Life-and-Destruction Page 30
What Jung sees as a "conflict of opposites" is modified by Judith Wright in
"The Killer" where she describes an identification or union of opposites. What
is seen as "black horror" is recognised as within the person, the Killer. The
snake's sudden turning in the reeds and springing up in defence is as instinctive
and as violent as the reaction of the human being who, under threat, kills. The
Killer and the Maker are exactly the same person. The "mind" of one is the
"crystal sense" of the other. The Maker becomes the Killer and destroys her
own creation, which is part of herself. This is truly like "serpentine
wandering".32 In this wandering there is destruction but it is the kind of
"death" that:
does not entail mere destruction but points to the inscription of erratic
markings or traces.... Along this margin, codependent subjects
interpenetrate. This intermingling creates an opening of self to the
other that cannot be encompassed by the traditional categories of the
logic of exclusion.33
The "logic of exclusion" is not evident in 'The Killer". In a unified flow,
running through dramatically different "moods", the poet brings the "day as
clear as fire" and the "black horror... from the dark" into one unified whole in
herself. The symbol of the serpent has in itself these opposites:
The serpent is ... a highly complex and universal symbol. It can be
male, female, or self-created. As a killer, it is death and destruction;
renewing its skin periodically, it is life and resurrection; coiled, it is
equated with the cycles of manifestation. It is solar and lunar, life and
death, light and darkness, good and evil, wisdom and blind passion,
healing and poison, preserver and destroyer and both spiritual and
physical rebirth. It is phallic, the procreative male force... and the
presence of a serpent is almost universally associated with pregnancy.
It accompanies all female deities and the Great Mother, and is often
depicted twining around them or held in their hands. Here it also takes
on the feminine characteristics of the secret, enigmatic and intuitional;
it is the unpredictable in that it appears and disappears suddenly.34
32 Taylor. Erring, p. 15
33 Taylor, Erring p. 141
34 Elizabeth Cain, "To Sacred Origins - Through Symbol and Story", in Creation Spirituality
and The Dreamtime. Ed. Catherine Hammond (Newtown: Millennium Books 1991) p. 82
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