July 4, 2025

I finally got my genetic genealogical information from 23andMe. I must say, it’s an odd thing to be doing, sending your spit to somebody, and the question arises as to why we care. An obvious answer is that our genetic makeup is part of our identity. But identity is not just personal. I am not just an individual in isolation. The fact that this newsletter appears on the Fourth of July reminds me that part of my identity is national. I am my unique self, but I am an American, part of a larger collective identity to which I am connected not just by geography but by biology.

And on this Fourth of July, I am forced to confront the fact that my country is moving towards ending birthright citizenship, as part of a larger effort to expel immigrants of all sorts, legal or undocumented. College-educated Americans are sometimes resented as “elites” who are not patriotic, who “hate this country,” which means that we not only consent to but celebrate immigrants rather than “real Americans.” Well, I am indeed college educated, almost uniquely in a widely extended family in which having 8-10 children used to be fairly common. I am half Italian and half Polish, which means I am a “real American” in the sense of being white. But my family, as far back as I have been able to trace it, is working class on both sides, mostly coal miners and farmers.

I am in fact Appalachian. Tuscarawas County in Ohio, where both my parents were born and grew up, is on the fringe of Appalachia. I am not a “hillbilly” like the ancestors of JD Vance only in the sense that I am not Scots Irish. But I devoted an earlier newsletter to the fact that I am as Appalachian as the author of Hillbilly Elegy. We both come from people who were farmers and coal miners in the mountains, even though both of us grew up in middle class suburbs of small cities. The Scots Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the Irish, the Eastern European Jews—all of these people came to the United States around the turn of the 20^th century for the same reason people come now, for economic opportunity. And my forebears were just as resented as immigrants often are now, and for the same reasons. Yes, we were white, but we were still “foreign,” spoke other languages and often were not fluent in English, ate strange ethnic foods, and did not have respectable middle-class manners. We were loud, often hard-drinking, did not dress very well. We worked at dirty and dangerous jobs—a job in a factory was an escape from the grueling work of farming and the danger of the mines. Originally despised, by my parents’ generation we climbed up to a precarious middle-class suburban status. And now people like my relatives overwhelmingly support Trump because he promises to get rid of a new generation who “do not belong.”

I have always loved my working class and immigrant origins—far from repudiating my humble beginnings, I have been proud of them. But now, for the first time, I feel alienated from those who should be my own. Working class people are supposed to speak bluntly, tell it like it is. Okay, I will tell it like it is. The hypocrisy appalls and disgusts me. Dudes, your own grandparents were immigrants of the kind you’d like to deport right now. And outside my own group, if you’re Latino and want a border crackdown, what are you thinking? We have a president whose wife is named Melania and a Vice President whose wife is named Usha. Are you going to revoke their citizenship? Do not tell me you only want to deport the criminals. The people being deported are not criminals, and you have no excuse for not knowing it. They are taking American jobs? It is true that you have lost the kind of family-sustaining work that used to be possible for the non-college educated, and you have every right to be bitter about it. But except in isolated contexts you have not lost them to immigrants. You lost them because of political decisions by a combination of neoliberal and oligarchic elites—and that is what we should all be banding together to demand justice for.

Who loves America? The real myth of America, the shining vision, is that country of origin, skin color, and social class do not matter. What matters is not what you come from but what you make of yourself. That is the true American Dream. If you think only latté-drinking liberals believe this, you know nothing of our history. It’s part of what our dream of freedom means—we are not determined by external factors, as was the case in Europe. What does any of this have to do with the imagination? Absolutely everything. We are the country whose founding faith is that we have the power to create ourselves through the imagination. People complain that this means we have no respect for tradition and customs, for the structures of the past. That is indeed a danger of our way of life. But those traditions and customs were often means by which the privileged ensured their privilege at the expense of others, even down to enslaving them. Our real American Dream is that we can re-imagine, we can recreate, there is no necessity by which we are inevitably bound. It is what is real about “American optimism” and “can-do mentality,” often regarded as vulgar by those who feel that those Americans don’t know their place, and also don’t understand the tragic limits of reality, to which we must bow or risk succumbing to a kind of narcissistic megalomania. Or, to put it simply, we are accused of lacking a proper sense of irony, and the skepticism that comes with it. Hence our immature adolescent mentality, our youth culture. These are the traits that sometimes irritate people about America, and they have their element of truth. But I am content with our national temperament. We are the country of the recreative imagination, the New World. Or we were. But we can rise up and be that again.

I will add only that this true ideal is quite different from “American exceptionalism,” which strikes me as an ideological perversion by a power drive of our national mythology. We are exceptional only in the sense described above, that we are a revolutionary society, founded through a break with the past in the name of a constant sense of new beginnings and the freedom to try to invent ourselves. We are not better than other societies, which have their own gifts and distinctions, from which we should learn and perhaps gratefully borrow. We are not the saviors of the world. That is an imperialist ideology that has often corrupted American politics. We are also not necessarily a society of “individualism” in a Social Darwinist sense. That is another ideological perversion, purveyed by greedy capitalists who say that selfishness is “human nature.” It is in fact a perversion of human nature, the truth being that human identity is a yin-yang balance of competition and cooperation, individualism and empathetic connectedness born of mutual need. I say this in the week in which the upper echelon of the Democratic Party has had a meltdown over the fact that a “democratic socialist” who says that billionaires should not exist may be on his way to becoming mayor of New York City—if the corrupt and sexually harassing Andrew Cuomo and the corrupt and weird Eric Adams do not siphon enough votes from him by running as independents. What the Democratic Party needs to be saved from is not democratic socialism, which simply means capitalism with restraints and a social safety net, as in the Scandinavian countries, but an old elite that cares for nothing but its own privilege.

My interest in my ancestors is partly personal. They are a reflection of or an aspect of myself. As such, they are mirrors. I love meeting the parents of students because the resemblances are so delightful. The students are variations on a family type, and sometimes you can see in a parent the person that a 20-year-old student is going to age into. I look very much like my father, dark, curly hair and small frame. My dad was 5’6”. At my greatest youthful extension, I was all of 5’8”. But on the Polish side, the males on the maternal side were huge. My great-grandfather was over 6 feet; my uncle was jokingly nicknamed “Shorty” because he wasn’t. My “baby” brother, five years younger, got the Kluba genes, and is also over 6 feet. I never tire of contemplating the chromosomal crap shoot. But physical resemblances are only half of it. There are also temperamental traits passed down the generations, although sometimes these are physically expressed. For example, when my mom was in the nursing home, a food service employee who took to her—everyone took to my mom—pointed out that she, my brother, and I all had the same laugh, loud, hearty, boisterous.

Can there be such a thing as a family personality? Dostoyevsky tried to portray one in The Brothers Karamazov. The four sons of Pavel Fyodorovich Karamazov are clearly intended to embody four aspects of a single “Karamazovian” personality, very much like Blake’s mythical four Zoas, who are the psychic components into which the Cosmic Man Albion shattered when he fell. Dmitri, the oldest Karamazov son, is a sensualist, much like his father. Ivan is the icy, skeptical intellectual. Alyosha is the spiritual son, on his way to religious orders. In Jungian psychology, four is the number of wholeness, but there is something about “the form of the fourth” that is different, and the fourth Karamazov son is Smerdyakov, the out-of-wedlock son of a mute prostitute, given to epileptic seizures, and a cunning, vindictive nihilist. Sometimes we ask ourselves how two utterly different siblings could have come out of the same family. That is, on the surface, true of the four Karamazov’s. But the sons are uncomfortably aware that, under the surface, they share a common personality that they are often ashamed of and try to hide. The “Karamazovian” personality is manifested in the father. It is excessive, unrestrained, histrionic, over the top, a satiric version of Blake’s aphorism “Enough! Or—too much!” On the one hand, Pavel Fyodorovich is vulgar and earthy. On the other, he launches into astonishing verbal performances, hot-air improvisations that swing madly between megalomania and self-abasement. In both modes he is an utter embarrassment to his sons. He is intolerable, yet unforgettable—all the more intolerable because they know that they secretly resemble him, though they have developed socially restrained personalities whose whole purpose is to deny that identity, so much so that three of the four are to a greater or lesser degree complicit in murdering him, a parricide that greatly interested Freud.

To embody traits of a parent’s personality and yet at the same time to react violently against them is a doubling that I think occurs in many families. (Dostoyevsky was fascinated by the figure of the double). But it has an interest for me personally because it so much captures the dynamic between me and my father—who, startlingly, had the same personality as Pavel Fyodorovich. Larger than life and twice as annoying, yet somehow strangely lovable. Not only that, but the bull-in-the-china-shop personality occurs elsewhere in literature: in Simon Dedalus, the improvident father of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce; in the failed actor father of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, both of these being versions of the authors’ own fathers. I’d even venture to add Falstaff as symbolic father of Prince Hal, and Zorba the Greek as father figure to the young writer who was Nikos Kazantzakis. There is a capped-volcano energy and vitality to such figures. They are Dionysian where their sons are Apollonian. They are black sheep, not socially respectable, yet they are larger than life. Such was my father, his outbursts fueled by alcohol. And in the end I know that I am much like him, where I would rather be like my mother. My mother hated my father, yet she loved me. Did she not see the hidden resemblance? Or did she have a love-hate ambivalence that she split between us? There are more mysteries in genealogy than are dreamed of by genetic theory.

I am interested in my ancestors because of what they can show me about myself, aspects of them which I have inherited. But I am also interested in them in a completely opposite way, as people in their own right, people apart from me. I am not unique in this. We are drawn to other people not because they are like us but by the very mystery of their difference. This can produce marriages of opposites, and also “odd couple” friendships of opposites, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. In the case of our ancestors, it can awaken something within us so that we find ourselves wondering, trying to imagine, as we stare at the names on a genealogical chart, what those people’s lives were like. What was it like to be them, in such different times, such different circumstances? Or not even so different: in the case of our parents, we may come to realize that we have lived in the same house with these other human beings for decades without knowing the slightest thing about them. To children, parents are Mom and Dad, not people with their own complexities and perhaps perversities. But sometimes, once we grow up, the masks of the roles they played may slip, and we may come to know them a little for the first time. I never tire of citing James Dickey’s wonderful poem “The Celebration,” a true story of his accidentally sighting his parents at a midway when he was an adult, and realizing that they are on a date. His father wins a stuffed animal for his mother, and they end way in the middle of the air, romantic on the Ferris wheel. For the first time in his life, he thought of his parents as real people, and when we reach that point, we may become interested in their past, and then the past of their parents in return, and so on back through decades, until a realm as hidden as any faerie Otherworld begins to come into view, the world of one’s ancestral past.

In 1991, at the ago of 78, Robertson Davies published his second-to-last novel, Murther and Walking Spirits, whose protagonist is accidentally murdered by his wife’s lover when he walked in on them. He finds himself still present as a ghost, but then begins viewing a series of movies that he realizes are the past lives of his ancestors. It is a dreaming-back experience like that of the Tibetan Buddhist Bardo, subject of a recent newsletter. The brilliant twist is that the stories he views are the fictionalized past lives of Davies’ own ancestors, so that what could have just been a gimmick becomes the vehicle of a very personal book. The stories are true to life, but have been brought to life by one of Canada’s greatest novelists. Mind you, Davies’ family bequeathed him some remarkable narratives from both sides of the family, English Loyalist and Welsh. When her officer husband is killed, the hostility of patriots during the American Revolution makes life intolerable in New York City for well-born Anna Gage, a version of Davies’ great-grandmother. Her response is to find a canoe, learn how to paddle it, put her children in it, and begin paddling up the Hudson River, eventually traveling hundreds of miles to Upper Canada. A dramatic and unusual immigrant experience, but not wholly unlike that of my own grandparents. A ship’s manifest for the S. S. Vaderland is accessible online, showing my great-grandmother Mary Brydniak Kluba coming over in 1907 at the age of 43, bringing her three children with her, including my grandmother Antonia or Anna, who was 13, to join my great-grandfather, who, with his brother, had come over a couple of years earlier in order to establish a place and means to live. What must it have been like to come to this foreign place, not even knowing the language? How did they even learn it, since there was no means of formal instruction?

Within a half dozen years, my grandmother Anna would meet and marry, in 1913, my grandfather, Louis Sokowoski, Jr. in New Philadelphia, Ohio. Apparently the verbal gift comes from grandpa’s side of the family, for my mom said he was a storyteller, though you had to take his stories with a grain of salt because he had a sly sense of humor and was capable of, let’s say, embellishing things. His father, my great-grandfather Louis, Sr. had been a coach driver in Poland, and some of grandpa’s stories were of accompanying his father while they drove the priests to visit the whorehouses. My grandpa also told ghost stories—according to my mom just to get my dad all riled up. One involved a poltergeist who was making a lot of noise, so my great-grandfather threw a shoe at it through the door. The shoe came sailing back out, or so my grandpa said. The Polish side was that of imagination and creativity, and my mom was the original writer in the family. My grandmother who had come over at 13 died in 1989 at the age of 95. The next year, my mom retired and began to write a family history that I estimate reached 50,000 words. It does exactly what I am talking about: takes the bare genealogical facts and brings them to life with stories. This is a woman who actually went to a one-room school for seven years, Beaverdam School close to the Sokowoski farm, and had no more than a high school education. I cannot tell you how proud she was to have a son who became a college professor and Chair of the department, she who had grown up on a farm that did not even have electricity.

My mom was glad to escape that farm to the life of a suburban housewife. It was a hard life. My grandpa worked in the coal mines until, when he was in his 60’s, his leg was crushed in an accident and he retired on disability, dying in his 70’s of black lung. My grandmother worked the farm, to which they eventually added dairy farming, with the help of four daughters, of which my mom was the youngest, plus a late-in-life son ten years later. Admittedly I am now old, but it still comes as a shock to me to read a statement like, “Stella [my aunt] was the only one of us other than mom who could control the team of horses.” It is 2025, and I am writing on a laptop, and there are rovers exploring Mars, yet my mother’s family farmed plowing with horses. Yet the description of that bare-subsistence life during the Depression is the most vivid part of my mom’s family history. They lived like pioneers, doing everything for themselves, raising and butchering hogs and chickens, saving the feathers for years to make comforters. My grandmother made beer, and my grandfather dandelion wine. In the later dairy farming years they acquired a huge bull, of which my mother was terrified. One of the horses, May, decided she was a watchdog and attacked all strangers. When my aunt Helen was dating the man who became my uncle Abel, May would not let them out of the car one night when they came home, but pawed the ground and snorted. They had to wake my grandmother with the car horn to escape. As the youngest of the daughters, my mom was left behind when her older sisters got jobs and apartments in New Philadelphia, and one of my mother’s tasks was to babysit my uncle, who was a full ten years younger. One day, in the midst of funeral preparations for someone, one of the neighborhood women who was there helping with the cooking set fire to the curtains. My mom, only 11 years old, was changing the baby, and grabbed everything and ran out the door—“baby, diaper, shit, and all,” as she put it. Another of her tasks was cleaning house on Saturdays. She would invite my cousin-once-removed, also named Wanda and her best girlfriend, and they would clean the house, then dance to the music of the old Victrola. My cousin Wanda is still alive, and turned 100 on June 5.

My Italian grandfather, Attilio Dolzani, was trained as a cabinetmaker in Italy, but had to get a job over here as carpenter in the coal mine. The mines were the main source of employment for the males on both sides, and the work was dirty and dangerous. At least three men in my family alone were injured or killed in mining accidents. In addition to my grandpa Sokowoski, my great-grandfather Kluba fell from the tipple into a railroad car, either 20 or 50 feet according to the sources, broke most of his bones, and walked with a cane ever after. A great-uncle was outright killed in accident, also a neighbor in a family mine—many families, including my own, had small private mines for personal consumption on their property. That is four people just in the immediate context of my family. This is the industry that the Republicans want to preserve while shutting down solar and wind power. I remember my dad telling me a story about how, when the mine foreman was seen climbing the hill towards where people lived, the wives would be seized with terror, for they knew he was bringing news that another woman’s husband had been injured or killed.

Not that my Italian grandfather’s carpentry work was much safer. We still have grandpa’s self-made toolbox, a huge wooden thing with a leather strap, which even without tools is very heavy. My dad remembers his dad walking with that toolbox on a 2 x 12 stretched between beams, swaying in the air, no such thing as scaffolding. He did make some furniture for family use, however, including the oak table which I have for many years used as my desk and on which I have written all of these newsletters. It is probably a century old, and atop it sits a laptop, the union of the old and the new.

It was an era without modern medicine, including vaccines: my dad nearly died of diphtheria in the 3^rd grade. My grandpa slept with him until the fever broke, got a mild version of it himself, but luckily recovered. Thanks to RFK, Jr. we can look forward to a return of such traditional family experiences. There was also high infant mortality. I have just discovered what I think my father never knew, that he had a brother, Charles, born prematurely the year after him, who only lived five days. The death certificate is available online. There were a lot of secrets, some of them still secret. For example, a surprising number of men—not women—are listed as “never married.” It is amazing how we still buy into the ideological belief that everybody gets married and has kids. If you don’t, someone like JD Vance will say there is something wrong with you. But it is not really true. Who were all these men? Were they closeted gay? Or were they perhaps just men who were not economically successful enough to get married and support a wife and family?

There were black-sheep secrets as well. My dad notes in his own genealogical material an Ernesto Dolzani and family who lived some miles away, but he didn’t know whether they were related. Well, my mom knew. In her family history, completely independently, she records that Ernesto’s son, Mondo, was a bootlegger who came to the farm to try to sell whiskey and in the process hit on my grandmother, who had to “put him in his place,” as my mom puts it. And there were just amusing secrets. My great-grandmother Kluba was mortified that she was five years older than the man she married. So she used to blacken her grey roots with coal soot. I have recently deduced that she repeatedly lied about her age—she is listed as five years younger than her actual age in the ship’s manifest. I may also count as a secret the diary my father kept aboard a destroyer escort in the Pacific during World War II, because for security purposes keeping a diary was illegal.

Does anyone care about these family stories but me? After all, these are tales of impoverished immigrants who did nothing remarkable except survive. But valuing the stories of common people rather than the elite is another manifestation of the spirit of democracy. It was in that spirit that my former wife Bonney Harnish

transcribed the diaries kept by her great-aunt, which was the subject of an early newsletter, February 4, 2022. I hope it is acceptable to quote what I wrote then:

...I am, in a sense, turning over this newsletter to a guest writer, Elinor Babcock, born Elinor Bonney (1885-1962), the great-aunt of my former wife Bonney Harnish. Elinor kept a diary off and on from 1912 through 1955, in other words from the age of 27 to the age of 70, though with large gaps, one of them of twenty years. Still, although a day’s entry was only a paragraph long, the full diary amounts to 3000 pages, and is in the process of being transcribed, annotated, and keyed to photographs on the website www.bonneybonney.com. All this work has been done singlehandedly by Bonney Harnish, with a dedication that is remarkable and yet to me understandable. I am no historian, but I think the diary has value as social history, as a record of working class Ohio life in the early 20^th century. Yet I think it is at the same time a compelling human document, raising questions about human suffering, and about the impulse to give meaning to that suffering by putting it into words. Elinor Babcock worked from dawn to dusk just about every day of her life, although dogged with almost constant ill health. The fact that she wrote 3000 pages, despite exhaustion and illness, despite having no idea that anyone else would ever read any of it, shows that this verbal monument, this life’s work in every sense, was required, as a necessity requires. Her lack of much formal education, evident in her erratic spelling, was only another obstacle to be overcome.

This urge to record the life of common people is a new thing. To my knowledge, we possess almost no records of ordinary life until at least the 19^th century. Who cared about the common people? They are common, indistinguishable, anonymous, not worth notice. On the other hand, the lineage of royalty and aristocracy is of utmost importance in two ways. The first is that of “blood.” We think of social class as a matter of who has managed to accrue some money and who has not. But that is a recent and capitalistic way of thinking about it. According to the old ideology, the upper class was what we would call genetically superior. It was an easy myth to subscribe to when one compared well-fed, well-brought-up aristocracy with a peasantry broken down at an early age by inferior diet and harsh living conditions. The ideology extended the physical superiority to include personal superiority, however. If one was of “gentle” blood, one behaved with a grace, delicacy, and intelligence that was natural, innate. Blood will out. This is obviously a self-serving lie, and Shakespeare had to wrestle uncomfortably with it in his later plays, when his company had become the King’s Men and the theatre audience had shifted somewhat away from a popular audience increasingly to the royal court. In late plays such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale you can hear him trying tactfully to get his high-born audience to think about their complacent assumptions by comparing aristocratic louts with heroes and heroines brought up as peasants. But Shakespeare himself was no democrat, and it will usually turn out that the girl brought up as a commoner actually turns out to be the lost child of gentility.

Hierarchical Renaissance society turned a blind eye to the revolutionary implications of the Bible. The greatest of all the kings of Israel was David, a shepherd boy. Not only did he become king in a very, well, American sort of way, by virtue of energy, talent, and intelligence, but his line became the greatest lineage of all, that of the Messiah. This is the “tree of Jesse,” David’s father. The line of David is given twice in the New Testament, once in Matthew and once in Luke. And yet the genealogy is a kind of illusion, for this is the line of Joseph, and Mary conceived not of Joseph but of the Holy Spirit. However, the pattern holds: the king of kings was born of people as common as my own family, in a barn full of animals. He might as well have been born on my mother’s farm where in fact my mom took care of the premature infant of one of her nieces, so small she was cradled in a shoebox. For two thousand years the elite have done their best to suppress the anti-elite implications of Christianity, right up to the present day, where the founder of Home Depot some years ago threatened to withhold his contributions to the Church if the Pope did not stop talking about the responsibility of the rich to care about the poor. It’s an old story. Jesus got run out of his home town of Nazareth by citizens outraged by the claim that he was the Messiah. He was the carpenter’s kid that they had known growing up. Who did follow Jesus? The nobodies—fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes. Prostitutes! In the Gnostic gospels, which were not institutionally censored like their canonical counterparts, Mary Magdalen was one of Jesus’ favorites. No wonder reactionary fools like Nietzsche and Yeats, admirers of aristocratic “strong men,” derided Christianity as “slave morality.”

The second reason that lineage is important in elitist societies is that it is one’s immortality. The action of the Iliad comes to a dead halt for about five pages in Book 2 as the poet recites the “catalogue of ships,” a record of how many ships were brought by each ruler, and what famous warriors were aboard those ships. This was a matter of status, but more than that. Fame was a warrior’s immortality in a culture that did not believe in personal immortality of the Christian kind. The dead survived only as shambling shades in a dark underworld. One’s real immortality was one’s fame, guaranteed by the poets who kept their name and their great deeds alive. Homer’s audience presumably was not bored by the catalogue of ships because these heroes were their ancestors.

But this is an adaptation for ideological purposes of something much more profound. Lurking in the popular conception of a family tree is a profound mythological implication. It is easy to think of those to whom we are closely related as being in some way part of our own identity—or, to put it the other way around, that there is some kind of larger identity of which we are a part. In a traditional way of life, in which people were not restlessly nomadic as they are in our culture, due to mass transportation and mass communication, people lived for generations in the same town or small region. I have so far traced the Dolzani’s back to an ancestor born “before 1790,” and every single relation is located in Flavon, a small town in the northern Alps. With the coming of nation-states in the 19^th century came a sense of national identity, in which people are linked not only by blood but by a common language and culture.

But although they may not think about it very often, most people are aware that, if you trace back far enough, everyone is related to everyone else, and notions such as that of a “mitochondrial Eve” who is the common ancestress of everyone living are the subject of news articles. Recent evidence that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon humanity not only could but did mate has led to curiosity about how many Neanderthal genes one might be carrying. In the “Proteus” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus muses upon the unity of all life in the witty image of umbilical cords forming a party line back to the common origin of all life: “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.” In Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake, this vision of the unity of all lives is carried even further. All the book’s characters are enfolded within the sleeping identity of a cosmic figure, whose most frequent name is Finnegan, a cross between a heroic warrior in Irish mythology and the Tim Finnegan of an Irish drinking song called “Finnegan’s Wake,” in which Tim, a hod carrier or construction worker falls off a ladder and is presumed dead but comes to life again when whiskey is spilled on him at his wake. The heroic fused with the working class.

We are connected biologically, genetically, to all other selves through DNA. But we are also connected psychologically, not on the surface level of the ego but on the level of a larger identity that Jung called the Self. The Self includes not merely the ego but also the collective unconscious, that part of the psyche that is common to all of us. At some deepest point, the collective unconscious and the body merge into one. The Self begins as a dormant potentiality, but progressively awakens through the process of individuation. The symbol of the all-inclusive Self in Jungian psychology is, as many people know, the mandala, the circle with a cross in it, symbol of totality. But the mandala is a spatial, structural symbol. In a long essay, “The Philosophical Tree,” Jung explores a counterpart to the mandala, that of “the tree or the wonder-working plant.” He continues, “If a mandala may be described as a symbol of the self seen in cross section, then the tree would represent a profile view of it: the self depicted as a process of growth” (253). The tree has a dual aspect, transcendent and immanent, cosmic and psychological. In its cosmic aspect, it is the World Tree, one common form of the axis mundi or axis of the world that appears in many mythologies—including the northern ones that gave us our Christmas tree. Your Christmas tree is a living room variety of the World Tree whose roots are in the underworld and whose apex touches heaven, symbolized by a star or an angel. The bulbs are the planets and the lights are the stars.

In its psychological aspect, as a version of the Self, the tree is our total identity. Its branches and perhaps flowers are the part of us that is visible. But we have all seen uprooted trees and know that a tree is symmetrical: the roots branch underground as deeply and extensively as the branches extend upwardly. One of the major characters of another Robertson Davies novel, The Rebel Angels, is a brilliant young scholar, Maria. She has come to the university (modeled on Massey College in the University of Toronto where I was a grad student and Davies was one of my teachers right at the time he was writing this novel) in order to live the life of the mind, which she rightly idealizes. But in the course of the book she has to learn to come to terms with her dark, hidden roots, of which she is ashamed and tries to repudiate. Maria is Romany, in other words, a “gypsy,” and her family are as socially unrespectable and quirky as Wes Anderson’s Tennenbaums. But she needs that dark rootedness, comparable to the “Karamozovian” nature of Dostoyevsky’s novel.

Both the crown and the roots of a tree grow out of a central kernel called the rhizome. At the end of his life, in his 80’s Jung dictated an autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in the Prologue of which appears this extraordinary passage:

The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, as a young medical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not have been prematurely annihilated.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

In the end the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallized. (4)

Tree and stone—the Philosopher’s Stone, or lapis. Twin images for the Self, organic and inorganic, growth and metamorphosis paired with changeless endurance. We always end in the paradoxes of the liminal borderline. A tree and a stone appear in the ALP chapter of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The Self is circumferential, all-inclusive. But it is also a hidden center or ground, what in The Productions of Time I call the Monad. As such, it is Jesus’ mustard seed:

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field:

Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. (Matt. 13:31-32, King James version)

Out of the mustard seed of my ancestry has come a tree, and I have come to take shelter in its branches. I sit in their shade, and sing my gratitude.

References

Jung. C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Revised edition. Random House, 1961. Vintage, 1965.

Jung, C.G. “The Philosophical Tree.” In Alchemical Studies. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 13 in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Routledge, 1967. Bollingen, 1967. 251-350.