In this edition, I review a few books I have enjoyed. There must be a word for books read in no particular order, but I haven’t found the right one yet. Douglas Adams coined “ballycumber” for reading multiple titles at once, but that is not what I am after. A friend suggested his own neologism, and it’s not bad: “feralexy” or “wild reading”. Certainly, the following are like wild flowers in a garden that is haphazardly mine. Please, therefore, excuse my feralection.
I also wanted to update you on developments, having decamped from Madeira to Toronto to begin, as of last month, my long-awaited training with the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts. It is an enormous privilege and I am relishing the work ahead.
Finally, nearing the end of a lengthy Hellenistic astrology course, I will soon start offering, at a modest fee, one-hour astrological consultations, including the vantage points of techniques that were the mainstay of the Hellenistic period. If you are horoscopically curious and possessed of an accurate birth time, email me.
The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe
Confronted by the awful state of the world, the temptation understandably is to disengage; Jeremy Lent, though, invites us to find its meaning. His polymathic engagement spans indigenous traditions, Taoism, neuroscience, and systems theory, clarifying meaning as an emergent property of what we connect to and, more fundamentally, what we are willing to interconnect with:
[T]he interconnectivity of the universe creates innumerable potentials, but we must actively participate in attuning to those potentials in order to actualise the meaning.
While there is this potential at many levels, from simple cells and the mycorrhizal wood-wide-web to the biosphere (indeed, the cosmos), our tendency from the Scientific Revolution onwards is to ride roughshod over an ecological self. Lent’s personification of such detachment conjures up a spokesperson for the dominant worldview. “Uncle Bob” is — but William F. Buckley Jr. from the above hyperlink will do just as well — equally an internal figure who, whenever thinking dares imagine beyond the status quo, invalidates alternatives with his dualistic, capitalistic, and mechanistic realism. He is, after all, Someone Who Seems to Know. Lent insightfully does not so much admonish this figure, saying:
Ultimately, Uncle Bob won’t be moved until he’s face to face with whatever is most meaningful to him, lurking in the inner core of his being.
E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End seems apposite: “She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect!” Perhaps we may also say ‘Only admit’ or ‘At least be receptive’ for the soul, like nature, is not set against us:
Life, unlike limited liability corporations, is never zero-sum — interdependence has been the technicolour force of evolution; the Uncle Bobs err believing that we are substrate independent, and the consequences of this fantasy, from the Selfish Gene to Generation Me (metaphors matter a great deal), is all too obvious, not only in our egress from the Holocene but in the distress of many. Readers will find much to ponder as Lent, explaining alongside the sixth mass extinction some of the human tolls, sets out the truly perverse ways in which anxiety, narcissism and loneliness are leveraged for profits.
His hope is not hoping understood as the last thing to die or the last spirit left in Pandora’s box, but as something radically enactive: it emerges from within and out of a deep connection with reality. He deploys the phrase “follow your heartbreak” — a contrarian riposte to Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss”. There is a lot of value in this therapeutically: hope can be entirely realistic when realistic, albeit the realism of our culture is not.
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality by Judith Rich Harris
In a way, the work of the maverick psychologist Judith Rich Harris adds to Lent’s web. Her outré thesis that we over-egg parents as the decisive explanandum in the formation of character — Mommy, Daddy, me — emphasises an orbit wider than the nuclear family:
Humans are formed for society—they are a group-adapted species with a highly active social life—and they are endowed by nature with abilities and motivations that fit them for that life.
Harris throws brickbats at the usual developmental literature, finding it full of holes. She makes her case that peer-socialisation, social categories, status systems and behavioural genetics (heredity), absent severe trauma, winnow personality to a much greater degree than the parental dyad. As regards the latter, hers is a null hypothesis: “the nurture assumption”. Interpersonally, she believes we are splitters rather than lumpers.
Reading No Two Alike, two observations that I trace back to James Hillman came to mind: the first, that friendship is vitally important and not given nearly enough consideration therapeutically, unlike in Greek philosophy, and the second, that psychological axioms always need to be psychologised, or ‘seen through’. Hillman writes in The Feeling Function:
It seems that psychotherapy is rather unreflecting about the collective movements of the psyche that affect its dogmas: when sex was the great repressed, we had the Viennese influence; then it was the mother complex everywhere, nourishing and breasts; now, it is a matter of the feeling function; soon, aggression, violence and enmity will be the theme.
Harris starts her book with a similar thought, contrasting, as does her source, Jerome Kagan, the diarist Alice James (sister of Henry and William) and the novelist John Cheever: both struggled with depression, but Alice:
“believed with the vast majority of her contemporaries that she had inherited her nervous, dour mood,” Kagan reported, whereas Cheever, writing in the latter half of the twentieth, “assumed that his bouts of depression were due to childhood experiences … the conflicts that he imagined his family had created.”
Cultural myths change, and archetypal dominants shift location, a skein that also runs through Lent, which I will say a little more about in the last review below.
From The Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers by Marina Warner
Marina Warner restores fairytales to material history (“the laws of dowry, land tenure, feudal obedience, domestic hierarchies and marital dispositions”) while rendering the history of enduring images — shifting as social relations change but possessing a fascinating, staying power.
In other words, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Walt Disney, like more recently Angela Carter, Paula Rego, or Cindy Sherman, are all working the same “recognisable groups and figures” (wicked stepmothers, demon lovers, reluctant brides, et cetera) like “an alphabet” or an “eight-note scale”. It is extraordinary to discover that, for instance, the earliest extant version of Cinderella harkens back to AD 850-60, China. It has been told, in some shape or form, for over a thousand years and some elements, like bewitched feet and enchanted slippers, are older than Methuselah.
At the outset, Warner is careful to put distance between her views and archetypal explanations that “leech history”, but what she has in mind is “inevitable symbols”, Platonic Forms sort of cliches, not what is better understood, as she herself describes, as a connective tissue of “many-throated” metaphors — oppressive or liberatory depending on our embodied consciousness. (Indeed, this being a large part of her explication, fairytales were often a subversion of received ideas in situ, with the distaff spinning and the wetnurse pushed to the very limit. She laments Disney’s doe-eyed influences, which have erased these harsher “web of tensions in which women were enmeshed”.)
If we can shift back to Uncle Bob and speculate: part of his and our problem, perhaps, is that his literalism prevents him ‘seeing through’ into his hero metaphors: an admixture of Hercules, St George and Elon Musk or some such Tech Bro. He does not see — Warner citing Félix Guattari — “the reference myths profoundly anchored in the psyche”.
Jeremy Lent calls these deeper forces “cultural attractors” that, like strange attractors in chaotic systems (clouds, murmurations, waves), converge into stable patterns, or basins of attraction, the longest lasting being archetypes. These he positions alongside the Adaptive Cycle model of change developed by an interdisciplinary group of scientists:
All complex systems, including worldviews, pass through a life cycle of four phases (fourness an ur-metaphor) with altogether different equilibria: growth, conservation, release, and reorganisation. And each is presaged by a transitional shift via — say, in the onset of the release phase — a stroke, a sudden market crash, or epochal rains and flooding. New attractors and new stories perforce emerge from out of the wreckage — staying with the release — and are either received or resisted.
As our ruling ideas prove inadequate to the demands of the present, what will Uncle Bob’s release look like? Will he work with or against reality? A concern with metamorphosis threads Lent, Harris and Warner; in different ways, they offer valuable insights into psychic movement.
We are living in what the Greeks called the καιρός—the right moment—for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols ~ Jung, CW10, par. 585.