The Hero's Guilt (1)

God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord ...

... And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were upon the earth ... all the foundations of the great deep (were) broken up, and the window of heaven ... opened.

-- Genesis 6:5-8; 7:10-11 (King James version)

***

So begin here with a dream-image that was belled clear and startling in my mind some moments after I had fallen back asleep around 6 a.m., next to my wife in bed:

I was at my father's place, instructing others (or taking advice from shadowy figures) on how to provide an outlet for some small welling stream -- to allow water a way to the surface, provide merriment, gleam, fresh insight: But then I look and see a flood pouring down his Glen of the Temple, down from Thors Gate, or perhaps up from the Poet's Stone -- a wide riverish wake drowning all in its path.

And wake.

***

Edith Hamilton's account of Hercules in Mythology underscores a darker vein of the hero's nature. "(Hercules) had true greatness," she writes. "Not because he had complete courage based upon overwhelming strength, which is merely a matter of course, but because by his sorrow for wrongdoing and his willingness to do anything to expiate it, he showed greatness of soul."

So when he kills his wife and two children in a fit of blind rage (excusable, to a hero like Theseus, because he had "lost his mind" in the red passion), he indentures himself to Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, to expiate for his crimes by undertaking twelve impossible labors (suggested to the king by Hera, who never forgave Hercules for being born) - tests in which his desire for forgiveness is matched with an heroic will to succeed. Thus he kills the lion of Nemea and the nine-headed Hydra, capture and bring home a stag with golden horns sacred to Artemis as well as a great boar on Mount Erymanthus, clean the Augean stables in a day, drive away the Stymphalian birds, fetch from Crete a bull sacred to Poseidon and then the man-eating mares of King Diomedes of Thrace, abscond with the girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazones, return the cattle of Geryon, a three-bodied monster ravening a far western island, each wore than the last. The eleven th labor -- to steal the Golden Apples of the Hespirides, an island that can't be found -- he must master with his wits (a rare moment for this big-hearted blunder), fooling the dumb-and-dumber titan Atlas. And the twelfth and last labor -- to steal the three-headed dog Cerberus from Hades -- is his most daring and impossible and (duh) harrowing, one he must accomplish wholly alone (he was usually aided by Athena in his previous labors). And the big lug picks up the monster and simply carries it out, placing it at the feet of terrified Eurystheus.

Point being here, the hero is motivated and shadowed by guilt for his outrageous actions. He may piss of the gods with his being (like Hera), but his archetype rules the inner hanging court of guilt and conscience. So what of this shadow: is it a door beyond the hero?

***

Action, reaction: for every forward striving, is there a resonance, a court down under where good intentions are crimes and the victory stroke impales one's own heart? Is that dark doppler more essential (faithful to our essence) than anything we attempt topside, in the day? Hillman so suggests in his essential Dream and Underworld:

"The shadow world in the depths is an exact replica of daily consciousness, only it must be perceived differently, imaginatively. It is this word in metaphor. Our black being performs all actions just as we do in life, but its life is not merely our shadow? From the psychic perspective of the underworld, only shadow has substance. Only what is in the shadow matters, eternally. Shadow then in psychology is not only that which the ego casts behind, made by the ego out of its light, a moral or repressed or evil reflection to be integrated. shadow is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connections with the underworld."

How the do we look upon the hero up topside, who so rules the light of the conscious day? Hillman again, same text:

"What goes on in the life of the ego is merely the reflection of one's deeper essence contained in the shadow. ... The shade is thus a cumulative deposit made simultaneously with the ego's career."

Thus the shadow of guilt -- the torment of Hercules, who cannot be defeated on earth except by his own self-judgment, who counts the failure of his heart far greater than the colossal cordage of his ball -- is what the hero is truly about. So why is it so hard to see this? Why must life and shade become so divided, and our stories so harrowed with guilt?

Hillman: "This way of putting the question radically changes our usual notion of super-ego No longer may we assume it is imposed from above by a later development, as if it only comes from sunlight and as if the small child casts no shadow. Rather, we are watched from our actions by the shadow of the body, that which is its closest witness."

And this: "(the shadow) creates the heroic endeavors of the day ego as a sort of expiatory function for its psychic torment below. ... Rather than viewing the soul as expiating in a nightworld for our shady actions in the dayworld, we may imagine dayworld actions to be expiations for shadows we have not seen. As long as we act in the heroic mode, we are driven by guilt, always paying off. Our doings are more like undoings, and our visible achievements are driven by an invisible image that either cannot rest (Sisyphus) or cannot move (Theseus stuck on the throne of Hades)."

***

So the hero's engine is forever dark, his striving to beat the world the soul's attempt to articulate what it cannot yet name, much less face off against. So you hammer Hydras and rassle bulls, fending off the creeping inferiority with outrageous fortunes abroad, topside.
I might be carrying (ferrying?) on the father's work, but down under I'm pissing mightily upon him, drowning his achievement in an embarrassing statement of pure puerile body -- flood up from my hips and out from the Poet's Stone, high words rogered by low porpoises.

Is that it? And all of that breastage crowding and crowing in my day, the bigger the better in plenitude, flooding me in nourishing lactates, more than I can ever mouth; and that flooding's undersides, my bottomless desire to flood breasts with semen, milk 'em the other way, my very imagining nursed not by the image but the desire for them, as Eros looks not upon Psyche but his fiery reflection in her eyes, and thus Psyche as the mirror of Eros, her cleavage my plunge, cock jammed between milk globes spuming a milky spunk, drowning the day. ... And all of those reveries snaking up from such hard dark-of-early-morning labors, d-cup adder's tongues flicking what I did not see as I wrote the words, sensibly, serially, rhetorically, in none of the modes the soul prefers ...

What did I achieve on paper that was not refuted in that boobal parade? Instead of seeing progress (or egress) from the hero, under the capstone of his waywarding balls, I wear 'em as a thinking cap all day, immersed in pure puerile sexual reverie, clear thoughts refuted, a good married day undermined by all of the secret hot fancies,jezebel jinns I could only wade through, guiltily, trying to make it up to my wife by being relaxed and courteous and flexible, easy, not tense in traffic, making good conversation, paying attention to her -- shadow hero and love's darling embroiled in the fascia of the day, in high foment, deep expiation, steadied only by prayers to my God, and an ever-more-abiding faith in the miracle of metaphor ...