Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
Why beat around the bush? God Him/Herself can be an
underground river, as per the poster for the 2009 Fetzersponsored
conference held in Fort Worth, Texas.
Subconscience
These UNDERGROUND RIVERS of sorrow, constantly quaking beneath the surface of
everyday life; everybody senses them at one time or another -- Donna Tartt recalling
Mississippi writer Willie Morris, internet posting, 2009.
It is the deep undercurrent, I, that is the motive power of life, and it is not perceived by our
usual consciousness. Its intense energy goes inward and creates sensitivity, intuition, and the
highest mental abilities. The flow of this UNDERGROUND RIVER is the most difficult thing to
grasp, and human civilization therefore cannot easily emerge from this dimension either. --
William Gleason, The Spiritual Foundations of Aikido (1995)
As I sit quietly painting, immersed in color and light, just beyond my consciousness violence
and desperation run like an UNDERGROUND RIVER. -- Andrea Krupp, artist statement from
the exhibition "Places I Know," 2009
He can let go of himself, let himself disappear into that great UNDERGROUND RIVER of the
unconscious where one necessarily loses one's self-realization. -- Carl Gustav Jung and James
Louis Jarrett, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 (1988)
Even in the Fabulous Country there is the UNDERGROUND RIVER, which runs deep and
silent beneath our consciousness, filling our waking lives with a dark meaning. -- Max Lerner,
"Fabulous Country and the Underground River," Saturday Review of Literature, December 5,
1959
Jazz musicologists such as Gunther Schuller have speculated that Charlie Parker's skill at
splitting the four beats of a bar into eight could be a reincarnation of subconscious impulses
inherited from a mental UNDERGROUND RIVER from Africa. -- Billboard, May 21, 1977
Film lives somewhere in that UNDERGROUND RIVER of the psyche which travels from the
domain of sex through the deeps of memory and the dream on out into the possible montages
of death. -- Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art, Thoughts on Writing (2004)
Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an
UNDERGROUND RIVER that came to the surface only here and there at intervals months
apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields. -- Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)
Tradition
The sub-consciousness is the governor of the waking brain. Tradition -- which is just man's
memory of man -- flows through it like an UNDERGROUND RIVER from which rise the springs
of every-day thinking. -- Henry Seidel Canby, Definitions, Essays in Contemporary Criticism
(1922)
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