The Soulful Beauty of Bad News: Ten Reflections

The Soulful Beauty of Bad News

1. THE SMALLEST LUMP…
For years when I was a school headmaster I made it a personal mission to tell our students and – especially – their parents that they should not only expect bad news from time to time, but that they should treasure it for the opportunities it can provide to deepen them. We are a school, after all, and losses, set-backs, and outright failure are crucial life lessons. What frail contenders, what hothouse flowers you will be, I told my students, if you do not sometimes have to endure disappointment, inexplicable hurt, and even injustice. Spared such essential tests and trials, a person is likely to grow up unable to distinguish between a disappointment and a tragedy.

Not getting into a first-choice college, not receiving a good grade despite phenomenal effort, not making a starting line-up, not winning an election, not being asked to a dance, not getting a particular job or an expected raise – these are all disappointments, but they do not begin to approach tragedy. I had developed this take-your-lumps prescription into a rather fervent orthodoxy when, humiliatingly, I had to take one.

My oldest daughter was a senior in high school and was in the process of deciding on the colleges to which she would apply. This was a bright young woman with good tested ability. She had done rather well in her college preparatory program, and she had developed a precocious interest in stagecraft and literature. She was, I felt, a strong candidate even for very selective schools. At the time, truthfully, I was apt to describe her prospects more forcefully: my daughter was, considered fully and objectively, perhaps the best college candidate on the planet.

Quite thoughtfully, she had devised a list of colleges and universities, all of them quite good, with distinctive programs in drama. I looked at her list and advised that she apply also to Harvard. Why, my daughter wondered? My answer was certainly spurious and unhelpful. Why? Because (I never said) Harvard seemed Olympian, elite beyond elite, lofty, remote, rarefied, “the best” and thus, though I knew far too little about it, a suitable place for my first born.

Dutifully, if also bewildered, she did apply to Harvard, and when on the early notification date she was “deferred,” I literally lost my mind. My wife phoned me at school to tell me the news, and as soon as the message registered – deferred: not admitted yet or possibly ever – I put down the phone and made my way outside the building. My school is surrounded by an imposing forest of very tall maple trees, and I found myself pounding an erratic path through this forest in the damp grey half-light of a December afternoon. I don’t know exactly where I walked, but I walked for a long time, well into darkness. I recall that I was talking to myself, out loud. I addressed the several members of the Harvard admissions office. The sharpest, most withering of my observations would be retained in the letter I would write when I returned indoors. I struggled to stay on the civil high ground, though I longed to express my incredulity with the burning outrage I was feeling. Bright images inflamed my wrath: my daughter belting out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” as the curtain closed on Act One of Cabaret; in her linen peasant dress confessing, as Juliet, the depth of her love for Romeo; at the kitchen table working so hard, so late, framed by haphazard towers of books; coaxing the inner city third graders through the play she had written for them; the inky column of her astonishing poem about the eternal ascent of Icarus. Buggers! Bastards! (Restraint failed me. Vast, knowing perspective failed me.) Didn’t I, of all people, know a Harvard undergraduate when I raised one?

I walked aimlessly through a darkened wood, fuming and spewing like a deranged person – no, not like one. It was hours before I was fit for human company, days before I understood just how far off center I had strayed; and even longer before I came fully to terms with the fact that I had taken the most workaday kind of parental lump with less grace than had any parent I have encountered in thirty-three years of school life. I am grateful that my daughter was spared the worst of it. That evening she explained to me that she did not really think Harvard was right for her, and she was not, given the quality of other applicants she knew, surprised she had been passed over. This, it dawned on me finally, was the measure of my daughter. This was her quality.


2.LONGING AND ACHING

We know we have souls, because we long for things, and it is the soul that is longing. It is sweet and renewing to evoke the soul’s longing – for what is beautiful, for what is vast, deep, and mysterious, for others we love. We also know we have souls because we ache. But we do not want to ache, even to think about or to remember aching. Except at very safe distances, we don’t think about aching, and when we do we are seeking remedy, to make it stop.

The biblical book of Job is a soulful and beautiful story. From a safe, fabled distance it tells of a God-related, thoroughly good man who suffers unbearable and undeserved injury, loss, and pain. Understood a little, Job’s story distances us from our darkest doubts and dreads. Understood fully, Job’s story opens up doubt and dread like a terrible, limitless cavern.

What exactly does Job teach? Is there wisdom, comfort, or any other good to be derived from the existential reality that, in the words of Rabbi Kushner's fine book, bad things happen to good people? Bad things certainly happened to Job. Without warning, catastrophe claimed his family, fortune, and worldly security. Before he could fully grieve for his losses, the same malignant force visited his body, painfully plaguing his flesh with suppurating sores. What could Job do? What could anyone do? He laments, he hurts, he asks out loud: why was I born? What is the point?

Like all mortals with a capacity to think, Job wants reasons, explanations. Of course there is a clear reason for his trouble. Satan himself has stripped Job of his comfort, health, and kin in order to prove to God that no mortal will acknowledge Him unconditionally. But while he is no more than a helpless agent in a Satanic test, Job would need a cosmic perspective to see this, and he is a mortal. Like the rest of us, he looks to the world he knows for answers. A number of friends, philosophers all, offer sensible explanations to the effect that surely Job did something to provoke such harsh treatment. Job’s interlocutors know that God is great and infinitely just. To be so terribly stricken, Job must have offended God. But the reader of Job knows that he did no such thing. Instead, he – or his rectitude – offended Satan, and Satan, himself a creature of God, is free to think and do as he pleases. As it happens, it pleases Satan to set up on his own prideful turf and to challenge God. Unaware of his part in the game, Job is left to suffer and ache. To his courageous credit, he is unresponsive to his friends’ bromides, and he continues to raise his soulful complaint.

Job complains until God answers him out of a whirlwind. In his terrifying majesty, God neither explains nor eases Job’s wretched condition. Instead he reminds Job of His vastness, complexity, and power, a context beyond Job’s, or any mortal’s capacity to comprehend. This Job understands: the limits of his mortal understanding. Nor has he been wrong to ache. To ache in such circumstances is profoundly, soulfully true. Seeing this, Job ceases to complain, though not to suffer, and humbly effaces himself before God. In the epilogue to The Book of Job, written, scholars believe, by another hand at a later date, Job’s fortunes are abundantly restored, suggesting in a reassuring way that God doesn’t let good souls down, even by worldly measures. The soulful lesson, however, is not the restoration but Job’s prior realization that abject misery and injustice may be beyond all intelligent reckoning: that while such devastation may not be fully understood, it may be fully felt. The very wrongness – and truth – of Job’s affliction lay not in a cerebral reckoning of the unfairness of what Satan did, but in what Job unflinchingly felt.

Western peoples enter the new millennium embedded in a culture that positively denies heroic feeling. It is a culture that wants its children to “grow up” out of such feeling into cool objectivity and productivity. When such feeling, the soul’s very language, cannot be denied or suppressed, the diverted and desperate expressions of that feeling are medicated into torpor or to death. A soul-denying culture wants no strong feeling of any kind, whether ecstatic, erotic, or horrific. A soul-denying culture does not want us either to long or to ache. I must hasten to add that the denial includes those pastoral and therapeutic voices that claim the curative benefits of “expressing your feelings.” Upon a little reflection it can be seen that the presumed therapeutic benefit of “releasing” strong feelings is that they will go away. This is the point of view that wants to see sexist cultural forces damming up little boys’ tears and fears to the point that they erupt in gunfire on school playgrounds. This is the habit of mind that believes once the dreadful feelings stored deep in the psychic pockets of the victims of every form of abuse are released in a satisfying catharsis – fountains of tears, deep exhalations, primal screams – a benign and viable Normality will prevail.

Such thinking misconstrues the true relationship between the soul and its practical circumstances, between feeling and real health. The point of intense feeling is not to obliterate itself. Nor is the point of feeling, however exquisite or aggravating, to change its bearers, to medicate them or to behaviorally reengineer them so that they no longer feel troubling or inconvenient things. The point of feeling is to register the soulful truth: thrilling alignment or worrying misalignment with essential realities and beauty, rapturous union with, or a despairing isolation from, other souls. Soulful feeling and only soulful feeling bears these messages. To ache and to long tell us the truth about where we stand in the world. There is no other way to know.

3. THE LOSERS WE ARE

Soulful feeling is intense and inherently dangerous. Such feeling registers all manner of trouble and uncertainty. But the feelings are not themselves the trouble; the feelings, again, let us know what is true, what is really there. To deny true feeling, a culturally normative reflex in our age, is to shoot the messenger bearing troubling yet important news. To reverse this soul-numbing condition, we must set ourselves to doing something likely to feel unfamiliar, alien. We must try to open ourselves to, even welcome, some very “bad” feelings and troubling conditions. We might begin to explore such interior states – feeling lost, at sea, contradicted, debunked, left behind, divorced, passed over, or fired – for what soulful messages we might be missing but badly need. Today the quickest way to dismiss another person on the street is to call him a “loser.” But the truth of the matter is that all of us are seriously lost at crucial junctures in our lives. Moreover, the depth and extent of our lost-ness is directly proportional to the saving value of what we find next. A good start to recovering soulfulness might be to recognize ourselves for the “losers” we periodically must be.

Very recently I found myself a big loser. Not incidentally, this occurred at a time when I was especially full of myself. It was spring break at school, and I had planned a solo vacation to Europe. The trip was to begin with some boys’ school business in London, then a first-ever trip to Amsterdam where a much anticipated train ride down the Rhine would take me to Munich to visit a few former students, then another leisurely train to Paris for a few days, then home. The prospect of this trip – the distance, the strangeness, the solitude, the fabled cities – thrilled me. Moreover, the actual experience unfurled before me with an eerily satisfying perfection. The meetings, connections, the striking look and feel of things matched my preconceptions of them with an almost déjà vu precision. I remember the agreeable realization as I was leaving my hotel in London with the collar of my dark overcoat turned up against the cold, that I felt like Harry Haller, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, moving anonymously between great cities.

As I anticipated, the greatest pleasure was the trains. For some reason, the sleek, velvety smooth trains I rode were nearly empty. I had an enclosed six-passenger compartment to myself on every leg of the trip. I lounged alone in the elegant dining cars with their wonderfully heavy plates and cups and silver. Outside the window, ancient winter light cast a steely sheen on the Rhine and helped convey the stony weight of the castles standing sentinel high over its banks. Exactly, I mean exactly, as I had thought.

Perhaps my sense of isolation, even my powers of observation, were heightened by the fact that I was in the process of writing – actually finishing – a novel. The novel told the story of a marriage from three different points of view, and I was very full of this story, and, again, of myself, as I penned page after page into my hardbound writing book, now and then looking up, as if in a dream, at window framed views of the Rhine Valley in late winter. By the time I left Munich, I had finished the novel, way ahead of schedule. I had placed my married lovers in a mythic structure, and my heart felt as if it were dissolving into that great form as I inscribed my final words. Moreover – blessedly – I could read it all over, savor it, on the all-day train from Munich to Paris.

In the compartment of that train, a few minutes before my arrival in Paris, I awoke from a nap. I began to straighten up and pull my things together. I had spread papers and books over the seats, and I clearly recall deciding to keep the magazines I had bought in London. The last item zipped into my bag was the Robertson Davies novel I was reading. No need, I felt, to keep the newspapers, and so I left them strewn on the seats.

I had not been to Paris in twenty-five years, but its settled, elegant whiteness came familiarly back to me. Yet again this trip felt as much a dream as waking reality. It was dark outside when I arrived at my hotel. As I unpacked my bag, I remember trying to name or classify what I was feeling, how I had been feeling since I awoke on the train. It was a good feeling, almost intoxication. I felt slowed down, full – and this was it! – too full of good things. When I had taken everything out of the bag and spread it over the surface of the bed, I knew. There was a terrible current at the back of my head, a sickening flash behind the eyes. There was no manuscript book. It was not there. A year and a half’s work.

Later I could be seen at the concierge’s station in the hotel lobby. An observer would have noted a tense, concerned man asking about how to contact the Lost Properties department at the Gard de L’Est. But earlier, as I stood over my belongings, my palms running horribly over the empty ribbing of my open bag, I was insane. For twenty minutes, like a robot, I placed all my belongings in the bag, zipped it up, then unzipped it and took them out again. Each time I did this my manuscript book was missing.

I was in Paris for three days, but I was not really, wholly there. I willed myself outside, to walk, to observe, once or twice a day to eat. I made, for me, elaborate, thoroughgoing attempts to recover my novel, and I must say the authorities were wonderfully, touchingly responsive. But I never for a second believed I would find it, despite its impressive heft and my name and address on the flyleaf. All I can recall is walking the peopled boulevards in the slanting sunlight of late afternoons, feeling something like a sack of feathery ashes where my heart and innards had been.


It was lost! I had lost it. I was a loser. Weeks, months passed, and I would still dissolve into this state of loss – I can feel it now, as I remember and write. Slowly, aggravatingly, I began honestly to ask myself why, not how. (How was obvious; it was under the newspapers.) Why? What did I need to lose? This book? The story it told? Myself as a writer? Myself who dreams on trains? Myself who feels too full, too full of himself? I will never know, nor does knowing matter. But I feel, still feel, the enormity of that loss. I have felt less, and for less time, at the death of beloved persons. And my loss was a kind of death. I would say that it was unbearable, but I bore it, bear it. I am not a crier, but when I lost my story – to me so nuanced, so surprising, seemingly pulled out of me rather than created – my deep interior cried and cried. I did not cry out, I cried in. And this is who I am now, a person who died a bit and felt it, who knows this, too.




4. NECESSARY DISINTEGRATIONS

It is our very nature to be lost from time to time. Arnold Gesell (1880-1961), the great American developmental psychologist, spent decades observing, recording, and filming the patterns of children’s behavior, and he arrived at a number of clear, instructive conclusions. The first is that, while genes and culture both shape a person’s development, the genetically encoded scheme is far more formative than are culture and environment. For one thing the genetic scheme unfolds in a fixed, invariable sequence. Just as the embryo’s heart always develops before the brain, and the brain before the limbs and extremities, essential behavioral patterns progress in a fixed order:
[The child’s] nervous system matures by stages and natural sequences. He sits before he stands; he babbles before he talks; he fabricates before he tells the truth; he draws a circle before he draws a square; he is selfish before he is altruistic; he is dependent on others before he achieves dependence on self. All his capacities, including his morals, are subject to the laws of growth.
(TD, Crain,18)

Environmental circumstances, Gesell maintained, can affect the extent to which a person’s developmental schedule is realized, but environment neither creates nor orders the sequence.

Put simply, Gesell held that human beings are more evolved than they are constructed. Moreover, their evolution reveals important structural patterns. Chief among them is the alternating recurrence of psychic stability and instability. As the body and nervous system become bigger and progressively more complex, and as the environment correspondingly demands new and more elaborate behaviors, a person necessarily undergoes periods of incoherence and uncertainty. Gesell and his associates interpreted such tempestuous passages as the “terrible twos” and early adolescence not as avoidable “problems” in development but rather as the necessary disintegration of a no longer adequate adaptation to one’s place in the scheme of things. The two-year-old is taking in data both from the environment and from his own interior that overwhelm the hard-won equilibrium of the one-year-old. With persistence and grace, the disintegration of the old scheme will be replaced by a more comprehensive, more adaptive, more conscious reintegration, but until that new scheme is familiar and effectively practiced, there is an all-being sense of frustration and loss.

The soul knows this. The soul feels the loss of the old order just as surely as it will one day warm gladly to the new. We ache, grieve, mourn, despair, grow fitful, endure periods of flat, numbed helplessness when we are temporarily or otherwise out of alignment with what we know best and need most. To live at all, or at all consciously, is to experience spells of misery and disorientation. In their published dialogue, We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and the World is Getting Worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura liken these dark and unsettling passages to “molting.”


Ventura: When you’re in your forties and you hit what they call midlife crisis, when you’re going through a kind of adolescence again, because you’re breaking a bunch of crusts – that’s belittled…

…And if you turn around and say, “You’re god damn right I am, and you’d better stay out of its way,” then you’re seen as nuts…But what you’re really saying is, “I’m molting.”

Hillman: “I’m molting, and I’m at the beginning of something, and when I’m at the beginning of something I am a fool.”
(H&V, 24)


Here Ventura and Hillman advance one of archetypal psychology’s most counter-intuitive and challenging themes: that the human trajectory is not necessarily forward, progressive, higher and brighter. The very idea of psychological “development” may be no more than a wishful attempt to keep the fullness of our being at bay. To accept the saving inevitability of bad news and that, in Hillman’s words, “growth is always loss” calls into question our era’s need, or at least eagerness, to see any troubled condition as a result of prior, and presumably avoidable, ill-treatment. As the cheerful juvenile delinquents in the musical West Side Story sing to the cop sent to correct them:

Dear kindly sergeant Krupke
Ya gotta understand
It’s just our bringing up-ke
That gets us outta hand
Our fathers all were junkies
Our mothers all were drunks
Golly Moses, naturally we’re punks…

The bright promise of history-as-causality, of seeing present stress as the (reversible) result of childhood deprivation and abuse, dims considerably with the realization that abusive parents are themselves former children with abusive stories to tell. As therapists and their clients move generationally down the family hall of mirrors, the assignable culprit, the clear cause, disappears into the mists of the remote past.

Hillman proposes an alternative view of the relationship of a person’s early life to his realized being. He resurrects, seriously, the Platonic notion that “the soul knows who we are from the beginning.” To take the soul seriously is also to take seriously the idea of personal destiny.

Hillman: …take Manalete who, when he was nine years old was supposedly a very frightened little skinny boy who hung around his mother in the kitchen. So he becomes the greatest bullfighter of our age. Psychology will say, “yes, he became a great bullfighter because he was such a puny little kid that he compensated by being a macho hero…”

…But suppose you take it the other way and read a person’s life backwards. Then you say, Manalete was the greatest bullfighter, and he knew that. Inside his psyche sensed at the age of nine that his fate was to meet thousand pound black bulls with great horns. Of course he fucking well held onto his mother! Because he couldn’t hold that capacity – at nine years old your fate is all there and you can’t handle it. It’s too big. It’s not that he was inferior; he had a great destiny.
(H&V, 18-19)


Archetypal thinkers like Hillman fault developmental psychology for its timid and ultimately unhelpful tendency to reduce the pains and losses essential to realizing our souls to symptoms and syndromes. In the prevailing therapeutic climate the emphasis is to counsel or medicate the person out of the problem instead of supporting one’s immersion into its meaning and value. In the developmental, therapeutic approach to well being there is a powerful, if unstated, assumption that we are not supposed to suffer wounds. But from a soulful perspective our wounds – including our most terrible wounds – define and complete our being. No humane person would want to deny the depth and awfulness of the abuses, privations, and neglect undeservedly visited on children – or on anybody. The soulful point is not that being undeservedly hurt is the crucible of personal fulfillment. But we must come fully to terms with such wounds when they are incurred – or else be forever crippled, life-long victims. And in fact, we all incur wounds. Hillman imagines himself as a figure in the darkest scenario: the son of an enraged, brutal father who beats and sexually abuses him.

"And I go on remembering those violations. I remain a victim in my memory. My memory continues to make me a victim…it continues to keep me in the position of the child, because my memory is locked into the child’s view…It isn’t that the abuse didn’t happen – I am not denying that it happened or that I need to believe that it did concretely happen. But I may be able to think about the brutality – reframe it, as they say – as an initiating experience. These wounds that he caused have done something to me to make me understand punishment, make me understand vengeance, make me understand submission, make me understand the depth of rage between fathers and sons...and I took part of that. I was in that…I’ve entered fairy tales and I’ve entered myths, literature, movies. With my suffering I’ve entered an imaginal, not just a traumatic world."
(H&V, 27)



Facing our own woundedness squarely allows us to commune with the great wounded souls who have preceded us; our particular complaint becomes historic, shared, universal. Often there is an intimation of greatness in this. Hillman likens our accrued wounds to rocks which, settled in our deep interior, become part of our essence. It is thus a terrible mistake to try to cast them out, smooth them over, or melt them away. Even while we learn the soulful lessons of our respective wounds, even as we learn to place them in larger, clarifying contexts, we must feel them, we must feel everything.

5. LONELY IN THE WORLD

In addition to our wounds, Hillman believes we must feel loneliness and isolation. This view, also, opposes him to our era’s therapeutic orthodoxies which aim for unbroken cheerfulness and togetherness. In an era which has reduced solitude to a pathology, the soul can find no quiet and still place from which to take stock, no perspective from which to see that togetherness is not the same thing as relatedness.

Hillman devotes a chapter of his book, The Soul’s Code, to the premise that we do not come into this world as a tiny bundle of psychic potential in order to “grow up.” Drawing on both Jewish mysticism and Platonist metaphysics in The Republic, Hillman makes the counter claim: that our souls are intact and profoundly complete even before they are embodied. The existential challenge therefore is not to grow up in an every more complex and demanding real world, but rather to grow down into the limitations and snarls of earthly existence when the soul would vastly prefer the paradise out of which it descended. This notion of growing down into the “real world” as a kind of soulful exile from paradise is supported not only by the Kabbalist book of Zohar and Plato’s myth of Er, both cited by Hillman, but also by the Freudian interpretation of the fetus’s expulsion at birth from a warm amniotic bath in which it floated in an effortless state of self-sufficiency. The soulful reality may be that Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden in the biblical Genesis is the lot of every man and woman.

To accept Hillman’s premise that the soul “grows down” into a bewildering and often unwelcoming world is to accept the fact of loneliness. To be human is to be at times profoundly lonely. This loneliness is not merely situational. It may be due to no assignable lapse in nurture or in societal care. Loneliness may be archetypal and thus unavoidable: a core component of being alive on earth. Hillman suggests that every child is profoundly lonely. Even as they mature, few people can find adequate words to describe the condition.

Moments of dejection drop us into a pool of loneliness. Waves of intense loneliness occur as aftershocks of childbirth, of divorce, of the death of a long-loved partner. The soul pulls back, mourns alone. Twinges of loneliness accompanying even a marvelous birthday celebration and a victorious accomplishment…Nothing seems to hold against the drop. All the networking that has interlaced our extension outward and downward into the world – family, friends, neighbors, lovers, little routines, and the results of years of work – seem to count for nothing. We feel ourselves curiously depersonalized, very far away. Exiled.
(Soul’s Code, 54)



Inspired artists and entertainers are sometimes able to give voice and image to archetypal loneliness – or, more specifically, to the intimation of the lost paradise which is at the heart of loneliness. Such artists seem to cast a kind of spell over us, to hold out, for perhaps the duration of a scene or a song, what Robert Johnson calls “slender threads” connecting us from where we are to the Golden World. Hillman contrasts the careers of two such soulful exiles of the mid-twentieth century, the child star and chanteuse Judy Garland and the exotic dancer Josephine Baker. From her earliest vaudeville turns as the toddler Frances Gumm, Garland was able to evoke an ethereal, better, lost world – somewhere over the rainbow, a place where bright, smiley youth win out, where the world could be transformed if you could only put on a show. Later in her foreshortened life, she would mesmerize audiences of sympathetic exiles, especially gay men stranded in homophobic mid century, by her wrenching evocations of being lost, left, stranded, broken. Baker too had the gift of lifting out of ordinary reality those who beheld her. In her case the promise was aphroditic liberation, unbridled sensuality, jungle fever.

Hillman suggests that her gifts, adoring admirers, and staggering celebrity aside, Garland could not finally bear to “grow down” into the waking world. The experience of workaday reality was too harsh. She sought instead good dreams, impossible love, narcotic and alcoholic oblivion. Even her self-destruction and flight carried her exile fans away.

Hillman contends that Baker was somehow more robust. She quite self-consciously elected to “grow down” into the world, to engage it practically in love and work. She forged intimate, often sexual, relations with hundreds of people, both men and women. She worked courageously for the French resistance against the Nazi occupation. She fought early and hard for African American civil rights. She adopted and brought up eleven children of different national backgrounds and races. In middle life the sex goddess foreswore beauty and vanity. She let her head go partly bald, reported her age as older than she was, lost herself in others’ needs. Baker, Hillman claims, may have discovered the secret for soulfully “growing down” into an imperfect world: “giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.” When unbearable feelings of loss and hopelessness opened up like a dreadful void, Garland searched frantically for a quick ascent; Baker let herself down and through the void, into history and the world.




6. BIBLICAL BAD NEWS

There are truly dark nights of the soul. The strongest narratives in Hebrew and Christian scripture make this case: that loneliness and suffering are central to life and that, experienced fully and consciously, suffering reveals the beauty and very meaning of being alive.

The first “historic” biblical narratives in Genesis are the stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Whether read as divine utterance, historical narrative, moral fable, or fertile crescent anthropology, the stories carry an unsettling psychological force; they resonate powerfully in this, and in possibly every preceding, historical era.

The ancient Hebrew figures with whom God established his covenant are decidedly un-heroic. The abiding reality of their lives was not glory or prosperity or even comfort; it was trial and loss. Abraham, to whom God first revealed Himself, was uprooted from familiar lands, troubled by his nephew Lot and was sadly without an heir and successor until in very old age, he is granted a son, Isaac. Then, inexplicably God called Abraham to make a blood sacrifice of his son. Seemingly because he was willing, however miserably, to do it, God spares Isaac, and great promises of future blessings and longevity are made to Abraham and those of his line.

Years later Isaac’s own twin sons Jacob and Esau would fall out over their birthright and inheritance. Jacob, the younger twin, is more cunning than his brother and, with his mother’s help, tricks Esau out of both his inheritance and his father’s personal blessing. But the plan is imperfect. Fearing his twin’s reprisals, young Jacob flees his home and treks hundreds of miles over uncertain terrain in the direction of an uncle who might take him in. Jacob’s short cuts and deceptions make an unattractive story – but we understand it, just as we understand his ensuing loss.

At the very dawn of his manhood, Jacob is reduced to nothing. Moreover, his prospects are terrible. An unattached youthful traveler was likely to fall prey to any number of calamities: wild animals, hostile tribes, murderers and thieves. He had lost his home and safety. He had lost his mother. There were hundreds of miles and countless days and nights in the wilderness ahead of him. On one particularly dark night of his soul, Jacob had a vision or a dream. It was a vision that would sustain him for a while and then, later, sustain Israel throughout the centuries.

"Jacob set out from Beersheba and went on his way towards Harran. He came to a certain place and stopped there for the night, because the sun had set; and taking one of the stones there, he made it a pillow for his head and lay down to sleep. He dreamt that he saw a ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven, and angels of God were going up and down upon it. The Lord was standing beside him and said, 'I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. This land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants. They shall be countless as the dust upon the earth, and you shall be spread far and wide, to north and south, to east and west…'

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.' Then he was afraid and said, 'How fearsome is this place! This is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.'"
(Genesis 28: 10-21)

Alone and desolate as a young man could be, Jacob envisions a ladder ascending to heaven. While it is not yet his destiny to ascend himself, he is granted a rare and powerful insight: that the most dreadful place on earth is the very gate of heaven, and God is there. This experience deepens Jacob, but it does not comfort him: “How fearsome is this place!”

Jacob will survive and even prosper. In the years to follow he works doubly hard to win a wife and his uncle’s favor. Good fortune is followed by calamity. Later as a man of family and considerable means, he flees his Uncle’s house with the hope of returning to his ancestral home. His twin, however, is rumored to be marching to meet him with a small army. Homeless, deviled by both a troubled past and a dubious future, he endures another solitary night in the wilderness.
Genesis:During the night Jacob rose, took his two wives, his two slave-girls, and his eleven sons, and crossed the ford of Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the gorge with all that he had. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him there till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not throw Jacob, he struck him in the hollow of his thigh, so that Jacob’s hip was dislocated as they wrestled. The man said, “let me go, for day is breaking,” but Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He said to Jacob, “What is your name?” and he answered “Jacob.” The man said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you strove with God and with men and prevailed.”

When Jacob is lost, when he is a loser, he contends; he opens himself up to terror and doubt for whatever he is meant to find in them. For his soulful tenacity Jacob is renamed: Israel, or “he who struggles with God.”

In the generations to follow, the Hebrew people will become Israel, and their story is an extended record of struggles with God. Jacob will live to see his beloved and favored son Joseph abandoned and sold into Egyptian servitude by his jealous brothers. In Egypt, Joseph is falsely accused of making unwanted advances on his master’s wife, and he is cast into prison for years. Only his gift for divining the meaning of dreams restores him to favor with pharaoh, and these very gifts save Egypt from a debilitating famine and the house of Jacob from extinction.

There is no biblical or historical end to Israel’s struggle with God – which, however unwelcome to modern western sensibilities, is the point of the narrative. Centuries after Jacob’s kin migrate to Goshen in Egypt, they are gradually enslaved. Moses’ heroic effort to unite and liberate them defines the very heart of Israel’s story. The Exodus has terrific cinematic appeal: an infant savior rescued in the reeds, God appearing in a burning bush, spectacular plagues visited on the oppressors, a divided sea, manna in the wilderness, water miraculously spouting from bare rock, a mountain shrouded by smoke. But at its core, the Exodus, too, is a story of relentless struggle and doubt. Moses does not believe he has the personal gifts to liberate the Hebrews in Egypt, nor, most of the time, do the Hebrews. Before and after the Red Sea parts for them, before and after food in abundance appears in the desert, before and after the Ten Commandments are imparted, the Hebrew people despair of their future. They long for their settled servitude in Egypt. When advance scouts reenter their ancestral lands in Canaan and take the measure of Canaanite inhabitants, their report back to Moses was that retaking the land of Abraham was impossible. Not one exiled Hebrew born in Egypt would live to enter the Promised Land.

For Israel and for, perhaps, all of us there is struggle forever ahead. Great opulence and majesty are achieved for exactly the historical duration necessary to create unbearable longing and loss when they dissolve into inevitable calamity, warfare, and civil strife. The glorious unification of Israel under King David and Solomon lasted for a mere seventy years before collapsing into ruinously divisive civil war. The divided states of Israel and Judah would in turn be overrun by Assyria and then Babylon. By the sixth century BC, even the symbolic center of the Hebrews’ faith, the temple built by Solomon, was razed to rubble by Nebuchadnezzar. Some Hebrews were assimilated, their heritage forever lost. The faithful were exiled and dispersed.

In this calamitous twilight of biblical Israel as a sovereign nation, a new and prescient strain of prophecy surfaced among the troubled Hebrews. Isaiah was a late eighth century BC witness to the political decline of Judah, the surviving Hebrew kingdom after its northern neighbor, Israel, fell to the Assyrians in 722. Little Judah had higher hopes. Capable, its kings believed, of effective alliances with surrounding superpowers, the political establishment believed it could negotiate a future. And didn’t Judah’s capitol, Jerusalem, house the Temple itself, and did not the Living God reside in its inner sanctum?

Isaiah saw larger forces at work. As a young man he had a transporting vision of God as the magisterial God of all creation, all peoples. Behind his anthropomorphic visage, the tribal God of Abraham was a mere mask for a staggeringly vast, supreme and only God.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts:
The whole earth is full of his glory.
(Isaiah 6:3)


This God was enormous, pervasive, ultimate – too complex and comprehensive to be wheedled for personal or even national favors. Isaiah saw the hand of God in the advances of the dreaded enemies. God, he proclaimed, worked that way, too. The appropriate response to such a god was to worship and submit, not to plot and strategize.


Tradition holds that Isaiah was executed by the royal authorities before Jerusalem fell. About a century and a half later, among the exiles in Babylon an unidentified prophet from Isaiah’s school, so-called Second Isaiah, advanced the notion that the accumulated suffering of Israel could not be tidily reduced to the sins of the fathers or to social injustices generally. Israel’s suffering was neither a great misfortune nor a punishment. The suffering was – and this could not have been easy to hear – Israel’s very purpose. Suffering is redemption, full human realization, the point. Second Isaiah establishes the redemptive nature of suffering in four strange and beautiful “servant songs.” The first Isaiah had years earlier prophesied that a redeemer of mankind would emerge from among the ruined and dislocated Hebrews after Israel and Judah were destroyed.

Then a shoot shall grow from the stock of Jesse*
And a branch shall spring from his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
A spirit of wisdom and understanding,
A spirit of counsel and power…
(Isaiah 10:33-4)


Christians of course believe Jesus is the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah. Moreover, Jesus is the suffering servant proposed by Second Isaiah:

Yet on himself he bore our sufferings,
Our torments he endured,
While we counted him smitten by God,
struck down by disease and misery;
but he was pierced for our transgressions,
tortured for our iniquities;
the chastisement he bore is health for us
and by his scourging we are healed.
We had all strayed like sheep,
Each of us had gone his own way
But the Lord laid upon him
The guilt of us all.
(Isaiah 53:4-6)


Christians the world over recite a creed on their Sabbath to the effect that Christ suffered and died for their sins so that they may have eternal life. This creed is more readily recited than understood. It is a true paradox and mystery – that suffering and death make life – and it is the core tenet of Christianity.

C. S. Lewis, a gifted explainer, sees the mystery of redemptive suffering as a means of escaping an existential hole or pit. An all-loving God creates humankind as a sheer gift. Part of the gift is freedom – freedom either to respond to life in God-serving and others-serving ways or to be delightfully self-serving. Because being self-serving is up to a point, delightful, it is easy and seductive to do so. Freely choosing self over God and others alienates one from God, however. We are, Lewis argues, soulfully aware of our lapses; we are chafed by conscience even as we drift pleasingly into self-satisfaction. The more pleased we are with ourselves, the more distanced from God we become, the more inclined to assume that we are self-created and thus responsible ultimately and only to ourselves. As we proceed into self-centeredness, our twinges of conscience become more urgent and disturbing. To rid oneself of such irritation, the self-centered being finally decrees his god-connection null and void, perhaps seeing through it as a superstitious anachronism. But if the initial theological premises – our creation in love by God and a prescribed (but freely resistible) return to Him which is the ultimate fulfillment – are true, then the self-server is in a double bind: first, he is following a life course that is finally unfulfilling; second, he cannot learn or know this because in his pride he has denied and lost his redemptive blueprint.

The problem, Lewis writes, is that only a bad person needs to repent, but only a good person can do it. The mystery of redemption lies in a good person’s willingness to suffer and repent for iniquities other than one’s own. Again the bad – self-serving – person has no motive to suffer or repent for even his own sins. The motive for taking on the sins and burdens of the world is sheer other-regarding love: agape. The point is not that we understand the beautiful-horrible image of an innocent Christ on the cross; the point is to accept the gift, to faithfully follow the example – “faithfully” because we cannot know. It is no more reasonable to love (and suffer) this way than it was for God to give life to human beings robustly capable of not returning the favor. Yet He did and, Christians believe, we must. Again, if Christian theological premises are true, suffering is purposeful and redemptive, not a mistake or mere bad luck. Theological premises aside, those who take on the burden of their own and others’ suffering are well along the road to soulful realization – because suffer we must.




7. BEING FAR FROM HOME

When we are in a state of longing – for what is distant, unattainable, long gone – our soul presses itself on consciousness; it is very near at hand. We are thus especially soulful when we are far from home. Being and feeling far from home is often unbearably sad, but at the core of the sadness is, paradoxically, an acute elation. Never is the meaning, the essence of home more vivid than when envisioned from great distances or spans of time. The heroes and questers of antiquity – Odysseus, Aeneas, Alexander – experienced their greatest heights and depths while far from home. And again, the central figures in the story of ancient Israel achieved their fullest realization as exiles, as strangers in a strange land. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a numbing indifference to soulful relatedness. Absence makes the heart not only fonder, but paranormally conscious of precisely what has been lost.

The achievement of the greatest writers and artists of modernity has been to evoke the soulfulness of being far from home. Thomas Wolfe had to leave the piedmont in order to evoke it imaginatively; the essence of home is never so beckoning, so crystalline as when we realize we can’t go there again. American writers from Washington Irving to Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, and Paul Theroux have had to leave America in order to find it imaginatively. Similarly Joyce in self-exile forged an eternally living Dublin, just as Nabokov evoked the sweetness and twilight grandeur of tsarist Russia after the revolution exiled him for life.

The distance from home need not be geographical. For Proust the distance was temporal; past consciousness would, after a suitable period of distillation, surface exquisitely, heartbreakingly into the artist’s knowing. Some souls seem to know no earthly home. The writer V. S. Naipaul, an East Indian born in Trinidad, then educated in Great Britain, ranges the world noting what men and women call home, noting also what he calls “the enigma” of every arrival. Emily Dickinson, who sequestered herself at home for her entire life, managed poetically to mark the distance between her daily being and an elusive better world, her real home.

…As all the Heavens were a Bell
And Being but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here --









We feel the distance from home as we catch present glimpses of prior light. A shaft of late afternoon sun flashes a crimson patch on the parlor carpet -–and you are transported in reverie to an afternoon many years ago, another parlor, another household, a history more vivid than any present reality – yet also, somehow, vanished. A scent in the air, a taste on the tongue, a phrase from an old recording – these too convey prior light.

There is the story of the esthete Marcel Proust who, toward the end of his life when he was ill and neurasthenic, would stir himself from the isolation he kept in his cork-lined chamber in Paris and ask to be driven to the Louvre. Inside the museum, looking neither to the left or right, he would proceed directly to Vermeer’s painting, A View of Delft. He would not look at the whole composition – a broad prospect of the seventeenth century town – only at a small patch of afternoon sunlight glowing rosily on a remote brick wall. It is said Proust would stare intently at this patch of canvas for about twenty minutes, then ask to be driven home. Proust needed to behold prior light.

Robert Johnson told me once that we are all born into paradise: into a state of all-being connectedness to everything and everyone. To develop, to mature, to “grow up” is to proceed out of this condition. Maturation and its consequent loss of relatedness are personally and culturally necessary. It is our lot to “grow” – but as Hillman writes, “growth is loss.” To grow up adaptively, to accommodate practical necessity is to distance ourselves from our first knowing.

Johnson describes the human life cycle as an ellipse. We begin at the paradisiacal curve of the figure, and we are projected out and away from that point with every discernment. Practical knowledge begins as the infant psyche first distinguishes itself from mother, self from world. From this psychic “detachment” follow all manner of distinctions and discernments: person from person, thing from thing, place from place, time from time, before from after, up from down, hot from cold, big from small, right from wrong, cause from effect. The more discerning we become and, with sophistication, the more analytic, the more power we are able to exercise over others and over the material world. True discernment is sound science, and a discerning person is adept at both “reading” and transforming the practical world. Science, enterprise, and political control belong finally to the shrewdest discerners.

But the very acts of discerning, ordering, analyzing, categorizing and organizing combine to fracture the paradisiacal wholeness which is our first condition. Each of us reaches a point in life, typically in early or late middle age, where we are as discerning – as worldly wise – as we are going to get. It is the time of our peak practical effectiveness, a time when we are likely to receive our highest accolades, our greatest popular recognition, our ultimate promotion. With our arrival at this stage in life, so accomplished and outwardly enviable, we enter the opposite curve of the ellipse. We are so far from paradise we come to doubt it exists or ever existed. In this condition it is easy to become jaded and impatient with optimists and idealists. At the far curve of the ellipse we come to resent, if we are not careful, the exuberance and dreams of the young, of even our own children. Entering the far curve of the ellipse, our deep interior feels, if we are honest, empty. There is some reassurance in executing familiar routines, but satisfaction even in these diminishes as the years pass; we affirm these routines, but there is a growing bitterness in the affirmation. There is the mounting psychic conviction that one’s – that everyone’s – life has not counted for much, perhaps alternating with spells of inflated insistence that one’s life has been exemplary, accompanied always by bottomless contempt for (or fear of) those who live otherwise. Entering the far curve of the ellipse, even the most wealthy, glamorous, and powerful feel barren and empty. This is the point in life in which it is seductively easy to slip into physical inertia, obesity, excessive drinking. There is at the same time the danger of desperate regressions: flight, promiscuity, simplistic creeds. Very often the arrival at the far curve of the ellipse is announced by an alarming health crisis.

The passage from paradise to doubt and emptiness is not an avoidable misfortune. But assuming, as Robert Johnson does, that the trajectory is not lineal but elliptical, there is hope. To journey soulfully on, to contend as Jacob did, even through what appears to be an endless wasteland, is to round the curve and proceed, but with expanded consciousness, back in the direction of paradise.

Not every man and woman has the courage, strength, and humility to round the curve. At the extremity, one neither sees nor feels the prior light. It is easy to picture impending death, and at the soulful level, we are indeed dying to something. The old war-horse of our persona, including our crowning achievements, perhaps our most entrenched and defining values, must go – or become integrated into a new, more inclusive context. This shedding of certitudes and orthodoxies can make us feel exposed, humiliated, and foolish. Many are unable to bear it; the loss of “what I have been” feels like the loss of everything, and desperate attempts are made to shore up the ruined fortress.

In early Nordic mysticism there is a tradition of Runes, which involves casting and arranging symbolic stones or panels to foretell the future. Perhaps the most austere Runic forecast is the one called Ice (also Standstill, That which Impedes). Ice, as it happens, is a precise description of the soul’s condition at the far curve of the ellipse:

"This is the winter of the spiritual life. You are in a situation to whose implications you are in effect blind… You are powerless; submit, surrender, be patient… This is a period of gestation that precedes rebirth… Shed, release, cleanse away the old. That will bring on the thaw… Submit and be still…"


Patient submission, willing surrender, dying to the old is the beginning of the soul’s return to paradise. On the return trajectory one passes over the defining discernments and achievements of the journey out – and the greatest of them are revealed to be insubstantial, fragmentary, perhaps inflated errors. We may find ourselves amused, perhaps fondly amused, at our driven former personas. As we return, we find ourselves giving up and shedding with more ease and less remorse. We find that what we are shedding is the merely personal. To lose ourselves is to find everything.

None of this should suggest that with a little patient forbearance, our mid-life flatness will open up into easeful serenity and that in our senior years we will glide seraphically back to the Source in a golden glow. The human record suggests pointedly otherwise. There is the prospect of Ice without end. One becomes the appalled witness to the loss first of certainty, then of vitality, then finally of health. Long before there is any intimation of a way back to paradise, we are lost, diminished, stranded. We lose a breast, a prostate, a colon. We know we could lose our grip on who and where we are even as we live. We may find ourselves babbling gibberish, suddenly unaccountably terrified, soiled in our own excrement. Like Lear, lost and forsaken on a desolate plain in the terminal Ice of his life, we may find our existence intolerable.






8. WHAT DESPAIR WANTS TO SAY

The passage through Ice, the slow and uncertain rounding of the far end of the ellipse, is perilous. It can be fatal. In the second half of the twentieth century western medical psychiatry has worked hard to isolate and treat what is clinically called depression. Manic depression, now called bi-polar disease, has received especially close attention. The low-energy, hopeless, flattened affect of depressives has been linked to depleted levels of brain chemical transmitters, and drugs which stimulate the production of the depleted substances are now massively prescribed. From the standpoint of practical survival, pharmacological interventions offer great promise and hope.

Philosophic psychology has long recognized a phenomenon called psycho-cerebral parallelism: that for every state of mind there is a corresponding state of brain. In other words, the writing of these words is accompanied by a brain state which can be described in highly specific electro-chemical terms. If my brain is electrically or chemically altered, so will be my state of mind – and vice-versa: as I write these words I am changing my brain. Psycho-cerebral parallelism does not, however, account for the causes of mental difficulty. While it is undeniably true that certain pathological mental conditions are apparently improved by the introduction of psychoactive medicines, the causes of those pathologies, whether depressive or delusional, are as likely to lie in the individual’s soulful misalignment with his world as they are in a genetic or disease-related deficiency. Medicine’s aim is and must be to restore the patient to social viability and health. The soul’s aim is to align itself with what is ultimately fulfilling and true.

Some nervous system disorders are undeniably congenital, others determined by trauma or virus; for these medical treatment may bring relief or cure. Just as undeniably there are troubled soulful states that are not finally treatable by medicines. Because a troubled soul slows and aggravates the body, it is easy to attribute this condition to conventional illness. But there is no pill or shot for soulful malaise. Indeed a tell-tale sign that the soul, and not just a physical system, is troubled is that the condition is chronic and mysteriously resistant to any kind of treatment. The Freudian era ushered in a new awareness of “psychosomatic” illness, but knowing one’s soul, and not a germ or wound, is causing the trouble does not of itself ease the pain.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that the present era in the west is a golden age of untreatable malaise. Tens of millions of Americans reportedly suffer from chronic fatigue, a bewildering array of pelvic/vaginal distress, anxiety, and depression – and the numbers are rising. Research initiatives are funded to find cause and cure. New miracle medicines flood the market. Diets recommend radically alkalizing the system, eliminating an entire food group, taking massive doses of a single all-healing herb. More conventional sufferers soldier on from day to day modified by Valium or Prozac. But again, when the trouble resides in the soul, no one seems to improve.

As previously discussed, a soul in Ice, at the far curve of the ellipse, is to all outward appearances clinically depressed. A person whose soul has arrived at this state is drained of energy, out of gas. Even ordinary action and resolution feel hopelessly enervating. Little or no pleasure is taken in art or music, in festivity or celebration, in food or company. This bottomed-out flatness carries with it a feeling-tone all its own. It is likened to sinking or falling into an ever-darkening abyss, to being blanketed from the rest of the world, to being helplessly and aggravatingly separate from everybody and everything. The very thought of forceful or therapeutic counter measures carries the sufferer into acute aversion and fatigue. The darker and deeper the descent, the more yawning the chasm of separation, the more guilty and shameful and unworthy one feels.

And then there is the resolution, however, unthinkable. The worst condition, as attempted suicides know, is not death but a harrowing realization that the present is undenurable. In the unendurable present the barrel of the revolver goes into the open mouth, the blade opens the vein, the last pill is gulped down. We turn the wheel, let go, jump – or not.

Or not. Hillman says we can drop through the very bottom of a depression and learn what it has to tell us. Perhaps this kind of dropping or falling through is, to risk confusing metaphors, the same thing as rounding the far curve of the soul’s elliptical journey. A therapist friend of mine opines that “falling through” a depression can be more deepening and healing than a medical intervention – if there is “support.” By support he means another attentive person or persons who believe your descent is as purposeful as it is troubling.

This same friend confided to me a depressive episode he experienced in his thirties. At the time, the outward indicators of his life and work were strong. He had married happily and started a family. He had a good job and bright prospects. He was a healthy, attractive, talented man – but then the bottom fell out. He was overcome with a dull, sickening feeling that nothing he did, nor any relationship he had mattered. He found himself profoundly unsure, doubting everything. His mother had also recently died, but he determined that his depression was not about her or losing her; his mother’s death, rather, beckoned him closer to an already widening void. He sought help from a psychotherapist, a woman, who, he feels now, said and did some wonderfully helpful things. At one point she asked him pointedly, “What exactly do you feel like doing right now? My friend answered honestly: “I feel like doing nothing. I feel like giving up.” He told the therapist he would like to go home, get into his pajamas, crawl into bed and have his wife take care of him as if he were a baby. To which the therapist asked him, “For how long? Years? A few months? Days?” My friend did not want years, or even months. It occurred to him that it was days he wanted, a few days of utter passivity and surrender. The therapist warmed to this. Days were quite possible! So why didn’t he go straight home, get into bed, and be a baby for a while.

As it happened, taking to his bed for a period of babying turned out to be beside the point. The healing or transforming effect of the therapist’s response, my friend feels, was that she helped him “lean into” the depression rather than to counter it, skirt it, endure it “with strength,” or to medicate it. This depressive felt he had permission to enter into the depression right through to the bottom, right into the crib, if necessary. With support, he was able to do this, and he has emerged, he feels, deeper and more durable and a more responsive therapist himself.

Of course not every depressed person would answer “days” to the therapist’s question. Some would ask for years or, like Hamlet, for eternity. They are anxious hostages in an unendurable present. The first seductive notion of oblivion begins to surface, then the formation of a plan, a highly specific plan. The specter of self-injury or suicide is never benign or frivolous. Robert Johnson believes that suicidal thoughts and drives have the potential for important psychic transformation; something needs to die all right, but not one’s whole being. With courage and support, one might “lean into” even self-destructive fantasies to learn what urgent soulful messages they want to impart. Jung himself wrote about a depressive, phobic episode he experienced in his late thirties. He found himself depressed, anxious, suddenly afraid to travel, even to go outdoors. He holed up inside. Suicidal ideas surfaced. He bought a revolver, loaded it, handled it, kept it close at hand. He made every effort to enter the new, unsettling condition in which he found himself. He leaned, he listened in – inviting even the deadliest impulses to come to consciousness. They were welcome, but they did not come, and Jung resurfaced into the light.

The soul seeks not equilibrium and ease but rather communion with what is ultimate. The soul does not always seek to feel good; it seeks to feel everything. It is practically inconvenient and often wildly inappropriate to feel everything – especially the extremities of feeling, agonies and ecstasies. Our greatest artists have attempted to expose a world in which the totality of soulful experience – from the diabolical to the divine – is at hand. Homer’s Odysseus has himself lashed to the mast so that he can hear and feel the Sirens’ seductive and deadly song. The whole soulful truth may involve periodic excursions into the very maw of hell. Two of the most expansive figures in Greek mythology. Dionysus and Orpheus, undertook journeys deep into hell as did the legendary Aeneas and, later, Dante’s narrative persona in the Divine Comedy. Two master painters of the northern renaissance, Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel, depicted hells of breathtaking vividness. Despite the painterly conventions of the period and the strangeness and perversity of the tortures and abominations portrayed, any child beholding such a canvas immediately recognizes that it is hell. Perhaps a signature of every great artist is the ability, when necessary, to impart an intimation of hell.

The soul does indeed know and recognize hell, but it also knows that hell is not and must not be universal. Hell on earth is an outrage, never endurable, always wrong. No matter how many tellings and recountings and dramatizations it endures, the soul cannot bear the Holocaust or any other manifest hell on earth. The Holocaust was hell on earth, hell made visible.

9. LOSING SIGHT OF BEAUTY

Hillman and a growing number of thoughtful Jungians are voicing a concern over the less visible or less clearly perceived hells mankind may be unwittingly creating. These writers ask whether the deprivation of natural and created beauty could be the cause of widespread soulful malaise, including depression. Romantic naturalists from Wordsworth to John Muir have celebrated the soulful power and majesty of natural beauty. Aristotle believed the alpine and maritime prospects over which romantics rhapsodize share an essential esthetic property: limitless enormity. The soul rises to the great and the vast: mountains and mountaintops, sweeping expanses of ethereal blue or star-bejeweled sky, oceans, deserts, endless prairies and plains. But the soul recognizes more than mere magnitude in natural beauty. There is the glass-clear pool in the glade, the darkening copse silhouetted against the twilit horizon at day’s end, the low murmur of a brook meandering among ferns and mossy rocks, the chiseled perfection of the face of every cat, the red-winged blackbird’s slivered gash, the transporting orange of the oriole, scarlet of the tanager, blue of the bluebird, the miraculous iridescence and pastels of parakeet and parrot, or saffron scaled fish against corral, a conch in a swirling tide pool, the craft of a nest, a bank of daffodils, the unearthly visage of an owl. Yes. But if the heart flies up and the soul unfurls to natural and crafted beauty, surely the absence or, worse, the ruination of that beauty will cause wounded contraction. Depression may well be more an esthetic problem than a neurological one.

Esthetic deprivation may also help explain depressive conditions that have no apparent domestic or situational cause. I can recall vividly driving in a car with my grandparents while on a summer vacation in northern Michigan. It was sunset, and I was alone in the backseat of the Ford, taking in the passing prospect with heightened feeling. I was eight years old. For a city boy, the surroundings were spellbinding: great outcroppings of granite bluff topped with forests of thick pine, then a break between rock faces and the appearance of still, glassy lakes made smoky and rosy by the declining sun. Stretches of meadow, too, and cultivated fields, and boundary hedgerows felt graceful and congruent. But then we would round a bend and enter settled territory and everything, it seemed to me, was ruined. The corrugated metals used to roof the farm houses and barns, the garish painted billboards, the rusted and skeletal tractors in the fields, the junked cars, phone and power lines slung blackly across the horizon – this was a mistake! I was eight years old, barely awake, unschooled and certainly unrefined, but I knew something was wrong. Why were the made things so awful? Why couldn’t they be made to fit? Each new harshness, each insult to treeline and sky felt like a clout to the head. It was sickening, it hurt, and nobody had taught me to feel that way.

Ugliness insults the soul. It was once believed that certain natural places – springs, streambeds, glades, forests – were so numinous in feeling that they continued to emanate their essence after they were razed, built and paved over. If an instance of despoliation, of ugliness, hurts the soul, pervasive ugliness overwhelms it and sends it into a kind of beaten grief. Environmental ugliness and ruin are depressive. Prozac and lithium may somewhat distance and detach the sufferer from the source, but drugs cannot cure it. For every practical reason, we have allowed environmental form to follow the soulless penchant for speed, portability, uniformity, and disposability – and in consequence have made sprawling, hideous messes. For mile after mile, mall after mall, the soul gasps for a beauty it can bear. Just as the soul seeks prior light, it seeks earth and grass underfoot, never pavement. It is long past time to ask if our chronic and elusive symptoms, if our depressions, are not the result of despoiling the soul’s natural home. What if greater forces than abusive parents, bad marriages, unemployment or faulty neurological wiring are at work in our depressions and anxieties? What if the Styrofoam cup, vinyl desk top, fluorescent light, and fiberboard ceiling panel are making us sick? Where the devastation is so massive and pervasive it feels irreversible, accrued horribly over generations, where the very elements – water, air, earth – seem fouled past cleansing, the soul folds its head under its wing and wants to die.

It is time, Hillman suggests, to consider the aesthetic basis of mental illness and its accompanying physical unease:
"Suppose we are being harassed, as much by the form of things as by their material, where form means their aesthetic quality…

Plotinus makes this clear (On Beauty 1.6.2): 'The things in this world are beautiful by participating in form… a thing is ugly when it is not mastered by some shape.' You and I are in psychologically bad shape because our physical world is bent out of shape. And, Plotinus says in the same passage, “this is because when the soul meets the ugly it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, out of tune, resenting it.” Plotinus here describes the clinical condition of the psyche turning itself in for therapy: out of tune, withdrawn, resentful. The ugly makes us neurotic."
(H&V. 125)





10. SOULFUL SAFE RETURN

Trouble, pain, isolation, doubt without end – this too is the soul speaking. If we want to know exactly what it is saying, we must listen, surrender, even descend. The soul is our instrument for registering our fit in the ultimate scheme of things. Its vocabulary is as variegated and nuanced as feeling itself. The soul can only tell and feel truthfully. When one is out of alignment with or simply starved for beauty and harmony, the truth positively hurts. Yet, if the soul is capable of taking the measure of our periodic misalignment in the world, and if we have the courage to let ourselves feel it, we will not fail to register the renewing realignment when it comes. There will be a first glimmer of prior light, then the familiar brightening of desire as grace bears us homeward.

The breaking of boys and men: part seven

BEYOND BROKEN BOYS




Contemporary culture has lost touch with its children, and as a result children are experienced as a proliferation of “problems.” The continuing stream of journalistic and analytic attention to perceived crises in children’s health, learning and viability intensifies rather than clears the fog. This is because the apparent attention is not really focused on children—that is, on individual beings with distinctive natures—but on the inconvenience, difficulty or threat children pose to civil order. To commerce children are a promising and readily manipulated market. To an educational complex dedicated to the maintenance of its established assumptions and protocols children present a collective bundle of under achievement, disabilities and behavioral management challenges. Medical and therapeutic establishments identify a bewildering profusion of new pathologies in children: rampant, lethal allergies, attention deficits and hyperactivity that must be treated with powerful psychoactive drugs. More and more children are reported to suffer from autism and Asperger’s syndrome, pathologies in which children appear unable to feel what others feel and to respond to them appropriately. Children are found to be profoundly susceptible to debilitating conditions formerly confined to adults, including addictions, severe depression, and suicide. Millions of children are lost to the world, transfixed before video or computer screens for most of their unassigned waking hours. Children give up their personal identities to groups and gangs. Children are in danger of being hurt or killed, of hurting and killing others.

In such a culture the remedies are as problematic as the pathologies and dysfunctions they set out to remediate. Parents obsessed over their children’s potential failure to gain impressive college admission pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for special tuition, test preparation, and college brokerage. They are called soccer moms and helicopter parents, providing and demanding too much of everything for children already overstocked with possessions and privileges and unnaturally buffered from developmentally necessary disappointments and losses. At the same time there are legions of “latch-key” children who are unstimulated, unsupervised and otherwise uncared for by working or otherwise preoccupied parents. As for pathology, suspicions mount that medicines are cause, not cure. Perhaps required inoculations cause autism. Perhaps antidepressants stimulate suicidal thinking. Perhaps the attention deficit prescriptions are medicating not a boyhood pathology but boyhood itself. Does a lack of scholastic rigor “leave children behind?” Or do we do children worse harm by hurrying them along? Is the school year long enough? Have we lost the pastoral ease and occasions for inventive play children experienced when school ended sooner and started later?

Not surprisingly, there are no satisfying answers to such questions, only mounting new concerns. This, again, is because these concerns are not really about children; they are about adult ease and unease. In this cultural climate the most urgent and compelling features of a child’s life will not be recognized or even seen. The problem of understanding a child’s experience is similar to the problem of understanding a prior historical period or a geographically remote people. We bring to the task the conceptual apparatus, language, and values we have acquired in our own time and circumstances. Without knowing it or even wanting to, our attempt to understand becomes little more than a reduction of the alien to the familiar, of their way to our way. Where reduction fails, we attribute the inassimilable material to inferior or primitive practice, or we simply fail to recognize certain features and practices at all. Thus it is with our attempts to understand children. This is not to say the enterprise is hopeless, just extremely difficult.

In order to understand and appreciate children, to love them and to help them make their imaginative and practical way, we must willfully suspend anything like certainty that we know what children are like and how they are supposed to think and behave. We must put aside, if not abandon outright, our most cherished notions of child development, of stages and phases. Our allegiance must be to children, not to conceptual models, tests, and norms. Even more important is a willingness to reconsider what constitutes data about children, especially if that term is regarded scientifically, as in measurable, replicable units of something or other. Pace social science, but reducing childhood experience to that kind of data contributes to the fog we are trying to dispel. Here one might well ask: what have we got then? This is what we’ve got. We have a loving disposition to actual, particular children, we have memory, and we have a treasure trove of stories. These are necessary but perhaps not sufficient conditions for understanding and appreciating children. There is also a biblical injunction to do something very basic and humbling—to become as little children. Perhaps the surrender of assumptions suggested above will, if it is a real surrender, amounts to the same thing.

Memory is crucial to accessing childhood, and memory is gendered. As a man, my consideration of childhood has taken me to boyhood where, in our era, all is far from well. Was it ever thus? No, it was not. Great and enduring stories remind us that boys once made rapt progress through beckoning worlds, worlds worth exploring, however perilous the way ahead. Memory, if we dare, will do the same.


Boy spirit is not understood through analysis but through witness. The first impression is more feeling tone than describable quality. We sense a spark, something infectious in boy’s urge to get up and out and away. He wants to move, to touch it, hold it, grab it, put it together, build it up, knock it down. He wants to make it move, get inside it, drive it, fly it away. He loves the look of it, the feel of it, the noise if it. He wants to take it outside, take you with him. He wants to show you, wants you to watch him. Maybe, for a minute, he wants you to help him. He wants to be amazed. He wants you to be amazed. He wants to run off, and he wants you to chase after him. He wants to get away, and he wants you to catch him. He wants to do it again.

He loves that you love him, and that is how he begins to love. In this he is irresistible. He is outraged but not cowed by meanness, neglect, and injury. He is neither aware of nor grateful for safety and comfort, but he thrives in them. Safety and comfort are the beginning of his understanding of home, of glad return. If he has been sufficiently loved and safe, if he knows home and loves home, he will play the hero and then one day possibly be a hero, a protector of loved ones, a savior of the city. He may also, even if he is safe and loved, play other parts. He may play villain or fool or rascal or wizard, but if he has been safe and loved, he will hold the hero above the rest.

He does not have to be taught place or how to feel about place. He is born prepared. His senses and his heart are keenly receptive to the print of places. Here you can serve. Take him outdoors, to parks, ponds, darkly canopied stands of trees, to stream beds studded with climbable rocks. Take him to the shore. Let him peer up into the faces of cliffs. From great heights let him gaze out over vast expanses. Hold him tight.

You cannot know and needn’t bother about the thousands of place impressions that he will treasure and store when he is alone: the swirl of the wall paper by the bed, the geometry of the dormered window, the pattern of tiles on the bathroom floor, the snow curled over the eaves, the creak of the stairs, the beckoning dark behind the furnace.

In pictures and in your travels, stand him in front of handsome structures: the classical court house, the cathedral, the castle, the imposing fortress. Let him behold the skyline of a great city .Tell him stories of great cities, great kingdoms. He already holds an intimation of such places and will store the images and stories in his deep knowing. He will go to animals, take their measure. Let him. Watch him watch them, squirrels, yard birds, rabbits, cats. Have a dog. Have two dogs.

Understand that he can lash out suddenly, that he can hit. Understand that he will throw things, drop things, break things on purpose. He can push. He can knock down. He can snatch what he knows is not his, hide and hoard it. He will press every boundary, and he will long to trespass. Understand these things. Feel them as he is feeling them. Remember feeling them. Then correct him. Then stop him. In time he may feel a helpless longing to set fires, to shoot, to stab, to pierce, to blow things up. You must acknowledge these urges, too, perhaps remember them. Then instruct and correct. When you must, stay his hand, tell him no.

As soon as he can, he will turn his imagination and longing to remote times. He is equally charmed by the deep past and the deep future. He seems always to have known that there was a time of dinosaurs. Dark forests and remote jungles are equally familiar. Just as readily he will extend himself into the future, outer space, worlds beyond worlds.

He will be drawn to the trappings and the clothes of prior eras: the knight’s armor, Robin Hood’s tunic and tights, the pirate’s buckled shoes, the tricorn hat, the cape, the sword, the bow and arrow, the chaps, the spurs, the six guns. These dreams will flow seamlessly into dreams of sport, of colossal work. He will be enchanted first by the uniforms and equipment, tools and vehicles. He will treasure, then scatter and forget hats, helmets, balls, mitts, clubs, bats, rods, reels, skis, goggles, fins. He will mount and ride anything that moves. He will quickly learn to steer but not to slow or stop. He does not love the big machines but wonders how to reduce them to his size.

He is responsive to music, even when he seems oblivious. He can feel music carrying him. He will mouth the words without regard to their sense but feeling their attitude. In music he will sense crisis, sweetness, danger, love’s longing and its loss. He will rise at once to making music, to the instruments, their burnished wood and gleaming brass, the thrilling complexity of stops and valves and felts and hammers. He moves at once to percussion.

He will enter stories earlier than you think, even as he fidgets, looks, away, squirms off your lap. You must understand he enters the story long before he follows its sense.
He enters the characters and the creatures. He enters the colors and the shapes. He is able to make them pulse with his own feeling. Show him, read him, tell him stories. When he has sufficient language to follow a story’s sense, some stories will hold him fast, confirm him. Grimm tales of abandoned or imperiled children who make their way will do this almost certainly. Stories of the destined, miraculous birth will do this, stories of Moses in the bull rushes, Romulus and Remus, Jesus in the manger. Do not interpret or explain his stories. Do not tell him the moral of stories. He has already gone deeper than that. He has lived in those stories, and there is every chance that he will go on telling the story because it is now the story of himself.

He enters stories before he reads. Reading does not unlock stories or open them up. Reading is only the medium for accessing stories in texts. Reading, even facile reading, can deaden stories, even as the reader is carried along in the act. The effort and awareness of reading will begin to form a barrier, distancing the boy from the world in the story, so that in time he will be able to say and begin even to believe that it is only a story.

A boy’s experience of other people, of his parents, siblings, adults and other children compose his first stories. Before he enters texts, he enters them. He does not come to know them as he learns their names and qualities. He enters into them, absorbs them before he names and categorizes them. In this he is utterly indiscriminate. If he is safe and loved, he will enter, know, and love others eagerly. He will observe, he will wait before touching, before imposing. He will play along side, listening, watching. Then he will risk offering a gesture, an exchange. He will follow or he will lead. He will do what the others are doing. He will play. He plays long before he is “taught” to play; he is not taught to play.

Boys who are loved and safe, boys who are witnessed rather than guided and shaped, are neither fearful nor fearsome. Such boys enter an open world, a story with all the elements, including loss, danger, evil, and death. In an era when boys, at least some boys, were loved and safer, there was no harm in martial play, in stories of boy orphans, boys kidnapped, boys taken up into a band of child thieves. In that era there was no harm in fantasies and cartoons of edgy cats alternately pursuing and fleeing mischievous mice or canaries. There was a zest, a lilt to the breakneck pursuit of predator and prey, heads flattened with frying pans, falls from cliffs, spectacular electrocutions. In that world the hapless and foolish sufferers always recovered and resumed the chase.

By contrast, in a culture in which children are really neither safe nor loved, where they are shaped and guided and lavishly provided for but insufficiently witnessed, danger lies everywhere. It lies in the coloring of apples. It lies in peanuts and in bees. It lies in fiber glass and household cleansers. It lies in competitive sports, in hurtful toddler games like musical chairs, in sadistic playground games like dodge ball. It lies in animal fat, in milk, in new strains of bacteria, in viruses, in the medicines devised to treat the viruses. If children ride their bikes down the street on an errand, they may be abducted and disappear. Pedophilic predators arise in profusion, insinuating themselves into children’s chat rooms, their vans idling just outside the school yard. Teachers and coaches and counselors are pedophiles. Scout leaders are pedophiles. Priests and rabbis and congressmen are pedophiles. There is no end to the succession of new child pathologies and syndromes and disabilities. Desperate efforts to shield children from threats on so many fronts give rise to monstrous parental excesses, resulting in new pathologies and syndromes. The ambient mood in such a world is terror. It is an age of terror.

One cannot—and should not!—say with certainty how the world will look, how conditions will improve, what fears will be dispelled and what errors will be corrected once we regain an understanding and appreciation of children. To do so would be to set up as if one had figured it out, drawn closure, adjusted the engine, patched up the infrastructure. That is the last thing children need.

Whether born of arrogance or desperation, the assumption of certain knowledge about children and what is good for them is the heart of the problem. There is no such certainty, no such knowledge. Every boy, if he is safe and loved, is a work in progress. If he is lovingly and appreciatively witnessed, he is very likely to emerge a surprise, possibly a pleasant surprise, perhaps the last thing you expected. Hedged in by knowing expectations of what he is like, of how and what and how fast he should learn, of how he should behave, whom he should love, and what kind of work he should do, he will refuse in the now familiar ways: he will draw inward, act out crazily, rebel, get sick.

Because we cannot nurture viable children with certainties does not mean we cannot nurture them. It is disposition, not certainty that is required. The basic dispositions have already been named: the disposition to love, to appreciate, to witness. When these dispositions are central and uncompromised, they are more than capable of resisting seemingly enormous cultural pressures to nurture and school children otherwise. Rightly disposed parents, joining will to instinct, have always done this, but because this disposition is by its nature unformulaic and fluid, there has been no movement or theory or school to carry it forth.

The first condition sought by the loving parental disposition is safety, and this cannot be overemphasized. Abraham Maslow rightly put a child’s safety at the foundation of any possible future realization. This is real safety, the soul’s apprehension of safety. It cannot be materially produced. It cannot be abstracted to suburban or rural refuges. It certainly cannot be gated. No privilege can buy it. A child can be safe and loved in a tenement or in a trailer park. Children who live in unworldly opulence, with every toy and diversion, can and do live in hellish anxiety and fear. For many western children unworldly opulence has become normative, generating its own stream of anxiety, the anxiety of not getting it, of not having it yet, of losing it. It is harder than almost any idealist imagines to shake compulsive acquisitiveness in a culture predominantly dedicated to material acquisition. In that culture, so fundamentally lacking in real safety, acquisition holds out the desperate promise, a promise never fulfilled. Children who sense their parents’ desperation in this regard become doubly so.

If a loving disposition can rise to resist crippling, dead-end acquisitiveness, it can also stand guard against and resolutely refuse to practice what the angry Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing called psychic robbery. Psychic robbery is the practice of substituting one’s own desires for what a child is thinking and feeling. Psychic robbery occurs in seemingly benign ways, as when a child declares, “I hate broccoli,” and a parent responds, “You don’t hate broccoli.” It also occurs—normatively—when children express their darkest and most intense feelings: “I hate baby,” “I want to kill you.” When parents and other nurturers answer “no you don’t,” “you don’t feel that way,” the child is not reassured; he is made anxious and hurried into despair, because the truth has not been acknowledged.

Psychic robbery is exponentially worse than disagreement. A child’s dark or challenging declaration can be met with sheer witness, with questions, with consolation, or with objection, but if it is met with a knowing, manipulative, or perhaps angry insistence that his feeling is not felt, that what was actually felt is an alien mental state, that is the beginning of a child’s profoundest anxiety and despair. The child is easily cowed into verbal denials and recantations, but the underlying and now inaccessible interior condition is deepening anxiety and despair. To deny and replace any true mental state felt or declared by a child is in effect to negate him, to cut him off from connectedness to others, to undermine his safety. Children detached in this way do not forsake the dark or unwanted sentiment. To the contrary, because the sentiment has been unwitnessed and unmet, it will become a fixation. Only in a detached, unreachable condition can a child live on in a world of psychic robbers. He will not relate to or find himself in seemingly well-intentioned but actually frightened classrooms and school curricula where the dark thought is unutterable on pain of expulsion, where it cannot be found in the assigned texts or even in the libraries, where organized exercises to identify and express “feelings” are highly manipulative, transparent attempts to lighten and sweeten the real thing, not to open it up, but to seal it off. There is ultimately no denying the darkness. Psychic robbery is both a selfish and futile practice. It is generated by a fearful disposition, not a loving one. The culture in which psychic robbery is normative will find itself overwhelmed by the very terror it refuses to witness in children.

I hope by now it is understood that all of this is offered out of a particular disposition, not out of certainty. This is not to say that disposition is weak or somehow inferior to certainty. Love and appreciation of children can infuse disposition with great strength and clarity—but again, not certainty. Beware of certainty, of the need for certainty. Certainty can only close off and cut short the continuous process of our understanding. Forsaking certainty does not mean you cannot know things. Knowing is not confined by certainty. It is possible to know, for instance, that the pursuit of certainty is futile, that the assumption of certainty does not satisfy.

All of so-called “self-help” is driven by the illusion of certainty: that some sage or therapist knows for certain why what’s wrong is wrong and how to make it right. Like addicts on the prowl for a fix their enfeebled forebrains know full well will not permanently satisfy, like unlucky gamblers emptying their wallets to place yet another bet, like school girls prowling the malls for yet another tank top or lip gloss, strangely aware that these items will not transform or satisfy them any more than any of their prior purchases, the self-helpless continue to kneel at the alters of certainty.

It is by no means certain but perhaps very promising that in addition to a loving disposition to children, certain pathways ahead beckon brightly—in fact, have always beckoned brightly. Again, my experience limits me here to the experience of boys.

I believe boys can thrive. In the past some have thrived. We have their stories. Loved and safe as they begin, boys have and perhaps can again make their way vigorously through experiences both enlivening and self-affirmingly great. In this condition their lives unfold as in a story. The first is the story of boyhood itself, the limitless exuberance and danger and wonder of the puer-spirit, the puer-spirit played out in every way, in every place, with whatever kind of gear, and with whatever companions happen to be at hand.

The boyhood story is busy and charged with movement, but there is no forward motion. Forward motion begins in another story, the story of a passionate quest. This is a love story. The boy is taken up, consumed in, enchanted by someone beloved, someone perfectly good, perfectly beautiful. The nearer he gets to the beloved, the deeper the communion, the more vaulting the love. There is no end to this, but even as the lover feels and seems to have it, it is at risk, it is elusive, it is gone. There must be a quest to regain this. Its allure is at the same time utterly chaste, deeply sexual and holy. The quest is for something like the legendary grail or a magic ring. It is for somebody like Dante’s Beatrice or Romeo’s Juliet. There is no certain end to this quest. There is every peril and obstacle. The quest could fail, could end in disappointment or even death. The very sadness of that prospect intensifies the beauty of the condition. The great boy does not care. He wants only to try. He wants to be consumed in the trying.

There is another boy’s story, perhaps the final story. This is the story of saving the city. The very best of cities has enemies within, enemies without. The great boy realizes early on and will continue to realize through the course of his life that the city, like his loving parents, has been his playground, his school, his home and his safe return. He has always loved his city, and even as he quested far from home, he realizes that without the city he could not have been. His happiness and all of his beloved could not have been.

His love helps him to see that the city is in peril and he musk risk everything, face every danger to save it. Saving the city is now the quest. It will require every thing he has mastered and understood. He will not, or not for long, attempt political reforms. He will not fall back on reasons and arguments. He is driven by no vision of clean streets, prosperous commerce, or civic conduct. He will of course create or preserve order, but he wants to save to soul of the city, its vitality, its loving disposition. We cannot of course know exactly how this new order will be constituted. It will be the kind of order a spirited boy who wants to save the city would create. It would be an order good for spirited boys. It might be the salvation of all of us, although nobody can say for certain.

The breaking of boys and men: part six

BOYS WITHOUT A STORY:
Broken Boys in the World

Boys reveal their broken condition in two ways. They tell us how they feel in written and spoken utterances, and they act out their inner state in increasingly dramatic and violent ways. If the broken boy’s connection to what sustains him has been severed so completely that he can no longer even recognize it or long for it, he fills the void of what has been lost with visions of negation. He alternately wants to destroy himself, to destroy others, and to destroy the world in which his life grows increasingly desolate.
Boys entering junior high school and on the brink of biological puberty are profoundly aware that the days of their true boyhood, such as they might have been, are numbered. They know just as surely as Peter Pan what the story of their future promises to be: an increasingly consequential progression of school requirements and then work. They feel the looming weight of the unstated expectation that a boy will one day assume domestic responsibilities as a husband and a father as well as civic responsibilities as a citizen, perhaps a community leader, and, if needed, a soldier. These prospects carry no allure or romance. Boys are more or less aware of them, but, except for certain fantasies of soldiering and combat, they do not long for them. Boys with nothing to long for attempt to fill the void with intense, reality-obliterating stimulation. They seek it with whatever materials are at hand: street drugs, liquor or pharmaceuticals filched from their parents, toxic inhalants, violent fantasies, and, once they are able to amass a suitable arsenal, violence itself.
Perhaps the least remarked aspect of the grim progression of American schoolyard shootings in recent years is that many of the young perpetrators had hoped that, in addition to drama, catastrophe, and annihilation of the people and things, their outing might provide some “fun.” Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson were 11 and 13 when they bundled a collection of rifles and handguns pilfered from Andrew’s grandfather into one of the Johnson’s vans and drove off to shoot their classmates and teachers at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro Arkansas, March 24, 1998.
Neither boy was an innocent. Andrew, his schoolmates claimed, had previously tortured and killed a friend’s cat and had shot another child in the face with a pellet gun. Mitchell boasted that he had formerly been a member of a violent gang, talked about getting high and “having a lot of killing to do.” At the time of the shootings, he was awaiting trial for having molested a little girl while he was visiting his estranged father.
The morning of the shooting the boys, dressed in army-fatigue outfits, drove to school and parked the van nearby. While Andrew ran inside and set off a fire alarm, Mitchell hauled the guns into the woods directly across from the school entrance. As the children streamed outside, the boys opened fire, killing four girls, a teacher, and wounding nine others before fleeing back to the van, where they were overcome by police.
In their school photographs the boys look, if anything, younger than their years, but each had already developed a canny sense of what he needed to do to appear to meet adult expectations. After their arrest, when their parents and other adults were present, they wept, expressed remorse, and asked for bibles and a chance to see their minister. With the other young inmates and out of their elders’ view, the boys talked excitedly and boastfully about what they had done, especially shooting a teacher Andrew particularly disliked.
Because of Arkansas’s relatively lenient sentencing laws for juvenile felons (since revised), Andrew and Mitchell were detained in juvenile detention facilities until their twenty-first birthdays. Mitchell was released in 2005 without a public record as a felon, legally able, if he should so choose, to purchase firearms. One New Years Day, 2007, he was arrested, along with another young murderer who had been convicted and released, for possession of marijuana and illegal possession of a loaded handgun. Andrew was released from detention on his birthday in May, 2007.
Six weeks after the Jonesboro school shootings, Kip Kinkel, 15, shot and killed his mother and father at home after they found out he had been expelled from school for having a stolen handgun in his locker. The following day, he packed up an assortment of his pistols and rifles and opened fire on his classmates at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon., killing two of them and injuring 25 before being subdued by police.
Kip’s mother and father were high school Spanish teachers. The Kinkels lived in a commodious suburban house where Kip was virtually an only child, his older sister by six years having departed for college. The extensive media coverage of the massacre stressed how unlikely it seemed to those who knew him that Kip would be capable of such brutal murders. Teachers and schoolmates described him as “boyish and likable.” His parents were reported to be attentive and loving. Commentators searching for possible psychological factors in the outburst pointed out that in a family of achievers, Kip was dyslexic and had to struggle scholastically, also that he was physically awkward in a family that prized athletic prowess.
In a journal he kept and in some of his assigned school writing, Kip tried to express what he was feeling about himself and his place in the world. These documents make clear he was suffering miserably, even as he presented a “boyish and likable” face to the world. He is boyish and likable in the note of confession he left after shooting his mother and father: “I have just killed my mother and father! I don’t know what is happening. I love my mom and dad so much. I just got two felonies on my record. My parents can’t take that…I’m so sorry. I am a horrible son. I wish I had been aborted…I don’t deserve them. They were such wonderful people.”
He is boyish and likable in his statement of contrition to the survivors of those he killed at school. “I have thought about what I could say to make people feel just a little bit better. But I have come to the realization that it really doesn’t matter what I say. Because there is nothing I can do to take away the pain and destruction I have caused. I absolutely loved my parents and had no reason to kill them. I had no reason to dislike, kill or try to kill anyone at Thurston. I am truly sorry this happened…”
It is almost unbearable to look at the photographs of Kip Kinkel’s face that appeared in the press at the time of the incident. Dark bangs fall over the forehead of a troubled, wistful boy’s face. It is a face one cannot help liking. It is a boy one somehow wants to embrace. His dark and desperate journal entries indicate no viable path forward in his school life or beyond. At one point he remarks that he would be unthinkable as anyone’s father. He reveals a powerful infatuation for a certain girl whom he is sure will never really know him and penetrate his isolation. He cannot imagine easy, satisfying friendships. He cannot imagine succeeding on the school’s terms or his parents’ terms. There was never for him a secret garden or Neverland or any kind of boy-realm where he felt invigorated, inspired and secure just as he was. The only way ahead he acknowledges is the world’s way, and toward that world he feels no tug or welcome, only alternating waves of murderous anger and self-loathing. And while he cannot see a place for himself within it, he does not fault the world of his family or the world of school. “They were wonderful people. It’s not their fault…My head just doesn’t work right…I wish I made my mother proud. I tried so hard to find happiness. But you know me, I hate everything.”
Kip Kinkel was by no means an eloquent or practiced writer, but in the personal journal found in his room, he may have come very close to realizing what was at the heart of his dreadful impulse to hate and to harm. “I don’t want to see, hear, speak or feel evil, but I can’t help it. I want to kill and give pain without a cost. And there is no such thing. We kill him—we killed him a long time ago.” The transition from expressing his desire to kill and give pain to the statement, “We kill him—we killed him a long time ago,” is surprising, seemingly irrational. That transition is revelatory, however, if one assumes, as Kip Kinkel quite possibly did, that the “him” referred to is boyhood itself.

On April 20, 1999, a little less than a year after Kip Kinkel opened fire on his classmates at Thurston High, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both seniors at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, entered the school in late morning heavily armed and dragging duffel bags filled with home-made explosives. Over the next 55 minutes, they wandered about the cafeteria, library and corridors of the school, tossing bombs and firing rifles and handguns at students and faculty. At times the shooters seemed to be firing randomly at display cases or banks of windows. At other times they would focus murderously on students they knew, taunt them and ridicule them before shooting them at point blank range. A little after noon, the school had grown quiet. Twelve students and a teacher lay dead. Twenty-four others were wounded. What students and staff remained were either silently hiding or dead. Police S.W.A.T. teams were massing outside, preparing to storm the building. A school surveillance video captured the final moments of the assailants’ lives as they paced agitatedly about the library before sitting down and shooting themselves fatally in the head.
Of all the school massacres of the past decade, none has been more troubling or gruesome than the Columbine shootings. The killers were older, farther along in their personal development, more effective, better planners. Both boys were facile with computer technology and shared a passion for firearms and explosives. Neither came from abusive or especially troubled households. Neither expressed hostility to his family. In documents discovered after the shootings, both boys stated explicitly their families were in no way at fault. On a calendar kept by Harris and found after his death, he wrote “good wombs have born bad sons” in the Mother’s Day square. Of the two friends, Harris was the more volatile and angry. Earlier in high school he had posted on his computer what appeared to be death threats to a former friend but local police did not see grounds for a formal response. At the time of the shootings Harris was taking a prescription drug, Luvox, to treat depression.
Klebold, best friend to Harris throughout high school, was quieter, harder to read. Some of his classmates thought him merely shy, but others, including some of his teachers, were aware of an angry, rebellious streak. He was inclined to inappropriate language in class, and one of his senior year creative writing assignments was felt by his teacher to be violent and mean-spirited enough to warrant a concerned conference. Klebold served for a time as a technology aide in Columbine’s computer facility, but he had to be disciplined for stealing one of the school’s lap tops and taking it home. In January of their junior year, Harris and Klebold were arrested for breaking into a car to steal computer equipment, for which both were required to undergo psychological counseling and to perform community service. Both boys complied and expressed contrition in the course of their mandated rehabilitation but secretly vowed to wreak a terrible “judgment” on those who had caught and disciplined them for what they cryptically called “the incident.”
The massacre appears to have been planned for over a year. Not old enough to purchase firearms legally, they found intermediaries through whom they could buy shot guns, pistols and semi-automatic weapons. On the internet they learned how to make pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and other explosives, more than a hundred of which they brought to school on the day of the attack. They kept meticulous track of their growing arsenal, including a video inventory. They logged time at a nearby firing range to practice shooting, also documenting these outings with video recordings. The boys periodically exchanged coded messages about the apocalyptic event they had conceived. The attack they were planning was sometimes linked to the film Natural Born Killers, in which a deranged young couple goes on a cross-country shooting spree.
There is a decided grandiosity in the way the boys referred to the impending event. The date of the shooting, April 20, seems to have been a last-minute postponement; the boys had hoped to launch their attack on April 19, commemorating the Branch Davidian shootout in Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Hitler’s birthday. A year before the massacre, Klebold referred to it as the “holy April morning.” The day prior to the event he filled up pages of his school notebook with excited musings: “About 26.5 hours from now the judgement will begin. Difficult but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking & fun.”
When Klebold was confronted by his parents about the violent fantasy he had handed in to his Creative Writing teacher, he protested, “It’s just a story.” There is a clear sense in the documents they left behind that both boys were hungry for a story; more specifically, that their own lives might rise to story quality. But besides Natural Born Killers, the only stories in which they could locate themselves were those structured into their favorite video games, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. In both games, one set on Mars, the other in a kind of Nazi prison, the challenge is for an armed and embattled individual to prevail against a teeming onslaught of attackers. In both games the embattled individual is decidedly righteous, and the attackers—sinister humans, extra-terrestrials, demons—are evil. In both games the world in which the combat is carried out is utterly spoiled. Combatants battle on ramparts suspended over putrid seas of toxic waste. No better world, no prior world awaits the lone victor. He exists to prevail in an endless and escalating succession of violent encounters in which one can either kill or be killed. Crucial for survival in each game is the acquisition of ever more lethal weapons.
Klebold and Harris seemed to be arming themselves for such a contest. A few generations earlier or in the cultural context of another hemisphere, their fantasizing might have been played out on the open range, with a lone cavalry officer on horse back confronting an Apache war party ascending the ridge before him, or perhaps with a masterfully skilled martial artist leaping, kicking and chopping his way through a never ending swarm of deadly attackers. But for Klebold and Harris, the story they were attempting to compose was an angry, ugly blend of Doom and Wolfenstein and Waco and Oklahoma City and Jonesboro. In their story they would be the lone, pitiless, against-the-world combatants, and their enemies would be all who had ever slighted them, ignored them, shamed them, or irritated them, even if the provocation was no more than living, looking, behaving and believing as they did.
The ruined world was school, Columbine High School. In it, as Klebold inscribed in Harris’s yearbook, “my wrath will be godlike.” Harris confided in his journal, “Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit.”
Since the inception of the plan to attack their school, both boys were aware that one way or another they would lose their lives. Harris pledges he will “leave this worthless place” without regret. Three years before 9/11 he mused about hijacking a plane in Denver and crashing it into a building in New York City. The day before the shootings, Klebold wrote in his notebook, “It’s interesting, when I’m in my human form, knowing I’m going to die.” Elsewhere in the same notebook he hopes that the rampage might be at least “fun.” “What fun is life,” he wrote, “without a little death?”
In the event, the Columbine school massacre was, even by the perpetrator’s standards, a terrible story. Sensational as the breaking news of the shootings was, the attack did not go as planned. The initial event was to have been the detonation of two substantial propane bombs in the cafeteria. The bombs they assembled were to have been powerful enough to blow up the entire cafeteria and cause the library above to collapse over the wreckage. The attack plan called for the boys to plant the bombs, withdraw to their cars to observe the devastation and then to open fire on students and faculty as they fled from the building. When the bombs failed to detonate and Harris and Klebold reentered the building, students were slow to realize their gun-toting classmates posed a danger.
As the two armed shooters ranged through the building, they shot some students at close range. They spared others. They fired idly in the direction of distant students, missing most of them. They shot out banks of windows, prominent display cases. Every few minutes they would toss an explosive—pipe bomb, Molotov cocktail—over a railing or under a desk where students were cowering, but most of the bombs failed to explode. A boy who knew Klebold asked him what he was doing. Klebold answered, “Oh, just killing people.” To a girl he encountered praying out loud that she would not be killed, Klebold pointed his gun at her and asked, “Do you believe in God?” He taunted her for a while and then apparently lost interest.
There were brutal, cold-blooded moments. Discovering a tangle of students hiding under a table, Harris said “peek-a-boo,” then shot and killed them at point blank range. At one point in the library, the shooters demanded that “all the jocks” stand up so they could shoot them. None did. Witnesses report another girl was asked if she believed in God and was shot when she answered affirmatively.
In less than an hour the school was quiet. The gunshots and a few of the explosives had damaged the facility, but it was not the smoldering ruin the boys had envisaged. Twelve students and a teacher lay dead in or around the building. Twenty-four others had been hurt. As police SWAT teams positioned themselves outside, Harris and Klebold paced distractedly about the library. Harris was bloodied and suffering from a broken nose caused by the recoiling stock of his rifle. Sensing there was nothing more to do, the boys sat down and shot themselves. No one can know their final thoughts, but they would have been aware that the attack had not gone very well, that they had failed to cause the kind of devastation they had imagined. There is no indication that either boy experienced any kind of revelation, however dark. Klebold was not seen to have had any “fun,” sadistic or otherwise. The events combined to no coherent story.
At seventeen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were as tall and rangy as men. Unlike Kip Kinkel, they could not have been—and in fact were not—called “boyish and likable” by anyone. And in fact they were not at all like boys; they represent, rather, something vacant and devastating that boys might become.