Christopher Wilmart, artist
[NOTE: This essay was originally posted May 5, 2008. I have recently edited it now fifteen years later. I'm sure to work on it some more but will publish it anyway as is. Doing so pressures me to get to the rewriting and editing since I know some few other eyes may be reading it (for which I am grateful). ALSO NOTE that you can click on the photos to enlarge them]
"Not because happiness really exists,
that premature profit of imminent loss."
— from "The First Elegy" of The Duino Elegies (DE throughout the rest of the text) by Rainer Maria Rilke, pg. 73
"...that life is real only in proportion to its difficulty."
—page 103, DE by Rainer Maria Rilke
"We live in an old chaos of the sun."
—page 70, from "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Recently, upon his entering my office, a male client collapsed onto the couch loudly lamenting the pain of his existence, the meaningless struggle to continue to go on living while trying to make art and a decent monetary wage when every effort seemed to die still-born upon taking acts to create and relate authentically to himself and others. In his early 30's the powerful daimon of his life, the inner tyro/tyrant, the Elan Vital (vital life force), his Essense tormented him in an agonizing whirlwind of compulsions, drives of creativity, powerful Urges so strong in him manifesting as relentless sexual desire and an unending preoccupation with the creative act, his art and all living in between lived in the context of the Demand.
—page 70, from "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Recently, upon his entering my office, a male client collapsed onto the couch loudly lamenting the pain of his existence, the meaningless struggle to continue to go on living while trying to make art and a decent monetary wage when every effort seemed to die still-born upon taking acts to create and relate authentically to himself and others. In his early 30's the powerful daimon of his life, the inner tyro/tyrant, the Elan Vital (vital life force), his Essense tormented him in an agonizing whirlwind of compulsions, drives of creativity, powerful Urges so strong in him manifesting as relentless sexual desire and an unending preoccupation with the creative act, his art and all living in between lived in the context of the Demand.
This Urge calls to him, appeals to him NOW to be made manifest, incarnate, a Thing, an object which exist arriving from creative/destructive acts. That he can barely contain and canalized this force of nature within and around him appealing to him for response surprises and exasperates him in his violent swings between grandiosity and self-hatred, between feelings of being gifted and feelings of being tremendously lacking and inadequate urging him on in varying degrees to creativity and destruction, artistry and addiction, expression and compulsion, a veritable agony and ect-tomy ('ect' means "to cut out/to cut away, to remove") with fleeting simultaneously exhillerating and exhausting ecstasy which does not stay but opens, alas, greater chasms of emptiness and hunger within him thus compelling him on to more graspings at the elusive happiness he seeks.
Contemporary psychology might say my client is bi-polar, or an addict, or more than a few other descriptive diagnoses. I would certainly pay attention to such in order to be present with their "array" of symptoms and provide a better hold, or context, for us both to work together in. As a Jungian I also know that his symptoms, behaviors and compulsions are soul (the Greek word for "soul" is "psyche") expressions and I seek to understand them as such, expressions from and of soul which need to be attended, tended to. I listen beneath and above and between the words, the wild hurling, the deep hurt to hear and bear witness to soul/psyche speaking, screaming, presencing through the person I am with.
He sprawls splay-limbed upon the therapy couch, hands opened stiffly straining toward me and the ceiling for some surcease and succor pleading for the answer, the secret, the key, the code, the scientific/mental/spiritual formula which, when possessed at last, will cease his ongoing circulating torments, the daimon will be finally be appeased and satiated, his existence will then flow happily into an eternal spring, summer and autumnal bounteous harvest of creativity and contentment, passion and glowing reputation, of sexual, artistic and professional satisfaction. And lots of money.
He sprawls splay-limbed upon the therapy couch, hands opened stiffly straining toward me and the ceiling for some surcease and succor pleading for the answer, the secret, the key, the code, the scientific/mental/spiritual formula which, when possessed at last, will cease his ongoing circulating torments, the daimon will be finally be appeased and satiated, his existence will then flow happily into an eternal spring, summer and autumnal bounteous harvest of creativity and contentment, passion and glowing reputation, of sexual, artistic and professional satisfaction. And lots of money.
And there will be no more winters!
He longs to be as a poet friend wrote in a poem of his youth, "crotch happy and dog dreaming."
Carl Jung and His Daimon
To understand what I mean by my client's daimon I refer to Carl Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the last chapter titled, Retrospect. Written just a few years before Jung died he is looking back over his life and reflecting:
"I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presense proved to be decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.
I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people--aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice...
...A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon....The lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me...Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others, and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.
The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it—though not always and not everywhere."
He longs to be as a poet friend wrote in a poem of his youth, "crotch happy and dog dreaming."
Carl Jung and His Daimon
To understand what I mean by my client's daimon I refer to Carl Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the last chapter titled, Retrospect. Written just a few years before Jung died he is looking back over his life and reflecting:
"I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presense proved to be decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.
I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people--aside from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice...
...A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon....The lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me...Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others, and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.
The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it—though not always and not everywhere."
—All quotes are from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the last chapter, Retrospect, Vintage Books, 1963.
Not only explicitly creative people have a daimon. Every person alive has a daimon but not every person consciously relates and responds to it (rather, many deny, ignore, repress or project it - "just get out of my awareness!". Yet the daimon persists and insists often by showing up in dreams, nightmares, symptoms, sickness, addictions, events, places, other people in order to call attention to its presence which demands attention, relatedness, and action for it has urgent business with each and every. It calls to us. Heeding makes a big difference in how one lives with it ongoingly.
Not only explicitly creative people have a daimon. Every person alive has a daimon but not every person consciously relates and responds to it (rather, many deny, ignore, repress or project it - "just get out of my awareness!". Yet the daimon persists and insists often by showing up in dreams, nightmares, symptoms, sickness, addictions, events, places, other people in order to call attention to its presence which demands attention, relatedness, and action for it has urgent business with each and every. It calls to us. Heeding makes a big difference in how one lives with it ongoingly.
Daimon has two faces. One is enough.
Mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell speaks of "refusing the Call," that inner urge or voice or tug which manifests in a person's life which has in it the "entelechy," the unique essence, of a person, and the tendencies, the telemetries of their personal myth of their life story. Some individuals can damper the daimon to such an extent that it is a tragic loss for they never respond to "the Call." If one does respond to the Call, the urge, the Drive, there is no guarantee of success but in the responding one lives life "in the teeth" of existence and goes one's own authentic way of individuating. Individuation is the goal of Jungian psychology
Jungian analyst and writer Edward F. Edinger explicates some of the depth meanings in the word individuation in these paragraph from his monumental book, Ego and Archetype, Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche [p. 163-162]. [Click on the texts to enlarge]
Reductive, personalistic psychologies (Freud and post-Freudian therapies and their spin-offs, body oriented therapies and others) attend to personal history looking for historical causes of suffering and much can be learned and possibly changed in the individual from these approaches. But they see only symptoms and not the symbolic nature of them. I certainly utilize personalistic approaches and their insights but my primary hold is Jungian. I understand symptoms to not only indicate personal history and causations but also seek the symbolic, the archetypal material which locates the suffering in a greater continuum of purpose and meaning. Jung has said that we take too much responsibility for our suffering. He calls it our "god almightiness," our inflated view of ourselves as masters of our fate and captains of our soul. His entire life was set on discovering and verifying the transpersonal factors involved in every individual's life as evidenced in dreams and other material. Like Job, Jung found that much of our suffering is inflicted by forces greater than ourselves through no fault of our own, archetypal forces, God, Gods, Goddesses to use theological language . Understand that when Jung uses theological words he uses them psychologically and not metaphysically. He speaks of "god-images" for these are records of humanity's relationship to and evolving views of god experiences depicted in images (visual, verbal, rituals, dance, etc., constitute images of gods) throughout human history. That there is an innate factor within humans which is religious-by-Nature is proven by Jung's lifelong researches.
Of Daimons, Character as Fate, Jung's Words on Failure, Errors, and Mistakes
When I speak to my clients of their daimon, explaining what that means in psychological terms, many feel tremendous relief to know that their sufferings in part are not merely or necessarily from defaults, wounds, complexes created in infancy and childhood (though that is certainly "on the map"), nor only of flaws of character and morality. Their struggles are more, shall I say, Biblical in the sense of the Old Testament story of Jacob having a long night where he wrestled with his "eesh", often translated and mostly understood as an angel but this force or tyro is more akin to the daimon Jung describes. It, like Jacob's eesh, is driven and can at times be violent, heedless of the individual's personal life and obligations.
When I speak to my clients of their daimon, explaining what that means in psychological terms, many feel tremendous relief to know that their sufferings in part are not merely or necessarily from defaults, wounds, complexes created in infancy and childhood (though that is certainly "on the map"), nor only of flaws of character and morality. Their struggles are more, shall I say, Biblical in the sense of the Old Testament story of Jacob having a long night where he wrestled with his "eesh", often translated and mostly understood as an angel but this force or tyro is more akin to the daimon Jung describes. It, like Jacob's eesh, is driven and can at times be violent, heedless of the individual's personal life and obligations.
Jung at times refused his daimon's demands reminding it that he had a family, clients, friends, needed to recreate and rest, etc. He needed to be ordinary, human all too relievedly human. From Jung we learn that one can consciously resist the daimon without refusing its Call to grow and create. One must develop a conscious relationship to one's daimon, a real relationship, push and shove, tug and pull for if one doesn't recognize it and therefore project it outward upon, people, places, things, activities, then one is guaranteed to get mugged by the daimon which will use any means necessary to get attention and expression, more importantly, integration into conscious personality.
It is important to understand that the daimon needs us as much as we need it. Each individual is a vessel, the eyes, hands, arms, feet, body action, thought and expression of the daimon. This force of nature is amoral in character and is what James Hillman calls a "psychic insistency." Since psyche means soul it urges and insists on being lived, developed, evolved, expressed and in such expression serves the sacred mysterious power within each individual which Jung calls the Self. Here the word sacred does not mean only sweetness and light but also struggle, darkness, pain, primal/primary emotions, and the Shadow both human and divine (yes, Virginia, the divine has a shadow, a shadow dimension and expression). The Shadow is sacred. Sacred does not exclude or shut out any part of human nature or Nature. The struggles to be and the courage to be, to borrow existential theologian Paul Tillich's expression, entails conflict, growth, setback, and at times failure. Failure does not necessarily derive from inadequacy and flaws, faults and defaults. There is also Fate.
It is important to understand that the daimon needs us as much as we need it. Each individual is a vessel, the eyes, hands, arms, feet, body action, thought and expression of the daimon. This force of nature is amoral in character and is what James Hillman calls a "psychic insistency." Since psyche means soul it urges and insists on being lived, developed, evolved, expressed and in such expression serves the sacred mysterious power within each individual which Jung calls the Self. Here the word sacred does not mean only sweetness and light but also struggle, darkness, pain, primal/primary emotions, and the Shadow both human and divine (yes, Virginia, the divine has a shadow, a shadow dimension and expression). The Shadow is sacred. Sacred does not exclude or shut out any part of human nature or Nature. The struggles to be and the courage to be, to borrow existential theologian Paul Tillich's expression, entails conflict, growth, setback, and at times failure. Failure does not necessarily derive from inadequacy and flaws, faults and defaults. There is also Fate.
And Fate is part of character.
In the following transcription, in the last informal talk he ever gave in the United States, Jung speaks eloquently of failure, of error and mistakes. Some of his address is worth quoting at length here:
"Jesus, you know, was a boy born of an unmarried mother. Such a boy is called illegitimate, and there is a prejudice which puts him at a great disadvantage. He suffers from a terrible feeling of inferiority for which he is certain to have to compensate. Hence the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, in that the kingdom was offered to him. Here he met his worst enemy, the power devil; but he was able to see that, and to refuse. He said, "My kingdom is not of this world." But "kingdom" it was, all the same. And you remember that strange incident, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The utter failure came at the Crucifixion in the tragic words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If you want to understand the full tragedy of those words you must realize what they meant: Christ saw that his whole life, devoted to truth according to his best conviction, had been a terrible illusion. He had lived it to the full absolutely sincerely, he had made his honest experiment, but it was nevertheless a compensation. On the Cross his mission deserted him. But because he had lived so fully and devotedly he won through to the Resurrection body.
We must all do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed becomes man. This sounds like a terrible blasphemy, but not so. For then only can we understand Christ as he would want to be understood, as a fellow man; then only does God become man in ourselves.
...And so the last thing I would say to each of you, my friends, is: Carry through your life as well as you can, even if it is based on error, because life has to be undone, and one often gets to truth through error. Then, like Christ, you will have accomplished your experiment. So, be human, seek understanding, seek insight, and make your hypothesis, your philosophy of life. Then we may recognize the Spirit alive in the unconscious of every individual. Then we become brothers of Christ."
--pages 97/98, from C.G. Jung Speaking, chapter "Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?" Princeton University Press, 1977.
Individuation, Hillman's Force of Character and the Pathologizing Soul,
Life with the daimon is meaningful, painful at times yet does not exclude happiness, joy, ecstasy and bliss but these are impermanent states of being, expressions of a spectrum of emotions from light to dark, all vital parts of human experience. The goal, says Jung, is not happiness (not excluding it either; Jung's laughter was renowned and it is said that sometimes strangers would follow the laughter they heard to see just who this person was so capable of such laughter). The goal is individuation, the individual's awakening to the fact that there are two centers in the human psyche, the ego and that other which is greater than the ego, the Self, that central organizing, ultimately mysterious factor/force from which the ego emerges. The ego serves the Self and the Self is served by incarnating uniquely and consciously in each individual. The daimon serves this process of the individuation of the person and the further evolution of the Self, too. The suffering of individuation then is not only human suffering but also, profoundly, the suffering of the Self, of God.
James Hillman, founder of archetypal psycholgy, writes about the daimon extensively in his book, Force of Character. The word choice of force is accurately chosen for the daimon is indeed a force and most of us are forced to grow and develop in areas and ways we would never volutarily choose. Note my explication of the word character in the paragraphs below regarding Gabriel Marcel. You will see how Hillman's title is very fitting to his elucidation of life with the daimon and its affect upon our character. Jung's account of his life with the daimon clearly describes the painful impact of its force and power on a person's fate and face. Hillman speaks of psychology and science as well as religions' attempts "to get the upper hand on fate and therefore to constrain the soul." (page 59, The Blue Fire).
In his book, The Blue Fire, Hillman says that "of its nature the soul pathologizes. That is to say, it gets us in trouble, it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible. It also makes us see perversely." Understanding and accepting this tendency of the psyche/soul to pathologize, to make trouble and obstruct, can relieve us from the burden of total responsibility. Trouble, to paraphrase Hillman taking this from Jung, his teacher, is inherent in the psyche/soul. Jung goes on to say that we humans take too much responsibility for our ills and unhappiness. Rather, Hillman here again, pathologies are the soul's meat and drink. The gods and goddesses, all, "come to us" unbidden from within the soul yet much of magic, science and religion throughout history, and even more presently, are designed to "work on the gods rather than recognizing their workings in us. We reach too far, missing the daimones that are present everyday, and each night, too. Plotinus said, "It is for them to come to me, not for me to come to them."
In a sense, says Hillman, there is no cure of souls for the very nature of soul is trouble, pathologies, gods, goddesses, daimones who do come unbidden, who traumatize us while we egocentrically think it is something we have or have not done or something that is done unto us which creates the trouble. While not absolving humans of responsibility, Hillman's insight derived from Jung frees us up to take ourselves on one level less seriously all the while seriously playing the game of life. Recall Jung's reputation for amazingly delightful, joyous laughter as mentioned above. A sense of humor, often dark and delicious full of the fractured, frought, fierce, fumbling and frail can assuage mal humours in the most awful situations. Gallows humor: the soul is there. I'll speak at much greater length below on response and responsibity, of an imperative in the "trouble" of the soul, and of the daimon which seeks and demands response.
Lunching With the Daimon - To Become Is To Be Referred
Just a few hours before my distraught client arrived for his session I had been in one of the local cafes, my "second offices" as I refer to them. That very morning I had lamented like my client similarly into my dark and bitter espresso and my journal. I am at least 20 years older than my client with more living and writhing tithing blood and flesh to the daimon under my ever expanding belt. I, too, wrestle with the daimon of perpetual insistencies, compulsions, demands to create, to express, and to rest in afterglow and everglitch for awhile from its ceaseless grip. Yet when I do find a bit of quiet, a parenthesis in the high pitching sea of its scratch and scream for my attention, I find that I miss it and do not quite know myself when out of its searching gaze and searing grip. I find that I miss the teeth and tear of it, of creating and the created, dare I say, of the Creator, that primal force within, behind, beneath, and yet separate from all things (see Kaballah for centuries of excavation of this paradox of the hidden and revealed Creator in and in between the imaginal gap between Itself and the creation. Many thanks to Shirah Kober Zeller, with whom I was most privileged to study, for her brilliant teaching of kaballah and insights from psychology regarding the imaginal gap, the thin space/spaces, wherein the "god of contradictions and contractions" reveals, and in such revelations, is awe-full; confusing as such may at times be, there is also a great release, a giving in to, and falling into and between, the gap, that mystical grasp of paradox on a deep soul level].
Happiness is often experienced as a cessation, or stilling, of powerful destructive/creative forces. W.R. Bion and Michael Eigen's insights here are invaluable regarding these "destructive/creative forces" insisting, presenc-ing, rendering, in the ongoing psychic/soul life of individuals). Such cessations are a relief to say the least! at last! - happiness = relief from suffering, a blesséd release as mentioned just above. Such are not the imagined to be integrative experiences that soul longs for after all; rather, they shock, are shocking, a kind of trauma, yet such are an essential experience in the process and progress of individuation.
Carl Jung, from his own experience, no tongue in cheek with him though he is and can be cheeky, wrote that "God is a trauma". As did the Sufi poets, Old and New Testament poets, and poets of all world traditions from ancient of days to the present, these poets are renderers, having been rendered out, and in, and then again, know this drive and longing in the midst of conflicting, crushing life for some mirroring, windowing, winnowing, wooing, winning, containing, and sheltering Other/other who will make meaningful our days and daze by any means necessary (but gently, o gently, we pray). When one is rendered one sur-renders (which etymologically reduces to "rendered out" as when one slow cooks meat to "render out the fat"), one assents, gives in, relents to be emptied out where one waits, prays, if one has the will or strength to pray, "without hope" which, by the way, is authentic prayer.
Poet T. S. Eliot, partially quoted above re: wait without hope, movingly writes about this rendered out, emptied out state,
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
When I and that Other/other inevitably fail and disappoint, the longing and urging increases, the compulsions, repulsions, expulsions, propulsions and impulsions repeat in their wrenching yet rendering dialectic of an intuition which hints at some essential and existentially present and sustaining meaning within this "old chaos of the sun." The daimon is never happy. The daimon is not content with "the Answer," "the Secret," "the Key," "the Code," "the Encounter of Encounters," "the Scientific Method," etc., yet these are not false but are, rather, fingers which point toward some ever elusive yet Real Thing which we hope brings us into more authentically creative and satisfying existence. In a journal note Thomas Merton writes, "My heart yearns for its Referent." The daimon yearns for its Referent, too, and refers us, burns and yearns us toward each our Referent —
To become is to be referred.
"Shall I say that yet again?" echoing poet T. S. Eliot again from the Four Quartets.
"I shall say it again": To become is to be referred.
Between the daimon and ourselves there appears
to be no referee though Reference aplenty.
Is This A Private Fight or Can Anyone Join In?
As I write of the struggle with the daimon and the daimon of struggle, I am minded of the ever impactful Bill Moyer interview with Joseph Campbell where Campbell tells a story of a drunken brawl involving many people in a pub in Ireland. Campbell is illustrating the healthy need to get out into life and grapple with it, to not be a victim of and in life, but instead to join in the fray of it and throw some punches:
As I write of the struggle with the daimon and the daimon of struggle, I am minded of the ever impactful Bill Moyer interview with Joseph Campbell where Campbell tells a story of a drunken brawl involving many people in a pub in Ireland. Campbell is illustrating the healthy need to get out into life and grapple with it, to not be a victim of and in life, but instead to join in the fray of it and throw some punches:
"A man walking down a street near a busy and popular pub saw someone pitched headlong through the pub door into the street. Excitedly the man ran into the establishment filled with bedlam, found one of the battered and bleeding brawlers, and asked,
"Is this a private fight or can anybody join in?"
There is something about rising to the battle, the struggle, and taking delight in it (as best and as busted as one can). A good fight is a good fight. Did not St. Paul encourage those of the new Christian religion "to fight the good fight?" St. Paul was one who knew the daimon well. Jung writes movingly of Saul of Tarsus who became Paul and how in following his daimon (Jung calls it libido, not sexual libido (as Freud confines the term) but powerful demanding life force), he at first "obeyed" it by persecuting the new Christian sect. Had he not followed the daimon he would never have had his life changing mystical, and violent, encounter, he was blinded by his vision, with "the Christ" on the road to Damascus. Thusly, involuntarily, Saul became Paul and thusly he and his daimon almost single handedly (I am exaggerating a bit here but his is a god of exaggeration) founded and shaped the early Christian church, and still does, for better and worse - it is helpful to remember here the gap between the dynamic and rendering opposites - to the present day.
Thus in the cafe, post-lament into my journal while the perplexed-at-my-dour-look server delivered yet another double espresso, in the soul-ache I waited, staring at the street traffic, full of the question, the perpetual question of meaningful existence in this indubitable erstwhile veil of tears, world woe, weltschmertz, pain, disappointment, and sorrow. I puzzled, too, on the pleasure I feel in pondering, floundering, and viscerally experiencing the question - I note here how easy it is to exaggerate but in this I serve that Great Exaggerator/Exasperator, emphasis on 'aspiration' as in the sense of "aspire" and, but seriously folks, its homonym cousin, "asperate" as in "the accidental breathing in of food or fluid into the lungs" as well as "to make rough or harsh" as in being roughly and harshly "manhandled" by the demanding daimon.
Thus in the cafe, post-lament into my journal while the perplexed-at-my-dour-look server delivered yet another double espresso, in the soul-ache I waited, staring at the street traffic, full of the question, the perpetual question of meaningful existence in this indubitable erstwhile veil of tears, world woe, weltschmertz, pain, disappointment, and sorrow. I puzzled, too, on the pleasure I feel in pondering, floundering, and viscerally experiencing the question - I note here how easy it is to exaggerate but in this I serve that Great Exaggerator/Exasperator, emphasis on 'aspiration' as in the sense of "aspire" and, but seriously folks, its homonym cousin, "asperate" as in "the accidental breathing in of food or fluid into the lungs" as well as "to make rough or harsh" as in being roughly and harshly "manhandled" by the demanding daimon.
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet urged a young poet in the midst of his suffering the pangs of mental and physical existence to not seek answers too quickly but, rather, "to live the questions" for in them one deepens contact with Mystery, grows familiar with and facility with not-knowing, staying awake and attentive in the gap, a staying (and staying-put if one can even move at all) which can individuate one (revisit Edward Edinger texts above), or does potentially though there is death in each hard question and one can indeed die in them.
Thus the great need for a Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Carl Jung, James Hillman, so many others, as well as there being culture, the arts, teachers all kinds, and on and on, to provide containing but not confining hold for the questiones, the sufferer who is after something real - a popular song sings "just give me one real thing - that real is a sense, an intuition, a sensation, a meaningful coincidence, that vibe or hint felt, often unseen (yet projected upon), and so one sorts, and sifts (as "soft sift in an hour glass" - Gerard Manley Hopkins) and in so doing unexpected gifts are gained for the hard-press of one's measure being taken and, yes, the taking full (impossible but we do, we will, we must) good measure of the Measurer, impossible, I know, but we do, we will, we must while wide-eyed or blind as was Saul "killed"/waking into Paul and adhered to God Almighty as then kenned.
And, importantly, all things being equalish (smile), there is play, the playing, in the never redundant "fields of the Lord, and, yes, there is the insistent joining in on the fight.
But seriously folks...
The playing, the fighting, the questioning are deeply serious and can, may, and do take a toll, some folks do not make it, the sufferings too great, too overwhelming, and one becomes comfortless.
Jungian analyst, David Rosen, in his book Transforming Depression speaks of commiting ego-cide rather than suicide which is final and resolves nothing that the individual's soul is painfully birthing into being or trying to. Parts of self, ego parts, die by ego-cide, by consciously diving into the questions wherein the potential for some rebirth into presence with just what is, the givens of human existence in a material and mental universe, may happen - the etymology of this word is shared with the word happiness in that both words are related to 'luck, chance' (see etymology below this text), thus there is in living, and dying, in the question of existence, the potential for luckily happening upon, by chance, Presence, and ways to be present with Being and Becoming in the face of non-being, and Death. Presence happens. It is an event in which for it, presence, to happen one must literally show up, be, be there and, yes, often, enduringly so as in Samual Beckett's play Waiting For Godot - wait. The very pondering and feeling of these questions and notations-in-the-waiting, rather, glyphs toward ever changing and evolving meaning and experience of meaning can bring a kind of fullness, a kind of pleasure, dare I call it happiness derived from perceiving oneself being articulated in the inarticulate pains and strivings of the heart, mind and body framed and formed in and by the lived questions and the yearning for the Referent of the heart.
Homo Viator, With-ness, Scaracter, and Human Exigencies
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going. I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going, for they are those who are going over." —Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, (tr. R. Hollingdale, Penguin. 1984, p.44
Gabriel Marcel, Christian existentialist of the last century, says that rather than being homo sapiens, human knowers, humans are homo viators, humans on the way, passing through. I recalled this as I sat with the espresso cup in my shaking hand remembering Marcel from my Calvinist Christian college days and the attendant agonies of questions there in them, of reading his book Homo Viator and finding from it some nascent ways to begin to crawl, baby step, limp, back into my skin, given permission at last to be someone "on the way" traveling, trevail-ing, unraveling and unveiling while the elusive self, the witness I was/am observes it all. Witness means with-ness, being-with/with-being in existence, being with the questions, being with self and with others, and, after the coffee shop self-session, being with my unhappy client.
Gabriel Marcel, Christian existentialist of the last century, says that rather than being homo sapiens, human knowers, humans are homo viators, humans on the way, passing through. I recalled this as I sat with the espresso cup in my shaking hand remembering Marcel from my Calvinist Christian college days and the attendant agonies of questions there in them, of reading his book Homo Viator and finding from it some nascent ways to begin to crawl, baby step, limp, back into my skin, given permission at last to be someone "on the way" traveling, trevail-ing, unraveling and unveiling while the elusive self, the witness I was/am observes it all. Witness means with-ness, being-with/with-being in existence, being with the questions, being with self and with others, and, after the coffee shop self-session, being with my unhappy client.
By living the questions on the way to being, while becoming, one bears witness to existence in all of its spectrum of agonies and glories. We are shaped by what we must bear with-ness to, by what we must be too much with, misshapen (how it feels, how we feel); this shaping forms what is in psychology called character, etymology of which literally means "scratches upon a surface." In other words, scars, as in scar-acter.
American poet, Wendell Berry, in a poem titled, The Sycamore, eloquently dignifies scaracter, describes it making, in this poem:
The Sycamore
In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
Hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark face.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
th e same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
Hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark face.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
th e same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.
This tree is character unique to its scarring, accidents, gnarls, lightning, Berry profoundly orienting poem describes ourselves on the way to individuation, we are in the weathers (and whithers) of that process, bearing the scars of being come by honestly merely by taking flesh, drawing breath, wherein there is no year we have lived in that has not harmed us -
Testament. I am here. I was there. I got here from there on the way.
Homo Viator. Aviator - Flyer. Traveler. Trevailer.
"Was I too glib about eternal things?" —Theodore Roethke
With Marcel's book I could begin to own my young dispair and the pathologies which are my soul as a result of Marcel's salvific insight into what he calls human exigencies. Existence is laden with exigencies which means urgencies, demands. These push, haul, explode me out of complacent Hallmark card, spiritually materialistic patchwork confections of pirated spiritualities, techniques, psychologies and formulas reduced to glib and psycho-sanctimonious presentiments and presentations regarding being here in existence in the external and inner world. When I understood then though barely but enough, enough, and remember now that in the very fabric of conscious human existence are exigencies, urgencies, demands, I knew that I could then continue to more authentically explore what was then nascently and now more clearly apparent regarding my personal Vocation, that of being a man on his way, a wrestler with those exigencies, personal, social and transpersonal, making and exacting their demands from my mere existence. As Rilke says in the Nineth Elegy, "Being here amounts to so much, because all this Here and Now, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us."
Here in Marcel I discover and recover again and own the exigencies, the urgings, the demands of being and becoming. In the exigencies I discover what Marcel and others call "the appeal in existence," "existence as appeal." There is a demand, a Call, an Appeal in existence and to exist is to be and to be in the appeal. In speaking just now of my sense of personal Vocation, Calling, from the experienced arrival of Marcel's human exigencies I recall that the very word Vocation has the word voice in it which implies that there is a calling, an appeal, a voice which evokes one's authentic nascent and evolving self which requires a continuing response to That which is heard. Again, Vocation is to be called and to hear and act in response from within that evocation one is ongoingly becoming. Rainer Maria Rilke eloquently describes this hearing and this response
Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
saints have heard: heard till the giant-call
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers...but hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.
We are so inherently hearers of the exigencies, the uninterrupted appeals of existence. And in hearing the appeals we must respond. For me that hearing and response led and continually leads me in my ongoing unfolding vocation of being a man on his way in the adventure.
With Marcel's book I could begin to own my young dispair and the pathologies which are my soul as a result of Marcel's salvific insight into what he calls human exigencies. Existence is laden with exigencies which means urgencies, demands. These push, haul, explode me out of complacent Hallmark card, spiritually materialistic patchwork confections of pirated spiritualities, techniques, psychologies and formulas reduced to glib and psycho-sanctimonious presentiments and presentations regarding being here in existence in the external and inner world. When I understood then though barely but enough, enough, and remember now that in the very fabric of conscious human existence are exigencies, urgencies, demands, I knew that I could then continue to more authentically explore what was then nascently and now more clearly apparent regarding my personal Vocation, that of being a man on his way, a wrestler with those exigencies, personal, social and transpersonal, making and exacting their demands from my mere existence. As Rilke says in the Nineth Elegy, "Being here amounts to so much, because all this Here and Now, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us."
Here in Marcel I discover and recover again and own the exigencies, the urgings, the demands of being and becoming. In the exigencies I discover what Marcel and others call "the appeal in existence," "existence as appeal." There is a demand, a Call, an Appeal in existence and to exist is to be and to be in the appeal. In speaking just now of my sense of personal Vocation, Calling, from the experienced arrival of Marcel's human exigencies I recall that the very word Vocation has the word voice in it which implies that there is a calling, an appeal, a voice which evokes one's authentic nascent and evolving self which requires a continuing response to That which is heard. Again, Vocation is to be called and to hear and act in response from within that evocation one is ongoingly becoming. Rainer Maria Rilke eloquently describes this hearing and this response
Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
saints have heard: heard till the giant-call
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers...but hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence.
We are so inherently hearers of the exigencies, the uninterrupted appeals of existence. And in hearing the appeals we must respond. For me that hearing and response led and continually leads me in my ongoing unfolding vocation of being a man on his way in the adventure.
Existence as Response
Here F.H. Heinemann, existentialist philosopher and writer, in his still timely book Existentialism and the Human Predicament published in 1959 speaks to this urging within existence for human response. The last chapter of the book is called, Respondeo, ergo sum; translated it means, I respond, therefore I Am. Because this speaks so much to the question of being which includes the problem of pain/happiness I happily quote extensively from the book.
Here F.H. Heinemann, existentialist philosopher and writer, in his still timely book Existentialism and the Human Predicament published in 1959 speaks to this urging within existence for human response. The last chapter of the book is called, Respondeo, ergo sum; translated it means, I respond, therefore I Am. Because this speaks so much to the question of being which includes the problem of pain/happiness I happily quote extensively from the book.
NOTE - Heinemann was a philosopher of the earlier to mid-20th century and one of the more accessible and readable ones. It the reader is not used to reading philosophy it may be a challenge due to the various philosophies the technical terms and issues they address. If what is below is too much then read the first paragraph for the basic thrust of Respondeo, ergo sum; upon first reading this passage an inner wheel turned within me that Heinemann's existentialism is of tremendous compassion and presence with what is, response implies relationship, the primacy of relationship as I and Thou, as I and It. The Hopi Native Americans in North America have a word which happens to complement this attitude/stance of respondeo, ergo sum, hakomi which means "Where do I stand within these realms?" The question is one of orientation and presence, being consciously awake, aware, engaged in the here and now inwardly and outwardly, awareness of both at once and where they meet, where they depart and so on. Here's some Heinemann:
"...I formulate the first principle as Respondeo, ergo sum...I am in so far as I respond. I arise on all levels of my being (body, sense organs, soul and mind) only by responding. Man comes into being by an act of response; his evolution consists of interrelated and complicated acts of response. As long as he is alive he responds...Man's position in the Universe is unique in that he, as a responding being, becomes answerable for his actions. This is the moral aspect of his freedom. Respondeo, ergo sum now means that I am in so far as I accept responsibility for my actions...Finally, our key-symbol (Respondeo, ergo sum) allows us to understand religion. Man is the only being able to respond to stimuli outside the "world" of animals. Man alone responds to God, speaks with God, and prays to God. This fact gives us the clue for understanding religion and the mystics without forcing us to admit the claim of the mystics to experience ultimate reality. The hypothesis of religion is based on a specific type of responsiveness of the spiritual center of man to the Transcendent, i.e. to powers transcending the sphere of sense-experience. Religion is not based on a feeling of dependence (Schleiermacher), nor is it "the knowledge of the Absolute in a finite consciousness" (Hegel). It is based on a response to the Absolute which has the power of elevating man above the misery of earthly turmoil and redeeming him. What matters is the manner in which we respond, not whether God answers or not...
This is the paradox of the human condition. Living in complete insecurity under the constant menace of annihilation, we experience the unreliability of human institutions and the instability of all finite objects. In our dispair we are inclined to doubt everything, even God's existence, of whom we cannot and shall not make an image [Heinemann is certainly NOT a Jungian. See my words above regarding Jung and the "god-image" in the section, Carl Jung and His Daimon.]. But at the height of our suffering, when everything seems to break down, suddenly we find ourselves confronted with an unconditional request [the appeal, the exigency, the daimon's drive -- Warren] which we have to answer. In such moments we experience God ['God' here meaning that from and in which we derive Ultimate Meaning for existence, our existence, not necessarily a metaphysical being which ontologically exists--Warren], and we learn that it is we who have to respond. We have to find our affirmation, which as a personal truth becomes objective if in very fact it be the right answer to the transcendent call [appeal, Rilke's "uninterruped news" -- Warren] in this specific situation. It is we who have to do those actions without which the eternal Light cannot conquer the forces of darkness...
Existence is a subjectively-regulative idea; for it brings unity into the chaos of our personal experience...as a general imperative it says, "Your responses shall be existential!" "Within all spheres of our being you shall act in such a manner that you exist in and through your answers!" "Reply [to the appeal, the exigency, the daimon] with absolute responsibility in the face of God!" "Answer so that you mirror the Universe in your specific way from your point of view!"...Existence as appeal is therefore preserved...the postulate to become existential in thought and action concerns everybody. An existential philosopher is one whose thought is action. Consequently he exists in his action-responses and in these creates himself and his world. He lives up to Fichte's statement: "Philosophy is a transformation, regeneration and renewal of the spirit in its deepest root: the emergence of a new organ and, with it, of a new world in the flux of time.""
--All quotes are from the the last chapter, Respondeo, Ergo Sum, in F.H. Heinemann's, Existentialism and the Human Predicament, Harper Torchbooks, 1958.
Harkening To The Suspiration
Paying my bill at the cafe I returned home more oriented in a "new/old world in the flux of time." I felt full not only from my meal but from my outpouring woes into the journal and the subsequent waiting and musing and refusing to be easily or quickly comforted. The session hour arrived and in spilled my client as reported above. I was concerned but recognized the synchronicity of his outpourings, the themes similar to mine, and thus I sat open and disposed to him keenly interested in just how he and I would be together in his very real pain regarding his apparently meaningless struggle to live and create. I sat on my urge to report that I had just been writhing around the same issues a few hours before and thus have I arrived regarding soul pathology, daimons, Rilke and "living the questions," (I know that I would have punched someone in the teeth if they had spouted "live the questions" to me in the midst of my experience of what D.W. Winnicott accurately describes as "unspeakable agonies and primitive terrors"!), powerful destructive/creative forces, ego-cide, Godot, waiting, homo viator, witness/withness, scaracter, human exigencies and their demand for response, respondeo, ergo sum, and inner and outter voices which appeal to us and when heard and responded to evoke in us Vocation along the way. I sat on all that. I tried to be present, being with and for him in his great pain. I did not seek to make him happy nor to increase his suffering. I let him empty and go on emptying himself into the space we were in, in the space which I try to become, empty, open, present. My verbal responses were minimal. I deepened my breathing in order to become present in the ground of being and to ground myself solidly in the space we were together in. He emptied. And emptied more. Then grew silent. Exhausted. He relaxed though he was not required to relax. He lay on the couch and breathed. I said, "That's right...let the couch hold you. Don't hold on anymore...let go and let yourself be held. Feel the support of the couch. And just breathe." And he did that. And I breathed, too. And silence filled the space, deepened the space of him and me.
I offered no solutions or formulas and kept the Rilke books on the shelf. Some other time perhaps. We booked the next appointment. When he left I pulled the Duino Elegies from the bookshelf and read these words:
Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe--maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more intimate flight. --page 21/22
O homo viator. Aviator. Flyer. Man on the way,
my client, may it be that he "will feel the extended air
in more intimate flight."
"Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
in more intimate flight."
"Voices, voices. Hear, O my heart, as only
saints have heard: heard till the giant-call
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers...but hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence." --page 23
Selah.
lifted them off the ground; yet they went impossibly
on with their kneeling, in undistracted attention:
so inherently hearers...but hark to the suspiration,
the uninterrupted news that grows out of silence." --page 23
Selah.
London as seen from the London Bridge August 2015
CODA
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneious cries;
...And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
--page 70, from "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneious cries;
...And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
--page 70, from "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ETYMOLOGY:
hap
c.1205, "chance, luck," from O.N. happ "chance, good luck," from P.Gmc. *khapan (source of O.E. gehæp "convenient, fit"). Meaning "good fortune" is from c.1225.
happen
c.1300, happenen "to come to pass, occur," originally "occur by hap" (see hap); replaced O.E. gelimpan, gesceon, and M.E. befall. First record of happenstance is 1897, formed from happening + circumstance. Happening in the sense of "spontaneous event or display" is from 1959.
happy
1340, "lucky," from hap "chance, fortune" (see haphazard), sense of "very glad" first recorded c.1390. Ousted O.E. eadig (from ead "wealth, riches") and gesælig, which has become silly. O.E. bliðe "happy" survives as blithe. From Gk. to Ir., a great majority of the European words for "happy" at first meant "lucky." An exception is Welsh, where the word used first meant "wise." Used in World War II and after as a suffix (e.g. bomb-happy, flak-happy) expressing "dazed or frazzled from stress." Happiness is first recorded 1530. Happy hour "early evening period of discount drinks and free hors-d'oeuvres at a bar" is first recorded 1961. Happy-go-lucky is from 1672. Happy as a clam (1636) was originally happy as a clam in the mud at high tide, when it can't be dug up and eaten.
exigency
1581, from M.Fr. exigence, from L.L. exigentia "urgency," from L. exigentem (nom. exigens), from exigere "to demand" (see exact).
Webpage for the above: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=h&p=2
ETYMOLOGY:
hap
c.1205, "chance, luck," from O.N. happ "chance, good luck," from P.Gmc. *khapan (source of O.E. gehæp "convenient, fit"). Meaning "good fortune" is from c.1225.
happen
c.1300, happenen "to come to pass, occur," originally "occur by hap" (see hap); replaced O.E. gelimpan, gesceon, and M.E. befall. First record of happenstance is 1897, formed from happening + circumstance. Happening in the sense of "spontaneous event or display" is from 1959.
happy
1340, "lucky," from hap "chance, fortune" (see haphazard), sense of "very glad" first recorded c.1390. Ousted O.E. eadig (from ead "wealth, riches") and gesælig, which has become silly. O.E. bliðe "happy" survives as blithe. From Gk. to Ir., a great majority of the European words for "happy" at first meant "lucky." An exception is Welsh, where the word used first meant "wise." Used in World War II and after as a suffix (e.g. bomb-happy, flak-happy) expressing "dazed or frazzled from stress." Happiness is first recorded 1530. Happy hour "early evening period of discount drinks and free hors-d'oeuvres at a bar" is first recorded 1961. Happy-go-lucky is from 1672. Happy as a clam (1636) was originally happy as a clam in the mud at high tide, when it can't be dug up and eaten.
exigency
1581, from M.Fr. exigence, from L.L. exigentia "urgency," from L. exigentem (nom. exigens), from exigere "to demand" (see exact).
Webpage for the above: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=h&p=2
