A Hot Bath with Carl Jung and my dead Father

Being sick from the rear, tum, and throat, and in need of some instant relief I decided to soak in a hot tub with a textbook. While bathing in the dirty tub I read about Carl Jung, a psychiatrist I’'ve read before and enjoyed before, mostly lectures. This book however was not his own work rather it was a summary of some of his basic ideas and the tenets of his decidedly esoteric psychology.

As I read, I kept feeling a strange sensation of overwhelming appreciation, a freshness of thought, a giddiness that was so awe inspiring I actually wondered if I was sick to the point of delusion. After a few straining moments the awe I felt instantly revealed itself to me, with an absurd specificity, as the awe my deceased father would feel if he had had the gumption in his lifetime to sit down and take in alternate and highly intellectual perspectives (in this case, Jung). I felt as though I was partly my father(literally) and through my eyes he absorbed the information I took in; as though, parts of me, indistinguishable from my father and therefore parts of my father indistinguishable from me melted away the names which defined us as individuals and all that was left was mutual life and shared history. I was beset in the tub with a sense of ‘otherness’ that I have never felt before but immediately recognized as being the essence of my father. I gave in to this sensation and whimsy and after a few moments it disappeared completely.

Since the time of my father’s death in 1991 I’'ve felt his presence in only very weak ways, mostly through wishful thinking, through the childish notion of his haunting omnipotence-- perhaps right after his death in the room of my childhood home where he died, but more often his presence was never felt in any direct way —except for the dysfunctional charm and destructiveness repeatedly playing itself out in my family.

This most recent time in the warm tub though, I felt his presence, not through the sensation of touch, but through the sensation of mind, I felt as though he read through my eyes, the words on the page before us, and his delight became my delight, my delight, his. I’'m not saying my father’'s ghost entered me, in fact that’s not at all what I’'m saying, I am simply saying that through some mysterious factor the definitive quintessence of my father became intermingled with my own essence and for a time it brought my father back to me/through me, —perhaps by genetic likeness, similarity of exact thought/ –the sensation of acquiring knowledge, or the residue of a familiar life once lived and still living through lineage..