Understanding Archetypes: Thomas Moore

In my last post (Freedom and Reality), I said that I tried to employ a "multivalent and archetypal" narrative style in my writing, as opposed to the 19th century "realist" style developed by authors as diverse as Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, and still used by a writer like Jonathan Franzen (who appeared on the cover of Time magazine after the publication of Freedom, with the headline "Great American Novelist").

Just after I posted "Freedom and Reality," I ran across a chapter by Thomas Moore, "Imagination is More Weighty Than Fact," from his book Original Self (2000, HarperCollins). This chapter spoke not only to my problem with "realism," but also serves to define the terms multivalent and archetypal style.

A word about Moore and his mentor, James Hillman, and then excerpts from "More Weighty Than Fact."

This comes from the jacket flap for Original Self: "Thomas Moore was a monk in a Catholic religious order for twelve years and has degrees in theology, musicology, and philosophy. A former professor of religion and psychology, he is the author of Care of the Soul, Soul Mates, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, The Education of the Heart, and The Soul of Sex."

I first ran across Thomas Moore's name in a book of James Hillman's collected writings called A Blue Fire (1989, Harper and Row), "Introduced and Edited by Thomas Moore." I first learned about James Hillman from a 1990 interview with him conducted by Michael Ventura in his "Letters at 3AM" column in the L.A. Weekly (which Ventura talks about here). My co-writer, Julie, had the opportunity to hear James Hillman speak at a mental health conference several years ago. He died about a year ago. This New York Times obituary describes his life and work fairly accurately. The final paragraph speaks to the subject of this post:

“Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled,” Mr. Hillman wrote in 1976. “But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.”

To help me get through a particularly dark period in my life, I repeatedly alternated three audiobooks: The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder (more on that in a future post), Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss, and Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. Of the three, Moore's was the most freeing.

So, finally, here is what Moore says in Original Self about imagination and modernism:

"It is difficult for a modern person, influenced by the myth of fact so embedded in our thoughts and values, to realize the importance of imagination. We are educated to prove our intuitions with empirical experiments and studies. Anything not verifiable by investigation of the senses we consider suspicious at best.

"This materialistic view of things gives us a half-life, a partial view of experience. The images of memory, dream, and fantasy then become useless, if not interfering. We distrust intuition and imagination as superstitious, a charge that quickly wounds our modern notion of intelligence. These other powers make us feel inferior, and we can't wait until our suppositions are proven by some sort of hardware or research design.

"This half-life existence, where imagination and ideas are ignored, comes from a surrender to a purely physical and literal understanding of events. In the currently accepted view, as long as you do the right thing, it makes little difference what your reason is. But this, says T. S. Eliot, is the greatest treason, a betrayal of our humanity, because the interior life counts. Without it we are indeed machines that can be manipulated genetically and given new mechanical parts. In this half-life there is no hope for immortality of any kind because only the current situation is real. In this half-life there is nothing of weighty and enduring interest, because the soul is ignored as unproven - the very thing that gives life ultimate value and makes it all worth living."