Warren's Words: Of Getting Low Down in the Vale of Soul Making
We are composed of agonies, not polarities
— James Hillman
So. Downward to darkness let us go, the realm of soul, a human and inhuman place, a perspective, reflective, mediating, making differences between ourselves and things, a constant substrate "there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse." In soul are multiplicities; polytheistic, there are gods in and of the valleys and gods even near the peak, but the very summit points to something other than multiplicity, something unitive and one. The peak is one spirited. Monotheistic. Thus is imaged in peaks and vales the history of human consciousness, the question of "the one and the many," of "unity and diversity," the four essences, earth, air, fire, water and that one essence which holds them all, that fifth essence, the quintessence.
This dialectic of running and returning, ascending and descending, is the way of human consciousness. Wholeness is that arrival and awareness that the whole contains both peaks and vales and values not one over the other. Of course, understandably, suffering humans vote for peaks, eschew the vales as we personally and collectively know more of the pain and separation of existence while intuiting/bodily remembering a primary identity within what appeared and appears to be a unitary at-one-ment with personal and transpersonal Mother. The yearning for peaks and peak experience is in part to recapitulate the extended, phenomenologically timeless dwelling-in/dwelling-for/dwelling-with oneness before separation when body-ego emerges-then a self separating/individuating out from participation mystique, or mystical participation, which is a fusion of identity between subject and object, self and (m)other.
A conscious ascent and arrival (should Grace allow) at the peak is not the longed for regressive pull backward into the undifferentiated Great Mother archetype with infantile (un)consciousness (Freud's "oceanic bliss") but, rather, due to the effort—the blood, sweat, tears and temptations to give up the assault of the peak—implies and requires an ego, a will, a body/mind compelled toward the summit...thus when it is reached the experience is, yes, of oneness and completeness arrived via the heroic journey which does indeed make soul. Soul-making begins and continues in the valley, in the perilous devoting of libido and the sacrificing of self-image at the beginning of the journey down and up the steep incline which demands letting go of dross, of superfluity, of even the imagined image of who we shall be if and when we reach the summit.
..After the peak, another flaying, a further rendering from the exacting/extracting journey, a necessary re-descent though one is transformed from the entire cycle of the journey which begins in veils/vales, spills/falls perhaps deeper there, struggles there, dreams of previous ascent, dreams of the peak, and so begins another phase—coagulatio in alchemy—the arduous ordeal of incarnating and integrating the climb, of having arrived on top spent, depleted, yet the fuller for the grinding upward and forward. And yet, in the end, Saint Jack and Saint Jill, saints of vales, of soul, spill, all the more vessels of clay made the more sacred for the "what is," the reality, of what they consciously contain and convey in laughter and tears. There's no rhyme or time on peaks. No sound there at all. Nothing speaks. Utterance is of the gutter, the candle burning, sputtering. We stammerers, stutterers, murmurers, mutterers make matter matter all the more ensouled.
…We speak of "scaling the peak." To scale, to skin, to scrape, to measure/mark, to ascend. The climber is scaled, too, scarred, riven, driven forward, striving, peaking. One aspires to arrive there, both peak and vale, integrated or at least consciously held/endured/celebrated as sacred conflict/agony—there is a spire in the word aspire after all, symbol of sacred verticality dependent upon equally sacred horizontal foundation, and spire as in breath, to breathe in and upon, to encounter sacred breath, rarefied upon the high mountaintop, to have expended countless painful yet necessary breaths during the struggle with what becomes hostile estranged elements, body, mind, earth, air, balance and gravity. But here in the vale, looking up at peaks, I have anticipated myself, ahead of myself regarding the different values symbolized by the vale and the peak. I walk backward here, spin and spill, to amplify what I have already sketched out, fore-stretched:
"The more I relate to everything everywhere
[peaks-language, unity and one, spirit, ecstasy],
the more I must relate to something somewhere
[vale-language, diversity, many, soul, depression]."
—this quote (as I remember it) by Howard Johnson, theology professor of Martin Luther King, Jr., words which oriented him as a young systematic theology student at Boston University.]
…Change in the valley requires recognition of history, an archeology of the soul, a digging in the ruins, a re-collecting. And—a planning in specific geographical and historical soil with its own smell and savor, in connection with spirits of the dead, the po-soul sunk in the ground below. (Po-soul in ancient Chinese cosmology was the earth soul, characterized by yin.)...From the viewpoint of soul and life in the vale, going up the mountain feels like a desertion. The lamas and saints "bid farewell to their comrades" (a quote from a letter by the current Dalai Lama of Tibet). Depression, the vale, pulls one deeply down into the unconscious in order to contact that "black hole" energy of authentic self now overpoweringly insisting upon conscious attention and earnest bringing-forth-and-up and beyond past persona-masks. Much needed aspects of authentic self are inwardly determined by that which is not the ego, what Carl Jung calls the "not I" or Self, that greater totality from which the ego is derived. Said aspects have been languishing in the unconscious which actually inflicts what Jungian analyst M. L. von Franz calls a "creative depression"—what psychotherapist Joan Poelvoorde helpfully calls a "working depression" as it is pragmatic, has a goal "it" is insisting toward integration into human personality—it is creative in that it seeks to be fleshed out, lived in temporal reality, thus personally incarnating the transpersonal Self uniquely in the valley. Poet W.H. Auden writes of the dark night's job description for creative soul-making, "With the farming of a verse make a vinyard of the curse. With your unrestraining voice still pursuade us to rejoice." No easy task but worth the effort—hi ho the dairy o...
These integrated aspects create Doppler-like disturbances in not only the internal field of consciousness but also in the external social field of relationships, politics personal and collective. Some people will not like the newer, wholler personality roughly etched with authentic character much as a landscape is scarred by iceberg, river, weather, human compression and patient, inexorable, excoriating/excruciating time. Even failure in the attempt to confront, accept, and integrate these hitherto repressed or nascent aspects of soul/self—if at least sincerely attempted—is individuating and authenticating.
One may, like the Old Testament Jacob, wrestle in the waste places of psyche in darkness with an aspecting-aspic-angel (aspic congeals) wounding, transforming, and coagulating both self and necessary angel in authentic encounter with life, all of it, volatile, dynamic "I and Thou"-and-"I and It" encounters, Martin Buber's dynamic characterization of the subjective and objective responses/encounters with Existenz which has within it an appeal for response, and in our human response it is born witness to, shaped/formed, and given soul: "Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul." (Hillman)
We are the creatures who respond in mind and emotion, in gesture and symbol, in bestowal of bearing presence/giving weight by our being with, in, and for what appeals to us "so inherently hearers" (Rilke) in depth-dark being/becoming, and in the going away and out of witness, but borne, as we can do, given location, within, in memory—and more.
"To be," says American philosopher C.S. Peirce, "is to be perceived." We must keep our eyes open even, nay, especially, in the dark, at places marked with only an "X," for it is there "on the narrow ridge," says Buber, where one does "not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed." Ridge. Vale. Of greatest value in either is the meeting of "what remains undisclosed." Revealed. Born with-ness to which is creative and transformative. Being "takes on" a face as do we human presenc-ers both or all at once angelic and daemonic. In many myths angels and demons morph into each other, trade roles and faces. We humans do too. This is vale work. This is soul making.
After enduring and gaining the "black gold" of self in depression's dark night one is less afraid of descents, of darkness, one's own, others, the ornery gods urgent to "remake and unmake the world", the creative/destructive archetypal forces/daemons (the Greek ones, not the miserable Christian ones), having learned that such descents are alchemical phases in an ongoing sacred process of greater integration involving necessary disintegration toward a more inclusive reformation. One may remain (blessedly, relievedly) dark, forever marked from the journey but consciously so with joy all the more authentic having not shut out any part of one's self, the dark and the lighter. Though others may not be able to tolerate the integrated darkness it may serve and enrich some others whose wholeness and very lives depend upon their darker aspects safe-kept in the unconscious until it is time for them to emerge and create not only new selves but also new worlds where Jack and Jill are saints and Sisyphus is an angel closest to the dark god(s) who safe keeps the soul and its sophia-wisdom etched in human flesh and mind.
"To be," says American philosopher C.S. Peirce, "is to be perceived." We must keep our eyes open even, nay, especially, in the dark, at places marked with only an "X," for it is there "on the narrow ridge," says Buber, where one does "not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed." Ridge. Vale. Of greatest value in either is the meeting of "what remains undisclosed." Revealed. Born with-ness to which is creative and transformative. Being "takes on" a face as do we human presenc-ers both or all at once angelic and daemonic. In many myths angels and demons morph into each other, trade roles and faces. We humans do too. This is vale work. This is soul making.
After enduring and gaining the "black gold" of self in depression's dark night one is less afraid of descents, of darkness, one's own, others, the ornery gods urgent to "remake and unmake the world", the creative/destructive archetypal forces/daemons (the Greek ones, not the miserable Christian ones), having learned that such descents are alchemical phases in an ongoing sacred process of greater integration involving necessary disintegration toward a more inclusive reformation. One may remain (blessedly, relievedly) dark, forever marked from the journey but consciously so with joy all the more authentic having not shut out any part of one's self, the dark and the lighter. Though others may not be able to tolerate the integrated darkness it may serve and enrich some others whose wholeness and very lives depend upon their darker aspects safe-kept in the unconscious until it is time for them to emerge and create not only new selves but also new worlds where Jack and Jill are saints and Sisyphus is an angel closest to the dark god(s) who safe keeps the soul and its sophia-wisdom etched in human flesh and mind.
Of History And Soul, Of Fleetingness And A Thing's Gracious Gift To The Eternal
I, like Hillman, am a soul man, partial to soul, to space, to time, to locale, at more than a lover's quarrel with the world and very much so at quarrel with spirit which "deigns to destroy us," says the poet Rilke, "us the most fleeting of all." Rilke is a soul man who spent much time on the peaks and even more time in the valleys. In the "Ninth Duino Elegy," Rilke is actually covering soul's ground, expanding Keats's foundational statement about vales and the use of the world, meaning a fuller spectrum experience of life and the Eternal's being enriched from the shadows, the surfaces, the subterranean. The Eternal is not complete after all. The Eternal needs the temporal, what is gained there in consciousness, the Eternal needs a where, an orientation, particularity, to be more substantial (substance is in this word) whole, wholeness, here meaning an ongoing process of completion and depletion, filled in with something in cycles of chaos and return rather than abstraction:
On with the boring center line
endlessly dividing though broken
on purpose suggesting a way to veer.
No guide needed here.
Fear is the drive shaft,
and longing turns the wheel.
— Warren Falcon
Lest it be thought that I am voting for sickness over health, gravity over levity, William Jamesian distinctions, I suggest that to be is to express and to attest to and for the Blind Universe, that Wholly Other Eternal Abstraction, of the implicate fullness of material being, of incarnation from quantum to quarry where physical being is an agony and an ecstasy and all between refashioned by age after age—in other words, by history. These things have soul, are soul, are ensouled by our conscious physical existence and our responsiveness in the vales.
And thus history wags on, unfolds, peak and vale, tooth and nail, spirit and soul seeing and singing "through the glass, a kind of veil, darkly" with swearing and praise to the end while never ceasing to marvel at "the dark loveliness of the glass." The tales tell us so. We contribute our own, leaving many sentences dangling in the vales where dangle is allowed or, dangling on the edge of a peak because we have been too long too high, our soul demands that we come down by any means necessary to the "necessary angel of the earth" (Wallace Stevens), the valley, the cleft where that angel, the angel of the Imagination, does its work in the human soul, doing, undoing, pretending which means in part to "stretch in front, put forward" a tense, a text and context extending out of soul into the plenum, affirming soul, the vale, precipitate weather continually shifting, making more soul and bringing a joy the angels of the spirit, of heaven have never and can never know:
He who binds himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies.
Lives in eternity's sun rise.—William Blake
He who binds himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies.
Lives in eternity's sun rise.—William Blake
Click below to read all three essays, Joan's, Warren's, and Maria's:
All photos are by Warren Falcon
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