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.

What dreams may come

"Our revels are now ended. These our actors (As I fortold you) were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air, And like the baseless fabric of this vision / And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. " -The Tempest VI.i.148 -158

Dreams, once inhabited, can lead down the siren-caressing corridors of self-deception. This is a vision impaired but unaware of its own ellusion from the facts. Shakespeare, W.H. Auden and T.S. Elioit, were artistically aware of this psychological process; they emphatically “fleshed out” this fallacy in their literary works. The Tempest, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Wasteland, all attempt to define the difference between illusion and reality. Shakespeare’s The Tempest explores this perceptual problem in the context of the theatre and a mystical island. The diametric “real” opposites are the audience and the city of Milan.

MY DREAM: Ariel was not present, but there was an ethereal quality to my last dream where I was in Las Vegas with my family, we robbed a bank, we were trying to escape in the getaway car...and then I was killed by a girl with a gun. This is Ocean's 11 gone wrong.

Musings on Nod

The poem below should remind us of several things.

Firstly, there is a danger of accepting fantasy as reality. W.H. Auden, in his poem "The Sea and the Mirror" examines the role of Ariel and Prospero in Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Auden's major premise in this poem is that Art/Magic are used to draw us away from our true selves(realistic--not fantastic). Caliban shows the more "human" side among the different characters on the island. According to Auden, though, we are tempted to be drawn into believing that we can waltz along to the urgings of magic (perhaps the ultimate example of "id"). Auden's "Mirror" allows the audience to see themselves in full view: the Emporer without clothes, and if it were applied to this poem, perhaps just the sleepy lids of a child. Auden's poem is only applied, facetiously to Winkin, Blinkin and Nod--- the danger of being lost in the dream world, though, is possible....If as Auden says, "Art opens the fishiest eye," it is fishy because it can be all-consuming. The puer aeternus, may become the dream world which allows the ends to justify the means. Lest we forget: Totalitarianism is always instigated by a dream.

Secondly, (contrary to my first ludicrous exposition), the thing we should remember is related to the recent rave review by Arianna on Pan's Labyrinth. According to A's Blog we know spirals are chaotic yet ordered, associated with mirrors, reflection and an opening of consciousness. The world of winkin, Blinkin and Nod, is set in the unconscious dream world. The three wanted to fish for herring (stars). But the three sailors were actually only one "wee one." Their world is a labyrinth back out of the unconscious world....

I loved Pan's Labyrinth --not merely for the heap of flesh waiting to gorge a child, or the Toad who puked out its own guts--or the heinous eye stabbing. In this film it seemed that everything that was most real (the child-mandrake who was killed in the fire, and the ruthless Corperal) seemed to fade away into this world of magic. The world of the faun and the God of the underworld were a delightful foil to the cold rationalism, dogmatism and violence of the upperworld. It was as if the Faun was saying, over and over again, "But that is not what is REALLY going on..." Fascist, factioned Italia was consumed in a battle which had very little eternal significance--although, its consuming claim to what was real almost stole away the Princess from her father the king. And through her own human flaw, the hunger for the grape, she allowed her desire to shadow and forget the mythic significance of her return, downward.

Pan's Labyrinth reveals the world of guns to be a dream, a pithy falsehood; Blinkin and Nod are revealed as the dreamy sea and flying shoe become nothing but a trundle bed--the unconscious world is a puer's fantasy. Each is a spiral and a mirror, playing and revealing the other world--an opening of consciousness--and a journey upward or downwards to what is real.
Which falsehood would you choose?

A Nascent Poem

Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the> three.
"We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful> sea.> Nets of silver and gold have we," said Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song as they rocked in the wooden> shoe.> And the wind that sped them all night long ruffled the waves of dew.
Now the little stars are the herring fish that live in that beautiful> sea;
"Cast your nets wherever you wish never afraid are we!" So cried the stars to the fishermen three - Winkin', and Blinkin', and Nod.>
So all night long their nets they threw to the stars in the twinkling> foam.> 'Til down from the skies came the wooden shoe bringing the fisherman> home.
'Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed as if it could not be. > Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod> > Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;> Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.> "Where are you going and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the> three.> "We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful> sea.> Nets of silver and gold have we," said Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod. > The old moon laughed and sang a song as they rocked in the wooden> shoe.> And the wind that sped them all night long ruffled the waves of dew.> Now the little stars are the herring fish that live in that beautiful> sea;> "Cast your nets wherever you wish never afraid are we!"> So cried the stars to the fishermen three - Winkin', and Blinkin', and> Nod.> So all night long their nets they threw to the stars in the twinkling> foam.> 'Til down from the skies came the wooden shoe bringing the fisherman> home.> 'Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed as if it could not be.> Some folks say 'twas a dream they dreamed of sailing that misty sea.> But I shall name you the fisherman three - Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod.> Now Winkin' and Blinkin' are two little eyes and Nod is a little head.> And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies is a wee one's trundle bed.>
So close your eyes while mother sings of the wonderful sights that be.> And you shall see those beautiful things as you sail on the misty sea,> Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three - Winkin', Blinkin', and> Nod. some folks say 'twas a dream they dreamed of sailing that misty sea.> But I shall name you the fisherman three - Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod.> Now Winkin' and Blinkin' are two little eyes and Nod is a little head.> And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies is a wee one's trundle bed.> So close your eyes while mother sings of the wonderful sights that be.> And you shall see those beautiful things as you sail on the misty sea,> Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three - Winkin', Blinkin', and> Nod.