black moths
by Brandi George
We’re finally reading Jung’s Red Book, after many years, after many people urged us to read it, and after being gifted with several copies (what will We do with them all?). Jung had visions, channeled the dead through active imagination, dreams, and other means that We don’t understand yet. He wasn’t afraid of going deep into the unconscious. We’re still afraid. We keep doubting the things We see and hear, and We will never be able to be present with them if We can’t stop this fear from taking over. The muses, dead poets, artists, yogis, mystics—even the gods—are there waiting for us to join them, perhaps to channel them into the land of the living.
No, not even to channel them. There is no purpose. The thought that there is a purpose is what makes people go crazy. It’s just the sea rising and falling, Woolf’s waves, Dante’s dark forest, the eternal sea with its beauty and ecstasy calling to us to be with it, just to be, just to melt into the river that becomes the ocean, the ocean that is beyond time.
The more We read Jung, it’s like the figures from reality and dreams have no boundary. For instance, Dante Alighieri has been visiting our dreams. One night, he visited us as a black dragonfly. At the beach the next day, a black dragonfly landed on our hand and stared at us. Then the dragonfly landed on Michael as well. When We arrived home, a cloud of black dragonflies was in our front yard. When We visited Philadelphia, another cloud of black dragonflies hovered above our head.
And since We started writing this book with an epigraph from Ted Hughes’s Crow, a large family of crows have taken up residence in the oak tree in our backyard. They dip hotdog buns and pizza crusts in the birdbath. They make a delicious racket.
*****
Sonu Shamdasani, in his introduction to Jung’s The Red Book (or Liber Novus as he often refers to it), describes the controversial content in the book, including “the relation of the individual to present-day society and to the community of the dead: an attempt to understand the psychological and historical effects of Christianity … and the future religious development of the West”[1] (48). After our exorcism and the burning of our poems, our “religious development” had been driven by poetry, yoga, and the playground of the imagination (in dreams and visions)—or as Jung writes, to “[overcome] the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation,” and to find “a new image of God in [our] soul” (48).
Liber Novus is a collection of fantasies and active imaginations, which Jung considered significant because they “stemmed from the mythopoeic imagination which was missing in the present rational age” (49). If this was missing in Jung’s time, then it is certainly missing in ours. Jung’s purpose was individuation or integrating these personalities/fantasy figures into the unconscious, but We don’t have any such goal. We’ve read the Bhagavad Gita too many times to have a goal. It urges us to work without attachment to the fruits of our labor. We must find our dharma, or unique life path, and then follow it without ambition. For us, this is still a brutal paradox. Where does ambition end and the “true path” begin? Are our visions a part of this?
There is a fine line between insanity and Jung’s experiments with the unconscious. It seems that intentionality is about the only difference. It’s the same sea, the same ocean, the yogis, mystics, and schizophrenics are accessing. The difference is whether or not you can swim. Yoga is extremely grounding, and Jung often used these techniques to tether himself just enough to reality to keep from drowning in the sea of the unconscious.
Rama et al discuss the relationship between creativity, yoga, and mental illness in Yoga & Psychotherapy: “The dark world of the personal unconscious is a barrier which must be conquered by the inner explorer who wishes to reach the higher levels of consciousness” (101). We don’t love the word “conquered” here, We prefer to float, to surrender to the depths. But certainly, there is skill and discipline involved in traversing these dangerous spaces. And although there are many similarities between the psychotic and the spiritual traveler, there are also clear differences. The psychotic “is one who has lost his way. Entering with no previous preparation, he finds a writhing cauldron of devils, evil spirits, and grotesque monsters which quickly engulf him” (101). The mystic, on the other hand, has a stable sense of self, control over the body and mind, and is able to swim, not drown, in the great sea of the unconscious. As for us—well, We are somewhere in between the two. We have been psychotic, drowning in fear, out of control, wishing for death. But after decades of poetic training and many years of consistent yoga asana practice, We accept the ocean as it flows into our lungs like a lover’s breath. We’re not sure what that means, but perhaps there is another way, the poet’s way—where madness and mysticism embrace like cosmic snakes? Or We neither swim, nor drown, but transform into a creature of the deep.
*****
“The body contains balance without symmetry,” our ashtanga teacher, Addy, said to us one morning. “The heart and diaphragm, alone, might create imbalance, but together they are an imperfect perfection. This balance without symmetry is life.” Creation and destruction are a part of the natural cycle of existence, but they are not pure opposites. Harmony is complicated, beyond the pure symmetry of rational thought. It requires intuition, imagination, and a trust in the consciousness of other beings, of nature, of animals. It requires us to listen, to observe the creativity of all beings without judgement.
Keats defined this creative force in a letter to George and Tom Keats: “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The binaries collapse, reason collapses. We must be capable of holding both sides together in perfect imperfection.
*****
Images are animals. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Images are animals. They need no justification for their existence. They live, they breathe, they are ends in themselves. The body, too, is an animal, a familiar. We are wild, spontaneous creatures. We must only look inward.
The breath is wind. The blood is water. The bones are earth. All of these, in imperfect perfection, burn with the life force of the sun.
*****
John Keats, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” is transported by the song of a night-singing bird. He is crushed by the weight of suffering, despair, and death. At first, he’s jealous of the bird’s happy song, but soon he allows it to facilitate a shift within him. Keats’s senses sharpen and blur, and he addresses his psychopomp, the mysterious bird, a guide through the dark forest: “Darkling, I listen.” The world hidden inside the world emerges:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
The song of the nightingale is a path, a doorway, into a world that is hidden in plain sight, a world that you can’t see with force or deliberation. The sight of this fairy world is a gift, always, and he flies, not with reason, “But on the viewless wings of Poesy.” Poetry, negative capability, allows him to cross the threshold, but he can only sustain it for so long. Soon, he returns to the land of death and suffering. He now wonders, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” As We do, he doubts the holiness of his experience, wonders if he imagined the whole thing. It is his reason here, his doubt, that closes the gate of the song.
*****
Jung writes, “The image of God has a shadow … The shadow is nonsense” (120). He also says that when humans are about thirty-five, they are called to express their shadows. He cites Dante Alighieri and Nietzsche as examples of this. In our life, We found yoga when We were thirty-five and began the long process of connecting to our body and letting go of our ambitions. Like Jung, We had lost our soul, and We were searching for it again. We found it using psychedelics, and then yoga. Poetry had become toxic to us—anything can be toxic, even God (especially God). Before We could connect to poetry again, We would have to root out the violence of competition and desire for external validation within us. We would have to learn to write from a place of connection and deep listening again.
Jung’s Liber Novus teaches us that, yes, We can be totally sane and have visions from the unconscious, and yes, the collective unconscious can and does speak to us. These visions stemming from the collective can be prophetic, or synchronistic, or felt by more than one person. We know this in our heart, but our culture doesn’t support the idea. Maybe this why Jung refused to publish Liber Novus during his lifetime, asking his family to wait for several decades before its release. They finally gave their permission in 2000, and the book was published in 2009. This book is central to understanding Jung’s theories and worldview, and it has only been available to the public for fifteen years. This is how scared Westerners are to face their shadows!
*****
What We’re trying to say to you, across time, is that you have a soul. Even if it has fled from you, it can return if you will stop, utterly, and lie on the ground as if you are dead, die in your imagination, sink into the earth, down and down, through the layers of lava and rock, and dissolve in the hot molten core of our living planet. Then get up and sing, dance, and pray. Pray to everything, especially to the shadow of God, which is nonsense. This is the soul. The soul is the shadow. If you crawl around like a child and throw your awards and accomplishments into the sea, then your soul may return to you. And when they do, praise them, make love to them with all of your being, and do whatever they ask from that point forward. If they ask you to drink poison, like Socrates—drink it. It is better to die than to violate the integrity of your own soul.
Jung felt that the soul was a female for male-identifying persons and a male for female-identifying persons. It would be the opposite of what gender you identify as. This is because identifying with any one gender represses the other one, pushes it into the shadow. Humans are naturally whole. This is why the rise of people identifying as nonbinary seems like a healthy development in human consciousness.
One of Jung’s friends, Cary Baynes, argued, “What struck me especially was what you [Jung] said about the “Bild” [image] being half the world. That is the thing that makes humanity so dull. They have missed understanding that thing. The world, that is the thing that holds them rapt. ‘Das Bild’, they have never seriously considered unless they have been poets” (130). One of the real powers of poetry is its connection with the image, the senses, the earth, the underworld of the soul.
*****
Typically, the poem centers on an image or series of images, which can be personal or collective. These images come to poets without narrative, without purpose, and We recognize them as beings in themselves, messengers from the unconscious, or the spirit world, or our own souls, which walk in a timeless space between the living and the dead. We bow to the power of nonsense, and so the image can simply be. The soul speaks in images—the soul of a person, the soul of the world, the soul of the tree, etc. Poets can communicate with the world around them without narrative or purpose.
The sea asked us this question—does poetry matter?—because the unconscious is our lover. Our limbs are eternally entwined, coiled around each other, dissolving into each other in ecstasy and continual transformation. The sea is our beloved.
The sea speaks to us because We’re a fool. Today We smelled jasmine in the rain, and read a poem to a rat, and offered tiny crystals to the crows who have taken up residence in our oak tree. We dress up for them every morning, put on as many cheap bracelets as possible and paint our nails with glitter. We spent our whole paycheck on flowers, spent our morning arranging them. There are large, overflowing vases in every room of the house, tall and rainbow-colored, with vines spiraling into the air. Mosquitoes laid eggs in the vases, and now there are swarms floating through the house. We threw marigold petals on the floor in honor of Shiva, and onto Michael’s forehead, and then they got stuck to our skin during our yoga practice, staining our clothes and mat. While they are still yellow, We won’t clean them. We bought a crown that is over a foot tall, which We will wear to speak to the birds tomorrow, whispering a phrase from Ted Hughes’ Crow: “Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, o littleblood.”
The sea asked us this question because We are the sea, and We’ve been waiting to ask ourself this question our whole life.
*****
Water is of the soul—oceans, lakes, rivers, rain. Today it has been raining all day, and We can’t stop sitting on the porch to watch it. The plants have strong souls, and they speak in images if you will listen.
*****
Although some might think We’re suffering from psychotic episodes, or that We’re schizophrenic, We think We have a case of divine madness. As Emily Dickinson writes, “Much madness is divinest sense” and if you won’t believe us, maybe you’ll believe her.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates discussed four types of divine madness: 1. inspired divination (prophesy), 2. prayer or worship (we think of it as bhakti, surrender to god), 3. poetic/artistic possession, and 4). love. The person who experiences these forms of divine madness swims in the great sea of the unconscious. This person doesn’t drown in the waters of the deep. As Jung writes, “if you enter into the world of the soul, you are like a madman” (150).
*****
Dream We live in a trailer with Mike, much like the one We lived in as a child. We’re cooking dinner when We suddenly say, “This isn’t our house.” Mike gives us a look like We’re losing our mind. We keep repeating, “This isn’t our house.” When he doesn’t believe us, We say, “Watch this!” and grab a rifle out of one of the bedrooms. We walk outside into the trailer park’s cul-de-sac and begin shooting the windshields out of the cars. We strip our clothes off. The police arrive, and We get into the back of the police car naked. Mike collapses on the lawn, heartbroken.
We fell asleep in the back of the police car and then wake up again in one of the bedrooms of the trailer. Mike is holding his head in his hands when We breeze into the living room. “See, told ya!” We hug Mike, but soon fall asleep against our will, slumping over. We wake in many different bedrooms, in many different houses, repeating, “Not our house” until We return to the trailer park. Mike isn’t there anymore, and the bay is dark and haunted.
We walk out of the front door with our rifle, screaming, “Not our house!” until earth cracks in front of us. A tall man with pale skin and long black hair rises from the ground with a crown of snakes on his head: Hades, King of the Underworld. He picks us up and carries us down a large circular stairway, down and down, for hours until We reach a giant auditorium. We were thrown onto a spider’s web, which causes the audience to shout and cheer. Hades turns into a spider and spins us into a little white cocoon. Instead of eating us, We’re placed in a cave at the top of the mountain (maybe in Tibet?). We remain there, in our cocoon, for many centuries. We keep trying to enter other people’s dreams, trying to get them to come and find us. We wake without being rescued.
*****
Black moths flew from Jung’s Red Book, so We threw it—twice. We grew tired of Jung’s references to Christianity, which no longer resonated with us. And yet, the book seemed to speak directly to the subconscious. Dark flying creatures emerged from the edges of our vision each time We read it: crows, ravens, pterodactyls, dragonflies, and now black moths. They leapt from the top of bookshelves, tree branches, countertops. Reaching our five-page limit, We picked up the other book We were reading.
Michaux’s Major Ordeals of the Mind explores his own drug-induced states and how they changed his experience of consciousness. This gave him insight into mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. He writes, “[schizophrenics] feel, despite their deficiencies, far from inferior in intelligence compared with their uncomprehending attendants who have the advantage over them” (40).
Michaux observes how the mentally ill don’t feel deficient until they are evaluated, or forced to perform, pushed to compare themselves in a standardized test, or when their families desire the patients to remember them, to love them, in a conventional way. When they are not being tested or forced to conform to societal expectations, they are at peace, whole, in communion with something that can’t be tested or proven. When the patients were left alone, they had an inviolable essence, a dignity that defied testing. This leads Michaux to argue that there is something beyond memory, beyond quantifiable intelligence, an “essence.” He writes, “The essence: what remains when one no longer needs to lower oneself, to keep busy, to function, to become finite, specific, small” (38). The daily tasks We must perform detract from this wholeness, this magnanimity, this divine radiance, this dignity that makes us wild, this wildness that puts us in contact with the creative force.
Does poetry matter?
Not as poetry. But—being whole and dignified does matter. And poetry can create a bridge to the subconscious, the space where We can dwell without memory, or tests, or competition, or ambition. The charnel grounds stretch infinitely in all directions. Crows lead us into the emptiness where We cover our body with the ashes of the dead.
*****
The world asks, “But is it insanity?”
*****
Krishnamurti writes, “There is something vast and immeasurable beyond the mind, a loveliness which the mind cannot understand. In that immensity there is an ecstasy, a glory; and the living in that, the experiencing of that is the way of education” (232). Poetry can be called that thing, if We want to play word games. But is it better not to name it, to attempt a definition that will always limit our connection to this force? How do We live on this earth?
We flip open the book at random, and Krishnamurti answers, “The strange part of it is that those who are seeking truth or God are much more explosive, they release extraordinary energy, not only in themselves but in others; and it is they that are the real revolutionaries…” (213). This is all We’ve ever wanted to know. The revolution must originate from within each person. This is how We live on this earth. This is how We support and love other beings.
*****
The sea asks, “Why do [loud thunder]?”
Sorry, what?
The sea demands, “Why [CRRZZZHDHSISNNDHHSLSKDKNGNGHNN]?
We drift down and down, our toes fusing, our insides opening to water.
[1] Jung, C.G. The Red Book (Liber Novus): A Reader’s Edition
Photo of Brandi George
BIO: Brandi George (she/her) is the author of Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), Faun (Plays Inverse/Press 53, 2019), and The Nameless (Kernpunkt Press, 2023). Her most recent collection of poems and paintings, Deus Absconditus and Love Letters from Outer Space (Kernpunkt Press, 2025), was co-written with Michael Barach. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Fence, and Orion, and she has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts, the Hill House, and the Time & Place Award in France. She teaches yoga and writing in Southwest Florida. Substack @brandileegeorge, Instagram @ brandileegeorge1111.