Roderick Main (U.K.)

Letter to Richard

Dear Richard,

It has been almost 14 years now since we first met at the London launch of Jung’s Red Book, where, to my great good fortune, you mistook me for someone else and introduced yourself! It wasn’t until the Cambridge launch of your Changing in 2016 that we met again, though in the meantime we had maintained, chiefly thanks to you, a correspondence and exchange of writings—hugely to my advantage, I must say. These and our meetings since then—when you gave the distinguished lecture at an academic conference on holism at the University of Essex in 2017; when we were both presenters at a week-long dialogue on consciousness at The Pari Center in Tuscany in 2019; and when you and Melanie generously welcomed me to your home while I was visiting Cambridge earlier this year—remain for me privileged moments of great personal significance.

From all these contacts, I have come to know something of your extraordinary capacity for friendship and for making others feel valued. I have also glimpsed something of the ‘encompassing versatility’ (zhouyi!) of your spirit, the breadth and depth of your sympathies and erudition, and by no means only in literature; the unobstructed insight you can and do turn to almost any topic. Above all, I have been humbled to witness your boundless creativity, in conversation but especially, of course, in poetry.

When I read your poetry, I immediately find myself in a space of infinite connections, openings, and transformations, where the most mundane subject matter becomes radiant with meaning and the most metaphysical and mystical subject matter becomes clarified, grounded, and relatable. As I journey through each of the major volumes you have published since I first got to know you—Manual, Notness, and Changing—I encounter, in varying registers, practically the whole gamut of life and of responses to what happens in life—a veritable education in being human. And the language in which you bring all this alive—at once precise, supple, and ebullient—again and again leaves me marvelling. Another, more particular marvel, for me personally, is that you, a poet, should find deep significance in the concepts of correlative cosmology and (in Jung’s modern updating) synchronicity—for me a most precious and affirming intersection with my own work as an academic.

But the greatest marvel of all, to my mind, is that, in a culture that does not put too much of a premium on fostering poets, you have lived fully the life of a poet and are still going strong at the age of 80! I can only imagine what choices and sacrifices you have had to make over the years to do this. Few, I think, have such courage; even fewer evince by their practice such vision, so it seems to me, of the importance of poetry for the well-being of civilisation.

In deep gratitude for your friendship and work, I wish you many more years of joyous life and creativity!

Roderick

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