Alice in Wonderland/ Dark Night of the Soul

[jonathan zap]

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Before this week’s blog I would like to briefly recommend seeing Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland   Some may question the changes to the original story, but a movie demands a different structure than a novel.  Staying closer to the original might have created an impression of disconnected vignettes and a movie needs a strong narrative drive.   The movie version emphasizes Alice’s journey as a rebellion from patriarchy and an  oppressive social matrix.  Some of the entities in Wonderland have trouble recognizing Alice, and perhaps this is because she is no longer a child (as she was in her earlier visit) and therefore she may have lost some of her earlier connection with magic.  Her journey could be viewed as a series of awakenings to her own power as a magical agent able to morph reality in accordance with her will.  This is the essence of magic which Crowley defined as: “The ability to create change in conformity to will.”   Highly effective and also emblematic of an underlying meaning of both the movie and the new medium of immersive 3D IMAX is that Johnny Depp’s eyes have been enhanced by CGI.  This is weirdly appropriate because our eyes, our visual imagination, I s being enhanced by CGI.  In some ways this film is even more appropriately related to the medium than Avatar because movies, as I’ve written elsewhere, are essentially a dream delivery technology.   Wonderland is much closer to the dreamtime and to magic than Avatar where we alternate between two interpenetrating fairly literal worlds----the world of imperialistic technocracy and Pandora.   Avatar allows us to break the one body/one psyche rule but by a technology dependent transfer to another literal,  fixed body.   Alice discovers in Wonderland, however, that her body can be morphed and surrealized a bit.  The limitation in Wonderland is that her body seems to change only in the dimension of size which seems a bit of a Victorian strait jacket given the plasticity of dreams, but if we consider all of Wonderland to be an exteriorization of Alice’s psyche than she is also morphing into hookah smoking caterpillars and everything else in Wonderland.  I would prioritize taking the journey down the rabbit hole as a 3D IMAX if want the full potency of what this new medium has to offer.  It’s also well worth your time to get to the theater early enough to be able to choose prime seats lined up with the center of the screen.
        Dark Night of the Soul

text © Jonathan Zap   566 Dr. Christine Page showed this slide as part of a presentation she gave at a conference I participated in at Fort Collins, Colorado The dark night of the soul can be a zone of intense anguish where the will to live is challenged. It is also a zone where great transformation is possible. Carl Jung, in his study of alchemy, related the dark night of the soul to the "Nigredo." Nigredo is an alchemical term for a condition of decomposition that was the first step in the transformation of base matter into the philosopher's stone. William James, the great American pioneer in psychology, a renown Harvard professor, would sometimes write in his journal, "Please God, give me a reason to live for the next fifteen minutes." I've had numerous dark nights of the soul. In the most acute episodes of despair that I've experienced, it felt like I would never be a functional human being again, and that suicide might be the only remaining act of self-love possible. In the dark night of the soul, the old identity crumbles, and the will to live may collapse. The great potential for metamorphosis in this state is that one lets the false die, and there is a movement toward the experience of meaning. Only the deeply meaningful can bring redemption to the dark night of the soul. For me, many dark nights of the soul came from feelings of despair at efforts to be loved in the romantic sense. What came in to redeem the torment was recognition of duty to others, that there were loving services I could still perform for others, and that if I could not be loved the way that I wanted, that I could still be love. Elohim creating Adam, 1795, William Blake, Color print finished in pen and watercolor. The test I often recommend for separating what is truly valuable from what is false and superficial, is to ask yourself what you will remember well on your deathbed. The dark night of the soul is a deathbed of the ego, an invaluable chance to let go of the artificial and return to your essence. Consider this a propitious time to honor the dark night of the soul, and allow your True Will to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of your despair. My Body is a Cage, a superb music video by Arcade Fire, expresses, at least for me, the transformative darkness of the dark night of the soul. See the section on dealing with shock in A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler Feedback always welcome.  Send to jonat...@hotmail.com

Thanks,  Jonathan Zap

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