Interview with Linda Leonard Transcripts, edited 1/18/08

word count: from 9,045 to 6,114

BARTON: Let me read something from the first paragraph of your book The Call to Create . In that book you defined creativity as

"an adventure of the soul in its quest for meaning." You also say we're all called on to create. What do you mean by creativity in

this context?

LEONARD: I mean just creating a life. (Pause .) Now, I just saw the film, No Country for Old Men . Have you seen that film?

BARTON: I just saw it.

LEONARD: The killer character is played by Javier Bardem. One wonders: Is there creativity there?

BARTON: Is he following his own bliss, to use Joseph Campbell's phrase?

LEONARD (laughs ): That's an interesting question. I mean, I don't think so, because he's killing other people. But I can see

how people can get a high off of killing. I guess if I were going to put it in Jungian terms, he's taking the daimon energy towards the

demonic.

BARTON: Creativity can be dangerous.

LEONARD: I think it is dangerous.

BARTON: At one point in The Call to Create you write that as creative beings we're often taken hostage, that creativity can be

experienced as a surrender or a possession. LEONARD ( after a moment thinking ): When you're doing something

creative, that energy takes over the psyche. It wants a lot from you. I think it wants to keep people creating. For myself, in

terms of writing, I know there are periods where I get very — I

don't know if "obsessive" is the right word here, but I just have to be doing it. Not all the time, just at certain times.

BARTON: I guess you could question whether that's a positive or negative.

LEONARD ( a deep laugh ): The way I've worked that out— and that was really in Witness to the Fire — is that there is a creative energy

in the psyche. This is Jung, but I think it is also in accord with the existentialists. What do you do with that energy? This is

where I like [existential psychologist] Rollo May so much. You can go with it to make things healthy and whole and holy, or you can take it into what AA would say is self-rule run riot, where you

have an ego mono-maniacal idea of what you want. And that can have disastrous results. From May's point of view, you can either

remain unconscious or suppress or repress that energy, not wanting to have anything to do with it. Because it is dangerous,

it requires you to make choices.

BARTON: Rollo Mays suggests we can have either a creative or destructive relationship with what he called the deamon.

LEONARD: Right.

BARTON: And in his formulation the key is whether you integrate it or become possessed by it.

LEONARD: And I think with Jung, too. I think Jung has the same idea. You go into the unconscious or the unconscious comes over you and you are exposed to these various figures and

complexes. The question is what do you do with all of that stuff. The goal, if possible, is to integrate it.

I love the filmmaker [Andrei] Tarkovsky. He has this wonderful book called Sculpting in Time . It's really wonderful. He

talks about how the human challenge is to stand in the middle of that energy and create towards the truth by expressing the truth.

BARTON: Explain why one stands in the middle?

LEONARD: Because it has a pull. It's the opposites—the divine and the diabolical are both there. They are part of the

psyche, I think. You can try to avoid it by various distractions and so forth. You can try to deny it, but it's always there in one way or another. If you're really conscious of it, you're dealing

with the tension. And that's where you have a choice of trying to direct it.

BARTON: You're suggesting that we shouldn't repress such things but we also shouldn't give in to them. There's a sort of

wrestling match, like Jacob with the angel.

LEONARD: There's a struggle. In that wrestling, you're forming things. Something is coming out of the unconscious, and

you have to deal with it at some point. That's certainly true of writing a book. You have to bring some form to it.

BARTON: And that's creativity, giving shape to blindimpulses.

LEONARD: I think so, yeah. Consciously.

BARTON: What do you do if your calling is diabolical?

LOENARD (laughs ): Oh boy.

BARTON: Let's assume, that's your path of individuation.

LOENARD: Okay. Can I do that, I have to ask myself? Can I call that individuation? This is a tough question.

Leonard pauses. I don't think so, because it goes towards destruction and I

think individuation has to do with healing.

BARTON: But don't some people have inner compulsions that are dangerous?

LEONARD: Definitely.

BARTON: What do you do with those?

LEONARD: My view of addiction is that you get possessed by something to the point that you become like Dracula or a vampire.

And you have to constantly suck the blood away so that there is not a degenerative aspect there.

In terms of the drugs and alcohol I think that's a disease. I don't see that as a calling.

BARTON: You've written a lot about the hidden connection between alcoholism and drug addiction and creativity.

LEONARD: Yeah.

BARTON: What do those things have in common?

LEONARD: I think that what all three have in common is a loosening of the ego. So the ego level goes down into the

unconscious and these things loosen the ego but what happens is you begin to get possessed, and in the case of alcohol and drug

addiction your body actually needs the substance, so it can get to a point where you almost have no choice because your body needs

it. I have been to AA meetings where people need a drink every half hour. And I myself got to the point where I needed one every three

hours. This is before going to some kind of tremor or whatever.

BARTON: And that is a calling to loosen the ego.

LEONARD: Well it does loosen the ego. And there's a whole history of drinking writers, especially in the middle or the

early part of the last century, and I think that was also tied up into some romantic ideals.

BARTON: In your book Witness of the Fire , you write that a transformation can take place. Something else can be substituted

for the addiction: a higher or greater calling of the creativelife.

LEONARD: I think it takes a surrender.

BARTON: Is that a different kind of surrender than the surrender the alcoholic has already gone through.

LEONARD: Yes. Because I think the alcoholic is pretty much unconscious. And is unconscious through the drinking. What works

in recovery, and also in creativity, is a conscious surrender.

BARTON: But isn't the artist attempting to get unconscious?

LEONARD: Yes. Yes, they are. They are trying to get unconscious. Joseph Campbell used the analogy of the shaman, the

artist, and the psychotic person all swimming in the same waters. And the artist learns to swim and not drawn. The others don't. The

alcoholic, the people who don't recover, drown. Or are more likely to drawn. And the people who somehow get into recovery

learn to swim.

BARTON: I'm wondering if we could pin this down a bit more. Are there moments when the artist is in the unconscious in the

exact same way as an addict? Is the difference simply that the artist is able to witness what has happened, to make sense of it?

Or is he always on a different level?

LEONARD: No, I don't think so. Theodore Roethke, who was a great poet and mystic and also an alcoholic, he has this wonderful

poem called the abyss, and he talks about going into the abyss consciously and then trying to come out of the abyss. So a little

bit like St. John's Dark Night of the Soul . St. John compares the soul to a burning log. If you are around the burning log, things get

smelly and sooty and comfortable, but eventually the log becomes a radiant fire that blends with fire and becomes radiant—the same

way the soul, if it stays with the process and doesn't give up, can blend with the Divine.

BARTON: That's nice.

LEONARD (laughs ): Well, that's St. John.

BARTON: I thought I might ask about some biographical information, because you write a lot about your own life in your

books. It seems to be part of your writing style. In Meeting with theMadwoman you wrote about a dream in which a madwoman was standing

above you.

LEONARD: Sure.

BARTON: What's the allure of the bottle of someone who is an alcoholic and who grew up in a family of alcoholics?

LEONARD: First of all I think it's a chemical thing. In my family all the men were alcoholics. In my own case I didn't drink

until I was thirty. I might have a little beer or something, but basically I didn't drink. Then when I went to Europe I started to

drink in the European fashion and that's when the drinking started. The allure was it gave me a kind of euphoria I had never

experienced before in my life. Also I have a gourmet side that liked the taste of alcohol. Initially it gave me a certain kind of

freedom, lack of inibition, a lack of judgment, a feeling of adventure. All of that stuff was very positive in the beginning.

But then, as this process took place in my body chemically. It also affects your emotional life and your spiritual life. At a

certain point I didn't really get any pleasure out of the alcohol but my body craved it. It's very insidious. It's very hard to

describe taking something that you know is going to make you feel worse. I think my drinking period lasted about fifteen years.

BARTON: At that point the spirit was no longer in the bottle. Is that right?

LEONARD: Somewhere in the process the spirit seems to drop out.

BARTON: I wonder if that's a metaphor for the creative process. What makes us high, partly because it's fresh and new,

becomes overused. The spirit drops out. No matter what makes us creative the juice is going to run out and we're going to have to

find something else.

LEONARD: I think that's true. And I think that's why its certainly true for me in terms of my books. Once I have written

them, I don't want to read them again. A lot of artists are like that. Picasso, you know, didn't go back and look at his paintings.

A lot of filmmakers don't go back and look at their films. Because they've gone through this and when it's completed they want to go

on to something new.

BARTON: Speaking of your books, almost all of them are about creativity in some way. Why do you think that the idea of creativity has been so important to you?

LEONARD: Well, first of all I love it. But secondly, it may be especially important to me because I did grow up in a trapped

kind of environment. I had to use a lot of imagination to kind of survive. A lot of violence and traumatic stuff was going on in the

house and novels and creative things kind of fed me. Imagination helped me realize that there was something besides the

environment that I grew up in, that there were other possibilities, and so forth. Also I was an only child, so I was one

of those people who had imaginary friends when I was little.

BARTON: And you were a book worm.

LEONARD: Yes. Definitely. Books kind of saved my life. My grandmother started [reading to me] when I was very young. I

started reading very early. Maybe around three or something like that. We would read poems and she would tell me about the

transcendentalists. And then I would be reading books constantly.

BARTON: What did the transcendentalists do for you?

LEONARD: They gave me a sense that there was more than the limitations I was living I was living in. My mother, you know, was

supporting the family at minimum wages, and the transcendentalists gave me hope that there was more. And also

they kind of brought nature into my life because I was living in a

row house. There weren't trees or grass around very much. There were some parks far away. So I didn't have nature.

BARTON: It sounds like they introduced you to somethingspiritual.

LEONARD: Yes. And a Divine presence of some kind.

BARTON: Did you feel that as a young child, that divinepresence?

LEONARD: Yeah, I think so. I certainly felt it. But I also had this thing going on there in our family situation, with my

father's alcoholism increased, he couldn't work. It got very very bad. So at those times, so I kind of had doubt and faith both as I

saw this terrible thing happen to my father. In those days, you know, alcoholism was not considered to be a disease. So, you know,

everybody in the family looked on him as somebody without will.

BARTON: That's a very creative place—to have doubt and faith at the same time.

LEONARD: Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. It forces you to question things.

BARTON: Were there specific spiritual experiences that youhad?

LEONARD: Well, I think I had this milk horse that, you know, used to bring the milk. That was a spiritual experience for me.

She came once a week and her name was Dolly. She was some kind of spiritual presence for me that was steady for a long time until

they stopped you know that milk service. . . . [possible follow up questions 1 and 2]

BARTON: To change subjects a bit, when did you begin to get interested in analysis?

LEONARD: While I was getting my doctorate at Duquesne studying existentialism, phenomenology. I was teaching at the

university and I loved teaching but I realized that psychology could take me deeper into the psyche. The philosophers that I was

attracted to, Heidegger and Kierkegaard in particular, what attracted me was the discussions of despair and anxiety and guilt

and shame, all of which I had gone through as a child in an intense fashion. And so that all kind of brought me into the psychology

realm.

BARTON: Who were the psychologists you were reading?

LEONARD: Freud said that if you want to understand psychology just read all of Dostoevsky (laughs ). So I was reading a

lot of Dostoevsky and there is a lot of psychology in there. At the time I started reading this stuff in the early sixties

existentialism was just coming into the states. I just saw correspondence between what the psychologists were writing and

what the philosophers were writing.

BARTON: Do you remember the moment you decided you would go to the Jung Institute.

LEONARD: I didn't actually decide to go to the Jung Inst. originally. I decided to, try to see if I could work with Meter Vas

{?} who was an existentialist psychiatrist who wrote Das Thines analysis of psychoanalysis. I wrote him [38:45; unclear what the

name of this book is], and asked if I could study with him. He asked me to send my dissertation which was on the concept of

detachment. He liked it and he said I could come study with him, but he could not give me a diploma of any kind and he said there was

this other place in Zurich that could give Americans diplomas he couldn't because I wasn't an MD and he only gave them to MD's.

BARTON: So you became a Jungian by mistake.

LEONARD: Not by mistake exactly, but by a very circuitous route. So I went to study with him and then I decided to check this

other place out, which was the Jung Institute. And I had read Jung's biography, or autobiography rather. I liked it, but I wasn't totally drawn. [James] Hillman was director of studies. He

asked my field and stuff, and he said Hildavens Wagner [don't have the spelling of this name], who was the daughter of Ludwig Wagner, the other great existential psychiatrist, was upstairs teaching

a course on mothers and daughters. And he said, "Well I'll take you up and introduce you if you like." So I sat in on the course and she was talking about Demeter and Persephone.

I liked it very much and liked her, and I asked her for a consultation and I went. But she had this little room with a funny

little table covered with a green cloth. It looked like it had crystal balls or something on it. It looked a little scary to me

(laughs ). She started asking me about my feelings, which I spent all of my life trying to hide. As a child of an alcoholic that's

what you do. So that unsettled me a bit. I liked her, but it unsettled me and I thought, "I'm not going. That's it I'm not

going back there again" (laughs ). And then I had a tremendous nightmare that night. And so the nightmare brought me back. And

that's what got me. Then I had to do it.

BARTON: The nightmare would have scared most people away.

LEONARD: Somehow I knew the nightmare was connected to the talk we had had. My mother was in it. A kind of father like figure

was in it. A grandfather figure was in it. It was all so very dramatic and kind of archetypal. I just knew I had to deal with it.

And I couldn't deal with it on my own. I knew that. So I just felt like I had to go back.

BARTON: You had to face this nightmare.

LEONARD: Yeah, Definitely. I knew it wasn't going to leave me alone.

BARTON: What was your experience in Zurich at the JungInstitute.

LEONARD: Well, I loved living in Zurich. I liked most of the courses. Things were very free then. You didn't have to take any

particular course, you could take whatever you wanted until you got to a certain control stage. So I really got into Jung. I found

that real stimulating. I didn't stay, by the way. I had to go back home. There was a year in between where I had signed a contract to teach at San Diego State, but then I won a postdoctoral fellowship

that allowed me to come back. It was the dark night of the soul, most of the time. At the

same time—I don't know about equally important but quite important because I grew up in an uneducated family—I was exposed

to all of this art and music and opera, and I traveled all over Europe. So all of that was very passionate. It was like an

incredible passionate journey of discovery, not only in the psyche, but in the culture. So I loved it, and I wanted to stay

there but my money ran out. And it ran out luckily it ran out just in time where I had finished every thing except my thesis. So I

came back and got a job and then wrote my thesis.

BARTON: When you describe the experience in Zurich as a dark night of the soul, what are you referring to?

LEONARD: Well—I think the feeling of despair. Now I grew up with despair, in my home. It was a despairing place. There were

other things that gave me hope, like the transcendentalist philosophers.

In the same way in Zurich I had to face a lot of dark, shadow stuff. And depression. Just about everybody in Zurich at the time

I was there was walking around in a dark night of the soul (laughs). And we didn't have anything to distract us since we couldn't work

because of the foreign working laws. I didn't have a family. And then you were working with your dreams constantly, so it was kind

of overwhelming in a certain way.

BARTON: How so?

LEONARD: All of the stuff that was I learning about. Dynamics and so forth. The mother-father stuff and just stuff

that was coming up from the psyche. Various images and so forth.

BARTON: How old were you at this time?

LEONARD: Thirty. I went through this when I was thirty.

BARTON: Did you imagine that you would go back into academia? Or did you have an idea you would become an analyst?

LEONARD: I thought of doing both. I felt I would do both.

BARTON: At the same time.

LEONARD: Yeah. Which I did. I did both for, while I was teaching at UCD. And then my energies got more into doing

analysis, so then I transferred over to doing the analysis part.

BARTON: Your 30-year-old self must have had intimations of what it wanted out of the future. It's a big moment when you have

to decide what to do with you your life.

LEONARD: I felt called. At a certain point I always felt called. I did feel called to be a teacher. And then at a certain

point when I felt called to be an analyst, which was maybe after the first six weeks I was in Zurich. Then I really tried to make

that happen.

BARTON: How did you experience this calling?

LEONARD: It's hard to describe. I mean I just experienced that it was something important to do with my life and that it

would be my way of contribution to people and society and so forth. And I just felt—it was just pretty much like Herman Hesse

describes in Demian, actually—I just felt I had to go take this journey. I didn't know where it was going to lead, really. But I

just felt I had to take it. And since my nature is to be an adventurer, basically, I liked also the idea of following the

adventure: going into the forest and not knowing what you are going to find there.

BARTON: Which is very much the experience of going into the psyche, your own or others

LEONARD: Right. And also writing. In terms of writing a book, I don't know what I'm going to do. When I start out, I have a

thing, or I have a title, or I have an image or something, but I don't really know what I'm going to do or how I'm going to do it.

BARTON: The fun for you is finding out where you're going to end up.

LEONARD: The fun is actually taking that journey of discovery.

BARTON: More so than sending the completed book to the publisher?

LEONARD: Yeah, I think it's the journey that's more exciting. Well, I also have a part of my personality that wants to

complete what it started, so I have a strong—I don't know what you would call that—I have a strong sense of discipline once I

connect. But I have to make a real heart commitment to it. So that the completing of the book is part of the journey. Now, the rest of

that, the getting it to the publisher and all of the rest of the thing that is involved in getting the book out—I'm not talking about the editing process. That's great. I want to make the

writing better. But selling it. Selling myself. Selling. The marketing part—I hate that. Actually I hate it very much. There's

a conflict within me in terms of that part.

BARTON: How would you characterize your own approach as distinct from other Jungians?

LEONARD: I fall in love with certain writers. I have fallen in love with Dostoevsky. I fell in love deeply with (the German

poet Rainer Maria) Rilke. I fell in love with (Polish film director Krzysztof) Kieslowski. And it's really a deep love

(laughs ). I get really passionate about them and I just want to read everything they wrote and understand everything I can from

their perspective, and I kind of live with these characters. I'm not quite sure if you answered the question, though.

BARTON: I think you did. Speaking of Rilke, there's a story that he said he didn't want to go into psychoanalysis because if

he got rid of his devils he'd get rid of his devils, too.

LEONARD: Right, yeah.

BARTON: There's a long tradition of artists and writers that feel that way.

LEONARD: And I can really understand that because if you analysze the mystery away—and certain approaches do that, they

try to interpret and reduce and analyze them away—then you're kind of almost destroying the creative impulse. So, if I'm

talking about the way I'm doing analysis, I would never want to interfere with that creative impulse. I would rather go with it.

In other words, trust that, with the right support and care of that creative process, that's probably what's going to heal the

artist.

BARTON: That's a very optimistic view in a way, that the psyche will heal itself.

LEONARD: Yeah, I guess so. But the person has to cooperate and choose it as well. I don't see myself necessarily as an

optimist but I guess it is optimistic.

BARTON: By optimistic I mean that you trust thepsyche to move in a positive direction, and you trust that it wants to be

constructive and engaged.

LEONARD: That's what I believe. I do believe that. I don't understand the attraction to the daemonic except in as so far as

there is a daemonic aspect of the creative process. But the destructive aspect of the daemonic, I don't understand that.

BARTON: Have you had clients who the pscyhe seemsdiabolical.

LEONARD: I don't think so. If I've had them, I haven't kept them (laughs).

BARTON: Good choice. To change subjects a bit, you seem to believe we live in an addictive society.

LEONARD: Yeah, I do.

BARTON: What do you mean by that?

LEONARD: First of all, I think addiction is part of the human condition. To be possessed by something whatever it is I think,

control and power are in some ways the most insidious addictions. To be possessed by something to the point where your life becomes

reduced to that one thing. And there are so many of those things out there, aside from substance addictions. There's money,

there's speed. By speed I mean that everything is so fast, there is no time for reflection.

BARTON: We're addicted to speed.

LEONARD: I think we are. I don't think I thought that earliert, but I think so know.

BARTON: And our addiction to speed isn't slowing down.

LEONARD: I feel that it's becoming worse and worse. I'm also getting older, so I might feel it even more. On the other hand I

don't have to necessarily be a part of it, the way say somebody who has a job in a corporation and is supporting a family would be more

likely to get hooked into it. But I do, I think it is serious because it takes away our solitude and the time to go inward. If

you're just speeding somewhere you don't see anything or experience much.

BARTON: That says something about where we're going as a culture doesn't it?

LEONARD: To me it does.

BARTON: At the same time, we're also becoming less open to things that don't fit on a spread sheet. We're less open to

mystery.

LEONARD: I think so, yes, except in so far as some of the eastern thought has come into our country. When I was starting out

in the Sixties, and maybe in the Seventies, there wasn't much eastern thought around. And I think eastern thought is healthy in

terms of putting an emphasis on a meditative way of being.

BARTON: We haven't talked about your experience with indigenous peoples, about which you wrote in your book Following the

Reindeer Woman . In 1992, for instance, you visited the Even people, who live above the Artic circle in Siberia. What was that

experience like?

LEONARD: Well, it was very hard to get there in the first place. It was hard to get anybody who could make an arrangement to

do anything. Then it was hard to get any planes in Russia. We had to get this helicopter that was an old Soviet war helicopter to

take us out to the wilderness. Keith and I were dropped of in a dry riverbed. There were a few people in the plane that were locals.

There were no seats on the plane, just sacks of potatoes and stuff. We got off the plane—one other guy who we didn't know got

out also—and we had a guide and a translator. We didn't know where

in the hell we were, or whether the helicopter was going to come back. But then we climbed up this riverbed and all of these

reindeer came right towards us. I have to say that those days—it was just a few days we spent

there—they were timeless. Now part of that is a little bit of the arctic where it is always light, but it just felt—it was an

ecstatic experience, actually. I've never had an experience like that before.

The reindeer were just really beautiful. They were really interesting. They would get together in a circle. If one reindeer

fell down or something they would help, other reindeer would help the reindeer up.

At that time in Russia in 1992, there were no visible shamans around. The shamans, because of communism, couldn't show

themselves. Ninety-two was that funny year when things were beginning to open, so there was hope that the shamans would come

out. We talked primarily with the elder of the tribe. And the way it worked is we would sit around the fire and eat. They believed

what belongs to one person belongs to everybody; so they would take this kind of knife with this meat on it and pass it around.

You just take a little piece off and eat it, and it just kept going around in circles until people didn't need to eat anymore.

BARTON: Marvelous.

LEONARD: It was really great. During these times, the elder would then tell us a little bit. First he asked us why we were

there. That was the first thing he asked us. When told him about the dream, Keith's dream. He was very impressed by that. I don't

remember saying a lot, but he was very impressed by it. I'm not quite sure what was night and morning but at a

certain point we went to bed. When I woke up, which I think was pretty early in the morning. There wasn't anybody else up. There

were these four big horn sheep heads severed. The elder saw me and he nodded. And then he told me that. because of the dream that

Keith brought—he felt it was the communities dream—it meant to them that the Reindeer Goddess showed up in this dream and gave them permission to hunt. So they went out that night and hunted.

Gradually in these days, we learned more and more about the way they lived, and about the Reindeer Goddess that they believed in. The elders were worried. Their mission was to take care of the

reindeer, the reindeer representing the mystery of existence for them. He was very concerned that, because of communism and tribe

members being taken away, that the people were not learning how to take care of the reindeer. And he said he knew a lot less about it than his father. Because he had been taken away to learn

Russian. He was 70 at the time, and he was really worried that the Reindeer people would really forget how to take care of the

reindeer. That the riendeer would die off, and so would they.

BARTON: That's a good thing to worry about if you're thatpeople.

LEONARD: Exactly.

BARTON: Were there things about that way of life that appealed to you?

LEONARD: I loved the timelessness of it (laughs ). I love the big cities, and that's the other side, but I loved

it there and the nature, and we were camping out. They were on migration and they were there on a brief stay. Just being next to

the reindeer was a divine experience. There were over a thousand reindeer. I guess I loved just living with nature in that close of

a way and with other people.

BARTON: Isn't this sense of timelessness you're speaking about fundamentally a different relationship to nature?

LEONARD: I think it is. I think it was what Heidegger was talking about, with his notion of temporality: The distinction between clock time, which he called linear clock time, and then

temporality, where he saw time, the future coming towards one, taking ones self from the past and coming to be in the present and

just being present. And so it was being present that was a big experience for the Reindeer people. Clock time just wasn't around. And it was

sacred, it felt like sacred time. It felt like the divinities—or whatever we want to call them—were present somehow.

BARTON: We don't have that in this culture.

LEONARD: Maybe in some Native American cultures.

BARTON: We do get a sense of that kind of time between the covers of books or in analytical hours, where people can discuss

their dreams. But that's a very different kind of space than living it day to day like the Even people.

LEONARD: Yeah, it is a very different kind of space. We do find it in certain moments. I think you're right. In an analytical hour or, for me, looking at a great work of art. I find that kind of

timelessness too. But its not. But others aren't in it. The culture's not in it.

I think I find it when I go hiking. That's when I experience it the most. Nowadays anyway.

BARTON (pause ): I'm struggling here with something that's difficult to articulate. It relates somehow to what you're saying

about Heidegger, and what happens to a culture when it becomes so controlled by practicality that nothing seems to open it up to

mystery.

LEONARD: Okay.

BARTON: We seem, at least to my mind, to have reached sort of reached some kind of end point to our rational practicality, in

the sense that we can now fish out the seas, we can affect the global climate.

LEONARD: Right.

BARTON: Our rationality has become so over-pronounced that our relationship with bodies and with the earth itself has become

disrupted.

LEONARD: Right. I agree with that. At that point, according to Heidegger, something else will come into the culture. From

Heidegger's point of view, because there's a greater mystery, something is going to disrupt that illusion of control. Although

we have to control to survive, but not only control. So yes.

BARTON: Where do you see that something coming into theculture?

LEONARD: Boy, I don't know. I mean, from Heidegger's point of view it starts out usually AS an anxiety. Some kind of anxiety

that upsets people and dislodges. Now I think to some degree we're already experiencing that with global warming. And all of the

different ways that nature is changing. That may be part of something, the disruption of—I would call that maniacal control.

BARTON: Do you see elements of change in the culture?

LEONARD: Change to the positive?

BARTON: I assume something has to change. We can't keep going the way we're going.

LEONARD: Right. Right. Well. I think there is, on the part of some people, a growing consciousness. I remember at least 25

years ago in Colorado people were already talking about the damage being done to nature. People were aware back then but there

weren't that many of them, and now I think that that knowledge is growing.

BARTON: What's the difference between then and now.

LEONARD: I think there were fewer voices crying out. A lot of poets—I'm thinking of Gary Snyder right now, but many others—they

were crying out, trying to announce this. But there weren't catastrophes. Maybe there were catastrophes. but I can't think of

any right now. But now there have been a lot of catastrophes. It's breaking into the public consciousness. But how much I don't

know. How strongly I don't know.

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