James Hillman
 

I miss him already. A wonderful man, writer, and trickster. Bly's comment in this obituary is apt: " 'I don’t know what to say about James,' Mr. Bly said in an e-mail. 'You could say, "James threw enormous parties for the spirits." '

Coming back to this to add that I don't think the obituary gets what Hillman was about, at all. The so-called men's movement was a small part of his work, and an aspect that interested me least. Parts of books like Re-Visioning Psychology and The Dream and the Underworld actually invoke the imaginal realm that Hillman wrote about so eloquently. And his book on Henry Corbin (applying Corbin's thought to his own "archetypal" psychology), Thought of the Heart and Soul of the World, is what brought me to Corbin's great writings. He was enormously erudite. The obituary makes him sound a bit Jung-lite, which he definitely was not.

He was an intellectual giant. He certainly guided my studies and my imagination for 20+ years, and most of what I am interested in today began with a playful directive from his mind to mine. Actually I know little of his later men-oriented work. Apart from the books Andrew mentions (The Dream And The Underworld is my favorite), his book Healing Fiction is a great way to understand his debts and detours from not only Freud, but also from Adler and Jung.

His passing is a huge event for me. I really love the guy, not least for being the secret mediator of my relationship with Cally.

Nemo

Sorry. Everything will be all right.

When we move the soul insights of the dream into life for problem-solving and people-relating, we rob the dream and impoverish the soul. The more we get out of a dream for human affairs the more we prevent its psychological work, what it is doing or building night after night, interiorly, away from life in a nonhuman world. This lifelong activity of nightly imaging is distinct from what we do in the day with these images, applying all the humanistic fallacies—egoistic, naturalistic, moralistic, pragmatic. Dream activity might better be conceived as soul-making, or in D. H. Lawrence's words, building the Ship of Death. (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology)

Underworld images are nonetheless visible, but only to what is invisible in us. The invisible is perceived by means of the invisible, that is, psyche. (James Hillman, The Dream And the Underworld)

Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the patient part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passion to extinguish certainty. (James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology)

With slow suspicion or sudden insight we move through the apparent to the less apparent. We use metaphors of light—a little flicker, a slow dawning, a lightning flash—as things become clarified. When the clarity itself has become obvious and transparent, there seems to grow within it a new darkness, a new question or doubt, requiring a new act of insight penetrating again toward the less apparent. The movement becomes an infinite regress which does not stop at coherent or elegant answers. The process of psychologizing cannot be brought to a halt at any of the resting places of science or philosophy; that is, psychologizing is not satisfied when necessary and sufficient conditions have been met or when testability has been established. It is satisfied only by its own movement of seeing through.
(James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology)

This passage proved revelatory for me:

This first entry into myth needs an important correction. It commits the ego fallacy by taking each archetypal theme into the ego. We fall into an identity with one of the figures of the tale: I become Zeus deceiving my wife, or Saturn devouring my children, or Hermes thieving from my brother. But this neglects that the whole myth is pertinent and all its mythical figures relevant: by deceiving I am also deceived, and being devoured, and stolen from, as well as the other complications in each of these tales. It is egoistic to recognize oneself in only one portion of a tale, cast in only one role.
(James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology)

I could go on like this forever. In some of Hillman's books I have underlined almost every sentence.

Nemo

Then let's go on like this forever...!

Ok, here goes:

The activity of perception or sensation in Greek is aisthesis which means at root ‘taking in’ and ‘breathing in’—a ‘gasp,’ that primary aesthetic response. . . .

What is it to ‘take in’ or breathe in the world? First, it means aspiring and inspiring the literary presentation of things by gasping. The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder. This aesthetic reaction which precedes intellectual wonder inspires the given beyond itself, letting each thing reveal its particular aspiration within a cosmic arrangement.

Second, ‘taking in’ means taking to heart, interiorizing, becoming intimate with in an Augustinian sense. Not only my confession of my soul, but hearing the confession of the anima mundi in the speaking of things.

Third, ‘taking in’ means interiorizing the object into itself, into its image so that its imagination is activated (rather than ours), so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul, becoming personified and thereby loveable—loveable not only to us and because of us, but because its loveliness increases as its sense and its imagination unfold. Here begins phenomenology: in a world of ensouled phenomena. Phenomena need not be saved by grace or faith or all-embracing theory, or by scientific objectiveness or transcendental subjectivity. They are saved by the anima mundi, by their own souls and our simple gasping at this imaginal loveliness.

—from The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World


I wish I had a copy of Myth of Analysis here to copy a passage from. That’s the first Hillman book I read, a life-changing event for me.

I knew Nemo and Cally would be in on this thread.

I like his shoot-from-the-hip style too, as in We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse:

The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of the Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, 'You become that you are.' And nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, a corner knocked off.

and

Coping with the dysfunctional suggests that you become more and more dysfunctional as you become more and more adjusted.

The Soul Fox


My love, the fox is in the yard.
The snow will bear his print a while,
then melt and go, but we who saw
his way of finding out, his night
of seeking, know what we have seen
and are the better for it. Write.
Let the white page bear the mark,
then melt with joy upon the dark.


(for Christine Allinson, 28 October 2011)

Mason does the moves on Hughes!

How apt - how like a fox Hillman is. (To say 'was' is ridiculous.) His lean body, penetrating eye, insouciant tail. Fidelity to the art of night.

At the start of wendy v's workshop a few weeks ago, she asked each person to name a poet who meant a lot to them, and to give a memorable line or two from their work. The figure that reached out at me was James Hillman, and the life-lines:

In your suffering is your soul.

The soul is always in want.


Andrew - he's great on the subject of bread, too! He said one of his ruling archetypes is Mars. I'm sure he said somewhere that Mars is behind his writings.
The Myth Of Analysis is crucial to me, too. Eros and Psyche tale, the torture of love, that love underlies analysis, that love only desires increase in understanding, increase in love.

And death, too. That death is the via regia of soul-making. And the polytheistic nature of the psyche.

I mean, all his obsessions are the stuff of poetry.

He is a poet, a poet who went to the well of poetry to body forth his ideas.

The first thing I ever read was his essay on 'Betrayal', which was life-changing for me. That lead to a life-long study of his works, and writing about him and Lawrence, and this path, of course, led to becoming a pariah of the academy...thank the gods!

My lips keep getting numb.

I wish Mark could be here today.

" Death in the soul is not lived forward in time and put off into an 'afterlife'; it is concurrent with daily life as Hades is side-by-side with his brother Zeus. The richness of Hades-Pluto psychologically refers to the wealth that is discovered through recognising the interior depths of the imagination."
Revisioning Psychology, p.207.

What a wonderful list of 'isms' that is, Nemo! Oh, when I first read that, my heart danced!

Mark says,

"He spent so long in the Underworld, he probably feels quite at home there."

No doubt.
"The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul..." (Andrei Tarkovsky)

"Soul-destroying is soul-making." James Hillman.

Initiation


Who says the myths are only myths? No more
Will I blaspheme the Gods as others do,
Who laugh because they have not felt the awe
And shock of being dragged into the blue.

Persephone, I was a type of her,
So innocently gathering the flowers,
Enjoying all the easy joys that were
As if forever in my fields and bowers.

I gathered up the violets of love,
Weaving them with lilies of romance,
And there was not a hint of cloud above
To mar the idyll of my languid dance.

But then one afternoon the cool wind fell,
Bringing down the silence on the trees,
And from the earth there rose a certain smell
Of sulphur that evoked a strange dis-ease

Which turned into a rising rumbled sound,
And then I felt the earth begin to beat
Breaking up beneath me as the ground
Revealed the empty space of my defeat.

And so I came to know the realm of death
Where every thing and person was a shade
While still my heart was beating and my breath
Affirmed that I was living, and afraid.

Now I must describe my greatest shame,
To tell how I was held against my will
And I was forced and broken, stripped and shorn
And ravished on the filthy floor of hell.

But let me say that here I learned to love,
Because I saw the truth that he loved me.
And with this love I let the world above
Go on without me, and this set me free.

Returning to the motherland I knew,
Of flowers and light, it is a different place;
A gem set in the velvet blackish blue
I carry in my eyes with Hades' grace.

Mark Allinson (inspired by, and posted in honour of, James Hillman)

"...we are not real."

Oh, Nemo...isn't that a 'real leaf'...

love all ways

Cally

Hillman is very well known and appreciated in Italy, and all his books are easy to find in Italian translation. Somewhere in Re-Visioning, I think it is, he says that his Archetypal Psychology had switched from the Teutonic style of Freud and Jung to make an "olive oil psychology" adapted to the Mediterranean south. I've always gotten a kick out of that characterization. He and his friends once had a conference at the old Medici villa in Careggi, where Marsilio Ficino and his group used to meet. Botticelli's and others' art got a lot of its impetus from the Ficino group. Hillman and the Dallas Institute are at least as descended from that as they are from Jung and Freud, and Hillman was a true friend of artists and writers, as well as being a gifted writer himself.

I don't know many names, but I do know a lot of American poets have drawn on his work -- Rita Dove is one, as well as of course Robert Bly.

Nemo, my copy of Re-Visioning is completely falling apart I've read it so much.

Mine too, Andrew.
The cover has disappeared.

Nemo

Andrew, what marvellous images your anecdotes have conjured! That was my thesis, actually - that Lawrence and Hillman shared a style of the imaginal "south".

I'm onto my third copy! The leaves of the rest are scattered around the earth.

On the road again, now, but will check in when I can. I love you guys.

Cally

That was my thesis, actually - that Lawrence and Hillman shared a style of the imaginal "south".

Cally, what a fascinating subject for an essay. If you have a copy still I'd love to read it. Both Hillman and Lawrence have a kind of Mediterranean exuberance and extroversion to their styles. They en-thuse the reader. I love Lawrence’s writings on Italy, especially the pieces on Etruscan sites, Tarquinia and Cerveteri.

Another American poet who had very strong connections with Hillman was Robert Duncan, a poet I revere even when I find him impenetrable. He’s always reaching, and often finding. He dedicated a poem to Hillman in his last book, Ground Work II: In the Dark, published just before his death in 1988. I’d copy it here but it’s impossible because Duncan enjoyed irregular layout of his poetry on the page. There are poems to Corbin in the same collection.

In an issue of Spring journal (1996) that’s dedicated to Duncan, there’s a fascinating typescript of a talk that Duncan gave to the Analytical Psychology Society of Western New York in 1983, called “Opening the Dreamway,” in which he pays homage to Hillman and also takes him on in points of disagreement. Here’s a quote, the only one I could dig up online (it’s from an essay on Duncan written in Italian, where the author quotes the English):

For the last fifteen minutes here, I want to read “Alchemical Blue,” which seems to me, as I said, the place where I find my goodness, aren’t you in trouble, Hillman, because you have entered very close to the poem in what you are doing? And still are in your love of gathering lore. So lore, when you are just gathering it, as poets also gather it, is very different from when you are suddenly turning and start evoking all the lore in a rhythm and now out of that an emptiness appears in the whole lore. Nor what you know at all, but the minute there is an empty place, the spirit, and soul and body, a new one will inhabit that place. The divine god would be present in the stone and would be present in the voice. The art of the poem is that the god appears. The content that we call the content is the body of the god. The sounds are in the place where the god hides and that is the physical body. The content I guess could be called the soul and spirit, and these have been broken in the contemporary poet. Hillman’s very aware of this. We’ve got a lot of poetry, for instance, which divorces these elements completely. And yet, to him, it always suggests that the poem has lost depth. I don’t experience the body as deeper, as a depth below the soul, or the soul as a depth or being above or the spirit being above. He is very convinced that the spirit is superior, but that is only in certain frameworks. In the world, actually I thought spirit was like a little fire inside every cell.

Thanks, for the tip toward Duncan, Andrew.
I don't know his work at all, but I just ordered Ground Work II.

Nemo

"When silence blooms in the house, all the paraphenalia of our existence shed their twitterings of value and re-appearas heraldic devices."

I've loved Duncan since I first read the words above near the end of 'Love's Body' - another seminal book in the life of my soul. Norman. O. Brown.

Fascinating, Andrew! I must find that Spring issue.

And I hope that book is delivered up to you before I am, Nemo, so we can dip into it tgether.

Andrew - Hillman's death has galvanised something within me. So many synchronicities surrouond it. I need to take up the DHL and Hillman work again. You will be one of the first to read it, I promise you.

Y'all are going to have to help me with this one. Until this thread, I had never heard of his work, or even his name. I feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I need some serious, and easy to understand, guidance.

Part of my problem is that I have an innate and prejudicial antipathy to Jung. Julian tells me I'm wrong to feel this way, that I should be more open, and he may be right. As soon as someone mentions anima or animus mundi, my brain simply shuts down. There's so much that's overtly or covertly masculinist in all that stuff I want to run away screaming, and that's before we get to the problems of essentialism. This is likely the best place to confess I feel the same way about most of Lawrence, or at least say the Lawrence I admire is not the same one I hear others admiring. It's a long way from "over the river closes / was savor of ice and of roses" to the ship of death.

Perhaps that's beside the point, but the two names seem connected. Since I'm aware this is a limitation of my own, off I went in an attempt to rectify my misunderstanding. I'm afraid I didn't get very far. As a good pragmatist, it's hard for me to get too excited about the discussions of soul or psyche. It's the same for universalist collective myth: I'm unconvinced that the owl I see is the same one a Persian sees. So much for my irrational prejudicial notions.

Let us move forward, then, on to what I did find interesting in my brief excursion into his thought, and what may yet make the journey worthwhile. I quote from my favored source:

"The poetic basis of mind places psychological activities in the realm of images. It seeks to explore images rather than explain them. Within this is the idea that by re-working images, that is giving them attention and shaping and forming them until they are clear as possible..."

In that case, I'm right there. It's not symbol making, or myth-making, or reinterpretation, it is what it is, let's look at the cigar as a cigar, a thing, a human product, with all its production or identity entails. Or, as Barthelme put it: 'I don't want some stupid red towel she used to dry off after her shower. I want to beautiful snow white arse itself!'

But the very next phrase ruins everything for me. It seems the goal is not to see the image clearly, that's only a median step. "... then a therapeutic process which Hillman calls "soul making" takes place." I have serious trouble grasping that concept. It only gets worse when I arrive at the acorn. The whole acorn theory of self strikes me as masculinist, individualistic, unique self-conception as identity. Sadly, this conflicts with my notion that *I* am completely incapable of knowing who I am, that I even have any set identity. When the oracle commands me to "Know thyself," I just shrug my shoulders and wonder how I could possibly do that.

But that's just me. Serious, thoughtful people who I respect and admire hold his work in great esteem, call it transformational, and it seems to inform their own work, which I consider splendid. So it's clear to me the fault is not in the ideas, but in me, and I'm walking around with blinders on. Can someone please help me remove them, by telling me - in language even a pragmatist can understand - why I should view things differently?

Thanks,

Bill

Bill, from what you write in your post I’d say your reservation about or distaste for Hillman is a non-issue. He’d never insist on your having an identity, if that’s your sense of it. He’d simply say that your sense in itself is a storyline—the story of not having an identity—to follow and spin out more. Probably as you already do in poems. And by writing poems you’re already engaged in the sort of thing Hillman was talking about. If you don’t feel comfortable calling it soul making that’s not important. (As you probably know, the phrase is from John Keats’s letter where he says that he sees the world, not as a “vale of tears,” as the traditional saying puts it, but as a vale of soul making. Look up that letter by googling the phrase and you’ll get more context. I myself find the passage incredibly stimulating and lovely.) A main point for Hillman is the autonomy of the imagination, and the imagination’s own way of knowing, not reducible or interchangeable with other ways of knowing. Instead of translating images, especially dream images, into the language of the ego and of conscious design, he encouraged “dreaming the dream on,” letting it subvert or surprise the ego. There’s a superb little book on this subject, by one of Hillman’s protégés, Robert Bosnak, who was Denise Levertov’s analyst for a long time (another poet strongly influenced by Hillman!), A Little Course in Dreams—take a look if you’re interested. For sure a main thing for Jungian psychology in general, and Hillman is no exception, is finding a way around the ego’s tricks, so that life can flow again. I don’t think the theoretical terms and categories are necessary for doing that--and in fact definitely can get in the way. Hillman himself fought against this tendency in Jung.

Thank-you, all of you, for turning me on to Hillman.

J

Ah, I didn't know he had left us behind. But I also am deeply, deeply indebted to Hillman for his brilliant writings and work in the areas of myth, dreams, and human potential. Like others, I am digging out the books of his I have and remembering him tonight.

risa

Nemo, In that book you ordered, I was wrong about Duncan’s poems to Corbin, by the way--I looked and can't find them now. The one to Hillman is there, on p. 81. But where I saw Duncan's poems specifically to Corbin, I cannot remember. Duncan was esp. influenced by Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, that much I do recall. Duncan’s early poetry books are my favorites of his: Opening the Field and Roots and Branches are in my personal canon of postwar American poetry. And his Selected Essays is remarkable--the essays on Whitman and on Dante are the best I've seen by an American poet. He's learned, intuitive, generous, truly visionary. I'll be curious to hear what you think of Duncan. I just love the guy.

Cally: Hillman's death has galvanised something within me. Me, too. Something has come full circle with this event. Love’s Body is a book I’ve always wanted to read but never have gotten around to -- now’s the time!

Jesse and Risa, it’s good to hear your thoughts on all this.

I'm still puzzling over the work itself (Thanks for the gloss, Andrew!), but may have hit the jackpot on the poems mentioned. Or, at least, it's a starting point for a search... ;)

http://henrycorbinproject.blogspot.c...an-duncan.html

Thanks,

Bill

Thanks, Bill, the link to the Duncan recordings is priceless--I'll be spending some time there, for sure. The page references to Duncan for the poems I was looking for unfortunately don't work. The blog author confounds two separate titles--Ground Work I: Before the War is a different volume from the one I cited earlier--and neither book has the page number that's listed. But I'll get there eventually. Thanks again for that awesome link.

I'll follow up on the early Duncan, Andrew. The snippets of his bio info I've read on line are quite fascinating as well.

Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital was an eye-opener for me! If you ever locate those poems, let me know.

As for Love's Body, that slipped through the cracks of my studies as well. The only Norman O. Brown I've read is his Hermes The Thief which, fittingly enough, was stolen from me a while back.

The best thing about reading Hillman is that, due to his generosity to other writers and his empathy with all artists, such study radiates out in all directions and leads to so many other works. I found so many others writers in so many genres through him.

Yes, thanks for the links, Bill.

Nemo

Andrew,

'Alchemical Blue' is such an important essay for me. Essential. And yes - it's fascinating, what his death has done. It's as if, all my life, I knew he was there and would go on saying the things that need to be said, the things no-one else was saying. Now, as you say, we have come full-circle, or perhaps full-spiral - in the same place but deeper - and now it is up to us to carry the blue flame, the forked-torch, in whatever way we can. I think it might be necessary that we meet one day and have a jolly good talk. The other night, before Hillman died, I read the essay you wrote on David Mason - the man I'm going to marry - and I thought, how interesting! I must talk with Andrew about Dave's work one day! And now - this. I need to come to Italy, for Lawrence and Hillman, and so I'm sure we will find each other there.

Nemo - what you said about the intellectual generosity of Hillman - sending the reader off on paths of their own - is so true, so eloquently said! And you'll find the same generosity in Brown. I can't conceive of my life without 'Love's Body'.

Cally

Cally, that Hillman essay is brilliant. I don't know how I've missed seeing it before this. With all I have read of his work, and I have heard of the essay, too, but somehow missed it until now. Thanks for posting it.

And of course we'll get together when you come to Italy. So much to talk about. A new Careggi villa somewhere in Umbria or Tuscany, with Signor Mason as the Colorado Boccaccio and Hillman, Lawrence, and Ficino crooning the Alchemical Blues.

Cally, Nemo, Andrew, Dave, Risa, J, and Bill,
(that list was a clue by itself)
So I have been reading interviews and selections of this fellow all evening. You know when you find a piece of your puzzle in some one else's pocket. Yeah...that feeling. Ordered the Underworld book. Thanks for this thread.
Andrew

Dream and the Underworld arrived the same morning as news of the previous night's unimaginable and senseless death of a wonderful teenager close to us. I feel like I poke the Persephone event with sticks on a daily basis but this is has been a true dragging under. I have long know that my broken-faith straddling of meaning/emptiness was an unsustainable contortion. I sense some hope of a footpath in this fellow's work. I would welcome the chance of corresponding a bit about his ideas if anyone felt interested.

Andrew, this thread is open. I'm listening, following. I have no idea how to guide anyone through Hillman, even though I've read every word. 'The Dream And The Underworld' is amazing, but, like Andrew, it is 'The Myth Of Analysis' that got me. Eros, Psyche, and that journey she makes and its outcome. Human nature. 'Healing Fiction' is another, as is 'Suicide and the Soul'.

The thread is open. We can talk here, endlessly. If you'd like any more info about any of this, PM me.

Cally

Thanks Cally. I will get a hold of the Myth of Analysis and whatever else I find and come back as soon as I can make a bit of sense out of my own Hillman reading.

It was just a rough week and I was drowning a bit. Not much sense in me starting chatter until I am farther along.

Re-Visioning Psychology was what I started out with.

Nemo