had the sense that my life was enfolded within stories quite outside myself.
I have always suspected we do not chart the course of our lives, but most of my life I resisted that gnawing, insistent suspicion. I had only ever wanted to be a bus driver, content and calm and clear about knowing the way. That was the fantasy I grew up with, the fantasy that suited my world, even as it was always challenged by those Sunday stories. But after the sudden death in 1991 of my wife Janet, to whom I had been married for 25 years, that resistance was shattered, and out of the broken fragments of my life, and in the cauldron of chaos worked in analysis, I realized that I had been a bus driver. Not, of course, the one I had had the fantasy of being, but the one that the image itself had shaped for me. I have not been the one mapping the route and driving the bus, but the one—and I love this phrase because it so fits the experience—who has been taken for a ride by those figures of soul who have been charting the course that has also mapped my life.
Listen to the Jung and the World Podcast with Robert Romanyshyn: