Yikes, Jung.

From quotez:

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
-Carl Jung

Not sure I’d stretch it to ‘all’ mental illness (though, y’know, out of me & Jung, pick the famous psychologist type. So … ), but I’d pay this one. Avoidance is a mental ouroboros. A green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on and ok, now I’m getting a bit carried away.

So let’s complement that with:

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
— Winston Churchill

and:

“The best way out is always through.”
— Robert Frost.

Boy, I just have dozens of these, don’t I.

You know, on a tangent, I was talking to a guy once who happened to work in advertising, & we were discussing upcoming movies, & I was saying, ‘Oh, the Movie Show reviewed that, & they said…’ Anyhow, the second time I said, ‘Yeah, the Movie Show guys said…’ he sniggered, cut me off & said, ‘Have you thought about coming up with an original opinion on anything by yourself?’

I think the next thing I said to him was, ‘Good night.’

And let me re-iterate: he worked in advertising. One of those vocations renowned for originality. So his point about my unwillingness to come up with an original opinion on movies as yet unreleased in my city was completely justified. Or, wait, no, I think he was just a complete tosser. Yeah, yeah, that could be it.

As to that self-indulgence thing that’s all over everywhere online, love nihilistic_kid‘s comment today:

I just thought this was an amusing addition to the conversation, since the self-indulgent/non-self-indulgent fight seems to be boiling down to another round of Artists vs. Hacks, again, sans any evidence of what actually motivates people to write. Of course those artists just love their own selves (ooh, smoochie smoochie, mirror man!) and of course the hacks just want to stick to formulae and do well by their readers (it’s in the contract!), goes the conversation so far. But the first person I met who actually gets to discuss motivations and meanings with dozens of authors per year pegged two uberhacks as the most self-indulgent of writers straight off.
So nyah nyah on everybody.

I don’t actually mean to get into the self-indulgence debate. It’s just that I find everyone else’s reactions so entertaining. Plus, clearly, tonight I have no original opinions on anything.

What I’m wondering, though, is how to gauge motivation &, once gauged, how to critically assess it? I’m wondering this because it seems to me that motivation is, in fact, important. Because I think it seeps into a work & therefore into a reader. In my mind, now, motivation has become twisted around with intention. ‘What is the author’s intention’ goes the popular highschool English lesson. As a student, I used to want to argue that it didn’t matter what the intention was, what mattered was what I took away from the text (I was post modern before I was even post modern. Does that make me pre-post modern?). But now I think intention is understated. Overlooked, even.

What, indeed, *is* the intention of the author, any author? What assurances, what subliminals, what attempts to get into the psyches of readers exist out there? What amount of trust should we give, & what hold in reserve? What imbalances are we contributing to the collective consciousness (thanks, Jung) if such exists? *Can* we contribute to the collective consciousness, or are we just passive recipients? Why did I not bother to check my facts before I started this post?

What numbers of people are wanting to ask me to defend my blithe comment that motivation is important — given that I have bothered with no evidence whatsoever? ;)