The Archetypes Embedded in the Pandemic
The USS Mount Baker, an ammo ship named
After a volcano, rests along the International Dateline
Twenty degrees north of the equator
Under a full moon with Venus and Polaris on display
Providing light, relief and certain location
Before we sail for North Vietnam with our bombs
And napalm, enough to burn the country down
And reduce the forests to a river of ash.
The bombs that still have not detonated
Have killed more than the original onslaught
And the trees will be dead for a thousand years.
Then we lost our way in the South China Sea
Under the spell of Poseidon and Typhoon Nancy
The heavens dark, the sextant discarded
Our remaining bombs broke free, terror on board
Then the Lord’s Prayer over the 1MC
“Deliver us from evil,” the skipper prayed
And we limped back to port, almost underwater
Midnight in the kingdom of wounds
With the planets in disarray and Venus quiet
For what has seemed like a lifetime.
2.
My path is down and back again
To the Battle of Britain and my young
Body huddling with my family
In my Mickey Mouse gas mask
In a cold, empty coal cellar listening
To ordnance I would later categorize:
Incendiaries, buzz bombs, and V-1 rockets
And other versions, setting the house on fire
Turning my brother’s eyes in his head
So that until his death the world seemed
A little glazed, off-center and shadowy
Like our world behind blackout curtains
Making sure darkness was everything
And everywhere, making certain that
The sun, moon and stars would provide
No comfort, no roadmap, no relief
Just another layer of darkness, a fabric
Of blackness that held us in, hostage
To my father’s cries of “Jesus, Mary, Joseph”
That now seem like an underground curse.
3.
A half a century later, in New York City
A guide, a teacher takes me back to sea
Remembering danger, traumas, lives lost
Going underground to the wars that have held me
The coal cellars where I’ve found comfort
And the blackout curtains that restrained the soul.
Now the virus, Covid-19, the blackout curtains again
Darkening soul, robbing us of agency
And meaning. Everyone wearing masks.
Death as easy as a handshake, a sign of the cross
Publicly emblazoned on the family tree
But the charge, the task, the mission
Is to find the energy in the pandemic:
As above, also below.
This is Blake’s universe in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower.
The charge is to look at the night sky
Take a new look at the heavens
Not as some young sailor with an antique sextant
That now seems wooden, a show of nautical hands
Fingers on a hawser chasing an anchorage
On some half-spent horizon edge
But as a poet who sees the universe in motion
4.
Not as a fixed destination, not linear, no cause and effect
But transformational, with synchronicity, with astrological energies
Moving out of Pisces, its masculine theology, too full of the archetype
That feeling of grandeur, the I-ness, the center of the universe
And close identification with the unconscious
Into an Age of Aquarius with the god image internalized
Human consciousness transformed from the “I” to the “We”
Jung’s psychology of soul, self-awareness, individuation
A wholeness, a discovery of the world soul, our agency
The recognition of the universe constellated in us
So even in the darkest times when the shadow dominates
Evil replicates, Covid continues to kill
And trauma rules we can see the signs of Aquarius
And can still imagine with the poet Auden —
Steady, steady on that meridian of promise —
“New styles of architecture, a change of heart.”
(This poem was prompted by a course at the C.G. Jung Foundation in NYC, given by Christina Becker, a Jungian psychologist, October 30, 2021: “The Astrology of the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Age of Aquarius, and the Evolution of Human Consciousness.”)
