10-31-20

JULIUS/GHOST

Ghost: the spirit of a dead person, especially one believed to appear in bodily likeness to living persons or to haunt former habitats.

the center of spiritual life, the soul

a returning or haunting memory or image.

“Ghost” is the word I am looking for here. Jacob sent me an article to read on Robinson Jeffers in which there was a reference to his Tor House and Hawk Tower, all built by Jeffers of native stone. I replied to Jacob that I had a memory of the rock cottage at Mesa Vista, also built of native stones by dad and his brother, Uncle David, when they were young. And I mentioned Julius, my mentor in stacking dry wall stones at Mesa Vista. Jacob asked for more of a memory about Julius. That is what turned my thinking to ghosts.

As you will see as you read along, there is much here about stones and building with stones and what that might mean to those of us who have experienced this obsession. Even though the subject has a more recent reference, there is a thread to it that winds back in time to another stone building, that of the Tower that Carl Jung built for himself over many years. I will start there before going on with my own story.

In his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung has a chapter on “The Tower.” He originally conceived of this tower as a place of simplicity, something resembling a primitive hut. But as time went on, he found that he needed something more substantial in which to live. He added several annexes over the subsequent years and with each one the stone structure took on deeper meanings for him. There is an underlying appreciation for the building materials, the stones, themselves. He mentions one stone in particular that was intended to fit into the structure but which hadn't been shaped that way and he saw that it had a different role to play in the overall plan. When I was working on my own stone walls, I never picked stones for a particular place in the wall I was working on but always felt there was a place for every stone somewhere and so I took the next stone off the pile and worked it into the wall. Jung's original structure was a place of maternal and familial care (the hearth) and was built after the death of his mother. After his wife died, he added a tower that symbolized his maturation into old age. In each case, the stones selected and the buildings built had specific meanings for him, almost a dedicatory practice. That is the way I felt about the walls I built.

“It might also be said that I built it in a kind of dream. Only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.”

He believed that his stone structures were inhabited by different spirits, one of which was Merlin.

“His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad.”

At one point in his story he is certain he hears a parade of people singing, laughing, and talking but in his waking/dreaming state he doesn't find anyone after a search of the tower. It was only later that he made the connection with another spirit from his classical studies.

“Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.”

Interestingly, he makes a final statement about his own version of history and it echoes now a recurrent theme in our present circumstances. His history is, of course, tied intimately with his own past and the history of all those whose roots we share.

“Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the 'discontents' of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.”

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass ….”

I think Jung is bringing us back to the very complicated formulas that define humankind. His own experiences are informed by the history embedded in his memories and dreams and reflections. He makes the case that our visions, our apparitions, our ghosts are as real to us as the reality of every day experiences. In that light, let me take up my own story of one ghost that appeared in my own personal reflections.

Ghosts are sometimes thought of as frightening apparitions that visit people in sleep and sometimes, as in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, bring messages of admonishment or warning. My ghosts have never been frightening and when they come to me they encourage my memory of them in many ways. And that is never anything but something of a mentoring spirit, very supportive and encouraging and persistently inspiring. So it is with my Julius Reinig ghost. And that is how I will develop the memory of him for Jacob and the rest of you in this week's letter.

This entry gives me a chance to document some of the thoughts I have been having about him and around him this past week. Thoughts around anything other than politics at this point before next week's election indicate something at a different level of perception and that is a welcome relief from the relentlessly dismal reporting on politics. So, this is a matter of substituting something wonderful and inspiring for something toxic and penetrating. But what are ghosts for if not for bringing to someone a message of inspiration and deep connection?

I have many ghosts of this kind, like Julius. They visit me when I am reflective and separated by degrees from the surface din of activities on Main Street. They come to me and are reminders of one of the nuanced and deeper levels of love. As I have thought about Julius and his effect on me and my life, love is the word that settles emotionally. There is nothing academic about my ghosts. They appear as they were in real life, teachers of enormous lessons. Often, the ghosts were my teachers when I was very young. They were available to me in ways that people closer in the family, mom and dad, were not. All of them saw me as a fleshly person, truly saw me for who I was at the time. For them, I was not a clinical specimen (as with dad) or part of a blur of children (as with mom). I was noticed and nourished by the connection, each ghost in a separate and different way, but always genuinely regarded with kindness and, yes, love. I don't believe one can genuinely regard someone else as they truly are in a state other than love. I felt embraced in a substantial and warm way by each.

Julius was one of these ghosts. He and I worked together several summers at Mesa Vista where he was a groundskeeper. I was too young, maybe 13 or 14, to get a regular job, even though most of those early summers were also times to mow neighborhood lawns, which I did in addition to working with Julius. The rock cottage was still standing at that time, even though it had not been used since all the adult Navajo natives had returned to the Navajo Nation, a time when they could be treated for their tuberculosis on the reservation. The rock cottage, then, was a place to store the tools and small equipment Julius needed for his outdoors work. It was there that he and I shared our lunch times together in the cool of the cottage basement during those hot summer days.

I was assigned to Julius to work outside doing whatever he wanted me to do. This was mostly mowing or moving hoses to water the lawns and flower beds, all of which he kept with such precision and care. As the first summer wore on, he had me helping him with some of the stacked rock work on the terraces he was building around the front of the nursing home. They were to eventually blossom into masses of irises, one of the few flowers that didn't require extensive watering but which bloomed resplendently in mid-summer under his care.

Julius collected the stones for the walls from the fields around his house which was some distance out of town. He would load them into the trunk of his passenger car, the only vehicle he could afford. And he did that over many years, one load at a time, a few stones in each load. The work of handling the stones was a welcome task for me because I was at that time a fat kid. I admired my classmates at the time who were athletic and in good physical shape. I thought the stone work would help me to be more like them. The work of laying stone under Julius's tutelage turned out to be more than an act of physical conditioning for me. I look back on that time now and realize how porous my emotional life must have been to have been so affected by his mentoring attention. I'm not sure what he saw in me but he trusted whoever I was.

During lunch times we would chat and once I asked him how he could keep his shirt sleeves rolled down all the time when it was so hot to work that way. He rolled up one sleeve and showed me his sharply tattooed identification number of many digits (we were then only 14 years beyond the Holocaust and the end of World War II). He said he kept it out of sight but could never keep it out of his mind. Over time that summer he told me many stories about his experiences as a Pole coming from an area of Poland that had suffered invasion, occupation, and reversals over many decades. He explained about Auschwitz, just an angry and sterile blot in my own educational experience. Most times I would have to ask a specific question but he would always answer. His memories were never couched in bitterness or anger. And, in fact, he could recite verbatim the speeches of Hitler broadcasted over all inmates in the long buildings that housed the prisoners. I could never understand how someone as evil as Hitler could so mesmerize his victims. Even now, it is hard for me to understand this part of brain mechanics and history but such a thing is made more believable with our present circumstances.

Julius had his own ghosts that visited him all the time. He recalled some of them for me. He told me about how he and several of his fellow prisoners would accompany the sickest to the filthy communal bathroom and tend to them as they lived out their abbreviated lives soiled and starved, just doing what was possible and called for in the midst of impossible circumstances. His stories were graphic but unlabored and not told in any way to make his efforts there to sound anything more than they were for him—one human helping others. The least sick tending to the dying. He survived and attested to the role of chance in his survival. Yet, his ghosts never troubled him in ways a thirteen year old boy thought they should.

I suppose I made a subconscious connection between this man of integrity and kindness and the stone walls he was building. I suppose it occurred to me deep down inside someplace that the solidity and elemental permanence of stones was a way for him to participate in a memorial of sorts to his lost comrades as well as his own incomprehensible memories. Perhaps he dedicated each stone to them as he placed them on the walls, stacking one upon the other as if in a community of his ghostly lost kin. And there are so many stones that are required for a sturdy wall. There was not a day of stacking stone here at the farm over 45 years that I didn't recall the ghost of Julius. And the walls I built hold within them some small measure of what I imagined his walls contained—a devotion and a dedication to goodness and the rightness of kindness towards one's fellow human beings.

I believe that we are visited by the ghosts in our lives when we need them. They come often unbidden but always willingly. They bring to us the messages that their lives held and, in this and in present moments, they continue their mentoring and teaching. Perhaps it is something of magical thinking to believe that our ghosts appear in this way, but I will entertain a full dose of this magical thinking in these perilous times when there is so little in the way of inspiration and loving kindness. When Julius comes to me now I see that he comes with his message of acceptance and care out of his life of trauma, darkness, and wretched circumstances. He transforms my moments of dread into moments of hope, survival, and even endurance. He says that if the Holocaust can be opened and let to bleed its life, then this wound that can bleed and eventually heal can also be every wound we know.

All of us are in an eternal lineage of ghosts. We do not know when our lives will end here in earthly circumstances. We do not know for whom we will be living ghosts when we give up our skin bags. What I do know is that I will be wandering about as beggars do and I will appear to someone when I am aware of a call from them. And then I will appear, just as Julius appears to me when he has been wandering at the edges of my memory. All of us will some day be living memories. And we will not have lost the love for one another that our beating hearts once held so warmly.