Reflections on Flights

I’m currently reading a book I picked up off the shelf of my roommates section of the bookcases. It’s by a professor who my ex used to talk about. She took his class and she always tried to communicate a very deep moment she had because of him. Granted, she did that a lot, on a variety of topics, but I was usually too infatuated with the way she expressed her passion and the way her nose twitched when she talked to pay attention to the actual content of those moments. But, regardless, my first impression of Professor Ogilvie is one of a sagely pedagogue, the kind I had hoped to find all over the place in college but had not stumbled across at that point.

He popped up a few other times in my experience, such as when I worked at the campus bookstore and saw his book stacked on the shelves next to Freud’s tidy little blue texts. I remember because the cover looked more like a trade paperback than a textbook, with a dust jacket and big colorful cover art. In fact Professor Ogilvie himself says in Fantasies of Flight that his style for this book is half trade book, half textbook. And I think it appropriate his style matches the… theories?... I came to after reading the middle 8 chapters first, as the good professor suggests in his preface.

He speaks of the conflict between Sigmund Freud and his student-turned-rival Carl Jung., not just of their theories but of their interactions as men and thinking, feeling beings. Freud, the stolid sexualist who blamed all problems on naughty little urges we have because of our childhood, felt Jung’s mystical hippie new age theories of the collective unconscious was simply a rebellion against Father Figure Freud. Jung on the other hand simply felt driven to answer questions that had begun at the age of three, long before Oedipal conflict usually manifests, and which Freud’s theories simply failed to recognize. This is a gross simplification, but it works for now.

I find it interesting that, during a period of my life in which I find myself faced with the intense conflict between fitting in the world as it is now and trying to make the world the way I want it to be, one of the most intricate intricacies of our modern civilization, Facebook, would bring Professor Ogilvie’s picture to my desktop monitor over and over. He shows up simply because he and I both went to Rutgers, but beside my connection to him through my tempestuous ex, I also worked with his son in the same musical that brought me together with that ex, Camelot. I played King Arthur, a man trying to change the world who is brought low by the failings of those around him, and Sam Ogilvie played the boy to whom Arthur passes his golden vision of Camelot and right.

Having seen his name so many times, I could not fail to be interested in a book I glanced at, thought it was something by Freud from the title and that vague memory I had of the bookstore, and began to read out of nothing more than a desire to find a way to pass the time pleasantly after a bad day. And after I finished the chapters detailing the personalities and creations of J.M. Barries, author of Peter Pan, Jung, and Freud, I began to think of the interplay between Freud’s death instinct, which he speaks of as an instinctive urge to return to a primordial state of stillness, and Jung’s collective unconscious, a kinship not only with all mankind but with all the universe from which we came.

Jung was drawn to this collective unconscious. He saw it as the Other, and his concept of anima as the opposite gender of the ego can be seen as corollary to the drive he himself felt to merge with this collective, this deep point in the mind that connects us to everything in Creation. In my mind at least, Ogilvie draws a parallel between Freud’s death instinct and Jung’s fascination with myth. The mythic structure, that of disconnection with the familiar, defeat of enormous and near impossible obstacles, then a return to the familiar with tools and experiences that allow the protagonist to change the familiar, normal world as he sees fit, mirrors that of the indigenous tradition of the vision quest. The human is a social animal; we share that trait with most primates. Take him out of his support network of other humans and he is at a great loss for resources and capabilities on he has relied on to survive. Would Freud chalk vision quests up to a desire to return to stillness, a death wish?

I think there is definitely a desire inherent in humans to skirt the edge of the canyon. Mostly people try to find a comfortable balance between having a nice view of the abyss and the surety of solid ground. Their death wish is displayed in how they want to view death, a ways off but close enough to keep things a little interesting Others, though, seek to return to a more primal state of being, living a little closer to the edge, because you can learn a lot by seeing what ends up falling off and away forever. Like any good gambler will tell you, the key in that case is not knowing when to step closer, but when to walk away.

The death instinct in this case I think can be recognized as a desire to dip into the collective unconscious for the resources and tools that will allow us to bring ourselves into better harmony with the world around us. To merge with the Other, to really learn how to properly use the tools and resources presented to us, is to kill the ego, that watcher of all but itself, the personas and parts assumed by the primitive individual just trying to get by in the world, the part that says it knows best because, well, I got us this far, didn’t I? The ego most of the time will find a way to reconcile mistakes it made and its pride, rationalizing things like it would have worked if someone else had done what they should have known to do, or I would be getting this done if I weren’t so tired from all my obligations.

I find myself at a point in my life where I can choose between finding a ‘career’ and working towards it, basically dedicating myself to an ideal and working up through the miserable system of references and agencies we have developed for a person’s placement in society, or living my life one day at a time, trying to my myself as happy as possible before I die. And that could come at any time, by the way. It’s hard to admit at 23 that I’m not always guaranteed the long life everything expects and plans for. But I may not have time to wait for happiness to spring after I’ve gotten tenure at some high school in suburban New Jersey teaching English to kids who would rather surf whatever will replace the internet in ten years, going home to hopefully a healthy relationship and a family. So maybe it’s time I abandoned the idea that I can fit into this world as it exists right now while I try to change my environment to something a little more tolerable. To admit our mistakes is a scary thing, as is to change from something familiar to the unfamiliar. It is the death of the self as we know it, and an embrace of what we might be. But if you’re not happy with the way things are, why would you want it to stay that way?