Un Cheval Andalou

I will start this one with an acknowledgement that it is all from memory, and that the memory is not always reliable.  But I will also argue that in this particular context it does not matter.  A Jungian therapist once said to me that it makes no sense to ask whether the dream has been remembered correctly, because there is no dream other than the recollected one.

"Un Chien Andalou" -- "An Andalusian Dog" -- is a justly famous, hallucinatory little film that Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali conspired to produce in the 1930s.  It shows us a succession of nightmarish vignettes.  In the one that stands out to me today, a young gentleman in fine clothes stands in a large and equally fine drawing room.  He is chained to a grand piano.  A dead horse, flayed, lies atop the instrument.  The man is struggling to drag himself and his burden in small steps towards an attractive woman who stands across the room.  (She could cross the room to him unburdened, but it seems that she is indifferent.)

A not-so-subtle message of the vignette is Sisyphean; that is, a tremendous exertion is being made in a hopeless cause.  But beyond that, it is a reminder that our cultural and social affectations are but expressions of vanity in a world that is governed at a deeper level only by blind and base animal instincts.  

I think of the scene now because it seems to mock my late fixations upon two things that are linked in my mind -- the possibility of transcendence and the imminence of right and proper judgment.

And yet, all can be reconciled if we see the entirety of "Un Chien Andalou" as a playing out of one man's descent into Carl Jung's netherworld, his shadow world.  On this view, the netherworld is a real, subconscious world that is shared by us all, and only by immersion into it can we reach the form of transcendence that Jung himself achieved, and that he referred to as personal integration.  

Jung would call this "science."  Without disparaging it, others might call it "mysticism."  With a little tweak to Arthur C. Clarke's oft-quoted aphorism, we may say after all that "any sufficiently comprehensive and advanced science is indistinguishable from magic."