Soul Making, Version Number One

2011_11_16 Soul-Making, Version 1

Part one

“Each of us enacts Persephone in soul—dragged off and pulled down by Hades—then we see life through her darker eye. We do mot recognize the full reality of anima until attacked by Hades, until unconscious underworld forces overpower and make captive our normalcy. Only then, it seems, are we able to discriminate psyche from human; then we see human concerns differently, psychologically.”

The quote is from James Hillman. I could have used this understanding when I experienced the INFERNO in July 1968; it would have saved me a lot of stress and stumbling around in the dark. On the other hand, I couldn’t comprehend it till after I had gone through the INFERNO. It takes a baptism by fire to open ones psychological pores and to distinguish the psyche from the human.

But let me begin at the beginning of the process.

Organized religion fell by the wayside for me my junior year in Madison, 1957, when I was 21 yrs old and an Applied Arts major at the University of Wisconsin. When I stack up my yrs in academe, first as a student for seven years, and ten as an instructor, it was a long tenure that left its mark on me, just as 21 years as a Catholic left an indelible imprint. All through my academic yrs after 1957 I regarded organized religion as old hat, as bogus. The new self-Image I had carved for myself was largely derived from the guiding philosophy of a few of my favorite professors. Fred Spratt, Dick Tansey, Mr. Collins and Tom Elsner. In two words, secular humanism. Almost two decades later, when I started working at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Tucson, I quickly learned I was in a crowd that despised the idea of secular humanism; they treated it as something aberrant, a dirty word, and a form of godlessness. But for me in my late twenties it was what I embraced as a serviceable credo. For more than a decade I saw myself as a hard-core rationalist who believed in the dignity of man and frowned down my nose at Christianity, which of course upset my mother and brother back in my hometown, Racine, Wisconsin. But that could not be help. I had to go another way than my family.

Not only had I taken secular humanism as my moral and intellectual guide from my teachers at San Jose State College, I totally dropped the art orientation I had grown up with, one that regarded Norman Rockwell and David Stone Martin as the exemplary figures to emulate. I gave up my allegiance to commercial art and threw my hat in the ring of Abstract Expressionism. There was a stage in between where I thought Oscar Kokoschka was the Man. There was still subject matter at that juncture, but more and more the emphasis was on a generous application of paint rather than representation. Naturally, it was my teachers who pushed me increasingly in the direction of abstraction, which by 1960 was a well-established and acceptable style and idiom. Eventually I was producing images on canvas that were devoid of representation. I began to sling paint with the best of them.

My political leanings had always been center-left so I had no hesitation falling in step with the Liberalism prevailing in the art department and on campus at San Jose State. My father had been a union leader at the factory where he worked for 35 yrs. He also had been an enthusiastic supporter of FDR, something I have a very clear memory of. I can recall arguments he had with my Uncle Joe who liked Senator Bob Taft; the house would shake as the two of them would go at with hammer and tongs for hours on Sunday afternoons. I always identified with my father and his point of view. I proved my mettle in regard liberal views when I started teaching at UNLV. I was founder and president of an AFT local on campus; I demonstrated against the war in Vietnam; I got involved with civil rights issues; and I was co-founder of CINEMA X, a film society that showed controversial and experimental films. Someone expressed their disdain for my activity by slashing a 15 inch cut in an oil painting of mine hanging in the UNLV library. In addition to that some angry student defaced two of my drawings in a one-man show in the art department gallery. He or she scribbled all over the two drawings with ballpoint pen. My reward for all this activity was the administration wasn’t going to give me tenure. It made no difference; after 5 yrs at UNLV I had had enough of university teaching.

Now everything I have discussed so far was about outside activity, not what was going on in the inside. There has been no mention of my dark side, which did stir in my time in Las Vegas. The complete story of what happened to me is told in detail in Primus Rota and Bridge in the Fog, so I needn’t go through it in detail here. Let me state a few facts and we’ll leave it at that. My political activity on campus and the negative national mood sent me into a depression that motivated me to stop painting and to start drawing, which had always been my first love as an artist. Synchronous with my mood and bad temper, I began to turn out drawings that had a bite similar to what George Gross and Jose Luis Cuevas had. I became known for these hard-hearted images of ugly, vicious people doing violence to each other. After my benign paintings the drawings shocked locals and me too, as I hadn’t known I had that much anger and raw emotion inside me. The dark side hadn’t been my concerned until I reached my early thirties. (I was hired to teach at UNLV when I was 29.) Sure, I had taken a psychology class and read some Freud and Jung, but that was all book learning; I took nothing to heart nor spent much time on introspection. The only indications of possible internal problems were two things. First of all, I had a long-time fear of the dark, which I attributed to my mother’s nighttime screaming fits, which never failed to wake me up, and to my Catholic past, as the devil was always after you. Secondly, my wife, Sue, had two affairs during the first year of our marriage, which shocked and shattered me; it was something devastating to my masculine identity, as I figured she had sought satisfaction elsewhere because my lovemaking was that inadequate. A darkness rose up in me that I had no idea was present in my psyche. It rocked my world, my confidence and my comfort inside my skin. The impact of her behavior was another influence on my pen and inks. Years later, after we had moved to Tucson, I had divided my Vegas drawings into major categories. One batch of drawings I designated “The Sinister Female.” I had worked out my anger by drawing a load of negative images of the female. I did that off and on for another 20 yrs.

By the time got out of grad school I had shaped an identity I called “the heroic ego.” However, in back of this polished persona there were occasional cracks in the façade, small rivulets of sickness and whirlpools of inner chaos seeping out through chinks in my character armour. The especially vulnerable areas were sexuality and masculine identity, poor self-esteem, personal demons, a deep seeded fear and anxiety, and the instability of male-female relationships. At certain moments my so-called heroic ego was more like a rag on a stick flapping in an ill wind. Behind my cool and confident exterior was, when a crisis hit, a deep insecurity that I worked hard to disguise or hide. My interior world always seemed to be in ferment. What was really happening was what James Hillman calls “ pathologizing or falling apart.” By this he means the psyche is self-regulating; it will through necessity create or manifest illness, morbidity, disorder, and suffering in order that the person can see him-or-herself through a deformed and afflicted perspective. Hillman writes:

“There is a simultaneity in the underworld and the daily world. There is only one and the same universe, coexistent and synchronous, bur Zeus sees it from above and through the light, Hades from below and into the darkness. Hades’ realm is contiguous with life, touching it at all points, just below it, its shadow brother (doppelganger) giving to life its depth and its psyche.”

When I began my teaching career in the mid-sixties I was brimful of confidence and saw things through the light; but soon after I had fallen apart and saw things through a glass darkly. It had to happen and I am glad it did.

“Revival is forced on us by the dire pathologizing of psychic necessities.”