Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
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Jung spoke of an “archaic man” or the “two- million-year-old man,” an unconscious layer of our psyche that still enjoys a full communion with all the forms and forces of the Earth community. At our depths, in other words, there remains an indigenous man or woman within each of us. Jung personally experienced this as the “primitive” within himself.
The “archaic man” within us takes nature as his guide. For him, wisdom derives primarily from daily natural occurrences, from signs and omens experienced through his senses, emotions, dreams, and visions. Jung believed that “most of [modern people’s] difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten wisdom stored in us.”9 Likewise, the cultural ecologist Paul Shepard suggests that if we are to live again in fulfillment and in balance with the rest of nature, we must reclaim our Pleistocene psyches.10 The Wild Indigenous One encompasses much of what I believe Jung meant by the “archaic man” or Shepard by our Pleistocene psyches. But a caveat is necessary: In contemporary people, much of the instinctive self is not only unaccessed, uncultivated, and unembodied but also actively repressed, both collectively as a result of Western cultural biases and individually as a result of the pathological and egocentric nature of childhood development in modern societies. Consequently, much of our South wholeness is now submerged and buried in what Jung called the Shadow (constituting the West subpersonalities, which we’ll explore in chapter 9).11
But our natural instincts need not be nearly so repressed as they are in contemporary Western peoples. Healthy, mature parents know how to preserve and safeguard something essential: their child’s original, natural wildness — her instinctive, sensuous, emotional, and imaginative qualities, those that exist before any cultural shaping. This aspect of the psyche is what Freud called the id. However, Freud’s soul-suppressing agenda was to tame and supplant that wildness, not nurture it. “Where id was, there shall ego be,” he advised.12 In contrast, one of the goals of mature parents is for this dimension of their child’s psyche — the Wild Indigenous One — to be encouraged, celebrated, and incorporated into the emerging personality.13
We need to preserve and embrace this priceless resource, our individual wildness — “our treasury of ecological intelligence”14 — in order to become fully human. And, as a species, we need the preserved wildness and diversity of the land, air, and waters in order to remain fully human.
POLYMORPHOUS EROTICISM
In addition to being indigenous, enchanted, sensuous, emotive, and instinctive, the Wild One is also the primary feature of our psyches that enables and ignites our sexuality and our polymorphous eroticism.
People with a well-cultivated South Self enjoy a sexuality that is untamed, sensual, wholehearted, playful, and intoxicating. And because the Wild One is only one of four facets of our horizontal wholeness, the sexuality of the Self is also nurturing and tender (North), magical and romantic (West), and innocent and lighthearted (East).
But what about “polymorphous eroticism”? Here we must first distinguish between the sexual and the erotic — the erotic being a far wider range of experience. Eros is the life force that allures, that draws one thing toward another, the way gravity “takes hold of even the smallest thing / and pulls it toward the heart of the world.”15 Eros, which, as noted earlier, has both West and South qualities, evokes in us a passionate curiosity, a wonderment that impels us to explore relationship and communion. Sexuality is a particular (and special!) variety of eroticism, a South variety. Sexual arousal spurs us to surrender to and avidly explore the allurement between our enfleshed self and that of another.
And here’s where “polymorphous” comes in. When embodying our Wild One, we are allured not merely by other humans but also by landscapes and seascapes, trees and forests, by ideas and poetry, art and music (rhythm as well as melody), and by eloquent spoken language and the fragrance and flavor of succulent cuisine. We find ourselves somatically aroused by the world, seduced and captivated by the everyday wonders of Earth. In the Western world, we’ve made erotic love too small; we’ve isolated it and ourselves from the animate planet within which we are immersed. As D. H. Lawrence famously lamented,
Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.16
The Wild Indigenous One is sensuously, emotionally, instinctively, and viscerally crazy about creation, enchanted by all things and possibilities.
ARCHETYPES AND EXEMPLARS OF THE SOUTH
As with the other three facets of the Self, the South has an interpersonal guise as well as an intrapersonal one, the latter — the Wild Indigenous One — having been the focus in this chapter so far. The interpersonal guise of the South is how we appear to others when we are fully embodying our Wild One. At such times, we incarnate the archetype of the Wild Man or Wild Woman — the Green Man, for example, or Artemis. (See maps 1 and 2.)
Green Man refers to nature spirits or flora deities found in a great variety of cultures and traditions throughout the world, including our own Western traditions and religions. Often depicted in carved wood or stone as a face with branches or vines sprouting from nose or mouth, the Green Man is a symbol of rebirth, fertility, or the cycle of plant growth initiated each spring. Some say the Green Man possesses the ability to work with tireless enthusiasm beyond normal capacities.
When a man has a particularly well cultivated Wild One, he might appear to others as a Green Man, an Earth-infused creature of sky and ground, tree and birdcall, fruit and herbs, effortlessly and endlessly bearing the natural abundance of the land.
Artemis is an ancient Greek goddess variously known as Lady of the Beasts, Goddess of the Wildlands, and Mistress of the Animals. She is the Hellenic goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, and both virginity and childbirth, and she brings as well as relieves disease in women. Artemis is often depicted as a huntress carrying a bow and arrows.
These Southerly archetypes are found in Western culture in many forms and guises, as, for example, satyrs and wood nymphs, Puck (the mischievous nature sprite, who also appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Diana (the Roman goddess of the hunt, Moon, and birthing), a variety of fertility gods and goddesses, and innumerable other characters from literature, art, and mythology. Examples of Southerly individuals in Western culture — people who seem to be fully at home in their bodies, in the more-than-human world, and among the other creatures, and who seem to be instinctive and/or sexually vibrant — include authors Jean Giono, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker, and Jim Harrison; poets Pattiann Rogers, Walt Whitman, and Gary Snyder; dancers Mata Hari, Vaslav Nijinsky, Martha Graham, and Gabrielle Roth; feminists Eve Ensler and Naomi Wolf; and environmentalists John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Jane Goodall, and Julia Butterfly Hill.
Without a well-developed Wild Indigenous One, we cannot be at home on Earth or in communion with the others, nor can we experience full emotional health and vivacity, sexual fire, or erotic vibrancy. Like the other three facets of the Self, the South grants an indispensable key to being or becoming fully human.
THE WILD INDIGENOUS ONE IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
The Wild Indigenous One in healthy children is fully embodied and easily observed. Human infants and children are by nature emotional, enchanted, sensuous, and erotic. In early childhood, we respond to our world instinctively and emotionally, as seen, for example, in our joyous wonder and delight during first meetings (with cat, puddle, raspberry, friend, song); our happy pleasure evoked by another’s smile, hug, or laugh; the emotional wounding of a critical word; the bodily hurt of a thunderclap or a hot stove; the sudden