The Cage

Georg Simmel, writing The Metropolis and Mental Life at the beginning of the 20th century, remarked that big cities were now dominated by what he called ‘objectivism’. It was difficult, he suggested, for modern man to cope with this form of existence, because human interaction had become short and instrumental, devoid of feeling and emotion. A surfeit of sensory stimulus was forcing people to become more rational and pragmatic in their social actions, impelling them to exclude much from their thought in order to survive psychologically. This was the price that had to be paid in order to be free from the restrictions and binding mentality of small communities. Some decades later, the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard wrote evocatively about the need to return to a place, or at least a way of being, that was more subjective. He held the view that there was a dynamic interplay between an active mind and its surroundings, so the way in which we perceive things becomes as important as the objects themselves.

To Bachelard the house was an archetypal phenomenological object, a place where subjective experience is at its most complex and resonant. It is the most intimate of spaces, somewhere soul can be expressed in thought and dreams, a retreat, and a place where we can belong. In The Poetics of Space he explored the home and its domestic vocabulary of tables, chairs, cupboards, and stairs; he was especially enthralled by the emotional associations of the attic and cellar and by their distinctive dreams. For Bachelard they embodied deep emotional reserves; the attic suggested clarity and elevation of mind; the cellar or basement was a darker, subterranean, more irrational place. The Poetics of Space describes an evocative and atmospheric world that is centred on home and its imaginary spaces; much of the book, typical of his sensibility, is about ambivalence and liminality, the thresholds between open and closed, inside and outside, arrival and departure. At its heart, though, is the idea of the domestic house as a fundamental source of creative space. ‘The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’, he wrote.

James Hillman, the originator of archetypal psychology, developed Carl Gustav Jung’s tradition of psychoanalysis; critical of the modern pursuit of happiness, he liked to focus his attention on darker and more problematic human experiences. Influenced by phenomenology and the Sufi thinking of Henri Corbin, and arguing that reality is at least in part a construct of the imagination, he nonetheless favoured a rooted and earthy response to the outer world. The ‘image’, as an expression of the imagination, was of great importance, especially as an antidote to the literalism that he felt was dominating everyday discourse. An image, he said, has more depth and resonance than words, and he warned against the reductive tendencies of interpretation and theoretical speculation. Following Jung’s line of thinking, Hillman’s concept of the image had a particular meaning; rather than being simply visual constructs, the most powerful images are symbolic representations of the process of individuation, the soul’s synthesis with the Self, an undertaking that consists mainly of the union of the unconscious and conscious mind.

Many of Jung’s ideas about personal transformation and individuation were inspired by his interpretation of mediaeval alchemy, a field that is often considered to be merely a fraudulent or primitive forerunner of modern chemistry. Jung, however, saw it otherwise. One of his core interests was Gnosticism; alchemy represented a historical link with that movement. Jung held that under the guise of turning base metal into gold (or liberating the light confined in matter, which was a Gnostic or Manichaean aspiration) alchemists were trying to redeem the psychic energy locked up in the body, thus making it available for the greater task of transforming the human spirit. The crucible was one piece of alchemical equipment that was used for the purposes of transformation; the other was the alembic, a still consisting of two vessels connected by a tube. The liquid in the first flask is heated; the vapour rises and flows into the second as it cools. It is in the alembic that distillation, a form of refinement or purification, occurs, but it is within the crucible that transformative heat and tension is constrained.

Hillman was less concerned with art than with what he described as ‘soul-making’, a practice through which individuals slow down and deepen their connections to themselves, others, and to the world, emphasising essence rather than action and presence rather than aspiration. Creative space, to Hillman, involved psychological containment, the deliberate retention of energies and emotions until they can be experienced consciously; in other words, until they are acknowledged, understood, and accepted as being important to our wholeness and well-being. He emphasised that this process of containing or soul-making can only occur when we open ourselves emotionally to our wounds and vulnerabilities.

In contrast, the analytical psychologist Erich Neumann (also trained in the Jungian tradition) was especially interested in the archetypes of the collective unconscious mind. Archetypes, he said, which are essentially formless components of the psyche, often take shape in art. The expressive material through which they pass, the time and place in which they occur, and above all the psychology of the individual in whom they appear, shape their various forms. To Neumann the ‘symbol’ reflected a much more complete reality than any rational concept of consciousness, and by ‘symbol’ he referred not to the abstraction of an idea but to an image that speaks to us vividly, that reveals something unknown and becomes alive or transparent. It is an experience in which being and meaning coincide. According to Neumann, we can be troubled, moved, captivated, or transported by the intensification or deepening of life in an archetype or symbol, which is brought into being by a particular kind of alertness or awareness, based on the unity of the subjective and the transpersonal.

Rigidity and chaos, two forms of negativity, are directly opposed to the creative principle, which also encompasses transformation. ‘Every transformative or creative process comprises stages of possession’, Neumann writes in Art and the Creative Unconscious. ‘Without such a fascination and the emotional tension connected with it, no concentration, no lasting interest, no creative process, are possible’. He goes on: ‘The transcendent function and the unifying symbol can appear only where there is a tension between a stable consciousness and a “charged” unconscious’. This is not necessarily a pleasant experience; it may be something we must learn to endure.

To the Greeks, the aether was the pure essence where the gods lived and in which they breathed; it was the fifth element. Mediaeval alchemists thought of the ‘quintessence’ as a mysterious substance that might be at the heart of heavenly bodies; it soon became synonymous with elixirs and with the philosopher’s stone itself. In our times a concept of dark energy (a hypothetical capacity that permeates all space and that may accelerate the expansion of the universe) has been called by the same name. The primary material – in alchemists’ terms, prima materia - of the universe is energy, not matter; and it now appears possible that space is neither empty nor passive but filled with vitality and information. Some scientists propose that there is a deeper dimension of the universe, variously referred to as ‘hyperspace’, ‘implicate order’ or ‘unified field’, which is associated with an oceanic expanse of virtual energy that underlies the quantum world.

Others, even less orthodox, suggest that this dimension is an ‘Akashic field’ that contains seeds and traces of everything, both visible and invisible, that has occurred since the beginning of time. ‘Akasha’ (originally a Sanskrit term for ‘space’ or ‘aether’) is a universal creative force that connects all elements of creation to the ultimate source of wisdom and love. From that perspective, the apparent vacuum of space is actually all-embracing and might be described as the primordial source of creativity. Our perception is not limited to wave-formations in the electromagnetic field or the air, and certainly not just to our bodily sensations. We are connected to the world and each other more fundamentally, in a way that is insensible but utterly basic.

Kabir, the 15th century Indian weaver and poet, puts the point with grace and lucidity:

Hiding in this cage  of visible matter

  is the invisible  bird of life  

pay attention  to her  

she is singing  your song.

Note: This text, commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, in 2013, was published in their book, Generation - 30 Years of Creativity. An artist friend recently told me that it was one of his favourites, so I thought that it might be worth circulating again. I thank him and, of course, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.

Le Grand Meaulnes

Dream Plays