What a pleasure to be a NYTimes “Pick” at comments on an article
I loved reading. Of the editors’ few picks, out of over 400 comments,
I’m the last word!
Now, not to burden you with intricacies, please bear with me to a figurative (non-intricate) end.
The “Jungian point” is potentially vast, for individuation (“for becoming most fully oneself”), for my life, and for Analytical Psychology (which is professionally post-Jungian).
Jung’s personality typology is a clinical pragmatic that led to the well-validated Myers-Brigg inventory, which (quoting myself from 2017) “parses selfality into eight ways (concepts of being) of preferring to be, each partly composing one’s selfidentifying (“process”: modes of enactiveness): extraversion, introversion, thinking, feeling, intuiting, sensing, judging, and perceiving.”
Individuation (for Jung, for professional psychology, and for creative life) is potentially far beyond commonly “mature” adulthood because “active imagination” (an originally Jungian notion) potentiates “high individuation” (middle of that 2010 page), which is potentially gynandrous (i.e., androgynous; but I prefer my feminized neologism), 2016:
May there be a ”meeting of minds”—exhilaration!—in gynandrous synergy of protean flourishing: all sensibility (receptive) with all intuitability (responsive); wholly feeling (receptive) with wholly thinking (responsive); fully perceiving (receptive) with fully valuing (responsive), enjoying introversion with extraversion, being Anima and Animus…receptiveness of sensing, feeling, perceiving, and introverting; responsiveness of intuiting, thinking, valuing, and extraverting—a tenable genderal phenomenology?For my life, the wayfaring has been long (attested by the links above, by “sundry gardening,” by “a creative life,” and by The Project). The faring reaches a place of its own whose reason for being, for going on, becomes its ownmost being for the sake of its life. An inestimable vulnerability stays invisible thanks to “steadfastness, confidence, even stoicness.”
The work of life evinces traces of itself in particular works, whose traceness belongs to an intimate vulnerability of the Work of art.
Whether or not one is ahead of one’s time (unlikely!) is no matter for the life, because works gain lives of their own through future reception. It’s the plight of creative life to sustain that invisible thanks through ongoing Work for the sake of Itself, as if there’s appreciability fated to remain unmet through overtly sharing traces.
The lessons of our poses, our postures, portray a protean synergy of self, eros, and Work that abides among intimates—like the darling literary love between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller (which enchanted my bohemian days on the road).
Yet, confession is not for improvisations at the Times. So, I posture, “I’m so jealous…I cant stand it.” and Miles is “wrong, simply wrong,” dear.
It’s all so beautiful: a life never to be wholly known save by the intimates who die, too.
So, writerly art does its best to make its love frame a seeming masterpiece.
