Psychology
mirrors rooms which humanity's workshop states
as education...ultimate descriptions...accurate definitions of pain
adequate beyond style...another's speech and imagination
commonly meeting these regions...human souls as the theme
of language...every step depending on such confusions...
of streets as words...passion the condition of these needed
transmissions...taking consulting to levels of panicky dreams.
Reading from his
new book, The Soul's Code: Character, Calling, and Fate (New
York: Random House, 1996), Hillman commented how it made The
New York Times Best Seller's List, "Which means, there must
be a yearning for what I'm addressing." Too influenced,
I thought, by the celebrity of friends, learning from them how
to smooth out
imagination's rugose terrain so that a large, admiring audience,
can follow. No doubt, reaching the masses is important. In his
case, however, like Derrida and Deleuze, ("the Frenchies," he
calls them), much of Hillman's value has been situated in insistence
that soul cannot be reached in a few obvious steps: "what
works is long careful work."
Thus, to a question
as to how one can apply his theories, in this case to teenagers
heading toward membership in a gang, he replied, "I must warn
you that I have no practical advice."
Actually
the soul hears itself identifying specific conditions...
measuring psychology's passions and presenting this craft
as concepts supportive of nominally abstract images...
dry ego...always cloudy...we drop experience's affects
to imprecision...burn the equipment..learning as flux
congeals...we come in for transference...blackening
the essences with mortifying words of hostility...
condensing this vaporous craft...regressing it down.
There was talk
of daemons, those strong creative forces whose demands sometimes
can't be controlled, especially in gifted children, who may rebelliously
act their agony out. That we must try to understand these children,
all children, and helpfully challenge them in terms of the talent
they may envelope, instead of masking our discomfort by drugging
their minds, is the passionate hope of what Hillman calls his "acorn
theory."
If
a person's traits evoke content subjectively...
this alone may help recognize a child=s poignancy...
enunciating...without choice...how knowledge takes
questions without judgement...directing love by the
pathology of leaving others receptive.
I
remembered how I loathed school, having by law to do the
bidding of that
institution, in whose claws I twisted and bled. To this day I
can't take tests with any success; that is, I can't give "correct" answers.
Abused, then, not by rejection, but ignor-ance, this pattern
continued throughout my life.
Hillman
went on to say, "What other people want from you is part of your
destiny." But what if you live in a society in which who is valued
is who can be used to produce the quickest and most material wealth?
And what if, as Thomas Merton said is the value of a monk, your value
to society is your uselessness; e.g., the present unmarketability of
what you make? What if you're an artist?
Be without
help...knowing this is
just another cry without a voice. (Ibid.)
I
thought of a recent trailer produced by a PBS affiliate,
which promotes the
idea of the importance of universal education, because "we
don't know which child is the next Van Gogh." But this Van
Gogh is not the man who, if he appeared before the person who wrote
the piece begging money for a tube of paint or a jug of wine, would
be turned away with disgust; but the paintings, the "Van Goghs," now
selling for millions of dollars, are respected and respectable.
While the man, Van Gogh, died sick, broke, and ignored.
The psychologist
told a story about how Jackson Pollock's older brothers would contest
how far each could piss; while Jackson, too young to compete, hid.
Hillman suggested that Pollock, with his paintings of drips, swirls
and swiggles, unconsciously developed this technique from that
incident in his life. Of course influences are more robust than
this. But the anecdote serves to fascinate some less mundane explanations,
such the Navaho sandpaintings he admired, or the Jungian analysis
he underwent, "working and expressing an inner world...working
with space and time."
With Hillman's
ability to turn questions on their head, like Henry Thoreau and
his Transcendental friends, who literally stood on their heads
to see the world from unaccustomed angles, sending hot blood into
spates of skeletal inquires, he ended by saying, "People only
ask me quick questions, to which I only have slow answers. So already
there's a problem." Answers are always already a problem,
because life is not only human, never durational, nor always "alive."
Anthropologists
sense people they describe as dead...
a human who has lost his name..being unable and
without himself...he finds himself possessed...belonging
to his primitive soul...between outer man and his lost
place...his communion of coming into the animal...with
his god...totem objects no longer able to power him
to connecting nature and ritual...there...in part...
transporting himself...initiated but never in person...
being a bewitched family...not called on...not true...
until gone.
Refigurations
(In order of appearance):
The Myth of Analysis: Three
Essays in Archetypal Psychology .Evanston, Northwestern University
Press, 1969.)
"Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language." Dragonflies.
Fall, 1978.
"Abandoning the Child." In, Loose Ends. Spring Publications,
Dallas, TX, 1975.
Insearch: Psychology and Religion. Irving, TX., Spring Publications,
1978.
"Abandoning the Child." In, Loose Ends. Spring Publications,
Dallas, TX, 1975.)