All of Chapter 2 Growth from the book "Kinds of Power" by James Hillman

From the book "Kinds of power : a guide to its intelligent uses" by James Hillman.  Copyright © 1995 by James Hillman.  Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

PART 1:  The Changing Heroics of Power

Introduction

Efficiency

Growth

Service 

Maintenance

p. 45

Growth

If efficiency seems the road to power and the method of maintaining its hold, so growth seems the proof of power.  Therapeutic jargon speaks of "inner growth" that leads to psychological maturity and which translates to mean "in control," taking charge of your life, empowered.

Yet when the word "growth" appears, at least six distinct notions converge.  They can be put into a list.

1.  Increase in size (expansion or getting bigger)

2.  Evolution in form and function (differentiation or getting smarter)

3.  Progress (improvement or getting better)

4.  Conjunction of parts (synthesis, integration or wider networking)

5.  Temporal succession in stages (maturation or getting riper, wiser)

6.  Self-generation (spontaneity or becoming creative, independent)

These ideas of growth glow with the hope of betterment, although we all know that getting bigger is not always better, that maturation also means withering and dying and that independence also brings solitude.

Nonetheless, growth remains freighted with positive implications like fertility, hope, good health, progress, optimism, strength, invulnerability, conquest and even life itself:  "grow or die."  The positive implications persist, despite the fact that a countercurrent has been discrediting the idea of growth in recent years.  The six main meanings of the term have lost some of their grip.  What once was a sacred cow in both psychology and Wall Street can now be dismembered.  We can put the dissecting knife to the term, just as government and industry are putting the pruning knife to growth all through their hierarchies.  Growth is becoming a more subtle idea than the naive version suited to a child, where indeed getting bigger, getting smart, getting better, etc., has to be the one indubitable path that leads upward and onward.  Nowadays "more" can no longer equate with growth because "more" actually can restrict the possibilities inherent in growth.

I like to think that this loss of faith in one of the basic metaphors of the American belief system, that of unending improvement through expansion, could have resulted from the sophistication brought about by psychology.  For we know that our individual personal "growth" did not follow the path we imagined as children: constant progress from four, to very nearly five, to six and then on and on to double digits, teens . . . We each know intimately that the psyche grows through defeats, divorces, depressions, and that every change for the better was paid for by concomitant loss.

That the gears are now in reverse cannot all be attributed to psychological sophistication.  Quality has been replacing quantity throughout the nation's desire.  Wherever we see increase we feel its weight.  All the numbers going up no longer portray the optimistic spirit, but instead indicate monstrosities, epidemics, ugliness, future disaster, extinction.  Growth has taken on a cancerous tinge.  To use the word now sends a message of potential danger, whether the growth be in the debt, the population, the underemployed, the homeless, the dimension of cities, the size of government, the particles in the air, the tax rate, the cost of living, the cholesterol count, even the rising numbers on the bathroom scale.  Going up now means decline.  What before was the measure of progress has become a sign of problems.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the reversal suffered by the idea of development---a favorite word both in the economics of urbanism and in psychology.  Here, psychology lags behind; it still teaches and promotes development.

The basic lessons of developmental psychology come out of the Victorian armoires of social Darwinism and its version of growth: get big, get strong, win out.  Progress is a natural process.  Don't get left back; take on your problems like a hero and work them through.  These ideas teach psychological capitalism:  how inferiorities are overcome and impairments integrated into an ever growing ego that is getting it all together.  Developed personalities can do whatever they want.  They take charge of their fates.

Psychology is no more aware of the shift in value of the idea of development than are landowners and real estate promoters.  For today when the rumor spreads that developers are moving in, citizens cringe and protests form.  The developer who once was only the improver has now also become the destroyer, and "developed" land means cut trees, bulldozers, access roads and eventually fast food.  We no longer are quite sure which term carries the more ecologically negative connotation: underdeveloped or overdeveloped.  Maybe it's neither, but rather that same childish view of growth as good.

But something else is sapping the idea of growth as a healthy solution to the nation's ills.  Our hearts have turned in another direction and our heads are following.  The lingering aftermath of Vietnam, the diffidence [Latin: 'failing in trust'] and corruption in high office, the faces of the hungry and the bodies of the dying have shifted our focus.  Victorious conquest and the grandiosity of expansionism no longer carry the national honor.  Smart bombs do not compensate for dumb kids.  We have begun to consider our losses altogether differently, so that the attitudes in business offices are no longer as separated as they once may have been from the emotions in therapy offices.  Sitting still, reflecting, remembering, grieving and giving in now carry the flag forward---because "forward" is not where it used to be.  Going on now means going downward into the faults of our culture and backward into the griefs of its memories.  Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment.  Mentors, not cheerleaders; mentors, not boosters or Babbitts.  Better sadness in high places---Lincoln as example---than endemic depression in the population and the economy. The legendary heroes of the ancient world---Ulysses, Aeneas, Psyche, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysos and even Hercules---all descended into hell to learn other values than those that rule the daily business of sunlit life.  They came back with a darker eye that can see in a dark time.

The Vietnam Memorial is black in a dominatingly white-walled capital.  That memorial is dug downward, unlike the aspiring needle of the Washington Monument and the growth charts whose arrow always goes up.  Visitors today to the political shrines of the nation often aim toward that dark mirror of memory before they climb the stairs and stare up to the oversize images of Presidents in their white Apollonian temples.  Can we revise the idea of growth so that the progression it implies can be incorporated into a more matured notion of growth itself?  "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things" (I Corinthians 13:11).

Let me propose, then, a second list of kinds of growth that correlates with some of the changes in both our psychological and historical conditions:

1.  Deepening

2.  Intensification

3.  Shedding

4.  Repetition

5.  Emptying

1.  Deepening:  The downward direction cannot simply mean decline, since organic models insist that things can't grow upward unless they grow downward at the same time, like most plants.  The downward direction differs from downsizing, because downward refers to depth, to the deepening of feelings and relational insights.  Thirty years of self-help, marriage counseling and recovery have been influencing the entire nation toward deepening.  Deepening in organizations can take many cues from these lessons in the private sphere without following them literally.

Deepening starts with staying with what is happening, staying in the mess.  Staying power.  This could translate into staying with the organization and in the job.  Career advancement would not require transfer and moving elsewhere to broaden and gain experience (or to get out of the present mess).  "Gain" is anyway part of the naive growth model.  Deepening insists: no avoidance and no escape.  Stay planted. No leave of absence.  Clean up the mess.  Gary Snyder, the poet and philosopher of Nature, declares that the best way, maybe the only way, to change a situation is to imagine, even to declare, that you will stay where you are, in your locale, the rest of your life.

Deepening forces an organization, like a marriage, to go into itself to get to the bottom of its troubles.  Going to the bottom does not stop at the bottom line, but goes into those supporting myths and philosophies on which an organization---again, like a marriage---rests.  What will be sacrificed to achieve its aims and to whose cost?  What corners is it willing to cut?  What deceits does it practice?  Can it ever be content, or must it be perpetually under pressure for ever more growth, called success?

Eventually, deepening gets down to bedrock ideas and the moral grounds  which, like marriage, make partnership in the organization possible.  Does this organization have a fundamental vision which I can share; does it desire the same goals; do we practice similar principles?  What, truly, realistically, are its principles---and what are mine?  Are we joined in a marriage for money?  Is our partnership a utilitarian relationship---that is, are we useful to each other, and therefore do I use the business as it uses me?  The more I stick with these issues and the more the organization can stay with its own self-questioning depths, the more both I and it may be actually growing (in the sense of growth as evolving and maturing).  This growth could be called growth of soul. [For expositions of making soul in daily life, see two books by Thomas Moore, "Care of the Soul" and "Soul Mates," both published by HarperCollins]  As in a garden or a marriage, deepening brings ugly twisted things out of the soil.  It's a work in the dirt.

2.  'Intensification'  in economics refers mainly to those kinds of production that use lots of hands, like intensive farming on small paddies and terraces by peasants as opposed to extensive agriculture over thousands of acres by harvesting machines.  I want rather to import the idea of intensification not from the economics of labor but from the mental work of poetry.

Poets in German are called 'Dichters' and a poem is a 'Gedicht,' a 'Dichtung.'  'Dicht' means thick, dense, so that 'verdichten' means to thicken, condense.  Poetic language intensifies by packing lots of implications and references into the small space of a word or a phrase.  A poem miniaturizes.  It is like a computer chip or an optic fiber that carries many messages simultaneously.  Such are metaphors.

However, so long as we have not shed the mentality of the child, we tend to be more impressed by expansion.  We are a nation with a fondness for grandeur, the biggest cave, the widest canyon, the tallest building.  One of the characteristics of an American is this romantic predilection [Latin: ‘to select’ ‘in advance’] for immensity.  Intensification goes against the national grain.  We can make a comparison with the Japanese psyche, of which it is said, and by the Japanese themselves, that they have invented little.  They only made things smaller; for example, the fan, invented in China, but folded and pleated first in Japan.

Corporations intensify by squeezing more return from each hour of labor, each tiny TV bite, each linear foot of marketing space, each dollar of capital investment.  They aim to tighten up and crowd more into a single unit.  From one perspective this is economic, from another it's poetic.

Going about reductions, cost cutting and doubling up on jobs inspired by a lean-and-mean philosophy isn't the same as intensification in the discipline of art.  If it's art, then the intensification must be measured by benchmarks of another kind---that is, quality rather than efficiency.  Long-lasting value rather than immediate profitability.  A cost-benefit analysis of the labor of art might have to declare it a total loss---or an astounding value-added product (burlap, bottle caps, scrap wire and black acrylic from the hand of a painter who becomes "hot" owing to the efforts of a Manhattan gallery).  What makes art compressed is neither the frugal use of materials nor hastening the time of production.

Although business and art both use intensification to achieve their ends, their philosophies widely differ.  Whereas business cuts for efficiency, the arts use similar procedures for complexity, meaning and beauty.  Could business continue its methods of intensifying but shift the philosophy which the method serves?  Could we imagine business tightening and condensing to enhance the beauty of its performance, to offer more interesting complexity to its staff and customers, to contribute meaning to the world its serves?  This aesthetic approach offers a more subtle meaning to the idea of growth than simple expansion and suggests the incorporation of values other than those measured by the corporate financial officer.

What counts in art's intensity is the artist's dedication, passion, enthusiasm, ecstasies and sweat.  There is a devotional focus to what you are doing---an intensive concentration that seems like obsession to some who declare you a workaholic or job-possessed, especially by those possessed by "family values."  But nothing intensifies more than being in love---the love brought to the art of your work and the love in which the work is done.  Nothing makes one leaner either, for the whole psyche is concentrated upon the object of desire.  Lean, yes, but not mean.

3.  Shedding:  The customary metaphors of shedding come from the cycle of nature and they feel comfortable: the fall of autumn leaves, serpents slipping their skins, crustaceans leaving their hard carapaces in order to grow larger and the old habits humans renounce on New Year's Day.  Other sheddings are less comfortable. They hurt: the pink slip, the closing of a unit or a department, the removal of an entire assembly plant to foreign shores.  In both these sheddings, one brought about by necessities of nature and the other justified as economic necessity, only extrinsic (external) activities have been shed.  The corporation may cut the payroll by a thousand and the government disband some programs but the intrinsic viability of the whole is not fundamentally touched.  The snake, in fact, is now in better shape.

I want rather to suggest 'intrinsic' shedding, not a reduction of frills and perks, not just letting go of nonessentials for the sake of renewal.  It's easy to cut fat, especially pork.  I mean radical shedding.  I take my model again from depth psychology rather than from the cyclical revitalization of nature or from the sort of puritan asceticism that enjoys tightening the belt every now and then and that witch-hunts business, government, research and academic institutions with ethical-cleansing fervor.  I am not trying to redeem the pain and loss of shedding by tying it to efficiency, productivity or hope in future growth.

Radical shedding happens in those crises that move in on the soul and cannot be easily fixed.  They come often unannounced, at any time, especially as one hits midlife.  They may have a specific and immediate cause, such as bankruptcy, divorce, illness; or no apparent cause at all.  The very essence of one's organized life is suddenly under fire, or swamped.  Like a natural catastrophe.

Can we think in a similar way about shedding essentials in an organization?  Can a corporate organization, like a human life, go through a similar sort of shattering insecurity, reevaluation of purpose, decline in self-esteem?  Can the organization's identity be placed in question, the principles that govern its daily activities, the accountability of its accounting procedures---that is, the values by which it takes stock of itself?  Can it examine ruthlessly its direction, its relations with employees, the public and the environment?  Can all that it conceives to be its individuality be shed?  Not literally, of course, even if most seriously, just as the crises that assail the individual person are most serious though they do not entail a literal jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.  But they do demand radical shedding of those identities to which one is unquestioningly attached.

Think of shedding in terms of the ugliness of rigorous clear-cutting rather than just cleaning up the undergrowth.  Or think of it as a forest fire.  The catastrophe model does not intend something better, some future growth, although we like to soften the blow by predictions of a positive outcome. I am reaching here for kinds of crises beyond the familiar ones business must face: relocation, incompatible mergers, lawsuits, wholesale desertions, pirating, patent infringements, delayed start-ups, stockholders' rebellion, cost overruns, fraud, embezzlement and so on.  I am trying to describe an organization's soul crisis which has no definable cause and therefore cannot be dealt with expeditiously and resolved.  The essential shedding seems to be a kind of  autonomous natural process of disorder and decay affecting the soul in a corporate body just as it does in a human body.  The crisis which forces shedding also forces a philosophical re-visioning, as if the crisis were demanding a discrimination between what must be held and what can be let go, a paring down to the bare-bone reasons this organization exists.  Sometimes management tries to head off these breakdowns by means of group retreats, psychological consultants or open sessions aiming to reformulate the mission statement.  They may not work because the timing is off---preemptive becomes premature, abortive, if it is not in tune with the seasons of the soul.

What makes shedding so difficult is fear.  Like a person, an organization accumulates systems, equipment, procedures, sections---all sorts of redundancies to protect it from the naked fear that it might be steering a wrong course, or worse, failing.  So the task of shedding is much like facing the fears in therapy.  It is a task of imagination.  A patient worries that her husband will leave her; another worries that he is becoming impotent; a third fears going crazy; another believes he has cancer.  Therapy says to each of these fears:  "Go on."  What would it be like to lose your husband, to be impotent, to go crazy, to have cancer?  Follow the morbid fear, the irrational fantasy.  Take imaginative risks; or as Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent psychologist who has studied holocausts and catastrophes, says, the task is to imagine the real, or to imagine as realistically as possible the consequences of shedding, to visit with the mind the scenarios of catastrophe and letting go of all security structures, comforting identities, realized achievements, forward planning.  See what remains, for only what remains can be truly relied on for growth.

4.  'Repetition' has long been a bugaboo of industrial mass production, supposedly turning humans into machines as in Chaplin's 'Modern Times.'  But for all the advancement of robotics in factories and electronic processing in offices, the repetitious work of the production line still turns out the goods America consumes.  Just think of Chinese and other East Asian assembly stations, or the chicken dressers and migrant farm laborers that give us our daily bread.

Growth carries a positive sign because it is dynamic and organic like a tree, whereas repetition is considered negative because it is static and inanimate like a machine.  Freud, too, put repetition on the side of death, seeing the compulsion to repeat as the primary activity of the death instinct.  Our common notions of repetition are so haunted by horrible fantasies of deathlike machines that we visualize, as in the movies, the organic life of beetles, ants and cockroaches as kinds of machines whose main fearful characteristic is repetitive motions.  (For a far more subtle analysis of machines, beginning with the very first machine---the Egyptian social, political and religious structure that could construct the pyramids without actual machinery---see Lewis Mumford's great work, 'The Myth of the Machine.')

Let's think about repetition from another, less offensive angle.  Repetition is fundamental not only to machines; it is the fundamental method in both ritual and the arts.  Instead of a drive toward death, the compulsion to repeat is an instinct toward art.  It shows the soul's pleasure in practice, in polishing, in precision.

Something in human nature demands performing in exactly the same way again and again, like the rituals that greet the sun or those that put the children to bed with the same story told with the same inflections, night after night.  It's practicing your golf swing or the catcher's throw to second base---over and over again.  We become artists only when we enjoy the practicing as much as the performing.  Until then we are caught by the limelight rather than the art.  It's not the opening in the gallery that makes the painter (although it may make his or her career); it's the repetitious actions in the studio.  Over and over again, not to get it finally right, not for the sake of perfection, but simply doing it as if for its own sake, freed from 'having' to do it.  The work working by itself, mechanically, repetitiously, impersonally.

Could this idea of disinterested repetitiveness---one of the highest aims of Zen, mystical contemplation and religious practice, as well as the practice of the arts and sports---transfer to administration, sales, production, accounting?  We cannot begin to imagine how this transfer might affect these activities until we at least entertain the idea of repetition as the essence of craft.  Why not imagine all the repetitive unprofitable actions of sales calls, number crunching and office forms as essential to the craft of business, not as undignified routines but as modes of care for accuracy and as signs of vocation.  Then repetition will be conceived not as a compulsion, a slavelike dehumanizing burden, but as the way things become beautiful.  Does this help to understand the interlocking connections of the Japanese between their mechanical repetitive style of work, their sense of ritual and beauty and the quality of their product?

5.  Emptying:  Let me draw your attention to a very different notion of growth that seems almost its contrary [Latin: contra 'against'].  I place its start with Goethe and see parallels with Buddhist thinking.  Goethe's examination of leaf growth in plants confirmed his intuition that the shape of the plant as a whole was determined in some way by the negative space around which the leaves unfold.  Let's say that the leaf doesn't just push its way into optimal expansion and round itself out, occupying the most space possible for absorption of sunlight.  If this were the case, then all leaves would take on the same round shape.  No.  The leaf takes on the specific shape of oak, maple or serrated cut-leaf birch because something in the surrounding emptiness governs the leaf's shaping into a species-specific manner.  It's not all in the genetic code; or, let us say, the genetic code unfolds in response to emptiness.

Goethe's ideas about plants, whether botanically accepted or not, nonetheless invite our attention to what is 'not' there.  Even further: what is not there characterizes the particular nature of each kind of plant.  This idea claims that emptiness has an invisible power that plays a determining role in what appears.  Patterns emerge and grow out of the empty, much as the potter's jar forms itself around the active presence of a hollow.  Each container---pot, vase, jug, cup---is simply the external shell of a specifically shaped void.  The power is in the void.  That nature abhors a vacuum may be only a modern Western idea of nature.  Different schools of Buddhist thought, for instance, consider the seeds of all existing things to be contained in a substratum void, so that care for emptiness is what allows the seed to emerge.  Absence takes precedence over presence, or better said, is the first form of presence.

The Italian thinker Gillo Dorfles presents similar ideas regarding music.  The toneless pause between notes makes the rhythm and melody possible.  Music is the result of specifically spaced and timed moments of silence.  Dorfles transfers this idea of the interval to all kinds of motions, including factory work, and the process of thinking itself in which the empty moment originates the shape of things to come.  Growth would focus on the not-yet, the voided out, the empty---those places in a day which are not filled, like the empty page in the schedule book, the vacant moments in the production line we now would eliminate as "waste."  Instead, they might better be called, as in music, "rests."  They are starts as well as stops; not breaks; empties.

We can apply these ideas of emptying to the aging of people and of systems.  Then we would understand the decline and shrinkage that accompanies aging as "value-added" rather than as literal loss.  The forgetful mind and lapses of attention, the vague fumbling of motor skills, the closing down of feeling responses and impoverishment of language may not be only as they seem to young eyes.  Perhaps space is being made, the rest for a different music, a voiding of the usual for the sake of the unusual.

Similarly with aging business, "downsizing" far-flung conglomerate enterprises, selling off divisions, sunsetting worn-out programs, pulling in the outposts of ambitious hopes and stocking up the larder for pension plans---these events reported in the business news are of course metaphors for older age in men and women.  More than that, these events can be imagined as the opening of gestalts from their habitual frames into new and untried spaces.  An experiment is going on.  To read these processes as signs of contraction and decay forgets one of the oldest ideas in the world, ideas of how the world itself "grew" into being: 'creatio ex nihilo,' creation out of nothing.  What comes first is nothing.

This view, as I said, accords so well with some Eastern philosophies that we are again brought to realize that ideas serve archetypal powers: the Western idea of growth as I presented in the first list above suits the child, while the one of Goethe, Dorfles and Buddhism suits the aged 'senex' (Latin: 'old man').  Again my point is simple: we cannot view anything except through archetypal glasses.  What is growth to the "wisdom of the East" looks like pathological decay to the archetypal vision of the developing child.  What to the optimistic naturalism of the child looks like healthy expansion of networking and improved facility seems to the octogenarian foolish distraction, a disintegration into what Oriental philosophy calls the "ten thousand things," a cancerous metastasis of proliferation.

What I am calling the "archetypal perspective of the developing child" lies at the root of the heroic growth idea; for heroes---Moses, Jesus, Hercules, Perseus, David, Oedipus---begin as endangered, vulnerable, abandoned infants or children.  Bigger=Better offers a grandiose defense that seems to protect against, even overcome, the inherent insecurity at the heart of heroic strength.

If our national notion of growth remains tied to the archetypal  perspective of the child and therefore blinded to more complex sophisticated kinds of growth, then the emphasis by the psychology industry on the "inner child" and on personal childhood sufferings supports the very archetype that determines the nation's naive ideas of growth.  To keep the economy growing and country moving forward into another century requires not only passing through the ending of this one but also a 'stance that welcomes endings.'  I like to remember Ulysses in the 'Odyssey,' who wants only to put an end to his twenty-year career of wandering by finally coming home.  Homer's whole epic is dedicated to the end.  And I think of Prospero in Shakespeare's 'Tempest,' who finally is able to put away his magic, break his staff and drown his book, welcoming the end.

Endings do not belong to the consciousness of the child; the child looks forward.  And the first of these endings is putting closure on American childlikeness itself (which does 'not' imply tough-minded, hard-hearted, unimaginative "realism").  To open the next century, we shall go through---in fact are already going through---the rituals of closing this one, the memorials of loss, the mournings and the remorse for having held too long to the childish kinds of growth that indeed "made this country great"---but not only great.  Growth now and to come will depend less on what programs we initiate to bring about growth during this closing time than on how this closing time helps refashion the idea of growth itself.

Therefore this chapter has elected to retain the idea of growth rather than to reject it whole hog.  However, we have tried to rework "growth" by separating it from the childish innocence and simplistic optimism which have led its main critics to belittle growth in favor of limits, smallness and no-growth, zero-sum models.  I do not believe that these critics have struggled enough with the idea itself, and so their dismissals do not satisfy the deep human wish that the term "growth" symbolizes.  To discard the idea only represses this archetypal desire and leaves it still encased in childish simplistics.

I have been trying a different approach.  Rather than exchanging growth for no-growth, I am adding to the list of notions with which this chapter began.  I am filling in the shadow of these notions, by taking the idea of growth into profounder regions of intensification, repetition, deepening, shedding and emptying.  When growth takes on these further meanings which darken its innocence, it is no longer incompatible with the actualities of America's demographic, social and psychological conditions.  Then our difficult, even tragic, individual, corporate and national dilemmas can be understood as necessary to the loss of addictive optimism and to the growth of soul.  And we can encourage growth's own maturation into a more fully formed and subtly differentiated idea that comes provided with its own inhibiting limits even as it remains a term of inspiration.

Two Essays by writer James Lee Burke

Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power

Hammering down I-25: it's a great country.  Don't let the hucksters and charlatans take it away

From www.jamesleeburke.com :

New York Times article by JLB Dec. 2, 2002

WRITERS ON WRITING

Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power

By JAMES LEE BURKE

I have never thought of my vocation as work.  I never had what is called writer's block, nor have I ever measured the value of what I do in terms of its commercial success.  I also believe that whatever degree of creative talent I possess was not earned but was given to me by a power outside myself, for a specific purpose, one that has little to do with my own life.

The previous statement is one of fact and not meant to be a description of virtue.  I believe creativity is a votive gift, presented arbitrarily by the hand of God, and those who possess it are simply its vessel. Those who become grandiose and vain about its presence in their lives usually see it taken from them and given to someone else.  At least that has been my experience.

Robert Frost called his art a lover's quarrel with the world.  Ernest Hemingway said a writer must have the probity (honesty) of a priest of God.  George Orwell believed the writer's task was to set right the injustices caused by what he called the bloody hand of the empire at work.  I think all three men could no more stop writing than they could will themselves to stop breathing.  Hemingway, in the same statement about probity, said that once writing became the artist's greatest pleasure as well as his greatest vice, the only thing that could separate him from it was death.

When I was a teacher of creative writing, a student would occasionally ask me if I thought he had talent, if indeed he should try to make a career of his writing.  I never answered the question, because the student had asked the wrong question.  A real writer is driven both by obsession and a secret vanity, namely that he has a perfect vision of the truth, in the same way that the camera lens can close perfectly on a piece of the external world.  If the writer does not convey that vision to someone else, his talent turns to a self-consuming bitterness.

Shakespeare said that all power lies in the world of dreams.  John Milton, in a sonnet written on his blindness, described his sleep as being filled with light, but at dawn he was once again robbed of his sight and woke to darkness.

My old professor John Neihardt, author of "Black Elk Speaks," used to say he wrote in the late hours because that was the time of day when the voices of dead poets spoke to him.  It's no accident that each of these men saw his art emanating from a world that exists somewhere beyond the appearance of things.

Early in my writing career I came to believe that the stories I wrote were already written in the unconscious by a hand other than my own.  In the 46 years that have elapsed since I published my first short story in a college magazine, I have never been able to see more than two or perhaps three scenes ahead in a story.  For me the creative process is more one of discovery than creation.  But I also had to learn that the gift or obsession or neurosis that compelled me to write was one that required a discipline that did not allow exceptions, at least not if I wanted to be successful.

At 20 I worked briefly on an offshore oil exploration rig in what was called the oil patch, 10 days on and 5 days off. I rented a mailbox at the post office, mailed off my stories to various magazines before going offshore, then found the rejections waiting for me when I returned.  I gave myself 36 hours to put the manuscripts back in the mail, and I've maintained the same system all these years, because to keep the work at home is to ensure its failure.

I know of no finer life than that of a fiction writer. You need only a notebook and a pencil and a belief in that quiet voice that dwells inside you in order to create a book that is truly wonderful. My first novel, "Half of Paradise," cannot be called truly wonderful, but to me, when I was writing on a pipeline in southeast Texas, it was.

Jack Kerouac once said, "Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul."  He also said that there was no such thing as failure in art, not when you genuinely invest yourself in it. What a critic might call failure is just part of larger work that is ongoing.

The material for the stories is everywhere. The whole human family becomes your cast of characters. You can give voice to those who have none and expose those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit.  As an artist you have automatic membership in a group that is loathed, feared and denigrated by every dictator and demagogue in the world. The greatest compliment I ever received was to have my novel "Cimarron Rose" expurgated (sanitized) to the point that it was banned at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville.

The most difficult test for me as a writer came during the middle of my career, when, after publishing three novels in New York, I went 13 years without a hardback publication.  My novel "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" alone received 110 rejections during nine years of submission, supposedly a record in the industry.

It was during this period I had to relearn the lesson I had learned at 20, when I worked on the offshore oil crew: you write it a day at a time and let God be the measure of its worth; you let the score take care of itself; and most important, you never lose faith in your vision. God might choose fools and people who glow with neurosis for his partners in creation, but he doesn't make mistakes. 

* * * *

Here is an Article from THE NATION, May 12, 2003 issue:

From THE NATION No. 18, Vol. 276

Hammering down I-25: it's a great country.  Don't let the hucksters and charlatans take it away

BYLINE: Burke, James Lee

In the 1920s The Nation published a series of articles by prominent writers about their home states, later assembled into a book titled These United States. We have commissioned a number of contemporary writers to write new portraits--a sort of "These United States Revisited." This is the second to appear in our pages.--The Editors

Most of my literary effort has been spent writing about the South and the American West. Geographically, I have always felt at home in either region. But the historical era with which people my age identify is less easily defined.

Americans of my generation, those born in the Great Depression, are transitional people, and as a consequence we tend to look at the historical calendar in the same way the two-faced Roman god Janus looked back at the preceding year and forward at the one to come. Because of the privation of the times we were born into, we throw away nothing, consider the wasting of food a theological offense and consider most financial institutions suspect. In some ways we feel we are sojourners in the present, with invalid passports, a bit suspect ourselves for the attitudes we hold.

George Orwell once described England as a protean (inconsistent) creature, stretching ceaselessly into the past, forever changing, forever the same. I think the same could be said of the United States. The changes I've witnessed in my lifetime are enormous. But the strength, resilience, courage and compassion that are inherent in every aspect of the American value system remain unchanged.  Unfortunately, our greatest weakness and vulnerability is still with us too--namely, our willingness to place our faith in charlatans, flag-waving demagogues and upscale hucksters who would turn the Grand Canyon into a gravel pit.

When I was a child, southern Louisiana was a misplaced piece of Caribbean culture where more people spoke French than English, almost all the dirt roads and state highways were canopied with live oaks, and each morning came to you like a gift, filled with birdsong, smelling of chicory coffee, ponded water, spearmint growing in a brick courtyard, night-blooming flowers, lichen crusted on stone, moldy pecan husks and fish spawning in the bayou. Time was static, and the salmon-colored vault of heaven over our heads was simply an extension of the idyllic natural world into which we had been born.

In his autobiographical book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller wrote of his visit to New Iberia during the Second World War and of the innocent way of life that characterized New Iberia's Acadian people, whose cypress cabins and houseboats and pirogues along Bayou Teche were shrouded in mist in the predawn hours, and the only sounds were fish flopping in the lily ponds.

Of course, the old injustices were here, too: massive illiteracy, rule by the plantation oligarchy, the denial of equality to people of color, wage exploitation of the poor, the great discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots.

The irony is that in many ways the deleterious aspects of early Louisiana society have found greater permanence in the present than the Edenic world described by Miller.  For the most part, the plantation oligarchy is gone, but it has been replaced in economic and political influence by the petrochemical industry.

This essay isn't meant to be an attack upon the oil business. My father worked for a pipeline company most of his adult life. I was a landman for Sinclair Oil Company and a surveyor on the pipeline and briefly a laborer in what is called the oil patch. Oil people are like Roman legionnaires. They're the cutting edge of an empire. The grunts who actually produce the oil and natural gas out of the ground are the hardest-working, most stoic and fearless people I've ever known.

But petroleum corporations are totally pragmatic, if not amoral, and they do business with baseball bats.  In the Hollywood film The Formula, Marlon Brando plays the role of a morally insane Texas oilman. One of his colleagues says something to the effect of, "These damn A-rabs is sure causing us a mess of grief, ain't they?"

As I recall, Brando replies, "Son, haven't you figured it out yet? We are the A-rabs."

The petrochemical industry in Louisiana is Louisiana. What that translates into is the second-worst environmental record in the United States. The governor of the state threatens, on television, to investigate volunteer attorneys who take on the cases of poor blacks whose communities have been used as open-pit dumping grounds for waste haulers throughout the South. For years our waterways have been considered among the most polluted in America.

This is the new world of Wal-Mart and the ubiquitous strip mall. The state roads and the parking lots of discount stores are literally layered with trash, thrown there by the cavalier, whose self-congratulatory hedonism is a form of anti-confiteor [anti-confessing].  Drive-by daiquiri windows are not only legal but under Louisiana law the owner cannot be punished for selling to minors as long as the infraction is committed by his employee.

I think the old plantation oligarchy would doff their hats in tribute to the public servants who have helped create a disparity in the quality of life here that has no peer outside the Third World.

My first trip into the real West was at age 15, when my father bought me a dollar watch and put me on a Southern Pacific sleeping car bound for a summer of trout fishing in Colorado's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I woke in the Pullman berth around 4:30 the next morning near Raton Pass. That particular dawn was marked by the most beautiful sunrise I have ever witnessed. The mesas were enormous and pink against a night-black sky, the hillsides a velvet green that seemed soaked in blood. When the train stopped before the long pull up Raton Pass, I stepped down from the vestibule into the coolness of the dawn and the good smell of the creosote in the railway ties and woodsmoke rising from the stucco houses in the valley. In the hiss of steam from the locomotive, the rattle of the ice and mail wagons across the train platform, I felt I had stepped through a hole in the dimension, back into the world of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp when they pursued the Clanton-McLaury gang into Colorado after the shootout at the OK Corral.

Up the grade lay the old mining town of Trinidad, the gateway to the Rocky Mountains, its cobbled streets specked with frost, its nineteenth-century buildings softly lit in the morning light. The past was right at the end of my fingertips.

My wife and I have made that trip, over and over, for exactly forty years now, except today we continue on up Interstate 25, through Colorado and Wyoming, and then into western Montana, where we live half the year. But the two-lane road that followed the South Platte River north from Denver through meadowland and cottonwoods is now a highway swarming with cars that drive close to eighty miles an hour, many of them SUVs burning gasoline as though there were no tomorrow.

My wife was in a hospital in Missoula, Montana, undergoing tests the morning of September 11, 2001, and I was in the waiting room, watching the news on CNN, when suddenly the cameras cut to the attacks on the Twin Towers. I will never forget the images that came through the television screen that morning, and like all Americans who were alive the day President Kennedy was murdered or the Sunday the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I will always remember what I was doing at that particular moment. I felt my chest contract and my eyes water, and even though I was 64 years old, I felt the same sense of shock and fear and, ultimately, horror that I had felt as a 5-year-old child when, at 1:05 Central Standard Time, in a small cafe run by an elderly man from St. Martinville named Mr. Goula, a small, brown, wood-cased radio with a tiny yellow station indicator announced that the Second World War had just begun.

During the six weeks following the September 11 attacks I think I slept two nights. I could not rid myself of the images of the people who held hands and leapt to their deaths to avoid burning in the flames. Or of the firemen and police officers who went up the stairwells of both buildings, knowing in all probability they would be crushed to death or buried alive. How loving and how brave do human beings get? The answer, I think, is in the images of those desperate souls who held hands in their last moments and those courageous men who plunged upward into darkness and flame in order to save lives at the cost of their own.

Before his death, Adlai Stevenson made a statement about the level of humanity that characterized the foreign policy of the United States immediately after World War II. We were the only nation on earth that possessed atomic bombs. We could have turned the planet into a slave camp of watchtowers and concertina wire if we had chosen. Instead, through the Marshall Plan, we rebuilt the countries of our enemies. As Stevenson pointed out, no nation on earth ever acted with as much humanity.

But today, as I fly-fish the almost mythic Blackfoot River of western Montana, I realize I am perhaps seeing the last of the wilderness areas that for most of us geographically define the historical United States. Extractive industries wait like a starving man at a banquet table, knife and fork at the ready, to rip into virgin lands. Every justification is offered: jobs, tax revenues and, most perversely, national defense and what has come to be known as the war on terrorism, which seems to have replaced the old slogan "the war on communism."

I believe every individual has a special place in his or her heart that he or she creates out of the aggregate of that individual's experience. I liken it to a stained-glass cathedral visited by the people who are emblematic of our lives, the virtues and qualities we hold dear, even the weaknesses and the frailty of moral vision that give us our humanity. The special place where I live is full of Americans who to me are heroic: Dorothy Day, the Maryknolls who were martyred in El Salvador, Molly Brown, Joe Hill, Thomas Jefferson, Woody Guthrie, the women and children who died in the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, Audie Murphy and Flannery O'Connor. And once again, the great irony is that the bravest people I've ever known are people who are so humble and nondescript you cannot remember what they look like ten minutes after they leave a room. But in the final say each of them is a descendant of Natty Bumppo.  [Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo is the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy of novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales.---from Wikipedia]

Let the revisionists and denigrators say what they will. This is a great country and it's an enormous privilege to live inside its borders. The egalitarian meritocracy that Jefferson envisioned will probably become a reality in this century. In the meantime we'll continue to hear the shrill voices of those who despise the idea of a pluralistic society. Their message is vitriolic and filled with fear and hatred because they know they're on the wrong side of history. But they make handy point men for those who would grind up our forests, leach gold out of the rocks with cyanide in the Blackfoot drainage and drill for natural gas on the edge of Glacier National Park.

I hope the day comes when the degenerates and cowards who planned and paid for the attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon are rounded up and given what they deserve, perhaps life terms chain-ganging on the hard road under the oversight of a few tobacco-chewing Mississippi gun bulls. I also hope the day will come when our national leaders will not lionize a collection of bedbugs and use the suffering of others to reinstitute a return to both cold war rhetoric and military spending.

But whatever happens, I will always feel a great pride in having been a participant in my country's national experience. The American story is an epic one, and all you need to do in order to see all its historical manifestations is to let imagination have its way for a moment or two and walk or drive through the older parts of our cities or across the countryside in the early morning hours when the fog hides the present and reveals the past.

In the late fall my wife and I drive south on I-25, through the Big Horn Valley, on through Denver and Pueblo, and past the site of the Ludlow Massacre, where striking miners and their families were attacked by state militia and unionbusters who worked for John D. Rockefeller's mineral interests. A tent city sheltering strikers and their families was set afire and machine-gunned. Thirteen women and children took refuge in a cellar under the flames. They died there, and today, between Trinidad and Pueblo, you can turn off I-25 onto a side road that leads you out on the hardpan toward the mountains, which are dotted with pinyon trees and turn a dark purple in the fall.

The storm cellar's still there. When you lift the door and descend the stairs, I would swear you can hear the voices of the dead in the plaster walls.

Farther on, when you drive down Raton Pass south of Trinidad, you will see the ruins of a stucco mission tucked back in the hills to the west. It was built by Rockefeller, supposedly to rehabilitate his image after the killings at Ludlow.

What does it all mean? For me, the answer is simple. The potential in human beings for either good or evil seems limitless. When I return to our home in Louisiana, on Bayou Teche, a tidal stream on which members of my family have lived since 1836, I look at the red sun beyond the live oaks on the bayou, the smoke from stubble fires drifting off the fields, the hammered gold-and-purple light on the sugarcane, and in the gloaming of the day I want to see the moment caught forever inside a photographer's lens, before the land developers and the builders of strip malls and discount stores have their way with what I think are the gifts of both Heaven and Earth.

A character in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls says, "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for." St. Paul talked about fighting the good fight. I think both men understood the ongoing nature of the struggle and the fact that the contest is never over, the field never quite ours. To be a participant, though, in whatever small capacity, is nonetheless a grand and ennobling experience. Sometimes on I-25 I think I hear Woody Guthrie's voice on the wind. It's a wonderful feeling to belong to both the past and the future and to be linked in spirit and vision to those who perhaps represent everything that is good and brave and decent in the human family.  At least it has been for me.

James Lee Burke is a novelist who lives in Louisiana and Montana.

All of Chapter 7 Penny Dreadfuls and Pure Fantasy in the book "The Soul's Code" by James Hillman

From the book "The Soul's Code : in search of character and calling." Copyright © 1996 by James Hillman.  This Warner Books edition is published by arrangement with Random House, New York, NY.  Warner Books, Inc., New York, NY.

 

Chapter 7  Penny Dreadfuls and Pure Fantasy

How do we select the right nutrients for the acorn?  How can we judge what is a waste of time?  Is there health food for the soul?

In the good old days, values were established and directions from them clear.  There was standard stuff to study, a canon (today renamed the core curriculum)---not only in the basic three R's, but also in drawing, elocution (pronunciation), music appreciation, nature studies.  The minds of very small children were guided, or drilled, whether in the direction of reason or of aesthetic imagination.  John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century philosopher whom we know today mainly for his utilitarianism and his ideas of liberty, never attended school.  Educated at home by his father, he began learning Greek at three and Latin at eight, and by fourteen had read most of the major ancient texts in the original.  Another wondrous example of nineteenth-century education was the Anglo-Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton:

At three he was a superior reader of english and considerably advanced in arithmetic . . . at five . . . he loved to recite yards of Homer in Greek; at eight he added a mastery of Italian and French . . . and extemporized (improvised) fluently in Latin. . . . By thirteen William was able to brag that he had mastered one language for each year he had lived.

This demonic appetite for language took him through Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chaldee, Malay, Bengali . . ."and he is about to commence the Chinese" wrote his uncle, complaining of the cost of providing the books for his ravenous nephew.

Francis Galton, who pioneered the study of genius and was yet another of these freak Victorian masterminds, could read by the time he was two and a half, sign his name before three, and wrote this letter to his sister before he was five:

My dear Adele,

I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin substantives and adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10

I can also say the pence table, I read French a little and I know the clock.

Francis Galton

February-15-1827

Nearer to our day---in time only, but just as distant in spirit as Galton and Mill---is the punishment meted out to Dorothy Thompson by her Methodist minister father.  Thompson, born a century ago, was once named by 'Time' magazine the most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a persuasive liberal journalist, the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, and the first correspondent to be expelled from Germany by personal order of Hitler.   In her columns and broadcasts she reached millions for years, taking on the right wing, the Republicans, the anti-Semites, the fascists and Clare Booth Luce with courage, skill, and much learning.

Once, when she slapped her little sister

her father locked her in a closet and would not let her out until she could recite Shelley's "Adonais" from beginning to end. By the time she was grown, Dorothy could deliver without pause whole chapters of the Bible, the sonnets of Shakespeare, great chunks of 'Leaves of Grass,' Chesterton's "Lepanto," dozens of the Psalms, and the entire Constitution of the United States.

The kind of punishment, though decreed by her father and decidedly cruel and unusual by today's educational standards, seems to have been chosen by her own protective daimon, who had, of course, anyway selected that particularly literary father. The memorizing of texts fit the pattern of her life of writing among such colleagues as Alexander Woollcott, Rebecca West, H. L. Mencken, and Thompson's own husband, the Nobel Prize--winning writer Sinclair Lewis.

Mill, Hamilton, Galton, and Thompson are exceptions only in their early mastery, not with respect to the materials mastered.  From Plato (who insisted upon music as essential to the canon) through the Stoics and Sophists; from the Catholics (especially the Jesuits), the Orthodox Jews, and Philipp Melanchthon (whose ambition it was to educate Protestant Germany) to Rousseau and Froebel with their Romantic programs; and on up to Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori, there have always been strong recommendations in the European tradition for an authorized program to prevent the young mind from wasting itself on trivia. The inner life of the mind, whether endowed innately or merely a tabula rasa (clean slate), needed to be correctly nourished in its full range, not only by means of logic and mathematics but also by addressing its ethical character and imaginative powers.

Therefore many recommendations have been less strictly mental and less literate, but just as dogmatically enforced. Hands to be kept busy; play restricted or supervised; no idleness; chores finished.  Construction: Make things, tinker, sew, learn crafts, do repairs and maintenance.  Manners at table, in dress, in hygiene, with neighbors. Language was disciplined so the child would be well-spoken.  Moral instruction from the religious, who ministered to the soul with Bible, hymns, and homilies.  And certainly not least, especially for the Romantics from Rousseau through Steiner, was the instruction of nature, the soul's primordial nutrient drawn from fields, flowers, and farmyards, and from the coasts and headlands of rocks and tidal pools, sea sounds and the winds.

Edith Cobb's 'The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood' makes it clear that the poetic basis of mind needs the nourishment given by the phenomena of nature. Imagination cannot come into its own without immersion in the natural world, or at least without occasional contact with its wonders.  John Lennon, for instance, a city boy, visited Scotland at the very beginning of adolescence, and while out for a walk one day he lapsed into "a trance . . . the ground starts going beneath you and the heather, and I could see this mountain in the distance.  And this kind of 'feeling' came over me: I thought . . . this is that one they're always talking about, the one that makes you paint or write because it's so overwhelming that you have to tell somebody . . . so you put it into poetry."

Conservative thinkers from Plato through Steiner to scornful Allan Bloom and that thug of virtue, William Bennett, with their various notions of back-to-basics, disciplined education that supposedly brings out the best in the child by giving it the best, would at the same time suppress vulgarities like porn and pulp (and even wine, according to Plato), insisting that imagination must be fed good stuff of cultural quality, natural reality, inventive challenge, and moral example.  The soul, they say, needs models for its mimesis (imitation) in order to recollect eternal verities and primordial images. If in its life on earth it does not meet these as mirrors of the soul's core, mirrors in which the soul can recognize its truths, then its flame will die and its genius wither. Ideal heroes and heroines provide the ecotypes on earth that release the guiding archetypes of the soul. [archetype: Psychoanalysis (in Jungian psychology): a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.]

But please now look at these stories of those whose flame blazed and whose genius flowered, and try to swallow the kinds of "soul food" their imaginations relished. Cole Porter, debonair songwriter of sophisticated word-rich lyrics, en route to and from his music lessons while a small-town Indiana schoolboy, became an "insatiable consumer" of spicy books---penny dreadfuls---hiding them away in his music bag. No sooner was the lesson done than he sped off to spend the day plunged into cheap adventure tales.  Frank Lloyd Wright played viola as a boy; he read Goethe, 'Hans Brinker,' Jules Verne---but also "tattered thrillers from the Nickel Library."  "Blood-and-thunder penny pulps . . . exerted great fascination [on James Barrie] with their garish covers and manly oaths issuing in balloons from sneering faces."  Richard Wright, Mississippi poor and without enough to eat was "forbidden to read anything except church literature and the Bible at home." He managed to get hold of "pulps and dime novels . . . with money he earned as a delivery boy."  He loved murder mysteries and read "Flynn's 'Detective Weekly' and 'Argosy,' both popular magazines of the 1920's."  Havelock Ellis read his Milton and Walter Scott and Defoe; but also he fell prey to a "hypnotic concentration" on 'The Boys of England,' a penny weekly which printed dramas "as high and remote from reality as were some of its settings."  Ellis read "while he was eating, while stomping the streets alone, and even somethings while ostensibly sleeping."

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first European to scale Everest, read, before his teen years, the Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and also H. Rider Haggard, and others like them.  "In my imagination I constantly reenacted heroic episodes, and I was always the hero."  Another reader of Rider Haggard was John Lennon.

Then there is the high school dropout guy who "dressed mostly in black, drove a silver Civic, dined at Denny's and Jack in the Box, read crime novels and comics voraciously, loved Elvis and the Three Stooges, always celebrated his birthday at the movies, and---legend has it---amassed $7,000 in parking tickets."  The movies he particularly liked portrayed women in prison and Asian martial arts.  The person?  Quentin Tarantino, scriptwriter and film director. His major film to date: 'Pulp Fiction.'

We need to remember that as the bodies of sports giants have often been raised on junk food, the imagination may be fed by cheap, popular, and "unhealthy" equivalents.  What matters is passion, which may be more predictive of capacity and productive of motivation than other usual benchmarks. Cole Porter said: "I suppose some of my lyrics owe a debt to those naughty books."  There is no right food and no wrong food; the food must only meet the appetite, the appetite find its kind of food.

As for the "acornic" significance of "extra-curricular books," consider Coleridge.  He read of "'the Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr. Philip Quarli' one of whose deeds was the shooting of a large and beautiful seabird . . . an action he immediately regrets."  'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' to which this dead seabird is central, is perhaps Coleridge's best-known longer work.

There are, I believe, certain necessary nutrients besides the occasions of chance that evoke the early imagination, as they did for Lennon on the heath and for Havelock Ellis immersed in his penny dreadful.  Among the many prerequisites for furthering imagination I would single out at least these three: first, that the parents or intimate caretakers of a child have a fantasy about that child; second, that there be odd fellows and peculiar ladies within the child's perimeter; and third, that obsessions be given courtesy.

Biographers usually look to the mother.  Lyndon Johnson was called a mama's boy; so was Franklin Roosevelt; Harry Truman handwrote letters to his mother while at the Potsdam Conference ordering world history.  So it is customary to see in a mother's ideals and intensity of ambition what is carried out by one or another of her children.  According to biographers, the source of success appears to lie in a mother's doting---or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.

This piece of the parental fallacy (a mistaken belief), with all its accompanying jargon about bad double-binding mothers or seductive smothering mothers, and also about absent or possessive and punitive fathers, so rules the explanations of eminence (prestige) that its jargon determines the way we tell the stories of our own lives. Notice that these psychologisms draw attention away from the child and back to the parent, who asks: "How am I doing?"  They raise doubts and anxieties, not about the nature of the child, but about the parents' own problems: Have I the right attitude?  Am I too strict?  Too lenient?  Am I good enough?---all of which reveal the inherent and almost inescapable self-referential narcissism in the parental fallacy.  Of this we have already said enough in the chapter devoted to this theme.  Here we need only recover one decisive influence from our global condemnation of the parental fallacy, and that is the parental 'fantasy.'

Parental Fantasy

What is the connection, if any, between the parental imagination---by "parent" I always mean the immediate, intimate caretaker of a child---and the child's acorn?  How do the parents imagine the child?  What do they see in this little person who has been dropped in their laps; what is it bearing on those frail and bony shoulders, what is it looking for with those eyes? Have the parents a fantasy of an invisible fate in the visible traits displayed every day?

Justus Bergman certainly looked for, and recorded, the visible traits displayed every day in his daughter, Ingrid.  He was a man filled with fantasy.  Ingrid was named after the Swedish princess born two years prior.  On Ingrid's first birthday, Justus filmed her in a white dress; on her second birthday he filmed her again. His third film shows her laying flowers on her mother's grave. Justus had a photography shop and studio on Stockholm's elegant Strandvagen, a hundred yards from the Royal Dramatic theater, and Ingrid was a favorite subject of his camera, dressing in various roles and loving to act in front of her father.  At age eleven, during an interval at the theater, she announced her vocation: "Papa, Papa, that's what I'm going to do."

The parental fallacy here sees sublimated incest, a father's daughter who lived out his controlling fantasy, as so many sons live out their mother's dreams. The Platonic fantasy, however, says Ingrid's soul selected exactly the right place and the right father to foster her acorn's desire. She even selected the right mother, who, by dying early, allowed the intertwining of Ingrid's calling and Justus's fantasy to proceed unimpeded by triangles of jealousy.  

The parental fantasy may not come as directly as in the example of Justus Bergman. It may instead show itself via dreams, or in overanxiousness, or in parental fights over school, over discipline, over sickliness---and over odd obsessions such as reading pulp fiction and watching midnight movies. The way the child's behavior is interpreted accords with the fantasy of the caretaker's vision. Does the mother kick her boy out of the house to play rough with other kids in the street because it's her fantasy that this boy needs to toughen up and be the man about the house (counterphobic to his weaknesses, and hers), or because of her fear of sissies and "queers," or because in her mind's eye she sees her son as a raider, with dash and good looks? The behaviors her instructions ordain or prohibit affect the child less than does the fantasy guiding her instructions.

To expect primary caretakers, for example, parents, to see through the child into the acorn, to know who is there 'in nuce' (nucleus), and to tend to its concerns---is far too much.  That is why teachers and mentors come into the world.  He or she is another special person, often someone whom we fall in love with early, or who falls for us; we are two acorns on the same branch, echoing similar ideals.  What heartsease and bliss in finding a corresponding soul who singles us out!  How long we move about, desperate to discover someone who can really see us, tell us who we are.  One of the main seductions of early love, and early therapy, arises from the desire to meet a person who can (or who you believe can, or who can at least pretend to) see you.

Greg LeMond, the remarkable American cyclist who won the Tour de France, received from his father money for equipment, clothing, and bicycling magazines. In addition to that encouragement, LeMond had a mentor: Roland Della Santa, a master bicycle-frame builder.  "Once or twice a week," said LeMond, "I went to Roland's shop and hung out while he worked.  He'd tell me stories about the great European stars, thousands of screaming fans and legendary races . . ."  The mentor provides specialized knowledge as well as the lore, the atmosphere of a tradition.

As caretakers, parents cannot also be mentors. The roles and duties differ. It is enough for a parent to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, and to get you up and off to school. Providing a cave of security, a place for regressions is no small job.  Freed of these tasks, the mentor has only one: to recognize the invisible load you carry and to have a fantasy about it that corresponds with the image in the heart.  One of the most painful errors we make is to expect from a parent a mentor's vision and blessing and strict teaching, or expecting from a mentor shelter and concern for our human life.  Van Cliburn's mother, who taught him piano for years, set a sharp border between her two natures: "When I'm teaching you, I'm  not your mother."

The failure to distinguish sufficiently between the rather ruthless limits of mentoring and the rather broadly mundane responsibilities of parenting---as when parents try to be guiding instructors, and mentors make a family of their following---leads to bitter breakups between apprentices and mentors. The younger person's wish to be fathered or mothered in a caring personal way (according to the Yale study by Daniel J. Levinson and his team) is the main reason for a failed end to the mentor relationship.  The confusion of expectations results also in the common resentment of "adult children" who complain that their parents never accurately assessed them, never recognized their inner nature.

The complaint may refer to more than absent parenting or mentoring. There may have been no access to fictional or historical figures, those imaginary mentors who can continue as guides even into older age. When Truman was about to fire MacArthur for insubordination and incompetence, he went back to the image of Abraham Lincoln, who had to fire General George McClellan despite all the political consequences of alienating McClellan (who later entered politics and tried for the presidency).  The parallels and threats were clear, but Lincoln provided the mentoring image.  Diane Arbus had 'Jane Eyre'; J. P. Morgan, Washington and Napoleon; John Lennon, 'Alice in Wonderland.'  Gary Gilmore, executed for murders, had "studied the legends of violence . . . the stories of John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Leopold and Loeb . . . Barbara Graham, Bruno Hauptmann, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs. . . . [He] brought home books about condemned men and women, and read them avidly." [Mikal Gilmore, "Family Album,"  'Granta' 37 (Autumn 1991): 15.]

Books too can be mentors, even providing a moment of initiation.  R. D. Laing, writer, philosopher, and revolutionary psychiatrist, tells of this discovery in a small public library, while he was still an adolescent in the 1940s.  He came upon Kierkegaard while

eating my way through the library, I mean I was looking at all the books . . . working my way from A to Z. . . . The first major thing of Kierkegaard that I read . . . was one of the peak experiences of my life.  I read that through, without sleeping, over a period of about 34 hours just continually. . . . I'd never seen any reference to him . . . that directed me to it.  It was just this complete vista. . . .  It just absolutely fitted my mind like a glove . . . here was a guy who had 'done' it.  I felt somehow or another within me, the flowering of one's life.

This moment of initiation is also like a ritual of adoption.  Kierkegaard---along with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche---became one of Laing's spiritual parents, a member of the family tree that nourished his acorn and fed his intellectual fantasy.  You expect less from your natural parents, and they become easier to bear once you have discovered the other family tree on which the life of your soul depends.

Perhaps the worst of all atmospheres for your daimon, trying to live with your parents in their place and circumstances, arises when these parents have 'no fantasy whatsoever' about you.  This objective, neutral environment, this normative, rational life is a vacuum with nothing blowing through.  So-called good parents abstain from fantasies for their children.  Each person has his own life and her own decisions to make. "Good parents" don't interject their prejudices, their values and judgments.  Unconditional positive regard is all a young person needs: "I'm sure you'll succeed at whatever you decide to do."  "I'm with you, whatever it is, all the way."  The fantasy that governs these parental stupidities is distancing, euphemistically called independence: You have your own room, with your own TV and your own phone line.  Independence as distancing finds its daily (or evening) expression in the great American long distance addiction and the phrase "I love you" spoken over the phone.  No ideas, no indignation, no anxiety, and no fantasy; love as anesthetic. This sentence, "I love you," parroted back and forth by child and parent may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas, and anxieties.

For a documentary of this void, watch the twelve-part television series 'An American Family,' which chronicles the day-to-day "life" of the Louds, a Santa Barbara, California, household of Mom and Dad and five kids during the early 1970s.  Marriage, family, and individual personality gradually collapse before your eyes, and the reason unfolds as you watch: The home has no living fantasy. 

The great difference between these people in California and the ones portrayed in Chekhov or in novels of family decay---'Buddenbrooks,' say---lies in a family life enriched by class commitments, cultural concerns, probing conversations into the imagination, wild longings, regrets, and especially despairs.  Literature gives to the despairs the complex flavors of irony and the beauty of tragedy.  These fictional people are not only living family, they are living fantasy.  The fictions of these families are more vivid than the family-fiction lived by the Louds, which has no stretch to its imagination.

If there is such a thing as negative culture or culture minus, the Louds have it.  The blaring sound of rock is the high point of the creativity in the family. . . . There is no religion, no threatening Jehovah, no merciful Mary, no sense of the beyond of the Talmud, the catechism, the myths of Jupiter and Hera; there is no avenging sensibility; no real moral right or wrong, no sense of judgement of good or bad weighing over the family.

Husband and wife "sit in their living room afraid, it seems, of nothing---no demons give them bad dreams, no wild animals haunt their steps.  A brush fire comes within inches of their house. . . . They comment about the fire casually. If the house burns it's insured; nothing really has the power to hurt them."  They belong to no clubs or organizations and have no real hobbies. . . . "no passions, such as movies, painting, reading, sewing.  When they're in the house they lie by the pool." 

Anne Roiphe, whose introduction to the published text of the documentary I am quoting, claims that "culture, if it means anything, must mean the binding of the individual into the social fabric."  But the Louds were woven into the consumer-rock music-alcohol-TV-automobile-health-school-apparel-business fabric.  Anyway, the social fabric is only a part, and an insufficient part if that social fabric impoverishes individual fantasy.  What came into that household left the Louds unsatisfied and numb to that dissatisfaction.

More important to culture than social fabric is the necessity of imagination.  And the Loud family are extraordinary people for its lack.  They have no fears, no desires, no strong angers or ambitions, no pity and no terror, and no images or language for their expression.  Their emotions and their imaginations have not been fed by fantasy.  It is as if they have been insured against its risks.  Or, more likely, they do share one major fantasy: denial.  "I think we're a very well-adjusted family."  Mrs. Loud says after the falling-apart and divorce.  She is absolutely right, for the Louds are indeed well adjusted to the American dream, with their own blue lagoon in their own sunny yard, sharing their hyperactive passivity.  Denial as fantasy; innocence as ideal; happiness as pursuit.

Was the virus that led to the family's disintegration brought by the camera that intruded into their intimacy for seven long months?  Or was there no intimacy to begin with, despite the sharing?  Did the Louds fall apart because their real life was transposed to TV---or was there no real life?  Perhaps the camera was merely a lens that magnified the virus already latent in the home.  Despite the limits of this series as an anthropological study, it does display the present fault in the American family: the want of stimulating fantasy, which, I am claiming is the principal fun and agony of parenting.

In the old days, the agon in the family had to do with major struggles between the fantasies of different characters and generations, such as following in the father's business versus getting an education, staying on the land versus moving to the city, marrying the one chosen for you versus marrying whom you chose.  And the heart's image of those old days could announce itself only as stubborn refusal to follow or by open rebellion against the parental fantasy that was engraved in a collective social code.  The codes have changed, the collective pressures differ, but the heart must still find the courage to make its choices.

The minor gesture toward the unapproved, the half step into rebellion, says "I am not Mother's little helper," "I am not a bookworm nerd," "I am not a lazy layabout," "I am not a bright little career girl."  The family fantasy that has a child typed and pinned and wriggling on the wall forces fateful choices on the heart, choices to find another kind of fantasy, anywhere.  In the Loud family one son took more than a half step, and he was diagnosed and medicated.  The repression of fantasy in them returned full flood into him, into his music, his language, his habits, including cross-dressing.

For it is not ultimately parental control or parental chaos that children run away from; they run from the void of living in a family without any fantasy beyond shopping, keeping up the car, and routines of niceness.  The value of the parental fantasy for the child is that it does force it into opposition and into a beginning recognition that its heart is odd, different, and unsatisfied by the shadow cast upon it by the family's view.  Far better for parents to wish the new baby were a boy, call her Harry, Sidney, or Clark, and cut her hair short, than for them not to have any wish at all.  At least the acorn is challenged and has a reality to contend with, the reality of the parental fantasy, which can result in seeing through the parental fallacy itself---seeing that I am not conditioned by and the result of my parents.

As a parent is not a mentor, so a parent is also not a nut---which brings us to the second necessary nutrient for the acorn: odd fellows and peculiar ladies.  The acorn needs living personifications of fantasy, actual people whose lives seem pulp fiction, whose behaviors, speech, dress carry a whiff of pure fantasy.  For me, an "extended family" means not simply more interchangeable caretakers among the many relations; it means extending relations beyond the perimeter of what is customary, an extension of imagination from the familiar to the fictional, to those figures talked about, told about, but rarely seen---in jail, in a foreign land, disappeared years ago.  Fictions of faraway folk conjure up images of possibilities for the potentials in the acorn.  Sometimes these possibilities are directed straight at the child, as if in indirect recognition of latent character: the wayward drunken uncle whom you "take after"; those look-alike cousins from Texas who never went anywhere and never married, who wear strange dresses and shoes and quote Scripture---"so if you don't watch out, you'll grow up to be just like them."

From Mr. Magoo to Big Bird, the peculiar figures of pure fantasy play on this desire for the extraordinary personage.  If Dr. Spock for the parents, then Dr. Seuss for the child.  Every evening's prime time brings in odd neighbors with strange behaviors that come in and out of the sitcom family set, extending the family with far-out fantasy people.  How strongly the child longs for parents to break their roles, dress up for halloween, put on something wild.  What is the attraction to theater, to the costume trunk, to make-believe with false faces and greasepaint kits in front of the mirror?  Is the point to escape the form I have been put in and by magic disclose the image in the heart?  Can I release the genie from its entombment in adaptation by a sudden vision of who might also be here?  Is the camcorder in the hand of the child an attempt to restructure the usual into the fantastic?

Primary caretakers who cannot be mentors on the one hand or crazies on the other can at least keep the door unlocked for invasions from the other side, for abduction by the alien imagination, for reminding a child of its essential belonging to the call of the angels.

For the third necessity---that a child's obsessions be given courtesy---I want to draw upon Mary Watkins's intelligent observations of imagination in dreams, in fantasy, in madness, in creative writing, and in children.  While imagining is going on, you are somewhat out of yourself, in another zone.  Sometimes the state is no more than a daydream, a staring, an absence; sometimes the unfolding of an entire future project; sometimes a hallucinatory terror at night; sometimes an ecstatic vision such as saints enjoyed.  There are various intensities---but the more thoroughly engaged you are, the more real the imaginative fantasy, its scenes, its voices, its beings, its feelings and insights.  Its reality possesses you and the words "fantasy," "imagination," "vision" do not really apply.  It feels all too real and too important.  Children under ten, and adolescents too, and of course the very old, find themselves again and again drawn away from the usual into this condition.

Imagining demands absolute attention.  The mind in the imagining zone cannot tolerate interruption any more than you can when trying to rewire a circuit breaker or prevent a sauce from curdling, or while preparing notes for tomorrow morning's meeting.  Yet when a child sits on the floor in the middle of a mess with three dolls and a slopped pan of water, or runs wild around the yard, in and out of bushes, it is just as thoroughly engaged in its task as you are.  Probably more.  Its play is its work.  Play is a child's job.  To pick the little worker up and carry it off, to call the child away to get dressed or clean up before the task is over, breaks right into the middle of its work.  Can your obedience to the fantasy of the clock and its kind of reality accommodate the child's reality of fantasy?

The acorn is obsessive.  It is all and only concentration, undiluted, like a drop of essence.  A child's behaviors elaborate this condensity.  The child puts into play the germinal code that pushes it into these obsessive activities.  By means of its concentration, a child gains breathing space and practice for the homunculus (a very small human or humanoid creature) of its innate truth, allowing this truth to articulate itself into styles and forms and facilities which it can perform only obsessively, repetitively, exhaustively.  Courtesy is called for.  Knock before entering.