Fifth Business Part 5 Liesl Title Liesl is

Fifth Business Part 5 Liesl

Title: Liesl is Dunny’s third and perhaps greatest “wise man”

This section begins with Dunny on a quest to understand Mary Dempster, saints, etc. and ends with Dunny beginning to understand himself.

Until now, the shift in understanding about the two realities (factual and psychological) has been largely external: he has tried to understand others’ roles in his life

Now he learns that he has to make those work internally as well he must learn his own archetypes, his own role in his own life

Remember Jung’s “Collective Unconscious”: • Common to all humans • Works in each of us as archetypes which sometimes erupt in our consciousness • We see archetypal images in dreams, myths, legends, fairy tales, art and religious symbols • If we look, we can recognize how these archetypal roles play out in our own lives

Two Realities He continues his saint quest (the physical, factual journey)

Takes him to Guadeloupe, Mexico

Presentation 15 : Religious Shrines

Again, sees the picture, examines it and gets the facts

• “I examined the picture through a powerful little pocket telescope. Certainly it was painted on cloth of a very coarse weave, with a seam up the middle of it that deviated from the straight just enough to avoid the Virgin’s face…. The Virgin, a peasant girl of about fifteen, stood on a crescent moon. The painting was skilled, and the face beautiful (201).

But the kneeling petitioners are of real interest

“The picture was not my chief concern, however. My eyes were on the kneeling petitioners, whose faces had the beauty virtually every face reveals in the presence of the goddess of mercy, the Holy Mother, the figure of divine compassion. Very different, these, from the squinnying, lip-biting, calculating faces of the art lovers one sees looking at Madonnas in galleries. These petitioners had no conception of art; to them a picture was a symbol of something else, and very readily the symbol became reality…. American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses. But where, I ask myself, will mercy and divine compassion come from then? Or are such things necessary to people who are well fed and kn ow the wonders that lie concealed in an atom? (202).

Sees the modern Western world’s attempts to “demythologize” everything “wonderful” as destructive (201) Humanity needs the irrational

“Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable fact? And all the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvellous is indeed an aspect of the real? . . . All I managed by the time I found myself sitting in the basilica of Guadalupe was a certainty that faith was a psychological reality, and that where it was not invited to fasten itself on things unseen, it invaded and raised bloody hell with things seen. Or in other words, the irrational will have its say, perhaps because “irrational” is the wrong word for it” (202).

Religious wonderment is a psychological necessity for most people (202)

Encounter with magicians

Presentation 16: Magic, Illusion and Oracles

Magic as secular mysticism We want to wonder (211) Eisengrim says they want “to be wondered at… People want to marvel at something, and the whole spirit of our time is not to let them do it… What we offer is innocent—just an entertainment in which a hungry part of the spirit is fed” )

Biography as myth-making Eisengrim wants Dunny to write his biography: “The book would have to be fiction. I presume you don’t think the world will swallow a courtier of polished manner if he is shown to be the son of a Baptist parson in rural Canada—” (213)

Archetypes We love to have archetypes reinforced Midas (206) The Vision of Dr. Faustus (207)

Midas (206)

Faustus (207)

Two Realities-Internal Roles Dunny needs to understand himself becomes a member of Eisengrim’s entourage (210) The cost of getting to know oneself – it is not without bumps along the way

Becoming a fool; his shadow erupts

Becoming known (221) Liesl as confidante Dunny as a talker (vs. Dunny as secret-keeper) He is both!

Dunny as Fifth Business (225) Revenge of the unlived life (Faustina) (229 -230) Not the hero of his own story. Who is? (230 -231)