The second half of Chapter 2 Growing Down 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.

p. 53

Loneliness and Exile

The "Judy Garland story" tells of solitude in the midst of world acclaim.  How do we account for the loneliness that accompanies every life?  Loneliness is not specific to stars in huge Hollywood houses, or reserved for aged senior in nursing homes.  Loneliness belongs to childhood, too.  That loneliness in a child's heart may be aggravated by fears of the dark, punishing parents, or rejecting comrades.  Its source, however, seems to be the solitary uniqueness of each daimon, an archetypal loneliness inexpressible in a child's vocabulary and formulated hardly better in ours.

Moments of dejection drop us into a pool of loneliness.  Waves of intense loneliness occur as aftershocks of childbirth, of divorce, of the death of a long-lived partner.  The soul pulls back, mourns alone.  Twinges of loneliness accompany even a marvelous birthday celebration and a victorious accomplishment.  Are these mere hangovers---compensatory falls after unusual heights?  Nothing seems to hold against the drop.  All the networking that has interlaced our extension outward and downward into the world---family, friends, neighbors, lovers, little routines, and the results of years of work---seem to count for nothing.  We feel ourselves curiously depersonalized, very far away.  Exiled.  No connection anywhere.  The spirit of loneliness has taken over.

To guard against these moments we have philosophies that explain them and pharmaceuticals that deny them.  The philosophies say the uprooted and hurried condition of modern city life and impersonal work has created a social condition of anomie.  We are isolated because of the industrial economic system.  We have become mere numbers.  We live consumerism rather than community.  Loneliness is symptomatic of victimization.  We are victims of a wrong way of life.  We should not be lonely.  Change the system---live in a cooperative or a commune; work in a team.  Or build relationships: "Connect, only connect."  Socialize, join recovery groups, get involved.  Pick up the phone.  Or ask your doctor for a prescription for Prozac.

Deeper than social philosophy and social remedy is the account of moral theology.  It recognizes in loneliness the sin of the Fall.  We are cut off from Eden and from God owing to the Original Sin of humankind.  When we feel alone and lost in the valley, we are stray sheep that have wandered from the path of redemption, out of grace and out of faith and therefore out of hope.  We can no longer hear the call of the shepherd or obey the bark of his persistently nipping dog hounding our conscience with guilt.  We are alone purposely, in order to hear the still small voice whose whispering is drowned out by the madding crowd.  Even worse: Loneliness is evidence of damnation for our personal sins committed in the corruptible body of flesh.  Of course Judy Garland was homeless, needy, broke, and lonely.  These are the wages of sin.

Moral theology from the East considers the suffering of isolation to be the task imposed on this life by past karmic actions in another incarnation or as a preparation for the next.  Moral theologies whether Eastern or Western subtly transform the sense of loneliness into the sin of loneliness, exacerbating its unhappiness.  Grin and bear it.  Or repent.

Existentialism, another way of accounting for loneliness, accepts the suffering of isolation as basic to its theory of human existence.  Heidegger or Camus, for instance, places the human being into the situation of "throwness."  We are merely thrown into being here (Dasein).  The German word for "thrown" (Wurf) combines senses of the throw of the dice, a projection, and a litter of pups or piglets cast by a bitch or a sow.  Life is your project; there is nothing to tell you what it's all about, which of course leaves you feeling existential anxiety and dread.  It's all up to you, each individual alone, since there is no cosmic guarantee that anything makes sense.  There is neither God nor Godot to wait for.  You make a life out of the deepest feelings of  meaninglessness.  The heroic ability to turn loneliness into individual strength is the way that Judy Garland failed to find.  She was too dependent, too weak, too fearful to combine "solitary" and "solidary," a motto proposed by Camus in one of the tales collected in his aptly titled work 'The Exile and the Kingdom.'  Garland's desperation demonstrates the truth of existential nihilism.  Such would be the existentialist reading.

These ways of thinking about loneliness---social, therapeutic, moral, existential---make two assumptions that I cannot accept.  First, each says that loneliness equates with literal aloneness and consequently is remediable by some sort of human action, such as repenting for sins, therapeutic relating, building the project of your life with your own heroic hands.  Second, each assumes that loneliness is fundamentally unpleasant.

But if there is an archetypal sense of loneliness accompanying us from the beginning, then to be alive is also to feel lonely.  Loneliness comes and goes apart from the measures we take.  It does not depend on being literally alone, for pangs of loneliness can strike in the midst of friends, in bed with a lover, at the microphone before a cheering crowd.  When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary; they are no longer harbingers of sin, of dread, or of wrong.  We can accept the strange autonomy of the feeling and free loneliness from identification with literal isolation.  Nor is loneliness mainly unpleasant once it receives its archetypal background.

When we look---or, rather, 'feel'---closely into the sense of loneliness we find it is composed of several elements: nostalgia, sadness, silence, and a yearning imagination for "something else" not here, not now.  "For these elements and images to show, we first have to focus on them rather than on remedies for being left literally alone.  Desperation grows worse when we seek ways out of despair. 

These conditions of nostalgia, sadness, silence, and a yearning imagination are the stuff of Judy Garland's songs, her voice and phrasing, her body language, her face and eyes. No wonder her performances reached the common heart as no others did. Nostalgia, sadness, silence, and imaginative yearning are also the inmost stuff of religious and romantic poetry in many languages and many cultures. They remind the acorn of its origins. Like E. T. in the Spielberg film, the acorn seems nostalgic, sad, silent, and filled with yearning for an image of "home."  Loneliness presents the emotions of exile; the soul has not been able to fully grow down, and is wanting to return. To where? We do not know, for that place the myths and cosmologies say is gone from memory. But the imaginative yearning and the sadness attest to an exile from what the soul cannot express except as loneliness. All it can recall is a nostalgia of feeling and an imagination of yearning. And a condition of want beyond personal needs.

Therefore, when we look again at Judy Garland, we can begin to understand why even when she was hardly able to find the words or hit the notes, the crowd called for those lyrics, "Somewhere, over the rainbow," and for the song's last yearning question, "Why can't I?" We can begin to understand as well how Garland was able to keep her fans and professional admirers, despite the shaming collapses and infuriating, erratic petulance of drunken, drugged, messed-up Frances Gumm--her birth name.  She made each of her listeners aware of what they, too, most intimately were longing for: the awakened image in the heart of the exiled and its yearning for what was not in this world.

We can also read again the last phases of her life as conditions appropriate to exile, like that of a wanderer on the road, a vagrant or a pilgrim, a member of the Diaspora, a Sufi poet-beggar, or a wine-drunk Zen monk. The daimon's home is not on the earth; it lives in an altered state; the body's frailty is a basic precondition of the soul's life on earth; and don't we each leave the world with debts unpaid? Drop the sociology and the psychoanalysis and Garland stands among the few who could never fully grow down because it was her acorn not only to sing and dance in the theatrical spotlight, to be the magical child and enact the otherworld's presence as the white-faced clown, but also to be the representative of exile and its longing.

Stardom II:  Josephine Baker

Another equally miraculous woman, whose movement down the Kabbalistic Tree took a different course, was born in St. Louis Social Evil Hospital in 1906, also in June. From this degraded entry into the world she first had to rise to the stars before she could begin her remarkable downward course.  As Frances Gumm bore the genius of "Judy Garland," Freda J. McDonald (or Tumpy, as she was called as a child) bore "Josephine Baker." 

This, too, was a woman of fascination and extravagance.  Josephine Baker Burst into the world at the Theater of the Champs-Elysees (Elysian Fields of heavenly paradise) in Paris in October 1925, nude but for a few feathers.  The motions of her frenzied dancing body "gave all of Paris a hard-on."  She was then nineteen.

By thirteen she had already been married.  That first husband, a steelworker, was earning, but Josephine "spent every penny he brought home on dresses."  As the success following the Paris opening brought in money, her "dresses" expanded: Now she had dogs she traveled with, a monkey on her shoulder, an ostrich cart.  She loved cars, although she could not drive.  Among those she owned was a rare and expensive Bugatti.  In January 1928 she and her manager left Paris for Vienna taking along, besides hangers-on, lovers, and relatives, "a secretary, a chauffeur, a maid, a typewriter, two dogs, 196 pairs of shoes, assorted dresses and furs, 64 kilos of facepowder, and 30,000 publicity shots for the fans."

The body into which her soul descended was one thing, its early circumstances quite different.  Scarce food, bedbugs; sleeping on the floor with the dog, hired out, as a child, to work where she and a dog shared the same food and fleas.  The woman she worked for beat her, and kept her naked because clothes cost too much.  Still a child, she was pawned off to another house to work, and sleep with, a white-haired old man.  That she'd gotten this far was already an accomplishment.  Records of the health department in St. Louis show that three out of five children died before the age of three.

She was dancing even then, in a basement where she set up a little stage and box benches.  She slapped the other kids around so they would sit still and pay attention while she performed.  She spent every minute she could watching performances at the local clubs and halls, and hung around the show people when they came through.

Once she carried a snake into a funeral where the coffin lay open.  The snake got loose and panicked the mourners; the coffin tipped over, the corpse rolled, and the snake was bashed to death by the angry people.  Tumpy---or was it already Josephine, protector of animals?---screamed, "You've killed my friend!"  It's not so unusual for children to feel an animal's soul.  Yet we also should recall that the snake is perhaps the most ancient and universal carrier of the genius spirit, the figure of a protective guardian, the "genius" itself.  Had she already made friends with her acorn? . . . . . .

Josephine Baker's star life shows many similarities to that of Judy Garland: the huge public acclaim and the public eclipse; the mesmerizing performances; the need to "be in love"; the struggle with men as lovers, partners, and exploiters (one young man shot himself right in front of her and died at her feet); money running through her fingers; the show-business whirl and its glamorizing effect on personal habits and health; the ascent from nowhere; the complete lack of a normal education; obsessions with physical inferiorities (Garland worried over her weight and build, Baker over her hair); and sex.  . . . . . .

Garland's biographers indicate some of the same compulsive eroticism.  The main similarity lies in both women's ability to fascinate, to represent a transcendent aspect of the human soul that calls to each soul in the audience.  It is as if they can show off the daimon, let it be seen and heard.  Garland's daimon was "Over the Rainbow," Baker's "La Danse de sauvage."

The parallels part.  Josephine Baker grows down.  This movement must not be explained away by her down-and-dirty act, her down-and-out childhood, the downfall of her career, or by the easy racist explanation that, since she was black, down was her way.  She was not put down, nor did she fall down; Josephine Baker grew down.

She moved step by step into the political and social world.  First, it was the war that began in 1939; she was then thirty-two.  She wanted to do all she could for her adopted country, France.  This meant risking her life for the French underground by smuggling information, hidden in musical scores, across the borders of France and Spain into Portugal.  Being black, she was banned from the theater and was in danger of deportation, even execution.  In Morocco, where she was kept royally by relatives of the ruling family, she worked at saving Jews from roundups; for a while she wore a yellow Star of David on her coat, a far cry from pink plumes.  During the cold winter after the liberation of Paris she scavenged hundreds of pounds of meat, bags of vegetables, and coal to help the poor.  She was awarded the Legion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre for her contributions and was congratulated by de Gaulle.

The next step down was her return to America, where she began to align herself with her St. Louis circumstances.  She was an early participant in the civil rights movement; she insisted blacks be hired as stagehands; she joined the 1963 March on Washington; she visited black inmates in a New Jersey prison.  For her efforts on behalf of integration she was praised by Margin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Bunche.  She also visited Castro's Cuba; the FBI's file on her ran to a thousand pages.

Baker's last step down was supporting eleven adopted children from many nations and of many colors, fighting to keep them together and to see they were fed, housed, and schooled.  She toured and performed, appealing for funds to hold on to the country estate that was their home and into which she had sunk her last money.  Saved once by Grace Kelly and another time by Brigitte Bardot, finally she was foreclosed and physically thrown out in the rain.  Broke, homeless, aging, she gave her last show to wild acclaim, in Paris a few days before she died, April 12, 1975, at the Salpetriere hospital.  Her death there recapitulated her birth at the St. Louis Social Evil Hospital, for the Salpetriere had been built for outcast women, prostitutes, syphilitics, indigents, criminals.

Rise and fall.  It is one of the archetypal patterns of life, and one of its most ancient, cosmic lessons.  But 'how' one falls, the style of coming down, remains the interesting part.  Judy Garland's was a heroic and sad decline into collapse.  Her efforts aimed at the comeback; she tried again and again to connect with the upper world of stardom, a struggle that ironically led to that dismal death in a London flat.  The thirty-minute ovation Josephine Baker received in Paris that final week was both for the daimon in her body ("the people did not want to leave the theater") and for her long and slow history of growing down into this world of "social evils": fascism, racism, abandonment of children, injustice.

The Platonic myth of growing down with which we began this chapter says the soul descends in four modes---via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances.  These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival.  First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging.  (Baker told people she was sixty-four while she was still in her mid-fifties; she wore old clothes and gave up covering her baldness.)  Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches.  Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs.  Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.

* * * *

From Dictionary Copyright © 2005 Apple Computer, Inc.:

daimon 

noun  ( pl. -mons or -mones)

variant spelling of daemon.

daemon  (also daimon)

noun

(in ancient Greek belief) a divinity or supernatural being of a

 nature between gods and humans.

• an inner or attendant spirit or inspiring force.

* *

From Dictionary:

existentialism

noun

a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

Generally taken to originate with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, existentialism tends to be atheistic (although there is a strand of Christian existentialism deriving from the work of Kierkegaard), to disparage scientific knowledge, and to deny the existence of objective values, stressing instead the reality and significance of human freedom and experience. The approach was developed chiefly in 20th-century Europe, notably by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.

DERIVATIVES

existentialist    noun & adjective

ORIGIN translating Danish existents-forhold ‘condition of existence’ (frequently used by Kierkegaard), from existential.

* *

From Dictionary:

nihilism 

noun

the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.

• Philosophy extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.

• historical the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900, which found nothing to approve of in the established social order.

DERIVATIVES

nihilist noun

nihilistic  adjective

ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Latin nihil ‘nothing’ + -ism.

* *

From Thesaurus:

nihilism

noun

she could not accept Bacon's nihilism, his insistence that man is a futile being:  skepticism, negativity, cynicism, pessimism; disbelief, unbelief, agnosticism, atheism.

* *

From Dictionary:

Kabbalah  (also Kabbala, Cabala, Cabbala, or Qabalah)

noun

the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible, first transmitted orally and using esoteric methods (including ciphers). It reached the height of its influence in the later Middle Ages and remains significant in Hasidism.

DERIVATIVES

Kabbalism   noun

Kabbalist   noun

Kabbalistic   adjective 

ORIGIN from medieval Latin:  cabala, cabbala, from Rabbinical Hebrew: qabbālāh ‘tradition,’ from qibbēl ‘receive, accept.’

* *

Hasidism  (also Chasidism, Chassidism, or Hassidism)

noun

an influential mystical Jewish movement founded in Poland in the 18th century in reaction to the rigid academicism of rabbinical Judaism.The movement declined sharply in the 19th century, but fundamentalist communities developed from it, and Hasidism is still a force in Jewish life, particularly in Israel and New York.

The first half of Chapter 2 Growing Down 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 2  Growing Down

The ladder whose ascent implies spiritual progress has a long pedigree.  The Hebrews, Greeks, and Christians all gave special value to the heights, and our spiritually influenced compass of Western morality tends to put all better things up high and worse things down low.  By the last century, growth became inexorably caught in this ascensionist fantasy.  Darwin's thesis, 'The Descent of Man,' became, in our minds, the ascent of man.  Each immigrant moved upward in social class as buildings moved upward with their elevators to more expensive levels.  Industrial refining of buried minerals---coal, iron, copper, oil---increased their economic value and the financial status of their owners simply by raising these basic stuffs from below to above.  By now, the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliche.  To be an adult is to be a grown-up.  Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that.  For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light.  Yet the metaphors for our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.

Hasn't something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model?  Birthing.  Normally we come into the world headfirst, like divers into the pool of humanity.  Besides, the head has a soft spot through which the infant soul, according to the traditions of body symbolism, could still be influenced by its origins.  The slow closing of the head's fontanel and fissures, its hardening into a tightly sealed skull, signified separation from an invisible beyond and final arrival here.  Descent takes a while.  We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.

The enormous difficulty small children have growing down into the practical, their tight won't-let-go grip, their fear, their strain to adapt, and their puzzled wonder over the little things of the earth around them show us every day how hard it is to grow down.  Japanese ideas of caring for infants call upon the mother or caregiver to be present all the time.  The child is to be kept close, brought into the human community because it has come from so far away.

Symbol systems like that of the zodiacal cycle in both Western and Asian astrology start headfirst.  The most refined, the most subtle, is the last sign, of the Fish (West) and the Pig (East).  The symbolic body-locus of this last sign is the feet.  It seems the feet are the last to arrive.  And they are the first to go, if we follow, for instance, the slow dying of Socrates.  The hemlock poison he was required to drink first numbed and chilled his lower limbs, as if he began to be drawn away from this world feet first.  To plant a foot firmly on earth---that is the ultimate achievement, and a far later stage of growth than anything begun in your head.  No wonder the faithful revere the Buddha's footprint in Sri Lanka.  It shows he was truly in the world.  He had really grown down.

In fact, the Buddha had begun the process of growing down early in his life, when he left his protected palace gardens to enter the street. There the sick, the dead, the poor, and the old drew his soul down into the question of how to live life in the world. 

These familiar stories of Socrates and the Buddha, and the images of astrology, give another direction to growth and another value to "down."  For, in its most common usage, "down" is nothing but a downer.  The soul has to drag its feet with doubts and second-guessing, if not symptoms, when pressed to accommodate itself to the upward push of career.  College kids with bright promise sometimes suddenly find their "personal computer" is down.  They fall off the fast track.  They want to "get down."  Or drinks, drugs, and depression set in like Furies.  Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life. 

Organic images of growth follow the favorite symbol for human life, the tree, but I am turning that tree upside down. My model of growth has its roots in heaven and imagines a gradual descent downward toward human affairs. This is the Tree of the Kabbalah in the Jewish and also Christian mystical tradition.

The Zohar, the main Kabbalist book, makes it clear that the descent is tough; the soul is reluctant to come down and get messed by the world.

At the time that the Holy One, be blessed, was about to create the world, he decided to fashion all the souls which would in due course be dealt out to the children of men, and each soul was formed into the exact outline of the body she was destined to tenant. . . . Go now, descend into this and this place, into this and this body.

Yet often enough the soul would reply: Lord of the world, I am content to remain in this realm, and have no wish to depart to some other, where I shall be in thralldom, and become stained.

Whereupon the Holy One, be blessed, would reply: Thy destiny is, and has been from the day of thy forming, to go into that world.

Then the soul, realizing it could not disobey, would unwillingly descend and come into this world. [Gershom Scholem, ed., 'Zohar---The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah' (New York; Schocken Books, 1963), 91.]

The Kabbalist tree, as first elaborated in thirteenth-century Spain, imagines the descending branches to be conditions of the soul's life, which becomes more and more manifest and visible as it descends. The lower it gets, the more difficulty we have grasping its meaning, according to Charles Ponce, a recent psychological interpreter of Kabbalah. As he says, the upper regions and symbols are not as occult as the worldly ones; "the legs remain a mystery." It's easy to see the ethical implications of this upside-down image: A person's involvement with the world gives evidence of the descent of the spirit. Virtue would consist in downwardness such as humility, charity, teaching, and not being "stuck up."

The Tree of the Kabbalah repeats two of the most enduring creation myths of our civilization, the biblical and the Platonic. The Bible reports that God took six days to make the whole cosmos. The first day, as you will recall, God was busy with huge abstractions and higher constructions such as separating dark and light, getting his basic orientation. Only toward the end of the process, as it moved downward during days five and six, do we get to the multitudes of animals and to the human being. Creating progresses downward from the transcendent to the teeming here of immanence (Latin: immanent- ‘remaining within,’).

Plato's tale of descent is the Myth of Er which I shall condense from the last chapter of his Republic: 

The souls are all hanging around in a mythical world, having arrived there from previous lives, and each has a lot to fulfill.  This lot is also called a portion of fate (Moira) that is somehow representative of the character of that particular soul.  For instance, the myth says the soul of Ajax, the intemperate and mighty warrior, chose the life of a lion, while Atalanta, the fleet young woman runner, chose the lot of an athlete, and another soul chose the lot of a skillful workman.  Ulysses' soul, remembering its long life of trials and tribulations, "and tired of ambition, went about a long time seeking the life of a private man of no business, and with difficulty found it lying somewhere, neglected by the rest.

"When all the souls had chosen their lives according to their lots, they went before Lachesis [lachos = one's special lot or portion of fate].  And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the genius [daimon] that had been chosen."  Lachesis leads the soul to the second of the three personifications of destiny, Klotho (klotho = to twist by spinning).  "Under her hand and her turning of the spindle, the destiny of the chosen lot is ratified."  (Given its particular twist?) "Then the genius [daimon] again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos [atropos = not to be turned, inflexible] to make the web of its destiny irreversible.

"And then without a backward glance the soul passes beneath the throne of Necessity," sometimes translated as the "lap" of Necessity.

Precisely what a "lot" (kleros) is imagined to look like does not come clear from the text.  The word 'kleros' combines three closely connected meanings: (a) piece of the earth, like our sandlot, car lot, empty lot, which expands to mean (b) that "space" which is your portion in the overall order of things, and (c) an inheritance, or what rightfully comes down to you as an heir.

I understand these lots in the myth to be images.  Since the lots are each particular and encompass a whole style of fate, the soul must be perceiving intuitively an image that embraces the whole of a life all at once. It must be choosing that image which attracts: "This is the one I want, and it is my rightful inheritance." My soul selects the image I live.

Plato's text calls this image a paradeigma, or "pattern," as translators usually say. So the "lot" is the image that is your inheritance, your soul's portion in the world order, and your place on earth, all compacted into a pattern that has been selected by your soul before you ever got here---or, better said, that is always and continually being selected by your soul, because time does not enter the equations of myth. ("Myth," said Sallust, the roman philosopher of paganism, "never happened but always is.") Since ancient psychology usually located the soul around or with the heart, your heart holds the image of your destiny and calls you to it.

Unpacking the image takes a lifetime. It may be perceived all at once, but understood only slowly. Thus the soul has an image of its fate, which time can show only as "future." Is "future" another name for fate, and are our concerns about "the future" more likely fantasies of fate?

Before the souls enter human life, however, they pass through the plain of Lethe (oblivion, forgetting) so that on arrival here all of the previous activities of choosing lots and the descent from the lap of Necessity is wiped out. It is in this condition of a tabula rasa, or empty tablet, that we are born. We have forgotten all of the story, though the inescapable and necessary pattern of my lot remains and my companion daimon remembers.

The greatest of all followers along the Platonic line, Plotinus sums up the myth in a few lines: "Being born, coming into this particular body, these particular parents, and in such a place, and what we call external circumstances . . . form a unity and are as it were spun together."  Each of our souls is guided by a daimon to that particular body and place, these parents and circumstances, by Necessity---and none of us has an inkling of this because it was eradicated on the plains of forgetting. 

According to another Jewish legend, the evidence for this forgetting of the soul's prenatal election is pressed right into your upper lip.  That little crevice below your nose is where the angel pressed its forefinger to seal your lips.  That little indentation is all that is left to remind you of your preexistent soul-life with the daimon, and so, as we conjure up an insight or a lost thought, our fingers go up to that significant dent.

Images such as these fill the mind with lovely speculations, and have for centuries.  Why is She called Necessity and why does He pay so much attention to sea monsters and creeping things one whole day before getting to humankind?  Are we best because last?  Or are we least, like an afterthought?

These cosmological myths place us in the world and involve us with it.  The cosmologies of today---big bangs and black holes, antimatter and curved, ever-expanding space going nowhere---leave us in dread and senseless incomprehensibility.  Random events, nothing truly necessary.  Science's cosmologies say nothing about the soul, and so they say nothing to the soul, about its reason for existence, how it comes to be and where it might be going, and what its tasks could be.  The invisibilities that we feel enmeshing our lives with what is beyond our lives have been abstracted by the cosmologies of science into the literal invisibility of remote galaxies or waves.  They can't be known or perceived, because they are measured by time, and our lives are mere nanoseconds in the vast panoply of science's myth.  What's the purpose of anything?

These "invisibles" of the physical universe can't be known or perceived, only calculated, because they are light-years away and because by definition they are indeterminate.  Here it is worthwhile noting that some ancient philosophy considered the indeterminate (apeiron) to be the basis of evil.  Explanation by the physical sciences of the ultimate origins of and reasons for our life may not be such a good way to go.  Any cosmology that begins on the wrong foot will not only produce lame accounts; it will also lame our love of existence.  The creation myth of random events in unimaginable space keeps the Western soul floating in a stratosphere where it cannot breathe.  No wonder we look to other myths, like that of Plato's Er, the book of Genesis, and the Kabbalist Tree.  Each of these gives a similar mythical account of how things are: They found us in myths, and the myths unfold downward into one's personal soul.  No wonder, too, that Plato says this about his "fable": " it may preserve us, if we are persuaded by it."

Stardom 1:  Judy Garland

The descent into the world may be painful and costly.  Costly, especially, to the family.  The price of calling is often paid by the very circumstances in which the acorn has taken root---the body, the family, and the immediate participants in the life of the calling, such as husbands and wives, children and friends, collaborators and mentors.  Often the demands of the calling ruthlessly wreak havoc on the decencies of a well-lived life.

Of course, not only the eminent are called.  Who doesn't feel the pressure of taking on too much and going too far, whatever the profession?  All of us worry that we could still have done more---another vegetable for Thanksgiving dinner or another half hour on piano practice or on the exercise machine.  The addiction to perfection is another term for the call of the angel.  The voice that cautions speaks only part of the daimon's message.  Another part calls to the ideal.  So the blame placed on modern stress, money needs, superego commandments, and dreadful deadlines tries to reduce the archetypal nature of the indefatigable inhuman angel and its relentless claims.  Though everyone feels at times the press of calling, it is in the exaggerated life of celebrities where these demands are most apparent and best documented.

Riches and acclaim never compensate; stars always seem displaced persons, always needy, estranged, haunted by an unspoken tragedy that is blamed on parents or betrayals in love, on ailments or forced inhuman schedules.  The blame belongs to the angel, to the difficulty of the inhuman attempting to come down into the human.  Addictions that keep stars estranged and "out of it," suicide attempts, and early death may result from the incommensurability between calling and life.  In a well-measured world of human convention, how can I live the ahuman demands of what I am called to do?

To show the difficulties of growing down, I want to contrast the stories of two of the most widely recognized exceptional talents in show business.  We'll begin with Judy Garland, or Frances Gumm of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, who entered our world June 10, 1922, by means of a show business family that promoted her almost as soon as she could stand up.  Garland's calling announced itself when she was two and a half.  As Baby Gumm, she joined her two older sisters onstage.  Then solo, she sang "Jingle Bells" to an audience that roared approval, brought her back again and again, to which she responded by singing and ringing her bells louder and louder.  Her father had to haul her offstage. Immediate rapport.  Immediate fans.

Baby Gumm had already seen an act of the Blue Sisters, three girls between the ages of twelve and five; "When the youngest Blue Sister started to sing, alone, the Gumms could all see how this was really going to send Frances into a fit.  And it did.  She sat transfixed.  When it was all over, she turned to Daddy and---I'll never forget it---said, 'Can I do that, Daddy?'"  Garland's sister Virginia reports that "even in her two-year-old head, she already knew exactly what she wanted."

Garland believed her calling "was inherited.  Nobody ever taught me what to do on stage. . . . I just did 'what came naturally.'"  Remembering her initial "Jingle Bells" performance, she compared the rush onstage to "taking nineteen hundred wake-up pills."  Garland of the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall was already there in two-year-old Baby Gumm.

Her own explanation of "inherited" means less literally genetic (as we shall come to see in chapter 6) than innate, given "naturally," like her daimon and its calling.  A thousand manipulating fathers cannot yield one Mozart any more than can the pushiest mother in the world produce one Judy Garland.  I would rather attribute the startling magnetism of Frances Gumm, age two and a half, in Grand Rapids, to the acorn of Judy Garland awakening onstage, an acorn that "chose" exactly those show business parents and sisters and circumstances for beginning its life on earth.

But that life took its toll on Frances Gumm.  Growing down followed a suffering course, a course that also followed an orbit among the "stars."  One after another, the big names of show business who sang, danced, and filmed with her, and who reviewed her, gave her immense tribute. . . . . "All my life," said Garland of herself, "I've done everything to excess."

But below her yawned the snake pit: ambulances to the hospital, stomach pumps, blackmail, throat slashed with broken glass, stage fright, shouting matches in public, pills by the handful, a bad drunk, promiscuous sex, sequestered salary, turned out in the street, bleak despair, and paralyzing terror.  The descending part was aging, embodied, entangled, and dying.

pick up again on p. 52:

The usual way of coming to terms with the tragic messes of Garland's life is to accuse "Hollywood" and its pressures of agents, studios, and pseudo-realities.  Only this can explain how a star so gifted, who "had it all," could "sink so low."

I would rather see each of these sinkings as attempts at descent, at misbegotten ways of growing down.  It is as if the world that she never reached kept pulling her into it by means of its usual instruments: sex and money, dealers and lovers, brokers and contracts, marriages and failures.  Down, down, even to testifying in a murder trial and her final scene of death on a toilet during the night of June 21--22, the apogee of the solar year, its brightest moment and shortest night.

Where most of the population never "make it" in the Garland sense and dream lifelong of becoming stars, or just of touching one once, the reverse in Garland's case is striking.  She wanted to enter the regular world, to live with a man in a stable marriage, to have children (she had three, but in her forties said, wistfully, "I suppose it's too late for me to have another child"), to have friends and not only fans.  What kept her going was none of these normalcies, but the ruthlessness of her calling, which opposed them.

The standard modern dilemma of home versus work, family versus career takes on in Garland's case the archetypal dimension of a cross, preventing her calling from growing down into life.  The vertical dimension stretched between hellish suffering and heavenly miracles, unable to settle into the flat and level of the daily world.  Her star was never quite born.  Hollywood magnified the calling, demanding that her life comply wholly with her otherworld's acorn, for which Hollywood acts as collective agent.  It expected her life to take car of itself.  But Frances Gumm did not know how to keep house, be married, raise children, cook a meal, or make anything with her hands.  She could not even find the right clothes to put on.  James Mason, who was her leading man in 'A Star Is Born,' said at her funeral: "She who gave so much and richly . . . needed to be repaid, she needed devotion and love beyond the resources of any of us."  An inhuman demand: the need of the inhuman for a human world.

Garland gave this account of the dilemma her acorn posed: "Maybe it's because I made a certain sound, a musical sound, a sound that seems to belong to the world.  But it also belongs to me because it comes from within me."

We are back to a general principle: The heart's image requires efforts of 'attachment' to every sort of anchoring circumstance, whether these anchors be the loyalty of friends, the stability of contracts, the reliability of health, the schedules of the clock, the facts of geography.  Because "the sound seems to belong to the world" and comes through as an invisible gift, there can never be enough world in which to sink its roots.  Why do stars "sink so low"---becoming commercial face-lifted drunks, sex freaks, religious paranoids?  Are these not desperate attempts to touch the common ground?  Every symptom is a compromise, as Freud saw.  Symptoms attempt the right aim but accomplish it in the wrong way.  The heights seek the depths; one way or another they want to come down, even if by suicide, by ruinous contracts and bankruptcy, by entangling emotional messes.  No soft landings.  "The middle road was never for her," said Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli at the funeral.

Two Essays On Teaching and Learning by Jacques Barzun and an excerpt by William James

From "A Jacques Barzun Reader." Copyright © 2002 by Jacques Barzun. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY.

p. 387

The Art of Making Teachers

Now that the collapse of the American public school is admitted on all hands, after thirty years of blindness on one side and defensive lying on the other, attention has turned to the question, What about the teachers---are they to blame or are they victims too?  And the related question follows, Where should we turn for good teachers?  For shortage is added to the other woes.

If is a fact of nature that there are more born poets than born teachers.  But the world's work cannot depend on genius; it must make do with talent, that is to say, fair material properly trained.  Up to now teacher training has been done by people unfitted for the job.  By temperament they have no interest in Learning or capacity for it; by purpose they are bent not on instruction but on social work.  They care little about history or science or good English, but they grow keen about any scheme of betterment; one recent proposal is: teach the importance of washing the hands.

The result of half a century of this world-reforming attitude may be seen in the language in which educationists think and talk.  Its characteristics are: abstraction instead of direct naming; exaggeration of goals and results; seeing the student not as an individual but as an example of some psychological generality; taking any indirect means in place of the straight one; and mistaking words for facts, and intentions for hard work.

Such is the educationist mind everywhere.  A few years ago New York City, finding its school system in bad shape, set up a task force to look into the trouble and devise remedies.  After a time, a large gathering of interested and qualified persons was invited to hear of any progress made.  An impressive and fluent official took about an hour to describe the committee's procedure, summarize its report, and explain how the recommendations worked to reform the whole system.  Then she asked for questions.  One bold spirit ventured "Could you tell us what success you have had so far?"  The answer: "We have had complete success.  All the heads of department to whom we sent the report have replied that it met with their full approval."

Nothing happened, of course.  The educationist spirit is that of bureaucracy---marks on paper take precedence over reality---and bureaucracy is inconvertible.  Indeed, some observers have lately said that no system, anywhere in the country, can be changed.  Physicists can transmute (change, transform) the chemical elements but not the schools.

In short, teacher training is based on a strong anti-intellectual bias, enhanced by lack of imagination.  The trainers live in a cloud of nomenclature, formulas, "objectives," evaluations, and "strategies."  By instinct, it seems, doing is held at arm's length; any call for change starts with a pompous windup: "When we talk about goals, we imply a context for action that transcends a dictionary definition.  Institutional planning embraces mission, goals, and objectives, while business strategic planning defines roles, goals, and tactics.  Goals . . . theoretically can be commonly defined and shared so that everyone is heading in the right direction."

To most teachers this mode of thought is or becomes second nature; the school-teaching profession believes in fantasy.  No doubt strong minds escape the blight, but they must go on to do their good teaching despite the creed and its oppressive atmosphere.

What, then, are the native qualities to look for in the person who, though not one of those born to the task, would make a good teacher?  And what sort of training should such a person get?  As to the first requirement: brains enough to feel bewildered and revolted by the educationist language---and courage enough to admit it.  Next, a strong interest in some branch of learning, meaning any one of the genuine school subjects.  Which those are can be found every day in the newspaper articles that bewail the failure of the schools.  Nobody writes about the poor showing in "Shopping and Community Resources."

In addition, a teacher should have some interests beyond his or her specialty.  In bearing, in manner of thinking and talking, a teacher should quite naturally appear to be a person with a mental life, a person who reads books and whose converse with colleagues is not purely 'business' shop; that is, not invariably methods and troubles, but substance as well.  There is no hope of attracting students to any art or science and keeping up their interest without this spontaneous mental radiation.  When it is reported that the teaching of biology imparts nothing but a rooted dislike of science, it is easy to see what disconnection exists between the mind of the teacher and the nature of the subject.

A key phrase in the foregoing is 'naturally have a mental life.'  It implies that the teacher 'likes' books and ideas.  With these likes, the teacher will not become a pedant (dogmatist) or a martinet (a strict disciplinarian) and will avoid another failing now often seen: false modesty and self-consciousness.  Addressing parents, a teacher from a very good school confides: "Teaching is part performance, part pratfall---at least, my teaching is so.  I never know what's coming when I go into a class."  Then resign and take a less scary job.  But the words are insincere---conventional hokum to show that the speaker is not highbrow or know-it-all, that a teacher is only a person older than his students, not wiser or better informed---"we all learn together."  (The cliche that a teacher learns from his students is true, but the thing learned is not at all the same and it is not a continuous "course.")

Now suppose a young woman, a young man, with a good mind and normal common sense, who is eager to become a teacher.  Training to fulfill this ambition calls for nothing complicated or abstruse (Latin: put away, hidden).  The all-important thing is mastery of a subject matter.  Ideally, it should be the freely chosen major in college.  This main subject needs to be supplemented by courses in other fields, to give awareness of their contents and outlook and their relation to the main subject.  Providing this "environment" is the ancient goal of a liberal education, which may be likened to a map of the mental life with one region of it extremely familiar, because it is "home."  For the teacher, a history of educational theories would complete the program.  It should be made clear too that science and mathematics are liberal arts, not some mystery of recent growth and suddenly in demand "for the twenty-first century."

Speaking of science, should the teacher learn psychology, child psychology in particular?  No.  The science, which is by no means settled, is like other sciences; it yields only generalities; and teaching is par excellence the adaptation of one particular mind to another.  There is no such thing as 'the' child---at any age.  Teaching is not the application of a system, it is an exercise in perpetual discretion (caution, diplomacy).  One pupil, too timid, needs to be cheered along; another calmed down for the sake of concentration.  Correcting faults and errors must take different forms (and words) in individual cases and must usually be accompanied by praise for the good achieved.  Variety of tasks is indicated for some and steady plugging (proceed laboriously) for others.  The class is not to be spoken to in the same way as the single child, and fostering emulation (Latin: rivaled, equaled) must not generate anxious competitiveness.

Now, no method on earth will teach ahead of time when, how, and to whom these purposely contrary acts are right or wrong.  Intuition---for want of a better term---is the true guide.  A good teacher can spot a gifted child without learning the twenty-two characteristics listed in 'The Encyclopedia of Education.'  The few pointers of a general sort that would help an apprentice (trainee) teacher can be found in William James's "Talks to Teachers," a small book still in print after a century.

The way to learn the art of teaching is by imitation.  To teach well one should have had at least one good teacher and been struck, consciously or not, by the means employed and the behavior displayed.  It follows that practice teaching is an indispensable part of the training.  But here lies the appalling predicament of the present hour: How can imitation and practice teaching produce anything but the kind of teachers we have had, misdirected and miseducated?  Unless bypassed, the profession will perpetuate, in all good faith and with heart-melting slogans, the damnable errors that have killed instruction and made the classroom a center for expensive waste. (1991)

* *

Where the Educational Nonsense Comes From

The first thing we must know under this heading is where the educational nonsense does 'not' come from.  The usual random guesses conceal the facts.  I call nonsense any plan or proposal or 'critique' which disregards the known limits of schooling or teaching.  Schooling means teaching in groups.  Thus a plan that might be workable if applied by a gifted tutor to a single child living continuously in the same house becomes nonsense when proposed for classroom instruction in an institution designed for hundreds or a national system designed for millions.

Similarly, the limits of teaching are transgressed if the plan presupposes extraordinary talents or devotion in the teacher.  Finally, nonsense is at the heart of such proposals as replace definable subject matters with vague activities copied from "life" or with courses organized around "problems" or "attitudes."  The attempt to inculcate (instill) directly, as a subject of instruction, any set of ethical, social, or political virtues is either indoctrination or foolery.  In both cases it is something other than schooling.  That fact is not in conflict with another fact, which is that schools indirectly impart principles of conduct.  Schools reinforce some portion of the current ethos (spirit, character, morality), if only because teachers and books and the normal behavior of those brought together exemplify the moral habits of the time and place.

Summing up these definitions and generalities, we may say that educational nonsense comes from proposing or promoting something else than the prime object of the school, which is the removal of ignorance. (1971) 

* *

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"Talks to Teachers On Psychology" by William James, Copyright © 1899, 1900 by William James

VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT

It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word 'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.

Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I am now about to talk of it to you.

I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr. Carpenter's words) grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.

Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington said, it is 'ten times nature,'—at any rate as regards its importance in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before.

So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this, under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.

To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from the treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.

I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success.

The second maxim is, Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says:—

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress."

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I have laid down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. 

This leads to a fourth maxim. Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.

"The Language of Power" 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 2:  Styles of Power

The Language of Power

Control

Office

Prestige

Exhibitionism

Ambition 

Reputation

Influence

Resistance

Leadership

Concentration

Authority

Persuasion

Charisma

Rising

Decision

Fearsomeness

Tyranny

Veto

Purism

Subtle Power

p. 95

The Language of Power

The term "power complex" originates with C. G. Jung and appears largely defined in his "Psychological Types," first published in English in 1923.  The paragraph reads:

I occasionally use this term as denoting the total complex of all those ideas and strivings whose tendency it is to range the ego above other influences, thus subordinating all such influences to the ego, quite irrespective of whether they have their source in men and objective conditions, or spring from one's own subjective impulses, feelings, and thoughts.

In brief, 'subordination' of any sort arouses the power complex.  The definition implies that to assert self over other, whatever that other may be, puts the other down.  The key word in Jung's paragraph is "above."  The means to rise above may take many paths. Subordination may use force, strength of will, persuasion by mood, logic of argument, conversion by faith, conviction by reason, terror, manipulation, entanglement or deception.  Whatever the method, the power complex subordinates to get and stay on top.

These different modes are familiar enough.  Anyone who has lived with a moodily depressed spouse, a cunning manipulator or an ugly bully knows intimately what subordination means, and that the superior position seems mainly to define itself in terms of someone or something else becoming subservient.

We are equally familiar with the techniques of subordination going on in our own character structure---thoughts we will not allow, feelings we prefer to keep down, fantasies and habits that may not see the light of day and are judged straightaway as inferior.  Whether inner or outer, in self or in others, Jung's idea of the power complex relies on the idea of a superiorly will-powered ego.

In other places, however, Jung goes beyond ego and speaks of a power drive or instinct to power, appropriating the idea, perhaps from Alfred Adler and perhaps also from Nietzsche's will to power.  Jung pairs this power instinct with another overwhelming psychic force, sexuality.  He contends that power provides the basis of Adlerian psychology, as sex does Freudian.  This contrast goes back further than psychoanalysis, back at least as far as two major sins of church morality in the Middle Ages:  'ira' (anger, rage) and 'cupiditas' (desire, lust).  These anciently sinful passions have now become the power and sexual drives.

Even further back, in the sense of ever-present, stand two mythological figures, Ares/Mars and Aphrodite/Venus.  They, too, are often paired and their stories tell about power and sexuality.  Behind modern psychological concepts is a long history, and behind the long history are the archetypal configurations which history clothes according to the fashion of the centuries.  The archetypal approach to power and sex says that a human being can never quite control either 'ira' or 'cupiditas' because these explosive drives are where gods dwell.  And though we may think the myths are long forgotten and the gods and goddesses dead, they resurrect in the passions of the soul.  That our habits are laid out on the lines of mythical grids is an idea that deserves more space and so it will be the focus of Part Three.

Broader than the psychological ideas of power complex and power drive is the word "power" alone, whose rather innocent definition is simply the agency to act, to do, to be, coming from the Latin 'potere,' to be able.  The ability to perform work: like electric power and muscle power.  In fact, power and energy are both abstractions induced from the performance of work.  When something moves or changes in any way, we posit, and then measure, the invisible reason for this alteration as energy or power.  More broadly still, power can be defined as sheer potency and potentiality, not the doing but the capacity to do.

The study of the word becomes more interesting as we go back to its Indo-European roots.  We discover that the word itself invites the psychological meanings given by Jung.  "Power" subordinates, indeed!  And even without a subject who uses it.  No dominant ego need be assumed.  For the root of the word is 'poti' meaning husband, lord, master; Greek 'possis,' husband, from which 'des-potes,' "lord of the house" from 'domos' (Greek), 'domus' (Latin), and 'posis,' master.  'Dominus' (our dominate, dominant) is the lord, the master, the possessor, and Roman slaves called their master 'dominus' as slaves in Greece called their master 'despotes' (from which our word "despot").

Already hierarchy and subordination, even despotism, are built into this idea of power.  In the Western tradition---expressed in the language we all inherit the moment we speak English (or any other Indo-European-derived language), thereby entering the cultural field of irrevocable and inexorable history---we believe that agency, to do, to act, involves bossing, dominion, lording it over, pushing things, people, the environment around.  God himself in the Latin Church is called 'Dominus,' and we humble humans made in that image become dominators simply by doing something.

The most perplexing question that runs all through this inquiry into power is: how can we exercise power, do anything at all as agents, without dominating?  It is the great question of our historical psyche, perhaps of human nature: how to act without dominion, without oppressive control, and yet accomplish.  It is the question that arises in parents raising their children, in social workers helping their clients, in managers giving instructions in an office.  Wherever we would do something as agents, power appears, and where power appears so does our Western history in the word.  We dominate in the image of our God, 'Dominus.'

We can immediately see why political feminism has focused on hierarchical organization as the keystone of "patriarchal consciousness."  Hierarchy subordinates; power becomes domination and despotism.  So, dismantle the table of organization and the declension of power downward from above.  Restructure, either in utter equality or into flexible, cooperative, leaderless groups---production gangs, assembly teams, task forces---so as to remain horizontal and not pinnacle upward.

For this radical shift in direction, sideways rather than up and down, new sins replace the old.  Ruthless leveling---no head dare stick up too high.  No one to look up to is the price of not looking down on anyone.  Respect, admiration, awe go by the board.  Other kinds of conformism and political correctness begin to dominate.  A new tyranny emerges: the absolutism of equality.

Besides the archetypal struggle for power between the vertical and horizontal dimensions---now personalized into male versus female---another power struggle goes on within the word itself.  The history of the term implicates whatever you do, and however you do it in a dualism of active/passive, master/slave, eventually sadist/masochist.  Work can happen only at the expense of power required to move inert matter.

This style of thinking about getting things done follows an ancient Western model of matter as mere potentiality, inert, passive, feminine, void.  It must be actualized by something superior to it.  Subordination again and again, from Aristotle through St. Thomas Aquinas into Newtonian science.  Only very recently will we acknowledge the innate power in matter, that it, too, is energy and that things do not require the dictates of a Caesar to get them moving.  Where Caesar appears, there comes the inert crowd, the unmotivated mass.  Mastery invites slavery of one sort or another, even if it be only the slavery of the material over which you show your masterful productive dominion.  Caesar is called tyrant, ambitious, mighty, master, lord, in Shakespeare's play; these epithets of power at the same time reduce the populace to "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!"  ('Julius Caesar' I, i, 34).  The world divides into actives and passives.

The political problems of "crowds and power," as the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti described in his classic study, reside in that pervasive idea of power that has Western consciousness in its dominion, an idea which insists that the more lowly and material, the more female and quiescent, the less power; power follows the high road of class, wealth, education, birth or gender.  Power stays on top like God in heaven, Moses on Sinai, the Greek gods on Olympus, Jesus on the Mount of Olives, and raised in resurrection, the colonials over natives, whiteness over darkness, and missionaries on top of their women.  The philosophical term is 'actus purus,' the most power defined as purest activity.  Below is matter, mass, mob---a mere potential needing both to be motivated from its native inertia and yet constrained from spontaneous eruption because of its latent potency.  The notion that pure activity is the essence of divinity gives spiritual impetus to the Western worship of productivity, and also to Western machismo, racism, and paranoia.

We can extend the notion of power by investigating beyond the psychological and etymological explorations we have just reviewed and imagining into the common notions that accompany the word.  For the term "power" differentiates itself in our minds with a host of shadings in common usage.  These different styles of power that we recognize in each other, we also search for or are embarrassed by.  I am thinking here of leadership, influence, resistance, authority, tyranny, prestige, control, ambition and the like---aspects of power that we shall soon study.  Perhaps these many facets are the components of power, the traits that together compose its force, its ability to act and do, go and get, have and hold, enslave and destroy; perhaps, too, these shadings account for why the idea of power carries such impact and offers such freedom, as well as inflicts such a curse.

As we review the styles of power, we shall mainly be using a 'rhetorical method.'  How do we speak about power?  How does power speak to us, display itself in language? 

From Dictionary   Copyright © 2005 Apple Computer, Inc. :

rhetoric 

noun

the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, esp. the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.

• language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content : all we have from the opposition is empty rhetoric.

ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French rethorique, via Latin from Greek rhētorikē (tekhnē) ‘(art) of rhetoric,’ from rhētōr ‘rhetor.’

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From Thesaurus:

rhetoric

noun

1 a form of rhetoric:  oratory, eloquence, command of language, way with words. See note at paralipsis.

2 empty rhetoric:  bombast, turgidity, grandiloquence, magniloquence, pomposity, extravagant language, purple prose; wordiness, verbosity, prolixity; informal:  hot air; rare:  fustian.

USAGE NOTE   rhetoric

Rhetoric = (1) the art of using language persuasively; the rules that help one achieve eloquence; 

(2) the persuasive use of language; 

(3) a treatise on persuasive language; 

(4) prose composition as a school subject. These are the main senses outlined in the Oxford English Dictionary. 

There should probably be added a new sense, related to but distinct from the first sense: (5) the bombastic or disingenuous use of language to manipulate people.

Older books defined rhetoric in line with sense 1:

 “Rhetoric is the Art of speaking suitably upon any Subject.” (John Kirkby, A New English Grammar; 1746.)

 “Rhetoric is the art of adapting discourse, in harmony with its subject and occasion, to the requirements of a reader or hearer.” (John F. Genung, The Working Principles of Rhetoric; 1902.)

But the slippage toward the pejorative sense 5 began early. In “Some Fruits of Solitude” (1693), William Penn suggested its iniquitous uses: “There is a Truth and Beauty in Rhetorick; but it oftener serves ill Turns than good ones.” (Charles W. Eliot, ed., Harvard Classics; 1909.) 

By the twentieth century, some writers with a classical bent were trying hard to reclaim the word—e.g.: “No one who reads [ancient authors] can hold the puerile notions of rhetoric that prevail in our generation. The ancients would have made short work of the cult of the anti-social that lies behind the cult of mystification and the modern hatred of rhetoric. All the great literary ages have exalted the study of rhetoric.” (Van Wyck Brooks, Opinions of Oliver Allston; 1941.) 

But T. S. Eliot probably had it right when he acknowledged that the word is essentially ambiguous today—generally pejorative (disparaging, derogatory) but with flashes of a favorable sense: “The word [ rhetoric ] simply cannot be used as synonymous with bad writing. The meanings which it has been obliged to shoulder have been mostly opprobrious; but if a precise meaning can be found for it this meaning may occasionally represent a virtue.” 

(“ ‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama,” in The Sacred Wood, 7th ed.; 1950.) — BG

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From Dictionary:

rhetorical 

adjective

of, relating to, or concerned with the art of rhetoric : repetition is a common rhetorical device.

• expressed in terms intended to persuade or impress : the rhetorical commitment of the government to give priority to primary education.

• (of a question) asked in order to produce an effect or to make a statement rather than to elicit information.

ORIGIN late Middle English (first used in the sense [eloquently expressed] ): via Latin from Greek rhētorikos (from rhētor ‘rhetor’ ) + -al .

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From Thesaurus:

rhetorical

adjective

1  rhetorical devices:  stylistic, oratorical, linguistic, verbal. See table.

2  rhetorical hyperbole:  extravagant, grandiloquent, magniloquent, high-flown, orotund, bombastic, grandiose, pompous, pretentious, overblown, oratorical, turgid, flowery, florid; informal:  highfalutin; rare:  fustian.

RHETORICAL DEVICES

allusion ellipsis metonymy

amplification  enthymeme onomatopoeia

anacoluthon  enumeratio   oxymoron

anadiplosis epanalepsis  paralipsis

analogy   epimone parallelism

anaphora   epistrophe parataxis

antanagoge  epithet   parenthesis

anthimeria epizeuxis paronomasia

antimetabole    eponym personification

antiphrasis exemplum pleonasm

antithesis  expletive   polysyndeton

apophasis    hendiadys procatalepsis

aporia hyperbaton prosopopoeia

aposiopesis  hyperbole rhetorical question

apostrophe hypocorisma scesis    onomaton

appositive hypophora sententia

assonance hypotaxis simile

asyndeton hysteron proteron syllepsis

catachresis kenning    symploce

chiasmus   litotes syncope

climax malapropism synecdoche

conduplicatio meiosis    tmesis

diacope   meronym  trope

metabasis   understatement

distinctio  metanoia   zeugma

dystmesis   metaphor

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back to "The Language of Power" :

As we review the styles of power, we shall mainly be using a 'rhetorical method.'  How do we speak about power?  How does power speak to us, display itself in language?  The rhetorical method differs from the usual ones for exposing a subject.  The more familiar methods analyze an idea by looking at examples, or they rely on anecdotes, or they deduce logical implications from definitions, or they employ an empirical study of a case from which to draw useful conclusions.  Another method, the more moralistic one, divides power into two basic kinds, the good kind and the bad kind, urging one and condemning the other.

A moralistic model appears especially in theories of power.  Judgments are disguised under the cloak of theoretical objectivity.  Theories present  a spectrum of power stretching from influence (good) to coercion (bad), from persuasion (good) to violence (bad), from legitimated (good) to usurped (bad), mandated by symbols (good) or by weapons (bad), shared and relative (good) to despotic and absolute (bad), located in persons or in social structures.  Theories usually start with definitions.  Definitions set standards, so that ideas of power can then be measured against benchmarks unidimensionally as if on a scale from one to ten.  A theory of power tries to treat it as a defined single something.

We need to unpack this difference between definitions and myths since we will be moving back and forth between them all through this book.  Using myths as grids lets you analyze phenomena by holding them up against the light of archetypal figures whose attributes and behaviors are even more complicated than what you are examining.  Instead of reducing meaning to a definition, myths amplify and complicate.  They are the path of richness.  Myths add information to phenomena and offer insights.  They provide images, puzzles, humor.  For instance, the great hero Hercules, a mythical figure who provides a backdrop for much of our male, muscular, untiring, slaughtering, energetic sense of power, was classically called a "beef eater."  Lettuce, in contrast, grew in the gardens of Adonis, the smooth-skinned soft-fleshed lover-boy, and lettuce was considered wimpy and negative for virility because it wilted and went limp fast.  This pairing of beef and lettuce provides a mythical background to a cultural shift in the malls.  Huge hamburgers are yielding space to salad bars.  This pairing appears also in comic reverse in the contrast between Popeye who eats spinach for strength and pudgy Wimpy who lives on hamburgers.

In a curious way, myths provide more objectivity than do models of thought.  Even though mythical grids use humanlike figures (Hercules) and speak the rhetoric of subjectivity---passions, feelings, habits and attitudes---their effect is more objective because they do not press a theoretical construction upon phenomena.  They leave you free to imagine further about meat eaters and vegetarians, about hunters and planters, about changes in pop-culture tastes, about green environmentalism, about "beef" ads, about heroes and power.

The value of a model lies in setting a standard definition useful for measuring approximations to the model.  A hero, according to a full and current definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is: "A man who exhibits extraordinary bravery, firmness, or greatness of soul, in connection with any pursuit, work, or enterprise; a man admired and venerated for his achievements and noble qualities."

Rather than an image, a mythical tale or a depiction, we are given a clear objective abstraction.  We have a model against which acts, people and qualities can be compared.  By setting conceptual measures, a model imposes subtle judgments even as it pretends to objectivity.  Is General Norman Schwarzkopf truly extraordinary?  If so, to what degree?  Has he greatness of soul?  Is Muhammad Ali venerated for his achievements and noble qualities?  What about Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Martha Graham, Picasso, Rachel Carson, Lee Iacocca---do they fill the bill?  Or a war hero like Sergeant York, an Olympic hero like Mark Spitz or Jesse Owens?  We find ourselves measuring, comparing, arguing, dissenting---and especially moralizing about what person, what achievement measures up to the model.  Myths don't have this effect.  They make us wonder, question and imagine.  To take Jesus as model leads to the 'imitatio Christi' and the guilt of never measuring up.  To take Jesus mythically leads to mystery.

From Dictionary:

model 

noun

1  a three-dimensional representation of a person or thing or of a proposed structure, typically on a smaller scale than the original : a model of St. Paul's Cathedral | [as adj. ] a model airplane.

• (in sculpture) a figure or object made in clay or wax, to be reproduced in another more durable material.

2  a system or thing used as an example to follow or imitate : the law became a model for dozens of laws banning nondegradable plastic products | [as adj. ] a model farm.

• a simplified description, esp. a mathematical one, of a system or process, to assist calculations and predictions : a statistical model used for predicting the survival rates of endangered species.

• ( model of) a person or thing regarded as an excellent example of a specified quality : as she grew older, she became a model of self-control | [as adj. ] he was a model husband and father.

• ( model for) an actual person or place on which a specified fictional character or location is based : the author denied that Marilyn was the model for his tragic heroine.

3  a person, typically a woman, employed to display clothes by wearing them : a fashion model.

• a person employed to pose for an artist, photographer, or sculptor.

4  a particular design or version of a product : trading your car in for a newer model.

ORIGIN late 16th cent.(denoting a set of plans of a building): from French modelle, from Italian modello, from an alteration of Latin modulus (see modulus ).

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From Thesaurus:

model

noun

1  a working model:  replica, copy, representation, mock-up, dummy, imitation, duplicate, reproduction, facsimile.

2  the Canadian model of health care:  prototype, stereotype, archetype, type, version; mold, template, framework, pattern, design, blueprint.

3  she was a model of patience:  ideal, paragon, perfect example/specimen; perfection, acme, epitome, nonpareil, crème de la crème.

4  a model teacher:  ideal, perfect, exemplary, classic, flawless, faultless.

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From Dictionary:

myth 

noun

1  a traditional story, esp. one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.

• such stories collectively : the heroes of Greek myth.

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back to "The Language of Power" :

The mythical approach to our subject, power, means that moralizing about it falls away.  This is because the background figures of power---Heroes, kings, giants, ogres, queens, witches, wise women, crones, spirits, daimones and especially gods and goddesses show that there are no absolute good or absolute evil figures.  Any god or goddess can be an enemy and a killer.  Any form of power can be destructive or constructively valuable.  There are abuses of magnanimity and nurture as there are instances of constructive well-being under the harsh rule of tyranny.  Yes, there are even benign despots.  A benign despot is not an oxymoron:  Western history is filled with constructive monsters like the czar who built St. Petersburg, or Napoleon.  The bountiful king binds his subjects by his gifts as does the CEO by the opportunities he offers.  The good mother provides and foresees and her sons and daughters become more and more passive and dependent, drinking themselves to death.  Benign despotism---isn't that what's feared by those who attack the welfare state?

You will find another major difference between what we are doing here and usual critiques and theories of power.  The various styles will not be lined up on any systematic thread of theory, from major to minor, from stronger to weaker, from older to newer, etc.  We are not laying out kinds of theory but kinds of power.  Rather than a 'theory' of power, ours is a 'phenomenology' of power, even a phenomenology of the fantasies of power.  'Phainomenon' = "that which appears to the sense or the mind."  How things show themselves; how they light up (with a root in flashing, shining, revealing).

From Dictionary:

phenomenology 

noun   Philosophy

the science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.

• an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.

back to "The Language of Power" :

A phenomenology also supposes that there is no such thing as power per se.  It is not an 'is,' or as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, "there is no there there."  A phenomenology of power shows no substance with borders that can tell you where power begins and where it leaves off, when it is present and when not.  Instead of a sharp definition, we have a family of resemblances (Wittgenstein) among closely related notions and descriptions.  A phenomenology of power treats the topic as a bundle of fantasies, of events moving through the mind and the world, the two rather indistinguishable from each other, a protean (ever-changing) shape-shifting, requiring lots and lots of terms to grasp the cluster of notions that our language speaks of as signs of power.

Whatever the method---logical, empirical, phenomenological---we have to use language.  A method persuades us by the power of its language, its rhetoric, defined as "the art of persuasion."  Therefore, if we can get at the ideas embedded in the language about power, unpack the persuasive ideas that affect our thought and behavior, we shall be as close as we can get to knowing the components of power.  All day long terms like "control," "prestige," "ambition," "charisma," "authority" cross our lips without much thought and enter into judgments that determine our decisions, and our relations with colleagues.  Since language is our luggage it's useful to open these terms for inspection.  Perhaps we'll find smuggled hypotheses and hidden prejudices, but also long-forgotten values we did not know we were carrying.

While psychologies of all sorts are actively concerned with "empowerment" and use the term regularly in conferences and programs, there remains a strange discomfort with the idea of power, not only for the tyrannical implications we have uncovered but for yet another reason.  A saying of Jung's expresses this best: "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking." [C. G. Jung, 'The Collected Works,' vol. 7, sect. 78 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).] 

This antagonistic setup makes one ashamed of the power side of loving (for love exerts a most forceful dominion on whatever it touches); and also Jung's sentence says that to go for power is loveless behavior.  They have become mutually exclusive: one or the other.

I think we have in Jung's frank statement the epitome of the romantic view of both love and power.  The one all-giving and selfless, the other all-demanding and selfish.  The one an expression of soul, the other only of will.  And yet we go to workshops to become "empowered"!  Perhaps my naming this opposition "romantic" is too confining, since even Machiavelli, the fox of Florence and no romantic, insisted that the soul's domain had nothing to do with the power of princes.  Again a distinct separation between an idea of love and an idea of power.

This division leads to the renunciation of power in order to become a nobler, loving soul.  Good guys come in last and that's why they are good.  Often women are elected or selected because in this opposition they represent soul, not power.  So to be disempowered is proof---not of wimpiness and castration necessarily---but of nobility of soul and a loving nature.  So, too, idealists and romantics often abjure (solemnly renounce) power.  To appropriate (seize) power deserts the soul for dirty politics.  Is it power that's dirty, or their 'idea' of power?

Is this why idealists often lose?  So often the question is asked:  why do people of nobler intention not try for office in the first place, and when they do get to call the shots and find things going against them, they refuse to find a way through by compromising, but resign, riding off on the high horse of indignation?  Why can't the good guys get into the gutter, as was said of Adlai Stevenson?

Even more curious:  why are the conflicts about power so ruthless---less so in business and politics, where they are an everyday matter, than in the idealist professions of clergy, medicine, the arts, teaching and nursing.  Those embattled in academic struggles and in museum and hospital fights deceive, backbite, threaten and maneuver shamelessly.  They will not speak with friends of their enemies.  Cabals form.  Hatchet men appointed.  Revenge plotted.  Yet in business and politics competitors for much larger stakes still go off to the golf course, eat and drink together.  In business and politics, it seems, there is less idealism and more sense of shadow.  Power is not repressed but lived with as a daily companion; moreover, it is not declared to be the enemy of love.

So long as the notion of power is itself corrupted by a romantic opposition with love, soul, goodness and beauty, power will indeed corrupt, as the saying goes.  The corruption begins not in power, but in the ignorance about it.  That's why we are undertaking these psychological, etymological and philosophical explorations.  Giving careful consideration to something, sustaining deep interest in it, isn't this love?  Maybe, then, what follows is an exhibition of the love of power.