Subtext:
• The spoken word section is a recording of Jung Scholar Sonu Shamdasani reading an excerpt from Carl Jung’s “The Red Book”. Written between 1913 and 1930 The Red Book recounts in surrealistic detail Jung’s experience with what has been called creative illness, madness, or a psychotic break. Written only at night it was unclear to anyone that he was experiencing such madness as during the day he carried on with his productive lifestyle. Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these years as "my most difficult experiment." This experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through willful engagement of what Jung later termed "mythopoetic imagination". In his introduction to Liber Novus, Shamdasani explains:
"From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form.... In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline."
• The sung section of this piece is a version of a song called “Red River Valley”, stylized after the rendition by Harry McClintock (1928).
•In between the Jung section and the Sung section is a brief interpolation of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 Op. 37
lyrics
Text:
“What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want.
Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.
That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Equivocalness simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life”
From this valley,
They say, You are leaving.
We will miss your bright
Eyes and sweet smile.
For they say you are
Taking the sunshine,
That has brightened my
Pathway a while.
So come sit by my side,
If you love me.
Do not hasten
to bid me adieu,
Just remember the
Red River Valley
And the one that’s loved
you so true.
I’ve been thinking,
A long time, my darling.
Of those sweet words
You never would say.
Now, at last, all my
Fond hopes have vanished.
For they say you are going away.
So come sit by my side,
My little darling.
Do not hasten
to bid me adieu,
Just remember the
red river valley
And the one that loved
you so true.
The soundtrack to the award-winning film “Freeland” functions beautifully as an album in its own right, with stark, evocative instrumentals. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 7, 2021
