Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

8
The Experiment
It did not take long to transport the materials to Rachel’s—she
lived only ten minutes away—but setting it up was something else.
That took all Sunday afternoon.
On the way over I was as anxious as I was excited. I was grateful
to Rachel for her offer, but uneasy about leaving my container.
While in my house, I could imagine this all taking place in my own
psyche, with the players being aspects of myself: me, the ego; Arnold,
eminence grise; Norman, lapsed puer; Brillig, mercurial
trickster; and Rachel, part-time muse. A neat conceit—a manageable
cast for self-discovery, assembled with considerable thought,
under my control. There was even a place for Sunny.
But they did have lives of their own. At one remove, perhaps,
but still. At any minute, any one of them—or, God forbid, all at
once—might do something out of character.
What if old Brillig suddenly took it into his head to become a
businessman?
What if Norman started spouting philosophy?
What if Arnold became less cantankerous?
What if Rachel cut me off?
And, the most disquieting possibility of all, what if I got to like
it outside? Who would “I” be then?
I took some comfort in Jung’s remark that “a life without inner
contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond,
which is destined only for angels” 111 —but not much.
In any case, my own dilemma, if I can call it that, was quite secondary
to the task at hand, namely to create a hologram of Brillig’s
piece of Ms. Little. How we got here, or why, was no longer important.
I thrust aside my troubling thoughts and resolved to see it
through.
111 Letters, vol. 1, p. 375.
110