James Hollis - Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life

Just so its clear

No whining on the journey.

If you whine, youll get stuck

Somewhere with people

Like yourself.

Stephen Dunn, Before We Leave

I keep thinking I could be, perhaps should be, a normal person and just turn on the telly and watch sports when not working at my day job as a therapist. (My team of choice is the Philadelphia Eagles, if you need to know. So for that reason, Dallas and New York fans will not get this book and should stop reading now). Unfortunately, the Daimon, apparently my Daimon, seems to have other ideas. Its rather like being a serial killer. I have normal desires, walk and talk normally, and then some sinister force takes over.

What is a Daimon, you ask. It is a tutelary spirit, a directive intermediary between the gods and humans. It is not a god and not a demon. It is an autonomous Hermetic link between higher and lower powers. (Hermes was the messenger of the gods; his Latin form became Mercury, the logo for Western Union). Plato said that Socrates did not speak; the Daimon spoke through him, using him for that purpose. And so too the artist who paints or composes. The Daimon directs the hand, provides the compelling energy. The human has only one choicewhether or not to submit to the Daimon.

The Daimon speaks to all of us in various ways although we often resist its urgent presence. Most of us, most of the time, find ways to slip-slide away from its invasive summons. Sometimes this avoidance leads to a quiet, untroubled life, but perhaps it also leads to a diminished journey, and sometimes it even pathologizes. As Jung once said, a neurosis is a repressed or a neglected god. So it is, I think, with the Daimon.

When I was a young adult, I dutifully wrote a dissertation on the tension of opposites as manifested in the life and work of the poet W. B. Yeats. Shortly after that, I wrote the first book in America on the relatively unknown British playwright Harold Pinterall this before age 30. To be employed in academia, I had to demonstrate that I could. And then I stopped for decades. As an academic, I was supposed to publish or perish. But something inside protested, and I dried up for two and a half decades. If I wanted to write under assignment, I would be a journalist or a copy writer for an advertising firmboth honorable professions, no doubt. But that internal resistance was compelling and apparently was asking something more from me than promotion or a small raise in salary.

I was a professor of humanities at private and state universities, and then from 1977-82, seeking, driven perhaps, to go deeper than the life of the conscious mind, entered Jungian analytic training at the Mother Ship in Zrich, the Jung-Institut. Upon returning, I started speaking and teaching in Philadelphia, which then spread to Wilmington, and then Ottawa, and then Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Montreal, and soon everywhere, most commonly at Jung societies. Then, unexpectedly, the Daimon arrived, pushed up through the floorboards of the adaptive self, and started hounding me. From that came 16 more books, plus a thesis in Zrich that became a book, and it hasnt let go of me yet. Often, I want to say, Stop, already! But it persists.

So, I see this book as late essays, given that all were written lately and given that I am 80 and dealing with at least two cancers. Since cancer took out the entire female side of my ancestors, I should say final, but I also know better not to predict anymore. The gods apparently laugh at such inflation and send the Daimon on its intrusive mission once again.

The reason I am spending the readers time on this subject, clearly the stuff of someone elses life, and not necessarily the readers, is that possibly I have learned something here that might be of to help the reader. But do continue warned. I said I resisted the external demands to publish in order to prove my competence, to get minuscule raises, promotion, a better office. And I am glad I did. But in the end I could not resist the insurgent demands of the Daimon within.

In the first half of life, our summons is to build an ego strong enough to enter the world, deal with it, meet its demands, and create a living space for ourselves in it. This is seemingly what growing up requires and all life apparently expects. But if we are privileged to live longer than that, we often find other, insistent demands beginning to wash up on our shores from the vast sea within. While I refused to submit to academia, I could not in the end refuse to submit to the Daimon. In fact, I think the meaning of the entire second half of life, (second half used more metaphorically than chronologically) is about finding, or submitting to, something larger than our ego needs, something larger than our complexes with their insistent chatter.