“Interesting,” a foreign voice creeps over my shoulder as I press the oil pastel into black paper. It sounds kind of German but not. I don’t know European accents well enough to know for certain, and so I just keep working on my drawing. I am alone in the room, I’m sure. It’s in my head. “That is not my pipe,” adds the voice neutrally. There’s no accusation hidden there.
I know I’m drawing a man from several old photographs, mashing them together to create my own moment with him. I know my subject is dead. I stop drawing, nevertheless, and look over my shoulder to see who is imitating him. But, to my amazement he is walking around my table already, and he is there and he is smoking a pipe. Not this one. He’s smoking his own pipe. He looks concerned.
“I know this is not your pipe,” I reply defiantly.
“Why did you draw this pipe, instead of my pipe if you wanted a moment with me?”
“This pipe insisted.”
“Ah!” he claps his hands, “Good.”
I start working again. My feelings are rising up through my hands melting the pastel I’m holding. It’s a bit uncomfortable knowing a dead psychiatrist is watching me work on a portrait of him. Am I doing it wrong, I ask myself silently?
Dr. Jung takes a seat across from me and pats his pipe on the edge of the table spilling out ashes now. I suppose since he cannot really be here that the embers are as dead as he is, and I watch as he pulls a leather pouch from his suit pocket, opens it and refills the bowl of his pipe with tobacco. It is impossible that I smell the aroma of fresh tobacco, I insist to myself, as a sweet woodsy scent drifts under my nose. He lights his match on the bottom of his shoe and sucks gently on the pipe until it lights. The first smell is the best, and strongest, as the puff of smoke floats up.
“What about this pipe?”
“Your pipe?”
“No, my dear. What about this pipe you’re drawing?”
I look at the pipe beneath my pastel and consider its simplicity, and the importance of the walnut wood of the bowl, the black ebony shaft, straight and just long enough. It is like a little piece of modern architecture.
“I changed my mind when I started drawing your pipe, and now I’m drawing this one. It is my grandfather’s pipe.”
“Ah!” he draws on his pipe and holds the smoke in his mouth, thinking. At least I think he’s thinking. It could be just me.
Dr. Jung says the bowl looks rather big to him, and I agree with that. In fact, I tell him that while I thought I was drawing a picture of him, in fact, I may be drawing the pipe, and we laugh. This happens to an artist in the weather of creation. A breeze blows in and the subject changes. I will make it back to his face eventually.
“What does this pipe mean to you, Amanda?” Dr. Jung shifts the chair back to cross his legs.
My elbows go to the table, and my chin goes into the palms of my hands as I smell the oil on my fingers. I look at him considering the banality of the question. Really? A pipe. My grandfather’s pipe.
“I suppose you are drawing some sexual connotations. The bowl. The shaft. Yeah, right. No,” I state emphatically, “It’s just a thing. It’s a thing I know. I know my grandfather’s pipe in my head better than I know your pipe. Your pipe is too complicated. It’s like a black Christmas bell turned upside down. It is too complex for me to draw.”
Sigh.
“That’s a heavy sigh,” he notices with me.
I tell Dr. Jung about my grandfather, Papaw. He had a stern, German way about him. He wasn’t German. He was American, second generation even. But, his parents were the first generation of German –Jews, and the rules of all of that followed him. He was worldly somehow. His business was architecture, but he had many hobbies, and they were lauded in the family. He could play nine instruments and had taught himself every one of them. He was a nearly professional athlete in odd sports like polo, golf and tennis. He played pool and billiards. He loved women, and would spend any party in the kitchen with the women rather than talking business when he could. He danced and was very fashionable in his day with a collection of silk handkerchiefs that were wildly patterned always in his breast pocket. And, he was an artist. With all of these details about him running through my head, how should I know why I painted his pipe? There were a million stories about my grandfather running through my head.
“Well, when did he smoke his pipe?” asked Dr. Jung so deductively.
“On Yom Kippur,” I smiled, “he smoked his pipe, and on the balcony, he smoked his pipe.”
“Yom Kippur? I doubt that.“ said Dr. Jung.
I looked at him defiantly again. What does he know about Yom Kippur? Some minister’s son, wrapped up in mysticism. Indeed.
“Yom Kippur is the day of atonement. He would have been at the synagogue, fasting and praying for forgiveness," Dr. Jung pronounced matter-of-factually.
“You don’t know my grandfather. How could you not know my grandfather by now?”
Dr. Jung pressed in a pinch more of tobacco, and sucked.
Perhaps, at the beginning of his life Papaw was at the synagogue with his founding-members family on High Holidays. They probably had good seats and were friendly with the Rabbi. However, my grandfather drifted from the religious part of being Jewish beginning during the Great Depression and culminating during the atrocities of World War II. It was doubtful to him that God really gave a shit about how we spent our time on planet earth if he could allow a man like Adolf Hitler, a man who shared his father’s first name, to behave as he did and live well to the end. My grandfather was always Jewish, identified absolutely with being Jewish, but would never worship in a house claimed by God. We only celebrated one holiday every year, and it was Yom Kippur, the holiest day. The day of coming to terms with what God is truly.
So we had a picnic up in the mountains, and my grandfather painted and smoked his pipe. We had Southern-Baked, Japanese interpreted chicken and cucumber sandwiches on tiny slices of cocktail bread. Apples. Always apples. My grandmother and I went for a walk collecting autumn leaves and a few remaining Indian Paintbrush flowers and pressed them between pages of wax paper and slipped them into whatever book she was reading, while my grandfather worked on his annual Yom Kippur water color painting. As we circled around him, I watched him painting from a distance.
These watercolors were bold and subtle at the same time. Influenced by the brushwork of Japanese masters and the colors of the West. He applied the color to paper ever so slowly, considering the necessity for the stroke before he committed to it. I suppose with watercolors there was no going back, but he was an artist who also never believed in a mistake. If it went someplace he didn’t intend, he simply adjusted, added a bird or a cloud or a bush or a mountain that was only in his mind. He only wanted to do one painting on this particular day, and he only worked on it long enough for the walk of a grandmother with flat feet and her scampering grandchild.
During this painting moment he smoked his pipe, staring out into the scenery to make a visual choice. The pipe, held by one hand, his elbow held by the other contemplating something very far away. Then holding the pipe in his mouth, he picked up a brush and contently painted a few strokes and stopped again. This was Yom Kippur: a painting by my grandfather.
When the painting was finished so was the pipe and somehow it happened precisely when my grandmother and I returned to the picnic area to begin packing up to leave. These were not people who would drag out any event longer than it could really go. When it was done it was done. Papaw would allow me to empty the bowl of his pipe into the fire pit, and wrap it up in a leather pouch with the tobacco, while he would pack up his easel and paints, and rinse his brushes.
At the time I would look at these modern paintings and be confused by them because they suggested the natural scene without depicting every detail. They were pictures that suggested the structure of nature, not the photographic realism of it. For my child’s mind it seemed as if it were questionable that he was even trying to paint anything but lines and color. I’m sure I asked the impertinent question, “Why didn’t you paint what you were looking at?” because only later did I grasp that the painting was about a relationship with nature’s construction and profound respect for the mood of it. I know that these works were a bow to God, to say, perhaps, that he perceived something great in creation that wasn’t obvious or on the nose.
Dr. Jung nodded now, holding his pipe as Papaw may have and I went back to work for a while.
“I see you’ve put a lot of effort into the nose. That is my nose.”
I laughed, “So it is!”
“Now we know some history of the pipe and its relationship to art, but what does it mean with regard to this painting? Layers and layer of color to get the color of the wood, the shape of the bowl, the angle of the pipe to the forefront, and my nose with nearly as much detail, and what does it mean to you? Will you spend this kind of effort on the rest of me?”
I stood back from the work, and contemplated my intentions now. Pastels are different from watercolor, at least the way I do it. I wondered what Papaw might say, and why Dr. Jung came to chat and he did not. I remembered what he would say to me when I was a child, or really a teenager drawing, “You don’t know when to stop, Amanda.”
My lips pierced. I crossed my arms and squinted at the sketchy lines that filled the rest of the picture. Taking a deep breath, I spoke out loud, “Of course, I’ll spend more time on your face, Dr. Jung, but this time I will know when to stop, to consider what really must be done, and what I can leave be.”
“Pardon me? Why is that?” asked Dr. Jung.
“This is a drawing about my admiration of your way of approaching the mind, the heart and life’s meaning, but now it is a drawing about this lovely conversation, too. The symbolism lies in important strokes, details and what is remembered.”
“It looks as if I may be laughing a bit. Is there a joke between us, Amanda?”
“Oh there are many jokes, Dr. Jung.”
Dr. Jung grinned and nodded with his pipe hanging from his mouth.
“Dr. Jung, when asked if you believed in God, do you remember what you said? How you replied?”
“I said, ‘I know. I don’t believe. I know.”
“Yes. Well, in the smoke I will give you the symbolic image of that which is most holy, something from the unconscious mind that is only observable from a personal, internal perspective.”
“Ah!”
“You asked me what the pipe symbolized, Dr. Jung.”
“Yes. In a dream a pipe might symbolize an archetype that you’re really working on now. The wise old man, for instance, could be it.”
“Oh, that is so ‘read-a-website-about-dream-symbolism’ Doc.”
“Of course, you must know what it is from your own point of view.”
“Dr. Jung, the pipe represents the pause that allows for inspiration and contemplation in my dreams. In this painting it means that I have arrived, and this is Papaw’s message of a German sort of approval that I am learning finally to stop.”
“Marvelous!” laughed Dr. Jung
.
“In the smoke I’ll let you know what comes in the pause.”
2012 (c) Amanda Morris Johnson
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| C.G. Jung Dreams |
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| A Yom Kippur Painting by Bob Morris |
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