posted April 17, 2013 12:44 PM            

from: "The Soul's Code:
In Search of Character and Calling"
by James Hillman

quote:

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Extraordinary people excite; they guide; they warn; standing, as they do, in the corridors of imagination -- statues of greatness, personifications of marvel and sorrow... They give our lives an imaginary dimension... Without these exemplars of the daimon, we have no other category of the extraordinary except diagnostic pathology. These personifications of heightened imagination burn right into the soul and are its teachers. Not only the hero... but tragic figures too, beauties and comics and crones and handsome leading men. The stagy exaggeration of character traits displayed by extraordinary people belongs to the Roomantic tradition. When the tradition of Romantic grandeur, with its cast of lunatics, lovers, and poets, is down-sized by egalitarianism, deconstructed by academic cynicism, or labeled grandiosity by psychoanalytic diagnostics, then the vacancy in the culture is occupied by pop-star squatters... By psychology's "mortal" sin, I mean the sin of deadening, the dead feeling that comes over us when we read professional pychology, hear its language, the voice with which it drones... Grand motivations are lost to psychological categories like grandiosity and inflation, while the adventure of ideas is cut to fit experimental designs... By looking at ourselves as examples of calling, at our destinies as manifestations of the daimon, and at our lives with the imaginary sensitivity we give fictions [we might find that] beauty is itself a cure for psychological malaise. That longing in the human heart for beauty must be recognized by the field which claims the human heart to be its province... The Romantics grasped this essential truth. Their exaggerated overreach toward cloudy glories meant to bring into this world forms of the invisible they knew were necessary for imagining what a life is... The daimon's "reminders" work in many ways. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed... It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns... It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition... It is slow to anchor and quick to fly. It can't shed its supernal calling, sensing itself both in lonely exile and in cosmic harmony. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind...

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