Well. I took
something of an unintentional sabbatical.
Oops.
Life has been kind of crazy lately– finalizing the move and
a super busy work week grabbed my hands and carried me off to magical places
which resulted in me doing little but busy-do-all-of-the-things and sleep. I did actually try to write, but it was
mediocre enough to gently slide into the never-see-the-light-of-day cabinet.
(I promised myself early on not to post anything that wasn’t
actually at least a little bit good.)
But I have returned!
With grand thoughts and magnificent observations! First, though, a picture of Samuel Beam.
 |
Does has beard.
Warning: I'm pretty sure this opening has nothing to do with the rest of the post. |
He’s the lead singer/ guitarist/ sole songwriter of my
current favorite band, Iron & Wine.
I absolutely love his music. It’s
evocative– almost mysterious sounding.
Picture a woodsy folk man, who listens to jazz and blues records and
reads postmodern poetry scribbled on subway walls… that’s Iron & Wine. Sort of.
They kind of defy description.
And the lyrics.
Poetry. Not ‘poetic’ or ‘Hey,
that was a good line,’ but ‘Huh. This
dude’s a better writer than me.' Check
this bit out:
Some days her shape
in the doorway will
speak to me, a
bird's wing on the window
Sometimes I'll hear
her when she's sleeping,
her fever dream a
language on her face
I want your flowers
like babies want God's love
or maybe as sure as
tomorrow will come
(Taken out of Fever
Dream, from the album Our Endless
Numbered Days.)
Anyways.
I spent $100 worth of Amazon gift cards a few months
ago. All on books. Well, mostly on books. I did buy a Sonic Screwdriver, too.
 |
I regret this purchase not. It sits in an honored place on my dresser,
and frequently comes with me to the outside world. |
But mostly books, one of which was The Archetypes and the Collective Unconcious, a volume that
collects Carl Jung’s basic writings on, well, the archetypes and the collective
unconscious. In case you don’t know,
Jung was an early psychologist– he studied under Freud, though he came to
depart from his teacher on many issues.
Significantly, they disagreed on the factors defining the human
psyche. Freud, of course, was mostly
concerned with the individual consciousness and the pathos that defined it.
Jung didn’t disagree that the individual’s personal
consciousness and the personal subconscious– or, as they refer to it more
often, unconscious– were factors in the human person. Far from it.
But he didn’t consider those to be the only factors influencing human
thought and behavior.
This is where things get cool.
He postulated that there is a collective unconscious. Quick
breakdown: we all have our personal conscious and unconscious, unique entirely
to us. Jung, though, believes that
another level exists, a shared unconscious identical in every human being. It’s a reservoir of archetypes that are
essential to humanity.
You’ve heard the word
archetype, before, I’m guessing. To be
honest, it gets thrown around inaccurately a lot. I’ve seen review blurbs that utilize the term
as if it meant cliché or stereotype.
Reader, beware. That’s not what
archetypes are.
Rather, an archetype is an unconscious and primordial psychological
presence common to all humans. We make
sense of the world through them, without realizing it. They are to the collective unconscious what
the pathos are to the individual unconscious.
Almost like instincts, but not exactly.
They’re like an enormous thought that everyone’s always thinking without
realizing it.
Representations of them appear in every world culture. The archetypes– which are in themselves
formless, or at least beyond human comprehension if they actually have a true
embodiment– find physical representations in human art and beliefs throughout
human society. One of the most
recognizable is this:
 |
The Ouroboros. This image is from Wikipedia. Totes authentic, y'all.
(Sarcasm about Wikipedia aside, I'm fairly certain this one's real.) |
It’s crazy how much that one comes up. The oldest example is Egyptian.
The Ouroboros symbol appears in Nordic mythology. As a timeline, ancient Egyptian culture
flourished over a thousand years before the birth of Christ (I know it’s more
correct now to say BCE, but seriously, the CE is based off of a Christocentric
timeline…). The mythological life of
Scandinavia barely began before the early Middle Age.
Confession: that’s the easiest one to point out. Many others are more ambiguous, and I haven’t
quite read enough Jung to adequately explain.
But I hope that gives you an idea of the whole archetype jam.
Importantly, the ways we represent archetypes are not the
archetypes themselves. As I mentioned a
little bit ago, they don’t have an actual physical form. They are primordial and permanent thoughts
present in everyone, and find different expressions in different ways through
the lens of human experience. But, as
with the ouroboros, they can also be strikingly similar across cultures.
~ ~ ~
Now, the modes of the expression, to be totally clear, are
not the archetypes. They’re almost like
art– imitations, reflections, personal interpretations of something
profound. E.g., one of the most striking
moments of my life was on a bus with my best friend on a trip we both attended
to Niagara Falls. I published a poem
earlier this year that was about said experience, but if I
hadn’t told you, you’d never know. The
poem’s language is about trolleys and Victorians and the road getting washed
away. Think of our representations of
archetypes like that. Distorted, though
the distortion is actually a good thing.
For art, distortion is good because honestly, what actually
happened on the bus wouldn’t be terribly interesting to anyone other than my
friend and I. But couched in the poetic
language, it transcends and becomes something other people want to hear
about. At least I hope they’d want to
hear about it.
But the reason the archetypes take forms, rather than
manifest as themselves, is a bit more dire.
Just a bit. On one hand, it’s
fairly obvious why– they’re incorporeal mental nonentity entity-ish things. But think about that for a moment– the
concept becomes alarming when you realize that, if Jung is correct, the
archetypes really define a lot of our basic behaviors, which in turn define a
lot of the way we lead our lives.
Encountering one, in its pure, raw form, would be unbelievably
unsettling. The least cloaked versions
of the archetypes are often the scariest.
Kind of like Cthulhu.
 |
Come to think of it, it might be best not to think too hard about
which archetype Cthulhu falls under. The implications are
probably unsettling. |
Thus, even a relatively tamed version of an archetype (because, let's be honest, Cthulhu doesn't really fit the normal definition of 'tame') will contain
tremendous power. Jung theorizes that
our mythologies, religions, stories, and the universal tenets and characters
that appear, are all at least partially the archetypes’ manifestations. Without those, we would encounter the
archetypes in their raw– or at least very much closer– form, a dangerous
proposition. They’re too much for the
human consciousness to handle. Actually,
Jung sees them as a root cause of mental illness and a catalyst for the development
of the pathos in the personal psyche. Don’t
get too close, or they’ll get’cha, to be a little crude in expression.
So, we develop all sorts of ways to react.
He gives particular props to Roman Catholicism. He regards the complex symbology of the
Church and the intricate layers to those symbols as huge layers of safety
netting over the archetypes.
He’s a little less enthusiastic about Protestantism,
because, historically speaking, the movement within Christianity largely denied
the ornate nature of the Church and focused on a de-mystification of the
business of faith.
Skipping things so we don’t get boring, one thing leads to
the next, the questioning of traditional authority brings on the Enlightenment,
we jump back a bit and get more symbolic with the Romantic movement sans the
authority of the Church bit, skip hop jump 20th century and
Modernism. The Church remains an
enormous institution, even in the historically anti-Catholic America (which is
kind of weird, given America’s reputation for tolerance, but oh well…). But the layers of imagery and symbolism have
been divested of their power, at least where archetypes are concerned. The Protestant and secular worlds have both
questioned them and, resultantly, rendered them unable to form an adequate processing
barrier between the archetypes and the human person.
~ ~ ~
I want to be clear– I’m Catholic. Passionately so. I believe in the cosmology of the Church. The Triune God, Mary, the Mother of God, the
saints, angels, demons, and the odd nephilim or two. Jung’s theories are compatible with this
belief. Actually, I’ve toyed with the
idea that the archetypes do, in fact, have their fundamental origin with the
Catholic cosmology.
That’s another story, though.
Basically, I just wanted to reassure any concerned readers
that I’m not, in any way, calling into question the truths of my faith.
~ ~ ~
So. Falling back on
the Church’s cosmology as the safety net against the power of the archetypes no
longer works, societally, because they’ve been called into question by so many
people and have been deprived of their former power, as images. Not as actual independent realities. Just psychologically.
This was well in place by the time Jung was writing. In the early 20th century, he
believed, the West was turning to the East and attempting to borrow their
symbols and images, to re-clothe the increasingly naked and powerful
archetypes. Generally, he thought that
was a pretty bad idea… “It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to
avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning the legacy
to which we are not legitimate heirs at all.
We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow
we have squandered this heritage.”
Borrowing those images, Jung believes, won’t work. We don’t have a legitimate claim on them,
because we haven’t built them up over centuries and made our delicate psyches
dependents upon them.
It’s vaguely akin to current poets who try really hard to
rhyme and maintain a stiff meter. The
schools of poetry that wrote like that did so because it was the mode of
expression natural and appropriate to them, in their time and place. Now, it– generally, not always– comes off as
very stilted and awkward.
So, stealing other people’s coping methods, he thought, was
basically ineffective, and maybe a little rude.
Making the archetypes conscious was important to him– recognizing them
in whatever way they manifested, often in dreams or through neuroses– and then
allowing them to go back safely into the unconscious. This may be a good clinical way of coming to
terms with the rawer archetypal presence in our lives. I don’t really know, not being a
psychologist.
Come to think of it, I’m fairly uncertain as to how
seriously these aspects of Jung’s theories are taken in current
psychology. He was always adamant that
he was a scientist, but his ideas seem, at least on the surface, fairly hard to
empirically prove… to be fair, he saw hard line empiricism as a hindrance. Hmmm…
Besides the point. We
are getting to the point, I promise. My
blog posts are the opposite of my academic papers. In MLA format, you’re supposed to introduce
the thesis at the beginning, but in my posts, I always throw it out somewhere
towards the middle. Hopefully, I’ll be
able to switch back by September, when classes begin. And stop writing so much in the passive
voice.
The coming semester will be interesting.
Ok. So. Archetypes.
Layers of images and symbols.
Stripped of their power.
Whoah. Now we’re way to close and,
Jung thought, getting alarmingly neurotic as a result. Enter therapy to help identify and thus allow
the archetypes passage back into the slumbering realm of the unconscious. Don’t bother bothering other cultures’ cosmologies. Won’t work, man. Sorry.
But.
~ ~ ~
Have you noticed how important pop-culture characters are to
us? They weren’t, not so long ago. If you talk to people who were teenagers or
twenty-somethings in the 70s, they had their heroes and things they thought
were groovy. (I'm not being facetious by using groovy. It's one of my favorite words.)
 |
| Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. He had some great hair going on. |
But, by and large, Batman didn’t have the power he has
today. He was a character in comic
books, and he had a really terrible TV show.
Think about Batman for a moment.
He’s now a symbol to the actual world, not just to the fictional Gotham
City. The Joker is too. Within popular culture, they’ve taken on
mythic proportions.
Star Wars. My close friends know I’m a little obsessed
where Star Wars is concerned. But I’m
not the only one. It was popular in the
70s and 80s. It’s a phenomenon now. Crazy huge.
It doesn’t matter that they’re just movies. The characters, phrases, and iconography of
the story are endemic in us.
There are almost endless examples. Head to Hot Topic sometime soon, which picked
up on the trend and reflects our societal obsession with these pop-culture images. I’ve been saying 70s and 80s, but it’s
honestly only been in the past few years.
In 2006, Hot Topic was the super commercialized emo fashion store. Now, it’s a little pop-culture shop. This trend towards a boredline idolization of
pop-culture figures is new. It’s been
building up for a while, certainly. But
to the level it’s at? Very recent.
The one that’s biggest for me has been exploding lately– Dr.
Who. It’s hard to put into words what
the story means to me. Almost nothing
has affected me as much in my life. The
experience borders on religious– not in a worshipful sense, of course, but in
its sheer import. The Doctor himself is
titanic in my imagination.
 |
My favorite Doctor is the Doctor, but I figured it'd be safest
to post a Tennant/ Smith duo pic, lest terrifying fandom people
come demanding which I like best and shunning me
when it's not the answer they wanted to hear.... |
I’ve cried more, been more moved by the Doctor than any
other story, or particularly fictional character, in my life. That in and of itself is a bit strange. The writing for the show is brilliant,
admittedly. But it’s not the only
brilliant thing ever written. The
characters are excellent, especially the Doctor himself, but they’re not the
only amazing characters out there. But I
can’t escape the potency of what it means to me. I can’t even tell you exactly what it means,
but it’s beyond appreciating a work of art.
David Tennant, who portrayed the Doctor from 2006 to 2010, said
recently, “The show has a particular place in people’s affections.”
I suspect that affection may be kind of archetypal.
~ ~ ~
Jung thought it best to recognize whatever weird way the
archetypes made themselves apparent in the personal human mind, rather than
trying to appropriate symbols devoid of such meaning when stripped of their
true culture. Yes, they’d manifest themselves
in many ways throughout the broad spectrum of people; the psychologist’s duty,
then, was to identify the symbols and associate them with an archetype. But the old way, wherein a complex net of
symbols usually prevented archetypes from manifesting in a rawer form at all,
seemed obsolete.
What he didn’t predict, what he, from the perspective of the
early 20th century, probably couldn’t have predicted, was the
ability of the human mind to create images and our weird proclivity for
sharing. We may live in a postmodern
world that loves individual experience, but we’re pretty convicted about
sharing stuff. I might use
post-post-pre-cyborgization criticism for Harry
Potter and you might look at it from a modernistic new historicist
viewpoint, but we’re both reading it.
Harry Potter. Star
Wars. Doctor Who. Death Note. Let’s be fair– My Little Pony. Even bands
are taking on an almost mythic proportion.
They’re beacons of hope, huge beyond who the people in them actually
are. More examples. The
Lord of the Rings. Game of Thrones. Pokemon. Avatar: the Last Airbender. The Lovecraft mythos that I’m always vaguely
referencing and posting depictions of.
All of these have a massive and maybe a tad bit irrational
following. Yet the irrationality, I think,
might itself be essential– Jung actually warns against trying to rationalize
the archetypes away or pretend as if we’ve developed beyond their
influence. He wrote, “I am far from
wishing to belittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty. But in the role of absolute tyrant it has no
meaning– no more than light would in a world where its counterpart, darkness,
was absent.”
Thus, I suspect that those being touched by these
pop-cultural giants are in fact interacting with the archetypes that exist in
our collective unconscious. The fact
that it’s collective might even explain the broad appeal of series that, less
than twenty years ago, would have been (or were) regarded as a fringe element,
of limited appeal to the masses. Now,
many of them are acclaimed and popular.
We love them with a fervor that’s honestly a little weird. Not a criticism– as I write, I’m looking at
one of my Doctor Who posters, and if
I turn around, I’ll see a map of Middle-Earth flanked by Narnia and Westeros–
but an observation.
We have entered the new archetypal age.
~ ~ ~
Sorry, I couldn’t resist the chance to make a dramatic
statement. I don’t know if we have or
not, but I think it’s a compelling idea with enough evidence to make it
credible and not just weird. Ponder
it. I'm not 100% certain I believe it myself. But I think it's interesting. Maybe I’ve been reading too much old
psychology and philosophy lately.
Let me
know what you think, if you’d like, in the comments. I’m heading into another week where busy will
probably be the word of the day every day, but I promise I’ll read any thoughts
you leave and try to respond soon!
Also, this might be the first in a cycle of related posts. Ummm, I'll let you know at the beginning of a new post if it's one of the closely related ones.
(Also, many thanks to my friend Jacob. He helped get me into archetypal theory. We discussed this idea yesterday, and he thought it meritorious, so give him a mental high-five if you liked it!)
