GRGR: The Center IS The Lie

[s~Z]

I haven't re-read GR during the discussion, but picked it up recently and
read passages here and there to re-activate that which blew me away the
first time I read it. What an onslaught. To say anything, the holocaust or
anything else, lies at the center of the novel is incomprehensible to me. To
say there is a center of the novel wherein anything can lie is
incomprehensible to me. Chris K mentioned Hillman in a recent post. From his
perspective there is no center. He separated himself from Jungian thought
because Jung asserts an individuation process by which the individual
transcends fragmentation by aligning the ego with the Self and achieving
wholeness.  Hillman says that is preposterous, that polytheism is preferable
to monotheism, and that the many dimensions of reality can never be
transcended, nor the resultant conflicts resolved. When I read GR I feel
like I am in Hillman territory, not Jungian. A miasma of clashing complexly
interwoven images with little hope of resolution, and no center.

"Before we try to resolve a conflict, Hillman insists we look at our belief
in conflict. In any conflict, there usually lies a secret heroism that
enjoys struggle or a secret martyr who wants to be torn apart. In a
polytheistic view of the psyche, conflicts no longer seem so decisive. From
the start, the motive in polytheism is to honor all sides. The idea is not
to conquer or be conquered. There is no one hierachical, unified head.

"In the context of polytheism it is virtuous not to be integrated and
centered, but to be flexible, embracing, tolerant, patient, and complicated.
The varieties of experience do not have to be harmonized. Balance,
intergration, and wholeness, important values in monotheistic psychology,
have no place in polytheism, which demands a stretching of the heart and
imagination. The polytheistic soul is richly textured and texted. It has
many qualities of character and is the theater where many stories are
enacted, many dreams mirrored."

         --Thomas Moore in _Blue Fire_, a collection of Hillman writings