If you've studied Jung's work at all, you've probably heard of the Duende. This excellent 20-minute video, "Duende: A Work in Progress" by Patricia Llosa offers a great explanation (special thanks to Alliance member and Jungian analyst, Erel Shalit, for bringing it to my attention!)
You might also be interested in reading this article, "REFLECTIONS ON THE DUENDE: An examination of The Theory and Play of the Duende by Federico García Lorca" by the late Jungian analyst, Raphael López-Pedraza.
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Randy, thanks for your comment on the article. There are a couple of other pieces on The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon that might offer more food for thought about the downward direction (back) into body and earth. My interest in poetry takes me in that direction searching for images. And I can see that the imaginal world lies between and overlaps with body and spirit to make soul...that's an idea discussed in the links I will list here for you.
I would like to hear more from you about your study of depth in dreams.
Barbara
http://www.barbaraknott.net/GV13archives.html
http://www.barbaraknott.net/GV15archives.html
I liked the Grapevine Art & Soul Salon and will read more there. Your references to James Hillman were very intriguing and I must admit to having only become acquainted with him recently.
While I haven’t posted many dream experiences, I did a blog entry here which featured one of my most transformative dreams. Over the years, my commentary about each dream seems to change all the time, as I learn more about the subject and understand a symbol, image, motif or myself in a new way. This has led me to be hesitant about sharing too much. I will no doubt interpret this year’s experiences differently next year than I do now.
To relate a dream which highlights this awareness of the height and depth communication from the unconscious, I will give one here, without commentary. I am also embarrassed sometimes at the pure archetypal nature of some of my content, because it seems as if I could have made it up. This is my own failing, which I hope to overcome. I have no personal associations to the content here. The “unknown woman” makes a helpful appearance, and I believe the people on the ground floor were integrated into myself when I descended, but that is just conjecture at this point.
Vivid Dream:
We were living up on the 2nd or the 3rd level of a house in a suburban neighborhood. When I looked across the fields, I could see other fairly large houses, with large yards and trees all around, some with white columns. I looked down (through the floor) and could see other people living on the first floor of our house. They were naked, had long black hair and seemed to be dirty. They crouched down as they looked up at us, seemingly in wonder and maybe fear. “We” were at least three and maybe four people, who were trapped up on our floor and could never leave.
A woman was using a hand drilling device to drill into the floor of the corner of the kitchen. She smiled and seemed hopeful that if we could get to the ground, we could go live in one of the other houses and have our own house in which to live.
We climbed down a pole or a rope, reaching the first floor. We walked out into a yard (clockwise from where we exited the house) and saw two women walking across the yard, on their way somewhere. They saw us and approached. At first, I crouched way down low to the ground, feeling the grass with my hands, wary of these new people but saw that they posed no threat. I think we sat down with these people and talked. The women seemed to be wearing brown, primitive looking dresses, which were possibly animal skins.
Randy, thanks for your comments about The Grapevine. I am glad to know you're reading around in it. Much of my own interest in the depths is reflected there.
I agree that specific commentary on your dream is not the drift of our interest here. I can point to some reading I've done about "the way down" and about depths. James Hillman's book The Dream and the Underworld is very precisely on the subject we've mentioned. It is not an easy book to read, but the rewards of revisiting it again and again are encouraging. Thomas Moore edited a collection of quotations from Hillman as an introductory overview of his work. That is called A Blue Fire. There is also a book in which an editor has collected pieces from Jung's Collected Works that are specifically on dreaming. I think it is called Jung and the Dream. Some of the imagery in your dream (dresses and animal skins) remind me that there is also a book of pieces from Jung called The Earth Has a Soul.
And the image of you reaching down to touch the grass reminds me that Walt Whitman's poetry is very earthy.
I hope these directional hints will be useful to you. And I'd like to continue the conversation as far as it wants to go.
Best regards, Barbara
Hi Barbara. Thanks for sharing such a beautifully-written, well-thought-out piece on the duende. I had never heard of the concept of "deep song" and found it particularly fascinating. You really managed to capture the feel of the duende throughout the piece, succeeding in your effort to not "explain duende but to give a sense of it by amplification of its associations and meanings."
This is a topic everyone can benefit by learning more about. What's interesting is that, a bit like phenomenology, I guess, one must really be "in" the experience in order to learn about it. You can't just read it in a book unless the author, like you, manages to instigate the appearance through poetic writing and engagement with the reader. Thank you again!
A fascinating subject. Evoked deep in the body through movement, accessed deep in the psyche, as explained by Ms. Llosa, the hermetic axiom is expressed in the story of the Duende. She referred to the fresh content, or ideas to be found in embracing life at the possibility of death, or exhaustion from activity like dance, accessing the unconscious through the inferior function, etc. to achieve Jung’s transcendent function.
Pulling Dionysus himself into this idea, choosing life out on the edge of a rubicon and winning it against the odds seems to be the act of a hero, a god, or a person connected with these archetypal energies.
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