About the Author
Bernard X. Bovasso is essentially a painter and a poet and a onetime art and drama reviewer for the Woodstock Times of Woodstock, N.Y. His interest in the work of C.G. Jung of Zurich goes back to his student days at the Cooper Union Art School (1948-‘51). Prior to that he served with the U.S. Maritime Training Service and then on active duty in the U.S. Merchant Marine at the close of World War II (1945 to 1949). In September of 1946 he was signed aboard the USAT E.B. Alexander when it exploded in the North Sea and foundered. After release from service he he often found it necessary to take a sea voyage during college summer recess to support himself at school. During the summer of ‘49 he nearly did not make it back for the Fall Semester when he was assigned to an LST loaded with giant snow plows and headed for Thule, Greenland for the construction of the early warning base just 500 miles south of the North Pole. “Operation Blue Jay,” as the mission was called, was composed of U.S. Army supply ships in the company of a U.S. Navy task force that included an aircraft carrier. The trip cured him of ever going to sea again. But he was also cured of Academia when, after Cooper Union, he turned down a fellowship to the Yale University Art School. He was perhaps much influenced by Herman Melville’s claim: “The whaleship was my Harvard and Yale.” Soon after he was in analysis with Frieda Stern of NY City, a protegé of Toni Wolff of Zurich. After that his interest in the Analytical Psychology of C.G. Jung became intensive and eventually led to a study of philosophy. At the New School for Social Research in NYC, he studied pre-Socratic Philosophy with Prof. Hans Jonas and Ernest Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with Prof. Eugen Gadol (1963). During 1972 he retired from NYC and moved to a small upstate village along the Hudson River where he reconditioned an old factory building for use as a studio and residence. His children include Christopher, a lead guitarist with his own NYC RocK Band, Gregory, a Professor of Psychology teaching in Philadelphia, and the youngest, Nina, an internationally acclaimed painter, now resident in Amsterdam. Two years ago Gregory and his wife Michele produced twin daughters, Francesca and Isabella, that are now the joy of his life. The girls have the big blue eyes of their now deceased Aunt Julie, actress, playwrite, director and producer who pioneered off-Broadway theater in NYC.
The present work recapitulates much of this more so that it was accompanied by a cluster of synchronicistic experiences that by no means diminished his often contentious relation to neo-Jungian psychologists and their theoretical affectations. In effect, the writting of The Masculine Mysteries preceded the recently published (2005) Polyimagical Realm and its critique of “Archetypal Psychology.”
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The Masculine Mysteriesby Bernard X Bovasso
THE MASCULINE QUEST FOR THE WHITENESS
The telestic nature of the Masculine Mysteries serves as the medium for The Whiteness which, in its generality, points directly to a representation of Death and the masculine drive to achieve union of the Self at the last stop in life: the divine after-life unity otherwise known as God or Allah, or, as Jung psychologically paraphrased it, the Unus Mundus as final and everlasting Oneness. For Freud this unity was called Eros, as simply the sum of “life drive,” in his distinction between Eros and Thanatos. For Goethe it was perhaps a return to the All and which, of course, is no-place at all, i.e., u-topos. For Herman Melville it was expressed through his Capt. Ahab who was joined in final unity with the great white whale. Today we may recognize as much in the suicidal martyr. In all cases the quest for The Whiteness expressed a haste to prematurely achieve final perfection. Such drives, for the most part were, at least typically, fit for men except for its feminine demeanor exemplified by the animus of the feminine psychology, a woman's inner and largely unconscious "maleness." In all cases, the color of all color and exclusively male quest for Final Perfection I must treat with regard to its form as only inferentially metaphysical and theological. But the content in fact addressed what Jung referred to as the imago dei: God as the psychological rather than the metaphysical Self. From this less than theological standpoint the Deity, as Melville noted in his Moby Dick, was concealed beneath the veil of Whiteness, the sought for final perfection in a realm other than that of life and the living.
Bernard X. Bovasso
Saugerties, New York.
Front cover design by the author
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The Polyimagical Realm by Bernard X Bovasso
I must note that as primarily a painter at the time of composing this work (1986) I was also painting “angels.” They were in figure what I have called personatypes and simulated, imitated realities, yet arché and beyond typification (typos) in content. This ambiguity is in fact the subject of this book. The simultaneity of image and immanence is not a problem, except we have no credible concept for simultaneity, or complementarity, and by which ambivalence prevails as the earmark of reality. Now, in the year 2004 it is the least I can say for showing the differences that only analytically repose in mutually exclusive camps, that of C. G. Jung’s rigorous and extensive amplification of Freud’s Psychoanalytic and the new Post Modern wave of James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology and its polytheistic trimmings. In that case the many gods earn a capital “G” and in contention with the One God. But speaking as both a painter and a poet I can only fall back on an experiential standpoint, something reminded by Plato 2500 years ago in his Ion dialogue: “and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know that they speak not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.”
Bernard X. Bovasso
Spring, 2005
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