The Teeming Brain

As I’ve stated here many times, I’m fascinated by the idea of the daimon, the guiding force inside a person’s psyche that acts like a spiritual/psychological compass, always pointing north, always reminding you of what your true life direction is no matter what direction you may currently be turned. This has led to my always being on the lookout for things that resonate with this idea. I’ve found that such references occur with surprising frequency once you’ve trained yourself to scan for them constantly. They’re especially common whenever people talk about their childhood dreams, drives, fears, and passions.

A case in point is a recent British television interview with Stephen King, wherein King talks ever so briefly about his early childhood attraction to horror entertainment. He uses the metaphor of an internal “geiger counter” that lights up when a person comes in contact with something meaningful to him or her. I find this radiation-based image to be pretty neat.

Here are his words:

Interviewer: What sort of a child were you, then?

King: A quiet one.

Interviewer: Were you?

King: Yeah, I was quiet. I had a lot of things to make up and I lived a lot of life, you know, inside my head. I had a normal enough childhood, I think. On the outside, anyway.

Interviewer: So when did the love of horror kick in?

King: Oh, from the very first. Basically, when someone says, “What was your childhood like?” I know that what they’re trying to get at is, “What twisted you to make you the sort of fellow you are today?”

Interviewer: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s exactly what I was asking.

King: But you have something inside that’s just your thing. It’s there and you go toward it. Lance Armstrong has the bike, and it’s like when that bike thing came up, his internal geiger counter went crazy. And mine, when I saw those horror comics and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, that was it for me. I wanted to do that.

(The rest of the interview is well worth watching. The portion I’ve just quoted occurs at a little over a minute into it.)

With these words King is getting at what I take to be very largely the same idea developed by psychologist James Hillman in his best-selling 1997 book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, which approaches being the definitive modern statement of daimonic psychology. Hillman speaks of “reading life backward” by looking at one’s lifelong behavioral patterns in symptomatic terms. Consider you lifelong loves and hatreds, desires and aversions, obsessions and neuroses, and from these “symptoms” try to divine what you are “meant” to be in the world by innate endowment and inclination. “Reading life backward,” he writes,

enables you to see how early obsessions are the sketchy preformation of behavior now. Sometimes the peaks of the early years are never surpassed. Reading backward means that growth is less the key biological term than form, and that development only makes sense when it reveals a facet of the original image. Of course a human life advances from day to day, and regresses, and we do see different faculties develop and watch them wither. Still, the innate image of your fate holds all the copresence of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Your person is not a process or development. You are that essential image that develops, if it does. As Picasso said, “I don’t develop; I am.”

By way of illustrating the point, consider Hillman’s further words in an excellent 1998 interview:

It’s important to ask yourself, “How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?” That may very well reveal what you are here for.

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too. When you look into the archetypal nature of taxation, you realize that all civilizations have had taxation of one sort or another. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing is about tax collecting — the scribe recording what was paid and what wasn’t paid.

So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.

. . . . I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing [i.e., a calling]. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It’s more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.

Finally, the current incarnation of the Wikipedia page about Hillman gives a very good summary idea of his overall approach in The Soul’s Code that will make a good conclusion to this post (but let the reader beware a couple of strange wordings in the text, courtesy of Wikipedia’s lack of editorial oversight):

Hillman’s 1997 book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines what he calls the acorn theory of the soul. This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself. It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns. Instead the book suggests for a reconnection with what is invisible within us, our daimon or soul or acorn and its calling to the wider world of nature. It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal. This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere — a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be medicated out of existence.

In this way Hillman diverges from Jung and his idea of the Self. Hillman sees this as too prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try and grow properly.

Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn.

Personally, I find Hillman’s theory and King’s geiger counter metaphor to be mutually illuminating. Thus it is that the mental image of an angelic/demonic being carrying an acorn in one hand and a geiger counter in the other can become a holy icon.

FYI, for some of my extended ruminations about daimons and the daimonic drive, I encourage you to read some of my previous posts, including: “Daemonyx: What’s in a name?”, “The Passion of Rob Zombie,” “The Daemon is someone inside you,” and “The Greeks and their daimones.”

Two recent posts from James Howard Kunstler at his blog Clusterfuck Nation exemplify yet again why I keep returning to read his rants. In many ways he strikes me as a Mencken for the modern generation. Like Mencken, his observations about contemporary cultural issues are razor sharp. Like Mencken, he shares these observations in sparkling-witty prose that’s chock full of intentional overstatement and quotable zingers. Also like Mencken, his vision of the America into which he finds himself thrown is equal parts anger, indignation, cynicism, and witty sarcasm.

But unlike Mencken — and here I may be about to expose my relative ignorance of the earlier man — Kunstler also lets slip a definite softer side from time to time, whenever he drops the sarcasm and expresses a less histrionic but no less genuine sadness over what America has become.

Over time I’ve found that Kunstler hits regularly upon the very issues that elicit my own anger, indignation, sarcasm, and sadness, issues related to America’s devolution into a theme-park culture of consumerism that exalts empty images of success and happiness based on superficial glamour. And he does so in a way that wrenches repeated “Amens!” from my soul. His two most recent posts at the time of this writing are cases in point. Below are links and excerpts. I urge you to follow the links and read the essays in full. Maybe he can become for you what he’s become for me: a locus of expression for the (validly) negative view of things in these late days of the New Roman Empire.

1. “Thuggo and Sluggo” (July 2, 2007)

As someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports, I marvel at the way my fellow citizens present themselves in public. I see middle-aged women who appear to have left home in their pajamas. But it’s the costume and demeanor of American young men especially that raises interesting questions about who we have become.

The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources: prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile.

. . . . The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose fantasies of power and importance. It’s a picture of men without real confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken seriously.

The rest of the world must tremble to contemplate the picture we present. The Nazi soldiers of 1944 were glamour boys compared to the riff-raff that American young men have become. As for those who actually do make it into the army, you wonder how they appear to the locals overseas — they’re probably taken seriously as exactly what they present themselves to be: manifestly evil beings who really need to be blown up.

2. “Rain Dance” (July 9, 2007)

Am I the only one who wonders whether rock and roll extravaganzas in the service of Great Causes might be exercises in grandiosity and futility? What I wonder especially: is this the only way we know how to respond to the difficulties that life on earth presents — to engage a corps of professional narcissists to strut and pose in stadiums, affecting to wave their magic wands (or Fender Stratocasters) and make everybody feel better about a given problem (distress on the farm, disease in Africa, global warming….)? Can’t we think of other, more meaningful things to do? Or are we stuck in a perpetually delusional rut of Woodstock-style symbolism, out doing a global rain dance instead of really changing our behavior?

. . . . There was so much about the Live Earth show that actually expressed what is worst about the current state of American culture: the obscene posturing of zillionaire celebrities, awarding themselves brownie points for the largeness of their concern — even while, like Mr. Sting of the band called the Police, they buy-and-sell $20 million Manhattan condos, and burn god-knows-how many tons of Wyoming coal amplifying the bass runs to “Roxanne.” And the flip-side of these celebrity pretensions, of course, is the disturbing fealty paid to them by the fans, as members of the public caught up in celebrity-worship are called. Obviously, the whole thing is a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop spiraling up to ever worse grandiosity on the part of the celebs and ever more pathetic groveling worship of these fake gods by the fans — until it becomes little more than an object lesson in the tragic limitations of the human condition.

I know, I know, it’s been well over a week since my last post.  I am indeed behind my time.  Currently I’m on summer break from my teaching job, and I think the “I’m on vacation!” attitude has spread out to affect my blogging behavior as well.

But for now I thought I’d take a moment to announce that T.M. Wright and I are making significant headway on the Holy Horrors anthology.  The headline is that, as of about a week ago, WE HAVE READ ALL OF THE SUBMISSIONS.  Responses are now being sent out right and left.  Many authors have already been notified and many more will hear from us shortly.

So that’s where the project stands now.  I expect that the next time I make a formal update — in the not-distant future — it will be to announce the anthology’s table of contents.

Thanks again to everybody who submitted a story!  T.M. and I really appreciate your interest, and also your laudable patience during this long reading period.  I’m thrilled to say we have attracted an absolutely amazing lineup of authors and stories.  Holy Horrors promises to be not only a good anthology, but a great one — and I say that as a pat on the back not to T.M. and myself but to all of the writers who have sent us such excellent stories.  For fans of high-quality horror fiction featuring a deep religious/spiritual element, this book promises to be a veritable feast.