What?
What, then, comes after?
After lament is done?
After tears are gone?
After words fail?
What, then, comes after?
After wide unseeing eyes?
After hanging wordless mouths?
After silences stillborn?
What, then, comes after?
Questions, I guess.
Different ones now
Then those not asked
Before.
UNDERSTANDING THE CLOAK OF CHARISMA
The snails were out in force this morning. As I focused on not stepping on these wee creatures, the title of this piece came to me: “Understanding the Cloak of Charisma.” My conscious intention was to blog on the importance of understanding “charisma” in the present political and cultural climate. What was new in the spontaneous presentation of this title, was the word “cloak.”
Aside from referring to clothing in the form of a bell-shaped, sleeveless cape, the word denotes something that conceals or hides. “Cloak-and-dagger” points to its sinister connotations in crime novels. One recalls Bela Lugosi’s vampire cloak, as well as the cloaks of invisibility popular in fantasy fiction and comic books (think Harry Potter) and many other such examples.
Yet, the common understanding of charisma is more in keeping with hyper-visibility than anything hidden. Clearly, this unintended and autonomous experience brings the ideas of charisma and cloaking together, much as a dream might. And, I must not forget, all in the context of snails.
I may be trying your patience and ignoring your demand to “get to the point,” but I trust this congeries of snails, charisma, and cloaks will yield something of value. And, I am not just referring to how important it can be to tend these unexpected, improbable mixtures, akin to the surprising and unplanned admixtures of volunteer seedlings vexing the intentions of the gardener.
Charisma. The major sense of the modern term “charisma” was defined by Max Weber in his 1924 book, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization: “Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.” This was a more formal definition than his treatment of charisma in his 1905 book, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.[1]
The term did not come into popular use, however, until it was applied to President John F. Kennedy and since then it has become ubiquitous, devolving into synonymic syzygy with “celebrity.” This is unfortunate because the deeper significance of charisma will always implicate “divinity” in ways that are not true of celebrity. While Jung uses the word only twice in his published work, and not in this modern sense, his concept of mana personality will prove useful for further analysis of charisma. Jung defines the mana personality as “a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God.”
However, these archetypal forms do not adequately convey the full sense of charisma in its irrational power since these forms are common structural aspects of most every society. Figures in these roles may identify with (and become inflated by) the underlying collective unconscious energy and members of the culture may project these qualities onto the figure (and thereby become identified with the figure). But these archetypal forms and dynamics may be quite evident without the figure being imbued with charisma—even if the figure embodies a mana personality.
Typically, the mana personality is understandable even if the mechanism of such a dynamic is not clear. However, the question of “why” such energy is invested in a particular person is often unanswerable. Jung’s best attempt to analyze this is in response to a correspondent’s questions about Adolf Hitler.[2] The first question: “How do you, as a psychiatrist, judge Adolf Hitler as a ‘patient’?”
Jung answered:
Hitler was in my view primarily an hysteric. (Already in the first
World War he had been officially diagnosed as such.) More particularly he was characterized by a subform of hysteria: pseudologica phantastica. In other words, he was a ‘pathological liar.’ If these people do not start out directly as deceivers, they are the sort of idealists who are always in love with their own ideas and who anticipate their aims by presenting their wish-fantasies partly as easily attainable and partly as having been attained, and who believe these obvious lies themselves. (Quisling, as his trial showed, was a similar case). In order to realize their wish-fantasies no means is too bad for them, just because they believe they can thereby attain their beloved aim. They “believe” they are doing it for the benefit of humanity, or at least their nation, or their party, and cannot under any circumstances see that their aim is invariably egoistic. Since this is a common failing, it is difficult for the layman to recognize such cases as psychopathic. Because only a convinced person is immediately convincing (by psychic contagion), he exercises as a rule a devastating influence on his contemporaries. Almost everybody is taken in by him.
The correspondent asked Jung: “How could this ‘psychopath’ influence whole nations to such an extent?
Jung replied:
If his maniacal wish-system is a socio-political one, and if it corresponds to the pet ideas of a majority, it produces a psychic epidemic that swells like an avalanche. The majority of the German people were discontented, and hugged feelings of revenge and resentment born of their national inferiority complex and identified themselves with the underdogs. (Hence their special hatred and envy of the Jews, who had anticipated them in their idea of a “chosen people.”!)
The correspondent asked: “Do you consider his contemporaries, who executed his plans, equally “psychopathic.”?
Jung answered:
Suggestion works only when there is a secret wish to fulfill it. Thus Hitler was able to work on all those who compensated their inferiority complex with social aspirations and dreams of power. As a result he collected an army of social misfits, psychopaths, and criminals around him. To which he also belonged. But at the same time he gripped the subconscious of normal people, who are always naïve and fancy themselves utterly innocent and right. The majority of normal people (quite apart from the 10 per cent or so who are inferior) are ridiculously unconscious and naïve and are open to any passing suggestion. So far as lack of adaptation is a disease, one can call a whole nation diseased. But this is normal for mass psychology; it is a herd phenomenon. Like panic. The more people live together in heaps, the stupider and more suggestible the individual becomes.
The correspondent’s final question: “If that is so, how can they be cured?”
Jung’s answer:
Education for fuller consciousness! Prevention of social herd formations, of proletarianization and mass-mindedness! No one-party system! No dictatorship! Communal autonomy!
Here Jung has given a straight forward rational analysis of a mana personality in the form of Adolf Hitler. And as we read this analysis the application to Donald Trump is inevitable. So many echoes! But I sense something lacking in Jung’s analysis and that lack is what I will now call the irrational cloak of charisma. Charisma, as a type of mana, originates in the collective unconscious. In my study of charisma, I find there are two main types, which for simplicity, I will call rational and irrational. Jackie Kennedy tried to immortalize her husband’s charisma by calling his legacy Camelot in her interview with Theodore White. President Kennedy, she said, was strongly attracted to the Camelot legend because he was an idealist who saw history as something made by heroes like King Arthur (a claim White knew to be untrue). “There will be great presidents again,” she told White, “but there will never be another Camelot.”
Whatever value the Camelot explanation, it is altogether rational. But what is so evident in both Hitler and Trump is how altogether irrational their “power” seems to be. All the usual ways of understanding both figures and the impact on the collective consciousness and behavior of the masses seem impotent in generating any sense of genuine understanding. This is the mark of the irrational power stemming from the collective unconscious which strikes one as not understandable in any of the usual ways. This is why the usual modes of understanding gain no traction in the present situation.
There are “levels” of reality in the collective unconscious, not unlike the different levels of reality in the “quantum” world. We cannot understand quantum reality by using the conceptions applicable to ordinary reality. Likewise, we do not understand realities of the collective psyche in ordinary psychological terms. Moreover, in quantum reality, certain aspects are not understandable even in quantum terms: time moves forward and backward, particles can exist in two different places at the same time, and particles can communicate between one another faster than the speed of light. It is no great leap then to imagine that certain aspects of the collective unconscious are not understandable or interpretable in standard archetypal terms. I think the irrational cloak of charisma as such a phenomenon.
We might also do well to remember that the collective unconscious is the field in which theoretically all aspects of existence are “interconnected” and that the vast extent of this field of connection is unconscious to us humans. The current cloak of charisma falling on Trump is no doubt an expression of a new dominant in the collective unconscious. Since this new dominant is expressing an unknown future in formation, the old ways of understanding even simple things fails to hold. While much of this new dominant is hyper-visible, the cloak suggests that something is not seen, not visible.
My sense is that part of the new dominant includes various nascent forms of psychic expression of the coming apocalyptic effects of climate change. The collective unconscious is even more affected by the actualities of climate change than our conscious awareness is. It may seem odd to think of the collective unconscious as hyper-aware, but this conception fits the facts better than most. In addition, my sense is that the cloak of charisma is hiding an unknown third aspect, the nature of which is at this point a total mystery but beginning to reveal itself to individuals here and there who have access to experiences of the collective unconscious.
Meanwhile, most humans blissfully will be unaware of these developments and most subject to the sway and allure of surface appearances. The charismatic power that Trump is carrying will take center stage. Those who are taken in will have images of Trump taking over more and more of their consciousness. But this will happen as well to those consciously opposed. Charisma will force Trump into the center of everything and everyone, just as all contagions do, whether viral, bacterial, psychic, or cyber. It is not Trump per se, but the workings of the collective unconscious. And when there is no knowledge of this source, there can be no understanding of what humanity is about to confront nor any way to adequately prepare.
My thoughts in more detail on how to prepare and what to do will be the subject of a subsequent post. I will not forget the snails.
[1] The linkage between the spirit of capitalism, religion, and charisma will be explored in a subsequent post.
[2] The correspondent was Eugen Kolb, writing Jung from Geneva for The Daily Guardian of Tel Aviv. Jung’s responses appeared in “Answers to ‘Mishmar’ on Adolf Hitler.” In C. C. Jung, Collected Works Vol. 20, 1384. Written on September 14,1945, Jung’s reply was not published until 1974.
In the second chapter ("Mystery in Character: A Secret Life with a Secret") of her delicious little book, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions, Maud Casey uses the work of Vivian Maier to illustrate the power of secret in fiction as well as life. Vivian Maier was a nanny with a camera, a woman who left more than 150,000 negatives, countless rolls of undeveloped film, scores of films, audiotapes, writings and hoards of bits and pieces of an entirely secret life, unknown by anyone before she died in poverty in 2009. Since the discovery and revelation of this trove, she is on the way to being recognized as not only a unique street photographer but among the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. The story of her discovery and the astonishing revelations of those who knew her as her friend and as their nanny is told in the film Finding Vivian Maier, by John Maloof. He bought much of her work by chance at auction and has subsequently acquired most of the rest of Maier's incredible output. It is a gripping account not only of her work but of the mad eccentricity of her secret life which as Maud Casey's subtitle suggests, raises far more compelling questions than answers—one of the great values of mystery.
Please see this film if you can. I do not know if it is available on the internet. I got my copy from the local library. It is unforgettable.
PROLEGOMENON TO THE END
Dispatch from the Dreamfield
Sleeping still but stirring. Muted intimations hinting.
Soon, when the knowing animal within awakes
Alarmed by not yet detectable quakes
It will send up warnings in dreams
Not in tweets, headlines, or bits of sound.
Reeling, we will seek to flee the entreating screams.
Too late then. Too late now.
We did not listen.
Panicked by the enveloping ineluctable reality
Our conscious mind will slip away into uselessness.
Nothing unites us or binds us into a keening herd
Like terror.
"The Fictive Purpose of Dreams" is a companion piece to "Dreams As Angels." These essays and a third (not yet titled nor finished) will be published together in book form with the tentative title, Essays In Search Of... I expect this to be available sometime in late summer. Here are the links to the completed essays:
http://ralockhart.com/WP/dreamsasangels.pdf
http://ralockhart.com/WP/fictivepurposeofdreams.pdf
THE THREE GREAT DENIALS
There are three great intertwined denials, ubiquitous in their reach, hegemonic in their power,
and life-destroying in their structure and dynamics.
First, is the Denial of Truth. The first level is our full reality. We are unconscious of much of who we are. Becoming conscious is the great dream of psychology, depth psychology in particular. But the degree of humanity working to become more conscious is minuscule to the point of vanishing. The degree of unconsciousness underlying the great bulk of individual thoughts and actions is vast beyond imagining. Unconsciousness pervades our relationships, from those most intimate to those of only passing interest. It pervades our involvement in the groupings we become part of, and our unconsciousness multiplies with other’s unconsciousness to maximize the corrosive potential of collectives at all levels of cultures, nations, and all else. What passes for truth in the public consciousness is grasped after as if such could function to bring individuals to consciousness. Dreams are the great “truth tellers,” but how many among us billions of humans listen, let alone bring such truths to manifestation in life?
Second, is the Denial of Risk. Unconsciousness cuts us off from the fundaments of life, not only in our own body, mind, and spirit but in the body, mind, and spirit of all life around us, including the life of our planetary home, the earth. Unconsciousness breeds the denial of risk inherent in separating human life from its rhizomic necessities. Chief among these risks is what functions as the life-blood of our contemporary life: money. Money has become our operative religion. More than any other single factor, we have become unalterably attached to money, as if “In Money, We Trust,” would sum up every department of our lives. The powers that be that operate the world’s financial system know this, count on this, rely on this “belief” system and operate as grand priests of the money temple. What we are not told, what is kept from view, is the degree of risk building up throughout the world. The risk is denied. Yet, the collapse of all great powers and empires has been triggered by risk gone wild and triggering the collapse. Because money has become more foundational in our lives than any other factor, this coming collapse poses a catastrophic risk to everyone’s welfare. And, sad to say, most everyone is denying this risk.
Third, is the Denial of Love. We can only do to others and so much of what is happening in the world when we deny love. We can only do to the life of the world, what we are doing when we deny love. We can only do to our habitat, our home, our earth when we deny love. As unconsciousness persists, as money invades and pervades every facet, love disappears. Freud spoke of the great battle between Eros and Death. Without love, the death of most everything of value will be what we live. That is our present future.
It is not clear there is sufficient human will to say no to power and money and the commodification of desire.
Dreams are raising this issue as a great question mark.
DREAMS AS ANGELS: Feeding Dreams with Our Substance
I feel this essay becomes more important every day as we slip toward the abyss.
Here is a dose of much-needed reality as nearly every human is complicit in ignoring the reality that is fast approaching. I side with Mayer Hillman
in looking to love, music, education, all the arts, and dreams as the way to celebrate happily the approaching final Ragnarök. I do try to lessen my
complicity, even in the face of futility.
Here's the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=272858&subid=1371379&CMP=GT_US_collection
Sometimes idiomatic clichés are hiding a richness behind or beneath their surface intentionality. Such linguistic elements become so because they are adopted without thought as if conveying something so obviously a truism no further thought is required. Like many memes, it becomes part of everyone’s “readymades,” borrowing here from Duchamp, who illustrated what happens when a cliché in one context (a urinal in a bathroom) is placed in another context (a urinal displayed as art and renamed, “Fountain”). The result is revelatory and can produce extreme emotional reactions or other psychic perturbations.
Consider the idiom “A picture is worth a thousand words.” This is an idea one can find singular instances of in the far past, but its readymade stature was not achieved until the first decades of the twentieth century in multiple advertising venues in the United States. We all know what this idiom is asserting: that information contained in a single image taken in at a glance is more effective than a thousand words conveying the same idea. We can get at the “unintended” idea quickly by focusing on the word “worth.” To wit: what is the worth in words of an image?
This reversal was key to Roland Barthes’ exploration of photography in his book, Camera Lucida. He did not try to find an image that would economically express his words, but he used his words to bring out something crucial about the nature of photographs (and, by implication, the nature of all images as well as dreams). He distinguished between the “studium” and the “punctum” of a photograph. The studium is what the photographer intended and typically is what we “see.” We get it, in an instant. But Barthes says it is the punctum that makes the photograph “exist” for him. This exists is then Barthes’ inner, subjective (psychic) experience. Elucidating this phenomenon requires Barthes to use words, lots of words, which an “image” cannot do.
I once wrote that “images are stories stopped in time.” To continue the story, will require either more images or words to tell the stories. Notice the plural here. While the image itself is singular, the potential stories are many and varied. The same is true of dreams. The dream is singular, but the potential stories are innumerable.
To illustrate.
Consider the following image.
One form of response is “criticism,” that is, an attempt to explain, interpret, and understand the image and to articulate its value and meaning or lack thereof. But as Baudelaire insisted, the only proper “criticism” of a work of art is another work of art. And the origin of this future work of art lies in the psyche of the viewer. Note I do not limit this to the conscious experience of the viewer. The unconscious will be viewer too!
So, then, as you look at this image, what begins to move in you in the form of “story” or “poem” or “drawing” or any other form of expression? Will it be taken up in your dreams?
THE ROOM OF LOST THINGS
My right white tube sock
my Esterbrook fine-point nib
my Great Books Vol 54: Freud
the heron photo with outstretched wings
...and so much more
Surely the room is full by now
a time warp?
a space warp?
a black hole?
maybe such rooms auto-expand
in some alternate multi-verse
You’ve such a room too, I bet
make your own list, do it now
but for now, let’s be pleased we’ve
not gone to the room of lost things.