Down by the river in the afternoon haze
the Mersey breaks on granite banks
as clouds drift past in waves.
The hoot of wood pigeon and chatter of lazy wren
weave harmonies with JCBs and the warbling of moorhen.
Down by the river in the evening’s tidal lulls
the Mersey laps at seaweed pillows
as waves cradle seagulls.
The sun paints the horizon with pastel shades of fire
as moorhen nest, pigeon rest and wren nestle in the briar.
Down by the river in night’s slack-water flow
the Mersey dreams a pool of life -
a salt-sown ocean tableau.
I’ve lived in Liverpool all of my life and when you reside in a place for such a long time the features of the landscape start to take on a life of their own. The internal dreamscape becomes populated with these landmarks which represent latent emotions or feelings. Eminent psychologist Carl Jung wrote about the ability of the unconscious to anthropomorphize objects through archetypes in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
In the same book Jung also wrote of a dream he had about living in Liverpool, a city he had never visited at the time. In his 1962 book 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections', Jung described the dream:
"I found myself in a dark, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining.
"I was in Liverpool.
"With a number of Swiss - say half a dozen - I walked through the dark streets.
"The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the centre was a round pool, and in the middle of it, a small island. While everything around was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a sea of reddish blossoms.
It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was, at the same time, the source of light.
My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree.
"They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the tree and the sunlit island, and thought, “I know very well why he has settled here.” Then I awoke.
"This dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the greyish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain.
"Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque - just as I felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all.
"Liverpool is the ‘pool of life'.”
Quote taken from 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' by Carl Jung.
The pool of life.
It was this quote of Jungs that I was thinking of just prior to writing this poem while sitting near to the river that has run through my life for the last 40 years. In my mind Jung's dream expresses that core of reality that sits just beyond the chatter of the human mind. We create so many problems through our obsession with our internal universe and belief in the sovereignty of thought.
The idea of separation of self through the expression of ego inspires judgement and ultimately violence, both internally and externally. Although we all have a body we inhabit, synchronicity and the dance of dreams speak to an underlying connection between all things. I personally experience this truth through meditation; as the years have passed and my practice deepened, that feeling of connection has become stronger to the point where it seems like a symphony rather than a solo.
Those moments that the poem describes where everything melds into one are like the melting of the personal into the collective unconscious. The merging of raindrops into the pool of life, creating ripples of thought on the surface before reverberating into stillness - it's in those moments the heartbeat of the universe can be heard.
Thanks for reading 🙂
The image used in to create the animation in this post is my own. The animation took some time to make using a combination of deep dream generator to create 3 different trippy versions of the original photo, before using GIMP Photo Editor to merge the images into an animation and optimize them for GIF. Check out the four images used to create the animation below.
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