C. G. Jung and his family resisted publication of his Red Book for over 75 years based on concerns over two kinds of people: academic colleagues they feared would lose respect for him, and adherents to his philosophy whose devotion bordered on religious.

I, of course, count among the latter.

The Red Book is a folio-sized manuscript of his visions, a walk through his personal cosmology, and a record of his own psychological crisis. It is filled with lavishly painted illuminations and is handwritten in meticulous and beautiful calligraphy. The moment I learned of its existence, I knew I had to see it. Luckily for me, until February 10, it is on display in the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, after which it goes to Switzerland, likely never to return. The one thing that drew me to Dublin was the Book(s) of Kells; New York would be nothing.

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The journey would be a three-hour drive with my husband from my home to that of a friend and fellow pilgrim in New Jersey. We would stay overnight, then the three of us would take trains and the subway to the Rubin, where we would meet up with two more pilgrims from New York itself. We would see the book, feast somewhere in Chelsea, wander Manhattan, and then begin the long subway, train, and highway trip home. And so we did.

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The journey itself, always a major part and in fact defining feature in a pilgrimage, was both grueling and worthwhile. I95 is a frightening drive in heavy traffic, and an expensive one if one must take tolls up through the NorthEast corridor, as we did. My husband (a non-player and fellow Jungian with an extensive academic background in Eastern philosophy) and I psyched ourselves up, discussing philosophy and psychology to the backdrop of whirring pavement and the random output of my car stereo. Arriving at Padre's (our fellow pilgrim in NJ, aptly named), we settled in for the night, knitting, talking, planning, wrangling trains, and psyching ourselves up even further.

The next morning, I faltered but was not allowed to fall behind. My knee is bad at the best of times, and once it buckled under me in a train station, I would remain the slow, weak hindrance to our progress. My fellow pilgrims supported me, found elevators, helped me along. Camaraderie was strong with us, as it should be in such a journey. An hour and a half of train (New Jersey Transit has the best abandoned scenery), then ill-fated running back and forth in the NY Subway system, and we finally spotted the Rubin, and the last fellow pilgrims to join us. I shall, of course, skip right ahead to the book.


(this horrible phone photo is a completion of Documentary Defiance)

The book took my breath away. Yes, yes, there were walls covered in drafts, in mandalas sketched on the backs of typewritten notes, every little thing that led up to this magnificent volume. There were earlier paintings, translations, a video, generally fantastic curation for the exhibition, which put it into context as the central work that made everything else Carl Jung ever did make a little more sense. But just around the first corner, there it was. Two hundred and five pages of parchment in a red leather-bound volume, sitting open to a different skillfully and patiently painted pair of pages every Wednesday. At the moment I laid eyes on it, the left page was filled with writing that could have been eight-hundred-year-old Latin calligraphy for all my knowledge of German and ability to concentrate on reading its beautiful typography would allow me to notice. The right page was a full-page circular painting. It featured something like a star and a tree growing under the earth, surrounded by animals and vague geometric figures. Targeted lights reflected off of every brushstroke, changing as one circled the work. Here was my illuminated Bible, such as my syncretic religion goes. My own copy, a back-ordered fifth printing with an end-noted English translation, had not yet arrived at home, and here was the original before us. My heart smiled. I can describe the journey, I can describe the technical details of the work. Words fail me at communicating what it meant to me. They always will. If you can be in Manhattan in the next few weeks, go.

Months of planning and a day and a half of travel, and we basked in our success for at least an hour until the call of other exhibits from cosmology to Jainism took us away. And we did indeed feast in our victory, at a Vietnamese restaurant in Manhattan, and continue our walk throughout town. We returned home well after midnight, the many many hours of trains and cars and a celebratory bar all filled with our intellectual and emotional observations on this centerpiece of a legend.

And, of course, we brought home toys. Carl Jung will now psychoanalyze all our other action figures. Starting with Batman.