Today's Google Doodle, honoring soccer at the Paris games,
suggests a review of Hillman's "acorn theory" of the soul in
a Log24 post of September 10, 2022 . . .
"… I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia.
I was convinced that at some future date, I, like
Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would
cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon
his chill and irony." — Jessica Kardon
Related reading:
The New York Times this afternoon —
" William Beecher, who as a reporter for The New York Times
revealed President Richard M. Nixon’s secret bombing campaign
over Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and who later won a
Pulitzer Prize at The Boston Globe, died on Feb. 9 at his home
in Wilmington, N.C. He was 90." — Clay Risen, 2:28 PM
Also on Feb. 9 —
Another Beecher narrative —
Religious meditation from the Church of Synchronology . . .
May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.
An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —
|
"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon
https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/ James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized. I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life. I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette. Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority. Anyway, I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia. I was convinced that at some future date, I, like Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon his chill and irony. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor. The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute. So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil. Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage. What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain. Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers. September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't. For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death." I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self. In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water." This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable. I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.
by jessica kardon |
See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."
November 2020 — Billboard at a La Brea Chevron: His Dark Materials
October 2021 — Nearby billboard: Guilty Party
Log24 on Sept. 18 — The Guilty Party acorn hat:
♫ The way you wear your hat . . .
On the feast of Saint Nicholas
See also the six posts on this year's feast of Saint Andrew
and the following from the University of St. Andrews —
This post was suggested by Paradigms Lost
(a post cited here a year ago today),
by David Weinberger's recent essay "Shift Happens,"
and by today's opening of "The Raven."
David Weinberger in The Chronicle of Higher Education , April 22—
"… Kuhn was trying to understand how Aristotle could be such a brilliant natural scientist except when it came to understanding motion. Aristotle's idea that stones fall and fire rises because they're trying to get to their natural places seems like a simpleton's animism.
Then it became clear to Kuhn all at once. Ever since Newton, we in the West have thought movement changes an object's position in neutral space but does not change the object itself. For Aristotle, a change in position was a change in a quality of the object, and qualitative change tended toward an asymmetric actualization of potential: an acorn becomes an oak, but an oak never becomes an acorn. Motion likewise expressed a tendency for things to actualize their essence by moving to their proper place. With that, 'another initially strange part of Aristotelian doctrine begins to fall into place,' Kuhn wrote in The Road Since Structure ."
Dr. John Raven (of Raven's Progressive Matrices)—
"… these tools cannot be immediately applied within our current workplaces, educational systems, and public management systems because the operation of these systems is determined, not by personal developmental or societal needs, but by a range of latent, rarely discussed, and hard to influence sociological forces.
But this is not a cry of despair: It points to another topic which has been widely neglected by psychologists: It tells us that human behaviour is not mainly determined by internal properties— such as talents, attitudes, and values— but by external social forces. Such a transformation in psychological thinking and theorising is as great as the transformation Newton introduced into physics by noting that the movement of inanimate objects is not determined by internal, 'animistic,' properties of the objects but by invisible external forces which act upon them— invisible forces that can nevertheless be mapped, measured, and harnessed to do useful work for humankind.
So this brings us to our fourth conceptualisation and measurement topic: How are these social forces to be conceptualised, mapped, measured, and harnessed in a manner analogous to the way in which Newton made it possible to harness the destructive forces of the wind and the waves to enable sailing boats to get to their destinations?"
Before Newton, boats never arrived?
Slouching
Towards Kristen
|
Jerusalem Post Interview by Hilary Leilea Krieger, JPost Correspondent, Washington Krauthammer, a columnist for The Washington Post, is a winner of the Irving Kristol award. Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2009: Can you talk a little bit about your own Jewish upbringing and sense of Jewishness, and how that influences you? I assume it’s a factor in this particular project. I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home [in Montreal]. I went to Jewish day school right through high school, so half of my day was spent speaking Hebrew from age six to 16. I studied thousands of hours of Talmud. My father thought I didn’t get enough Talmud at school, so I took the extra Talmud class at school and he had a rabbi come to the house three nights a week. One of those nights was Saturday night, so in synagogue Saturday morning my brother and I would pray very hard for snow so he wouldn’t be able to come on Saturday night and we could watch hockey night in Canada. That’s where I learned about prayer. That didn’t seem to you to be a prayer that was likely to go unanswered? Yeah, I was giving it a shot to see what side God was on. And what did you determine? It rarely snowed. ************************************ More on Krauthammer’s Canadian childhood: “His parents were Orthodox and sent him to — “Charles Krauthammer: Prize Writer,” ************************************ Also in the Jerusalem Post interview: …. What, then, did you mean by a Jewish sensibility? “…. In literature it’s an interesting question, what’s a Jewish novel?” |
My Prayer:
Private Gomorrah lessons
with Kristen.
Background:
“Heaven Can Wait”
at Haaretz.com
Happy Rosh Hashanah
(and Gemara).
Update, 5:01 AM Sept. 19
Before becoming a writer,
Krauthammer was, his
Washington Post biography says,
a resident and then chief resident
in psychiatry at
Massachusetts General Hospital.
Related Metaphors
This morning’s New York Times:
MicheleBachmann.com this morning:
See also:
James Hillman’s “acorn theory“
of personality development
(yesterday’s entry).
“The action is in the plot, inaccessible to introspection, and only the characters know what’s going on.”
— James Hillman, quoted at David Lavery’s weblog.
See also
Click on image
for further details.
The Simplest Terms
“Broken down in the simplest terms, the story centres around two warring factions, the ‘Fathers’ and the ‘Friends.'”
Today’s birthdays:
Kirk Douglas,
Buck Henry,
John Malkovich.
In a nutshell:
The Soul’s Code and
today’s previous entry.
Powered by WordPress