Reflection on "The Force of Character" by James Hillman

James Hillman, an archetypal depth psychologist, whose post-Jungian conception of the human experience is essentially imaginative, and whose amoral fluctuation between endurance and immaturity lies nascent in the temporal grains of salt which gather and line the throat with ever increasing grab as aging commences upon the personality. Written at an old age, the author speaks clearly against any kind of aging therapy, and humanizes the current malaise which treats aging as a virus.

The author unwraps biological naturalism with the psychological bloom of a mind fermented with insightful, though not inundated, research on the literary and aesthetic character of human aging as a welcoming asset to life, in flagrant contrast to the ceremonial traditionalism of preparing for death, a non-issue in the continuous envelopment of life throughout the growing and falling of seasonal lasting. Dreams are referred to for their imagistic plentitude in bringing the holistic human experience towards fruition in the entire round of consciousness.

In short, Hillman's psychology is life-affirming unto the limits of modern knowledge-bearing with regard to the biological strength of humankind to age well and vigorously, as an essential presence in social reflection, as a memory of characterful belonging in the psyche of an unconscious gathering of the old triumphant spirit of age in all its mythic fortitude and human vulnerability.

Read Scott London's brilliant interview with the late author: On Soul, Character and Calling : A Conversation with James Hillman

__________

Strutting down main street, Northampton, the little city atmosphere in a smaller town, brevity of metrosexual burning. Eyehole of gouged recollection, that there is a grayer hiss over the obscure horizon edge. A paranoiac whereabouts, a drinkability churning in the ingrate stomach as cold rice turns to frothy fluid within mellowed bowels. The attuned ear swings in frantic respite as the free march to movie theatre skies nickels and dimes my racy birth rite beginnings in the stingy hollow of American noonday education.

Northampton (Massachusetts) by William Henry Bartlett

Deeper along the edge of the township, towards rougher pasture, the greener grass gives to a brown floor of the barn stead. Outside, a reenactment of the medieval lance posture, only instead of a game between knights, the Anglo matador speaks in a murderous war with the human horse. I try my hand. With two lances upraised, I pierce the flesh of a gorgeous brown horse, mirroring the hue of the dirt circle fenced by a weak wooden ring and an audience steeped in American farmhouse poverty. As other horses, unsaddled and with fierce eyes, carouse into the ring, I jet from the gathering into a blacker city.

The Present by Thomas Cole

The jurist is deliberate, patient and silent. Instead of an easy interpretation by the passive jury of bored, directionless public witnessing, a guitarist lights the court with unfailing melodies, an original spirit of human will, to impose the individual struggle with death outside of foreign deliberation in the mind of an other. Because truly, in listening, the other melds seamlessly with the brain of a decidedly active witness, pardoning all in the sonic flight of metaphysical charm.

_________

Gazing at my Love's face, I see through the apparent reality to a frameless art. A sacred geometry in the flesh. A timeless elision, going beyond spent energy.

To consume a day; imagining with laughter in the midst of family. 

- excerpt from "Gazing at Love's Face"