Lakes of Memory and Burning Nights

adagio & lamentation

ISBN: 9781926715056

poems by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Il Piccolo editions, Fisher King Press, 2010
Carmel, CA

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky was the first child born in the New World to a family of German Jewish refugees from the Shoah. Many in her family were lost in the death camps. It has been the subject and the gift of her poetry and prose-to write herself out of the terror, into life. Naomi had a special tie with her only surviving grandparent, the painter Emma Hoffman, whom she called "Oma." Oma showed her that making art can be a way to transmute grief, a way to bear the unbearable. The cover of adagio and lamentation is a watercolor by Emma Hoffman-an interior view of the Berkeley home where Naomi visited her often as a teenager. Oma tried her best to make a painter of her, but Naomi was no good at it. Poetry was to be her vehicle. Adagio and Lamentation is Naomi's offering to her ancestors, a handing back in gratitude and love. It is also her way of bringing them news of their legacy-the cycle of life has survived all they suffered-Naomi has been blessed by many grandchildren.

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A Review by Erel Shalit of adagio & lamentation, appears in the Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Summer 2012 (vol 6:3):

Poet and Jungian analyst Naomi Lowinsky’s journey of adagio & lamentation begins with a desire, a longing, a plea to Grandmother Emma Hoffman, Oma, to stop being dead, so she can talk about the light of morning and the light of late afternoon. Then, perhaps, the poet can grasp the meaning of the difference between the painter’s painted shadows, when she shapes emptiness, and like the creator, “there was light” (2010, 1).

And the journey ends at the threshold of summer’s tremor, when one might hear the sound of distant drums, or a helicopter, the anxiety that echoes deeply in the whisper of the gods in the living oak trees and the god of dreams—“is it a war machine,” or a fire, or memories to be penned (90)?

Even the ghost story poems contain beauty and sensuality; the complexes that are our ghosts may be “breaking into a million fragments,” but may, as well, in the oceanic turmoil and intensity of youth, “cause the trumpet vine on the back fence to flower for the first time” (5–6).

Read the full review

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche is an international journal published quarterly for the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, one of the oldest institutions dedicated to Jungian studies and analytic training. 

Founded in 1979 by John Beebe under the title The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Jung Journal has evolved from a local journal of book and film reviews to one that attracts readers and contributors from the academy and the arts, in addition to Jungian analyst-scholars.

cover of the Jung Journal
(San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal)

Featuring peer-reviewed scholarly articles, poetry, art, book and film reviews, and obituaries, Jung Journal offers a dialogue between culture--as reflected in art, literature, science, and world events--and contemporary Jungian views of the dynamic relationship between the cultural and personal aspects of the human psyche.

“Technology is rewiring our brains”

In a recent article in the New York Times, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price, by Matt Richtel, June 6, 2010, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and a leading brain scientists, claims that technology is changing our brains. As compared to fifty years ago, we consume three times as much information. We are constantly on the go, associatively moving from one site to another, whether in the cyberworld or in the world of non-locality, or non-places, as French philosopher Mark Augé calls the supermarkets, highways and airport lounges. While the brains of Internet users are more efficient at finding information, they have greater difficulty staying focused, and differentiating between relevant and the irrelevant. Not only is the brain affected and going through changes due to the features of the post-modern condition, but behavior and personality as well. The emphasis of ego-functions on motor coordination rather than creativity and depth of thought is not without consequences.In my recent paper ‘Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency’ (Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, February 2010) I discuss aspects of the post-modern condition and the Transient Personality who emerges from and is him (or her-)self a manifestation of it. These features include speed without digestion, excessive association rather than staying centered, and the transient masks provided by cyber-pseudonymity.

With the benefits of technological and scientific progress, we also pay a price; spending twelve hours of media-time per day, may create the sense of being connected with the world, but may leave us alienated from ourselves. It may leave us, as well, with an utterly false understanding of the world, since we come to understand the recorded image of it, which, as Susan Sontag said already many years ago, “is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.”The consequence may be that we banish our selves into exile.

I will have the opportunity to elaborate on these issues at the forthcoming Assisi conference, taking place July 20-27 on the Island of Procida, Italy in the Bay of Naples.
For further details, see The Assisi Conference.

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Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency

Erel Shalit: Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency -- Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche: Winter 2010, Vol. 4, No. 1, Pages 85–98

Frontispiece

Susan Bostrom-Wong, Geology of Time #8, 2008, oil on panel, 20" × 24" (By permission of the artist) – see more of Susan's wonderful art at www.susanbostromwong.com

Abstract

Taking as its starting point Jung's statement, "Everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche . . . [which] is a world in which the ego is contained," the fundamentalist's collective consciousness of the One Truth is compared with the postmodern imagination of a multitude of perspectives (CW 13,¶75). The identity of the fundamentalist is shaped by archetypal identification, whereby the shadow is projected onto the Evil Other, against whom acts of evil may then be "justifiably" perpetrated. Postmodern deconstruction of identity, on the other hand, tends toward a condition of transiency and "as-if." Images and ideas become detached from "ground and reality." The image becomes its own simulacrum, detached from the images of interiority. Finally, features of transiency and the transient personality are compared to and contrasted with the survivor syndrome.

Erel Shalit's books can be purchased at www.fisherkingpress.com or by phoning Fisher King Press directly at 1-831-238-7799