I have a short essay over at Dirt and Seeds about what used to be called a “primal experience” back when people talked about the unconscious. Nowadays the unconscious has been relegated to quaint-ville and only turns up on television shows like Fringe where its a second class narrative device involving hypnosis and aliens. Sometimes I wonder what Carl Jung would think of the advent of “big pharma” and its destruction of the talking cure. Jung understood a happy life contains plenty of darkness and we better not forget it. He said:
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Measure, meaning, patience, equanimity.
My early childhood–my primal moments–occurred in Helsinki, Finland in the late 1950’s when the Finns were balanced precariously between the Soviet Union and the United States. It was a dark time. They’d survived two wars with Stalin and though they hadn’t been gobbled up like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they’d lost approximately 20 % of their country to the Soviets. Worse perhaps, they’d lost out on the Allies Marshall Plan because they’d received arms from Hitler to fend off the Russians. In effect, Finland was poor. In my first memoir Planet of the Blind I tried to describe what that poverty felt like:
In Helsinki I lean close to the gray, birdlike women with ether eyes who ride the trams. Each has survived the wartime starvation, and now, in the darkest city on earth, they are riding home with their satchels, which had taken all day to fill; the stores were ill-stocked
and the lines were long. I remember their almost feral attention to the trolley’s windows at twilight. As a small boy, I climb ever closer to them, their strangeness imprinting on me an indelible image of hardship.
Even a happy life cannot be lived without a darkness–maybe more than one measure. The moment above is primal–I haven’t forgotten. Helsinki today is clean and prosperous and even her smallest children walk about the streets speaking on cell phones. There are fancy foreign restaurants on every corner. I like today’s Finnish capitol. I always choose civic satisfaction over its opposite: abandonment. Poverty is abandonment; depression is also. But back in 1959 there was something about those women on that trolly–a depth of understanding, a wizened sorrow.
Schopenhauer said: Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little death.
I like the “little Helsinki” of my darkly measured, little and early days.
Planet of the Blind 