“A gentleman with the mad soul of an Irish convict poet’: remembering Chris Bailey, and the blazing comet that was The Saints.”

~ John Willsteed

Published: April 11, 2022 9.44pm EDT.

“Chris Bailey isn’t the first of our creative children to leave this life behind and move on into memory. With their passing, like the returning comet, the past is freshly illuminated, allowing us to look back at our young lives. Back when the future was broad in front of us, urged on by voices like Bailey’s to open our eyes and see the world.”

Rendering of the band The Saints. Hudley Flipside, 2010.

I have often written that the band The Saints is one of my only addictions in my life. After the death of Chris Bailey, (now one year ago).

I have been grieving him and a general time shift. The 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s and now. Over 40 years. This band led me on a path into a different realm of being. I found a bunch of misfits like me.

I found my voice and I awoke from a kind of existential youthful experience to find myself and my soul. Music, friends, and a punk community that still holds my heart. Yet also knowing Chris Bailey was born the same time and so close to mine … we share these same generations or ten-year changes.

Youth to adulthood and being senior citizens. As this post explains so much more in an indirect way too. In my grief I decided to do something that I do once in a while to soothe my soul. I reached out to Carl Jung books. What came to mind yesterday was something from one of Carl Jung’s Black Books. Volume two page 175-6.

I read from the last paragraph. I call it random reading. The intuitive response is amazing to me. Encouraging action also. So, with this so much is shared, and I am content to move on past my grief. Into a new season of life knowing that,

“the world beyond, where men are whole and complete, unlike here. The saint’s halo also characterizes his transcendent shining light, his psychic being.” (p.162) The Black Books, Volume Two, Carl Jung

Life endures … this gives me hope maybe like finding the Sun!

“In this moment the enormous tension was released and like rain it swept away [57/58] everything that was tensed, too highly strung. And soon sleep returned and brought with it a curiously beautiful image.” {138}

“Forms walked clad in white silk in a colored atmosphere. Each surrounded by a strangely fragrant, glowing tinted aura, some reddish, the others blueish and greenish.” {139}

{138} “This paragraph was replaced in LN by “Then I had a second vision.” ” (p.162).

Picture.. reversed.

The Saints (Barry Francis, Ivor Hay, Janine Hall, Bruce Callaway, Chris Bailey) at The Hero of Waterloo, Sydney. 1980. Picture by Judi Dransfield Kuepper.) Image taken from article by John Willsteed,

https://theconversation.com/a-gentleman-with-the-mad-soul-of-an-irish-convict-poet-remembering-chris-bailey-and-the-blazing-comet-that-was-the-saints-181059?fbclid=IwAR3o-g8RRKpyNxgIQ6x7QsihP9fTBaDqaBZhzozuQI0oHlaWVenjLWeZ_F8

“Jung recounted this dream to Aniela Jaffé and commented upon it as follow: This is some kind of in-between realm (the term definitely occurs in the original version of the dream) The idea was that if one is confronted with the shadow- as was the case through the experience of Siegfried’s dream then the idea comes:

I enter into a twilight: I am this and yet also something else. And this doubleness an abdication of the unconscious, which reached strangely far beyond me.

Like a saint’s halo- This has a strange effect on the attitude toward the human being.

If one is in the company of several persons, and one knows them and knows about their shadows, one then sees these people as they are, but are also something entirely different. They are surrounded by a strange sphere. They live in a strange, light-colored sphere, which circumscribes their ‘other’ state.

This seemed to me to be like a vision of the world beyond, where men are whole and complete, unlike here. The saint’s halo also characterizes his transcendent shining light, his psychic being.”{139} (MP, p. 170)

The reminder of this entry was replaced in LN by “I know, I have stridden across the depths. Through guilt I have become newborn.” (p.162)
Carl Jung’s Black Books. Volume two page 175-6.

Siegfried’s dream

http://mlwi.magix.net/siegfried.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Books_(Jung)