cell913blog.com #12

 One of the more intricate and subtle examples of how perception informs our thoughts, beliefs, and ensuing behaviour is contained in the way in which ‘images’ are considered, on the one hand as allegory, and on the other as myth. In the former instance, allegory is a defensive reaction of the rational mind against the full power of the soul’s irrational personifying propensity. Gods and demons become mere poetic allusions.….Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues: and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating and annihilating effllects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance. Without the inherence of soul in words, speech would not move us, words would not provide forms for carrying our lives and giving sense to our deaths. It in this person in the word, its angelic power, that nominalism dreads. Nominalism* is not simply a philosophical position which would disembowel words, emptying them into windbags, flatus voci. It is a psychological defense against the psychic component of the word. The bigness it fears and would reduce refers to the complex nature of words, which act upon us as complexes and release complexes in us. Philosophy works wholly with words, so it must bring their complexities into rational order. This it the job of rational speech whether in logic, theology or science. In fact, the rational use of words was what the words ‘sanity originally meant in Latin. Therefore, nominalism refuses to recognize the person in the word or to personify them; to do so implies insanity….Today we have lost both the eighteenth century’s poetic capitals and the nineteenth-century’s oratorical ones, used to imbue with power and substance such jingoes as Liberty, Progress, and Empire. Our ‘gods’ have become small, save one, and with the exception of a few last conventions of proper names, titles and places, and the nonsense capitals of corporation abbreviations (nominalism is capitalism, letters as units of exchange), the one magnification persisting as a capital refers to the one person still remaining in a depersonified world: I. Only I and God, one to one, and some say God is dead. (James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, p. 8, 9,10, 11)

For many the assumptions of these notions are mere exaggerations, on conventional vernacular, melodramas, far too ‘heady’ and ephemeral, idealistic, and thereby beyond either legitimacy or necessary deployment, both in thought and in ‘effective communication.’ Clarity of thought, today, implies and indeed demands, a literal, empirical and nominal approach squeezing all of the universal essences out of everything, every concept, every person and every noun, adjective, very and adverb. Add to this impoverishment of words, through almost universal compliance, is an imposed ‘morality’ to each word, each piece of behaviour. Abstractions, universals, and the resonance of those mysteries, as if they were ‘immoral, anti-God, and worse, ‘woke’ because they do not conform to the minimalist, constricted, repressed and devoid-of-imagination mind set of much of our public discourse.

Inserted into such a vernacular (as well as mental, political, academic, legal, medical, religious languages) as the one remaining ‘capital letter’ the personal I, the ego, has taken on such an inordinate aura of both importance and responsibility as if to give literal embodiment to the again literal interpretation of the Biblical phrase from Genesis !:28:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The scorched-earth erosion of words into both literalism and nominalism linked to the inflation of the ego as the only poetic force remaining (as dominator of the earth), can be considered a poverty on two basic and fundamental levels, from a psychological perspective. Whatever petrifies or terrifies must be deflated into something we (believe) we can and will manage….or perhaps even psychically and historically erased from use, and thereby from our consciousness, like death, or demons, or daimons.

Individual ‘issues’ are so reduced simply by the surgical and eventual conventional removal of all ‘cognitive fat’ like what would be integral to the human imagination. Rejecting anthropomorphism, animism and personification, and preferring ‘personifying’ Hillman continues his tutorial:

(Another tradition)…continued to regard personifying as a necessary mode of understanding the world and of being in it. It began with the Greeks and Romans, who personified such psychic powers as Fame, Insolence, Night, Ugliness, Timing, Hope, to name but a few. Theses were regarded as ‘real daemons to be worshipped and propitiat4ed and no mere figments of the imagination. And, as is well known, they were actually worshipped in every Greek city. To mention Athens alone, we find altars and sanctuaries of Victory, Fortune, Friendship, Forgetfulness, Modesty, Mercy, Oeace and many more….Many consider this practice as merely animistic, but it was really an act of ensouling; for there is no question that the personifying of the ancient Greeks and Romans provided altars for configurations of the soul. When these are not provided for, when these Gods and daemons are not given their proper place and recognition, they become diseases- a point Jung made often enough….The need to provide containers for the many configurations of the soul was formulated in the third century A.D. by the greatest of all Platonic philosophers, Plotinus. In a section of his Enneads called appropriately ‘the Problems of the Soul’ we find this passage:

I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptable is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phrase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it. (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, pps.13-14)

Growing up in a social and cultural ethos of 1920’s and 30’s in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Hillman was confronted almost on daily, if not hourly, by exaggerations of various kinds: the circus, the ‘freaks of nature’ the first Ferris-wheel, the depths of both the ocean and the underbelly of crime, to which he frequently delved, through his imagination. Exaggeration, for a young boy may have morphed into a penchant for the creative imagination, stripped of any sense of ‘linear development’ and replaced by a kind of episodic perspective.

Such exaggeration, and more importantly, such deference for and to the creative imagination, in today’s world of ‘the pursuit of empirical facts’ as the ultimate reality (and then deposed as if they were dangerous and too liberal), sounds like a hollow knock on a door behind which there is no one listening. Indeed, literalism, empiricism, and nominalism reject any and all forms of exaggeration and the poetic mind, while, ironically, remaining fully and deeply, almost unconsciously, enmeshed in an exclusive, exaggerated, inflated crowning of those reductionisms.

The word ‘apartheid’ itself, now resurfacing in the accusation of genocide by Israel, coming from South Africa, for what they consider crimes in Gaza, cannot be confined to a single act, a single moment in history, and a single uninflated or unexaggerated box. By its very personifying, it warrants not only a capital “A” as if it were a figure of tragic and epic history but a universal revulsion whose legal technicalities and final judgement in The Hague could take years. Not to be worshipped, as, for example, Hope, Apartheid is a personalized monster, and carries that force and power especially for the people of South Africa, all these years after its official demise.

What does not carry a similar potency, however, is the culmination, the convergence, the vortex of the multiple insidious and potentially existentially threatening forces which, themselves having been stripped of their poetic mind’s perception, and reduced to another of the many intractable conundrums that we (the collective of humanity) attempt to probe, diagnose, experiment to ameliorate and potentially eliminate. Just as so many of our medical interventions are not ‘cures’ but perhaps ‘management of symptoms’ for the purpose of reduced discomfort and pain, so too, many of our interventions -whether political, military, scientific, philosophic or medical, legal and diplomatic- prefer, if not require but demand, their own specialists, separated from and elevated above a common and universal, while using a multivariate analysis and seeking a collaborative initiative. Caught in the vortex of a language that does not permit personifying of an issue, or a ‘god’ which could be ‘seen’ as having us by the collective throat (think denial, obfuscation, hypocrisy, pretention, hubris) and a personal as well as a universal ‘ego’ that can and will accomplish whatever it ‘sets its mind to’ achieve, a resulting paralysis can be seen as both inevitable and disastrous.

Political and conventional language in speeches, lectures, books, movies, television dramas and school curricula, as well as an underlying and heroic ‘ego’ perception that we are ‘doing the best we can’ read like a recipe book for continuing to expect the expected. And, how can anyone be either surprised or even hopeful while we are all swimming in a whirlpool of our own ‘basic’ blind or at least foggy perception. Seeing clearly, is not only a requisite for weather forecasting, and for diagnosing a tumor in a breast; seeing clearly is also the capacity and the willingness to view whatever tumor or storm in and through the lens of a poetic imaginative and universal lens, the human soul.

Surely, we do not have to come to the place where the black South Africans were in their political, cultural, legal, social and economic impoverishment, imprisonment, illegitimate arrests and slavery before we reach the tipping point in our perception of our condition as ‘suffering inordinately’ the ravages of the abuse of political, economic, ideological, corporate and even intellectual repression, constriction, willful deception and the closing in of the legitimate human rights and freedoms and dignity, for which Mandela and his freedom fighter comrades made such sacrifices.

‘Lifting our eyes’ as a phrase incarnating the image of opening our perspective to the whole horizon of not only the immediate diagnoses and ameliorating palliatives, and seeing both our historic and evolving and ‘freeing’ perspective not only as bureaucrats and managers, but also as visionaries, rebels, and prophets. And, like Mandela, whose leadership rested upon a notion of selflessness, and continuous learning even from his enemies, we might embrace some of that selflessness and open our eyes, ears, and especially our minds to imagine what might be!

Mired in what is, while we scurry to swat flies, (metaphorically), will continue to blind us to both our potential and the seriousness of our ‘boiling pot’….Is it that frog we are determined to emulate?

 

 

*Nominalism: (from merriam webster dictionary) a theory that there are no universal essences in reality and that the mind can frame no single concept or image corresponding to any universal or general term; the theory that only individuals and no abstract entities (such as essences, classes, or propositions) exist.