Alchemy
 

Prompted by some other threads on these pages (and a failed attempt to start one of my own a little while ago), as well as a rather good article in "Poetry", http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=182786 I went back again to G M Hopkins.

My return visit was a delight I have to say.

I had (almost) forgotten what it was like to read poetry that was so "meant" in the sense of conveying the poet's own genuine delight at simply being in the world.

I guess that all poetry cannot be like that, nor would we want it to be. But it does seem to me sometimes that craft and technique have almost (in some arenas) ousted "feeling" as an acceptable motivation for writing poetry.

Hopkins was no doubt ahead of (and hence misunderstood in) his time. There is no doubting his technique or craft but somehow it is used in service of something else - the desire to convey, as well as he might, truthful emotion.

I have heard poetry called "a fictive utterance" and have even heard poets say that one "shouldn't let the truth get in the way of a good story" (which is the same thing really, only more crudely put). However there is no substitute (in my conception) for that mysterious alchemy by which a poet conveys that he is in fact "telling the truth" emotionally. And if the language must be bent a little to accommodate the alchemy - so be it. It is (as I have said elsewhere in these pages) the servant, not the master of the muse. Sometimes that happens, paradoxically, when you allow the words to simply "have their way" with you.

I have put this in General Talk just as a statement of belief. However if anyone is interested in developing this thread it might be better placed in MoM.

I, for one, would welcome more discussion about the aforementioned alchemy with reference to the great exponents of it (whether formalist or not - which seems a pretty sterile distinction in this context). Not by any means to decry discussion on form or technique.

I write as an unashamed lover of "the ecstatic voice" in poetry, and one who would like to hear it a little more often at least.

Two recent, wonderful examples in these pages were:

Mary Meriam's - Leaf

and

Cally Conan-Davies' - Netted

No doubt I have missed more in the past.

Philip

Interesting, this lack of response to your thread, Philip.

Is it possible that the ecstatic voice is a little embarrassing for some of us? A little too earnest for our tastes?

The dominant tone today seems to be one of reserved irony. Or as Edna Millay says in Sonnet clxv:

It is fashion now to wave aside
As tedious, obvious, vacuous, trivial, trite,
All things which do not tickle, tease, excite
To some subversion, or in verbiage hide
Intent, or mock, or with hot sauce provide
A dish to prick the thickened appetite;
Straightforwardness is wrong, evasion right;
It is correct, de riguere, to deride.

So when we see a blast of pure ecstatic emotion, we feel embarrassed by such a display.

I don't. I love the ecstatic mode.

Like this passage from Whitman, on his responses to music:

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music - this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent
waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of
death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

============

The ecstatic mode involves the self beyond itself (ex-stasis) - a transcendence through powerful emotion. The poetry of Mysticism is full of ecstasies, such as in St. John of the Cross.

Does the ecstatic mode embarrass us today?

Mark asked:
Does the ecstatic mode embarrass us today?

No. But some of it's alleged expressions do. The real thing reduces most of us to respectful silence.

Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa is, for me, the most wonderful sculpture ever. I remember when I first saw it, in an art book, and I had to photocopy it, and that tattered page has been with me for years. My great art dream is to see it, in the flesh so to speak. I was baptised on her feast day, and given her name as my second one. Is this a case of nominal determinism?? :) My ecstatic nature has always made me feel somehow wrong. I wish I knew what to do with myself!!

Cally

Cally, it is beautiful and alive. I love Bernini's work. But I don't think that that work is the best of his or anywhere near the best sculpture.

There is so much sublime sculpture that resolves its tensions into a stillness past understanding.

I guess ecstasy takes different forms.

Not to forget Hopkins's dark night of the soul, of course.
Take a look at Carrion Comfort or his last sonnet:

http://www.sonnets.org/hopkinscomm.htm

He has never been too popular among the generality of neoformalists, more fool them.

Best regards,
David

Perhaps many people in the modern world have been formed, or have formed themselves, to be less available to the ecstatic experience. In addition to the basic meaning of "feeling overwhelming happiness or joy," ecstasy carries the sense of "mystic self-transcendence."

Some lines form Wordsworth come to mind:

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!

When a culture's dominant emphasis is materialism and consumerism and things and self-absorption and banal electronic entertainment and fluff and stuff and fluff and stuff, where is there a place or possibility for the ecstatic vision?

Richard

Oh, Janet - I didn't mean it objectively! Only meant it is my own favourite. For that look on her face - given over, overwhelmed, - pleasure or pain? Both. The thing about ecstasy - again, for me - is that it's as close to laughter as it is to tears! It's so magnanimous - as laughter is, as all genuine feeling is.

Wonderful Hopkins sonnets, David. And Richard, perhaps instead of giving our hearts away, we should simply give them.

ps I meant to say, going back to Whitman, that I love 'From Pent-Up Aching Rivers' - that one sweeps me away every time!

Cally,
And there I was thinking you meant the drapery ;-) Actually I do think the ecstasy is in the drapery.

Janet - I am genuinely (hopefully you know me well enough to accept that) interested in what you hint at here.

1) Examples of alleged expressions which embarrass us?
2) As someone who has experienced ecstasy in a rather singular way I find the idea of being silent about it difficult to understand.

But as for poetry in general. I think it is unreasonable to expect the reader to get out what you did not put in. Not everyone wants the reader to experience ecstasy - and that is fine. But if you do want that response there is no way in the world to craft it into being - you have to genuinely feel it.

To have one's poetry of that kind judged by others, though, is in a way to "put one's self on offer". And that is the difficult, albeit rewarding, bit.

If one sets out merely to obey the rules of craft and form then one only stands to be judged by one's success at adhering to them. Which to me feels safer. But adherence to rules of form and craft by no means excludes the expression of true emotion or ecstasy. Hopkins was most certainly a formalist.

I think there is a very genuine sense in which people these days are embarassed, as Mark says, to say what is in their heart (although I imagine it is no longer OK to speak of the "heart" as the seat of emotion in the same way that, as I was recently advised in these pages, it is no longer "good form" to speak of the "soul" as the seat of other sensibilities).

Chinese and Japanese (classical) poetry are great examples of how ecstatic emotion can be conveyed simply and without reort to wailing or chest-beating or free-form confessional. What is a haiku but the ecstasy of the moment encapsulated in what is a very exact and demanding form? Ecstasy doesn't have to declare itself from the rooftops, it can be inherent in a quiet (if not silent) and reverential way

Regards

Philip

Edited in to say: of course one can be stunned into silence by the truly beautiful, but later (when it is recollected in tranquillity perhaps?) there is very often a case for saying something about it.

Mark said: "Interesting, this lack of response to your thread, Philip.

Is it possible that the ecstatic voice is a little embarrassing for some of us? A little too earnest for our tastes?

The dominant tone today seems to be one of reserved irony."

YES. YES. YES.

But with reservations...

I'm not sure the ecstatic voice necessarily equates with earnestness, more a childlike sense of wonder for me, unmasked by cynicism or irony.

PQ

That's right, Philip. Given the prevailing social atmosphere of rationalism and materialism, any experience beyond this tight and impoverished consciousness is bound to cause embarrassment. The rational ego must believe that it is the captain of the ship, and so any rumblings from below deck must be suppressed. Like a rumbling tummy at a sophisticated dinner party, such uncontrolled rude noises are not to be mentioned in polite society.

In the same way, expressions of strong emotion are embarrassing to the rational, Apollonic ego.

It says: "Poor form, old bean. I say, do try to keep a stiff upper lip old chum, you're letting the team down."

There is always a chance that the current economic crisis will be good for poetry - as Les Murray says, "Rich cultures can't afford poetry/ Poor ones can." Wealth (or as we now realise, the fantasy of wealth) is conducive to superficiality and thinness of consciousness.

Yup. Just like in the Middle Ages, where the only ones who could afford to marry for love were the serfs and peasants. Land owners had too much to lose, marriage had to make Good Economic Sense.

It’s just like you guys are saying, the dominant aesthetic of our time is rationalistic, secular humanist--post-“Enlightenment.” And the dryness of the official culture, the economic machine, the education system, has to be compensated for with drugs, pharmaceuticals, the “entertainment industry,” porno, big-money sports. The ecstasy will out, one way or another, even if it has to settle for taking a shower with the raincoat on.

That’s why I don’t totally agree with Mark’s assessment. It isn’t just about emotional catharsis, it’s about emotion with presence of mind, an expansion of consciousness, not just shooting one’s wad. Unconscious wad-shooting is what consumer society is all about.

The topic of ecstasy in poetry that Philip brought up here (for which, thanks, Philip!), has to do with Dionysus and Apollo getting together: to make a poem. Apollo is about form, remember, archetypal form. The rational ego you talk about, Mark, is just Apollo in the unemployment line. His real role, his divinity, is in his gift of form that comes from the nature of things themselves. That's an ecstasy in itself.

Mark

Vis-a-vis the conscious and the unconscious I have this to say:

In the modern mind we think of consciousness as the thing we share and the subconscious as private. I believe the reverse is true. Our conscious minds are very individualistic and ego-bound. The subconscious is, in effect, our storehouse of racial memory and primitive responses to the basic shared experience of the human condition.

On the subject of wealth:

My brother is a banker. I said banker. He tried to convince me once that transferring numbers from one screen to another equated to the creation of wealth. I told him that there was no material wealth that wasn't ultimately dug out of the ground (usually by some poor sap on low wages). Right here and now I feel somewhat vindicated in that view.

In the same way, for me, there is no spiritual wealth worth sharing that isn't dug out of the subconscious (again by some poor sap, like me, albeit on rather less modest wages!)

I think I shall replace my "hawk" avatar with a dove...

:-)

Philip

I can't produce one immediately. I mean noisy rapture and excitement rather than speechless suspension in another state.
That moment in a concert hall before the applause breaks out.
It is often through the text in a way that is not possible to describe. Better so, usually.
Always. But you don't explain or describe it. It is a state of being.
So was Bach.
I'm not. I'm just embarrassed by a whipped up false rapture that is mistaken for the real thing.
So is much plain poetry written by our near contemporaries.
I'd better be honest here and say that on the whole I dislike English-language Haikus.
But the saying is done after the experience. Nothing against that.

I have a poem coming out soon which does all of the above. I hope ;-)
Janet

Dear Janet

I find much of what you say agreeable (as usual).

Bach - ah yes. A supreme example of emotion through form. Did he not say that everything he did was done to "the greater glory of God"?

I do not share his faith but if that was his motivation and his music the result I applaud it utterly. I have been listening to his Cantatas lately. Divine in both senses.

The C Minor Passacaglia for instance - exactly the right notes in exactly the right order!

Philip

:-)

Edited in - "So is much plain poetry written by our near contemporaries.". Yes indeed. Mary Meriam's "Leaf" was exactly an example of such quietly and simply stated ecstasy.

"I have a poem coming out soon which does all of the above. I hope ;-)"

I hope and expect so too.

Thanks, Philip, and Andrew.

Andrew, I am sorry if I gave the impression that merely blurting out something emotional was the answer. I agree, there has to be a deepening of consciousness. Pure acting out (or blurting out) is childish.

One of my Gods, D.H.Lawrence, who is snorted at globally these days, was often accused of inciting emotionalism, to which he once retorted in a poem ("Flowers and Men"):

Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages.
Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of its coarse stem?
Oh what in you can answer to this blueness?

And he also warned that:

"If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness
and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed
the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
will be bright red with blood."

Which I believe absolutely.

But where is consciousness to be expanded? Certainly not into "higher" and more rarefied levels of "spiritual" consciousness, in order to become disembodied angels - but downwards into the darkness below the present threshold. Lawrence writes:

Lucifer

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
But tell me, tell me, how do you know
he lost any of his brightness in the falling?
In the dark-blue depths, under layers and layers of darkness,
I see him more like the ruby, a gleam from within
of his own magnificence,
coming like the ruby in the invisible dark, glowing
with his own annunciation, towards us.

- D.H. Lawrence

We recall that "lucifer" is "the bearer of the light". The darkness bears the light. All light and no shadow (the current ideal) makes for two-dimensional flatness of consciousness.

I wrote a poem once, which is published and "out there", about which I feel acutely embarassed because it was a bit of a "wad-shoot", although no-one has ever said as much.

I set out to let the words have their way with me without too much conscious intervention, but I have to admit I'm still trying to figure out what it means. One thing is for sure - I could have said it in a far more rational and measured way. I recently had the opportunity to rewrite or remove it from the book for its second edition but chose not to.

In making that choice I was reminded of RVW's statement about his 4th Symphony:

"I don't know if I like it, but it's what I meant"

Once in a while I figure that is an OK philosophy.

Philip

But Mark, why would higher and spiritual have to mean disembodied? Christianity, for one, would be appalled at such an idea. The point is the vertical dimension, which rationalism leaves out. But vertical means up and down, and which direction all depends on the person, the time, the life circumstances. I’ve been places in my life, and others I know have too, that downwards into the darkness was the last place we needed to go. Things were already dark enough. Sometimes, the light is just the thing. Ask Lawrence’s gentian.

I do love those quotations, by the way. Lawrence, I agree, is a good example of a poet who approached the ecstatic with his eyes open.

Pound, another anathema in certain precincts, did it himself sometimes:

So that the vines burst from my fingers

And the bees weighted with pollen
Move heavily in the vine-shoots:
chirr - chirr - chir-rikk - a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.

ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS!
With the first pale-clear of the heaven
And the cities set in their hills,

And the goddess of the fair knees

Moving there, with the oak-woods behind her,
The green slope, with white hounds
leaping about her;

And thence down to the creek's mouth, until evening,
Flat water before me,
and the trees growing in water,
Marble trunks out of stillness,
On past the palazzi,
in the stillness,

The light now, not of the sun.

Chrysophrase,
And the water green clear, and blue clear;
On, to the great cliffs of amber.

(from Canto XVII)

Just my quick $.02:

I don't for a moment believe that one has to be in ecstatic mode to convey great passion or emotion. Indeed, I think strong emotion is more powerful when it is meted out in an even tone...much in the same way as a person who speaks quietly when angry is often more fearsome than one who yells.

I'm not knocking ecstatic poetry -- I like Shelley too much for that -- but too often it has the feeling of being contrived, as Janet points out. If what you say is heartfelt and important, an exclamation mark is redundant. In my opinion.

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.

Thanks, Andrew.

Yes, Hillman's Imagination is the same as Blake's, and Coleridge's "primary imagination."

For Hillman, the Kantean noumenal is entirely collapsed into the phenomenal - "archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a non-presented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image." AP, p 13

And for Hillman, an image is not only an object of experience, but the quality of the being of the observer ... "an image is not what one sees but the way in which one sees." The experience may be beyond representation, ineffable, as the mystics say, but the state of being of the psyche is itself an image. And so the "direct knowledge of being" is thus a psychic image, in Hillman's extended sense.

Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image. And if something is beyond all experience, then how can we say it exists at all? Nothing can exist unless it becomes an image experienced by a psyche. Even imagining a world entirely devoid of observers is an image to a psyche.

So I agree with him that even the most exalted spiritual state is still happening within Psyche, even while the fantasy of the pneumatic transcendence of the Psyche is experienced. The idea that the mystical observer has somehow escaped from the psychic realm, into wordless and imageless experiences of "pure being" is for Hillman a literalism of yet another psychic image.

Maybe, Mark. I’m fine with saying that everything is psyche, if Hillman is saying that psyche is, by definition, everything ones sees as well as the way one sees. Hard to find fault with an argument as circular as that.

Jung, while clinging to the belief in a noumenal reality, agrees that the only reality we can ever experience is psychic:

"Whatever [the psyche] may state about itself, it will never get beyond itself. All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world. Nevertheless, we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences us ... ‘pyschic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image’."(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p 385.

So all beliefs in a non-experiential transcendent are also psychic phenomena. In terms of our human experience, the "beyond" is always "here".

As Hillman says, his psychology is truly a Western form of Zen Buddhism, which says the same thing.

I'm definitely on Andrew's side of the question in the recent posts.

Mark, since you cite Schuon somewhere, I seem to remember Schuon making a sharp distinction between true spirituality & what he called "psychologism." In any mystical tradition the "unmanifested" (e.g. Eckhardt's "Godhead") is at a higher ontological level than the "manifested" or phenomenal, & the goal of mystical practice is to realize that higher level, which is nothing if not unimaginable, surely. To say that "the unimaginable" is itself an image is to play with words while disastrously missing the point (i.e., the difference in levels of being).

Jung's assertion, that the psyche "will never get beyond itself," has problems. Insofar as it means simply that the experiencer can never experience anything it is not equipped to experience, it is a meaningless tautology. Insofar as it means that the contents of the psyche's experience derive exclusively from the psyche itself, it is a nightmarish solipsism. It's like saying a finger, touching a rock, never gets beyond the finger. Is not the act of touching a way of seeing what's outside?

"nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image" is subject to the reductio ad absurdum of infinite regress. "psychic image" is a subjective impression treated as a object: one does not simply experience the image, one has the image & then "knows" it. Why the extra step? & if it is admitted, it generates the infinite regress: I know that I know that I know that I know... for each potential object of knowledge, a "psychic image" needs to be substituted.

"Experience of the void, while it may have no representable images, is itself an archetypal image." Here again the gratuitous extra step: not "the void" but "experience of the void." The void itself has, by definition, no images. To say that experience of the void is an image is.... a curious proposition, when you think about it. How does one imagine the experience of nothing?

Psychologism really is bad business, Mark, largely because it's so good up to a point. It works out well until it doesn't. And then...

Mind you, all this is poetry-fodder....

What AE said.

Schuon is excellent although I think he and his Traditionalist associates (Guénon, especially) don’t give Jung enough credit. They do tend toward the same old mind-body dualism that we talked about earlier in this thread. Really, the poets have been the best cure for that.

Which brings me back to Philip’s topic, ecstatic poetry. Here’s a phenomenal one on noumenal experience:


The Annunciation

The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steadily there.
He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time.
Immediacy of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So greater wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered voice.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

---Edwin Muir

Hi, AE, great to see you in this discussion.

Let me start with your last point:

Absolutely! And that is certainly consistent with one of Hillman's central expressions - that Archetypal Psychology assumes "a poetic basis of mind":

“Here I am working toward a psychology of soul that is based in a psychology of image. Here I am suggesting both a poetic basis of mind and a psychology that starts neither in the physiology of the brain, the structure of language, the organization of society, nor the analysis of behaviour, but in the process of imagination”. Re-Visioning Psychology, p xvii.

The strangeness and complexity of Hillman's psychology is not easily conveyed in short quotes on threads, and really deserves a great deal of thought and study - and a new way of seeing our experience. I am aware that every point I make creates new problems for explanation. I taught a course at Monash University in Melbourne in the late eighties which included among its texts Re-Visioning Psychology. But even that course was far too short to do the material justice.

I am so glad you raised this point, AE. Hillman is constantly warning of the danger of "psychologism". Psychologism attempts to interpret events or ideas in subjective terms, explaining things by way of a reduction to psychological factors.

Hillman differentiates his process of "psychologizing" (or "seeing through") from the illegitimate process of "psychologism".

"Psychologism means only psychologizing, converting all things into psychology. Psychology then becomes the new queen and - by taking itself and its premises literally - becomes a new metaphysics. When the insights of psychologizing harden into systematic arguments, becoming solid and opaque and monocentric, we have the metaphysical position of psychologism: there is only one fundamental discipline and ultimate viewpoint, psychology ... Philosophical and scientific assertions are, of course, not only psychological statements. To reduce such assertions wholly to psychology commits the psychologistic fallacy, or 'psychologism. This point is important." Re-Visioning Psychology, p 133.

The key difference between Hillman's "psychologizing" and the fallacy of "psychologism" is that for him the psyche of individuals does not involve the "container fantasy" - the "skin-encapsulated ego" - the mind as a purely subjective entity, possessed by a human person "within" the head.

"Archetypal psychologizing ... avoids the psychologistic fallacy because ... the archetypes remain the perspectives of mythical persons who cannot be reduced to human beings or placed inside their personal lives, their skins, or their souls ... We keep from psychologism by remembering that not only is the psyche in us as a set of dynamisms, but we are in the psyche." p 134.

Archetypal psychology, Hillman stresses, "is NOT a humanism."

So Hillman's psychology is not reductionistic in the way of other psychologies: "psychologizing does not mean making psychology of events, but of making psyche of events - soul making. So psychologizing methods may be applied to psychology itself." p 134. The process of "seeing through" literalisms is never ending - where it does come to an end and a conclusion, Hillman sees paranoia. We do not so much have a psyche within us, but, as Jung says, Esse in anima - we have our being in the midst of soul or psyche, which is everywhere. As much "out there" in the world of things as "in here".

Did I say "the unimaginable" is an image? - I think I might have said that "nothingness" or "the void" is an image, because it may be experienced. It might not be describable but unless it can be experienced, where is it?

When Hillman sees such expressions as "different levels of being" he looks for the archetype behind the statement - in this case, the archetype of Hercules, the fantasy of heroic conquest of "higher and ever higher" levels of being and mystical attainment. Hillman would call this a type of literalism - the heroic ego battling ever upward in a quest for ultimate enlightenment. Hillman sees all metaphysical statements as literalisms of images.

I don't think it is meaningless. The idea of a transcendent really - entirely apart and distinct from all psychic elements - is itself a psychic idea or image. The image of a transcendent reality always remains an immanent image.

If the psyche is conceived in humanistic terms, which it invariably is today, as a thing entirely contained with the head of a human person, this would indeed imply a solipsistic nightmare. But again, we live in the sea of psyche, esse in anima, which is not simply "in here."

AE, you might have missed my earlier point that for Hillman, "image" is not simply an object to psyche, but "the way of seeing" of that particular psyche, resulting from trans-individual archetypes. The archetypal orientation of a psyche is as much an "image" as its objects. As Meister Eckhart says:

"The great wastes to be found in this divine ground, have neither image nor form nor condition, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself ..."

This mystical way of seeing is itself the "image" here. Where is this "void" unless an experienced image - and we should note this is not Eckhart's consciousness of the void, but God's consciousness, which he participates in.

"A man who verily desires to enter will surely find God here, and himself simply in God; for God never separates Himself from this ground."

As I said, Hillman dispenses with the Kantean noumenon - the thing in itself. Anything we might say about such a transcendent object is ALWAYS an immanent image.

Well at least we can agree on this point, AE, and I am as much against it as Hillman, and yourself.

As I say, I am aware that posts such as this will probably generate a degree of protest, horror and confusion - if not outright rejection.

All I can really suggest is to read Hillman - start with Re-Visioning Psychology where most of the principles of AP may be found. But have a google at the many other books and essays Hillman has written.

Sorry, Andrew, we cross-posted.

That's a fine poem - I love Muir!

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

This seems to suggest an influence from one of the great ecstatic poems of the English Renaissance - Donne's "The Ecstasy". Because it is possible that some here have never seen this poem, given our current education system, I will paste it in here:

THE ECSTACY.

- John Donne


WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm, which thence did spring ;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one ;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls—which to advance their state,
Were gone out—hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay ;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.

If any, so by love refined,
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,

He—though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same—
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part far purer than he came.

This ecstasy doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love ;
We see by this, it was not sex ;
We see, we saw not, what did move :

But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this, and that.

A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size—
All which before was poor and scant—
Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love with one another so
Interanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know,
Of what we are composed, and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But, O alas ! so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we ; we are
Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air ;
For soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.

As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can ;
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man ;

So must pure lovers' souls descend
To affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look ;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change when we're to bodies gone.

As you say, we cross-posted, Mark. With the additional material you are posting here, I am still drawing a blank on how Hillman has anything useful to say about metaphysics. I just can’t see the point of reducing it to psychology, even Hillman’s relatively ample and imaginative version of psychology. I certainly wouldn’t want to read Plotinus or Heidegger or any great metaphysician with those preconceptions. I’m interested in reading them in their own terms.

That's fascinating about the echo of Donne in Muir!

Cally, I was really surprised when I saw this, finally, in Rome. She is in a very confined space, high up -- you can't walk around the statue and see it from the back. And there are "spectators" painted on the walls, looking on.

Still, I can sit and look at it for a long time. Hope you get there!