Our Uprootedness

A Poem Found In The Words Of Carl Jung.

Jan 22, 2024

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Chimerical promises of a golden future,
we have plunged down a cataract of progress.
We rush impetuously into novelty,
dissatisfaction and relentlessness.

The loss of connection with the past,
ignorant of our ancestral component,
what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity:
the ephemeral conditions of the present.

Our Uprootedness: A Poem Found In The Words Of Carl Jung - by Tom Shaw

The poem you’ve just read is a found poem using an excerpt from Carl Jung’s memoirs, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”. The original passage gives a view on the modern condition of humanity that feels incredibly relevant today. As such, I’ve adapted the full passage from which I derived my poem below, for your reading pleasure.

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.
Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past - our uprootedness - which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction and relentlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognise that everything is better purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.
The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle of mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity. [...] If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present, and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present - in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it. Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonised with the ephemeral conditions of the present.
Carl Jung, from “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”.

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