"Quería ser pájaro" (1960) by Leonora Carrington
Lately I've been thinking a lot about minimalism vs. extravagance, or perhaps, richness -- clutter and catastrophe. I also finally finished reading my brother's bachelor's thesis this morning, which is concerned with the distinction between spirit and soul, seen through the lens of depth psychology.
In this view, the spirit is vertically oriented, upward-reaching, high-flying, like Icarus; both the force that drives the quest for spiritual enlightenment and the spirit that quests. This is what I associate with the urge I sometimes feel to get rid of every extraneous thing I own, even the majority of my library, and move into some sort of closet-like room, preferably in a foreign city where I know no one, and live in harmonious asceticism with only a few electronics and a tea kettle. And a cat, preferably. It's a desire for purity, spaciousness, and a kind of eternal newness -- a desire that definitely belongs to the spirit. But just as the spiritual urge can turn destructive, causing burn-out, insanity, and swan dives born of sun-melted wing-wax, the urge to get rid of all my stuff can also become a violent reaction to dissatisfaction with the world-as-it-is and with various forms of frustration, which manifests as me ripping all the books off my shelves and throwing them at the wall with a bloodcurdling war cry (sorry, neighbors).
On the other hand, the soul, according to writers like C.G. Jung and his somewhat rebellious disciple, James Hillman, is downward-reaching, rooted in the underworld, and associated with all the fertile, fecund emotion, experience, physicality, imagination, and dream-stuff that composes life on earth. If the spirit is the mountain where the monks levitate, the soul is the valley where we common folk live, love, work, drink Coca-Cola, and create. The longing to descend deeper into the mysterious realm of the soul is what I associate with the opposite of my yearning for minimalism -- the yearning for a forest of storied objects and palpable energies to surround me, both in tangible reality and in my inner world. Sometimes I want to live in a portable, luminous egg, and sometimes I want to live in a decaying, twisty mansion crowded with bizarre artifacts. I once read that the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington (who is also interested in psychology) decorated her house like the lair of a 16th-century magician -- and that's where my main problem with this shiny new version of ascetic minimalism comes in: the problem of inspiration. For anyone who wants to make art, to write, to delve into her own psyche and meet the beings who dwell there, it's important to be surrounded by at least a few things and images that speak to the soul and have significance to the individual... Or is it?
Honestly, I'm not really sure about any of this. But while last week I went around my small apartment collecting random clutter that no longer had any significance to me, I still find myself completely unwilling to get rid of the odd assortment of Celtic crosses, hand-painted boxes, purple wombats, chunks of Icelandic lava and jars of Himalayan dirt that have been given to me by friends and/or acquired the status of magical totems throughout the years -- no matter how much I sometimes want to set the damn place ablaze and walk into the sunset with nothing but the iPhone in my back pocket.
Because that's the thing about technology -- no matter how useful, how innovative, how much a portal to the near-infinite worlds online, a mass-produced piece of machinery can never accumulate and serve as a touchstone for the same kind of imaginative or memory-related energies that can be carried by a unique, sensual, perhaps handmade object. (Or can it? Thoughts? Disagreements?) And so I tend to associate technology with the sometimes self-destructive flight of the spirit, the ancient urge for a pure world apart from the sensual distractions and messy physicality of the valley of the soul (John Keats' "Vale of Soul-making"). It seems the more technology we produce, the more of the physical world we destroy, and as we destroy the planet, we destroy not only natural resources, but the dense, lush, challenging natural world from which we came and from which our dreams, symbols, art, and poetry also come. Losing touch with the physical world is the downfall of the short-sighted spirit... Digging deep in the seeded muck is the shovel-work of the intrepid soul.
Maybe.
"Don't quote me."
3 comments:
I occasionally want to burn my things as well. Actually, occasionally has become frequently now. But that was a beautiful look at that sort of tendency.
Technology, in some ways, allows you to collect much more, delve much farther. A computer is in some ways like a house... it has rooms, some of which are filled with useless nonsense. But it is not the same as having an old mansion full of books because you obviously can't go into your computer, fall asleep in your digital library of e-books.
Rejecting materials but keeping technology is only really different in the experience. And that with technology it might be possible to have 40,000 books rather than 400, you could indulge your desire for collections till your harddrive space runs out.
Yesss, so true about the house-like-ness of computers. I guess then the question is, how important is the nature of the experience? (Of physical things vs. virtual ones.)
That also made me think of Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, when the heartbroken Princess Leigh-Cheri locks herself in her black bedroom with nothing to look at but a pack of Camel cigarettes, which, in her state of sensory deprivation, absorbs her whole attention until she winds up going on these crazy journeys inside the world of the Camel pack. Robbins' whole thing is that communion with an object that serves as an "other" is part of how we connect with the great Mystery of Existence. At least, I *think* that's what he was saying...
@ Arielle -- Thank you.
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