Adieu

I’m afraid this blog has run out of gas.

Creating Sustainability in an Unsustainable Culture

May you live in interesting times
–Ancient Chinese curse

Is it understatement, a redundancy even, to say that there has been so much happening in and around our world of late? A deep fear of loss has been unleashed, a resurgent atavistic panic burns in the hearts and thoughts of human beings around the world, and as a collectivity of human concern, we yearn to be rescued from our problems, to “get the economy back on track,” to find a way to sustain familiar standards of living, and to once again, happily, loose consciousness by burying ourselves within the pervasive and peculiar Western myth of progress.

In the midst of this–what, exactly, does one call the forces that are currently affecting our lives and in our world? As I will explain, whatever this is doesn’t rise to the level of a catastrophe; more likely it is merely, as Nietzsche called it, chaostrophe. So, in the midst of our fear and panic, I want to take a moment to point to something deep and powerful working in the collective, as well as in the individual psyche, and it goes far beyond the implications that the concepts of depression, regression or progress call into awareness. Contemporary events are simply the Prima Facie manifestations of the powerful, and powerfully reordering, archetypal energies currently in play. Chaos is always the experience individuals have when their once-valid world begins to transform. Chaos doesn’t mean that humanity has gone off course, and chaos doesn’t nullify progress; in fact, chaos is always and in all ways an unavoidable and singular artifact of progress, a progress that is necessarily accompanied by change. In any event, it is naïve to believe that the concept of progress is always and only good. Progress may be as much a way of distancing from psychic or physical reality as it is a means of approaching an understanding of the world. In other words, progress may be psychologically defensive in equal measure to its ability to its societal benefits, so one must be careful to not be enthralled by what is, in its worst incarnations, an all too often comfortable cultural justification for moral degeneration and a grotesquely ruthless weapon of destruction.

I want to examine two fundamental psychological mistakes human beings make when trying to create sustainable environments of any kind, be they ecological, sociological, or psychological. The first mistake is what philosophers term a “category mistake,” or the kind of conflation of concepts that occurs when, for example, one mistakes essence for substance, quality for quantity, or archetype for form. Essence and substance, according to a remarkably prescient philosopher, Réne Guénon, are universal principles which serve as the two poles of manifestation–essence being the active and substance the passive principle: “…these two principles appear in [the world] under the aspects of quality and quantity respectively…essence is the principial synthesis of all the attributes that belong to a being and make that being what it is….” For my purposes in this essay I will define essence as immaterial, unquantifiable, and existing as pure potentiality while substance is material, manifest, and quantifiable. Substance is the materia secunda of the world (while the Prima Materia of the alchemists is more properly thought of as essence), and as visible matter, the artisan shapes it; it consists of bodies in motion or at rest, and it is the condition that belongs most exclusively to the world, which we humans then order, measure, and classify.

The second psychological error is a mistake of perception. Over the course of human history, human consciousness has changed. Originally humans inhabited the world in a state suggesting that very little, if any, self-identity existed. Human beings existed in units–in tribes, in familial and consensual alliances through which identity was located and found exclusively within the communal or societal group, a psychologically undifferentiated space that C. G. Jung has termed a participation mystique, a psychological situation which:

…consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity [with the observed object] . . .. Among [modern] peoples it usually occurs between persons, seldom between a person and a thing. In the first case it is a transference relationship . . .. In the second case there is a similar influence on the part of the thing, or else an identification with a thing or the idea of a thing.

This Participation Mystique is the sort of consciousness that Jean Gebser, in his masterwork entitled, The Ever-Present Origin, has called unperspectival. Later, and uncommonly perhaps, in the ancient Mediterranean World a reorganization of human consciousness began and added another, a third, dimension to the human perception of space (this same irruption of consciousness began to express in Europe around the 13th Century). With knowledge of this added dimension of space, the human world was transformed: Leonardo revolutionized the world of art, Cervantes and Chaucer radically re-imagined the novel, Newtonian physics and Cartesian philosophy insisted that the world is not a mystery at all but rather, it is a logical, predictable machine, a machine of unimaginable complexity and precision perhaps, but a machine none-the-less and possible to be replicated by human hands. The ego emerges as the center of consciousness and human subjectivity, which necessarily experiences the rest of the world (and all non-human life in it) as a distant other, as object, and shifts its focus from a deep and sacred exploration of time (“Time resides in the soul” says St. Augustine) to a voracious obsession with space that results in the progressively stultifying materialism of the past two hundred years.

Parenthetically, I often think that the concepts of soul and space are antithetical. What I mean by that is that so often people describe their encounters with soul as having the quality of timelessness–of moments and experiences existing out of time; in a word, eternal. The eternal quality of the soul seems to bind it to contemplations of time: fleeting time, quality time, time of day, family time, me time, and the-only-time-we-have-is-now time, etc. Eventually, Enlightenment thought begins to distinguish between space and time: even the etymology of the word includes a definition from the early 14th Century identifying time with “limited space.” Feeling, essence, and quality abide in and are recognized through their relationships to time while behaviors and other quantitative phenomena are, to greater and lesser degrees, rooted in space. Space invites extension, in fact, space is axiomatically filled with matter and material (nature abhors a vacuum), and while spirit may precipitate in matter and therefore be found in space, as in the spirit of a place or an individual, soul is always attempting to dematerialize and will never be found in a substance, but rather only in the awareness of essence. This notion, as I will try to illustrate, has tremendous implications for the concept of sustainability.

Right now, at this moment in history, human beings seem to stand poised on the brink of another revolution in consciousness. Quantum physics, neuroscience, cybernetics, and postmodern spirituality are all suggestive of an invisible, perhaps even immaterial, reality that influences human experience and reality far more than the physical, mechanical world we find ourselves so comfortable in and so accustomed to. As a species, we seem to be on the cusp of developing what Jean Gebser described as “Aperspectival” consciousness, a consciousness that rests upon two guiding principles:
1) Latency: that which is concealed or hidden, and contains our past and present, and which already contains our future. “We are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well.”

2) Diaphaneity, or transparency. The point of transparency is to expose everything latent (principle 1), everything hidden behind, in, and before the world, our past, present, and future.

Gebser insists that taken together, these two principles constitute a methodology (and that it is a methodology there can be no doubt, as Gebser makes clear, sometimes painfully so, from the six hundred and some odd pages he uses to articulate this methodology) that evolves from the experiences of human beings in transition, experiences that have embedded within them the concealed, latent intimations and intuitions of incipient futures which, as they become more distinct, clarify the experience of the present.

To my way of thinking, the most striking aspect of an aperspectival consciousness is the absolute lack of distance, a transubstantiation of time and space, in both the psychic and the physical sense. It is a form of consciousness very similar to that possessed by those we typically refer to as “enlightened” beings. Time, specifically the absence of linear time, is once again restored to its rightful place as an object of deep meditation and wonder; a focus upon essence and quality takes precedence over substance and quantity; space is rendered meaningless by experiences of soulfulness; and a conscious re-animation of the world is undertaken so that one sees oneself as a part of all that is, from a place of highly differentiated, spiritually aware consciousness (i.e. Thou art That) rather than from a place of undifferentiated consciousness as in the unperspectival way of being.

Finally, it seems to me that sustainability, as most commonly spoken of today, is not sustainability, per se, but rather a reaction to specific influences or circumstances that appear to be threatening. Constantly responding to a threat, or threats, is not a sustainable proposition. As long as sustainability is conceptualized as a set of related behaviors which are operationalized or exercised upon matter “out there” in the world, there will always be a psychic distance, and an actual physical distance, distance that creates unsustainable situations.

It is not, in fact, physical space that needs to be reclaimed and sustained, yet space is the insistent concern of issues of sustainability, and indeed the insistent concern of the modern era, perhaps of all eras. Man leaves his African cradle and ventures out into unknown space, occupying the subcontinent, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Eventually, Copernicus “discovers” heliocentric space; Columbus, only the most famous of innumerable (and earlier) ocean going explorers, and others become aware of Earth’s space; Vesalius deconstructs ancient certitudes about the body and describes the body’s space; Galileo looks even more deeply into outer space with his telescope; and on and on and on, constantly extending into space as object–as place, quantifying, measuring, and occupying every space we possibly can, and continuing to do so right on up to and beyond the very moment you read this article. The unsustainable result is that humanity knows more about outer space than it does about its own inner space primarily because inner space requires contraction rather than extension and intimacy rather than distance; knowing about inner space necessitates an understanding of essence rather than thingness, of qualities rather than mechanics; exploring inner space requires feeling awareness rather than behavioral awareness; comprehensive awareness of inner space requires a shift in consciousness from the perspectival to the aperspectival.

Sustainability, in order to be truly sustainable, has to emerge organically from an aperspectival consciousness and render distance itself immaterial. Only when one is intimately connected and equal to all other things will there be true sustainability; the familiar tradition of Primus Inter Pares is not enough to create sustainable futures for there can be no first among equals if there is to be true sustainability, there are only equals. Nor is the tradition of caretaker for the planet a sustainable model, for the shadow of the caretaker is the exploiter, and Christian mythology, to cite just one case in point, has yielded such extraordinary examples of shadow irruptions as to make us wary of any further impositions of that model on ourselves and the world. Even attempts to measure and quantify sustainability issues, while perhaps helpful in formulating a response to a threatening situation, is not the same as creating or implementing sustainability.

What will finally create sustainability is the soulfully realized experience that any suffering anywhere is one’s own immediate, personal suffering, and the human instinct to pure, unadulterated self-interest will do the rest. There will be an instinctual move to ameliorate the unsustainable situation. The missing piece is supplied by the transformational realization that we are not unrelated, unconnected, and separate individuals, but that we humans share the larger part of a genome with every living thing on this planet, which is itself a living thing.

I am not, by the nature of my emotional constitution an optimist, and I don’t believe that human beings can, en masse, create such a radical shift in consciousness any time soon. Such a shift happens slowly and gradually (after all, perspectival consciousness took some 1,500 years to coalesce), and more and more, it seems that we are simply running out of time. But even though I am not by my nature an optimist, I am encouraged by the fact that I am so often so spectacularly wrong in my analyses and beliefs, that such a shift could be happening right under my nose and I would not necessarily recognize it because, Nietzsche writes, “Each is farthest away from himself.” The only hope we have, the most sustainable refuge we have, is the soul–the Anima Mundi, and in it is, as Dante wrote, the love that moves the sun and other stars.

Wordsworth, Foucault, and President-Elect Obama

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
–William Wordsworth, 1807

Just over two hundred years ago, Wordsworth wrote, The World is too Much With Us, and until this last decade of my life, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. How can the world not be with us? We are of the world; the world is ours, and it is the summan bonum of life to make it–getting and spending–and become, as Tom Wolfe wrote in The Bonfire of the Vanities, masters of the universe…isn’t it?

The last ten years have been difficult and graphic experiences of the world being too present have been rapidly accumulated by every living human being around the world. Personally difficult, yes–that goes without saying, and the challenges and callings of Pysche have become more and more demanding. Aging itself is often discovered to be a bittersweet experience: one may more clearly realize one’s purpose and begin to uncover ones authentic self while simultaneously watch the sand running out of the hourglass leaving so little time, it seems, to attend to such an evolving consciousness. But things have become even more difficult on a cultural and international stage. America, indeed the world, seems to have cut loose from its moorings and drifted into a bizarre simulacrum of itself wherein that which is stated is the opposite of what is meant, a world wherein the things professed to have value are in practice scorned, and a world wherein one may, under the banner of divine love, encourage and enforce cruelty, bigotry, and xenophobia. Yes, things have been difficult lately, perhaps not too difficult, but just enough so that I am sometimes very tired.

So it was with weary eyes (and a nervous stomach) that I watched election events unfold Tuesday night and when, a little after 9 PM, Barack Obama was declared to be the president elect, it just hit me: what a curious, vexing, confusing, and ultimately, what an unutterably beautiful thing the human spirit is. My hopes overflowing that my darling, sleeping daughter will wake up to a new world, and the old one that I inhabit, the world turned upside down by blustering, unreflective, incurious certainty is irrevocably changed for the better by the elevation of a vigorous, intelligent, polyethnic young man with a dazzling smile and preternatural understanding of the social, geopolitical, and historical moment. Surprisingly deep and tender feelings have grown in me for this very decent man that we as a people have chosen to lead us, at last really lead us rather than feed our national narcissism while simultaneously fueling our personal nightmares, and as a result I can’t help but identify with Walt Whitman’s stirring reflections on Abraham Lincoln:

I saw him on his return, at three o’clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and looked very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to be become personally attached to for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native Western form of manliness.)

Like Whitman’s affection for Lincoln, I am realizing that I never see Obama without feeling more and more personally attached to him–all the more so for his unselfconscious exhibition of the same constellation of qualities that Whitman ascribed to Lincoln.

When I was a kid, I remember visiting so many houses that had, in a place of importance hanging on a wall, a portrait of JFK. I was consistently overawed by the professions of love and the tender reminiscences that Kennedy inspired in the adults around me, and I grew to love him with the same kind of love that a son feels for a father. I had not imagined I could experience a similar depth of feeling for a political leader again–until now. I have watched in amazement as the machinery of destiny mingled with Obama’s own courage and aspirations to create a unique moment in the history of the world; it feels to me as if Arthur has returned to mend the battered walls of Camelot.

That this single event reverberates around the world is because of its unique ability to offer a glimpse of a hidden reality supporting a deeper truth that, as Wordsworth writes, makes one feel less forlorn, less out of tune; it opens ones heart to a profound gratitude and an inescapable sense that change is at hand, that the old determinants of fear and savage power will no longer define the world. The language and emotion surrounding the man, Obama, and his achievements often carry an unmistakable tone of religious devotion and hope, or apocalyptic caution (I heard a woman on NPR refer to him, with all seriousness, as the Anti-Christ), a tone that has been often criticized by both detractors and admirers alike during the course of his campaign, but such spiritual hyperbole is understandable in both historic and archetypal traditions.

From an historical perspective, slaves and abolitionists alike depended on a variety of liberation theology to sustain and embolden them, beliefs that gave them hope of a heavenly existence yet to come while simultaneously providing comfort while living in a hell on earth. There is something of the numinous surrounding Obama in his appearance apparently out of nowhere and his rapid ascent, and it is not difficult at all for anybody, not only minorites, to see the fulfillment of a divine promise of equality in which the last is now first, the slave is now the leader, and the stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.

Archetypally speaking, there is a powerful promise of collective renewal and rebirth embedded in the action, in the expression, in the behavior of electing this man; a promise removed from the purely conceptual, intuitive realm and established in the embodied, manifest world. Perhaps something approaching autofécondation interieure, the rebirth and renewal of a suppressed ancient soul, an awareness of a connection to each other, the world, indeed the universe itself, is occurring in the unconscious collectivity of the American electorate.

Senator Obama has been referred to as the first post-partisan president elect. I might also offer that he is the first post-identity (I’ll have to come up with a more mellifluent phrase) president, rejecting the politics of identity and identity groups and the cultural particularism that has increasingly, and perhaps unintentionally, given rise to the coarseness, bellicosity, and narcissism leading to the death of discourse in this country.

Late in his life, Michelle Foucault reevaluated his thinking about the negative consequences of subjectivity, what he called, “the hegemony of man.” Previously he had believed that the only solution to this tyrannical mode of being, a way of being that separated and elevated humankind above everything else on the planet, was through adopting an ethos of radical transgression–a delightfully appealing postmodern notion. Later, however, Foucault began to legitimatize the Greco-Roman notion of aesthetic subjectivity and “the choice of a beautiful life:”

What strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something which is related to objects and not to individuals, or to life….But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

The beauty of Foucault’s thought is that one need not nostalgically long to be, nor try to become as Wordsworth wrote, a Greco-Roman “pagan” in order to see the world yield up its miracles. Miracles are available to anyone anywhere as soon as one gives up identity and particular expectations of reality–still a radical transgression it seems, but at exactly that moment, the gods appear. I think this is what has touched me most deeply about this recent and miraculous presidential election: possibility became reality and at least for a season, Americans envisioned their lives as a work of art.

The Truth of Myth

I am often asked what, finally, is myth all about, what is its function? Why is mythology so prominently seated on the psychic fence posts supporting fences which are inevitably, it seems, erected between cultures? After all of my years of study devoted to exploring this question, I am convinced there is no one right answer, that there is no correct, encompassing theory of mythology that answers the question, “What is myth?” satisfactorily; there is, alas, no unified field theory of mythology. Each theory fills in gaps in knowledge or understanding and moves us farther down the road of understanding why mythology, folklore, and even fairy tales are important to human beings, but no one theory alone adequately explains the persistent, and powerful presence of myth.

For instance, Bruce Lincoln convincingly argues that in prehistory, the word mythos denoted “a blunt and aggressive act of candor […] an assertive discourse of power and authority that represents itself as something to be believed and obeyed.” What difference a dozen millennia or so make! The definition of the word mythos as authoritative and truthful speech has, over time, acquired for itself the exact opposite meaning so that in the popular idiom today, myth means something false or untrue; a fairy tale or a “just so story” at best. But Lincoln’s scholarship in this regard touches upon something still relevant to modern men and women: the fact that underneath the fantastic narratives, the improbable beasts, and the arbitrary gods, myth speaks to aspects of the human experience that remain fundamentally enduring and true today, even as they were for those human beings alive twelve thousand years ago.

Where one runs into problems, however, is in trying to understand just what those truths are. Joseph Campbell, for instance, posits four functions of myth:

In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive–vitalizing
all–is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being [….]

The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of a presence and the presence of a mystery. The cosmology has to correspond, however, to the actual experience, knowledge, and mentality of the culture folk involved [….] Today we turn to science or our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world [….]

A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group [….]

The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization.

Scholars often tend to focus on only one function of myth, the one that makes the most sense to them, and proffer that function as the underlying “truth” of the myth. Even Campbell himself most often privileged the fourth function of myth–the psychologizing function–as the most significant. Indeed, Robert Segal comments that:

For Campbell, myth is not only necessary for the deepest human fulfillment, but also sufficient. One needs nothing else, including therapy. In fact, therapy is only for those without myth.

Myth for Campbell contains all the wisdom humans need. They need only learn to interpret it. They need never venture beyond it.

In other words, the most important function of myth, at least, in Campbell’s view of it, is to draw the individual’s attention to unrecognized, innate reserves of heroic psychic energy that may inform one’s life in such a way that one experiences human fulfillment.

On the other hand, Bruce Lincoln takes a view of mythology that is, if not actually representative of, at least closely related to, Campbell’s third function of myth. Lincoln prefers to describe myth as “ideology in narrative form,” and as an example of such ideological transmission, Lincoln cites an old, Irish myth:

To accomplish its end, the Táin does not just differentiate the categories of male and female, or the others with which these are brought into association…It also ranks these, and misrepresents the ranking it offers as the product of nature and necessity rather than as a contingent set of human preferences advanced by interested actors, some of whom are responsible for the text. This misrepresentation is an ideological move characteristic of myth, as is the projection of the narrator’s ideals, desires, and favored ranking of categories into a fictive prehistory that purportedly establishes how things are and must be.

I find it very hard to argue with Lincoln’s thesis. His book, Theorizing Myth, is well argued and well researched, and one may easily imagine any number of historical situations in which ideology informed the transmission of myth. Yet, Lincoln’s theory is also incomplete. Myth may also be used as a means to understand and reflect upon cycles of nature, to create order from chaos, and through analogy relieve anxiety. As a psychiatrist, C. G. Jung believed that myth facilitated attempts to probe into the mysteries of existence, explore the apparent limitlessness of psyche, and, through mythology’s mythopoetic power, endow individuals with a sense of awe and wonder as they gaze upon, and ultimately embrace, the incomprehensible marvels and horrors of life.

Myth establishes a bridge that brings the relationship between human beings and psyche into a more fully conscious, though not literally black and white, or even (oddly, it seems) comprehensible realm. Jung writes:

It is possible to describe this [unconscious] content in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character. Therefore, in describing the living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.

And, more forcefully that
Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings [….] Myths […] have a vital meaning. Not merely do they represent, they are […] psychic life [….]

If myths are the stuff of psychic life, as Jung has asserted, they are not mere nothings and therefore valueless; the myths themselves are shifted into and embodied upon the field of psychic reality, and so established, operate as facts. Psychological facts are as real as any other facts one may take into consideration. They only lack a material substance, and so lacking are often confused with nothing; but psychological facts are indeed something, and they often establish motives for the most extraordinary of behaviors.

The logos of mythology appears to be able to describe and give significance and some limited understanding to the condition of being human better than other approaches, precisely because myth, as Campbell observes, “does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.” Myth, because of its indistinct, metaphoric, poetic nature offers a more discriminating and more personally relevant explanation of the world to individuals than does the language of discrimination itself, science. This is why people will often reject documented evidence obtained through scientific inquiry in favor of their own feelings or beliefs.

However, one needs be mindful, as Dogen has cautioned, to not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In other words, one myth standing alone does not, nor can it possibly, hold all of the archetypes or distill the mysterium into a tidy, succinct, authoritative narrative. Therefore one must take pains to try and understand an entire oeuvre of myth before the mysteries might possibly begin to yield, ever so uncertainly, to understanding. Even the achievement of such great understanding may, in and of itself, not be enough: a fractured, two dimensional reflection of the one, holographic, essential mystery is not enough to supply a coherent “unified field theory” of myth. Consequently, lacking the big picture, one is left to suffer from feelings of incompleteness, inadequacy, and incomprehension because a telescope big enough to see that has not yet been invented.

Such a lack of understanding is often felt within oneself as a lesion on the soul, or a perforation in psyche, and one’s awareness of carrying such a wound instills a hope that the healing balm might be found over that next hill, or just around the next bend, and all that matters for now is to go in search of them. Beverly Zabriskie writes:

Psychologically, they [the characters of myth] showed that deeply felt suffering may transcend the limits of outer events. The one way journey of the natural law, of life as affliction and pain, becomes the two way crossing wherein one may return to oneself with a sense of greater strength and meaning.

Though they may lead us away from who and what is loved, the soul’s migrations also lead us more deeply into ourselves, and into a better understanding of what it means to be a human being held within, and holding onto, psyche.

Often, the “who” or the “what” that has become one’s treasure has been grounded in a crude, material, one-dimensional notion of reality and looks like an accumulation of power or financial success. The leave-taking movement asks one to step outside these parameters and chase after uncannily familiar energy, a presence that has suddenly dropped off one’s radar. Choosing to examine myth from a psychological perspective employs a model that describes the reality and functions of psyche while at the same time allows human beings to more consciously participate in it: Jung wrote, “Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious processes, and their retelling causes these processes to come alive again and be recollected, thereby re-establishing the connection between conscious and unconscious.” By advancing the connection between consciousness and unconsciousness, the inner and outer worlds are now more harmoniously attuned to one another, and each is imbued with more meaning, with more relevance, and with more value.

Menelaus and Helen’s Excellent Adventure

And yet he weeps for him, and sorrows for him, and then it is over, for the Destinies put in mortal men the heart of endurance. — Homer, The Iliad

One of the most difficult things to face in life is injustice, and the world gives one plenty of it; injustice gnaws at the marrow of one’s being even though the ideals of Western culture, indeed much of the world, have been committed to the eradication of injustice for hundreds of years (Thousands, if one wishes to include ancient Greece). Yet, in spite of all these efforts, countless individuals are victims of injustice every single day, our cultural values and political institutions are awash in corruption; individuals seek political office not to pacify a brutish world, but rather the selfish acquisition of wealth and power. Local and federal governments promote mindless conformity while civil rights are gleefully, self-righteously, trammeled. All too frequently it seems as if America has been transformed into a nation of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who consistently punish incredulity and refuse to initiate any independent thought or action.

In the midst of bleak circumstances it is difficult, if not impossible, to find answers, hope, or meaning. It is tempting to think that never before have things been so bad nor fallen so far, but that would not only be wrong, it would be naive. Suppression of civil rights is not new, nor should it be surprising, for humanity has always possessed a great talent for expressing its worst impulses and finding novel ways of imposing its dissipated will upon the masses. Not only are the circumstances in which we live historically familiar, their dynamics have existed in social systems from time immemorial. In his book, Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner writes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In a sense, Faulkner is echoing James Joyce who, some thirty years earlier in his masterpiece, Ulysses, utters, “History is nightmare from which I’m still trying to awake.” It seems that the desire for power–an irresistible, rapacious, imperial power–which subsequently crushes the human desire for relationship and love under the heel of a boot, is one of the most enduring and compelling instincts the human animal has.

The Iliad describes an uncannily contemporary situation: a superpower ventures across an expanse of sea to destroy a city-state–a diverse, sophisticated city-state rich in natural and cultural resources, located along ancient routes of trade–all because of an inflamed, and therefore unbearable, wound to a pugnacious, arrogant, uncurious, and ill-natured leader’s ego. Easily recognizable to modern readers, the rulers of the Greek state of Argos were Agamemnon and his younger brother Menelaus, two descendents of, even by ancient standards, despicable, treacherous, and barbarous ancestors. Their great-grandfather was the infamous Tantalus who, wanting to test the god’s omniscience, killed, chopped up and served his own son, Pelops, to the gods as a ritual dinner (The gods weren’t fooled and devised a special torture for Tantalus in Hades). Until Orestes (Agamemnon’s son) fulfills his destiny, psychopathic ruthlessness is the most notable characteristic floating in the gene pool of those born unto the House of Atreus. Agamemnon, inexorably influenced by his ancestral nature, seems destined to always choose the worst of any two alternatives presented to him; he is filled with murderous Atê, his peculiar frenzy and his eventual ruin, his recklessness and dissolute violence (he murders his own daughter as a sacrifice to the gods); he capitalizes on an event, which is at worst personally humiliating for his brother, and fabricates a pretext by which he, self-satisfied and self-righteously, obliterates a society.

Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, is not a particularly large presence in The Iliad, but he is something of a weasel: a braggart and a histrionic, a bully who presses his advantage over those who are weaker. In his Poetics, Aristotle describes his character as “indecorous and inappropriate,” strong disapprobation from Aristotle. Helen, the semi-divine beauty, seems rather empty-headed and somewhat uncomprehending of her role in the atrocities playing out before her. But, perhaps that judgment is too harsh; perhaps one never understands the role of fate or destiny in one’s own life during the moment of its unfolding. Nevertheless, her name hints at her destiny: hela means “to destroy,” and na refers to ships, although she proves far more fatal to the relatively land loving Trojans than she does to the Greek navy. After her lover, Paris, is killed Euripides suggests she secretly aids the besieging Greeks in a number of ways, hastening Troy’s fall. Eventually, and with no apparent thought to the tragic events they set in motion, Menelaus and Helen are reconciled and legend has it that they live happily together thereafter in the Elysian Fields. One can almost see them, blithely sauntering off into retirement, content to busy themselves with plans for building Menelaus’ presidential library.

One may easily be made to wonder just how this is fair; how is this even remotely just? How can these two, causes of so much death and destruction, simply live out their lives free from any consequence whatsoever? Homer instructs his readers that “Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness,” but surely this cannot suffice for an explanation; and indeed, it does not. There is an explanation; however, the explanation is imprisoned beneath the lines of the text, it is a non-literal, elusive meaning that defies authoritative articulation and singular definition; it is an explanation that may only be imagined. As a brief aside, imagination is very different from fantasy. Fantasy is, quite simply, an autoerotic diversion while imagination is a powerful, transformational, and potentially unlimited creative endeavor: as the poet John Keats wrote, “I am certain of only two things: the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the power of imagination.”

Once imagination is engaged to the unwritten implications of the text, a multiplicity of meanings may be discovered, exponentially proliferating sets of meanings, meanings that are barely contained beneath the plot driven, logically and chronologically cohering text. One of the meanings emerging from the margins of the text is that the simple, single-minded, desire for love and relatedness is so transcendently redemptive that even grotesques such as Menelaus and Helen are atoned for. Survival, for Homer, seems to be related to the burning desire for relationship and love: Agamemnon is interested only in the accouterments of wealth and the esteem power provides him; everyone and everything else–even his daughter’s life–is a distant second to achieving his own aims, and as a result, once he returns home he is ignominiously dispatched by his wife, slaughtered like a market-bred steer. A desire other than relationship also consumed Achilles; he is filled with hatred of Agamemnon, and wants revenge for the petty and arbitrary way he has been treated. Soon enough, an even more burning hatred and vengeance is born within Achilles when his soul mate, Patroklos, is killed, and as invincible as Achilles appears to be, even he cannot escape the fatal consequence of harboring dark and ugly motives. There are others, those like Ajax, pursuing the glory of battle, which are eventually, and inevitably, dispatched from Homer’s narrative.

But others, like Diomedes, recognize and honor relationships with opponents, and in so doing, appear to live through the brutal and overlong war. Not the least of these is Odysseus, who from the very beginning was reluctant to leave his loved ones and, once he left, ached to be reunited with them. His thoughts never leave his family for long, and all his efforts in battle are directed toward reunification rather than victory for victory’s sake. Perhaps the elderly Nestor survives because of relational longings as well, but in his case rather than longing for another, his relationship is to the past, linked through a sacrament of proper remembering, nurturing the past’s proper place in the present.

That meaningful relationships enhance one’s life is a long established fact: married people tend to have longer lives, children retard the physical and mental effects of aging in their parents, and having a pet of some kind lowers blood pressure and ameliorates depression. Relationships demonstrably improve the quality of one’s life. In fact, relationship may be the fundamental goal of life. After the fall of Troy it is relationship, in all its variations, which commands the attention of the ancient poets: Odysseus’ efforts to return to Penelope; Clytemnestra’s murderous marriage to Agamemnon, Orestes’ devotion to his sister and, ultimately, to the ideals of the city-state and the rule of law; Andromache and Hekabe’s life in Greek slavery; Menelaus and Helen’s happiness.

It may well be that relationship is the entire point of falling. Not until Adam and Eve are evicted from Paradise is a deeper, more conscious relationship to the divine possible. When people fall in love, the fog of romance and the nature of unconscious projections prevent genuine relationship; couples must fall out of love in order to move into relationship. Through neuroses and addictions, one often falls into the depths of oneself, hits bottom if you will, and it is only in the depths of one’s own being that one may glimpse who, or what, one most authentically is. Any structure too imbalanced or one sided is bound to fall, and as reconstruction evolves, a more balanced way of existing is found; a fact no less true for psychic structures than for concrete and steel ones. Falling, in quite literal ways, creates deeper relationships to the material world: learning about gravity, understanding the fragility of the body and the resiliency of skin, finding the limits of kinetic energy and physical ability, mastering self-care and healing; all such essential knowledge is inspired by falling.

Understanding the apparent injustice of Menelaus and Helen’s happiness is to understand the Fall of Troy as the beginning, rather than the end of the story. Falling is never the end of anything; in fact, falling always, and in all ways, reorients one to beginnings, beginnings filled with unlimited potential and the call to deeper relationship. If Troy had never been sacked, Athens could not have emerged as one of the noblest experiments in human dignity and self-determination the ancient world had yet known: there is a direct line of cause and effect beginning with Agamemnon’s involvement in the sacking of Troy, to Orestes’, his son, central role in the establishment of a democratic Athens. When the injustice of falling is immense one tends to become disoriented, focused on the blinding injustice while one’s desire for cosmos, for order, is subverted and the world no longer makes intuitive sense.

Standing in the rubble of fallen things, it is quintessentially human to want to see only that which has been lost. Grief, fear and pain limit one’s vision and direct one’s focus to a former unity, a unity that was an illusion of prelapsarian wholeness. Great courage, and a heroic act of will, is required to see through past illusions which one is yet inclined to mistake for present realities. Menelaus and Helen didn’t “get away” with anything, people like them never do. For, in the most fundamental sense, they must live with themselves and each other as they are; they will not be magically transformed into compassionate, loving, or caring people. They will always be, as F. Scott Fitzgerald characterized Tom and Daisy, “careless people” who, regardless of the gleaming exteriors they cultivate, are filled with a moral cancer and crippled by an incurable soul sickness. What’s more, the story was never about them, but rather the story is about what their extraordinary lack of consciousness helped to create. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what kind of people they were, they were merely instruments or tools anyway, subplots within the much greater, perpetually unfolding narrative Psyche commandeers to create consciousness in human beings, particularly the awareness of the necessity of deep, loving relationships, not only to each other, but to Matter itself.

If one can learn to see through the injustice and unfairness that often attends falling, one may achieve a glimpse of the source from which deep relationships and love springs, and with this vision drawing one on, new ways of living emerge and vast reservoirs of consciousness are filled so that life without endings becomes a reality; living without infantile needs for closure, that ubiquitous cultural chimera, which so often results in emotional violence if not actual physical violence, is achieved; desires for love and relationship to be satisfied are surrendered, and in surrender a deeper truth is made clear, a truth that teaches that the aim of such desires–the aim of love and relationship–is not for them to be satisfied, but sustained.

Should Not in Greatest Arts Some Scars Be Found?

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
–Leonard Cohen

Scars are curious things given an even more curious name: the word scar is derived from the Greek word eschara, meaning place of fire. The word does not mean caused by fire or nor that scars are the result of exposing one’s skin to fire, although there is a connection to the Latin word for scab. No, scar means quite literally the place of fire: the fire is found within the scar and the scar is already present in the fire. Perhaps its derivation has to do with the sensation of intense, searing pain, the kind of pain borne by the body at the receipt of a wound, a wound on fire with pain, and deep enough to create scarring. There are other connections to fire to be found in scars: wounds that result in scarring tend to bleed heavily, and blood has long been symbolically associated with fire. Phrases like, “he makes my blood boil” find their roots in the relationship between the physiological arousal of increased blood flow and fire as the symbol of intense passion. Purification is another ancient relationship between fire and blood; together they form the basis of ritual sacrifice and, in fact, bleeding is the body’s way of purifying a wound.

The most familiar English usage defines a scar as a mark left on the skin after a surface injury or wound has healed. Scars commemorate and memorialize, they freeze time, space, and emotion in pale, sometimes jagged, and awkwardly knitted lines on the skin, and not infrequently, they leave a jagged signature upon the heart as well. And even though there is no apparent etymological relationship between them, one can’t resist adding an “e” to scar, to create the word scare. A scary encounter leaves scars, even children know that. Psychic trauma is referred to as emotional scarring, and it gets its very own medically approved diagnosis: Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. One can hardly deny that it makes intuitive sense to relate scar and scare. After all, intense fear–being scared to death for instance–leaves its deeply etched mark upon the mind even though the frightening event has long since passed. In fact, it is often the scar no one else can see that is the hardest to bear.

Chatting with a friend the other day, we began talking about scars–major scars, deep scars, vivisecting surgical scars–and how hard it is to adjust to living with them. Regarding the outside of the body, worry about what others see when they look at one’s wounds, and concern over the kind of narratives others will apply to explain the wound occupy one’s thoughts, erode one’s self-confidence, and force one to harshly revise or re-imagine one’s body image. On the inside, in the mind’s eye, the scar is an immutable reminder of one’s own vulnerability, one’s mortality, and one’s ultimate fragility in the face of fortune’s vicissitudes. All one’s fears, everything that scares, are made conscious in unaccustomed and disturbing clarity; wraiths materialize through unfamiliar fault-lines spanning the topography of previously unmarked flesh.

Scars also serve as a means of identification: if one ever has the misfortune of being booked into jail, one of the questions asked is whether one has any birthmarks, tattoos, or scars. Scars are an ancient way of tendering or proffering one’s identity. One of the most poignant accounts of recognition and identification may be found in Book XIX of The Odyssey, when the disguised Odysseus (transfigured to look like an old, decrepit beggar by Athena) is given a bath by his old nursemaid, Euryclea: as she begins to bath him, she recognizes the scar on his thigh, received as a small boy when he was gored by a boar, and through her recognition of the scar, identifies Odysseus himself. Her eyes fill with tears of mixed grief and joy as she clutches him by his beard and calls him her “dear boy.” For he who was dead is alive again and he, who was lost, is found.

For the lover longing for the beloved, the beloved’s scar is a welcome affirmation of her presence. The scar is an inseperable part of the beloved herself, and any sight of it ipso facto incarnates the beloved; so much so, in fact, that the scar may become as much an object of love as the loved one herself. Writing of the Christ’s scars in his book, The City of God, St. Augustine expresses a similar sentiment when he says that they (Christ’s scars) will not “be a deformity, but [have] a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body.” This is an essential idea to take note of, and it bears repeating that the body does not manufacture the beauty shining in and through the scars, in fact the body is not, in and of itself, beautiful. If the body does not produce the beauty, then what does? Beauty is, in fact, created by a powerful alchemy involving a scarring wound, a loving gaze, and a precious foundling, all culminating in a moment of poetry and illumination. It is the result of, as Leonard Cohen sang, the word becoming flesh. Love is transformed from an abstract, vaguely meaningful word into a living, breathing, and human experience promising answers to all life’s insoluble riddles (It is worth pointing out that wounds, particularly lacerations, to the body often assume the shape of a mouth. Perhaps the word cannot become flesh without inflicting a wound; in other words, creating a mouth which has something to say.)

According to Greek Stoic philosophers the word, or logos, embodied the creative principle; it was literally the singular, creative force. Imagine the blinding light that would pour out of every pore of the body if one managed to install the universal creative force within a single human being. Yet that is the way in which the beloved is usually encountered: she is met as one who has fashioned the entire universe solely for the pleasure of the fortunate lover upon whom she smiles, she becomes conflated with the creatrix belle-mère, the beautiful mother-goddess who creates the world. Unfortunately, it is too often a commonplace that the logos lives just outside one’s own experience, remains embodied in another, and the desire to lose oneself in the beloved arises quickly. An appealing idea begins to dawn that loosing oneself may, in fact, be the answer to escaping one’s own inner struggles and unmanageable, painful emotions. The beloved is perfect, or so the fugitive consciousness reasons, and oneself is irredeemably flawed; her scars radiate the light of creation while one’s own simply accentuate one’s brokenness; and so convinced, the flight from the self into the other is complete.

The scar and its shadow are made deeper and darker by attempts to recoil from and hide them, and one’s anguish is compounded as the attempts to conceal one’s scars inevitably fail, until finally, one wears one’s scars as a symbol of everything corrupted, debauched, perverted, and subverted within. Nothing emanating from such an internal state can help but be grotesquely and tragically flawed. In a poem called, My Father’s Wedding, Robert Bly describes the state of affairs resulting from such an inversion:

If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

Everyone is familiar with such a character who, whether in real life or in fiction, spreads poison and corruption throughout the world to compensate his inability to apprehend beauty; Richard III sneers that since he was not made “to court an amorous looking glass” he will choose to be a villain, “and hate the idle pleasures of these days.” Al Capone’s scar imbued him with a profound quality of menace and invincibility throughout much of his career. But once he was brought down and shown to be a simple thug, a cruel, syphilitic bully bolstered by swagger and braggadocio, his scar appeared, in the eyes of the public, altered to reflect his decay; his scar became a symbol of everything torn apart, of everything shattered, and of everything ruined within him. Even in traditional presentations, witches, demons, trolls and monsters are frequently described as having ugly, terrifying scars.

One of the most memorable of literary scars is that of Captain Ahab’s in Moby Dick. His scar threaded its way out from under his grey hair and ran down the side of his face and neck, disappearing beneath his shirt collar. Speculation among the crew was that the scar ran the length of his body and culminated on the soles of his feet, the way a lightning strike will sometimes run down and scar the length of a great tree from crown to root. Experiences that leave such long and deep scars are life altering, and afterward one will no longer be what one was before the scar was received. In these brief examples, each one refused the call of change that always attends such a wound and instead reacted with infantile rage at having been subjected to the sometimes crippling nature of life; a nature that may, according to some indiscriminate whim, core one like an apple. Each, in his unwillingness to see in his wound the brilliant light of creation, saw everyone and everything as an acceptable target for his rage. Ultimately, that is the undoing of individuals such as these, for they eventually target themselves with the same pitiless violence previously reserved for everyone else. Now these are extreme examples to be sure, but these very same dynamics are present in the psychologies of untold numbers of people; the difference being that whatever else has been lacerated in them, the connection–however tenuous it may be–to others and to humane values has not been entirely severed.

While one may feel as though exposure to apocalyptic conflagration has reduced one to ashes, it is important to remember that the fire that burns and scars is not the fire of annihilation, but rather it is the fire stoked within the alchemical furnace, and a new life is fashioned in these flames. Whenever two previously unrelated things are joined together a scar, or a seam if you will, is always the result; and when individuals are joined to previously unknown and unconscious aspects of the themselves, scarring is the painful and inescapable result. Bringing together the disparate aspects of oneself is not at all easy and in doing so one often feels oneself to be at the edge of personal extinction. It can only be ever thus: only when one is faced with something overwhelming can the archetype of wholeness be constellated. So do not be ashamed to look at scars. Valorize them; caress them; trace their course in your skin and in your mind’s eye. Scars are roadways drawn onto maps of flesh, leading always to the truth buried deep within oneself.

Falling Up

Many things have fallen only to rise higher.
–Seneca

There is an old saying in the American South: “If you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by itself.” This is as if to say one should look more deeply, see through the apparent phenomenon the world presents, question why things are as they appear to be, and from such an encounter–the starting point, so to speak–seek deeper truths. Such deep looking, rather tangentially, I admit, links turtles to falling–specifically, to falling up. That is, after all, one possible explanation for how the turtle found itself atop a fence post: it fell up there. But first, consider a few other things, through which I hope to make the relationship between turtles and falling up more distinct. There is a very old joke, and as to its origins I am unsure, but I will present it here as I have heard it told so many times:

A disciple asks his guru what it is that supports the earth, and the guru replies that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies “Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.”

Another familiar version of the story is this:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called a galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

The notion of turtles or tortoises supporting the earth is an ancient one (the turtle itself is an ancient animal, existing in some form on the earth for the past 150 million years), and figures prominently in a remarkable, and remarkably diverse, assortment of mythologies from around the world. In many Native American myths, the earth is supported on the back of giant turtle who in turn swims the cosmic sea, and for the Sioux particularly, the earth is itself a huge tortoise floating on the celestial waters; in Hindu mythology the god, Vishnu, assumes the form of a turtle and carries the world on his back; when attacking fortified redoubts, Roman centurions fashioned a protective formation they called the tortoise by holding overlapping shields above their heads; in ancient China it was said that the turtle’s shell formed the vault of heaven while its four legs signified the four cardinal directions or the four corners of the earth.

Interestingly, the Chinese also equated the turtle with the yin principle and the element of water. Why it might be related to water is easily deduced, but a somewhat more puzzling question is, what is the turtle’s relationship to yin energy? Yin has traditionally been defined as the energy of the feminine as opposed to Yang, the energy of the masculine. Yin is a softer, more yielding, a more supple energy; the word itself variously translates to shady place, North Slope, cloudy, overcast, and south bank of the river. Yin is frequently described in watery terms: slow moving, fluid, tranquil, streaming. It has qualities of preservation and darkness (interestingly, turtles have notoriously bad eyesight and find their way primarily by feeling their way around land or through currents). Finally, if you separate the turtle’s shell from its owner and turn it over one may easily imagine a vessel–a dish, a bowl, or a container–and from there, it is not at all difficult to imagine the turtle’s shell as a biological container, a womb.

From this point on when speaking of turtles, one is no longer able to only discuss literal turtles; now conversations about turtles necessarily include one’s awareness of all the unconscious and archetypal elements of turtles as well. Turtles have become metaphor and symbol, a way of seeing more deeply into the world of phenomena and material presence, and thusly seen, “turtleness” is no longer a hidden element of an encounter with an actual turtle, sauntering about and barely contained under the surface of its own literality, and our’s. Meaning beyond a literal turtle is produced, and the “meaning” of turtles may now be found everywhere. Meaning, or meaningfulness, is a funny thing; there is no meaning to be found in a single thing or set-of-things. But if multiplicities of “thingness,” or sets of non-literal meanings arise, an inner significance or inner substance may be sensed or intuited–but probably not articulated–which may radically alter one’s world.

In this spirit of thought experiment, I began to wonder how turtles fall after I encountered a poem by Kay Ryan, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, entitled, simply, Turtle (please note that Ryan’s turtle is a female):

Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.

Turtles it seems, are unable to fall down, if only by virtue of already existing so close to the surface of the earth. Even if they do freefall the one or two millimeters of space that exists between themselves and the ground, it is most probably of no great consequence to them. If, barring a fall into a well or off the edge of an abyss, they are to end up in “serving dish” posture there must be some element of falling up, a necessary direction if a turtle is to end up on its back.

Ryan tells her readers that the turtle “exists below luck-level” and has little capacity for imagining beyond the literal life she daily experiences. But this is where the archetypal and metaphorical qualities of turtles fundamentally alter the turtle’s (and alters anyone who sees beyond the turtle’s literality) mundane existence. The hitherto hidden antediluvian history and mind-numbing significance of “turtleness” raise it up far beyond its humble, individual domesticity and point by the example of its archetypal nature to esoteric forces that are quite capable of “turning her load of pottery to wings.” The levitating force, the inverted gravity that makes one fall up, is equanimity, or patience as Ryan calls it–an intensely mindful awareness and acceptance of things as they are–combined with chastening.

Chastening is a marvelous word for the poet to have used as it means to correct, restrain, or to purify; and judging from the way the word reverberates in this poem, she most likely intends all three meanings at the same time. Most, if not all, individuals eventually reach a point at which chastened is the most poignantly descriptive word one has with which to describe the wisdom that accumulates, often painfully, along and through the course of a life. Always attached to such hard-won wisdom is an untold abundance of images also accumulated over years of living and now have become fixed in the individual. The totality of consciousness (consciousness + unconsciousness) is like an eye that is able to see into the most distant, dark spaces and espy the images comprising the totality of human experience. And these images are not simply dreams, memories, or reflections, but are instead tremendously powerful psychic factors that impinge upon and inform one’s life in the same manner “reality” does.

In one of his letters, C. G. Jung pointed out that all things are “as if” they were real, and that even those things that people and cultures routinely consider to be real are, in truth, the effects of some thing or things that cannot be known. Why, then, dismiss and force out of one’s mind the notion of falling upwards as something physically impossible and irrational, even though the thought of it may persist and even seem to draw one into some deeper experience of oneself and the world? Instead, one should look more deeply into such a compelling image and find what the world, indeed what one’s life, might be trying to communicate. The feared danger of losing touch with reality is diminished by cultivating patience and by the chastening quality intrinsic to life, which paradoxically concentrates and leavens consciousness at the same time bringing cosmos, good order, to inner chaos. Without allowing the light of consciousness to fall on the inner world, a full understanding of the outer is not possible, regardless of the technological sophistication brought to bear upon it.

However, submitting to such inner work is generally thought of as a liability: phrases such as navel gazing, wool gathering, and far worse are used to describe it. Our collective culture seems unable to tolerate falling down; the inner work, equated to an intolerable vulnerability, threatens the hyper-valued phallocentric structures of thinking, problem solving, and planning. Falling down is synonymous with a demonstrated lack of stamina, a lack of skill, and (horrors!!!) impotence. If one watched even a few moments of either national political party’s recent conventions with an even mildly incredulous eye, this sad fact was shockingly apparent: the conventioneer’s insistence upon splitting themselves off from the myriad problems this country faces was consistently reinforced by a fragile, self-satisfied superiority framed in self-congratulatory rhetoric specifically designed to discourage any sort of introspection whatever. Because to focus on anything but the positive, to move in any direction other than straight ahead, is to shatter the Edenic unconsciousness this culture insists upon at this peculiar moment in history. Individuals are no less prone to this kind of psychic inflation than the collective. It is no different, and no less delusional, than Tantalus insisting he spends his days in retirement, lounging in his summer home in the Hamptons. This virulent variety of willful unconsciousness denies anything is wrong even while one is plummeting, falling farther and farther, into the abyss.

Eventually, in spite of all efforts, conscious or not, to avoid it, everyone arrives at a moment in life when the appearance of truth draws well nigh; when, to follow the thread of this essay, there begins to form, in the dimmest glimmer of a notion, the realization that if one can become more conscious of falling, one stops falling down and begins to fall up. But this invites, if one is honest, a distinctly discomfiting feeling of the uncanny, as if to ask, “What is this, and how can this be?” But that uncanny sensation is an unavoidable presence when encountering something unexpected, say, a turtle atop a fence post, precisely because the uncanny is what always accompanies a move outside a domestic, predictable experience of life. The uncanny is not a threat, but rather it is a calling, perhaps even a seduction; it invites one to fall into its mysteries, and while falling, to rise up and explore it; most of all it is an invitation to discover transformation, the transformation of the sort that changes pottery into wings.

De Profundis Clamo ad te Domine

Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he does not know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to exhaust the dimensions of something so large!

– Chuang Tzu

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you have probably noticed my hesitation to post in the past few weeks, a hesitation which may become clear as you read on. It’s important to speak one’s truth, and in doing so I don’t wish to simply bash psychology; I love it too much to do that, but I am arguing that psychology, as it is most commonly taught and practiced, has lost its way; it has sold its soul so that it might be regarded as clear-eyed, hard science. While I am the last practitioner to argue that psychology should abandon its empiricism–it cannot be debated that in its empirical origins is to be found its value–I am arguing that psychology, as a discipline, must strip itself of the misleading, seductive garments of scientism–the belief that science or the scientific method can alone explain psychological phenomena. Psychology is not a field ideally suited for the application of scientific methodology; in the application of research conducted upon large groups important individual differences are lost, and in deviations from the norm, pathology is declared without turning a skeptical eye to the norm itself. Such prima-facie assumptions are often found to be in direct conflict with the everyday experience of living that most people have, and creates a nearly unspannable gulf of misunderstanding and misattribution between therapists and their clients.

All of this is not to say that psychology is meaningless; it’s not, it may yet be of great value to individuals and to culture. Psychology is a legitimate field of study, a bonafide area of inquiry, and an important, even necessary, subject of human investigation. Understanding the human condition and its constituent elements is often the precursor to ameliorating human suffering. But the field of psychology has become possessed by its own shadow, a shadow that emerges in the discipline’s fears of inadequacy (which are quite legitimate, for finally and fully understanding the human condition is impossible), its superstition, and in its egregious, passive-aggressive treatment of narrative.

The field of psychology comes by its inferiority complex honestly; Sigmund Freud himself was wracked with insecurities, and his invention carries within itself the legacy of its progenitor’s feared inadequacies. While I am not a Freud scholar (but I am a Freud enthusiast and have read most of his work), my impression is that he was first and foremost a biologist; he made revolutionary and lasting contributions to that field and established an enviable reputation as the result of some of his researches. He was secondarily I believe, a physician–his real love was the laboratory, and finally, as if by accident, a psychologist. Physical scientists and physicians, especially those who were university professors, never really gave him the respect he hungrily (and sometimes, judging from his letters, pathetically) sought, and if they did, they gave it grudgingly. It is not unusual–though clearly not warranted–even today to find that psychiatrists are not regarded in the same manner as other physicians, and that they occupy a lower position relative to the medical profession in terms of prestige and compensation.

In its aspirations and pretensions to Science, psychology is an astonishing failure. Questions of causality regarding psychopathology are left begging for answers, or at least some sort of plausible response, and all that may be heard in return is an amalgam of confusing, solipsistic doublespeak and deafening silences. Because of this inability to find clear answers, we psychologists resort to reliance upon a kind of superstition: we give clinical syndromes, various sorts of mental illnesses, bizarre thoughts and behaviors…names. The collection of nomenclatura we call the DSM is, in many psychological circles, taken to be the final word in defining mental health, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Yet, among psychotherapists, the qualities of reliability and internal consistency in the application of the definitions contained in the book are so severely limited as to make the diagnostic categories nearly irrelevant. Even so, as is the case with all the fundamentalist religions of the world, there is still great–almost exclusive–authority invested in the book. Psychology’s compulsion to name (it cannot fairly be termed “diagnose” since a relationship between symptom eruption and causality is hardly ever apparent) is a neurotic expression of superstition and magic implying that if one can figure out the phenomenon’s name, one may control the phenomenon. It is exactly the sort of thinking at the heart of the fairy tale about Rumplestiltskin. If you guess his name, you get rid of this problem guest. Naming is the original magic that allows one to have dominion over the named. In the Judeo-Christian creation myth one of the first things Adam does is name everything in the garden; naming becomes a symbolic act of control and domination.

Finally, in its state of shadow possession, psychology as it is often practiced, does tremendous violence to narrative. As I mentioned earlier, psychologists like other fundamentalists are people of the book, and have grown used to certain symptoms having assigned narratives. Almost without exception, the therapist will ask the client for narrative context, and if they don’t hear the orthodox narrative which traditionally accompanies a given symptom, they simply proceed as if the orthodox narrative is implied, ignoring the presenting narrative with the assumption that the patient is not sufficiently self-aware to be cognizant of the “true” narrative, a narrative the therapist alone, it seems, is privileged to know.

I want once more to emphasize that this is a critique of psychology’s shadow, not of the entire organism itself. I would no more condemn the entire field of psychology for the neurotic expression of its anxieties than I would condemn a human being whom I love for the same fault. Psychology is necessary; it matters deeply. My point is that psychology has lost it own soul, just as human beings so often do, in its search for legitimacy and its subsequent worship at the alter of scientism. But it is not too late to reclaim psychology for the humanities, for the arts, reclaim it for culture, and most importantly, for the individual. But in order to do so we must, paradoxically, no longer believe that psychology is a panacea to be imposed upon every individual who is homeless, criminally inclined, addicted, depressed or simply unhappy; rather, it may only transform those people who meet Psyche (and by logical extension themselves) with an open heart, an open mind, and with a resolute desire to seek out and receive beauty. When individuals encounter the elements of psychological study in the exact same way a work of art is received–a poem for instance–only in this fashion can individuation truly commence, for individuation requires an appreciation for the beauty, sometimes for the horrible beauty, of all that is human.

C. G. Jung once noted that “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” We outgrow by consenting to live into, live through, and live past our symptoms rather than indulge a childish wish to have them excised from us, as easily as a dentist would remove an abscessed tooth. The roots of psychic suffering are seldom found adjacent to the symptom and while one might for the time being eliminate the symptom, the root remains and continues to rankle. Jung once wryly commented that religion is a defense against a religious experience, and I think it may well be said of psychology that psychology is itself a defense against a psychic experience. In other words, the experience that confronts one, whether psychic or spiritual (I’m less and less sure there is a difference), is so vast, so overwhelming, and in the face of it one is so small as to be insignificant, that one retreats to a system of definitions and rules to protect oneself from the enormity of the experience. This is why the science of living, our psychology, needs to be transformed into an art. We would not spend much time with art that was only designed to entertain us or make us happy, and neither should we spend time on a psychology created for the same purpose. A sense of meaning and significance transcends happiness just as beauty in art transcends pleasant images. Happiness is fleeting and mostly a matter of luck (the hap in happiness is the same hap as in mishap, happenstance, happening, happen on, haphazard, etc.) and that is why we must make our lives, as Nietzsche wrote, a poem; this is the only way to live a vital, meaning-filled life of significance, and in addition living artfully, as I will explore in later posts, is the beginning of living mythically.

In his book, Opus Posthumous, the poet Wallace Stevens writes, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” Dominick McLoughlin is a psychoanalyst who uses poetry as therapy for terminally ill patients, and he asserts that, “The act of writing poetry does not involve a flight from reality. It is something much more substantial that sets us squarely within the human condition and allows for the possibility of change.” That “something more substantial” to which McLoughlin refers is a universal quality found in poetry: a particular life is but a small part of a scarcely conceivable whole, each life participates in something greater than itself, something that promises to eradicate existential loneliness and fear, and serves to attune one to inescapable life changes, changes that are inevitable and cause one to search for contentment while carried away by the changes the soul demands.

Aristotle notes that the function of the poet and of poetry is to describe:

not the thing that has happened [that is what Aristotle calls history], but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary […] it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history [or individual experience] are singulars.

Poetry inspires the reader to reconsider the realms, not only of the possible, but as Aristotle shrewdly noted, the necessary. Aristotle wants his readers to understand that what may possibly come to pass is not simply a haphazard future or a random confluence of events. He allows the reader to realize that the products of poesis may well be necessary–a fitting progression of an ongoing life, or a specific answer to a specific question, an answer that arrives on the scene with such a plangency that it cannot be ignored. However, it is often the case–especially in the process of psychotherapy–that what one may envision as necessary seems impossible to capture, and what one believes is possible to achieve does not always appear to be a necessity.

Poetry subtly alludes to that which might be–the life that waits if only one can let go of the need for control and predictability, and leave one’s present condition behind. Literary art provides an indistinct, often vague, notion that one feels more readily than one may articulate, and I believe the difference between poetry and prose is found in this indistinct intuition of feeling.

Helen Vendler suggests that in prose writing narrative voice is distinct, descriptive, and informative; it gives us an abundance of detail and character development and history. But in poetry “voice is made abstract,” which is to say that the reader can know far less about a poetic voice than a narrative voice. It is as if the natural home of the ego-identified self is the novel, while the home of the soul is found in poetry where, Vendler says, “the human being becomes a set of warring passions independent of time and space.” These warring passions serve to construct a bridge that connects the abstract, soulful aspects of human life with its equally important embodied realities, thereby resulting in a more fully conscious individual, one who feels more piquant and vitally alive.

For the careful reader poetry and literature draw attention to the rhythms and cycles of life, and to the individual reader’s journey through them. Literary art supplies one with a gazetteer, a map of the soul and its passions, an atlas that represents the reader’s path and what one might encounter on and off that path. Found in its pages are practical advice as to how best conduct oneself in the face of psychic danger and emotional obstacles. Literature gives the reader a Virgil-like escort who teaches lessons that aid one in developing a greater understanding and a more skillful expression of one’s values and goals.

Epic poetry, specifically, is full to bursting with images of being lost, of journeying, and of being tested. In fact, epic tales capture the essence–the beauty, the horror, and the struggle–of the reader’s individual experience of life. I do not find it to be in the least coincidental that Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, possesses the fairest voice, nor is it a coincidence that she is considered the oldest of the muse-ical sisters. For one who is engaged in the poesis of life, it is important to be able to listen to her voice often and long (and for such extended listening only a fair voice will do) for in her voice is contained the wisdom of all the ages. Calliope’s concerns are of the greatest importance to human beings: the concerns of navigating life’s trials, of integrating the agonistic forces of life, and finding a way to live peacefully with one’s own disjoint nature.

I am arguing that poetry and literature serve as mirrors in which readers see themselves and their own human nature reflected. Hamlet says that the purpose of the dramatic literary arts, “both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as’t were, the mirror up to nature.” Readers become conscious of themselves–of their own natures–and conscious of the archetypes flowing through them by gazing into their own reflections as they appear on the written page. (Harold Bloom makes the point in several of his published works that in all probability, Shakespeare fully intended his plays to be read, and not only performed on the stage by players. Bloom notes that there are subtleties and asides that occur too quickly on the stage for the audience to absorb, and may only be fully encountered on the written page.) But, and this is a crucial point, such an awareness does not come from careless, light reading; one must read archetypally in order to apprehend the archetypes. One must read psychologically in order to understand one’s psychology. And one must read mythically in order for the myth to emerge and be apprehended in one’s life. When one commits to a work of literary art in this manner, the eye that is in the art simultaneously reads the reader. In such a symbiosis of art and observer, knowledge of oneself is received which has heretofore been kept secret from him. The disclosure of such secrets serves to soulfully unite the psychically split individual and create a significant sense of wholeness. Seeing oneself thus reflected fills in the blanks.

In Search of the Shiny Man: The Archetype of Wholeness

A few days ago I was sitting downtown in the morning sun, enjoying a cup o’ coffee with my friend George. George is my favorite psychonaut, a boon companion in our preferred and shared pastime, exploring the edges of consciousness. For some reason I cannot now recall, I found myself recounting a trifle of an experience in which I may have behaved foolishly. It is, however, an experience that for some reason continues to stay with me and is accompanied by a persistent feeling of das unheimlich, a German word meaning uncanny, and is literally translated as “to be not at home.” So all this is to say that the remembering of this ostensibly trifling incident, still has the capacity to pitch me out of my everyday, domestic experience of life; it makes me feel that I am not at home.

One day, a year or two ago, I walked out of a coffee shop in Phoenix, head down and intent on slipping into my car and its comforting aloneness, when out of the corner of my eye, my attention was drawn to a man sitting at a table outside the shop. He was, perhaps, in his thirties and obviously homeless, or at best a dharma bum. His thick dark hair hadn’t seen shampoo for a very long time and framed his face in long, not unattractive dread locks. He was dirty; dirty face, dirty clothes, and dirty hands, but (there is no other way to describe this phenomenon) he was literally shining. His face bore the expression of pure bliss and he was simply beautiful to behold. I kept on walking to my car, but my thoughts had been infected by him. Possibilities regarding the opportunity I might be facing sped through my mind, and I knew I would regret it if I did not speak with him. I turned around, went back to his table, and I sat down across from him. He seemed to be looking past me, as if he were witnessing a vision of the most sublime variety, and still, always upon his face he wore a look of utter ecstasis. He didn’t flinch as I sat down, and never acknowledged my presence, even when I finally spoke and succinctly beseeched him only, “teach me.” He simply continued to blissfully stare, unaware or perhaps even uncaring of my presence. I sat with him for a few more minutes before I left, still captivated by the beatific radiance of his face, and wondering why I was psychospiritually brought to my knees by his compelling presence. Finally, I drove away feeling a bit ashamed, if the truth be told, because I, of all people, should have known better.

After all, I had been a police officer; I dealt with the homeless, the marginalized, the outcast, all the human detritus a society is capable of producing, every working day for six years. On top of that, I’m now a psychoanalyst; I should recognize schizophrenia or other serious mental illnesses when I encounter them. But I’m also a mythologist, I know the stories of the gods assuming the forms of a beggar, of a human wretch, to test the hearts and minds of those who purport to be piously concerned with social justice, compassion, and the teachings of divine love. I know that I must have thought, “What if this is my moment, my opportunity to have an encounter with the gods?” Oddly perhaps, I still prefer to think that that is exactly what it was.

After sharing my tale with George, he told me about one of his own encounters with a “shiny man” when he was walking across a plaza in Santa Fe. George remembered that the man shone so brightly he couldn’t bear to look at him. George also remembered the same sense of awe–of divine presence, and his memory of the encounter has not at all dimmed with the passage of time.

If such people, like the two I’ve described above, are neither avatars nor divinities, what are they? I think it is fair to say that from my vantage point, which is the vantage point of the witness, what one is experiencing is an archetype, an archetype which is either superimposed on the actual human being by Psyche, or is itself, wholly, independently and completely, a manifestation of Psyche. The purpose of the archetype would be to spur the one who witnesses it on to individuation, to arouse in that one a desire to seek to become whole.

While George and I were talking, I remembered a play written by August Wilson called, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Wilson’s Raison d’être was to write ten plays, each of which is set in a different decade, depicting the African-American experience in the 20th century. Two of the most well known of these plays are Fences and The Piano Lesson, and while Joe Turner might not be the most well known of the so-called, “Pittsburgh Cycle,” it is certainly among the most powerful.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone illustrates the idea I’m working in this essay–the idea that the archetype may be superimposed upon another, more or less average, person–most strikingly, most poignantly, and most beautifully. Wilson’s synopsis of the play makes it clear that there is something extraordinary–something archetypal–happening in the unfolding of this drama:

From the deep and near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing […].
Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy.

The setting for the play is a boarding house that ostensibly provides a place for tired seekers to rest from their journeys, but in fact this particular boarding house functions much more as a way station of the soul; it is a crossroads at which all opposites are encompassed and contained. But, true to the nature of soul, it is when the seekers have themselves stopped seeking, when they are at rest, having temporarily forgone their searching, that soul reveals itself.

One of the boarders is called Bynum, a worn, vaguely shamanistic wanderer who recalls at least some of the old Yoruban ways of understanding the world. Bynum says that he met a “shiny” man on the road one day who told him, “if I come and go along with him he was gonna show me the Secret of Life. Quite naturally I followed him. A fellow that’s gonna show you the Secret of Life ain’t to be taken lightly.” Bynum’s father subsequently appeared to him in a vision and explained Bynum’s unhappiness by Bynum’s lack of having a “song,” and so at his father’s urging, Bynum chose a song. His father told him that he would know if his song had been accepted and fulfilled its destiny in the world if Bynum sees another shiny man before he dies. I would like to point out that this is itself another example of a radiant, shining moment, an experience which lies beyond words or descriptions, an experience that conveys and discloses an understanding that there is nothing more to fear in this mortal life, and one can, as Bynum says, simply “lay down and die a happy man.”

Herald Loomis is a seeker, too. He seeks his wife from whom he was separated when Joe Turner kidnapped him into slavery. Loomis says that he’s “Come from all over. Whicheverway the road take us that’s the way we go.” Opening up to being led “whicheverway” is an essential characteristic of one’s psychology that develops a propitious relationship to Soul, but it also means that one may, more often than not, be led into darkness and despair, into situations that might seem pointlessly cruel, painful, and indecipherable–exactly the sort of thing that happened to Herald Loomis when Joe Turner snatched him up.

Bynum and Loomis meet at the boarding house, which functions as the alchemical furnace, a thin place at which point acts of fate regularly occur, and Bynum helps Loomis make sense of his abduction by telling him that all Joe Turner wanted was to have Herald’s song for his own;

That ain’t hard to figure out. What he wanted was your song. He wanted to have that song to be his. He thought by catching you he could learn that song [….] Now he’s got you bound up to where you can’t sing your own song […] ’cause you was afraid he would snatch it from under you. But you still got it. You just forgot how to sing it.

Bynum knows why people refrain from singing their own soul’s song: they are afraid the songs will be snatched away from them, and being so afraid, live dulled-down lives–lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau called them–lives deafened to the soul’s callings, muted to singing, and blinded to the winding path, all the results of misguided efforts to keep themselves safe.

But psyche will not submit to individual will. Soul exhorts us to exposure, to love and to loss, to suffering and uncertainty. It dares us to know that we can–indeed, must–stand alone, tasting the existential fear, enslaved to our own mortality, and nevertheless find that by surrendering to the forces of life and death, we can abolish the vacuum of meaning in our lives.

Finally, Loomis finds his wife; he wants to see her so he can “know that the world was still there. Make sure everything still in its place so I could reconnect myself together.” But, he does not cling to her, nor does he collapse into her. Instead, he says goodbye to her. Leaving her allows him to create his own world:

I just been waiting to look on your face to say my goodbye. That goodbye got so big at times, seem like it was gonna swallow me up. Like Jonah in the whale’s belly I sat up in that goodbye for three years. That goodbye kept me out on the road searching [….] It kept me bound to the road. All the time that goodbye swelling up in my chest till I’m about to bust. Now that I see your face I can say my goodbye and make my own world.

All that remains is for Herald to sing his song, and with Bynum’s encouragement he does. Herald’s song makes those around him uncomfortable because it challenges his fellow’s indiscriminate beliefs in truth, justice, human kindness, and most disconcertingly of all, the belief in a putatively loving, delivering, Christ. It is, as Wilson writes in his accompanying stage direction, a song of

self-sufficiency, fully cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh, having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world, he is free to soar above the environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.

The Herald Loomis who departs is not the same Herald Loomis who arrived at the boarding house; during his searching and his wandering, soul has become more consciously present–a fully realized reality, soul has become a vessel from which Herald can drink in the meaning of his life.

No, this is not the same Herald Loomis. Bynum rejoices, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!” In order to become shiny one must be, as both coin and Herald are, well worn, burnished, rubbed (sometimes the wrong way) by life, and subjected at times to some very real darkness. One may be forced to leave behind notions of fairness, success, joy, and the conviction of how one’s life should unfold. Suffering beyond understanding, feeling lost, and being gripped by indescribable fears doubtless belong to the contractions of the soul. Yet these contractions are not a death rattle, but are instead the heralds of a new birth that frees a space within consciousness for the holding of, and the acknowledgment of the unspoken grief of loss that always, and in all ways, accompanies change. At the same time the soul contracts, it also paradoxically expands, clearing new territory, ensouling more of the world, allowing psyche to more meaningfully integrate consciousness and unconsciousness.

Literature (as art) is essentially a reorganization of basic human nature and its conditions so that its presentation more clearly illuminates that very nature and the conditions of an archetypal existence, an existence that every one of us is subject to. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a marvelous example of that truth. I will give C. G. Jung the final word on this topic, for he suggests that literature:

…stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls [sic] and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of great art, and of its effect upon us. The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work.

The Olympic Games: The Alchemy of Struggle

The Olympic Games begin tomorrow in Beijing, and like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I will watch athletes who will amaze with demonstrations of physical prowess, grace, and unprecedented athletic skill–skills cultivated and honed over a lifetime of devotion to a particular sport. New heroes are certain to emerge from this, the XXIX Olympiad. Heroism and the Olympic Games have always been linked together, and not just in the modern era of Olympic sport (the modern Olympic Games were first held in Athens, in 1896). Heroism and the Olympic Games were joined from the very beginning, the first recorded mention of the games were in 776 B.C. but they may have occurred as early as 884 B.C., when the games were called the Olympiakoi Agones. This is in itself a revealing name, and in the name itself is discovered the link between the games and the archetype of heroism.

Olympiakoi—specifically not Olympiachanntes—were properly identified with the worshiped deity, in other words the Olympiakoi were merged or alloyed with the inhabitants of Olympus, they were to be counted among, and as like, the gods themselves. The second word, Agones, is not used to denote games, but rather agones means struggles. Agon is the word from which we derive the word agony. So from a mythological and psychic perspective, the Olympic games are a form of mimesis, an imitation or a reproduction of an aspect of god-like experience, a memorialization of the struggle of the gods through sport.

Mythology tells us that the greatest of Greek heroes, Herakles himself, is the originator of the games. It was after he had completed his twelve labors, a monumental struggle that battered both psyche and physis, and may have contributed to his unexpected descent into madness, that Herakles measured off the stadium on Mt. Olympus by walking in a straight line for 400 paces. This distance was called a stadion and is the basis for the modern track circumference of 400 meters. Sacrifice and ceremony alternated with athletic contests, and the deities honored were, of course, Zeus, and a divine charioteer named Pelops, who myth says once ruled Olympos.

The thing that is often overlooked, the inconvenient fact that is not often conscious in an engagement of the archetype of heroism, is that the hero is often not successful and it is the unsuccessful hero who is often the most compelling. Witness the images of commercial television as the games approach: the images are of the falling runner, Mary Dekker-Slaney, of the lame Kerri Strug, of the track athlete who, shredding a hamstring, is helped across the finish line by his father, tears streaming down both their faces. These are the images that arouse a noble heart, and a victory without some experience of the agon that is unavoidable in life seems shallow and narcissistic. Arthur fails to protect Camelot; St. Joan is imprisoned and executed, and John Wayne “dies” on the beach at Iwo Jima. These narratives, and others like them, are the enduring images of heroism.

But there is another problem frequently encountered by the hero; curiously, perhaps, it often happens that the hero does not want to (or cannot in the case of imprisonment or death) return from the labor or quest, and instead desires to continue to participate in a psychology of one-sidedness and inflation precipitated by some modicum of success and by the unconscious identification with the hero archetype. This means that the hero’s sources of instinct and wholeness, the collective nature of man all the way back to prehistoric times, as well as the seeds of future development and constructive fantasies have been rejected and split off from consciousness, and when this happens, one is all too vulnerable to fall into a situation far worse than the one from which one heroically sallies forth with the intent to alter. Because the unconscious contains the images of wholeness and redemptive psychic energy, a neurotic dissociation from it (by clinging only to the brilliant, successful heroic image) means nothing less than a separation from the source of all life.

The sheer necessity of engaging the agon is the principle voiced in the Olympic Creed which reads: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well (emphasis is mine).” What is essential is to engage one’s life, and all the elements of it. One may not say, “This experience I like; I’ll have more of this. But this one over here, this is awful, I’ll have none of it.” But functionally, people make these kinds of decisions every day and the cost of such a choice to split off and reject what are arguably the most essential constituents of life is eventually catastrophic.

An unwillingness to experience the agon, the true struggling of life and its darkness, its confusion, and its pain plunge one into a situation from which there is no escape, and the hero, formerly reveling in his success and celebrity, is plunged into chaos, stripped of his honor and humiliated, or worse. In modern stadia one sees this drama enacted any number of times and in any number of ways: Pete Rose, Floyd Landis, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, and countless others are stripped of their laurel crowns and either are expunged from the record books or have asterisks sewn to their bodices and live out their diminished lives and presumably unrealized longings as contemporary Hester Prynnes, scarlet in symbol and in countenance.

But must that be the end of the story? Mercifully, no. In fact, such a dolorous denouement may just be the beginning. A harsh twist of fate, whether it is precipitated by narcissistic strivings or not, is often the vehicle that delivers one to the door of the alchemist’s laboratory. Psyche is, in my way of thinking, the great alchemist and the materials the alchemist works with–the Prima Materia– are the basic, instinctive drives of the individual personality. Alchemy is not some sort of primitive, proto-chemistry wherein slightly balmy men seek to turn lead into gold. Alchemy is a symbol of the unifying function of psyche in which psychic wholeness is the goal. The subject matter is not literal but symbolic; it is not rooted in the external world but within the human mind.

When I speak of basic, instinctive drives I am talking about the very things that are the uncomfortable, perhaps intolerable, facts of our human existence such as the drive for power and control, for dependence upon or fusion with another, and the drive for glory that seems to underlie most athletic, and I might add, academic, striving. If one has split consciousness off from one’s drives, if one doesn’t know what they even are, you inevitably will enter into a depression in order to meet them. That is why, in the consulting room, I am not to quick to prescribe behaviors or ideas that will ameliorate or eliminate the client’s depression. There is always a point to a depression; the depressive experience is itself goal driven, and its goal is, in most cases, to encounter one’s unconscious drives and motivations. The soul is realized, it is made real, in depressions: the poet John Keats wrote in a letter, “Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul-making.” A vale is nothing more than a valley, a geological depression, and it is in the psychic vale, an emotional depression, that one may encounter the soul and its reality. It is there that one touches it; it is there that one looks for underlying meaning.

Instead of arguing with or dissociating from the drives that carry us away, we need to, as Marie von Franz said, “cook” them and find out what they want; as objectively as possible, find out what the drives are driving at by subjecting them to the alchemical fire which subsequently releases the soul from the clutches of instinct just as subjecting material to fire releases vapor and steam. von Franz notes that “The desire to be something special really comes about through the hunch or intuition of individuation; there is the vague idea of being an individual, and without realization of that uniqueness it is not possible to individuate.” In other words, if one can follow one’s drives and even one’s symptoms back to the point of origin–what von Franz means by “cooking” them–one is lead directly to the Self. For if you are capable of dreaming or fantasizing about the archetype of the hero, that suggests you are capable of incarnating or manifesting the archetype through yourself.

Our culture is on the one hand all too quick to abandon the suffering or failed hero, but on the other hand, that exemplar of failed archetypal heroism is usually the most enduring one. The failed hero–Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Beowulf, Sylvia Plath, Amelia Earhart, Anne Frank, Achilles, just to name a few–is the individual who indelibly marks our consciousness. Often, it is true that the hero is most heroic in her failure; she embodies heroism by living at the edges of herself, by reaching so excruciatingly high and falling; and, it is through the supreme poignancy and beauty of failing when everything is on the line that she experiences an apotheosis of sorts. In her failure she reveals the nobility and the poetry of being a human being. To risk everything in the reaching, in the striving, only to fail cannot be failure at all; indeed such an action transcends ideas of success or failure and secures one a place in the company of the gods. And what’s more is that we all know instinctively that one such act by a lone individual may redeem us all. Joseph Campbell wrote:
It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.