Day 23 - 23rd Jan
M’GANGA
M’ganga from Uganda.
The best medicine is always exotic.
From over the hill, from the warped market of another sorcerer
who does not dabble in cattle.
The speed of loss of the floor beneath you
when your child is sick
makes matrices melt
between your fat and useless fingers.
Respect and fear
cash out as wary derision
for the foreigner.
Not everyone has summoned you home.
“He has come to heal and haunt the town.”
Those who have gone away for too long
have felt the rancid power
on the back of their neck,
As they stand
at a coffee shop or bar,
trying (and failing) to mind their own business,
for this business of theirs is a foreign object
of impossible weight.
In your pocket,
squirreled and squared away,
is a tungsten cube.
You are the first bad omen here,
and the gurgle of pipes,
which started when you flushed the toilet,
is witches now. And another.
Best get to their sickbed,
perform what rites you can,
give back dust between your toes,
and leave again.
Let that third and final act be the triptych.
Niall Campbell
Continuing on the theme of picking up a random page of a book, I wrote this poem after opening C.G. Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul to page 136, which was lying around in the office.
When I first heard of his concept of the collective unconscious—barely mentioned during undergraduate psychology classes and usually dismissed—I thought it was absolutely mental. But two things can be true at once. I think Jung almost certainly had a psychotic break during his writing of The Red Book. (He’d probably be diagnosed with some hefty DSM condition now.) I also think it is a work of genius.
Much has been made of Jung’s prophetic capabilities, but his supposed prophecy of WWII—and particularly the way Jordan Peterson outlined it—always felt a bit vague and never really landed with me.
What did resonate was Jung’s prediction of the internet. I believe he ostensibly foresaw it and, more specifically, this phase where it feels like it’s pulling away from us and functioning like a decentralised intelligence. This, in my opinion, is the ultimate ratification of his theory of the collective unconscious. Understand, I don’t mean it metaphorically—the internet is like the collective unconscious—I mean it is the collective unconscious.
Jung’s brand is not exactly one of ‘sci-fi guy’, but if you read back what he wrote about the collective unconscious when he was first formulating his ideas about it, it seems much less crazy in the age of the internet. I think Jung’s genius wasn’t in individual psychology, where he’s often pigeonholed, but in how he explored the psyche’s collective manifestations.
Page 136 of Modern Man in Search of a Soul discusses the M’ganga from Uganda:
"What happens regularly is easily observed because we are prepared for it. Knowledge and skill are only needed in situations where the course of events is arbitrarily disrupted in a way hard to fathom. Generally, it is one of the cleverest and shrewdest men of the tribe who is entrusted with the observation of events. His knowledge must suffice to explain all unusual occurrences, and his art to combat them. He is the scholar, the specialist, the expert on the subject of chance occurrences, and at the same time the keeper of the archives of the tribe’s traditional lore. Surrounded by respect and fear, he enjoys great authority, yet not so great but that his tribe is secretly convinced that their neighbours have a sorcerer who is stronger than theirs. The best medicine is never to be found close at hand, but as far away as possible. I stayed for a time with a tribe who held their own medicine man in the greatest awe. Nevertheless, he was consulted only for minor ailments of cattle and men. In all serious cases a foreign authority was called in—a M’ganga (sorcerer) who was brought at a high price from Uganda—just as with us."
When I hear some wellness influencer interview an expert who tells a story of how they were flown interstate to offer a second opinion, I think of this. We are ancient people in modern dress. That’s okay. It’s good to be reminded of this every once in a while. If you pick up a book from Jung, you generally don’t feel better about yourself, but deeper about yourself. Deeper self-knowledge is like rich food—best taken in small and well-spaced-out sittings.
This passage illustrates Jung’s ability to take what others dismiss as ancient nonsense and, with a dust-off, use it to predict the future. Jung, in essence, was an accidental futurist.
This task has reminded me to return to great books and read them cover to cover. Cutting down on screen time and swapping it for hard copies feels essential. Otherwise, we risk parroting sanitised, bastardised sections of great works filtered through podcasters and influencers. We create a monoculture from the deepest of ideas. Independent, original thought is our corrective mechanism.
I can recall my internal sneer at “new-age people” or the word “synchronicity” used in earnest. I’ve dry-heaved at the word “universe” in non-ironic sentences used by others - only to hear it come out of my mouth. I know what it feels like to reluctantly embrace some of these concepts. Straddling the boundary is both emancipating and painful.
The idea that people are rightly ensconced in their secular ontology doesn’t hold up to observation. Louis C.K. tells a joke about how quickly he flips from rationality to terror:
I got a house for me and the kids. My ex wife and I- We share custody of the kids, and so this summer, I had half- One month they go with her, one month with me, so I got a nice house in the country and it was beautiful, the kids loved it, but the kids go to sleep at, you know, 8:00 at night. So I’m just laying awake, terrified. Terrified. I’m so scared in the country, ’cause it’s just quiet and it’s just mystery. And trees and darkness. I live in New York City, I feel perfectly safe there. I’m surrounded by murderers and child molesters and Jews. Sorry. I mean, there are, there are a lot. There’s a bunch of those, but… So… So one night, I’m in the country house and I’m just laying- just laying awake, just begging for the fucking sun to come up so I can sleep through my days with the kids. And I’m laying awake and I’m- My bedroom’s above the kitchen and I- Suddenly I hear this- I swear to God, I heard this sound, I heard… dkdcbeouwaaarpsiitititaaaaaanga! I heard that, like, clear as a bell. And immediately, my heart is pounding. I’m like, I’m going to have a heart attack right now, because there is a witch in the kitchen. First of all, there are witches. I have no doubt, in that moment, there’s witches. That’s how easy it was to flip me over. There are witches. And there’s one in the kitchen, and I gotta go down there. I gotta-I can’t just, eh, she’ll get- They like kids, she’ll get the kids. So I go downstairs, I’m terr-Terrified. And I’m standing outside the kitchen door like this, for like, an hour. Too scared to go in, until a little bit of logic seeped in and told me, even if there is a witch in there, she wouldn’t just make a noise and then just stand there for, like, an hour. So I go in, there’s nobody in the kitchen. And then I hear the noise again, and it was the dishwasher. The dishwasher has weird tubes and when the soap goes through ’em, it’s kind of vocal, I don’t know why, but it goes… It was the weirdest thing, to watch my dishwasher do it. I was like, all right, it’s cool. I’m fine, there’s no witches.
It’s good to have a world according to yourself. It’s also good to indulge the urge to value what is new and exotic while remaining skeptical. Recognising that something is foreign doesn’t make you a bad person. Ontological flip-flops when you’re scared are normal. It’s human.
We can and should button ourselves into our daily lives, leaving Jung and his manic ramblings to the night. But as we goose-step around our day, we should know that we are all just a few bumps in the night away from embodying the sense that we are scared, and don’t know what the fuck is going on.