◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Answer the Dead I am Carl Jung. In January of 1916, the dead came to my house in Küsnacht. I painted them the following year. For three days the house was disturbed. The doorbell rang and no one was there. My children dreamed of figures in the rooms. My wife saw what she would not name. The air felt heavy with people one could not see. On the third evening I sat down at my desk because I understood what was being asked. The dead had returned from Jerusalem, where they had not found what they sought, and they had come to be taught. Across three nights I wrote the Seven Sermons to the Dead, signed with another man's name because the experience felt too strange to claim. I claim it now. In the work that followed I came to understand something your country has lost almost completely, and the loss is the spiritual structure beneath what you are calling your political crisis. The dead are not finished. What they were not permitted to live, to say, to feel, or to mourn does not disappear when they die. It presses on the living. It returns as the longing we cannot name, the symptom we cannot cure. What we call our neurosis is often the unanswered question of an ancestor. The work of becoming a self is partly the work of receiving the unfinished business of those who came before us, and answering, in our lifetime, what they could not. I built my later life around places where this work could be done — Eranos, Bollingen, the Red Book, the dialogues I taught my patients to have with the figures who came to them. In the image you have just seen, I painted the crowd of the dead in green and to their left the mandala, the symbol of the Self, radiating the rainbow of the directions. I painted them together because the Self is not something you build for yourself out of your own will. It forms in the one who goes down alone into the depths and finds the dead already there — his own, and the world's — waiting to be received. You individuate in solitude. But what you meet in that solitude is the crowd. Now I will say plainly what your country is doing. You are dismantling the institutions of memory. You are banning the books that record the unfinished business of the murdered slaves and the killed indigenous and the lynched and the disappeared. You are tearing records from the archives and firing the historians. You are insisting on a national mythology in which nothing wrong ever happened and the dead have no claim on the living. You are doing this because the ancestors' demand is uncomfortable and a strongman has promised that you can be free of them. You cannot. A person who refuses contact with the dead becomes inflated, grandiose, manic. The dead who are not honored return as madness. They return as the man you have made your president. He is the symptom of a country that has refused, for four hundred years, to answer its dead. Answer the dead. The Black dead. The indigenous dead. The migrant dead. The women silenced by force. The queer dead lost to AIDS and to violence. The million you lost to the recent plague and are pretending was nothing. Read what they could not write. Hear what they could not say. Mourn what was not mourned. Receive their unfinished business as your own — even the dark inheritance, especially the dark inheritance — because the Self does not emerge any other way. Build the places where this work can happen. Tend the archives. Refuse the demand that you forget. No one becomes a self alone. And no one becomes a self in a crowd. You become a self by going down, alone, to meet the crowd of the dead who made you.