In the summer of 1992, I was invited to represent the United States at the 12th Dunvegan Castle Arts Festival in Scotland. The patron of the festival was Yehudi Menuhin, long-time friend of clan chief John MacLeod of MacLeod, the host of the festival held on the Isle of Skye in the 800-year old ancestral home of the MacLeod clan. The festival took place over a two-week period, featuring poets, story tellers, pipers, singers and lecturers.

The previous year’s US representative was Helen Vendler, then Keenan Professor of English at Harvard University (the first woman to achieve a senior professorship there) and poetry critic of the New Yorker. Her lectures had been on “The Structure of Poetry” and “Three Shakespeare Sonnets.” Pretty big footsteps to follow! I had been asked, as well, to speak on poetry. I am not a poet, but I have strong feelings about the necessity and value of poetry. The titles of my lectures were “Writing from the Inside of the Inside,” and “The Cost of Poetry and the Price of Its Loss.” It took all the courage I could muster not to prepare formal lectures, but to have faith that I could speak from some deep well in me that values poetry and why it matters. To this day, these two talks remain my personal favorites. Both talks were extemporaneous and no recordings were made, so the lectures exist only as memories now.

I wasn’t the only Jungian analyst at the festival. John had also invited his friend Bani Shorter, an American living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is known for her work on the Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis with Andrew Samuels and Alfred Plaut, as well as her book, An Image Darkly Forming: Women and Initiation. Her talk at the festival was titled “The Thread of the Story: The Fairy Flag.”

I had the great pleasure of meeting some of Scotland’s finest musicians, singers, pipers, story tellers, and poets. A highpoint among highpoints was meeting and spending many evenings in conversation with one of my “heroes,” the poet Norman MacCaig. He was Scotland’s greatest poet writing in English and had long been one of my favorites. I am not one who seeks autographs, but I did bring along MacCaig’s Collected Poems for him to sign if I got a chance to ask him. Not only did he sign and write some now-treasured words, but we had some unforgettable conversations over the clan chief’s special Macallan single malt.

In the spring of 1980, I had visited Dunvegan as a tourist. While there I collected stories about money from Donald Stewart, the Curator while standing under the famous Fairy Flag. This became part of my talk later that year which became my article “Coins and Psychological Change.” Just before that experience, I had spent an extraordinary evening with Sorley MacLean, the great Gaelic poet, at his home in Portree. We talked late into the night about the “source” of his poems, from dreams, visions, and from “one knows not where,” as he told me. In my dream that night, I dreamt of an old hand printing press. This was the origin of my making and printing handmade books and the beginning of The Lockhart Press. Being with him was a total gift. I had looked forward to seeing him again at the Arts Festival, but as the event neared, he took ill, and I did not get to see him again. He died in 1996.

In April 1992, before leaving for Scotland, I presented seminars and talks on “Writing Inside Out” at a conference in Santa Monica, California, sponsored by Pacifica Graduate Institute. I had suggested the title as well as the subtitle: “Where Dream and Word, Like Twins, Are Born.” I was joined by Annie Dillard, Allan Ginsberg, and Natalie Goldberg, working for a weekend on this theme. It was working with and being with them that inspired and crystalized the talks that I gave at Dunvegan.

The night after I finished the second talk, I had a dream that remains one of the most gripping, compelling, and profound dreams I have ever had. I think my dream to “Remember Skye” is referring directly back to this dream experience, urging me, I think, to realize there is more I must do with this dream. I have written before of this dream in the interview with Robert Henderson. Everything I said there about it still applies. But now I sense something more is at issue. In the dream, I am in a great hall in a castle (unlike anything at Dunvegan). The ceiling is very high and on the four walls hang enormous tapestries. I am alone. As I gaze up each tapestry, I see that they are woven stories of the history of the great castle, battles, ceremonies, celebrations, and such. As I watch ever more intently, the figures begin to move on all the tapestries. All the scenes become animated and it is amazing to watch. As I watch more, the tapestries begin to devolve into swirls and whirlpools of color. All figuration is lost. As I take in this dizzying spectacle, I see great heads begin to rise and fall back, ancient heads, male and female, Vikings, perhaps, or earlier northern figures. This goes faster and faster. As each figure rises, I can see that it is speaking and, I sense, speaking to me directly— speaking with some urgency. But I hear only silence. The dream goes on endlessly in this fashion. When I awake, I am standing at the opened window, looking out at the clear sky. and I see there the figures of the dream, continuing as they had been, but still all in silence.

It's a wonder I didn’t fall out the window.

You can imagine my frustration in not being able to hear the voicing of these figures. What were they saying? Why the urgency? Why couldn’t I hear? I have tried everything I know how to do in working with dreams, but still—even now—I cannot hear them. I am prompted now to put this renewed remembering of this Skye dream alongside a more recent dream. Here is a recounting of the more recent dream in the form of a poem, an approach I now use with many dreams.

The setting:

An anywhere, everywhere

living room middle crust

at best or no crust at all

The characters:

Strangers all, but known

to me; everyone friendly

not a party, but festal still

The hostess:

Black-gowned but all

eyes on the black earthen

cups, squatting on her tray

The drink:

Black too, Blavod— it is

libation for night’s time

black clay holding black

She says it costs $5.99

a cup for this final toast

just drink up and welcome

Ragnarök

Of course, Ragnarök is Norse mythology’s end of the world, end of the gods, with everything swallowed by the oceans. But as with all such “end of things” myths, there is always an “afterward” in which something begins again. Not so much a rebirth of what has been, but of something new. But my dream speaks of celebrating a final toast, and I sensed in the dream that this was indeed a final Ragnarök. Could this be related in some way to the “urgency” with which the Northmen were speaking to me?

I think so.

I have come to terms with my own end as I’ve tried to make clear in my book with Lee Roloff, The Final Interlude: Advancing Age and Life’s End. It is more difficult to come to terms with the end of humanity. But a clear-eyed look at the events of the Sixth Extinction as they unfold, points to no other conclusion. It is hard to carry the idea that what would follow would not be human. But our collective hubris may be preventing us from seeing something different than human as being the fate of the earth. Jung says to look at the artist as the carrier of the messages as to what the Coming Guest will be.

In a future post, I will do just that—look to the art that is becoming infused with these potentia.