To my astonishment, this memory was accompanied by a good deal of emotion. “Aha,” I said to myself “there is still life in these things. The small boy is still around and possesses a creative life which I lack. But how can I make my way to it?” For as a grown man it seemed impossible to me that I should be able to bridge the distance... -Carl Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections |
During the year I spent in Greece Tool’s Ænima was one of my closest friends. I was suffering from an illness I won’t get into, except to say that I was falling apart in ways I hadn’t even known it was possible for people to fall apart in. And the pills weren’t working. Books, art, and music felt like the only places I could find solace. Ænima served as a kind of emotional and psychological map for me. The album worked in an oddly synchronistic way with the issues I was struggling through and the studies I had become interested in. There are fourteen tracks on Ænima, the ninth track is called Jimmy, and it is preceded by an intermission that sounds something like a nursery song.
Among Tool fans there is an often-repeated interpretation of Jimmy. The suggestion is that the song’s lyrics are a reference to the stroke and paralysis of Maynard James Keenan’s mother and the affect this had on him as a child. I’d like to offer an alternative analysis –one that I believe to be both more universal and profound than the commonly accepted explanation. | |
As most of the band’s followers are undoubtedly aware, one of the themes that runs through Ænima is the concept of a man’s anima. “Anima” is the term the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung used for the feminine side of the masculine psyche, the female within the male. A male’s anima is characterized by his emotional life, expressiveness, creativity, and his connection to the rest of nature. For both cultural and psychological reasons the anima is often repressed, either because it is not viewed as socially acceptable or because it is experienced as threatening. One of the other causes of this repression are traumatic experiences where we either come to believe that our emotions are shameful and unsafe, or are faced with situations where emotions have to be ignored for survival reasons. But repression of something fundamental to our nature always has a cost, and an unacknowledged anima can wreak havoc in a man’s life and lead him to ruin. Jimmy deals with a spiritual return to the point in the artist’s life when his anima was disowned and cast aside, a return to reclaim and integrate the emotional life and wholeness that was lost at the age of eleven, under a dead Ohio sky.
What was it like to see
The face of your own stability
Suddenly look away
Leaving you with the dead and hopeless?
Eleven and she was gone
Eleven is when we waved goodbye
Eleven is standing still
Waiting for me to free him
By coming home
The point has been reached where the repressed anima and the emotions it contains are doing real damage and “The face ” of the poet’s “stability…Suddenly looks away.” While this probably happened over a long period of time it is common to experience the cumulative effect of ignoring one’s emotions as an acute and “sudden” crisis. The repressed emotions have manifested themselves as illness and existence has become “dead and hopeless.” One of the fundamental things that needs to be understood about the song is that the “she” that is referred to is not a person, “she” is the splintered feminine aspect of the singer’s own psyche. Personifying a part of the psyche (like the shadow) in order to better deal, or even converse, with it is common practice in Jungian Psychology. Spiritual and Psychological development are arrested when we disown vital parts of ourselves. This is why “eleven” (the artist at age eleven) is “standing still” “waiting” to be freed by the grown man “returning home” and reclaiming his wholeness. The entire song can actually be viewed as the lyrical and musical representation of an inner-child exercise that is often worked through in psychotherapy (a quick internet search will bring up several, or see John Bradshaw’s book “Homecoming” ).
Moving me with a sound
Opening me within a gesture
Drawing me down and in
Showing me where it all began
Eleven
The wounded eleven-year-old child and the emotions he has disowned are both the cause of the crisis and the key to healing. He shows himself and his need for integration through symptoms and disruptions. The child and his wound make “sounds,” “gestures,” and continually draw the adult poet “down and in” to reveal the causes of his instability and illness. The boy wants to “show him where it all began.”
It took so long to realize that
You hold the light that’s been leading me back home
Under a dead Ohio sky
Eleven has been and will be waiting
Defending his light
And wondering
Where the hell have I been?
Sleeping, lost and numb
So glad I have found you
I am wide awake and heading home
Hold your light
Eleven
The eleven year old holds the “light” of wholeness and the child is waiting for the artist to come back (psychologically speaking) and reclaim it. The boy inside has given painful clues as to the solution to the problem and wonders “where the hell” the artist has been. But, until this point, much of the problem has remained unconscious and the poet has been “sleeping, lost, and numb” or not following the map of his feelings. Now that the pieces of the puzzle have been made conscious he is “wide awake” and “heading home.”
Lead me through each gentle step by step
By inch by loaded memory
I’ll move to heal
As soon as pain allows so we can
Reunite and both move on together
Hold your light
Eleven.
Lead me through each gentle step by step
By inch by loaded memory
‘Til one and one are one, eleven
So glow, child, glow
I’m heading home
What was it like to see
The face of your own stability
Suddenly look away
Leaving you with the dead and hopeless?
Eleven and she was gone
Eleven is when we waved goodbye
Eleven is standing still
Waiting for me to free him
By coming home
The point has been reached where the repressed anima and the emotions it contains are doing real damage and “The face ” of the poet’s “stability…Suddenly looks away.” While this probably happened over a long period of time it is common to experience the cumulative effect of ignoring one’s emotions as an acute and “sudden” crisis. The repressed emotions have manifested themselves as illness and existence has become “dead and hopeless.” One of the fundamental things that needs to be understood about the song is that the “she” that is referred to is not a person, “she” is the splintered feminine aspect of the singer’s own psyche. Personifying a part of the psyche (like the shadow) in order to better deal, or even converse, with it is common practice in Jungian Psychology. Spiritual and Psychological development are arrested when we disown vital parts of ourselves. This is why “eleven” (the artist at age eleven) is “standing still” “waiting” to be freed by the grown man “returning home” and reclaiming his wholeness. The entire song can actually be viewed as the lyrical and musical representation of an inner-child exercise that is often worked through in psychotherapy (a quick internet search will bring up several, or see John Bradshaw’s book “Homecoming” ).
Moving me with a sound
Opening me within a gesture
Drawing me down and in
Showing me where it all began
Eleven
The wounded eleven-year-old child and the emotions he has disowned are both the cause of the crisis and the key to healing. He shows himself and his need for integration through symptoms and disruptions. The child and his wound make “sounds,” “gestures,” and continually draw the adult poet “down and in” to reveal the causes of his instability and illness. The boy wants to “show him where it all began.”
It took so long to realize that
You hold the light that’s been leading me back home
Under a dead Ohio sky
Eleven has been and will be waiting
Defending his light
And wondering
Where the hell have I been?
Sleeping, lost and numb
So glad I have found you
I am wide awake and heading home
Hold your light
Eleven
The eleven year old holds the “light” of wholeness and the child is waiting for the artist to come back (psychologically speaking) and reclaim it. The boy inside has given painful clues as to the solution to the problem and wonders “where the hell” the artist has been. But, until this point, much of the problem has remained unconscious and the poet has been “sleeping, lost, and numb” or not following the map of his feelings. Now that the pieces of the puzzle have been made conscious he is “wide awake” and “heading home.”
Lead me through each gentle step by step
By inch by loaded memory
I’ll move to heal
As soon as pain allows so we can
Reunite and both move on together
Hold your light
Eleven.
Lead me through each gentle step by step
By inch by loaded memory
‘Til one and one are one, eleven
So glow, child, glow
I’m heading home
The child, if he is listened to, will direct the healing process. The boy inside the man will lead him “through each gentle step by step.” The split from the anima and feeling, as already mentioned, did not occur as the result of one traumatic event, but through a series of wounds, some of which are routinely inflicted on boys in our culture, and some of which are specific to the individual. (this also may be where the immediate crisis of MJK’s mother’s stroke comes in ie. the feelings that came along with it may have been too traumatic to manage). Because of this the poet is relying on |
the child to lead him through each “loaded memory.” “One and one” refers to the two sides (masculine/feminine) of a whole person. These sides will be “reunited” so that “both” can “move on together.” Jung often used the alchemical hermaphrodite and the commonly referenced “androgyny of Christ” to represent this idea. Jimmy closes with an invocation to the child within to continue serving as a beacon, to “glow, child, glow” until the artist is healed.