The Chariot of Fate – Sublimely

In 1973 this powerful etching marked a sea change in my vision as I grasped the necessity of augmenting an aesthetic worldview with a depth psychological one. As fate would have it, a state proof of this etching sent to my brother Derrick was answered with a copy of Carl Gustav Jung’s seminal autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Five years later after completing an MFA and working as a Psychiatric Assistant in a Minneapolis hospital I entered analytic training at the C.G. Jung Institute Zurich.

The Creation

Out of his enormous and prodigious brain
God hurled his thoughts in bronze.
He hurled the formidable and eternal forms
Of life and the world rose
Drunk with the harsh sap of green life
Men adored it
Lived and fell under the immense eye
At evening of that portentous day
Thought rose in the exhausted breeds
The living sighed, the moon
Kissed the sepulcher and aroused a frenzy
Till thought descended to hell
Drank its flames so portentous
That against death and the gods
It hurled the chariot of fate sublimely

– Dino Campana, Orphic Songs (1914)