"Control" and "Ambition" 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. 109

Control

Perhaps the most common word today associated with power is "control."  To be in control.  To take control.  Yet control derives from an idea that essentially limits power, in fact puts brakes to power like a control switch or the control panel that governs an installation so that it cannot over heat or short-circuit.  Control is agency, yes, but of a restrictive kind: the word comes from 'contra rotullus,' against the roll.

Since the free flow of inertia follows the path of least resistance, the easy path downhill is controlled by restraints.  The complaints to "get the government off our back" and that controlling the military means "fighting with one hand tied" express this hindering sense of control.  Control governs more by veto than by leadership, more by checking and balancing a variety of forces than by charging forward like a point man in front of the pack.

When we look closely at what we want when we want to be in control, we find mainly 'preventive' desires.  We want not to be bugged, not to be demeaned, not to be blocked and criticized.  We want obstacles removed that compete, like other divisions in the company and other gang lords in the neighborhood.  Control means preventing interference.  It has a conservative effect.  So we feel frustrated by people in control.  They won't let us do it our way; they don't allow freedom; they restrain pleasure; they put all sorts of comptrollers and paperwork in the way.  Why is it, after all, that so many restrictions and confining rules come down from the top issued by those in control?  And why that fantasy: "If I were in control here, things wouldn't go on like this; I wouldn't let things slide; I'd put a stop to . . . "?  Yet when we ourselves get into a position to "take control," we find that the freedom from restraint we fought for is restricted by the new restraints we ourselves have begun to impose.  The idea of control controls the controllers; we are not in control of the power of control.  Still, the fantasy of controlling the roll of the dice or the wheel of fortune runs deep.  It offers power over fate itself.

That great analyst of power, Machiavelli, in his Renaissance classic 'The Prince,' conceived of power exactly in these terms of control versus Fortuna, the capricious Goddess of fate and luck.  Machiavelli opposes the two, control and Fortuna, so that power becomes the ability to control the unpredictable interventions of Fortuna, those errors, vices, incompetencies and mess-ups that beset any enterprise.  That person who can prevent, direct or inhibit these eventualities is, in Machiavelli's teachings, a person of power.

Control as a negative power that inhibits has come more and more to dominate organizations, both internally and externally.  Internally, by means of meticulous accounting procedures.  For instance, the postoperative-care nurse who has to account for wound dressings and not only dress wounds.  More memos in triplicate, more requirements to "get back to me on this," more comparative bids, comparative expense items.  Externally, by means of security technology---hidden cameras, urine testing, access control, document tracking and shredding, hierarchies and categories of secrecy, tight supervision of computer time, phone calls . . .

When a control freak takes charge, nothing must escape his or her attention---each purchasing order, each expense chit, each "away from the desk."  The control freak does not have to manage everything alone to prove that he or she has power.  It's not so much "do it my way" as it is "keep me informed."  Control means knowing what's going on.  Everything must be submitted for inspection.  It's the submission that matters.  Nothing kept hidden.  No locked drawers or closed doors---the open office submits everyone to control.

A more subtle method of control uses loyalty.  "Just trust me." "I have to be able to count on you." "You come through for me and I'll cover your back."  By bonding loyally to other people, we are bound by them to be at their side and on their side in organizational struggles.

These examples of control---the need to know, to supervise, to check up, to use loyalty as a means---tell us two things.  First, they reveal the fact that control weakens power because control constrains its varied expressions.  The subterfuge of influence, the manipulations of prestige, the risk of leadership, the silence of resistance do not submit to control and are designed to circumvent it.  But these kinds of power are disallowed.  Instead of adventuring forward to explore and research unknown territory, control fights a rearguard action, keeping inventory of what has already happened.  It likes complete reports.  Control, for all its self-assured position of command, relies on a defensive vision, and the traits enumerated---enforced loyalty, exactitude, suspicion of the hidden, watchfulness---are paranoid traits.

So, second, what is the underlying anxiety raised by the idea of losing control?  What is really hidden that the paranoia defends against yet never sees?  What does "losing control" conjure up?  Smashing a window, roaring, screaming, cursing out that bastard boss or that bitch?  Bombing the place?  A whole range of childish, melodramatic, sloppy, hysterical, crazy behaviors.  To be out of control has come to mean wild---and helpless, and thus powerless.

"Out of control" could, however, mean something quite different when we look at these wild fantasies, for they show a vast store of energy let loose.  Powerful indeed!  Here we begin to uncover another of those mythical infrastructures that govern our feelings and our fears.  The mythical figure whose ancient nicknames were "the loosener," "the unbound," "the roarer," and who represented the unstoppable flowing power of natural energy, rather like Freud's pleasure principle, was the God Dionysos.  He was celebrated as a child; called God of wetness and drunkenness; ruled the theater and drama; took wild-animal form; and was associated with hysteria and madness.

Each of the regions of his rule threaten the tightness of control.  Wild panther and bull, 'wet drunk,' theatrical bisexual, underworld mystery, vegetative instability, democratic populist, soft child and especially his epithet Lord of the Soul are hardly qualities that belong in the boardroom and the government office.  Moreover, Dionysos, who led his followers out of the city and into the woodlands, was never politically correct.

Suppose, however, we shift perspectives.  Suppose we try to fathom the power in this configuration from within, rather than trying to keep it under control.  What is the essence of Dionysian power?  What is the ground of its attraction and endurance through centuries?  Control over his power and fear of his excessive effects seem never to work either in the ancient world or in the contemporary psyche.  In fact, attempts to control the uncontrollable only exacerbate the excess.  Sexual harassment in the correctly ordered office exemplifies the exaggerated return of Dionysian vitality in situations of stressed mental despair.

The phrase in our common language that most simply captures the Dionysian mode is: "Go with the flow."  Not merely adrift, floating, without compass or port---but flowing with the motions of the psyche.  It is like dancing---the Dionysians are depicted usually dancing---where leading and following merge; it is a fusion of one's private consciousness with the field, where borders become imprecise.  One develops a special sensitivity to underground reverberations, so that one's will is embraced by the group and represents the group.  (Dionysos appears nearly always surrounded by his group, his 'thiasos'--revelers.)  One embodies the consciousness of the group and is ruler (Lord) of its soul by feeling into all that goes on throughout the organization.  It comes alive with its own vegetative growth and decay, pulses, seasons.  Dionysos was identified with the sap in the vine, the tendrils of the plant, the nourishing milk---the creative juices that are the soul of any system.  One cannot control Dionysos, but one can exercise control in a Dionysian fashion by not separating oneself from the unaccountable empowering force that generates all through an organization and is its true bottom line as a vital rhythm.  After all, organizations, as the very word declares, are organic, just as corporations, from 'corpus,' are living bodies.

It seems rather evident, from an archetypal or mythical perspective, that our ideas about control and the fanatic force we bring to the effort of taking control, staying in control and not letting go of control both in ourselves and in organizations derive from an attempt to master Dionysos.  Were we to learn more about his gifts and his ways, gain more insight into the mysteries of his cult and the value of his nature, we might try less for control and actually gain more power.   

* *

p. 131

Ambition

The desire to hold office, to gain power in any form, often suffers condemnation, even if recruiters look for ambitious young graduates who want to climb the ladder.  Ambition has been defined, snidely, as "reach exceeding grasp" and "aspiration beyond competence."  Or as hubris (excess of pride), perhaps the worst of all Greek faults of character.  Vaulting pride in one's own capacity; no need of the Gods; no need of the counsel of mentors---this is the ambition universally condemned in tragic literature and heroic epic.  Cocaine, uppers and muscle-building steroids are the concrete examples in our world of ambitious hubris.  They show that enhanced performance follows a truly mythical pattern---an extraordinary rise and a disastrous fall.  The one single wisdom taught by all the classical stories is: remember the limits put on mortals by the immortals (as the Greeks called their divinities).

A traditional West African song advises:

 Do not seek too much fame,

 but do not seek obscurity.

   Be proud.

    But do not remind the world of your deeds.

 Excel when you must,

 but do not excel the world.

 Many heroes are not yet born.

 many have already died.

    To be alive to hear this song is a victory.

This practical wisdom warns against trying for heaven---it leads only to hell.  Keep to the limits of the actual world.  Staying alive proudly is ambition enough.

However, when we search the word, "ambition" reveals some pleasing features.  Ambit means circuit, circumference, compass.  Ambition as full compass, all around, the whole hog.  'Ambire' in Rome designated the going-around of a candidate for office, canvassing for votes, which leads to the second meaning of soliciting, fawning, so that an ambitious person can be narrowly described as one seeking office.  But more widely, the going-around fills out the ambit and paces out step by step (ambulation) the dimensions of one's personal kingdom, measuring one's size.  Ambition takes one to the edges of one's limits, to the "verge" as the dictionary says.

The ambitious are said to have an "appetite" for power.  Mighty figures in myth like the Norse giants and the Greek Titans, and the huge creatures in fairy tales and Disney cartoons, as well as the immense eater Gargantua in the French tale by Rabelais, all have humongous appetites.  They want everything in the world.  The common notion of appetite has become reduced to general drives like hunger and thirst, so that the word constellates fears of putting on weight and drinking too much.  The basic idea of appetite, however, shows that the reach and aspiration of ambition are located in the word "appetite," which comes from 'petere,' the Latin translation of the Greek word 'orexis' (our anorexia: without appetite).  Orexis means desire, yearning, craving; its root, 'oregein,' means to reach out with the hand, to stretch the fingers to grasp.

If we go deeper, we find something stranger still: 'petere,' and therefore appetite, is cognate (associated) with ptero, the Greek for the wing of a bird, and the structure of that wing is homologous with our human fingers.  Etymology says we fly with the imagination in our hands by means of our making and doing (the first definition of power as agency).  The appetite in ambition lifts us off the ground and carries us to that verge of the farthest possibility.  Perhaps, then, the attempts to control the appetite by diet are scientistic, unimaginative means of reducing the wings of desire and the power of ambition to the properly correct proportions of the puritan corset.  I am saying that appetite control is an unconscious substitute for the control of ambition.  The fear of flying.

So ambition in the truest sense of the term calls for risk---going for it!  No one can know beforehand how wide the perimeter, how far the ambition will carry until you've gone too far and are declared to be overambitious.  It is this risking extremes that makes us condemn ambition in people and yet often praise it in a work of art or political program.  An ambitious intention aspires; it sets itself high goals and takes the necessary risks.  Circumstances, other people, the recalcitrance of things and the Goddess Fortuna set the limits on ambition.  We pretend it is a fatal flaw in character, that one did not calculate right, could have foreseen what was coming.  These cautions after the fact locate ambition wholly within a person as if it were a trait to be controlled, whereas the term that is crucial here is the vaulting nature of ambition to go to the verge.  At the other side of the edge and beyond it is the wholly unforeseeable, and ambition seeks by its very nature to go too far.  Self-limitation, by means of willpower and developed self-control as a braking restraint, misses the inner sense of ambition which must go beyond better judgment, risking the impossible.  To exceed, risk excess.  As William Blake the poet said, in his 'Proverbs from Hell': "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough," and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

* * * *

"Concentration" and "Authority" 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. 156

Concentration

We begin by looking at old movies for images of concentrated power:  the oak-paneled library set where the evil widow now owns all the stock in the company; the somber magnate alone in his Western railroad car; the tight-lipped Mafia boss under his black hat, back to the restaurant wall; the kung fu teacher utterly focused, utterly compact; the paranoid enemy of James Bond, isolated and impregnable, the concentric focus of a world empire; the frail churchgoing schoolteacher whose single-minded determination turns the frontier around.  Or imagine Rodin's statue of 'The Thinker'---that head, that fist, that concentration.  Images of power.

In the textbooks of business today, concentration of power gets poor marks.  A chief executive, a board or a company are considered to be on the wrong managerial road when power is concentrated in too few hands.  Power is to be decentralized among subsets, each with its own decision-making and profit-generating autonomy.  Centers of power are to be loosened, empowerment shared.  Cooperatives, teams, worker-shareholders, conversations rather than directives, networks.

The network replaces the turbine as a governing image.  Today, not the massive dynamo of tightly coiled wires wrapped around themselves, not even the tightly packed silicon wafer; but the images of flow, feedback, distributive energy, touching all the bases, balancing constituencies, delivery---an indeterminate field of almost random forces---are the new images of power.  Not the heart, the capillaries.

The famous lines of the greatest of Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, which prophesied the horrors of Western civilization during the first part of the twentieth century---"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"---also foreshadowed the chaos and catastrophe theories of the latter part of the century, theories which void the center in favor of creative innovation, freeing enterprise to find its niche and do its thing any which way it can.  The center 'should' not hold so that things may indeed fall apart.  All you need is access with the help of compatibilities.  The internet linkup is where power resides.

Power comes in to any of us by being plugged in---or rather, power 'is' being plugged in, since there is no single generative source.  The concentration which "Think" requires, like the corporation whose motto it was, gradually gives way to Stay-in-Touch.

Despite these trends, concentration remains a distinct proclivity of the human mind.  Something about the mind enjoys a focused immersion into itself.  To bring careful consideration to a single question, to evaluate options and set priorities, to lay out an intelligent schedule, to listen without distraction, to observe, attend, analyze, mull---all this calls for a power of mind beyond the "takes" of aides and the briefings of experts.  Hercule Poirot in the Agatha Christie detective novels called this capacity his "little grey cells," by which he meant not mere "smarts" but the ability to concentrate fully on the puzzles of the crime, its circumstances, the characters, motives, alibis.  All held together in the intensity of thought, resulting in masterful strokes of action.

The idea has occurred to me of a possible relation between lack of concentration in schoolchildren, which psychiatry calls "attention deficit disorder," and the increased violence with weapons in the same population.  The intense concentrated power of a weapon---gun, knife, club, chain---may offer single-minded focus to a distractible and diffuse consciousness that surfs through the day as if it, too, were part of the media, all channels on at once.  If, as I am suggesting, the psyche desires to concentrate, then a weapon may be satisfying what the school-room does not afford.  Besides policing weapons, we might search for methods of teaching that capture attention and evoke concentration---images, dramas, rituals, rhythms---thereby transferring power back from the weapon to the child's mind.

My emphasis on concentration as power, and a power that the psyche needs and enjoys, takes us away from current ideas of leadership as learning---that is, the idea that the power of an advanced leader lies mainly in an ability to stay open.  The very word "concentration" means closed circles, self-enclosure, inward focus, density, intensity.  Surely, it will be said, such a mind will asphyxiate in its own closet, breathing only its own exhalations.  No winds of change blowing through, no assimilation of new input, and so it cannot learn and therefore cannot lead.  From this standpoint, concentration looks like withdrawal and the abdication of power.

However, concentration finds its learning elsewhere and receives input from other sources rather than other people.  This is the introverted style of power found in the shaman, the recluse, the hermit, the mystic, the contemplative.  They turn to dreams, meditations, reveries, signs, omens, old texts, motions of nature and "sessions of sweet and silent thought."  Concentration gives access to other powers---inner, hidden and highly suspect to the everyday camaraderie of business.  It attempts connection with genius, with inspiration.  It trusts solitude.  It enjoys silence.  And it rises with an agreeable determination to the challenge of tensions, crises and no-win dilemmas.

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p. 160

Authority

There is a kind of power given neither by control, by office, nor by prestige, and it can't be achieved by ambition.  Reputation is some of it, but only some.  This is the power of authority.

The nature of this kind of power, where it comes from, how it can be recognized, the ways it works---these are questions that stock answers cannot satisfy.  For instance, authority may come with older age, although that is not assured, since the seniors in our society may not carry the authority of clan elders.  The accouterments of age, such as the dyed hair, dentures and wrinkles of a person in a retirement beach chair, do not confer the same authority as do similar signs (scars, lines, toothlessness and tattoos) in the face of a tribal elder.  Age is not enough.  Nor does the maxim "information is power" hold for authority.  A person may be crammed with data and remember all the intrigue and personal history of the office, proving "invaluable" to the company, and never gain enough authority to be heard.

Authority may come from exceptional accomplishment, but that, too, is not assured, for specific expertise does not necessarily confer the wider weight of respect.  Field experience may contribute to authority, but armchair reflection may prove proportionately more significant.  Therefore, the frequent use of experts on TV as "authorities" confuses the narrow with the broad, opinion with sagacity (wisdom, shrewdness), and information with knowledge.  The voice of authority on Eastern Europe or education policy called to the TV panel need not be limited to field hands "who have been there" when what is wanted is that old mental virtue called estimation, the capacity to make value judgments by seeing not just all the angles but also seeing deeply into the long-term roots and ramifications of an issue.  Speaking to the essential issue differs from speaking for or against a position in regard to an issue.  The authoritative voice brings an intrinsic quality of disinterest---with conviction.

The quality is hard to describe, yet like good art and bad pornography (or bad art and good pornography), "I know it when I see it."  It may be lodged anywhere in almost anyone, though actual examples are few.  We come across it in memory---someone in your hometown childhood, a person of dignity who could size things up and whose words struck deep, whose mere presence appreciated invisible values.  Was it what she did; what he said?  Was it how they carried themselves, or reacted at a critical moment?  Was it their aura of distance or their easiness, so at home in the world?  One thing seems sure: they made you feel the power of authenticity.  They simply had it in themselves.

Even if authority arises as an autonomous gift and resides in my specific nature, its actual power manifests only within a communal context.  It must be recognized.  I may be experienced, intelligent, unique and detached, but until I am needed, until my voice is called for, I do not have authority.

Other people grant the authority that cannot be conferred by individuality alone.  Authority is therefore societal, just as self is communal.  We belong to each other, and the recognition by others of the qualities that each person embodies is as basic to human awareness as is the recognition of cries and songs among birds and smells among mammals.  Authority may be intrinsic, but it is not really there until given confirmation by the world.  "World," by the way, is not confined only to other people; for authority in humans is recognized also by animals, who show quickly whom they respect and whom among their handlers they can trick, scare and disobey.

That authority cannot be affected by persuasion and does not try to tyrannize or even subordinate shows its intrinsic autonomy.  This autonomy is less a sign of aloofness than of radical independence from all other kinds of power.  The radical independence of judicial courts written into the Constitution separates judgment from other kinds of power.  It must be disinterested.  Perhaps it is in this very independence from the usual manifestations power that the authority of authority lies.

The misuse of the term "authorities" for governing bodies, of "authoritarianism" for despotism, and diagnosing an "authority problem" as a rebellious inability to take direction defame the idea of authority and confuse it with other styles of power.

This confusion of an authoritative voice with an authoritarian one shows how little we grasp this kind of power.  It also shows how fearful we are of authority in a democratic society, and one increasingly egalitarian.  But even more, these confusions tell how ego-centered are our notions of power in general; we seem unable to imagine authority as a gift or capacity not located in the ego.  So what limits our understanding here is not fear of authority but the justified fear of usurpation of it by the ego.

I want to stress the detachment of this kind of power, its inner restraint, for authority gives enormous power.  One voice can sway a thousand.  The respect afforded by others raises you above others.  A potential for tyranny is always there the moment you exercise your authority.  Shakespeare writes (Measure for Measure II, ii, 108):  "O! it is excellent / To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant."  Withholding, disinterestedness, independence seem to be necessary corollaries of authority.

The independence of authority frees it from the office, prestige and trappings of power.  Bernard Baruch had only a park bench; Wendell Berry keeps to his poems and his Kentucky farm.  Einstein.  Segovia.  Casals.  Rouault.  Matisse.  Recent pop psychology that wants to give back to men the authority they feel they've lost refers to this independence as the inner king.  In a play that treats the lost power of a king, Shakespeare says a lot in a few lines about authority.  When Kent places himself in service to the king, Lear interviews him for the job (King Lear I, iv, 24ff.):

 "What wouldst thou?"

 "Service."

 "Who wouldst thou serve?"

 "You."

 "Dost thou know me, fellow?"

 "No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master"

 "What's that?"

 "Authority."

And this is after the king has been deposed from ruling power.  Clearly Lear's authority is intrinsic (deep-rooted, deep-seated), and as the play proceeds and his helplessness and madness increase, the power of authority never leaves him.

Of course, some of it comes from his past performance.  After all he was the king, as Oedipus at the end of his life, blind, aged, impoverished and dying, still was once Oedipus Tyrannos.  The past is still there in the present.

In our times Averell Harriman, though not to be measured against figures like Lear and Oedipus, into his nineties was a man of authority.  Without office, without a power base, his generation of influence long past, he nonetheless still carried authority.  Having been an ambassador, a governor, a special emissary and troubleshooter, a scion of a privileged family, and present at decisive moments of twentieth-century history, of course conferred power on him.  But there are many others who "have been there since the beginning" yet fade into oblivion.  Authority is more than knowledge, memory, judgment, competence, social relations; more than who you know and where you've been.  And because it is an invisible quality, it also attracts great envy and its authenticity is demeaned as merely, in Harriman's case, deriving from wealth or belonging to the right class.

One final component needs to be singled out: what the Romans called 'gravitas,' a certain weight that gives importance, even an oppressive seriousness.  Descendants of 'gravitas' appear in our "gravity" and "grave" and in the French 'gravide' for pregnant.  'Gravitas' itself descends from an even older, though still most popular, Sanskrit term, 'guruh,' weighty.  The power of authority comes from the belly; its direction is earthward like gravity.

Perhaps, authority rises as the soul sinks gravely---graveward---as one becomes an ancestor, a figure who represents the stored wisdom of the community, a representation rather than a personality.  One's authority comes then less from personal history and more from impersonal authorities beyond the grave, the dead and their teachings.  Is that why we turn in crises and in older age to biographies, trying to deepen our individual personality by connecting with the past and the dead, those figures Emerson called Representative Men?  And perhaps that's why authority seems most apparent in the aging.  Maybe it is ultimately authorized by the chthonic gods of the Underworld, by Hades, and the ancestors whom our culture recognizes only as History.

* *

From Dictionary:

chthonic  (also chthonian)

adjective

concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting the underworld : a chthonic deity.

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Greek khthōn ‘earth’ + -ic .

* * * *

Chapter 5 Solitude from the book 'Walden' by Henry David Thoreau

From http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden05.html :

 A Project in Cooperation with the Thoreau Society

  

  The Thoreau Reader

 Annotated works of  Henry David Thoreau

“When you get into a railway car you want a continent, the man in his carriage requires a township; but a walker like Thoreau finds as much and more along the shores of Walden Pond.” - John Burroughs, The Galaxy, June 1873

Walden

 

Chapter 5  Solitude   

THIS IS A delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen — links which connect the days of animated life.

The reference below to unexpected visitors shows that Thoreau was reasonably close to town, with friends that might walk out to visit, and not the hermit that some readers have assumed.

 

[2]    When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe.

[3]    There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts — they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

[4]    Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music (1) to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

"Mourning untimely consumes the sad; 

 Few are their days in the land of the living, 

 Beautiful daughter of Toscar."(2)

[5]    Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago.(3) Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill,(4) or the Five Points,(5) where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called "a handsome property" — though I never got a fair view of it — on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton — or Bright-town — which place he would reach some time in the morning.

[6]    Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. 

[7]    "How vast and profound is the influence of the subtle powers of Heaven and of Earth!"

[8]    "We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them."

[9]    "They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtle intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all sides."(6) 

[10]    We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circumstances — have our own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors."(7)

[11]    With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra (8) in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. 

[12]    I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

[13]    Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory — never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

[14]    I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

[15]    I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils,(9) but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone — but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

[16]    I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley;(10) and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.

[17]    The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

[18]    What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs (11) in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron (12) and the Dead Sea,(13) which come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora.(14) I am no worshipper of Hygeia,(15) who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Æsculapius,(16) and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe,(17) cup-bearer to Jupiter,(18) who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,(19) and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.

* *

Notes

1. in Greek mythology, the Aeolian harp was the instrument of Æolus, god of wind. The ancient Greeks made Aeolian harps that were played by moving air 

 

2. James Macpherson (1736–1796) from Croma, poetry of "Ossian", supposed 3rd cent. Gaelic poet, later established as a forgery by Macpherson 

3. Thoreau lived at Walden from 1845 to 1847. Walden was not published until 1854 

4. fashionable section of Boston 

5. former disreputable section of New York City, between the current NY City Hall and Chinatown 

 

6. Conficius (1551-1479 B.C.) Chinese philosopher, three paragraphs in quotes are from Doctrine of the Mean 

 

7. Confucian Analects 

 

8. in Hinduism, chief of the Vedic gods, god of thunder, & rain 

9. hypochondriac melancholy 

10. William Goffe, Edward Whalley, indicted for killing Charles I of England, lived in hiding in America 

11. Thomas Parr was an Englishman said to have lived 152 years 

 

12. in Greek mythology, a river in Hades 

 

13. large salt lake bordering Israel & Jordan

14. in Roman mythology, goddess of the dawn 

 

15. in Greek mythology, goddess of health 

16. in Greek mythology, god of medicine, father of Hygeia 

17. in Greek mythology, goddess of youth 

18. in Roman mythology, chief of the gods 

19. in Roman mythology, queen of heaven, conceived Hebe after eating lettuce 

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"Autobiographical Notes" of "Collected Essays" by James Baldwin

From http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/baldwin-essays.html

The New York Times on the Web

CHAPTER ONE
Collected Essays

By JAMES BALDWIN
The Library of America

Autobiographical Notes

I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on--except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. I must also confess that I wrote--a great deal--and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don't remember why, and I was outraged.

Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about which the less said, the better. My mother was delighted by all these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and industry--I guess they would say they struggled with me--and when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant and writing book reviews--mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first--fellowship, but no sale. (It was a Rosenwald Fellowship.) By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem--which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in life--and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech--and something of Dickens' love for bravura--have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.)

One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I don't mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there are only two--For or Against--and I, personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of view I am perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all.

But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled; it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro's progress. Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine--I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write.

One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.

I don't think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else. I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings--at least--of a more genuinely penetrating search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life.

About my interests: I don't know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink---it's my melancholy conviction that I've scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it's impossible to eat enough if you're worried about the next meal)--and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

(C) 1998 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. All rights reserved.

JAMES BALDWIN:
Collected Essays.
869 pp. New York:
The Library of America. $35.

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