C.G. Jung on poetry

C.G. Jung on poetry:

Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living at that age. A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men. So Faust touches something in the soul of every German. So also Dante’s fame is immortal, while The Shepherd of Hermas just failed of inclusion in the New Testament canon. Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects—whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction.

                                                      --C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Cedar and Pine Avenue, Summer 2011

Lost, found, missing

News Flash! Montreal is the North American capital for deserting animals when people move. It's more than 75,000 animals left behind, dropped off on the roadside, left at the SPCA, or otherwise disposed of as Quebecers move, en masse, every year on July 1st. Maybe people think someone else will move in and adopt their cat, dog, hampster, guppies, or other animals... Individual social responsibility (as opposed to imposed collective action) was never a high point in la belle province. Bob Barker, where are you when we need you?

Re. these photos: I love finding repeated actions on city streets; for instance, lost, found, and missing pet posters. Always home made, they are often plaintive cries for the return of their missing pet. Photos of disappeared cats or dogs, or parrots, taken when the animal wasn't lost, a time of happiness, become mug shots of possibly miserable animals. All of our childhood fears of being deserted by our parents return to us as we look at these posters; context is everything for transformation; the animal now becomes an archdetype for our fears of abandonment.

Alexis Nihon Plaza

Carlton Card Store, Alexis Nihon Plaza

Alexis Nihon Plaza