Introduction
I’d forgotten that I still had these letters until I discovered them while dumping obsolete files from my laptop. Because I’d also forgotten almost the entirety of their content, re-reading them was like discovering material written by someone else. I no longer recalled not only the details of certain events from that crucial phase of my life, but also pretty well all of the science fiction texts I mention. As a result, poring over the letters decades after writing them has been mesmerising, entertaining, refreshing, enlightening and heart-warming.
I have no qualms about confessing that I like the rediscovered writer of these letters immensely; she’s someone I’d be glad to call a friend, confidante and scholarly colleague. One cannot, after all, genuinely love others without loving oneself, warts and all. Sadly, at the time of writing the letters I didn’t have the kind of undemanding love for myself that has since become a liberating and healthy norm. In retrospect I don’t regret that former flaw, given that it was my willingness to be wounded which kept me in the relationship which spawned the Letters, even when that vulnerability became almost too painful to bear.
Around that time, as a longtime member of the Mythopoeic Literature Society of Australia [MLSA] I had newly acquired a passion for the science fiction literary genre. I had also recently been awarded my PhD degree; my supervisor, an avid science fiction devotee, had introduced me to several novels that resonated with the Jungian slant of my thesis. In no time I was hooked and took to devouring one science fiction novel after another. It didn’t take me long to recognise that science fiction at its best was contemporary mythology which—by bridging science and imagination— spoke to our collective dreams, defects, aspirations, and search for identity, transcendence and meaning. Science fiction interwove many of my core passions: the Cosmos, the heroic ‘quest’ motif, philosophy (as the ‘love of wisdom’), mysticism, archetypal themes, myth-making, the battle between good and evil, spirituality and the evolution of consciousness. Thrilled to find out that the MLSA was set to host an international science fiction conference at the University of Melbourne, I hesitantly yet keenly put up my hand to be one of the speakers.
The paper I presented at the Conference briefly explored science fiction as contemporary mythology that reflects the evolution of a collective consciousness inextricably bound to technology. I referred to numerous works of science fiction, including well-known Australian author Damien Broderick’s novel The Dreaming Dragons. Widely regarded as Australia’s ‘dean of science fiction’, Damien had amassed an impressive body of work that included his cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala, which coined the term ‘virtual reality’ in 1982. His award-winning The Dreaming Dragons featured in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels [1949-84] and was chosen as the year's best by Kingsley Amis.
Unbeknown to me, Damien was present in the Conference audience. During a break in the proceedings, he approached me and we chatted for a short time. As I recall, I was not at all attracted to him physically, or emotionally; romantically he just wasn’t my type. He initially came across as a self-assured, softly spoken, shrewd, guarded and supremely intelligent man, full of brilliant insights but lacking the kind of emotional warmth and intensity that resonated with my own heart. Damien’s outer coolness, I later learned, was in part a defensive persona, a self-protective, surface ‘mask’ beneath which lurked a deeply poetic soul.
We all adopt masks of one kind or another in social situations where we do not feel safe, or comfortable with exposing and expressing our true selves. The persona is thus an integral facet of a healthy psyche, but to identify with it is to sell our soul in order to fit in, be feared or admired, or seen as socially respectable. It can also be a way for sensitive, wounded souls to armour themselves against the possibility of being further hurt by others, a theme which surfaces in my later letters. The persona then becomes a twin-edged sword, since we cannot give and receive genuine love without being vulnerable to the pain it inevitably inflicts.
After the Conference I returned to my hotel room and went to bed early, since I needed to get up at dawn the next day to catch my return flight to Adelaide. That night I had an overwhelmingly powerful, precognitive Dream that was in essence a highly condensed, symbolic dramatisation of my entire relationship with Damien—including an indication of how it would end. I have discussed the Dream in some of the Letters, but I never shared with Damien its ending. His final move was to quickly wheel himself away from me, downhill in a wheelchair propelled by his burnt hands and stunted arms. Enough said.
When I awoke I was stunned and disoriented. But before proceeding further, I’ll mention that I’m capitalising ‘Dream’ because during the years 1994-97 I experienced a deluge of intense activity within my psyche, which gave rise to a series of inordinately powerful Dreams that were unusually vivid, and emotionally either devastating, or extremely disorienting. The Dream of Damien had been so real, clear and disruptive that I found it next to impossible to focus on the mundane task of getting ready to leave the hotel. I was so dazed that I almost forgot to book a taxi to the airport. In all honesty, if it hadn’t been for the Dream I wouldn’t have given my rather cerebral chat with Damien a second thought. Yet now I’d been hit with an overview of a deeper relationship that hadn’t yet begun.
Once back in Adelaide, I found myself routinely wandering about in an unfocused, limbo-like state, caught between something that had in one way already happened but not yet manifested outwardly. It was like living in two realities, neither of them more real to me than the other. Eventually I contacted Damien and we decided to start exchanging letters. A couple of months later, one of my PhD supervisors invited me to mind his house while he and his wife went on an overseas trip. It was while staying here that the phone rang one evening. I knew it was Damien, but as I got up to answer the phone my legs gave way beneath me and I collapsed to the carpet, the first and only time that such a ‘fall’ has happened. I often wonder if it was a kind of synchronicity—a physical mirroring of the destabilising impact that this relationship was to have on me.
Damien told me on the phone that he wanted to fly over for a visit, which I happily agreed to. When he finally arrived on my doorstep with a bottle of champagne, I opened the door and announced, ‘Here he is, the man of my dreams.’ I of course meant it literally rather than figuratively—and certainly not idealistically—given that I was well aware of how the Dream had ended.
Particularly when it came to romantic relationships with men, one of my weaknesses at that time was to go out of my way to please, praise and support them, or keep the peace at all costs, all too often at the expense of my own emotional health. While I never compromised my personal integrity, I often ignored the emotional pain, worse still the masochism that often came with not being loved for who I was. I’m nonetheless eternally grateful to Damien for playing devil’s advocate by embodying a great deal of my then repressed, unconscious shadow. By the same token, in retrospect I can see that I was way too accommodating toward some of his disagreeable proclivities. And perhaps he would have said exactly the same about me. What I know is that through embracing the discomforting challenge he represented, I became in time a more well-rounded individual.
It’s always been my modus operandi to move on once a transformational phase has ended, by completely severing ties to whatever, or whoever is no longer essential to my personal Tao. There’s an element of the inner daemonic at work here, too; that relentless hunger to ‘follow one’s bliss’—the beckoning call of one’s heart—wherever it may lead. Accordingly, since emotionally I’ve now moved on from my relationship with Damien, I can appreciate these letters from a detached standpoint that weighs their merit in terms of their potential interest to readers. Lovers of science fiction, Jungian scholars, analysts and therapists, holistic philosophers, scientists, and practitioners of mysticism, shamanism, and spiritual healing should find much to interest, amuse, inspire, challenge, enlighten, or intrigue them.
Because the original files are decades old, however, a sizeable chunk of text has been irretrievably scrambled, or otherwise corrupted beyond repair. As well, I’ve omitted material that I consider to be too private to share, in terms of it being either too personally explicit, or potentially embarrassing to either of us. In addition, to preserve the anonymity of certain folk Damien and/or I knew, I have abbreviated their names to invented initials. Hopefully the text I have retained suffices to convey a sense of the emotional complexity and tension which our temperamental quirks, background experiences, and different takes on life generated.
It could be argued that these letters have validity only if Damien’s input is included. I beg to differ. Firstly, this is primarily an autobiographical rather than dialectical offering; secondly, the letters in many places respond or allude to Damien’s implied, or inferred input; thirdly, the insights and reflections I offer draw upon psychospiritual, developmental and relational truths and experiences that many readers will hopefully relate to. Finally, both emotionally and psychologically the tone of Damien’s letters differed markedly from my own. Sometimes cynical, he was also a more extraverted, disciplined, grounded and rational person that me. My focus is more on the inner life and transformation of the psyche, irrational intuition, dreams, myth, mysticism, synchronicities, spiritual experiences and insights, and Jung-oriented insights into relationships.
Based on my personal experience and understanding, the mystic is 'one with all' not by choice, but as a result of a movement of grace that opens the heart and inward eye of vision to the direct intuition of all reality as the symphony and dance of universal Tao. For the mystic, there is no division between self and God, since mystically the experience of 'God' is synonymous with the intuitively sensed centre of our own being, which I call the 'divine self’.
Mysticism is a unifying consciousness that transcends spacetime and is immersed in the unitary Ground of Being. From this vantage point, there are essentially no discrete beings but rather endlessly creative versions of the One Energy, or Cosmic Soul. For the mystic, this One Soul is the living sea in which they and all beings swim. Through observing this play of forms and soul, the mystic remains aware of the ceaseless flow of energy into and out of its tangible and imaginal expressions. Through contemplation and meditation, s/he constantly communes and is one with the circumferential whole of Nature and Cosmos.
I shared little about my own mystical experiences with Damien, mainly because of his conscious aversion to anything that (to him) smacked of naively optimistic New Ageism. Because the first few letters were written before he flew to Adelaide to spend time with me, their tone leans toward cordiality and friendliness. After he returned to Melbourne, our amusing anecdotes, witty banter, scholarly discussions, swapping of news, and philosophical musings gradually gave way to much deeper, emotionally volatile exchanges. To cope with the demands of this descent into tension, my own self-protective persona became very much the antithesis of the Medusa-like, seething, secretive core of my true self: lighthearted, optimistic, intellectual and detached. I suspected that the unleashed, passionate intensity of the real me would have scared the hell out of Damien. Heck, at times it scared me.
Emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically, I experienced our relationship as a kind of Jungian analysis. And analysis, far from being a calm, rational evaluation, can be a challenging, close interaction between two people who, because of their equal force of character and personality differences, push one another so far out of their comfort zones that a mutual shattering, or ‘dis-integration’ unfolds. Analysis, in other words, breaks the whole into constituent ingredients and dissolves one’s illusion of having a stable, fully understood, predictable, or safely inscribed psyche.
Thus while I strove to keep an emotionally even keel that I felt might keep the relationship afloat, I could not stave off what in time became a jumble of combative, affectionate, conciliatory, defensive, and ultimately dismissive and angry responses to my letters. Hence ‘e-motion’, which includes tension and conflict, is the raw material for the alchemy of mutual transformation. But it is love which warms the alchemical ‘Work’. Take that away and Mercurius, the mysterious ‘Unseen Third’ in an analytical relationship, no longer has the energy to catalyse further meaningful change. In the end, whatever love Damien may have had for me turned cold, or was forcibly suppressed.
I’m largely in the dark as to how he experienced all of this, and whether it left a lasting impact on him in terms of a needed transformation of his own psyche. I’ve never doubted that because our unorthodox, at times bizarre relationship was fated to happen—and because I followed my heart in allowing it to unfold in its own way—only good came of it. I hope, then, that you enjoy these letters as much as I revelled in writing them.
The final ‘AfterWords’ section of this book speaks for itself and revolves around several other 1994-7 Dreams that fatefully disrupted my life. With regard to Ayrton Senna, that impact still resonates deeply throughout my heart and soul.
Maureen B. Roberts, PhD
