The Mysteries

I had a birthday last month. A dear friend sent me this book, The Mysteries, as a gift. It’s a fable and illustrated storybook for adults created as a collaboration between Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, and caricaturist John Kascht. It’s so cool and beautifully illustrated in textured black and white art that perfectly both tells the story and leaves lots of room for the adult imagination to fill in the emotions and gaps of the tale.

There’s a wonderful, short documentary on its creation on YouTube. Check it out. It tells the story of two artists with vastly different styles and processes for creation, both accustomed to working independently, and how they managed and worked through a collaboration where they had agreed up front that nothing is approved unless both artists liked it and agreed.

There are so many ways a reader can approach the fable and its meaning. When I talked through the story with my friend, looking at the pictures together, her take on the story and its meaning and context came through from a very different, but perfectly valid, perspective, compared to mine. To me, what I saw in the story was a fable that echoed themes and ideas espoused by Carl Jung and his discussions of the shadow self and what it means to be alienated from that, or, alternately, integrated as a person by embracing and exploring one’s shadow.

I also saw in it some principles of Buddhism and the escape from the ego or the concept of anattā or no self, and the principle of impermanence in time and space but perhaps the enduring presence or activation of consciousness.

But those are both lenses that are most relevant to me at this stage in my life. I’ll probably be writing about both of them more. There are tensions between them that are interesting but which to me can be reconciled. To Jung the development of the self is the ultimate goal of growth and living, and Buddhism teaches that the self is an illusion to be overcome and detached from.

I highly recommend the book and welcome comments from anyone who has read, or should I say, experienced it.