Salvador Dali's Narcissus

This painting represents my newest exploration of the tempest: Narcissus--the deceived man who is in love with the image. In the masque of the Tempest what we see is man magically lead-on by his love of the image. Miranda and Caliban are perhaps the most persuaded by such "divine images." Dali's painting "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus" shows the landscape of wasteland and water on one side and the landscape of the flower-narcissus' dead body, the chess board (the play within the play-Tempest) and the drama of human actions(naked bodies dancing in the background). I think he has The Tempest down pretty well. Or, then again, maybe this class has ruined me and I am gyreing/spiraling into insanity....

Is this a man?

One of the fascinating parts of Hillman’s analysis of Freud, is the exploration of how personal agency is taken away from the patient, and given over to the interpreter—the narrator of the greater plot. “We do not enter into the inside of the case as we do in a novel, sympathizing with Dora, but remain outside, laying bare tissues, analyzing with Freud” (7). According to Hillman, Freud engineers a new genre, describing the literary in terms of the scientific.

Hillman says that the cure of the patient has very little to do with their own courage and personhood. The plot line which, in Freud’s case is always concerned with identification and cure, is governed by “psychodynamics” (8). If the therapist/literary interpreter can link the anxiety to an aspect of the greater Oedipus complex, the psychotherapist has conquers over the patient’s problem. The romance/comedy is then complete.

Freud’s plot is termed “elegant” by Hillman. It’s odd…I have heard of “string theory” or the Big Bang described in the same terms, referring to an elegant universe. Here we have an elegant psyche. For Freud, the “lifting of repression through prolonged recognition (in therapy) was the end all. Neurosis is identifiable and curable. In a sense this can be understood as the antithesis of the romantics (Rousseau’s) conception that each individual has a completely free and open consciousness at Birth—individual’s stories and plots are therefore, their own. In Freud’s universe, and especially in the case studies, everybody is inevitably affected by the same pathological curse (Hillman shows that the mythic and scientific diagnosis is synonymous pg. 11). Hillman exposes the Freudian fantasy as conforming to the mythic level: “plots are myths.” We should understand the meta-plot of all Freudian analysis to be connected to the mythic. Jung is a smidge better because his archetypes are variegated and involved in a forwards and backwards process of individuation.

Interesting Parallel: Christianisms projection of its own hellish image onto hell, forms an interesting parallel with Freudianism, if “Civilization and its Discontents” is merely, as Hillman writes, “A diagnosis is indeed a gnosis: a mode of self-knowledge that creates a cosmos in its own image” (15). It is almost absurdly strange that a Christian and a Freudian world view are condemned by Hillman on the same basis. Jungian and Freudian psych. are both criticized on the basis of their reductivism; turning images into psychological abstractions and processes. I think the main reason that Jesus, Jung and Freud are somewhat lumped together is that they form a direct transference and parallel between the underworld and the world of sleep, and the world of interpretation. Hillman critiques his colleague’s POV, stating, “these one to one parallels should not be forced: polytheistic psychology cannot speak straight on, one to one” (23). Can polythiestic psych be critiqued on the same basis as Freud—creating its own fantasy of how the soul is constructed?

Hillman goes one step farther than Freud in his “discontents”: not only is the conscious mind NOT the basis for human motivations and understanding, the subconscious CANNOT be translated vis-à-vis rationalism: Hillman proposes that reflection and the response of images is the proper hermeneutic, Hermes the proper god, but Hermes reflects a plethora of images/gods (30). The work of interpretation is to reflect the dream image and keep it ingesting in the bowels of the underworld...ha ha ha.

Felix Culpa; and Hillmanian Soul-Making

Milton's Paridise Lost may be the paradigmatic exposition of felix culpa. After being cast out of Eden an angel announces that the banished couple may find: "A paradise within thee, happier far." This work brings up the question of genre in a poignant way. In the Romantic era, critics saw Satan as a heroic figure within the piece--even so much that Blake wrote that "Milton was a true poet and part of the Devil's party without knowing it" (Wiki).
Par. Lost may have been classified by Frye as being High Mimetic and a classic form of Tradgedy (Man--the protagonist seperated from Eden, the ideal society). However, Satan, as the anti-hero is seperated from the celestial kingdom--a higher realm--only to fight back with great vivacity. The high mimetic can be seen in Adam's Felix Culpa as ultimately comic; Frye terms this Apollonian; The deeper tradgedy of Satan, on the Mythic level, is termed Dionysiac.
Milton's Satan is in the catagory of the demonic, but is given the oratory skills of the heroic. Ultimately, the opsis of his apocalyptic battle is heroic. Dante's Satan is much more in the realm of Hillman's Underworld, where blackness, diarrhea, mastication, reversal and bodily perversion reign. The opsis is much richer and blacker.

Although reading Hillman sometimes worries me, I enjoy his perspective: that the soul is enriched by the world of dreams and darkness. The concept of felix culpa would be one that he is inherently uncomfortable with---perhaps his response would be: "What fall; our perceptual problem is in the belief of the necessary rise." This corresponds with a quote I found of his on the false perception of death--the belief that death is something to be physically overcome (Christianism and Materialism)
“Our emphasis upon physical death corresponds with our emphasis on the physical body, not the subtle one; on on physical life, not psychic life; on the literal and not the metaphorical. /For us pollution and decomposition and cancer have become physical only….The death we speak of in our culture is a fantasy of the ego, and we take our dreams in this same manner” (64).

What is the Fantasy? Is it Hillman's Dream world, where there can truly be no tragedy, or is it the assumption of the necessity of rising, back into the world of comedy? What is the impetus of soul making? (A term often utilized for human suffering as necessity--for building the moral depth of the soul--a defense for theodicy)

Trees and the Tempest

In my exploration of the puer, I have found that Adonis and Pinochio have their origins within trees. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, we learn that Ariel is taken from a tree; Prospero saves this spirit from being imprisoned there by Sycorax. The relation of trees to these primal spirits cannot be underestimated. Hamadryad nymphs might be described as a genus of nymph s who are “coeval" with their trees. Two mythic stories surrounding these nymphs are:
-The story of Rhoikos who saw an oak was about to fall. He propped up the tree. The Tree's Nymph asked him for one wish to thank him. He asks for sex and the Nymph replied that a bee would announce the time of their meeting (Oxford...74) A similar myth exists about Arkas, father of the Arkadians and his eventual marriage to the nymph Chrysopeleia.
-Ovid’s version of the Erysichthon myth, dryads are dancing around a mighty Oak, belonging to Ceres. When Erysichthon cuts into the “oak of Deo” blood flows from in and the nymph within the tree cries out a prophetic curse as she dies. Ceres sends his nymphs to find Fames. “The hideous hag Fames attacks Erysichthon who uses up his money, sells his daughter and finally consumes his own flesh" (76). Melanie would be interested in this enactment of Sparagmos. The Erysichthon myth is also an interesting parallel to the lenten season of emptying; it carries the ritualistic consuming of flesh, crying out in death, the bleeding tree, and the celebratory carnival preceeding the tragedy.
Nymphs are characters who refuse to leave our world. They occupy the psychic realm of the id, and challenge the design of the masterful senex (Prospero)--whose projection of the dramatic action in The Tempest is nothing less than extraordinary.