The Domestication of Apocalypse

Weishaus's poems Manzano and Atomic Muse re-story the psychic domestication of nuclear encahntment, a type of negative spell by which a culture metabolizes potential apocalypse into a normative landscape. As Jungian arts-based research, the poems reverse the semiotic degradation that renders nuclear weapons unconscious, restoring symbolic literacy where military language obfuscates it. When a culture stores warheads beside apple orchards and exhibits death as memory without flinching, a counter-enchantment, poetry as antidote, mobilizes the psyche with new meaning to break the trance.

In Manzano, Weishaus writes of a mountain "born of fire storing nuclear devices as if apples ready to be baked / and burned to their core" (Rowland & Weishaus, 2021, p. 177). The simile is the enchantment made accessible: warheads become apples, annihilation folded into the pastoral. The line enacts the psychic mechanism, normalization through metaphoric substitution, and in enacting it, exposes it. The stanza closes with "middleclass patios stained with ashes / of delicate biota and the silence of militant bones" (p. 177), the suburban and the catastrophic sharing a single sentence without rupture. That seamlessness could be the symptom.

Atomic Muse asks more directly: "Who is the muse of a museum that exhibits / Death as Memory in disguise?" (p. 169). The museum curates decommissioned weapons as heritage; the poem insists we notice the sleight. Urania, muse of astronomy, is reimagined wearing "skulls as / a necklace, earrings of bodies immutably hung, a girdle of severed hands" (p. 169), the mythic figure conscripted into nuclear service, a celestial gaze bent by an unconscious complex toward militant ends.

This is living depth psychology, a collaboration with the psyche; it inhabits enchantment's own language and turns it conscious. The epic is a courageous linguistic technology of the soul because the poem is the counterweapon: an enactment of holistic reclimation.References

Rowland, S., & Weishaus, J. (2021). Jungian arts-based research and the nuclear enchantment of New Mexico. Routledge.

References

Rowland, S., & Weishaus, J. (2021). Jungian arts-based research and the nuclear enchantment of New Mexico. Routledge.