INTRODUCING NEW WORK IN PROGRESS
One Rule to
Live By: Be Good
Inspired by Jordan B. Peterson, a clinical psychologist
and U of T professor, a modern-day hierophant who spoke truth to power and refuted
the amendment to Bill C-16 and was catapulted onto the world stage for his valiant
defense of free speech and pushback to postmodern nihilism, identity politics,
and political correctness. He is the
author of the Amazon global bestseller12 Rules for
Life: An Antidote to Chaos.. TODAY’S POST: Chapter One:
“Ask the Question, and the Answer Will Come.”
CHAPTER ONE
Ask the Question,
and the Answer Will Come
I wrote a book of poetry last year, Not
My Circus, Not My Monkeys; and I opened my book with the following poem:
What the Hell
Is Going on Out
There?
Hierophants of the world,
what the hell is going on out there?
Your antennae are out of whack,
and all you report is madness,
madness, and more madness, or
am I too blind to see?
Hierophants of the world,
tell me the truth, has the world
gone mad or is this some new sanity
beyond my ability to process
and understand?
Hierophants of the world,
I’ve lost all faith in religion, science,
and politics, but not in the better nature
of my fellow man, so please tell me:
what the hell is
going on out there?
My poem came to me unbidden, nearly word perfect; but I
wasn’t angry at the world when I wrote my poem. I was angry at myself for my
inability to process and understand what the hell was going on out there. But
my muse was good to me, and it offered me hope in the better nature of my
fellow man; and time went by...
Little did I expect however that the answer to my angry
question would offer itself to me in the better nature of a budding hierophant that
I saw coming three years before he stepped onto the world stage with his surprising
Amazon bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos, a transplanted western boy from small-town Alberta by
the name of Jordan B. Peterson, a clinical psychologist and U of T professor of
psychology who began posting his lectures on YouTube five years ago where I “chanced”
upon him while doing research for a book I was working on, which strangely
enough was titled The Sign of Things to
Come; but because I don’t believe in chance, I’ve put the word in quotation
marks.
I watched one
of Professor Peterson’s lectures on C. G. Jung (Jung: Personality and its Transformations), and he made such a strong impression upon me that over the next
few days I watched five or six more of his personality lectures; that’s when I knew that he was going to make his mark on
the world one day. He had the right stuff.
In fact, I was so moved by his passion, intelligence
and authenticity that I sent him copies of my books The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway and The Pearl of Great Price, because I knew that his own remarkable journey to “wholeness and singleness
of self,” as Carl Jung described the goal of the individuation process, was
leading him to the mysteries of the secret
way just as Jung’s own journey had led him, as he tells us in his commentary to
Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the ancient Taoist text, The Secret of the Golden Flower:
“I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and
only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had
been unconsciously led along the secret way which has been the
preoccupation of the best minds in the East for Centuries” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 86; bold
italics mine).
Like Jung, I also had found the secret way; and my
heart went out to Professor Peterson. That’s why I sent him my books to read,
in the hope that he might glean some insights from them that would lead him to
the secret way also.
That was three years ago. Last year I was working on a
new spiritual musing, which I normally post on my Spiritual Musings blog before
publishing them in book form, but I hit a blank wall and did not know how to
bring my musing to closure.
Though I’m always surprised when it happens, whenever
I hit a wall in my writing the merciful law of divine synchronicity kicks in and
offers me a way out of my predicament; that’s why I was “nudged” to watch Professor
Peterson’s lecture on Jung again, and something the professor said was exactly
what I needed to bring my musing to resolution, and it behooves me to quote my
musing to illustrate how the secret way works in my life:
The Purpose of Art is Art’s Purpose
I don’t know why I
was called to write this spiritual musing, but while working on another book
this morning (The Sign of Things to Come)
I wrote something that jumped out at me like a news bulletin from tomorrow, a
hierophantic insight that was a remarkable confirmation of the theme of my new
book on the sign of things to come but which called out to be explored in
today’s spiritual musing, an insight that falls squarely into that dreaded
category of dangerous spiritual musings that always scare me.
A dangerous
spiritual musing can hit so close to home that it can nick the sacred bone of
one’s life and come back to play nasty with me; but that, essentially, is the
theme of today’s spiritual musing—daring to take the risk and cross the line
into the unknown territory of the creative unconscious where the objective will
of the creative principle of life and the subjective will of the author become
one willful purpose, which brings to mind those famous words by the celebrated
poet of The Wasteland: “We shall not
cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring /Will be to arrive
where we started.”
From the earliest
age, I wanted to be a writer like my high school hero and literary mentor
Ernest Hemingway; but in grade twelve I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge and was called to
become a seeker like Maugham’s intrepid hero Larry Darrell, and I spent many
years exploring the sacred teachings of the world to find an answer to the
haunting question of my life, who am I?
Happily, I found the
answer to my question and my explorations brought me back to where I started,
which was my desire to become a writer; and I wrote indefatigably to make up
for all the years I had spent looking for my true self. And the more I wrote,
the more I learned about the art of creative writing, until one day I
discovered the secret that all great writers find eventually, like the
inscrutable poet Emily Dickinson, and that’s the dangerous subject of today’s
musing…
My life partner
Penny Lynn joins me in my writing room for coffee every morning, and we talk
about our dreams and other things and always about the book she brings in with
her to read, and it’s surprising how quickly she can read a book in such a
short time each morning before going to work; like The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, 887 pages long; Alice
Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman; and
the book she’s currently reading, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, and we talk about her
impressions of the stories and the authors.
That’s how I gauge
the quality of the books she reads, because I trust Penny Lynn’s judgment
implicitly; and her impressions of John Updike’s writing confirmed Professor Harold
Bloom’s indictment that Updike is “a minor novelist with a major style,
hovering always near a greatness he is too shrewd or diffident to risk.”
Penny loved Mavis
Gallant, and even more Alice Munro’s stories; but John Updike she could take or
leave because his stories, though masterfully crafted and brilliantly written,
did not leave a lasting impression.
“They fade away as
soon as I read them. It’s like he never gets to the soul of his story,” Penny
said to me, and I had to wonder why, because as much as I love John Updike for
his brilliant style and uncanny mastery of le
mot juste his stories faded away on me also, unlike Hemingway’s stories
which left a lasting impression; but when I was given the insight for today’s
spiritual musing, I knew why—which is why I felt compelled to explore it in
today’s musing; and so, once again into the breach…
Creative writing is a mystical experience. Norman Mailer
called it “spooky,” but he didn’t’ know why, and neither does any other writer
that I’m aware of (except for maybe Emily Dickinson); but I resolved this
mystery in my spiritual musings, because writing my musings brought to the fore
the mystical element of creative writing, which proved to be the intelligent guiding principle of life
that guides our creative unconscious but which has also been called “God
within” by Emerson and “Spirit” by Wordsworth and other poets; and herein lies
the danger of today’s spiritual musing, because it dares to bring God into the
dynamic of the creative writing process which will be sure to raise a few
eyebrows, literary and otherwise.
Without mincing
words, then; I’ve come to see that ‘the
generous Spirit that makes the path before us always bright’ as Wordsworth
tells us in his poem “Character of the Happy Warrior,” which I made the ideal
of my life, is the élan vital of
life, and writers have the gift of tapping into the creative force of life with
their writing. And herein lies the dilemma of the creative writer’s art,
because tapping into the creative force of life incurs an inexplicable moral
responsibility that can intimidate the most gifted writer, as it seems to have
done the prodigiously talented John Updike.
Literary critic
and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, Professor Harold
Bloom felt that John Updike was too shrewd or diffident to risk the greatness
of his art, but he never explained why, which is what I feel I was called upon
to explore in today’s spiritual musing; but to do so, I have to explain that
the writer who does not work in willful harmony with the intelligent guiding principle of life will impede the flow of
the creative process and damage the integrity of his art—like the novelist who
controls his characters instead of letting his creative unconscious give them a
life of their own so they can bring to light the archetypal truth of their
story. “Art is the truth above the facts of life,” said the author of Out of Africa Karan Blixen, which our
own Nobel Laureate Alice Munroe brought closer to home with aphoristic genius
in her comment “Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life.”
I quote these
eminent writers to make the point that the
inherent purpose of art is to explore the truth of life. That’s why
Hemingway began every story that he wrote with the truest sentence that he
knew, upon which he built the rest of his story to satisfy his literary credo
to “tell it the way it was.” But that’s not the whole secret of Hemingway’s
art, because being true to “the way it was” does not always satisfy the
creative process, as Hemingway learned when he experimented with his novel The Green Hills of Africa, a strait
biographical account of his African safari with his second wife Pauline
Pfeiffer which proved to be an artistic failure that taught Hemingway the
lesson of his life that every great writer must learn and obey: it takes the miraculous power of
imagination to lift one’s writing to the lofty heights of art.
Hemingway revealed
his “secret” in his memoir A Moveable
Feast, the final book of his life that he was working on just before taking
his own life with his favorite shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho: “I was learning
something from the paintings of Cezanne that made writing simple sentences far
from enough to make the stories have the dimension that I was trying to put
into them. I was learning very much from him, but I was not articulate enough
to explain to anyone. Besides it was a secret.”
That “secret” made
Hemingway a great writer. After licking his wounds for the artistic failure of The Green Hills of Africa, the
resourceful writer used the same African safari experience to write two of his
best short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and my favorite
Hemingway story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which proved to Hemingway that the
miraculous power of imagination was necessary to make art, thereby confirming
what Adrienne Rich said about creative writing: “Poetry is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a
deeper perception of what is.” Hemingway gave his African safari experience
to the guiding principle of his creative unconscious, and the deeper perception
of his experience was revealed in his two remarkable stories that bared the
wretched soul of his protagonists.
That’s how art is
made. But as much as I understood how art is made, I could not quite give my
understanding of the secret of art the clarity that it deserved; and then the merciful law of divine synchronicity
kicked in to assist me, which was proof yet again of the intelligent guiding principle of life that I had learned to
trust implicitly…
I started writing
this spiritual musing yesterday morning, but I had to stop because I could not take
it any further; it needed “something” to bring it to resolution, and as
serendipity would have it, this “something” came to me when I was nudged later
in the evening to go on YouTube and watch Professor Jordan Peterson’s lecture
on Jung again, and something he said about art jumped out at me, because it was exactly what I needed to bring
resolution to my spiritual musing.
As he gave a
Jungian interpretation of the movie The
Lion King to his students, Professor Peterson inadvertently revealed that
certain “something” about the creative process that I needed to bring
resolution to my spiritual musing: “Art
cannot be designed for a purpose. The purpose of art is art’s purpose,” which
is the secret of all great writing that I intuited to be the intelligent guiding principle of life.
Ironically, this
is the mystical nature of the creative process that has been called spooky by
Norman Mailer (and other writers, like Martin Amis), because no one understands
how it works. But the psychologist Carl Jung intuited this secret in his essay
“Psychology and Literature” in his book Modern
Man in Search of a Soul: “The artist is not a person endowed with free
will who seeks his own ends, but one who will allow art to realize its purpose
through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal
aims, but as an artist he is a ‘man’ in a higher sense—he is ‘collective
man’—one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind” (Modern Man in Search of Soul, C. G.
Jung, p. 169; bold italics mine).
Which implies that
the creative process is the intelligent
guiding principle of life that brings the truth of life into existence
through the medium of the artist but which, as Hemingway and all great artists
come to learn, can only be done when the artist engages the transcendent
function of his imagination and transforms the reality of his experience into a
deeper perception of that experience, as Hemingway did with his African safari
experience when he wrote his two famous short stories, “The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
Being aware of the
mystical nature of the creative process, I engaged my own imagination to
transform one of the most private experiences of my own life: I flipped a coin to make up my mind for me.
I did this for six months with every major decision of my life for the
experimental purpose of “letting go and letting God.” I did this to learn to trust my gut
instincts, which proved to be very effective, and twenty years later I gave
this experience to my creative unconscious to work into a story, and with the
power of my imagination I transformed my experience of “letting go and letting
God” into a deeper perception of my experience, and the truth of my experience
became my magical realism novel The
Golden Seed; so I know how this mystical process works. But what does it
really mean to say that the purpose of art is art’s purpose? What is art’s purpose?
I could explore
this until the cows come home, but the short answer is that art’s purpose is to bring to light the archetypal truth of man’s
existence; and when an artist imposes his will upon the will of the
intelligent guiding principle of the creative process he impedes the archetypal
truth that the creative process seeks to bring to light; this separates the great
artist from all the rest, regardless how gifted an artist may be, like John
Updike who hovered near a greatness that he was too shrewd or diffident to
risk.
Which means, if
the logic of art holds true as I believe it does, that the greater the truth
the intelligent guiding principle of the creative process seeks to bring to
light, the greater the risk the artist will have to take; and, as the history
of art tells us, only the very few dare to risk their all for the greater truth
of their art, as Hemingway did when he bared his wretched soul in “The Short
Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and as Emily
Dickinson did in her poetry that continues to baffle the world with the
mystique of her “secret.”
——
I continued watching Professor Peterson’s lectures and talks on YouTube
with a growing fascination, because they were answering the angry question of
my poem and satisfying my need to know what the hell was going on out there; and
then the good professor was pushed to the edge by the pernicious forces of
identity politics and political correctness and he took a courageous stand for
free speech and spoke truth to power by refuting an amendment to the
Canadian Human Rights Act in Bill C-16
After carefully parsing the legislation, Citizen Peterson did not view Bill
C-16 as an egalitarian coda that would merely expand the list of prohibited
grounds of discrimination to include gender identity and gender expression. In
his view, being forced to use “preferred pronouns” amounted to “compelled
speech,” and he flat out refused to use invented pronouns under government fiat;
and he made two videos explaining his position and posted them on YouTube, and
they went viral and catapulted him onto the world stage. And then he published 12 Rules for Life; An Antidote to Chaos, his well-reasoned response to the nefarious forces
of postmodern nihilism and identity politics, and that launched him onto the
global stage; and to everyone’s surprise, he became the heroic hierophant that the
world was calling for.
Time passed; and then one day I read
an interview of Jordan Peterson by Christie Blatchford in the National Post (Saturday, January 20, 2018), and I was once again nudged by my oracle
to send him a copy of My Writing Life,
the sequel to my book The Lion that
Swallowed Hemingway that I had sent him three years earlier, plus a copy of
my twin soul book The Merciful Law of
Divine Synchronicity (twin soul to my book Death, the Final Frontier), which I felt would help to satisfy the
good professor’s Jungian longing for the guiding principle of the secret way of
life—a terrible presumption on my part; but, like Socrates, I always listen to
my oracle, and I sent the following note with my books:
Professor Peterson. Pardon my presumption. Please
accept a courtesy copy of My Writing Life,
a sequel to The Lion that Swallowed
Hemingway that I was nudged to send you three years ago, and a copy of my
twin soul book The Merciful Law of Divine
Synchronicity which may excite your interest, given your passion and admiration
for C. G. Jung.
Once again, I was nudged to send you these books upon
reading your interview with Christie Blatchford in the National Post (Saturday, January 20, 2018), after reading Conrad Black’s column
first, of course (I just love that man’s metanoic change of heart after his
public humiliation and prison sentence), and the excerpt of your new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, because the thought occurred to me that being
as Jungian as you seem to be you might be intrigued by someone who actually
experienced what Jung called “wholeness and singleness of self,” it being that
rare fruit of the individuation process. Incredible as it may seem, this was my
experience; and I was nudged to send you these books to give you a literary
insight into the life of an individual who actually satisfied the longing of
his soul for wholeness and completeness. Again, pardon my presumption. But if
you can find the time in your busy life to read them, I’m sure you’ll
understand my reason for sending them; and I hope they give you inspiration for
your own courageous individuation process.
Respectfully,
Orest Stocco
More time passed; and on Saturday,
March 17, 2018 I read a three-page feature article in the Toronto Star headlined, “Who’s Afraid of
Jordan Peterson,” by Vinay Menon, and so moved was I by the good professor who had
thrust his articulate sword into the heart of the nefarious beast of postmodern
nihilism and its odious offspring political correctness with his Amazon bestseller
12 Rules for Live: An Antidote to Chaos
and sold-out public talks which drew thousands of people hungering for the Logos
and all the interviews across Canada, the United States, England, Denmark, and Australia
that I heard a call from my muse (much louder than most calls) to write a book
that would cut to the quick on the natural process of individuation and help resolve
soul’s longing for wholeness and completeness, and the title that came to me by
providential decree was: One Rule to Live
By: Be Good, and being a servant of my muse, I went to my computer and
began writing this story…
------------------------------------------------.
NEXT WEEK: Chapter Two: “The Imponderable Myth of
My Life”
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