Echoes in a Hollow Space

“Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries. We can well think all our lives long that we are following our own noses, and may never discover that we are, for the most part, supernumeraries on the stage of the world theater. There are factors which, although we do not know them, nevertheless influence our lives, and more so if they are unconscious.”

—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, tr. Richard and Clara Winston

There are two images for this post, besides the one above, both at the end of this post. One is called the falling man, a photograph by Richard Drew, the other is called the hanged man. I was reluctant to use them because even now some people don’t like looking at images from 9/11, and ones of those images caused some controversy when first published. There’s nothing gory about it, but it does represent the last moments of a man’s life. Some feel that’s a private moment and should never be seen. I don’t discount their feelings, but I also believe it’s something more: a testament to the horrors of that day, of terrible decisions forced on ordinary people, of their courage and grace in making those choices, no matter how desperate.

All I know is that the first time I saw the image of the falling man it resonated inside me like a struck bell—beautiful, horrible, incomprehensible. Yet deeply known. In the amazing and moving documentary, 9/11: The Falling Man, made about this picture, it’s revealed that the editors of The New York Times had a series of pictures in this sequence to choose from, but found this one most compelling. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Of course, there’s a personal horror of recognition here. One morning you go to work and something unthinkable happens to rip everything away. This picture represents the ultimate “there but for the grace of God go I” moment. But that’s not what my deeper cord of recognition was about. This man’s death was not a symbol, but there was a potent symbol in that sky. It took me a couple of days to understand it. An image from tarot came to me: the hanged man. Not in the sense of portents in the sky or any other such bull, not to minimize the power of the falling man by reducing the image to a formula. The image is its ownself, vast and powerful, but there’s also this other thing falling beside it: archetypes working themselves through the real world and through our psyches.

This phrase about the hanging man card from aeclectic.net in particular struck me: “It is as if he’s hanging between the mundane world and the spiritual world, able to see both. It is a dazzling moment, dreamlike yet crystal clear. Connections he never understood before are made, mysteries are revealed.”

Not him, you understand, but us…suspended between life and death, the sacrifice to gain knowledge, a time of trial or meditation, the moment of clarity, of not being able to see things the same again. It’s not just this man’s life, and the ending of it, but that moment of suspension and terrible clarity for the United States and the world.

That subconscious strata of images and ideas is always at play inside each of us. I’m not in any way saying those archetypes are the only reason we respond so powerfully to the image of the falling man, but I do believe they are part of the mix. Whether or not you have ever seen a tarot deck, or this particular tarot deck, this image doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It appeared in the tarot because it was part of our culture’s archetypal and intuitive heritage. Perhaps it’s an image that would resonate only in Western culture—I don’t know enough to say otherwise—but it is part of the unconscious lives of everyone who has ever lived in the West for any length of time.

And what does it ultimately say about 9/11? Maybe that archetypes are cultural snapshots—or roadmaps—of the great moments in human existence, both specific and nonspecific, grandly sweeping and intimately personal.

Each of us is composed of both conscious and unconscious associations. We need to examine ourselves closely before leaping on any bandwagon or cause or demagoguery, committing ourselves to actions and movements that rob us of our individual and essential humanity and turn us into impulsive mobs, spurred to commit atrocities in the name of some deep, unthinking leviathan swimming just beneath the waters of consciousness.

In February 1945—or maybe it was 1942. The newspapers disagree. In February, 1945, reports the AP wire service of January 21, 1975, a man who appeared to be in his forties was found floating in a life raft in the North Atlantic. He had head and internal injuries and was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to speak, though he’d nod yes or shake his head no sometimes when asked questions. For all anyone could tell, he was completely unable to remember who he was or how he got in that raft. He carried no identification, but there was a card in his pocket with the name Charles Jamieson on it, and the birth date of April, 1898. So that was the name they listed on his hospital records.

Stars and Stripes of March 30, 1957, reports that an ambulance brought him to the U.S. Public Health Hospital in Boston on February 10, 1942, then sped off, never to be traced. Several government agencies carried on searches to identify him without any luck, and it was speculated that he’d been on board a merchant ship torpedoed by a Nazi sub.

And yet the name Charles Jamieson did not appear on any crew records of any ship sunk during that time.

In March of 1957 Mrs. Frances Hamilton, then of Long Beach, CA but born in England, claimed that Charles was her long-lost brother, James Hamilton, a British merchantman, whom she hadn’t seen since 1921. However, not even the British consul believed her, reporting that she produced no “concrete proof” that Charles was her brother, and furthermore, that she herself seemed rather confused. She told rambling and incoherent stories about her brother James, and although a “tearful reunion” took place between Mrs. Hamilton (who had taken back her maiden name after a divorce) and Charles, he didn’t respond to her in any way except for the same peaceful smile he gave to anyone who talked to him.

The link was dismissed as wishful fantasy on Mrs. Hamilton’s part.

Charles lived on at the U.S. Public Health Hospital for nearly 30 years. A sweet-natured man, no one ever knew how much he comprehended of his situation and his environment. He liked candy, liked to be wheeled around the hospital—and had plenty of willing volunteers to take him. Occasionally, he played checkers and responded to music on the radio. Everyone who passed him in the halls stopped to speak, to benefit from his sweet smile and peaceful nature. “He was—you could almost say—loved by every member of the staff,” said George Hedquist, assistant director of the hospital, “almost as if he were a mascot or a member of the family.”

The man who became know as Charles Jamieson had clearly lived through horrors, but he brought none of them with him on that bitter journey across the Atlantic and into the safe harbor of the U.S. Public Health Hospital of Boston, Mass. Nothing there, no, no, nothing there to think on, nothing there. . .

“Charles Jamieson” died in January of 1975, still unknown, having never spoken a word in all those years. The Transcript of January 23, 1975 reports that 100 people attended the funeral of sweet, mysterious Mr. X.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.