View Single Post
Old 06-29-2008, 10:28 AM   #2
Level 6 - Very Deep Thinker
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
Posts: 185
Bincount™: 4
Re: Carl Jung and Ænima (an essay)

With this information, one can better understand H. The singer has experienced, at the start of the song, something that has changed his conception of the world: the birth of his son. This causes him to feel emotional and passionate for the first time. This forces him to look at his life (“what’s holding up is a mirror”), and finds that his friends (“a snake/looking to turn this piss to wine”), though they seem to have his best interests at heart, are encouraging him in unhealthy habits and ways of thinking. He says, “They’re both totally void of hate/but killing me just the same”. This can be interpreted to mean that, on the one hand, his friends are “considerately” killing him by encouraging his negative habits, and on the other hand, his son is killing him by forcing him to confront and expel the parts of himself that led him into this situation. The “storm” of emotion that comes when he attempts to separate himself from this lifestyle causes him immense pain; however, “beneath the storm, under these tears, the walls came down”, and he is finally able to “drown” the snake and accept the pain that he will have to endure to cleanse himself.

Immediately, one finds numerous Jungian elements in this song. Before his son’s birth, the singer was in a state of malaise and found life to have little meaning; for Jung, this would be seen as a symptom of him being shut off from the archetypal world of the collective unconscious (as well as his own personal unconscious). The singer’s first experience of an archetype comes with his son’s birth. Likely it is his anima that the singer experiences for the first time here; the feelings of emotion and passionate in Jungian psychology are related to one’s connection with one’s anima. This gives him a glimpse into what life could be like if he further healed his psyche and came to totally reconcile his fractured unconscious. The pain that he experiences when he attempts to separate from his old lifestyle reflects another Jungian idea – the painful nature of the process of individuation. For Jung, pain and suffering were inevitable if one honestly wanted to heal him- or her-self. One can see that idea mirrored in this song; it is far from easy for the singer to separate himself from the “snake” and try to move his life into a better path, but it is necessary for him to deal with that pain in order to move forward.

Tool often includes short tracks in between songs as transitions. The track after H. is interesting because it is just the sound of a record clicking, as though it had reached the end of one side and had to be turned over. This furthers the idea that the singer has come to a turning point in his life – he has reached the end of his old life, and is now starting a new path. The title of this track, ‘Useful Idiot’, is the name given to those people in Soviet countries who obeyed the regime and had unswerving loyalty to the party, even when they were suffering immensely from the party’s actions. There is a clear parallel between these ‘useful idiots’ and the state of the singer before the birth of his son, in that he obeyed his desire for stimulation even when it caused him such suffering. This furthers the idea that after H., the singer’s life is on a different track.

The next track, titled 46&2, is the song on the album that most depends on a Jungian translation in order to make any sense. It describes the singer’s confrontation with his shadow self; he says, “I’ve been crawling on my belly/Clearing out what could have been” and “change is coming through my shadow”. The shadow self, as previously mentioned, is a complex composed of all the repressed or rejected parts of oneself. In order to grow, a person must examine their shadow self and find ways to incorporate it into their ego. This is clearly what the singer is doing in this song. He says he is “wallowing in my own confused and insecure delusions/For a piece to cross me over/Or a word to guide me in”. In other words, this means that the singer is introspecting and examining himself, his psychological processes, the assumptions he makes about the world, and all of the other previously unquestioned parts of his psyche, in order to discover the repressed parts of himself. The singer referred to this in an interview:
I really went out of my way to discover the things I don't like about people, in essence, for self-reflection, so really just going off on the deep end, going, "What is it I don't like about you? What is it that bugs me about you? Why do I dislike what you do and how you do it?" And as soon as I get all of that stuff on paper and write it down, I just kind of turn the you into me, and you really come up with some interesting things...
This is clearly a description, in layman’s terms, of the process of discovering and examining one’s shadow self.

The title of the song, 46&2, echoes the idea of growth and evolution present in Jung’s psychology. 46&2 refers to chromosomes in the human body. Currently, each human has 46 chromosomes – 44 plus the 2 sex hormones. Thus, the idea of “46&2” is that of people evolving to reach a higher state of consciousness. The idea comes from the mystical and New Age ideas of Drunvalo Melchizedek, but removing this unscientific origin still leaves a valid metaphor for the evolution and growth that the singer experiences when he confronts his shadow self.

The section after the second chorus – “I choose to live and to grow, take and give and to…” etc.) – can be interpreted as the singer coming to terms with and accepting all the parts of himself that he had previously rejected. Instead of shying away from the ugly parts of himself, he unconditionally accepts it all as part of the growth that he has to go through; he will “do what it takes to step through”. Finally, at the end of the song he can “See my shadow changing/Stretching up and over me”. This process of reflection has let him finally come to terms with his shadow self and incorporate it into his ego. He “[comes] out the other side” to see that “forty-six and two are just ahead of me”.

The next significant track is jimmy, though it does not contain as many overt Jungian influences as the previous two tracks. In it, the singer realises that his problems are rooted in a trauma that he suffered when he was eleven. Taken autobiographically, the singer is likely referring to an accident that his mother suffered when he was eleven that left her paralysed and unable to care for him. He refers to this in the lyric “Eleven and she was gone/Eleven is when we waved goodbye”. Introspecting, he realises that this was “where it all began, eleven”. In this introspection, he personifies his eleven-year-old self as another person, and says that “Under a dead Ohio sky/Eleven has been and will be waiting/Defending his light and wondering/Where the hell have I been?” He reconnects with his eleven-year-old self, and begs him to “hold your light/Eleven, lead me through each gentle step by step/By inch by loaded memory” and says, “I’ll move to heal as soon as pain allows/So we can reunite and both move on together”. Clearly, his mother’s paralysis caused the singer some significant trauma, and by recognising this, he is able to work through the conflicted and painful emotions that he felt in order to finally overcome it.

Again, this song shows the singer working through his pain in order to reconcile himself with his unconscious. His eleven-year-old self could be seen as an archetype, in this case the archetype of the child; in this interpretation, the song shows the singer reuniting with this archetype which has been laying dormant in his unconscious. Alternatively, this eleven-year-old self could be seen as a personification of a time in the singer’s life before he was traumatised, and the reunification that he talks about means that the singer has remembered what life was like before he was scarred by his mother’s paralysis. He describes himself as being “sleeping, lost, and numb” until that point; this phrase aptly describes the singer’s state of mind at the start of the album. The trauma he suffered at a young age can thus be seen as the root of all his subsequent problems; by moving beyond this, he is able to reconnect with the archetypal dimensions and overcome his feeling of meaninglessness in life. He is now “wide awake” – he still feels the pain of the separation within himself, but he is fully conscious of it and can now heal.
OFFLINE |   Reply With Quote