Carl Jung does some Liverpool dreamin’

by | May 18, 2010 | Going Places, Once Upon a Time | 2 comments

Once upon a time (1973), in a galaxy far far away (Liverpool), I was invited to the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun by Allan Williams, “the man who gave away the Beatles.”

“You must come,” he said, pressing a badge into my hand. “It’s a home for artists.” Sadly, I didn’t take him up on that offer, so I can’t tell you what went on in that fabled institution.

What I can tell you is that the Liverpool School of Language, Music, etc. was situated in an old fruit warehouse. The man who opened the club in 1974, Peter O’Halligan, had decided that this disused industrial building on Mathew Street was the site of Carl Jung’s famous dream about Liverpool.

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“I found myself in a dirty, sooty city,” wrote the famous psychologist in 1927. “It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss, I walked through the dark streets.”

I’m with him so far, except for the Swiss and the fact that he only dreamed about walking through Liverpool’s dark and rainy streets. I actually did walk through them, many times, and crikey did I get wet.

“I had the feeling that we were coming up from the harbour,” Jung continues, “and that the real city was actually up above … in the centre was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island. While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly-lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree — a Magnolia — in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of the light.”

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Original photograph by Lily Shih

This dream, Jung continues, symbolized his situation at the time. “I can still see the greyish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque — just as I felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all.

“Liverpool,” he concludes, “is ‘the pool of life.’”

Moments that make everything worthwhile

You either feel that way about Liverpool or you don’t. Alan Bennett famously doesn’t. Liverpudlians, he says in Writing Home, “all have the chat, and it laces every casual encounter, everybody wanting to do you their little verbal dance.”

I love Writing Home but I also love the Liverpudlians’ verbal dance. I’m guessing that Eddie Izzard does too. “I was walking past a building site in Liverpool,” the comedian, actor, and “action transvestite” told James Rampton of the Independent in 2004, “and a brickie [brick-layer] shouted at me from the scaffolding, ‘Hey Eddie, where’s your lippie?’ [lipstick]. I said I’d left it at home, and he replied: ‘Wanna borrow mine?’ Moments like that make everything worthwhile.”

I had lots of moments like that in Liverpool: in the Walker Art Gallery, at the Everyman Playhouse, and at Pier Head with its trio of handsome buildings, the Three Graces, past which the Mersey River flows into the Irish Sea.

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And I remember riding back to my flat on a bone-rattling train one night, looking out at the sky, a dark pale blue — a contradiction that is somehow very Liverpool — with skeins of dark grey clouds laid over it and one bright star; and in the foreground, tall brick houses with rows of chimney-pots.

The light, and the source of the light.

Too square for the school

I didn’t go to Peter O’Halligan’s club because, like Betsy Ray, “I could never be a Bohemian.” I suspected that in addition to being the School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, the club at 18 Mathew Street might also be a School of Drink, Drugs, and Licentiousness, and even at 30, I was too square for that scene.

But I was wrong, according to Larry Sidorczuk (see his comment below.) I should have gone. I wish I’d gone.

Thank you for the badge, Mr. Williams. May you rest in peace, an Honoured Citizen of your beloved city.