(From " The
Essential James Hillman" ed.Thomas Moore 1989 Routledge)
According to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, "the
whole world is full of gods." The idea that the world itself
in al its particulars has soul was reborn in the Renaissance
and now it is taken up in archetypal psychology. In the writings
of James Hillman, Robert Sardello, Ginette Paris, Wolfgang Giegerich,
and other archetypalists, this is not just a philosophical and
mystical notion. If psychology is by definition work with the
soul. And it nature and culture have soul. Then psychology must
concern itself with this larger sphere.
Hillman argues strongly against reducing soul to personal subjectivity,
naming personalism as on of the burdens of the modern era.
Psychology assumes that only humans are persons, and therefore
we are given the impossible responsibility of carrying the full
weight of soul. We tend to interpret everything in terms of
personal relationships. Even therapy is often defined as the
interaction of two persons, and the goal in therapy is the personal
development or growth of the private individual.
The soul is not of itself personal. Of course. the psyche presents
itself in images of persons and in personal feelings, but it
is more than personal. Carl Jung used the phrase objective psyche,
suggesting that when we look into the soul. E are looking at
something with its own terrain, its own history and purposes,
and its own principles of movement and stasis. The interested,
noninterfering tone of Hillman usually takes when dealing with
manifestations of the soul derives in large measure from this
conviction that the soul has it own reasons.
To the archetypal psychologist the world, too, is a patient
in need of therapeutic attention. When our fantasy of the world
deprives it of personality and soul. we tend to treat this "inanimate" world
badly. We place all our psychological attention on interior
events and intimate relationships, withdrawing that attention
from the world. But if the world has subjectivity, we have to
have a relationship with it. Therefore, as Hillman says, we
can be in the world through the heart rather than the head.
We can feel our congenital ties to the things of nature and
of culture, discovering our actual attachments and thereby developing
new intimacies with what has been previously dismissed as dead
throwaway matter.
Hillman refuses to see personality in the world of things as
projections of our own fantasies. While it is true that we perceive
the world’s soul through a refined and string imagination.
That doesn’t mean that the world is alive only through
our fantasy of it. Nature, architecture, politics, economics,
and even city transportation are filed with fantasy that lies
beyond our projections. Archetypal psychology tries to unveil
that imagery. The point is not to dissect the world’s
soul for the mere pleasure of analysis and understanding. But
to remember the world’s body so that we can become more
aware of how it affects us and relate to it as person to person.
We might also find in that relationship, as we would with a
human patient, areas of suffering in need of special attention.
Here. Hillman’s point is that therapy on our own sold
is ultimately ineffective without equal attention to the world
soul.
Hillman’s essay on nature is especially interesting in
the regard. If we take nature literally and romanticize its
beauty and harmony then we stand a chance of losing touch with
the "natural beauty" of culture. Of the things we
make. For his notion of soul. Hillman relies on alchemists who
describe soul as an opus " a work". He also keeps
in mind the quotation from John Keats that describes the world
as the "vale of soul-making". Hillman uses this as
a motto for archetypal psychology. Culture can be defined as
the work of soul-making.
To his theory of anima mundi Hillman adds many essays on the
soul of ordinary things, from city streets to the ceiling in
a room, thereby restoring a sensibility for the affections and
sensitivities of things. If the world has soul, then each thing
in its own way will manifest consciousness and affect. If it
is difficult to imagine this soul. the perhaps that difficulty
only demonstrates how much subjectivity we humans have usurped.
Yet it is abundantly clear how much soul we can find on an ocean
beach, in a cabinetmaker’s shop, or on neighbourhood street.
Returning soul to the world not only attends to the world, it
offers more opportunity to engage in the work of soul ourselves.
Anima Mundi 99
In place of the familiar notion of Psychic reality based on
a system of private experiencing subjects and dead public
objects, 1 want to advance a view prevalent in many cultures
(called primitive and animistic by Western cultural anthropologists),
which also returned for a short while in ours at its glory
through Florence and Marsilio Ficino. I am referring to the
world soul of Platonism, which means nothing less than the
world ensouled.
Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul spark,
that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in
its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities
presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation
as a face bespeaking its interior image-in short, its availability
to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only
animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul
is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made
things of the street.
The world comes with shapes, colors, atmospheres, textures---a
display of self-presenting forms. All things show faces, the
world not only a coded signature to be read for meaning, but
a physiognomy to be faced. As expressive forms, things speak;
they show the shape they are in. They announce themselves, bear
witness to their presence: "Look, here we are." They
regard us beyond how we may regard them, our perspectives, what
we intend with them, and how we dispose of them. This imaginative
claim on attention bespeaks a world ensouled. More---our imaginative
recognition, the childlike act of imagining the world, animates
the world and returns it to soul.
Then we realize that what psychology has had to call projection
is simply animation, as this thing or that spontaneously comes
alive, arrests our attention, draws us to it. This sudden illumination
of the thing does not, however, depend on its formal, aesthetic
proportion which makes it "beautiful"; it depends
rather upon the movements of the anima mundi animating her images
and affecting our imagina tion. The soul of the thing corresponds
or coalesces with ours. This insight that psychic reality appears
in the expressive form or physiognomic quality of images allows
psychology to escape from its entrapment in "experience." Ficino
releases psychology from the self-enclosures of Augustine, Descartes,
and Kant, and their successors, often Freud and sometimes Jung.
For centuries we have identified interiority with reflexive
experience. Of course, things are dead, said the old psychology,
because they do not experience (feelings, memories, intentions).
They may be animated by our projections, but to imagine their
projecting upon us and each other their ideas and demands, to
regard them as storing memories or presenting their feeling
characters in their sensate qualities-this is magical thinking.
Because things do not experience, they have no subjectivity,
no interiority, no depth. Depth psychology could go only to
the intra- inter- in search of the interiority of soul.
Not only does this view kill things by viewing them as dead;
it imprisons us in that tight little cell of - ego When psychic
reality is equated with experience, then ego Becomes necessary
to psychological logic. We have to invent an interior witness,
an experiencer at the center of subjectivity-an we cannot imagine
otherwise.
With things returned again to soul, their psychic reality given
with the anima mundi, then their interiority and depth-and depth
psychology too-depend not on their experiencing themselves or
on their self-motivation but upon self-witness of another sort.
An object bears witness to itself in the image it offers, and
its depth lies in the complexities of this image. Its intentionality
is substantive, given with its psychic reality, claiming but
not requiring our witness. Each particular event, including
individual humans with our invisible thoughts, feelings, and
intentions, reveals a soul in its imaginative display. Our human
subjectivity too appears in our display. Subjectivity here is
freed from literalization in reflexive experience and its fictive
subject, the ego. Instead, each object is a subject, and its
self-reflection is its self-display, its radiance. Interiority,
subjectivity, psychic depth-all out there, and so, too, psychopathology.
Hence, to call a business paranoid means to examine the way
it presents itself in defensive postures, in systematizations
and arcane codes, its delusional relations between its product
and the speaking about its product, often necessitating gross
distortions of the meanings of such words as good, honest, true,
healthy, etc. To call a building catatonic or anorexic means
to examine the way it presents itself, its behavioral display
in its skinny, tall, rigid, bareboned structure, trimmed of
fat, its glassy front and desexualized coldness and suppressed
explosive rage, its hollow atrium interior sectioned by vertical
shafts. To call consumption manic refers to instantaneity of
satisfaction, rapid disposal, intolerance for interruption (flow-through
consumption), the euphoria of buying without paying (credit
cards), and the flight of ideas made visible and concrete in
magazine and television advertising. To call agriculture addictive
refers to its obsession with ever-higher yields, necessitating
ever-more chemical energizers (pesticides, herbicides) at the
expense of other life forms and to the exhaustion of agriculture's
earthen body. . . .
We have tried hitherto in depth psychology to regain the psyche
of the world by subjectivist interpretations. The stalled car
and blocked driveway became my energy problems; the gaping red
construction site became the new operatio going on in my Adamic
body. We could give subjectivity to the world of objects only
by taking them into our interior subject, as if they were expressing
our complaint. But that stalled car, whether in my dream or
in my driveway, is still *a thing unable to fulfill its intention;
it remains there, stuck, disordered, claiming attention for
itself. The great wound in the red earth, whether in my dream
or in my neighborhood, is still a site of wrenching upheaval,
appealing for an aesthetic as much as a her- eneutic response.
To interpret the world's things as if they were our dreams deprives
the world of its dream, its complaint. Although this move may
have been a step toward recognizing the interiority of things,
it finally fails because of the identification of interiority
with only human subjective experience.
Attention to the qualities of things resurrects the old idea
of notitia as 2 primary activity of the soul. Notitia refers
to that capacity to form true notions of things from attentive
noticing. It is the noticing on which knowledge depends. In
depth psychology, notitia has been limited by our subjective
view of psychic reality so that attention is refined mainly
in regard to subjective states. This shows in our usual language
of descriptions. When for instance 1 am asked, "How was
the bus ride?" 1 respond, "Miserable, terrible, desperate." But
these words describe me, my feelings, my experience, not the
bus ride which was bumpy, crowded, steamy, cramped, noxious,
with long waits. Even if I noticed the bus and the trip, my
language transferred this attention to notions about myself.
The 1 has swallowed the bus, and my knowledge of the external
world has become a subjective report of my feelings.
An aesthetic response does require these feelings but it cannot
remain in them; it needs to move back to the image. And the
way back to the bus ride necessitates words which notice its
qualities. (Anima Mundi, 77-80, 85)
If God-given and man-made are an unnecessary, even false, opposition,
then the city made by human hands is also natural in its own
right. Surely, it is as natural to human beings to make burial
grounds, marketplaces, political and social communities, and
to erect structures for worship, education, protection, and
celebration as it is for them to gather nuts and berries, trap
animals, or hoe the soil. Cities belong to human nature; nature
does not begin outside the city walls. Therefore, the city does
not have to copy the green world in order to he beautiful, a
habit which puts a premium on suburbia, each citizen with his
private tree, turf, and Toro. Urban beauty would not draw its
standards from approximation to wild nature, requiring potted
trees and vine interiors, noisy artificial waterwalls that impede
the natural flow of running conversation, and plastics that
fake the look of leather and stone. Again, pop art in sculptural
forms has revealed the simple, genuine givenness of plastic
masses that do not imitate anything prior to themselves.
Second, if we can take back the experience of God-givenness
from its location only in nature, then we might be able to find
this experience elsewhere. The great cathedrals of Europe, for
instance, were God-given and man-made both--and these were built
at a time when the large outdoors was usually felt to be haunted
by evil. The soul's need for beauty was met mainly by urban
events such as pageants, music, contests, and feasts centered
around the huge cathedrals and their stalls. What we now turn
to nature for-inspiration in the face of might and majesty,
wonder over intricacy, rhythms, and detail-could as well appear
in our constructions. Skyscrapers, power stations, airports,
market halls, and hotels can be reimagined as structures for
the soul to find beauty, rather than conceived merely as secular
and cost-efficient service functions.
Third, the imitation of nature changes. We would imitate the
process of nature rather than what the process has mode, the
way of nature rather than the things of nature, naturans rather
then naturata as the philosophers say. It would be less a matter
of building a false river through a mall than of building a
mall so it reminds of a draw, reflecting the actual way nature
works this specific Texan geography. It would be less a matter
of planting trees in a row along a sidewalk than of making the
sidewalk itself meander organically as if it were itself growing
along with irregular ramifications. We would remember nature
in the way we construct so that nature echoes in the constructed
object.
The majestic, descending torrent of the Fort Worth Water Garden
hasn't a single leaf, a single loose pebble: it is utterly unnatural-stone,
cement, hidden piping plunked down into the usual downtown wasteland.
Yet that construction completely overwhelms with the experience
we expect from natural beauty-its wild adventure, its encompassing
grandeur. The Henry Moore sculpture in the city hall plaza of
Dallas is more natural than the trees around it, even though
they are organic. The Moore piece remembers nature's contours,
skin, and volumes. The trees. however, are engineered according
to a designer's plans, enlarged plantings from in architectural-scale
model. (Perhaps that is why they haven't been able to grow since
having been stuck down there five years ago.) The Moore sculpture
does not imitate a great beast, a mother and brood, 2 group
of bills-yet those echoes resonate within it. Children touch
it, play around it. They ignore the unnatural trees.
The imitation of nature could then employ technical means as
it has done for centuries in the arts. The garden, after all,
is not nature but art; in fact, it is nature imitating art.
The restitution of 2 natural environment would not require the
literal transplantation of whole biospheres "parked" into
set-aside preserves but would rather suggest miniature biospheres
all through the city: hybrid dwarf shrubs, songbirds in cages,
window boxes and vegetable plots, fishponds, insect vivaria,
terraria. Botany and biology would be hon- represented on the
stiff of city hall instead of serving only academia and servicing
the drug industry. 1 am suggesting here the imitation of nature
as a miniaturization of nature such as the Japanese practice.
1 am suggesting a reduction in the scale of awe from a romantic
and sublime immersion in vastness to joy in pondering the particular.
Fourth, we would no longer let the National Park Service, the
Sierra Club, or God take care of our need for beauty by protecting
or fostering wilderness. We could come to a more psychological
notion of wilderness following the definition inherent In the
rules governing wilderness areas: enter and enjoy but make no
mark. Disturb nothing, pollute nothing, leave no trace-if possible,
not even a footprint.
This definition psychologically implies that wherever we tread
with that attitude we are creating the experience of wilderness.
When we move with senses acute, listening, watching, breathing
in tune with the world about us, recognizing its priority and
ourselves as guests, witnessing its "God-givetiness," then
we have made a wilderness area or moment. The restoration of
the pristine starts in a fresh attitude toward what is, whatever
and wherever it is....
Last, and this is most important to the psychologist practicing
in America. There could be a profound shift in therapy of soul.
Soul could be reclaimed from soulful places our there filled
with God given beauty, as if soul were given to us automatically,
by osmosis, when we stand beneath a redwood or hear the waves
on the shore. Once we recognize, however, that the need for
beauty must be met, but that scenic, physical nature is not
the only place it can be met, we would take the soul back into
our own hands, realizing that what happens with it is less given
and more made-made through our work with it in the actual world
by making that actual world reflect the soul's need for beauty.
CITY AND SOUL
Without images, we tend to lose our way. This happens, for
example, on freeways. Rectangular signs, uniform in size grid
all painted green (or all painted brown at the airport) with
numbers and letters, are not images, but magnified verbal concepts.
We don't know where we are except by means of an abstract process
of reading and thinking, remembering and translating. All eyeballs
and head. Lost is the bodily sense of orientation. We might
even consume less gasoline-all those wrong turns-if our way
through the city were landmarked by images like those of the
old crossroads, the hangman's tree, the sign of the red ox,
the fountain.
The soul wants Its images, and when it doesn't find them, it
makes substitutes; billboards and graffiti, for instance. Even
in East Germany avid China where ads are not allowed, slogans
still are written large on walls and placards posted. Spontaneously,
the human hand makes its mark, insisting on personalized messages,
as human nature everywhere immediately chalks its initials on
monuments.
These marks made in public places, called the defacing of monuments,
actually put a face on in impersonal wall or oversized statue.
The human hand seems to want to touch and leave its touch, even
if by only obscene smears and ugly scrawls. So, let us make
sure that the hand has its place in the city, not only by means
of shops for artisans and displaying crafts, but also by animating
and bringing culture to the walls and stones and spaces left
bleakly untouched by the human hand. Surely, a city's masterpieces
of engineering form and architectural inspiration would not
he despoiled by the presence of images that reflect the "soul" through
the hand.
The last of these different ideas of soul that are reflected
in a city is the notion of human relations. That is probably
what comes first to your mind when you think of soul-the relations
between human beings, at eye level in particular. When we think
of the cities, our contact with them (with New York, for instance)
is craning the neck upward. The rube tourist goes to New York
sightseeing its wonders, and ends his vacation with a stiff
neck. Yet, the eye-leve) relation between human beings is a
fundamental part of soul in cities. The faces of things-their
surfaces, their facings-how we read what meets us at eye level.
How we see into each other, look at each others' faces, read
each other-that is how soul contact takes place. SO a city would
need places for these eye-level human contacts. Places for meeting.
A meeting is not only public meeting, it is meeting in public;
people meeting each other. Pausing where it's possible to have
a moment of eye-level touching. If the city doesn't have places
for pausing, how is it possible to meet? Strolling, eating,
talking, gossiping. Terribly important in city life are those
places where gossip can take place. People stand by the water
cooler and tell about what's happening and that gossip is the
very life of the city. We speak differently from behind a desk
than we do in the coffee alcove. Who saw whom where, what, what's
new, what's happening-here is some of the psychological life
of the city. That grapevine of gossip.
WORLD
We also need body places. Places where bodies see each other,
meet each other, are in touch with each other, like the people
who leave their offices in Paris and swim in the Seine River
or have a lunch break in Zurich and swim in the lake, or skate.
This emphasizes the relationship of body to the daily life of
the city, bringing one's physical body into the town. In other
words, 1 am emphasizing the place of intimacy within a city,
for intimacy is crucial to the soul. When we think of soul and
soul connections, we think of intimacy and this has nothing
to do with how big the city is or how tall the buildings are.
There is always the possibility for corners, for pauses, for
being together in broken-up interiors where intimacy is possible.
Let's use, as an image of this aspect of soul in city, one
of the main streets of Dallas: Lovers Lane. If you imagine a
city as a place for lovers, then you may understand the idea
I'm trying to express. 1 don't believe love interferes with
business or efficiency or tax base or retail sales or any of
the rest-at all. 1 think a city is built on human relations,
of people coming together, and it would increase, if anything,
the very things that are desirable in a city. So, it is not
a matter of splitting again into two things, that is, work and
pleasure, city and soul, public daytime and private nighttime,
because that cuts soul off from city. There have always been
places built within the city where there is a break with the
seeming purpose of the city. It is only recently, of course,
that we think the purpose of cities is economica] or political.
The purpose of the city from the beginning was something instinctual
in human beings to build them: To want to be together, to imagine,
talk, make, and exchange. One needs those, so-called marketplaces,
places where the break can take place....
A city that neglects the soul's welfare makes the soul search
for its welfare in a degrading and concrete way, in the shadow
of those same gleaming towers. Welfare, mainly an inner-city
phenomenon, is not only an economic and social problem, it is
predominantly a psychological problem. The soul that is uncared
for-whether in personal or in community life-turns into an angry
child. It assaults the city which has depersonalized it with
a depersonalized rage, a violence against the very objects-storefronts,
park monuments, public buildings-which stand for uniform soullessness.
What city dwellers in their rage have in recent years chosen
to attack, and chosen to defend (trees, old houses, and neighborhoods),
is significant. Once the barbarians who, attacked civilization
came from outside the walls. Today they spring from our own
laps, raised in our own homes. The barbarian is that part of
us to whom the city. does not speak, that soul in us who has
not found a home in its environs. The frustration of this soul
in face of the uniformity and impersonality of great walls and
towers, destroys like 2 barbarian what it cannot comprehend,
structures which represent the achievement of mind, the power
of will, and the magnificence of spirit, but do not reflect
the needs of soul. For our psychic health grid the well-being
of our city, let us continue to find ways to make place for
soul.
("City and Soul," 3-6)
The eighteenth century took care of this need of t he soul for
indirection in a canny manner. Into the walking areas there
were constructed what the common people called "ha ha's":
surprising sunken fences, hidden hedges, boundary ditches
which, when come upon suddenly, called forth a "h* ha," stopping
the progress of the walk, forcing the foot to turn and the
mind to reflect. How strange this is to us today. Imagine,
while walking from your parked car toward your visual objective,
being blocked by an open culvert trench or a chain barrier
that you had not previously perceived. Your "ha ha''
would be fury-a public complaint, a lawsuit. When we walk
today, it is mainly a walking with the eye. We want no mazes,
no amazements. We have sacrificed the foot to the eye. Older
cities often grew up around the traces of the feet: paths,
corners and enclosures. crossings. These cities followed the
inherent patterns of the feet rather than the planned designs
of the eye.
Clearly, the automobile seems a further development of eye consciousness
rather than foot consciousness. Despite an old word for the
car, locomobile, its locomotion is a visual experience. Hence,
walking on a highway because the car broke down is a horrifying,
depersonalizing experience. Out there is revealed to the foot
as burrs, weeds, holes, trash, and roaring leviathans at one's
back. Of course new cities have sidewalk problems since the
foot is ignored. The streets soon become criminal regions: roll
up the window, lock the door, don't linger. Street crime begins
psychologically in a walkless world; it begins on the drawing
board of that planner who sees cities as collections of highrise
buildings and convenience malls, with streets as mere efficient
modes of access.
Development planners have radically affected our notions of
cities, leading us to forget that cities spring up from below;
they rise from their streets. Cities are streets, avenues of
commerce and exchange, the low-country world of physical thronging,
a congregation pounding the pavements in curiosity, surprise,
and encounter, human life not above the melee but right in it.
Cities depend on walking for their vitality....
What can we do? May a psychologist question proposals for malls
without foot imagination, and may he raise doubts about underground
tunnels for pedestrians, or recommend interesting downtown sidewalks
rather than glassed-in walkways? May he propose things that
are noticeable to the eye and ye ' t draw the foot into cxploration-like
complexities, nooks, watercourses, levels, shifts of perspectives?
It is surely not the psychologist who lays out the span between
parking lot and building, for if he did it might be more a mode
of encountering faces, with posters and paintings, places for
pausing, rather than an eerie cement gray space to hurry through
in fear, where place is remembered neither by eye nor foot but
conceptually-a code-lettered stub clutched in the hand. Yes,
1 suppose the psychologist would build "ha ha's" in
the paths of progress, wanting every design for a street project
to be imagined not only in terms of getting there, but also
in terms of being there. ("Walking," 4-6)
I want now to claim that the ceiling is the most neglected
segment of our contemporary interior-interior in both architectural
and psychological senses of the word. Whether oppressively close
and ugly ... or removed altogether in vaulting A-frames or atria
to the roof, the ceiling is the unconsidered, the unconscious,
presenting interiority without design, with no sense of inherent
order.
What statements are these ceilings making? What are they saying
about our psychic interiors? If looking up is that gesture of
aspiration and orientation toward the higher order of the cosmos,
an imagination opening toward the stars, our ceilings reflect
an utterly .secular vision-short-sighted, utilitarian, unaesthetic.
Our heads reach up and open into a meaningless and chaotic white
space. The world above has merely a maintenance function, God
the repairman called on when things break down. Curiously, however,
the perspective from above still remains. Look at our usual
blueprints, our usual models. They are drawn from above as floor
plans; the view is down from the ceiling. The place from which
the gods have fled is now where the planner sits. We must remember
here that renewal of spirit occurs within an enclosed space,
under some sort of ceiling. Ancient kings, as far back as the
pharaohs, placed themselves under a canopy, a tent, a domewalls
were incidental-and thereby the interior man, the soul, received
renewed vitality. The ceiling did indeed refer to heaven, to
ciel, as our popular and mistaken etymology of ceiling continues
to insist.
For ceiling doesn't come from ciel, French for "heaven,
sky." Covering the room, enclosing it, that feeling of
interior designed space---that there is design to the interior,
and this design renews the human spirit-is the true root of
the word. It derives from celure, via Middle English (celynge,
silynge, syling, and selure [celure] for "tapestry, canopy,
hangings," finally coming to ceil, meaning "to line
with woodwork!'
Ceilings became white only during the Enlightenment, the eighteenth
century, with the refinement of the plasterer's art. Previously
all the detail was exposed: joists, beams, the reverse of the
floor above. Then the detail was enhanced by carving the bums,
painting, gilding, stucco, plaster, so that looking up fed the
imagination. The eye traversed an intriguing pattern of rhythmical
and inherent relationships-where function (joists, floorboards)
and beauty were inseparable. Ceilings emphasized design-and
I do not mean only the magnificent ones painted to represent
the heavens and the gods.
Inside the Latin root of the word itself (celum, caelatura,
caelo) is the idea of design as burnishing, chiseling, engraving.
The upper aspect of our interior space is an intricately fashioned
and figured design. The ceiling is a place of images to which
imagination turns its gaze to renew vitality. The true ceiling,
then, as derived from the word is not a flat white rectangular
space studded with incidental equipment, but a magnificent artifice
of imagery. The ceiling up there corresponds with the richness
of human imagination. It is this our heads can open into and
find protection under.
Which brings us to the quality of light and ceiling fixtures.
You all feel the difference when the overhead light is turned
off and standing lamps, table lamps, go on. You know the kind
of interior that emerges-like a Vuillard or a Bonnard room,
an effect used in the movies to change the atmosphere toward
intimacy and interiority. Single uniform brightness gives way
to shadings of color, reflection, and the sense of nearness
to the light within the reach of the hand-as to a candle or
a fireplace. Overhead lighting belongs originally to large state
halls, banquet rooms, exhibitions, factories, and markets, where
very high ceilings and expansive floor plans demanded flooding
of light from above. A splendor both marvelous and functional,
indoors, yet lit as the sun-filled world. The light fixtures
themselves became objects of awe. They have of course given
way, in most cases, to what the maintenance crew can get at
and clean up, as low-cost as possible.
Now we apply the same overhead lighting in the smallest cubicles
with the lowest ceilings. We sit bathed in a merciless, shadowless
enlightenment, democratically falling on all alike, straight
down-a spotlight like that used to break criminals into confession,
a brilliant clarity like for an anatomical dissection. The light
does not group the furniture, encircle it. Instead, each thing
is distinct, isolated from each other thing. Interiority is
gone: the flickering feeling of the cave, lighting that makes
this piece of room here different from that over there. The
room receives the massive doses of illumination of summer outdoors:
uniform, bright, cloudless. And timeless: it is always noon
indoors. We cannot tell because of these ceiling lights what
time of day it is, what the weather, what the season of the
year.
Moreover, you do not want to raise your eyes, to look into
fluorescent fixtures, at the bright bulb in the track can. You
keep your head down-a depressive posture, outlook limited to
the horizontal or the downward state. In such light what does
the soul do with its shadows, where find interiority? Does the
soul not shrink into even deeper personal interiors, into more
darkness, so that we feet cut off, alienated, prey to the darkest
of the dark: guilts, private sins, fears, and horror fantasies.
1 am suggesting some of our most oppressive psychological ills
come out of the ceiling.
To conclude this psychoanalysis of the ceiling, a word on moldings.
At the retreat of the Dallas Institute on Architecture and Poetry,
Robert Sardello gave a remarkable, thought-provoking paper in
which he examined the place of the right angle in the design
of modern cities. He pointed out that tile right angle is an
abstract expression for the ancient archetypal directions of
heaven and earth, sky god and earth mother, the vertical and
horizontal dimensions reduced to a simple pair of intersecting
lines, much like the tool used by carpenters, the square, the
Greek word for which is norma (from which we have norms, normal,
normalcy). The simple right angle normalizes our entire world
from the grid plan of city plats to the graph paper on which
we calculate and display the living curves of economic activity.
Modern Baulhaus design exposes this conjunction of father sky
and another earth. The joint is laid bare. Moldings resolve
the shock, the violence of their direct rectangular conjunction.
Moldings provide a skirt, a curtain covering the exposed pornography,
the crotch shot of ceiling joining wall in bare fluorescent
light. Moldings are not merely a Victorian cover-up, a delicate
discretion-they are an erotic moment in a room, a detail that
softens the vertical, letting it come down gently through a
series of ripples, heaven into earth, earth into heaven, the
secular and the divine, not cut apart and placed at right conflicting
purposes. a leap, a gap (as we often see a black line at the
ceiling's edge where the two directions have receded from each
other, the Sheetrock not quite meeting, the taping and mud inadequate).
The problem of how to conclude a ceiling, its edge or end,
was particularly a concern of Islamic builders, who had to set
circular domes on square rooms. Squaring of the circle and circling
of the square, the meeting of two worlds, gave rise to extraordinarily
ornate corners rich with embellished moldings. Rich fantasies
develop at the juncture where the ceiling descends into the
living space of everyday....
My purpose with these physical details is to make a psychological
point. 1 want to preserve and restore the simple gesture of
looking upward. If our society suffers from failures of imagination,
of leadership, of cohesive far-sighted perspectives, then we
must attend to the places and moments where these interior faculties
of the human mind begin. Remember the psalm: " shall lift
up mine eyes-from whence cometh my help." That primordial
gesture toward the upper dimension, that glance above ourselves,
yet not lofty, spacey, and dizzy, may be where the first bits
of interior change take place. This change of soul can take
place inside our ordinary rooms.
("Ceiling," 79---82,84)end.
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