Ooh. Thanks for that.

In my copy of his Complete Poems, that one and "Bavarian Gentians" are on the same page. Gorgeous poems, both. On the facing page, though, he has a goopy one about a butterfly. If we can all agree that "Bavarian Gentians" and "Lucifer" are good poems, and "Butterfly" is, eh, not so good (a big IF, I know), it might be instructive to compare them. What makes one "Ooh"-worthy and the other goopy?

Editing in: I tried to find the poem online, but all the versions I found have extra line breaks inserted. Sigh. Here it is.

Butterfly

Butterfly, the wind blows sea-ward, strong beyond the garden wall!
Butterfly, why do you settle on my shoe, and sip the dirt on my shoe,
Lifting your veined wings, lifting them? big white butterfly!

Already it is October, and the wind blows strong to the sea
from the hills where snow must have fallen, the wind is polished
..........with snow.
Here in the garden, with red geraniums, it is warm, it is warm
but the wind blows strong to sea-ward, white butterfly, content on
..........my shoe!

Will you go, will you go from my warm house?
Will you climb on your big soft wings, black-dotted,
as up an invisible rainbow, an arch
till the wind slides you sheer from the arch-crest
and in a strange level fluttering you go out to sea-ward, white speck!

Farewell, farewell, lost soul!
you have melted in the crystalline distance,
it is enough! I saw you vanish into air.

Andrew, first let me affirm my commitment to the mystical Heraclitean principle that “the way up and the way down are the same”. And all the great mystics would agree.

However, in the exoteric Christian tradition, a certain Gnostic tendency reigns, which sees the body as a temporary prison from which the ego seeks deliverance. The world, the flesh, the devil – as Donne’s Christianity would say – is what we wish to defeat. That is, to defeat the body, its sensual lusts and its vulnerabilities. To “rise” towards the ideal of a heaven of purity and light, and the defeat of all the “darkness” associated with having a body.

What I am trying to avoid by using the metaphor of downwards and darkness is this all too common tendency for “spirituality” to mean transcendence – the “up, up and away” desire of the superman ego to arise and fly – to escape the bondage to the body, with all the limitations that the body brings, and most especially death. The “spiritual” mind wants light and disembodied freedom.

As Roberts Avens says:

“There is little doubt that Western infatuation with Eastern spiritual disciplines, ostensibly designed to transcend or extinguish the illusion of the ‘Ego,’ has reached an impasse. Instead of offering an alternative way to transforming Western consciousness, these disciplines have been converted into subtle devices for enhancing its insatiable desire for light, power and control ... What has in fact ensued from the artificial transplantation of Eastern values into Western soil is a kind of “spiritual materialism” - using “spiritual activities” in order to bolster and enrich one’s ego. – Imagination is Reality, p 1.

So “light”, “power” and “control” – together with the metaphor of “up” - are the aims of much contemporary “spirituality”, which also happen to be very compatible with ego desires. The spirit rising into the ether is very often an ego-balloon seeking to cut its tether to the “negative” associations with the body – particularly its sufferings and its death. To me, this contempt for the body, the senses, for instinct etc, and the desire for escape, is a betrayal of life, in favour of the Gnostic, life-despising spirit.

The psychology of the contemporary secular situation is identical – rational materialism also elevates the mind above the body in the same Gnostic fashion: the body has no inherent traits or instincts, and we are all born blank slates. Marxism is a secular Gnosticism, psychologically as “spiritual” as any other religion. I see Marxists and born-again Christians as psychologically identical.

Lawrence also believes in a transcendence, but one with includes the body, and is imaged as “downwards” . He writes:

“However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.
And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived.”
– Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essay

Andrew, it all depends on how the darkness is imagined. This is how Lawrence saw it:

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on
blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

The “lost bride” is the soul, and her groom is Hades. And the consummation can only take place "below, where we do not understand. "

Hi, Rose!

I do agree that the butterfly poem is less than those around it. But why?

Again he is talking about the soul - psyche as butterfly - but here he is using the traditional Christian imagery of flight, up and away. And it comes off as thin and unsatisfying alongside the infernal poems.

Our postmodern rationalist culture (and the religious forms of spiritual Gnosticism) are to me as lightweight and "spiritual" as the butterfly. It is all light with no shade, all treble with no bass, all mental and non-sensual.

The downward transcendence, which includes and involves the body, is the only satisfying spirituality for me.

Mark, thank you for your explanation of what you mean. That clarifies a lot. I agree with everything you say. With a slight reservation at: “it all depends on how the darkness is imagined.” Even this I agree with, to a point. I know that this is true, given certain circumstances. But sometimes, and for some people at certain points in their lives, there is no choice in how to imagine the darkness: it is simply darkness, irredeemable, destructive. I’m thinking of extreme states: schizophrenia, heroin addiction, what have you. In some situations, the darkness can’t be penetrated by imagination, it is simply dark and potentially annihilating. The statement of Heraclitus works for people who still have enough strength to confront the suffering. But I completely agree with what you say about spirituality that denies the body and life. Blake, along with Lawrence, had a lot to say along those lines:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight

And talk about a poet of ecstatic vision:

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!

I like the butterfly poem. It doesn't have any latin in it. I know about butterflies. And geraniums. And wind and sea and October.

Perhaps it's too much of a minor key and reaches no conclusion except the inaccessibility of the inaccessible.

D H Lawrence was different in that he made a lot of use of the ordinary.

I think.

Wilhelm Reich reached the same conclusion only he suggested another cure.


"Lucifer" is magnificent. Thanks for it Mark.

I have come to believe that we have arrived when we no longer crave ecstasy but instead are constantly aware of the continuum of life and find that enough. The ecstasy is just punctuation in something even better.

What a pleasant surprise, Philip, to find "Leaf" here at the party. Thanks for all your kind words. You might enjoy reading, if you haven't already, Charlotte Mew's poems. Two of my favorites are "Absence" and "Smile, Death."

Andrew, there is no doubt that some psychic states are indeed very painful. And I have direct experience to testify to that! But does that fact mean these experiences are of no value, and should be eliminated, if possible? Sometimes pain is necessary to life. The way to physical fitness, for instance, often involves the pain of heavy exercise, but there is no other way to make strong muscle. No pain, no gain, is true.

Part of our hyper-spiritual culture is the idea that all suffering is pointless, and should be eliminated. Which I see as Gnostic resistance to incarnation.

However, many recent long-term studies have found that depression very often leaves people stronger and more resilient.

Hillman says that "pathologizing" ( the psyche's inherent inclination to generate symptoms) is often painful, but is necessary to "soul-making":

"Since pathologizing is frightening, we are obliged to follow fear, not with courage, but as a path that leads deeper into awe for what is at work in the depths of the soul."

"The soul-making of pathology has its distinct flavour, salty, bitter; it ‘skins alive,’ ‘wounds,’ ‘bleeds,’ making us excruciatingly sensitive to the movements of the psyche."

"The analyst’s insight and the patient’s wound together embody the archetypal figure of the Wounded-Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that the illness and its healing are one and the same."

That is, the sufferings of depression may lead to insights otherwise impossible to attain:

Or, to put it more poetically:

"The wound and the eye are one and the same."

And unlike the "upward" transcendence into the light, the pathologizing transcendence downwards really does deflate the ego, which is why we hate it and resist it so much. The ego-balloon is avid for upward flight, since this suits its nature, but feels crushed when held down in the depths.

"Pathologizing leads out of the ego and into a recognition that through a pathologized experience I am bound to archetypal persons who want something from me and to whom I owe remembrance." Re-Visioning Psychology.

In short, depression can be re-visioned as a spiritual initiation - which is how the 17th C. "School of Night" (Ralegh, Chapman, & co.) saw it. And re-visioned in that way, the pain can become more bearable, since it is not a pointless, futile experience.

Mark, to a point I agree with this, but the problem with Hillman is he never really cuts the mystic some slack. Say someone has been deflated in said downward path. Would you or Hillman then give the thumbs up on upward movement? Or is transcendence nixed from the get-go? Having read nearly all of Hillman myself, and admiring him a great deal, I still think he himself is defended against just that, transcendence. He doesn’t really come to terms with it, always deflates it to his psychological terms—even when it’s the real thing, not just pie-in-the-sky phony spirituality. This is why his writings don’t go anywhere near the transcendent profundity of, say, a Meister Eckhart or Eriugena, or Plato in a dialogue such as the Parmenides. He avoids taking them on, reduces them to the terms of his Archetypal Psychology. I’m afraid that Hillman can be as reductionist as the Freudians and Jungians he accuses of that. Ironically, people can be “too literal” about “pathologizing” too, as evidenced by any number of Hillman’s epigones.

I do agree with what he says about our society’s manic denial of depression, etc. You might be interested in checking out this thread, during which I asked myself, “Where’s Mark when you need him!”

Yes, you are right, Andrew. When Hillman hears the word "transcendence" he reaches for his revolver. But I am not sure that this in itself disqualifies his position from mysticism.

Hillman writes:

"The 'emptying out' of Western positivisms, comparable to a Zen exercise or a way of Nirvana, is precisely what archetypal psychology has effectuated, though by means that are utterly Western, where 'Western' refers to a psychology of soul as imagined in the tradition of the south." – Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account.

Hillman calls himself a Neoplatonist, and often quotes the Dialogues.

Roberts Avens expands:

"Perhaps, then, a Western Nirvana would require that the West first lose itself in the immeasurably vast and dangerous caverns of the imagination before it may reach the heights of Eastern spirituality; for otherwise there is a risk of a monistic adulation of the spirit-principle. First imagination, then spirit." p 8.

"But also: there is no spiritualization without imagination because in the end it is the imagination that ‘images’ the spirit even when the latter pretends to be independent from the imagination; for spiritual independence or detachment, like everything else humanly created, is a product and a fantasy of the soul." p 8.

"I take the view that imagination is the common ground of both Eastern and Western spiritualities in their most diverse manifestations insofar as their professed aim is to transcend all duality." p 9.

"By transcendence I do not mean going beyond duality in the direction of oneness and unity nor any other sort of ‘wholeing’, but rather an awareness of the essential polycentricity of life - seeing ontological value in the absence of ‘eternal’ values and principles. For I am convinced that there is no other way of being human and free." p 9.

This is the Zen idea of "Non-Duality" - where the transcendent is experienced as immanent in the world - undivided. As the Buddha says: "Samsara IS Nirvana".

Hillman calls Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) "the first work of modern psychology." For Hillman, as for Blake, heaven and hell are modes of the Divine Imagination.

Hillman's reduction, if indeed it is a true reduction, is the reduction of all experience to the psychic image, which for him is the fundamental building block of all experience - the atoms of the psyche, as it were. Nothing ever happens unless it becomes an image to Psyche. But since the image is "a complex datum", it is infinitely expandable.

Hillman claims that in his psychology "Reductionism is defeated from the start because the mind is poetic to begin with, and consciousness is not a later, secondary elaboration upon a primitive base but is given with that base in every image." Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, p 10.

Yes, I did see your depression thread, Andrew. I do look in when I am not participating. Unfortunately I was in one of my "voiceless" phases. Being a type of Persephone, I spend certain seasons in the deep and cold underworld. Not that I am rendered literally mute, I carry on almost as normal, but I have trouble with articulation at those times. Poetry becomes a laughable impossibility. And my temper at such times is not conducive to a discussion board. Ask someone who has tried to live with me! So I choose to absent myself.

But if someone were to offer me a guaranteed "cure" for this condition, I would refuse it. Because I know that anything of any value I might have written, or will write in the future, is utterly dependent on this condition.

I meant to say to Rose - I love that avatar!

Mark, if by “imagination” Avens means what Coleridge says on the subject I agree:

“The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

”FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”

Archetypal Psychology really is a useful approach for seeing through Western positivisms and literalisms, for those that need it. I myself prefer going directly to the poets Hillman likes to cite, certain philosophers, and sacred Scripture.

As for “there is no spiritualization without imagination,” well, that is ridiculous. The goal of philosophy, says Plato, is direct knowledge of Being. And Being is beyond all representation, therefore beyond images. The traditional teaching, as Hillman often mentions, is that the soul is the mediator between body and spirit. Not that all experience can be reduced to the psychic image.

The Neoplatonist Proclus said there are three lives of the soul: first, the mystic life, the desire of the highest part of the soul to be united with the One (Plotinus’s “flight of the alone to the Alone). The second is the expression in figurative language, myth and symbol, the intelligible essences, i.e., the spiritual realities. In the third, says Proclus, “it accords with its inferior powers, and energies with them, employing fantasies and irrational senses, being entirely filled with things of a subordinate nature.”

Is this “Western positivism”? I don’t think so. I think it is a subtle and profound insight.