Bodying Forth the Forms of Things Unknown Michael Conforti , Field, Form and Fate, Patterns in Mind,...

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Bodying Forth the Forms of ThingsUnknownDennis Patrick Slatterya

a Core Faculty, Mythological Studies at Pacifica GraduateInstitute in Carpinteria, California. His new book, acollection of essays gathered from the past twenty-fiveyears of writing, entitled Harvesting Darkness: Essayson Literature, Film, Myth and Culture, was published inFebruary 2006.Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Dennis Patrick Slattery (2006) Bodying Forth the Forms of ThingsUnknown, The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 25:2, 31-48

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Bodying Forth the Forms of Things Unknown

Michael Conforti, Field, Form and Fate, Patterns in Mind, Nature and Psyche (Rev. Ed.), New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2003.David L. Miller, Christs: Meditations on Archetypal Images in Christian Th eology, New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2005. David L. Miller, Th ree Faces of God: Traces of the Trinity in Literature and Life, New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2005.David L. Miller. Hells and Holy Ghosts: A Th eopoetics of Christian Belief, New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2004.

Reviewed by Dennis Patrick Slattery

Some books depart this world without a tear shed, and well

that it is so. Others die a premature death, expire well before their

full trajectory has been reached, their just impact felt. I place the

four titles in the latter category. Th ey have each been given CPR

by Nancy Cater, owner and publisher of Spring Journal Books; for

many worthy reasons each has been revived, and in one case, re-

vised. By doing so, Dr. Cater has pumped new blood into the inter-

disciplinary study of psyche; both Michael Conforti and David L.

Miller are original, interdisciplinary and playful thinkers who, each

in his own way, revives Psyche herself from the paralysis of cadav-

erous thought, bloodless dogma and anemic assertions about soul

life. I am happy and honored to perform a small act of resuscitation

to bring these books back into the conversation of psychological

life. Resurrection can be a dicey aff air, as world religions and myths

make very clear. But with these texts, revival is revision. We are giv-

en a new way of envisioning psyche through the congruent purpos-

es of two highly charged interdisciplinary imaginations.

While tutored by diff erent disciplines as they shaped their own

vision of psyche, both Conforti and Miller share some common

complexities: both sense and develop the fundamental importance

of analogy, likeness, correspondence. Both of their envisionings rely

on an oblique way of grasping and understanding psyche’s move-

ment. Both writers implicitly confi rm in their writings the truth

THE SAN FRANCISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY THE SAN FRANCISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY JOURNAL,JOURNAL, 2006, Vol. 25, no. 2, 31–48.

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32 Dennis Patrick Slattery

or validity of Jung’s observation: “Since analogy formation is a law

which to a large extent governs the life of the psyche,…”1

In addition, Conforti and Miller engage a poetics of soul, i.e.,

a making known of what invisible energies stir and roil in the dark

silent cauldron of the collective unconscious. Both use in original

ways other disciplines by means of which soul is detected, explored,

expounded and therefore extended; their approaches are then indi-

rect, nuanced, spiraled and subtle. Both are sensitive to language’s

intrigues, to the way psyche lives in and through words, sentenc-

es, paragraphs, punctuation.2 I like Rowland’s observation of Jung’s

writing on this point: “Jung put the expressive creative nature of

the psyche fi rst…. Th e unconscious is like a mythic being; no, the

unconscious is like an ocean of fl owing images. It is an attempt to

evoke in writing what cannot be entirely grasped:”3

Miller, perhaps more than Conforti, is alert to the nuanced

powers of poetic expression, while Conforti senses the energic qual-

ities of psyche in its pre-linguistic status. Both, however, interrogate

directly and implicitly the poiesis of soul, its myth-making and po-

etic structuring of meaning: Conforti through the corridors of phys-

ics, morphic structures, implicate orders, science, while Miller con-

verses easily with poetry, theology, mythology, and depth psychol-

ogy. Each writer, moreover, develops his own hermeneutic stance,

what I would call a mythic act of imagining, that is distinct and yet

cross-references the other. Th e eff ect evokes in the reader her own

engagement with language, science, poetry, and the multi-disciplin-

ary voice of soul.

Finally, both submit to the truth of Rowland’s assertion above,

and underscored by Jung, that what one strives and stretches to ex-

press, ultimately cannot be grasped. Here Jung as well as both of the

writers reviewed here understand the illusive quality of the soul as

white whale, which Ishmael directs our gaze to in the fi rst pages of

Moby-Dick: “But that same image we see in all rivers and oceans. It

is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key

to it all.”4

Given this broad and general introduction to their works, let

me turn to Field, Form and Fate in order to convey its most salient

arguments. In his “Introduction to the Revised Edition,” Conforti

stresses, as he did in the fi rst Introduction, “the independent prop-

erties of psyche and nature.”5 Not the fact of something’s existence,

but the preceding fi eld out of which it gains form, is Conforti’s origi-

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Bodying Forth the Forms of Th ings Unknown 33

nary locus of exploration. I say originary because Conforti does not

wish to lose sight of the archetypal ground of ontology, a word and

presence he develops from the physicist David Bohm’s work, es-

pecially Wholeness and the Implicate Order.6 Conforti lays out his

schema at the end of the Revised Introduction. His goal, as he states

it, is to present “my continuing thoughts on the nature of arche-

types, their emergence into matter, and the patterns they form.”7 As

one can discern from this sentence, his interest gathers in exploring

an archetypal fi eld theory or confl uence theory, both of which con-

vey a sense of an archetypal pattern recognition. Th e large question

that Conforti poses and then pursues in depth is: anatomy of the

psyche and anatomy of nature: how are they confl uent?

His title chapters provide a clear delineation of the ground

he works: “Patterns in Psyche and Nature;” “An Archetypal Field

Th eory;” “Replicative Patterns: An Archetypal Perspective;” “From

Form to Chaos to Higher Form;” “From Reduction to Induction:

Shifting the Paradigm.” Replication, repetition, resonance, remem-

bering, reiteration—his research is loaded with “r” words that seek

the underlying patterns of psyche’s movement and its “objective

correlatives,” to borrow a term from T. S. Eliot, to reveal an under-

lying unity in the created order—human, animal, vegetable, miner-

al. Th is last statement is for me the most exciting part of Conforti’s

work, which he pursues not only in his writing but in an annual con-

ference in Assisi, Italy, which gathers scientists, artists, theologians,

and philosophers, who are invited to render intelligible their part of

the elephant so that the emergence of a fuller sense of form can be

discerned.

Conforti works from a hypothesis that dates back to Plato:

“matter emerges in response to and in accordance with a preformed

image, or fi eld. Th is image, or fi eld, fi nds expression in matter with

a specifi city that matches the informational core of the archetype.”8

I cannot help but see enormous potentials in this statement for the

study of art, poetry, indeed all creative expressions as manifesta-

tions of the fi eld, even the fi eld’s energic resonance. Conforti, I be-

lieve, here redefi nes and furthers Aristotle’s understanding of mi-mesis as an imitation of an action. Writing of the nature of tragedy,

but which I believe can be extended to the entire radius of poetry,

Aristotle believes that “tragedy is not an imitation of men, per se, but of human action and life and happiness and misery. Both hap-

piness and misery consist in a kind of action, and the end of life is

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some action, not some quality.”9 If, as O.B. Hardison declares in his

commentary on action, “Aristotle’s imitation is a process … in gen-

eral, poetic imitation in the representation of some action in lan-

guage….”,10 then it is not a big stretch to suggest that the creation of

poetry follows fi nally the inner logic of poetic art. I am suggesting

that what Conforti discovers in the patterned reality of the psychic

and natural order fi nds its cunning duplication in the creative pro-

cess; both are engaged in a poiesis, a making or shaping of some new

matter through a patterned, may I say mythic, impulse.

Th e juice in Conforti’s thought for me is that the psyche, and

by extension the created world of nature, is fundamentally poetic,

meaning psyche carries an impulse to make or shape energy into

matter (my own modifi ed defi nition). Psyche and matter are fun-

damentally poetic creations; both stem from a dark fi eld of energy

seeking its proper matter, because in part that energy matters in the

world. Each stems from a morphology which, Conforti believes, in

the way of archetypes “is preexistent,” but which seeks then a design

or designated pattern “unique to their species or fi eld.”11 Matter it-

self then, he conjectures, is understood “as the psyche’s attempt to

present in symbolic form the face of an archetype.”12 Th is impulse to

symbolize, to poeticize, to imitate (mimesis), is the deep mystery of

psyche’s ontology that fascinates Conforti and drives his work.

From the above observations and hunches, Conforti posits an

“archetypal fi eld theory,” which is in part based on inferences. His is

a psychology of energy, even a poetics of force, as when he reminds

the reader of his earlier writing on this topic in 1987:

I speculated that archetypal fields contain specific energetic charges. ... Situations such as the above-mentioned experience of death, along with the birth and death of a child or the emotional tone felt around a dinner table, all suggest that our individual and collective emotions are generated by the archetypes of life, death, etc.13

Th eir power resides in their ability to aff ect matter, to rearrange,

to reshape matter by means of energy. Th e genesis for Conforti’s

thought here is in part Jung’s work “On Psychic Energy” in Th e Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche published in 1928, especially

his observations on “equivalence.” Jung writes:

The idea of development requires the possibility of change in substances, which, from the energic standpoint, appear as systems of energy capable of theoretically unlimited interchange-

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ability and modulation under the principle of equivalence, and on the obvious assumption of a difference in potential.”14

Further on, and confessing to his own writing as a source of confu-

sion over the term “libido,” Jung writes “On Psychic Energy” to cor-

rect his earlier 1912 defi nition of libido: “Libido, therefore, is noth-

ing but an abbreviated expression for the ‘energic standpoint.’”15

Conforti’s work might then be understood as an elaborate and com-

plex extension of Jung’s libido theory as a psychological physics of

soul.

But his infl ected studies are towards fi elds of energy rather than

libidinal fi elds. Nonetheless, the ground of their respective studies

is the archetype. Conforti reminds us that,

Jung understood that the archetype, like a field in the natural world, is distinct from its observable derivatives and can be manifested in either the psychic or physical realm; that is, an archetypal patterning organizes not only mental images and ideas but also material events.16

My own sense here is that something of mythic awareness

swirls around this last quote. Conforti’s assertion prompts me to

speculate that mythic thinking or mythic awareness is in part the

ability to grasp that psyche and matter are two aspects of the same

phenomenon, certainly of the same ground of energy, which then

coagulates when its intensity reaches a certain degree into matter.

Is matter then, that part of psyche which we can observe? And may

poetry be an expression, by analogy, of this fi eld of energy that can

have the same force-ful fi eld on the imagination as matter does on

the senses? Both archetypal fi eld theory and a mimetic theory of

poetry have their correlate in a marriage of matter and form via an

archetypal resonance no less real than a burn on the hand from a

hot stove.

A word then on another quality of this fi eld: replication and

repetition. Fields, Conforti assumes, “have the power to orchestrate

interactional and lifelong patterns.” He goes on to suggest that “vir-

tually every human interaction and experience is an externalization

and incarnation of an archetype into space and time.”17 Th erapy is

a particularly unique cauldron for these patterns of repetition and

replication to be drawn out and changed by introducing alternative

fi elds of infl uence. Conforti observes that “the initiation of treat-

ment serves to activate the dominant archetypal constellation with-

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in both members of the therapeutic dyad. Th e core complex embed-

ded within the archetype tends to draw to it, like a magnetic fi eld,

self-similar/complex-similar interactions and information from the

environment.”18 Th erapy becomes a form of editing the narrative, a

revamping and rewriting of the fi eld to break the repetitive pattern

that the individual is enclosed, even cocooned, within. His work

with a client he names Mary reveals to him how powerfully a fi eld

that dominates one can create a closed world in order for the person

to maintain a “state of equilibrium within her psyche and in inter-

personal relationships.”19 By contrast, an open fi eld of energy, an en-

ergic system receptive to new information, continues to grow, deep-

en and mature by means of the measure of the objective psyche.

Towards the conclusion of what I fi nd to be an exciting and

evocative set of ideas that carry into many disciplines, Conforti as-

serts: “If we seriously consider the implications of an archetypal, in-

formational fi eld theory, we are led to view life as evolving through

the creation of recursive processes and then moving forward into

new domains.”20 His idea has an able precedent in the work of an-

other Italian. Dante’s Commedia contains a rhyme scheme that the

poet created for this poem, one which he called terza rima. It is the

rhyme scheme consisting of the following pattern: ABA; BCB; CDC

and so forth. One sees that the middle term of each of the previous

rhyme schemes becomes the fi rst and last terms of the subsequent

terza rima, so that the movement, to say nothing of the poetic con-

tent of the poem, is two steps forward, one step back, in constant

rhythm sustained throughout the 100 cantos of the poem. Science,

in the shape of the psychological physics of Conforti’s theory, has its

medieval precedent, if not its brotherhood, in Dante’s poem, one, I

believe, of our most cogent and aesthetically complex statements of

depth and archetypal psychology.

Finally, I am pleased to see a new Glossary at the end of the re-

vised edition. Th e Reference section of Conforti’s original study will

be of interest to students of psychology, aesthetics, literature, phys-

ics and therapy.

It is not much of a leap at all from quantum physics and depth

psychology to David Miller’s interest in a polytheistic and certain-

ly Trinitarian psychology. Both writers express much of the same

story through infl ected plots of their respective disciplines, both

are multi-valent in their approaches, and both seek the mystery of

narrative itself that seems to undergird the visible universe. Miller

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writes at the end of Th e New Polytheism: “Th e task rather is to re-

discover the stories of the Gods and Goddesses, the theology of the

people. It is to recover the varieties of religious experience lurking

in the varieties of theological experience.”21

I believe he kept this idea, if not this quote, directly in front of

him as he wrote the three books reviewed here, over the next fi fteen

years. In Christs, published eight years after Polytheism, he writes

in the Introduction that Christian theologians have missed the lay-

ers of Christianity by failing to see that by stripping the stratifi ca-

tions of Christian thinking, one may uncover through their forms, the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece! Th e implication is that

the monotheistic theology of Christianity has many meanings liv-

ing in and beneath it, a rich, multifaceted constellation of possibili-

ties, whose articulation corresponds to the polytheistic mythology of

classical Greece. My sense is that the poly, or multiple structures of

religion and myth, are the heartbeat of Miller’s work, which he will

pursue through all three texts. Th at the psyche is multiple, seeks

correspondences, nurtures itself on likenesses and “als ob,” as ifs, is

the bedrock of mythological and religious amplitude.

His study divides into Th ree Parts: “Christ, Th e Good Shepherd;”

“Christ, Th e Clown;” and “Christ, Th e Great Teacher.” Th is tripar-

tite view of Christ takes twenty-seven chapters to complete. His

method is not only analogical but anagogical and mythological; his

approach is adapted from his mentor, Stanley Romaine Hopper’s

work: to step back, down and through. His methodology is there-

fore also Trinitarian, or tripartite; indeed the number three be-

comes the most important fi gure in Miller’s imagination, in part

because he believes psyche is tri-partite, if not Trinitarian. Since,

in reading all three of his works, I accumulated over seventy pages

of typed notes, I will have space and stamina to bring in only what

I consider his most original ideas as he develops a new fi eld of dis-

course: Archetypal Th eology.

Part of his intention in Christs is iconoclastic. Early in the

book he debunks the “perfectionist” mythos surrounding the im-

age of Christ as the good shepherd. Its literalism, its one-sidedness,

its focus on “rationalistic intellectualism”22 all contribute to a one-

eyed vision of the shepherd and a constricting sense of how one

might believe. But there is a playful and even clownish operative in

Miller’s work, for he then turns to history and literature to uncover

several other ways of thinking, and even counting sheep: “sheepish-

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ness,” “wooly-mindedness,” “being fl eeced,” “by hook or by crook.”23

A bit of Miller’s own clowning-around? Pulling a bit of scholastic

wool over our own watery eyes? Yes and no. His methodology un-

folds here: to break open these calcifi ed cubicles of faith that have

hardened over centuries, in order to allow a multi-valent and multi-

imaged Christ to appear, to give the sacred image back its blood, to

thicken its metaphorical power so it moves back and down closer

to a human experience, and to a human as experienced. I grew to

enjoy his whimsy, his writing, in a way that smacked more of con-

versation than conversion—more bubbly around the edges, if I can

get away with such a metaphor in a review. Play indeed becomes for

Miller a way of pursuit. A bit of tongue and cheek as well as split

hoof in mouth.

I found most provocative the chapters dealing with an anal-

ogy of Polyphemous, the most famous Cyclops in literature from

Homer’s Odyssey, with the Christ image. Instead of envisioning

the Cyclops as devouring, as an image of untamed appetite, Miller

turns the fi gure a few degrees to expose how Polyphemos can also

be grasped as the good shepherd, one who suff ers, who loves, as the

benevolent one-eyed shepherd. Th rough a meticulous tracking of

the Cyclops in history and myth, Miller reveals a keen hermeneutic

that rivals the ferocious imagination of James Hillman. Th e former

imagines the single forehead eye in all its fullness: “we speak, for ex-

ample, of the ‘eye’ of a cyclone or hurricane, the suggestion of this

imaginal association is that cycloptic vision comes from the soul’s

storm, like Job’s vision out of the whirlwind of suff ering.”24

I focus for an instant on the key phrase, “imaginal association,”

because if one turns one’s gaze a bit, one is able to glance at an entire

way of imaginally working image, a poiesis or a making of image, so

that one goes beyond plot or information, to myth and imagination.

See this in the following quote: “A christopoesis that views the Good Shepherd as a monster in everyday life-experience, may … begin to

see the deep monsters of soul’s storms as shepherding.”25 Yes, the con-

tent of Miller’s work is important and noteworthy; but the deeper

importance of his study, it seems to me, is to elicit by example a way

of imagining; he is, regardless of text content, always working and

writing about the power of imaginal associations, keeping percep-

tion open-ended, liquid, fl owing, playful, unstuck, undogmatic, li-

able to surprise at any turn of phrase: “Th e suggestion is that these

fi gures are re-entrances to a deep way of seeing out of a perspective

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of ego-blindness: a seeing from the perspective of imperfection!”26

Th e exclamation point he asserts at the end of the last sentence is

not an empty rhetorical fl ourish; I believe it expresses Miller’s own

surprise at what he has just discovered in the writing of imperfec-

tion! Such is the sustained possibility when one successfully adopts

a “cycloptic Christology.”27

Th e “deep poetic eye,” he believes, senses the shimmer on the

surface, a correspondence in the interstices, and a revelation in the

fi gure of a clown. “Th e carnality of the incarnation; bringing reli-

gion down to earth: this seems to be the theme haunting both theo-

logical and secular interests in linking Christ to the clown.”28 Miller

ranges far and wide through poetry, fi ction, philosophy, history to

bring together rich but heretofore unrelated strands of an image

like the clown, to piece together from bits and parts a transformed

vision of the ordinary. It is not that these are simply new “lenses,” an

awful and awfully overused word to describe novel ways of under-

standing. Miller questions the whereabouts of all the other senses:

for example, “to round out a realistic sense of things with its pu-

trefying stinks, its burly smells, and its gustiness, a recovery of the

sense of smell, a rediscovery of the nose, may be crucial.”29

Here and elsewhere he seems intent on developing a “sensate

psychology,” a plea for the smell of things, a nose for detail, a good

touch, to exercise taste in what we discern, to hear with the third

ear. Without the body, Miller assumes, one is in danger of under-

standing only intellectually, without any sense of connaturality, of

communion and converse with the image. Equally important is to

discern the haunting presence of an older mythic fi gure and a deep-

er mythic story behind, for example, the fi gure of the clown and

Christ. For Miller that fi gure “is Silenos, of course.”30 Miller’s meth-

od is, from my perspective, “mytho-genetic;” behind the fi gure—

contemporary, secular, aged and religious—is a mythos in new garb,

an action of the soul in antique dress. Th e study of mythology, then,

is a study of psyche. Miller will not allow the false walls separating

disciplines to obstruct his view; he rises above them or burrows in

underneath them to gather a larger, more diverse fi gure into the

folds of his study.

Finally, Christ the great teacher. Or was he the great preacher?

Miller asserts that the Western tradition has split these two human

endeavors, at once lauding preaching and lamenting teaching as an

inferior activity. He adumbrates the teacher as “absent-minded” in

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our understanding, and the preacher as soulful; these fi gures are

“both deeply in the self.” To rediscover their likenesses in us, Miller

asserts, “‘outer theology’ is viewed as depth psychology, and the dis-

tinctions of the tradition between teaching and preaching begin to

take on a new sense.”31

In his discussion of teaching vs. preaching, Miller disturbs to

access an entire nest of splits in the Western psyche, splits that a

new Archetypal Th eology could begin to close, to mend and stitch

together so that a new image grounded in “mythic depths” would be

warranted. We have in the West, he implicitly states, gotten the sto-

ry wrong, not examined the stories we live by, have not calibrated

their devastating eff ects on the way we know as well as the content

of that knowing. Th is insight is as valuable as the content of his text.

He returns to Silenos, the drunken teacher, to Noah in his drunken-

ness, and to Lot in his inebriation, to the moistening that reclaims

something dried out, needing full liquid immersion. Th e image of

the drunken professor or teacher directs us to something beyond

condemnation; its off ensiveness is its greatest strength, for it leads

us to something deeper; it signals a life of soul in the body of a peo-

ple or an individual. Miller works it this way: “when life goes drunk,

things seem transitory in the extreme, fl owing here and there, like

time’s Heraclitean river. When transitory, all moves. Everything is a

metaphor of something else. Images are in fl ux . ... Time’s quantity

takes on imaginal quality.”32

Th at same brand of drunkenness spills onto the shirt of the

poet, wherein a “drunken rhythm”33 occurs between self and world,

a place of emptiness, of the metaxy of which Plato spoke,34 a riff ,

a rip or tear in which nothingness is allowed to be felt, where “we

sense our being as if between two wheres, or whens, or whos, or

what. Th e fullness is sensed in the moment of apparent emptying,

which is not a tabula rasa but rather a pleroma.”35 Th is same “be-

tween space,” is in fact the third thing, the tertium quid of Jung,

which defi nes a Trinitarian geometric shape of meaning. Indeed, it

is the major plot line of Th ree Faces of God.

Miller’s mission in this, but in truth in all three books, is to

redeem theology from the scourge of dogmatism, which, like an

overzealous restorer of a masterpiece painting, applies such harsh

chemicals to the fragile and aged paint pigment, that he scrubs the

shadows, the nuances, the subtleties of shades, in fact the entire life,

out of the artistic creation, leaving an antiseptic, bacteria-free com-

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position. He is after a more soul-oriented approach to religion “dif-

ferent from the doctrinal and pietistic perspectives that split reli-

gion from its soul in the interest of ego, as if saying, where religious

image is, there let ego be.”36 What he seeks he will name more suc-

cinctly in Hells and Holy Ghosts, namely, a “theopoetics of Christian

belief,” a marriage of imagination to theological image, resting on

the wisdom of poetic imagery, the power of analogy, and the craft

of correspondence, all of which return us in the process to Jung’s

earlier assertion: that analogy formation is not just a tendency but

a law of the psyche.

Once again he follows the methodological markings of

Stanley Hopper: fi rst, a leading back, a remembrance, then, a lead-

ing down, where “imaginal theology becomes archetypal; and the

step through,”37 where a new fabrication, a making or shaping of the

image into a new form, is possible through the energies less of ego

than of eros, the god of connection, relationship, correspondence.

Th e erotic is the imaginal that sidesteps the more stiffl y-clad logos,

where archetypes are in deep recovery from the doctrinaire and de-

bilitating shapes of dogma. Instead, theological idea, mythic image

and poetic metaphor, a new Trinitarian way of imagining, “are actu-

ally at work in the perspectives and paradigms of thinking and sens-

ing in our time.”38

Structure therefore imitates content: Th is text is divided into

three parts: “Remembering the Trinity;” “Contemplating in Th rees;”

and “Loving by Triangulation.” Each of the three parts is again di-

vided into three to create a trinitarian aesthetic as well as a triple vi-

sion of the Christian trinity. Seeing and sensing the trinity in a new

format includes grasping the sameness of the three in their august

diff erences. In fact, the breakthrough I believe Miller achieves in

this study is that “there are many trinities, for trinity is a way of see-

ing all things, including actual, literal behaviors.”39

Hesiod, Plotinus and Augustine are Miller’s guides here on the

nature of likeness, for apprehending likeness is a way of deepening

one’s understanding of action, image, concept. His genius in this,

my favorite of the three books, is to uncover that three-fold likeness

and diff erence is a core value of psyche, perhaps even its core struc-

ture, and its originary mode of apprehending. His aim is to estab-

lish a mythic context for the trinity wherein triangulation is the one

constant in a history of fl ux: “the three–in–one notion, or so the ar-

gument goes, was passed from Egyptian mythology into Hellenistic

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syncretism, from which source Christian theologians took it.”40 His

exploration exposes an entire boulevard of inquiry as to how my-

thology is historical, how history is mythical, and how both promise

great returns for one’s interest related to depth psychology.

Underneath these fi elds, however, is, for Miller, an unquench-

able interest in the image on its own terms as a means of getting back

in touch with the unknown, through its pathology and its broken-

ness. Th rough, for example, the pathos of the crucifi xion we are re-

turned to some meaningful dimension of everyday life.41 I am com-

pelled here to say that in the structure of the trinity, where there is

no pathos, no grotesque twisted-ness, there is no mythic meaning,

no depth, no discord that coils into a meaning-spiral.

Miller’s own thought spirals back to Christs to retrieve the be-

tween, the third thing that exists in the gap. He will move this idea

forward full bore in Hells and Holy Ghosts to illustrate how in the

Christian Trinity the Holy Ghost is the haunting third thing that

makes the relationship between Father and Son even possible. Th e

third thing is the ghostly presence that haunts the dyad. Th e bound-

ary between, Miller argues throughout his study, must be seen for

what it is: arbitrary and often in need of deconstruction. It is what

so often blocks the presence of the tertium datur. Borderland, edge,

precipice, hiatus, margin, boundary, frontier, limit, liminality—

these terms defi ne the imaginative reach of breakthrough that dog-

matic assertions mute and arrest.

His development of these ideas, especially in the act of read-

ing or listening, in the section called “Liminality, Boundary and the

Between,” I found most provocative. Riffi ng on J. Hillis Miller’s un-

derstanding of the experience of reading as akin to that between

guest and host, David Miller reveals that in deep engagement with

the text, one loses all sense of who is guest, who is host, engaged in

the imagination with the third thing, the imaginal world of the text

itself.42 He ends this section with an insight from Hopper: “’Here the

between would seem to be the boundary between the ego and the

deep self. It would appear … that it is by way of the deep self that

being comes to presence.’” Miller extends the voice of his mentor:

“as if self were the threshold through which move the metaphors of

reality. ...”43 What he suggests at the end of this section is that one’s

way of seeing must be metaphorical in nature so as to allow for the

third ghostly part of Trinitarian perception to come fully into being.

Seeing is then always triadic, if not tragic, to the extent that it envi-

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sions the brokenness inherent in image and its splintered refl ection

in the self.

If I were to designate a term for the method employed and de-

ployed by Miller in all three studies, but perhaps most poignantly in

this text, I would call it a theological poetics of retrieval, because his

work is archeological, or archetypeological, if I might coin a weight-

bearing neologism. For example, he seeks out the goddess Hekate,

haunting the edges of the trinity, at the same time that he asks for a

re-call of alchemy’s language as “a basis to Christian doctrine of the

Trinity [that] has been systematically ignored.”44 A form of amne-

sia–by–fi at has invaded Church doctrine and the language it uses to

express these beliefs, in part, Miller off ers, because theology gravi-

tates towards concepts rather than images. So it has stripped its

body of both myth and poiesis, ignored or buried likenesses and jet-

tisoned the poetics of trinity: “Th eopoetic—theology viewed as po-

etry—can save us,” he counters, “from our idolatries and fi xations,

which, even if correct, may well remain regressive.”45 A trinitarian

poetic, or a poetics of a triadic unity, always presents the third as

“ghostly, (‘hooded’) and its function is to connect (here through in-

terrogation). ...”46 His persuasiveness on this point is built up with a

cargo of poets who outline the potency of the powerful third, which

is erotic, loving and benevolent.

Each of Miller’s three texts satisfi es the triadic requirements

of stepping back, down and through; however, none steps down

with the vertical intensity of Hells and Holy Ghosts, a double book

within a single cover. He divides his third text into four sections:

“Descents,” “Hells,” “Holy Ghosts,” and “Resurrections of the Dead.”

Th e fi rst two parts I found to be as helpful in illuminating the

underworld as is James Hillman’s Th e Dream and the Underworld.47

As in the previous work, Miller enlists the writings of specifi c po-

ets, mostly contemporary, to reveal likeness, similarity, correspon-

dence. But more: the poetry off ers a language of soul and penetra-

tion, an aesthetics of descent and return. In this text as well, Miller

sweeps closest to the thought of Joseph Campbell, who also felt that

the rich imagery of the Christian church was to be understood best

as metaphors and not historical fact: “When the language of meta-

phor is misunderstood and its surface structures become brittle, it

evokes merely the current time–and–place–bound order of things

and its spiritual signal, if transmitted at all, becomes ever fainter.”48

For Miller, in congruence with Campbell, the universal fantasy of

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descensus ad inferos which exists in “every person’s experience,

came to be required as an article of literal belief attached to the per-

son of one historical fi gure—Christ.”49

Th is study, then, explores the crossed swords of literalism and

metaphor. While it cancels belief if set aside, the archetypal journey

of “Th e descent of Christ into hell leads theology toward a descent

into mythology, a mythological way of seeing and thinking, a way

that is nonliteral.”50 In this regard, Miller is a shape-shifter, an atti-

tude bender, and a kind of scholarly ophthalmologist in his desire

to shift the vision of hardened beliefs back to the more fl uid forms

of imagining, to insert the optics of metaphor across the eye of his-

tory. He is consistent in his insistence that without the poetic sense

that infi ltrates both ideas and images, one easily becomes stuck in

the sticky surface gloss of literalism.

Th e descent is a way out of such fi xity. Th e descensus ad inferos

is a way of deepening, becoming intimate with nuance and shading,

with down as through; with resonances of Dante’s Inferno resonat-

ing in Miller’s imaginal background, we remember that psychologi-

cal move: the way down is, as Virgil tells the frightened pilgrim, in-

deed the way up and out. Th e act of reading itself, Miller proposes,

following clues from Origen, is an imaginal descent into a non-lit-

eral world. Th e descent into a text asks the reader to set aside the

events read as “some actual event in the literal and physical past.”

One must “understand them fi guratively as referring ad inferos, “‘in-

teriorily,’ to soul, in anima. ... Origen calls this metaphoric reading

of Scripture a ‘bursting of iron bars.’”51

Th e importance of this move of soul delineated by Miller can-

not be overestimated; it involves an entire shift of consciousness

from fact to fi gure, from matter to metaphor with its own herme-

neutic. He harvests its importance: “Th us the descensus ad inferos

is a perspective on any event in life, rather than being itself a single

event. It is that deep perspective on worldly things, a transpersonal

way of understanding things personal. Hell is a way of viewing his-

tory. It is history’s other foot.”52 Th erein arises the nub of this sec-

tion of the book.

In the second part, “Hells,” Miller weaves together, then draws

the strings more snug between, archetypal psychology and theolo-

gy; I sense that their common coloring is mythology, for each works

from a particular narrative line. Th e question, however, is always

one of interpretation, perspective, credibility, complexity. Life can

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indeed become Hell if one enters it deeply enough, Miller reveals,

with its suff ering, pain and promise of breakthrough. He outlines

many descents: that of laughter, of the Middle, of Imagination, of

Psychopathology and into Modern Literature. Suff ering co-exists

with laughter, the faces of comedy—infernal, purgatorial, and par-

adisal, are each part of the descent into nuance, inference, even a

dark logic, “but not without a sense of humor. Its meaning is in-

ferential with the understanding coming between the words of the

text.”53

Th is section marks Miller in his most poetic intensity, con-

cerned as he is with the literary psyche, distancing self from self in

order to see more and more deeply. He continues to push down and

into the recesses of underworld knowing in “History as Hell.” Dark

illumination, a via cruces, a way of ego crucifi xion, epiphany, disso-

lution of ego, laughter in descent, humor in humus—all of these at-

tributes shine forth in the soul’s making, its own poiesis. As a read-

er, I begin to wonder how theology, mythology, poetry, and history

were ever allowed to be stripped of one another’s language and in-

fl uence. Each needs the other as Miller convincingly reveals, for the

soul’s inherent multiplicity, its analogical nature, begs to be heard

from the lexicon of each of the above disciplines.

Part Th ree, “Holy Ghosts,” traces the ghostly, haunting pres-

ence of history in language, and of the language of ghost. His ety-

mological tracking is keen and multiple, wherein he discovers that

ghost arouses connections with anger, fury, ugly, to wound, to pull to

pieces.54 Th e soul itself is ghostly, something eternal fl oats through

it in its shadings and nuances; the ghost, Miller understands, is a be-

tween fi gure, a phantom third that makes relationships themselves

possible and lasting, so long as it is haunted by the third force of

presence.

In Part Four: “Resurrections of the Dead,” the ghost is the

Paraclete, “from Para-kalein … ‘to call alongside.’ Presumably, the

noun formed on this verb depicts a person ‘called alongside to help,’

that is, a ‘helper.’”55 As he tracks Christ’s own relation to this help-

er, Miller surmises from scripture that Jesus, after his crucifi xion,

will return as the Paraclete, a ghostly presence, to help “as a deep

and holy power. ...”56 Th is particular section is a fi ne example of how

Miller works, pushing down and into, for instance, a Scriptural pas-

sage, then sensing other analogous texts with similar motifs, then

weaving them together, not without a degree of reasoned specula-

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tion, to shape a third thing, an idea he can rightly claim as his own.

It is well worth watching the process as it unfolds: careful scholar-

ship, close imaginal reading, a claiming of secondary sources, then

his own imaginal twist, or underworld turn on the material: back,

down, through. His book is his method, a brand and style of detec-

tion, refl ection and infl ection that allows the historical and mythic

to fi nd a new theopoetic home.

Each pursuit he ends his study refl ecting upon should pro-

duce a ghost, a resonance, a haunting aftertaste, a slight ringing in

the ears, a felt sense of something. Th e ghost fi nds its habitation

between the mythos of the reader and the logos of the work stud-

ied. Th e ghost rises up to pull us down, into an echoing laughter at

the bottom of the well, where visions of new and ornate swimming

things may have their voice heard, perhaps for the fi rst time.

Taken together, Michael Conforti and David L. Miller off er in

these four volumes an imaginal complex of knowing anew by re-

tracing what has been assumed to be familiar. By analogy, through

linking fi gures as strange bedfellows, some new tertium datur ris-

es up to allow a squinting glimpse of not just new content, but new

disciplines, theopoetic and psychophysic, to welcome anyone inter-

ested in the art of knowing to fi nd only slightly grooved pathways to

follow. Th e work has indeed just begun.

Endnotes1 C. G. Jung, “Th e Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,” CW9 ii, ¶414.2 See in this regard especially Paul Kugler’s fi ne study, Th e Alchemy of

Discourse: Image, Sound and Psyche, Einsiedeln, Daimon-Verlag, 2002, and more recently, Susan Rowland’s Jung as a Writer, New York, Routledge, 2005.

3 Rowland, 3.4 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, Th e Whale, (Harrison Hayford and

Hershel Parker, eds.), New York, Norton, 1967, 14.5 Michael Conforti, Field, Form and Fate, Patterns in Mind, Nature and

Psyche (Rev. Ed.), New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2003, xxiii.6 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, London, Routledge,

2002.7 Conforti, xxviii. Concerning two recent books that illuminate Conforti’s

work, see my reviews of Atom and Archetype: Th e Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–1958, (C. A. Meier, ed.), in Th e San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 22:1, 2003, 5–12; and David Lindorff ’s Pauli and Jung: A Meeting of Great Minds, in Th e San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 24:3, 2005, 29–34.

8 Conforti, 15.9 Aristotle’s Poetics (trans. Leon Golden, Commentary by O.B. Hardison, Jr.)

Englewood Cliff s, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1968, 12.10 Aristotle’s Poetics, 284.11 Conforti, 21.12 Conforti, 22.13 Conforti, 41.14 Jung, “On Psychic Energy,” CW 8, ¶41.15 CW 8, ¶56.

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16 Conforti, 50.17 Conforti, 63.18 Conforti, 84.19 Conforti, 108.20 Conforti, 131.21 David L. Miller, Th e New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses.

New York, Harper and Row, 1974, 72.22 David L. Miller, Christs: Meditations on Archetypal Images in Christian

Th eology, New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2005, 21.23 Miller, Christs, 22.24 Miller, Christs, 49.25 Miller, Christs, 49.26 Miller, Christs, 49.27 Miller, Christs, 51.28 Miller, Christs, 69–70.29 Miller, Christs, 71.30 Miller, Christs, 83.31 Miller, Christs, 146.32 Miller, Christs, 173.33 Miller, Christs, 181.34 Miller, Christs, 181.35 Miller, Christs, 183.36 David L. Miller, Th ree Faces of God: Traces of the Trinity in Literature and

Life, New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2005, 5.37 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 8.38 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 12.39 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 59.40 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 66.41 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 70.42 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 87.43 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 92.44 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 103.45 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 112.46 Miller, Th ree Faces of God, 118.47 James Hillman, Th e Dream and the Underworld, San Francisco, Harper

Paperbacks, 1979.48 Joseph Campbell, Th ou Art Th at: Transforming Religious Metaphor,

Novato, California, New World Library, 2001, 7.49 David L. Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts: A Th eopoetics of Christian Belief,

New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2004, 24–25.50 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 27.51 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 46.52 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 46.53 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 80.54 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 105.55 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 136.56 Miller, Hells and Holy Ghosts, 140.

Abstract

Dennis Patrick Slattery, “Bodying Forth the Forms of Th ings Unknown,” THE SAN THE SAN FRANCISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY JOURNAL,FRANCISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY JOURNAL, 2006, 25:2, 31–48. Review of Michael

Conforti, Field, Form and Fate, Patterns in Mind, Nature and Psyche (Rev. Ed.) and

David L. Miller: Christs: Meditations on Archetypal Images in Christian Th eology; Th ree Faces of God: Traces of the Trinity in Literature and Life; and Hells and Holy Ghosts: A Th eopoetics of Christian Belief. Studies in morphogenetic fi eld theory,

psychic energy and the discoveries in physics, pattern recognition, all stemming

from the pioneering work of C. G. Jung, are the loci of Michael Conforti’s original

interdisciplinary thinking. David L. Miller’s work that unites in new and ground-

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breaking ways the fi elds of theology, poetry, mythology and depth psychology of-

fers the outlines of a new discipline: theopoetics. Both writers have pioneered new

pathways to an understanding of soul, archetypes and fi elds of inference. What

both writers share is a keen sense of the metaphorical nature of psyche, its analogi-

cal impulse, its fi gural propensity and its engagement with history. Conforti envi-

sions further rapprochements with science and psychology, while Miller takes up

the poetic sense of psyche in its theological and mythological raiments.

Key Words

Morphogenetic fi eld theory, mythology, poetry, theopoetics, mimesis, poiesis, psy-

chic energy.

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Bodying Forth the Forms of Things Unknown Michael Conforti , Field, Form and Fate, Patterns in Mind,...

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Transcript of Bodying Forth the Forms of Things Unknown Michael Conforti , Field, Form and Fate, Patterns in Mind,...