John Keats wrote: "Call the world if you please, 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find the use of the world..." From this perspective the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.—James Hillman
We are composed of agonies, not polarities. —James Hillman
'We do not mourn that we see through a glass darkly, we now rejoice in the dark loveliness of the glass. '(Dominic Crossan,1975: 39)
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. The ordeal and sacrifice in the vale, the descent and the ascent is effectively (repetition upon repetition as are all our days and nights) described by T.S. Eliot quoting St. John of the Cross in his, Eliot's, poem Four Quartets, from the fourth Quartet "Little Gidding:"
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
*
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 of 'coagulatio' (descent) in alchemy - the arduous ordeal of Incarnating and integrating the climb, of having arrived on top spent, depleted, ego purged 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. The No-thing speaks.
Utterance is of the gutter, the candle burning, sputtering.
We stammerers, stutterers,
murmurers, mutterers make
matter matter all the more ensouled.
Much there is to say and sing of that.
Many the tongue-wink-and-wag:
The animal we are
reserves just rights
to complain -
empty bellies,
encroached territories,
crotch urgencies,
skin withers,
fur falls -
brittle goes the bone,
so small the gathered human corners,
so great the needed mercies.
Do not dishonor
the animal we are.
We fight for blood right,
birth right,
some bread,
a place to lie down
with kindred beings.
A patch beside a stream,
a doll house street,
sweat-and-blood won,
proclaims a personal kingdom.
Darkness prepares the light,
light the darkness -
Dialectic of rays and veils.
Even so, Milarepa fore to the mind preparing the heart,
preparing the heart, Eliot may help with hope,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
*
"Ich Habe Genug" (It Is Enough) BWV 82: No. 1, Aria — Carl P. E. Bach [right click to open link]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFLSCBExoNU&list=RDMFLSCBExoNU&start_radio=1
**
ADDENDUM(B) - Significant study that turned my inner wheel (sails) toward other than John Calvin's monocular monolith.
"shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?
It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees:
nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees...
and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward,
by which it had gone down in the sundial of Ahaz"
- Kings 2 20: 9-11 (King James Bible)
Here's but a significant (for and to me when a lad) parenthesis on what/how I, surprise/no surprise when it arrived and proceeded, left the kingdom of Certainty (the conservative Christian Barnacled Pier at the end of once was a boardwalk attach to shore, extending into the insistent, patient ocean. Each thundering wave, the gusts of wind, shakes the structure in its core. Arrogance, yes, of such wooden aspirations, temporary at best, byt doomed from the start. But it is a given that humans try, defy, and in the effort of construction, also admit an identity with that vastness, the forces seen and mostly unseen but felt, intuited. Noble, yes. Strident (but not like the so very effective waves not intent upon anything at all but blindly impacting, making an impact whether witnessed or not:Found, hallelujah, one who allowed me to own my love of theology long sealed into a sub-basement chamber to which I would secretly plumb for forbidden myself (my formerly Christian self, but a desperate boy, 3rd grade till sophomore year at a conservative Christian college, when I found language-and-philosophy, ironically, relievedly (in secret to others), in a philosophy course that gifted me Ludwig Wittgenstein, both his schools of philosophy (logical positivism - which I figured out, despite anal Ludwig's attempts to lob of mysticism/metaphysics via logic, leads one to a mystical leap into the V/void that remains (how can V/void remain?! ah, language - what fun, outruns itself, exceeds, too, and definitely bleeds literal wars) when one has climbed syllogism by syllogism, trot by Tractatus, to the final venal or worse, or not, "plank" - the necessary leap from it into
v
v
v
v
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aka (glyphics from they meta- they preta- metaglyphics to approximated -physics - one elderly (80's) philosophy professor at UNCA, where I studied for 3 semesters post-Christian college) countered me in this by inviting me to "jump out the window, third floor, to confirm if -physics was a rumor or not lol. Forever a wise fool , me, at least, at least I tried to not just swallow but, rather, better to wallow in all the millennia of approximations, bless 'em all, re: homo scrapiens thrownmess when new brain oped eyes, blinked much,such are all surmises a'plenty as well as countless sabor tooths, snakes, the everywhere deathly plethora , all a
I entertained then, an AHA, that perhaps it is/was i who was dead ended no matter the scatter of inter-prises in eventual not so secret despair, up- or down- ended in/at dead end theology(JEEZ))
Not only "gool ol Ludwig Witt," - a riff from Clockwork Orange novel by Anthony Burgess - but there was, referring back to the language philosophy class at the Christian college, Blesséd Benjamin Lee Whorf', amateur, brilliant, and seminal linguist, penetrating into the utterly different experience of reality presenting via Navajo language (and neighboring tribes sharing linguistic roots) which is not a noun and verb based language at all but based on verbs or, rather, dynamics of process, of verbing rendering an utterly different perception and encounter with what is seen, or ongoingly orienting one (also a verv) via utterance (see link below to read a bit of Michael Ortiz Hill's attempts to grock Navajo language - so (for me, still) very exciting).
So, already in love with words since third grade or so, the fuller circle filled in some more in the philosophy class that liberated me, or began to, from some vents of steam pressing me away from barnacled peer theology into eventual gales, long veils and vales, what ailed then and now.
To be continued.
See links to Hill's experience with Navajo language (in part two of the essay.
And google Wittgenstein, if interested (gird loins - ha! wrote 'lions' so gird them too!
And google Benjamin Lee Whorf (or go to archive . org for his book, Language, Thought, and Reality, title alone signals the power of language (in which we think) and reality rendered from language/think.
