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Monday, July 5, 2010. Yesterday I re-read Adios Hemingway, a novel by Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer. Just a detective novel, but by a Hemingway aficionado, but one who, reading about the life that you lived, has serious reservations. In fact, he is repelled by The Hemingway Myth, the pointless killing of animals, the meannesses, the out-of-control behavior, even while he recognizes the generosity, the warm-heartedness, the serious craftsman.

You would find it a sobering thing, to see the opinions others hold of you. Even the exaggerated good would be a reproach; the bad opinions would sting as much because they were out of true proportion as because they were true.

You say “the exaggerated good.”

Well, if people see only the good sides of you, isn’t that a reproach, showing you what you might have been, if you’d had a better handle on your other selves? And if they see only the bad sides – or let’s say the unpleasant sides, put it that way – it is still a reproach, showing you how often you fell down, how many things you did that you wish you hadn’t. And if they had a truly balanced view of you, do you suppose you’d agree with the balance?

I’ve always known you were a highly moral man.

I was a perfectionist man. Like Jake [Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises], I wished I was a better Catholic. But, remember, we’ve been trying to get you into the habit of seeing yourselves and each other as the communities you are rather than the units you think you are. So if you look at my life you might profitably look at it again as an example of seeing from this new point of view. That is the point of your extensive reading of and now about Hemingway, remember — a public life that can be re-examined with insight gleaned from the inside. So think of “me” — the essence of the person — as the ringleader of so many individual elements. Think of “me” as the guy who got stuck paying the bill for whatever the guys inside broke. Of course, I also got the credit for what they accomplished.

I feel where you’re going, but let’s spell out some what and why.

Hemingway the borracho, for instance. Do you know — can you imagine — the trouble that brooding drunk cost the rest of me? Even the happy drinker brought problems as well as relaxation and exaltation. And what about the ones who married women, seeking something that others didn’t want and couldn’t stand? How about the violent clashes within me of so many elements that sometimes couldn’t stand one another? And above all, what of the resulting fly-off-the-handle temper, and worse the mean pursuit and getting-even and the right-at-any-cost element? I ask you, imagine yourself as ringmaster of so many strong contending elements — and the nervous strain that holding them altogether took, and produced. If you can see me as holding together what our mutual friends TGU are calling a person-group, a lot of complexities and perplexities in my life and in your lives will be cleared up for you.

I’ve said it before, but once again, you can’t really say this in life and be heard; It sounds like special pleading, asking for mercy, or even for what people call “understanding” which often amounts to forgiveness without repentance. Nevertheless even if it can’t be easily said, it remains true: I, you, we, everyone — we are not individuals in the way your society assumes that we are, and therefore we don’t function in the way we are assumed to function, and therefore most of our lives go unexplained and, as Thoreau said, they have to go unexplained, because even the explanations would have to be explained.

Theft again.

Can I help it if you leave stuff around to be stolen?

Smiles on both sides. Okay, and so –?

Well, if you look at my life and you try to see it as reasonably consistent, you get these puzzling anomalies, don’t you? How can one person be so controlled and so uncontrolled? So generous and so suspicious and even grasping, so great a friend and so treacherous a friend, so gracious and so snarlingly offensive, so this and so that endlessly? And you say he has “moods” or “streaks” or sides to him that this or that brings out. But these explanations don’t explain! They sort of explain away. Think of yourself. Who — trying to see you from outside and having a pretty good experience of you — could do more to understand you than to construct a more or less fictional individual who could have done and said what you have done and said, more or less consistently, more or less staying in character? And even that construction is going to show puzzling sides to it. The reason why isn’t far to seek. It’s because such a construction is a cover story, a papering-over of reality with an image that looks like what could be expected — at the price of not resembling what it really is!

Yes. This is ground we’ve covered before.

I think you’ll find that it isn’t enough to say a thing once. You repeat it, and the person hearing it is in “a different space” as you say; in actuality a somewhat different group of themselves is reading it than read it previously. You may have to say it ten times before enough of the person-self’s constituent parts have heard the message.

That’s an interesting concept.

Just consult your own experience. You read something, it makes an impact. You read it again and it makes a different impact, as if the words were different. It isn’t the words, it’s the “you” that’s different! And if it’s a different enough mixture, the words may seem almost brand-new, and you’re thunderstruck that you never thought to understand them that way when you read them before. Well, you, in that sense, didn’t read them before. Other parts of you did.

Yes. And what’s the specific practical application you’re putting this to? For I can feel there is something.

To transform your lives, it is necessary for certain new ways of seeing (hence, of being) to percolate all the way down. They don’t do this right off, it takes repetition in different contexts. So when, a while ago, we spelled out the way of seeing yourselves as a person-groups functioning within social-groups, we were loosening the hold on you that the socially accepted — assumed — fiction of the individual has on you. Once see yourself differently, and everything can change. But to see yourself differently is not usually the work of one flash of insight, but of the slow working of that insight into this and that corner of your existence.

 

[Edited from a conversation with Hemingway in 2010]

you might ask yourself, what is important about whether Hemingway’s life went off in the wrong direction? Why should you care what happened so long ago?

Well, the impression I had was that it concerned the interaction between this side and your side.

You could look at it more like this: Your lives are not divorced from this side. Not now, not ever. That may be easy enough for you to accept, but the converse is equally true: When you get onto this side, you are still not divorced from the other side, which at that point is the physical.

It’s a dicho, one of your reversible statements.

It isn’t even that. Wherever you are, you are intimately connected to the other side. Always were, always are, always will be, like it or not, believe it or not. Suppose you don’t believe in the air, since you can’t see it or taste it or feel it. Doesn’t matter, you’re still living in it and can’t help living in it, because there isn’t any other place to live. It’s the same here. We talk about the physical and nonphysical as though they were separate, but that’s just the effect of language. The two sides are like two sides of a coin. Can you have a coin with only one side?

Posted for May 22, 2025

[Edited from a conversation of 2010. I asked Hemingway’ what he thought of things Dr. Jung had said of Hemingway’s career.]

You know, it’s one thing to react to a new idea, and another thing to think about it. The first is instant and usually emotionally charged, because emotionally driven. The second is slower, because it involves a long chemical process of analysis; weighing this against that, looking at this in light of that, readjusting the balance. In fact, that’s a better analogy. First you have to weigh the new elements, then you have to shift the cargo to keep your boat trimmed.

Okay, that’s two analogies, and they don’t work very well together. The point is, when you actually consider a new way of looking at something — especially if it’s something close to you, so that every aspect of it is connected to many other strands of yourself and your interests — it is going to take you some time to readjust things. That’s a bit of work, too, sometimes, so it’s one reason why people usually just shrug off the new viewpoint as wrong or not relevant. When you get someone like Carl Jung looking at your life and talking to you about it, you’ve got to listen. You’d be crazy not to — especially here, where it’s so hard to change.

It’s a funny thing to look back on your life — this particular version of my life, anyway — and realize that it can be seen differently in a way that makes sense of things I hadn’t ever considered in connection to each other. That doesn’t mean the way I always saw it was wrong — what would wrong mean in the circumstances? — but that it gives another insight into it.

[From a conversation of 15 years ago. Dr. Jung:]

Ernest experienced the hidden pressure of people’s expectations. This is a real and not a metaphorical force. It has real effects, that may be used, well or badly, but will in any case be experienced. As with anything else in life, the more consciously used, the better, as conscious control puts the conscious personality where it should be, deciding. Surely this is obvious.

Lincoln became President of the United States, and his very election brought to a head a crisis that had been building nearly his entire adult life. He found himself at the center of the storm from the first moment, and had to grow into acceptance of the role fate had in mind. By his depth of character, by the human qualities that gradually became evident to people, by his ability to articulate what his people felt but could not express, he came to mean more and more. By his identification with Emancipation, he moved from partisan to statesman to iconic figure. And of course by his martyrdom he perfectly fulfilled the savior archetype in modern guise, and this — combined with the success of his twin causes of Union and Emancipation — assured that his reputation would continue to grow. People’s affection grew. People’s hatred or incomprehension lessened, with time. But all the time his cultural effect grew. He became more central to the myth of the American experiment; not merely the political but the social experiment.

As he lived he was the recipient of people’s prayers and curses. After he had finished living, still he was the recipient of prayers and curses. This did not and does not leave him untouched. There is no such thing as an electric current that flows without flowing. There is no such thing as nonphysical connections among people of similar vibrations flowing without flowing. Lincoln limits and channels and also frees and directs people’s energies to the degree that they allow themselves to be affected. But those in bodies can easily choose whether to be consciously affected. Those not in bodies cannot.

You will notice that my [Jung’s] work was done in the most sheltered part of Europe that was yet central. Portugal, for instance, was equally sheltered, but was a backwater. Austria, Germany, England were all central but not sheltered. My work had to be done quietly, steadily, without distraction but without isolation. In short, my life’s circumstances were an alchemical retort, within which life proceeded to experiment and produce new combinations.

When my work came to be carried on, one strand of it came to be Robert Clarke, living an entirely obscure, humble existence in an English backwater. Externally he had no credentials but experience; no connections, no way to make his work known. But when he was ready, how easily the way opened. A letter to Colin Wilson, a referral to you, and the publication of two books. Then, when he was safely dying, the entrusting of three more books to you. None of this, you see, was produced or affected by the pressure of other people’s expectations. His alchemical retort was entire privacy through obscurity. Thus three examples of how fame, or constricted specialized fame, or entire obscurity may shape a life’s work.

Hemingway is an example of a life lived itself as an example of wholeness, of gusto. The image, however, became increasingly skewed and skewed his life accordingly. And continues to do so 50 years after his death.

Papa, do you understand what Dr. Jung means here, and do you agree?

I brought up the subject, remember.

So — either of you — how does an image reduce someone’s options, or, as it was put, skew his life, after he’s no longer in a body to have his life skewed?

[EH] You might as well ask how mind-control works, or if somebody can be hypnotized, or if you can call spirits from the vasty deep. It’s all the same thing. You are treating people as if they were unconnected, or as if death disconnected them. You know better in another part of your mind. Apply what you know.

In other words, we are all one thing, so of course we affect each other.

Even the grammar of the language makes it nearly impossible to make a clear statement in that direction, doesn’t it?

Well — I’m getting the idea, I think. But I never thought that the pressure of people’s expectations continues after we’re gone.

Well, think about it a little. What is the pressure of people’s expectations, except psychic pressure? It isn’t like anybody is physically pressuring you. (Of course they might — putting on economic pressure, or threats to your safety or your family’s, but these are just means by which to exert the real pressure, which is psychic pressure.) It’s actually easier to resist such pressure, if you are aware that it exists, when you have a body and a physical set of surroundings and circumstances to help you do it. “The body and its stupidity,” as Yeats said. Once you’re out of that particular buffer, the pressure exists and your means of resistance to it are greatly lessened. Fortunately, as soon as you’re dead, most people don’t realize there’s more they can do [to you] than write obituaries and biographies and lying articles, so they leave you alone more. But those who do know don’t let up, unless it costs them more than it gains them.

Now don’t go getting the idea that we are defenseless on the side, exactly, and of course don’t get the idea that influence is a one-way street. But that’s the question you asked: How can we still be affected 50 years later.

 

[This from a conversation 15 years ago, initially with Hemingway.]

I’m a little hesitant here, but I think we need to call in Carl Jung. He can explain what was going on, I think.

[CGJ] But you are afraid you are making me up, and making up the data, and thus exposing yourself to the danger of being exposed as a fraud! This is no improvement from where we began.

Well, I do it regardless.

Yes. But you will do it more easily without the exaggerated respect for facts and data and verification and criticism. Such things must be risked and dealt with, or even disregarded, if one is to accomplish the clearing of any new trails.

Yes, I know. It just happens to be my particular obstacle.

If it were not this, perhaps it would be lack of access, or lack of anything to say, or inability to say it. But — continue to overcome it. Work at it. Nothing worth your while comes without obstacles, however talented or lucky you may be, or however perfectly fashioned for a particular line of work.