cell913blog.com #72

I, literally, figuratively, metaphorically and philosophically HATE War! And, doubtless so do millions of others. And I find the wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan all gut-wrenchingly horrific. And I have no way either to change the course of those wars nor, seemingly, to ameliorate or filter my own gut-roilings every time I watch another bombed-out apartment building, hospital, school or the body of a wrapped, dead child being carried from the ruins of their home.

What I hate, however, has the potential, simply in compliance with my denial, avoidance and disgust, to exert an even greater influence on my psyche than is heathy or balanced or manageable. There is something to be said for the potential ‘power of avoidance, denial and dissociation.’

James M. Minnifee, decades ago, wrote a book whose title has clung to memory throughout my life. The title is Canada: Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey. Canadian adherence to American foreign policy, as viewed by Minnifee, a Washington-based correspondent for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), warranted critical scrutiny, as has the Canadian relationship with the United States from the beginning.

 From the Canadian Encyclopaedia.ca, in an article by J.I. Granatstein, updated by Tabitha de Bruin, Daniel Panneton, Richard Foot, February 7, 2006, Last Edited: June 24, 2024, we read:

As a result of Lester Pearson’s leadership in the 1956 Suez Crisis and Canada’s ole in the UN Emergency For he helped to create, many Canadians consider peacekeeping part of the country’s identity. Although Canada’s contribution to peace operations has declined since then, Canadian peacekeepers continue to serve overseas in such places as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In total, more than 125,000 Canadians have served in UN peace operations….In 1956, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal, which was a vital route for oil travelling to Britain. This concerned Western nations and led Israel to attack Egypt. However, they did so without informing the US, Canada or other NATO allies. Canada wanted to minimize the harm done to the Western alliance by the Anglo-French attack. At this time, Lester Pearson was Canada’s secretary of State for External Affairs. Working with UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, Pearson suggested creating a peacekeeping force to stabilize the situation and to permit the withdrawal of the attacking forces. Pearson also offered a battalion of Canadian troops. The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) was quickly formed and placed un the command of Canadian Major-General E.L.M.Burns.

And while peacekeeping, in general, has a positive historic record of dampening conflict, reducing casualties, and generally urging combatants toward the negotiating table, wars continue to erupt, seemingly more recently injected with the venomous poison of terrorism or the testosterone-injected autocracy of individuals (men), some with state power, others acting in terrorist and/or gang cells. The penchant for violence and war has been the subject of writers far more deeply and intimately engaged in the passions and the ironies, paradoxes, the loves and the nationalism that often lie at the heart of war. Does war bring people together in a common effort, as witnessed and documented from the stories of World Wars I and II? Is it inherent in human nature, that the choir-boys plane-wrecked on a deserted island in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies will be ‘rescued’ by a battle-ship of war, incarnating the inescapable nature of the human proclivity for violence and war?

Personally, I have never worn a military uniform. Furthermore, I have cynically and skeptically scorned the military and the quasi-military hierarchical system of ‘order’ and ‘discipline’ that has been transferred to many of our civil organizations. I have held the notion, analogous to the hyper hygiene of the operating room being transferred to the private residence, that the exigencies of war and the battlefield are not appropriate parallels from which to organize the work in offices or factories. Indeed, from this perspective, I have noted, with disdain, disappointment and derision the many examples from the workplaces, of extreme and unjust judgements being imposed on ‘unacceptable’ (defiant, deviant, disobedient, and even creative and sensitive) behaviour by those in power, as if in a military court-martial. Making or imitating the military mind-set, in our public square, is not only offensive but actually sabotaging much of what needs to take place in many social aservice dispensaries. Managing workers, too, does not and must not submit to the ‘military’ or quasi-military mode of supervision. And this includes the avowed principle of ‘rehabilitation’ of criminal offenders in our jails and prisons.

Given my total lack of military combat, and even the heightened emotional and psychic ‘high’ of an Olympic Gold Medal, or even of the intensity of adrenalin-rush that must come as one walks across a stage to be hooded with a doctorate in philosophy, I have a psychic blind-spot for such experiences. They remain outside my experience, and thus I come to their encounter as a psychic kindergartner.

And that is how I came to James Hillman’s chapter, ‘Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars’ in his book, Mythic Figures, Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, Volume 6: Mythic Figures, 2021 by Margot McLean. Somewhat deliberately shocking, certainly arresting, perplexing and challenging, Hillman requires a significant re-think of war.

Recalling a scene from the movie, Patton, in which ‘(t)he General takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc, and says, ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than life.’ This scene gives focus to my theme-the love of war, the love in war and for war that is more than ‘my’ life, a love that calls up a god, that is helped by a god on a battlefield, a devastated piece of earth that is made sacred by devastation. I believe we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull. This special state must be ritualistically entered. We much be ‘inducted,’ and war must be ‘declared’-as one is declared insane, declared married or bankrupt. So we shall try now to ‘go to war’ and this because it is a principle of psychological method that any phenomenon to be understood must be emphatically imagined. To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart. (Op. Cit., p.121)

These words have been written by an American MALE archetypal psychologist. And, as in the deep past, when revisiting the multiple mythologies of the origins of various cultures, one finds that the records, the research and the perspective of the scholars, is masculine. So too, are the archives that fill the stacks in the world’s seminaries and ecclesial libraries, authored, for the most part, by men. And this masculine perspective, attitude, rationality, and even creative imagination hangs like a mystical, and often blinding, gauze cloud over Western thought. However Hillman and others may attempt to bridge the literal/empirical with the poetic/mythical, we all reside, see the world from, and embody a perspective of our gender, our race, religion, ethnicity and cultural legacies. To bridge that divide, however, is an honourable, delicate, nuanced and highly challenging pursuit. Hillman has chosen the ‘middle ground’ of the myths, gods and goddesses, in order to give a face and a background to our deepest and most challenging of personal and national issues. His perception and conviction that ‘in critical moments at highest stress and adrenalin,’ rather than begin with the moral judgements that have been ascribed to virtually each and every human act an decision, he prefers to peer through an artistic, comparative, mythic theme as his operating lens, diving deeply into the symptoms of the moment on which to sketch his psychic landscape.

Focussing on Hillman’s deployment of gods such as Mars and Venus, as his entry into the American psychological attitude, perspective and ‘soul’ with respect to war, offers a path to walk in and with the archetypal perspective. It is a path we might choose to walk into and toward any other deep and profoundly challenging moment, symptom and crisis in our life. It is not an exclusive, nor even a ‘best’ or most ‘ethical’ or certainly not a ‘clinical’ or rational approach to the psychological pursuit of soul.

From the perspective of this scribe, Hillman may well be (intentionally and consciously or not) attempting to secure a perspective ‘bridge’ between the right and left brain, in his pursuit of the ‘soul’ of each of us, and of the anima mundi, certainly of his homeland, the U.S. Injecting the artistic ‘objective correlative’ of mythic figures, stories, metaphors and themes as a way of approaching our ‘soul’ from a psychological perspective, borrowing from Blake, Keats and other romantics, he invites us to leave our certainty of the clinical diagnoses especially of what clinical psychology calls ‘abnormal psychology’ and begin to explore a more verdant ‘garden’ of images, as our way both of perceiving and of adjusting to our deepest emotionally challenging moments.

Hillman’s intimate, iconic and somewhat unconventional perspective on the American attitude to war may seem exclusive to his homeland. Nevertheless, his approach seems relevant and applicable to other lands and crisis moments. The United States was birthed at the end of muskets, rifles, bayonets, in their war with Great Britain, America has been raised on a diet of weaponry, military conflict and arms production and sales. The psychological lens through which Hillman perceives differs from this scribe’s psychic lens. As both a Canadian and an ‘innocent’ of war, I see war through a Canadian lens somewhat less dramatically. And that is how and why my imagination is accosted in reading Hillman’s words.

Hillman borrows from Glen Gray’s ‘The Warriors; Reflections on Men in Battle,’ (New York, Harper and Row, 1970, p.44) for his supportive reference:

Glenn Gray writes in the most sensitive account of the war experience that I know, The Warriors:

Veterans who are honest with themselves will admit the experience in battle has been a high point in their lives. Despite the horror, the weariness, the grime, and the hatred, participation with others in the chances of battle had its unforgettable side. For anyone who has not experienced it himself, the feeling is hard to comprehend and for the participant hard to explain to anyone else—that curious combination of earnestness and lightheartedness so often noted of men in battle.

And in his own words, Hillman writes:

(W)ars are not only man-made; they bear witness also to something essentially human that transcends the human, invoking powers more than the human can fully grasp. Not only do gods battle among themselves and against other foreign gods, they sanctify human wars, and they participate in those wars by divine intervention, as when soldiers hear divine voices and see divine visions in the midst of battle. Because of this transcendent infiltration, wars are so difficult to control and understand. What takes place in battle is always to some degree mysterious, therefore unpredictable, never altogether in human hands. Ware s ‘break out.’ Once commanders sought signs in the heavens, from birds. Today we fantasize the origin or war in a computer accident. Fortuna—despite meticulous battle plans and rehearsals, the battle experience is a melee of surprises. We therefore require an account of war that allows for its transcendent moment, an account that roots itself in archia—the Greek word for ‘first principle’-arche, not merely as archaic, a term of historical explanation, but as archetypal, evoking the transhistorical background, that divine epiphanic moment of war. This archetypal approach holds that ever-recurring ubiquitous, highly ritualized and passionate events are governed by fundamental psychic patterning factors. These factors are given with the world as modes of its psychological nature, much as patterns o atomic behavior are given with the physical nature of the world and patterns of instinctual behavior are given with the world’s biological nature. (Mythic Figures, pps. 123-124)

Tutoring this innocent Canadian, in the archetypal psychic and cultural perceptions of war, Hillman writes words that challenge my own ‘blunt, unnuanced, uninformed, and also innocent’ attitude and perception of the American view of war.

Compared with our background in Europe, Americans are idealistic; war has no place. It should not be. War is not glorious, triumphal, creative as to a warrior class in Europe from Rome and the Normans through the Crusades even to the Battle of Britain. We may be a violent people but not a warlike people—and our hatred of war makes us use violence against even war itself. Wanting to put a stop to it was a major cause of the Los Alamos project and Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a bomb to ‘save lives,’ a bomb to end bombs, like the idea of a war to end all wars. ‘The object of war,’ it says on General Sherman’s statue in Washington, ‘is a more perfect peace.’ Our co-called doublespeak about armaments as ‘peacekeepers’ reflects truly how we think. War is bad, exterminate war and keep peace violently: punitive expeditions, pre-emptive strikes, send in the Marines. More firepower means surer peace. We enact the blind god’s blindness (Mars Caecus, as the Romans called him, and Mars insanus, furibundus, omnipotens), like Grant’s and Lee’s men in the Wilderness, like then bombing of Dresden, overkill as a way to end war. (Mythic Figures, p. 128)

“Love and war have traditionally been coupled in the (mythic) figures of Venus and Mars, Aphrodite and Ares. This usual allegory is expressed in usual slogans--make love not war, all’s fair in love and war-and in usual oscillating behaviors-rest, recreation and rehabilitation in the whore house behind the lines, then return to the all-male barracks. Instead of these couplings, which usually separate Mars and Venus into alternatives, there is a Venusian experience within Mars itself. It occurs in the sensate love of life in the midst of battle, in the care for concrete details built into all martial regulations, in the sprucing, prancing and dandying of the cavaliers (now called ‘boys’) on leave. Are they sons of Mars or of Venus? (Mythic Figures, pps:126-7)

 From Hillman, we learn too of the aesthetic aspect of Mars,

And also there a love lies hidden. From the civilian sidelines, military rites and rhetoric seem kitsch and pomposity. But look instead at this language, these procedures in the sensitization by ritual of the physical imagination. Consider how many different kinds of blades, edges, points, metals, sabers, battle-axes, lances, pikes, halberds that have been lovingly honed with the idea for killing. Look at the rewards for killing: Iron Cross, Victoria Cross, Medal of Honor, Croix de Guerre; the accoutrements: Bamboo baton, swagger stick, epaulets, decorated sleeves, ivory-handled pistols. The music: reveille and taps, drums and pipes, fifes and drums, trumpets, bugles, the marching songs and marching brass, brass braid, stripes. (Mythic Figures, p 127)

Given that this is but a prelude to Hillman’s ‘take’ of the U.S. struggle with the psychic implications of war, with more to follow, we can begin to discern that there are more and much more subtle visages to Hillman’s poetic basis of mind, as applied to the highly charged notion/image/concept of war, than that of the literalists, the empiricists, the rational purists. And, by extension, we begin to embrace a ‘way of ‘seeing’ of exploring and of imagining ‘war’ differently than we have previously.

And that is one of the primary challenges of Hillman’s archetypal psychology.