(MinorLits 02/05/2017 Essays & features)
I want to take you back to a moment I experienced about eight years ago. It’s a few weeks after my father, Ken Campbell’s, sudden and untimely death. I’m standing on the corner of two cobbled streets in Liverpool in the rain. And I’m looking at a bust of CG Jung. And that’s kind of weird because right at that moment I’m halfway through an essay about Carl Jung for a Master’s degree I’m doing. But that’s not why I’m there.
Stood next to me is Prunella Gee, Chris Langham and a guy called Peter O’Halligan. We’re all looking up at this bust of Carl Jung.
It’s there because Carl Jung had a dream about Liverpool and he wrote about it in his book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. He said he thought it may be the most important dream he’d ever had. And he realised that in his dream, Liverpool was the Pool of Life.
I’m writing this essay about Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and synchronicity, a phrase he coined, and now I find myself looking at this bust of his head. And that bust has only been erected because of the tireless campaigning of Peter O’Halligan, who’s standing next to me. Because Peter O’Halligan is sure that this very spot is the exact spot that Jung dreamt about.
But just to the side of this bust is another unusual thing – it’s a plaque, set into the wall, which commemorates The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun.
This has also only been erected due to the tireless campaigning of Peter O’Halligan.
Because just over 30 years previously, which is when O’Halligan first found this illustrious Jung-Dream site, he also noticed that the building on the corner of these two streets – just along from where the Beatles first performed – was derelict. And so he adopted it, set up a caff, and called it The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun.
And the first production to be staged in a room above the caff, was an eighteen hour epic called Illuminatus!, directed by my father, Ken Campbell, starring (amongst many many others) my mother, Prunella Gee as Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Confusion, and co-adapted with Chris Langham from a novel by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
And there we all are now, and I say “It’s weird because right now I’m in the middle of an essay about Jung“, then I realise that, although I’m doing a distance-learning Master’s degree, I am actually studying at John Moores University, based in Liverpool.
And Peter O’ Halligan tells me that John Moores knew my dad’s dad, my grandfather, who I never met, they were both from just outside Liverpool, and John Moores offered my grandfather the opportunity to get involved with his new business venture, but my grandfather declined. It was the football pools! Which made John Moores a multi-millionaire, which was how come he’d had enough money to build a whole university, where I was right now studying Carl Gustav Jung.
