What is it exactly what I felt and why, when I made the album Ummagumma From Pink Floyd for the first time 55 years ago? What was that immediate profound fascination with that music? Below I'm going to try to make clear what made the unconscious recognition possible, using a chapter from the collected works of Carl Gustav Jung that I read this morning. At first, it is probably useful when I talk about the psychological approach of a work of art, in Jung's work it was literature. I took the liberty of using his approach to this music, as I think I recognize it in that music.
CG Jung distinguishes two methods of creation, the psychological and the visionary. For my story, which must remain very concise, only the visionary is enough, partly because I find what I am looking for. What strikes me directly is that the psychological explanation of, in this case the visionary art on the album Ummagumma, is a primal vision of chaos and darkness that would be incompatible with certain moral categories. These three categories are: standards, values and attitudes. Standards and values refer to behavior, while attitude pertains to the person acting.
Let me start with the latter. It probably pertains to an experience that seems incompatible with the personality or fiction of the composer's consciousness. The conflict leads to wanting to make it invisible, the displacement towards the unconscious of the experience in question. Furthermore, I am not going to go here because reducing the visionary experience to the personal experiences of the creators, the experience makes it something figuratively, a surrogate, loses the primal character and the primal vision becomes a symptom, a psychic neurosis of the maker, so to speak, and the chaos is reduced to a spiritual order. This statement will soon return within the limits of the ordered cosmos. That's not what I experienced when I was listening and a whole new world opened to me. The only order I could distinguish were the music notes played on the musical instruments.
The source of the shared experience here must be taken seriously though it seems that the mind will feel compelled to intervene in this obscure metaphysics to prevent the world from sinking into dark superstition. Maybe because I was so young and was completely open because of my fascination, the last thing happened to me. A listener who doesn't unknowingly identify himself with the atmosphere and message that is contained in these songs and doesn't understand this music is probably a rich fantasy, artist grilling or derailed poetic freedom. Maybe there was a more everyday love experience among the members of the band or one of them. The passion behind it is in any case palpable and leaves some less deep minds lost. The experience of the maker has become a real symbol, an expression for an unknown reality. It has become a fact, a psychic reality with as much value as a physical reality, for me anyway.
The feelings, the passion, of both the members of Pink Floyd, and mine lie within the consciousness, the object of the vision outside, which makes it mystical or magical. The band between the music and the band on the one hand and me on the other is for good forged, although the members of Pink Floyd will not have noticed any of that. The feeling that is summoned to me is that of things that are naturally secret. They're mysterious and creepy, an illusion because they're hidden by the ratio, the mind. They hide from such things out of fear of God.
The cosmos represents the consciousness, the sun and the faith of the day here, while the chaos stands for the nightly fear, the moon and the unconscious. This tension creates the question if there is anything alive on the other side. My soul was drawn out of the human, in the above human, which is also called the divine. This is, of course, a very strong and profound experience at the age of nine, the profound consequences of which at that time were completely inconceivable. Was it a trick of the unconscious to give me an omen in this threatening and ominous way that something will happen?
The laws, moral and practical, which man has invented to protect us from the madness of fear of metaphysics, the eternal fire of God, which may be too close here, fall out of here and do not last in this young mind of mine. The beauty of this darkness was to me so awesome and encompassing that it was like a revelation of a new unknown religion. This is what brought my fascination up from the deepest source of my being, my unconscious and his archetypes. The fascination lies in the experience and in the source and is still there, now almost 55 years later.
Every time the collective unconscious penetrates the experience and joins the time consciousness, a creative act has taken place that pertains to the whole period, it is a message to contemporaries.
