“Here. Drink, lady. Drink.”
Chapter 11
DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN
RUBIN MUSEUM
DECEMBER 6, 2010
Wet snow sluiced under the tires of the taxi pulling up to the curb at 150 West Seventeenth Street.
Betsy paid the Pakistani cabbie, tipping far too much. She chalked it up to her excitement, she was actually about to see Jung’s Red Book—she wanted the entire world to share her excitement, the joy of anticipation.
Forget the analyzing, Path, she told herself. You are on vacation this weekend.
She marched through the sidewalk’s dirty slush, her cheeks burning from the wind gusts rocketing down the city canyons. Betsy was always amazed by how sharp Manhattan’s wind could feel, comparable to the sting of blizzard gusts in the Rockies.
She pushed the glass door open and was embraced by warmth and yellow light. She sighed with delight.
The Rubin Museum exuded the scent of the sacrosanct. Betsy had visited it before, to see the Buddhist mandalas and Tibetan art. When she was at Jungian conferences or visiting friends in New York in the winter, she would often duck into the little private museum for a cup of chai or a curry soup to chase the city chill away.
She often thought of her father here, though he died years before it opened. He would have loved it.
Tonight’s program, however, was the only reason she had flown to New York for the weekend. Carl Jung’s The Red Book—Jung’s illustrated chronicle of his journey of the soul and battle with madness—was on display at the Rubin. This original manuscript had been locked in a Swiss bank vault for fifty years. This was the first time it had ever been seen in public. Along with the book itself, the museum was presenting an extraordinary series of discussions that were virtually public Jungian analyses of prominent artists, writers, intellectuals, and mystics.
Jung, a protégé of Sigmund Freud, had moved further and further away from Freud’s principles. He eschewed his mentor’s rigid adherence to sexual trauma as the root of most mental illness. Jung believed in the collective unconscious, that all humans shared a common pool of ancient knowledge and experience that they were not aware of, but which affected every moment of their lives. Dreams and intuition were valuable tools to not only the psyche but to the soul.
At the age of thirty-eight, in the year 1913, Jung was haunted by his own demons, foreseeing the death and destruction of World War I. His visions tortured him further until he labeled them a “psychosis” or “schizophrenia,” but instead of trying to cure himself, he explored his visions in what he termed “active imagination.” He illustrated his dreams and began keeping a series of notebooks, which were later transcribed into a big red leather bound book, The Red Book.
Each evening discussion in “The Red Book Dialogues” paired a Jungian psychoanalyst with one of the notable guests. The celebrity would be shown an illustration from The Red Book, seeing it for the first time right there on stage, and then the psychoanalyst would ask questions about the viewer’s feelings and interpretations of the drawing.
This particular night the celebrity was a tarot card reader named Rikki Gillette, to be interviewed by Dr. Jane Kilpatrick from the C.G. Jung Institute.
Betsy’s mother was originally going to meet her for this event, but Grace was still engrossed in historical research in Slovakia. Besides, thought Betsy, her mother never “got” Jung. This would be far beyond her comfort zone.
She thought of her father. If only he had lived to see The Red Book tonight.
There were plenty of familiar faces in the crowd. To see the manuscript, written and illustrated by Carl Jung himself, was a psychoanalyst’s version of making the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Betsy waited her turn to peer down at the enormous tome, encased in bulletproof glass. Every few days the pages were turned. She gazed in awe at the twisting colors and bizarre forms on the two selected pages.
Superimposed on a labyrinth of river blue and beige lines was a figure of a—turbaned man?—outlined in red and black. He fell back, staggering from a golden ray of light piercing—his heart? But if it was his heart, why did it look like a club, as on a playing card? His face showed no fear—surprise, perhaps—and…
Betsy leaned closer.
Ecstasy. The man was being touched by the divine.
Others crowded around her, she could smell curry on someone’s breath, perhaps the woman behind her in line. Betsy only then realized that the man was standing on a snake, an angry snake ready to strike.
“Excuse me—may I have a look if you are finished?”
Betsy nodded, but it was agonizing to step away from Jung’s original work. She was thankful that her mother had given her a first edition copy of the book for her birthday a few weeks before.