Dust to Dust:
Titanic Pulverization and Dionysus in Exile
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides), is among the most prevalent perennial grasses of the Southern Plains. As the name implies, the grass coevolved with the great herds of American Bison that roamed the Great Plains of North American until their near extinction at the hands of hunters and American soldiers in the 19th century. Buffalo grass’s thick web of slender, fibrous roots creates a dense sod which both stabilizes the soil of the Southern Plains and stores moisture and nutrients within its biomass. The zone immediately surrounding plant roots, known as the rhizosphere, is one of the most biologically active of all environments and is home to an astonishing array of fungi, bacteria, and micro- and macroorganisms. Buffalo grass, with roots that can extend upwards of nine feet below the soil surface, therefore fosters a surprisingly robust soil ecology even in an area like the Southern Plains which averages less than twenty inches of rain per year.
In the early decades of the 20th century, rampant land speculation and a flood of migration to the Southern Plains, soaring demand for wheat due to German blockades during the First World War, and a period of unusually high precipitation set the stage for an ecological, economic, and humanitarian catastrophe now known as the Dust Bowl (Burns, 2012). Lured by higher yields and higher grain prices, farmers in the Southern Plains, most of whom had little experience growing crops on such vulnerable, marginal land, plowed up tens of millions of acres of short grass prairie in order to plant annual crops, predominantly wheat. Without the thick network of buffalo grass roots to hold onto soil and nutrients, a decade-long drought turned the Southern Plains into wasteland virtually overnight.
Now nearly a century after the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s shocked and traumatized a nation, it is remembered largely through the photographs of Dorothea Lange, the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, the fiction of John Steinbeck, and the grainy, otherworldly images of “black dusters” dwarfing the towns and villages they were about to engulf. Exhaustively studied by historians, scholars of public policy, ecologists, and social scientists, the Dust Bowl still occupies a unique space in the American psyche even as the number of people who directly experienced the era dwindle. For some, it has come to represent a cautionary tale; for others, the Dust Bowl forms part of the broader mosaic of the suffering and deprivation of the Great Depression. But while the Dust Bowl is typically thought of as a particular set of circumstances which occurred in a particular place during a particular time, I will suggest that its significance is both timeless and timely; the Dust Bowl is archetypal. As such, we might imagine the Dust Bowl as a play within a play, a unique and particularly dramatic fractal image of a pattern that has been present in humanity’s relationships with land, with food, and with the gods for millennia. Our goal is to better understand the interplay of those forces within the psyche that weave a web of cohering relationality and those that plow up and pulverize the relational, thereby loosing mere anarchy upon the world.
Because our interest is in the archetypal qualities and tensions of the Dust Bowl, our exploration will be of the depths, through and by way of images, which C.G. Jung considered to be the irreducible substrata of psychic reality and James Hillman looked to as “inexhaustible source[s] of insights” (1977, p. 80). The voluminous work that has been done to understand the Dust Bowl from historical, cultural, environmental, and political perspectives is invaluable and helps inform our own inquiry, but our focus here is on the level of the psyche, on who and what impacts the climate and soil of the inner landscape. In this sense, we will be working with the Dust Bowl much as we might work with a dream, seeking to deepen and enrich our understanding of psyche, on its habitual patterns and its innumerable moods, subtleties, personages.
Much as the Dust Bowl’s frequent, disorienting wind storms prompted people to follow fenceposts to find their way home through the shifting landscape, we will be proceeding through the half-light with the benefit of the four “fenceposts” outlined by Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology, the central work of his oeuvre and the primary and most expansive elaboration of the field of archetypal psychology of which Hillman was the instigating and guiding force. In Re-visioning, Hillman was “working toward a psychology of soul based in a psychology of image” fundamentally grounded in “the process of imagination” (1975/1992, p. xvii). Archetypes, a term first coined by Jung and defined by Hillman as the “deepest patterns of psychic functioning”, are integral to our exploration and intimately interwoven with image. Jung theorized that archetypes only exist as potentialities and are not seen or perceived directly – we catch intimations of them only through images they infuse and inflect with their various qualities and characteristics. Thus, to adopt an archetypal perspective is to train one’s gaze for the “common connection between what goes on in any individual soul and what goes on in all people in all places in all times” (p. xx).
Hillman labeled his four fenceposts personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing and dehumanizing. What he meant by these terms is unique to the field and often divergent from their common usage, so it is worth unpacking each of them since they will form the basis of our image-based exploration of the Dust Bowl.
In personifying, the psyche is not envisioned in terms of drives and emotions, chemical exchanges or firing of synapses, but as a constellation of persons with their own agency and autonomy. To cite what is perhaps the most well-known example of personifying within the field depth psychology, Jung experienced and articulated the contrasexual aspect of his psyche as a person, the anima, and attributed to her characteristics and motivations distinct from those of his conscious ego personality. Hillman posits that personifying is natural and intrinsic to the psyche, and that “personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another avenue of loving, of imagining things in a personal form so that we can find access to them with our hearts” (1975/1992, p. 15). Personifying is a way of connecting with and relating to the complex dramas of our inner life. Hillman added that “where imagination reigns, personifying happens” and that “to enter myth we must personify” (p. 16, 17). It is to the complex, colorful, variegated mythic legacy of the Greeks that Hillman looked most frequently and diligently to recover the wealth of psychological insight which personification can unlock. “We return to Greece in order to rediscover the archetypes of our mind and our culture” (p. 30).
In pathologizing, Hillman took up and ran with Freud’s dictum that “we can catch the unconscious only in pathological material” (1975/1992, p. 70). It is through psychopathology, through the suffering of the soul, that the psyche draws attention to itself and thus invites the conscious aspect of ourselves to become aware of what had hitherto been unconscious. Hillman introduced the term as such:
pathologizing mean[s] the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective. (p. 57)
Thus, pathologizing is conceived as an act of the psyche that invites a particular attitudinal response; i.e. not to immediately try to fix or explain away what is “wrong”, but instead to sit with the pathological images and symptoms and view them as gateways to move more deeply into soul. Our afflictions point to complexes, complexes point to their archetypal core, “which in turn refers to a God. Afflictions point to Gods; Gods reach us through afflictions” (p. 104). Suffering and affliction is therefore seen not as merely personal and individual, but as collective and even partially divine. Pathologizing opens up new ways of seeing, for we can “see” through the wound. The view of the world looks quite different from the part of us that is depressed, anxious, manic, or grief-stricken, and this can deepen, compensate, and broaden our overall perspective.
Psychologizing turns an archetypal eye towards ideas, the forms and patterns of the mind, envisioning “the fundamental ideas of the psyche to be expressions of persons—Hero, Nymph, Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, Puer… These are the root metaphors. They provide the patterns of our thinking as well as of our feeling and doing” (1975/1992, p. 128). In other words, ideas do not arise from a neutral place – they, too, have an archetypal ground from which they emerge and contain within them the qualities and limitations of those underlying archetypes. From rational, luminous Apollo, we derive rational, luminous Apollonian ideas. From fluid, wily, creative Hermes, we meet the world with Hermetic ideas. “A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence, and a set of ideas” (p. 130). Archetypal psychology would have us recognize which Gods are coloring and informing the way in which we perceive the world at any given moment. Every God has its strengths and its shadow; every archetypal perspective has its various attributes, its blind spots and biases. To recognize that every idea is partial and provisional upends problem solving as we conventionally conceive of it and fundamentally alters how we approach that which we deem problematic, prompting us to rely less upon the heroic will of the ego and more upon the imaginative, innate, and creative capacity of the deep psyche:
Psychologizing tries to solve the matter at hand, not by resolving it, but by dissolving the problem into the fantasy that is congealed into a “problem.” In other words, we assume that events have an outer shell that we call hard, tough, real, and an inner matter that is epiphenomenal, insubstantial, strange… where problems call for will power, fantasies evoke the power of imagination. (p. 135)
In the polytheistic cosmos of ancient Greece, and in Hillman’s polytheistic conception of the psyche, “what the Gods notoriously want is remembrance of them, not choice among them” (p. 139). What is asked for is an attentive attitude toward the archetypal, a recognition and honoring of the distinct persons within us, how they exhibit themselves, and what they would like to express. Psychologizing takes personifying a step further: it asks us not just to acknowledge the persons of the psyche, but to get to know their thoughts and predilections, their passions, prejudices, pet projects, and pet peeves.
Hillman’s fourth and final fencepost, dehumanizing, serves to emphasize archetypal psychology’s core tenet that the psyche is not merely human and personal, it is also and more importantly expansive, collective, and connected to the divine and to the anima mundi, the world soul. Hillman’s conception of the vast, wild, unruly, multitudinous soul echoes Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes.)” (1904, p. 68)
Hillman’s call to dehumanize was in part a response to contemporary, secular humanism, which placed the human being (and, more importantly from Hillman’s standpoint, ego consciousness) at the center of moral and philosophical consideration. While Hillman was not advocating literal polytheism, he saw in humanism a dangerously sterile, uninspired, and soul-denying worldview. To dehumanize, in Hillmanian terms, is to widen the aperture, to shift the focus from the narrowly circumscribed ego to that of the soul whose center, to paraphrase Nicholas of Cusa, “is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Hillman’s four fenceposts will serve as compass points as we dive into Dust Bowl imagery and attempt to get our bearings. In personifying, we will get to know the archetypal persons implicated in the images and the archetypal phenomenon of the Dust Bowl. In pathologizing, we will attempt to stay with the suffering, disorder, and morbidity that the Dust Bowl presents us with, seeing these as gateways to soul. In psychologizing, we will stay present to the archetypes informing the ideas with which we engage the topic. In dehumanizing, we lean into the possibility that psyche extends beyond the human realm and connects us to the world soul, the anima mundi. The Dust Bowl, a true pathologizing act of the world soul, presents us with a wealth of imagery with which to work. In this limited foray, we will constrain ourselves to three images, three openings into psyche that nonetheless offer a glimpse into the archetypal dynamics at play. The first and third images are from John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath and its 1940 film adaptation. The second image is a photograph with the inscription “dust storm approaching Spearman, Texas” and dated April 14, 1935 (better known as “Black Sunday”, immediately after which the term “Dust Bowl” first appeared in press). But before we get into the granularity of our images, I want to set the stage by introducing the dramatis personae of the Dust Bowl, the key archetypal players implicated. Following Hillman’s lead, we begin our inquiry not by asking how or why but who. In so doing, we make our own return to Greece.
The Gods, the archetypal persons, are just as likely to reveal themselves through absence as through presence. The overarching quality of the Dust Bowl is its dryness, the prolonged and acute absence of moisture. Moisture holds soil particles together through the adhesive and cohesive property of water. Without moisture, the earth bakes and cracks, and if it is plowed, it becomes pulverized (pulvis: dust, powder). When soil becomes dust, the atomized particles of clay, silt, and sand cannot cohere, they are without relational bonds. Who then, is the God or Gods who brings moisture? Whose absence was it that was so consequential during the Dust Bowl? Poseidon? Okeanos? The nymphs of stream and pond? Moisture is not simply the presence of liquid, however. Rivers and oceans are not moist, they are wet. Moisture is the presence of a liquid in, amongst, and between; it is liquid as tiny droplets and thin films. Moisture implies a liquid presence with a tremendous amount of surface area in relation to volume, and due to water’s adhesive qualities, this wealth of surface area is what holds things together. Moisture facilitates relationship.
Moisture is a quality of the God of wine and vine, of theater and vitality, Dionysus. “Water…is the element in which Dionysus is at home,” wrote Walter Otto in his classic work Dionysus: Myth and Cult (1965, p. 162). Dionysus brings the element of water not through rivers and lakes, but through the wine that liberates and lubricates, through the green xylem of plants, through the blood that fills the phallus and drips from the lips of his maenads during their bacchanalia. Dionysus brings the element of water into the relational, connecting moistness of life itself; he is the carrier of zoe, the primal life force. When Dionysus is absent, therefore, life becomes sapped, wilted, withered. If he is away long enough, he leaves deserts in his wake.
Personifying can bring us insight not simply through the qualities and of the archetypal person in question, but with a highly elaborated mythic cosmos like that of the Greeks, we learn even more through the Gods’ behaviors, back stories, and relationships. Archetypal persons do not exist in a vacuum: they are always feuding, conspiring, copulating, and creating with one another. And so our next question is not why was Dionysus absent during the Dust Bowl? but who is it that brings about Dionysus’s absence?
In one of Dionysus’s origin myths, the God was born to Zeus and the Goddess of the underworld, Persephone. While playing one day, Dionysus was lured with toys to the arch-enemies of the Olympian Gods, the Titans, who promptly dismembered the child. Zeus then swallowed his infant son’s heart, and Dionysus was born again through Zeus and the Theban queen Semele. The Titans are Dionysus’s violently dismembering antagonists, and it is the Titans upon whom Dionysus enacts his revenge which, as we shall see, has to do both with dismemberment and madness.
Whereas the Olympian Gods bring proportion and a dynamic order, the Titans usher in excess and disorder. The Titanic knows no limits, and this is its power, its hubristic vulnerability, its grave danger. Having defeated the Titans and confined them in Tartaros, the Olympians bound the archetypal Titanic impulses of human nature. But every myth exists at all times in potentia: the great war between the Olympians and the Titans is not something past and resolved but an omnipresent archetypal potentiality. And when we lose the Gods, when we neglect the archetypal persons within us and slip into ignorance regarding their personalities, their autonomous longing and needs, the Titans once again gain the upper hand. Hillman describes the stakes and the nature of the conflict as such:
Besides Zeus, an especial enemy of the Titans was Dionysus, who was torn by them to bits. What does this say to our condition now? If Dionysus is “Lord of Souls” as he was called and “Zoe” the vitality of life itself, the moist green infusing all plants and animal nature with a savage and tender desire to live, then this urge can be rent to shreds, atomized let us say, by any procedure, any ambition, any universal law that goes beyond the bounds. (1989/2016, p. 144)
Titanism is thus characterized by rapid growth and expansion, and a heedlessness with regards to consequences. In his essay Re-sink the Titanic, a meditation on the Titanism of the modern era, Glen Slater remarks, “The Olympians, of course, portray the dominating forces of the cosmos, personifying the very organs of psychic life. Ever poised to displace this organicity, the Titans sponsor the gigantism of the psyche—inflation, grandiosity, unchecked haste” (1998, p. 107). Slater’s use of the term “organicity” seems just right to me and sheds further light upon the Titan’s enmity towards Zeus and Dionysus, the (pro)creative force of the Gods and his son, carrier of the life force, the God he wanted rule the cosmos. The Titanic is not simply anti-Olympian, it is anti-organic, i.e. anti-life.
The Titan Prometheus is of particular relevance here, for it is Prometheus that steals fire from the Gods and gives it to humans (in addition to teaching them mathematics) “Prometheus provides the impetus for scientific discovery and application in the modern world and is most present whenever these innovations begin to exhibit godlike power” (Slater, 1998, p. 111). The actions of Prometheus may seem altruistic and laudable, but Slater articulates the inherent danger in our unquestioning acceptance of the Titan’s offering. “Blinded by the wonder of his creative gifts, this residue of Titanic ancestry easily escapes our perception. But it is losing sight of the Titan in Prometheus that we become most prone to hubristic excess and its results” (p. 112). Zeus’s anger with Prometheus, however, has more to do with a separate incident in which the Titan tricked the king of the Gods by swapping the meat traditionally sacrificed to the Gods with the bones and fat of the animal (so that humans could keep and eat the meat). Through the influence of Prometheus, therefore, there is an erosion in the quality and sincerity of humanity’s ritual sacrifice, of “making sacred, surrendering to the presence of a god, humbling oneself to the scheme of things” (p. 113). Through Prometheus, humanity becomes less reverential to the divine, to the archetypal persons, and decidedly more Titanic.
It is time to turn to our first image from The Grapes of Wrath which sheds light upon how the dismembering, life-sapping forces of Titanism operate. Having just been released from the state penitentiary on parole, Tom Joad returns to his parents farm only to find it abandoned. A neighbor named Muley Graves has taken refuge in the empty house, and he proceeds to tell Tom the story of how he was pushed off of the land he had farmed as a sharecropper for decades by the farm’s new corporate owners. Graves and his entire family are outside of small wooden home when a Caterpillar tractor arrives to raise the home.
MG: Go on back. Go on back! I’m warning you. Go on back. You come any closer and I’m gonna blow you right outta that Cat. I told ya!… (the tractor driver lowers his goggles) You’re Joe Davidsons boy!
JDB: I don’t like for nobody to draw a bead on me.
MG: Then what are you doin’ a thing like this fer? Against your own people?
JDB: Three dollars a day, that’s what I’m doin’ it for. I got two little kids at home. My wife. My wife’s mother. Them folks gotta eat. First and only I think about my own folks. What happens to other people… that’s their own lookout.
MG: Yeah, but you don’t understand son, this is my land!
JDB: Used to be your land, it’s the company’s now.
MG: Have it your own way, son. But just as sure as you touch my house with that Cat, I’m gonna blow you plumb to Kingdom come.
JDB: You ain’t gonna blow nobody nowhere. First place they’d hang you and you know it. For another, it wouldn’t be two days before they’d send another guy up here to take my place. Now go on! Get outta the way! (Ford, 1940)
The Titanic does not often present itself directly. Hillman wrote, “despite flagrant titanism all around us, the Titans themselves are invisible, like the black night sky of Uranos, their terrible father, and hidden by their mother, Gaia, in her deepest womb” (1989/2016, p. 145). The Titanic creeps into our lives through ideas, systems, economics, technologies. The multinational corporation – huge, expansive, everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent yet faceless is perhaps the most fitting modern image/non-image of the Titanic. Hillman added, “Without images [the Titans] become pure expansion” (p. 145).
Muley Graves’ encounter with the Titanic is not through the president of the conglomerate that now owns his land, nor even through the company’s representative. The Titanic comes to Graves in the person of a neighbor’s son who has quite understandably taken the path of least resistance in order to feed his own struggling family. Joe Davidson’s son has become pulverized, become dust, become an expendable, replaceable cog in a Titanic machine (“it wouldn’t be two days before they’d send another guy up here to take my place”). And as an extension of that Titanic machine, he then perpetuates Titanic dismemberment, literally plowing under, uprooting, and pulverizing the very organic community of which he was once a “member”. This image captures the expansive propensity of empire as well as the expansive nature of agriculture itself since its origins 10,000 years ago.
The American psyche has always grappled with the Titanic, and one could argue that the Titans now have the upper hand. Speed and expansiveness bear the mark of the Titan, and nowhere is this more evident than in the land of moon shots and fast food, manifest destiny and skyscrapers. A nation heedlessly plowing up buffalo grass prairies to expand wheat production, to feed an expanding population, with an expanding appetite and expanding imperial ambitions is displaying its Titanism through and through. It is little wonder that Dionysus fled the scene, taking his life-giving moisture with him, particularly following the added insult of the “dry” decade of the Prohibition 1920s. When Dionysus flees in exile, “his only recourse is to seek refuge in the lap of the Great Mother at the bottom of the sea or, in other words, to regress to the unconscious” (Lopez-Padraza, 2000/2018, p. 20).
Our second image, that of the Titanic dust storm that rolled through a huge swath of the country on April 14, 1935, is an image of Dionysian vengeance. The repressed Dionysus does not go quietly into the fair night; indeed, his exile and the withholding of the cohering, life-giving moisture he brings is in itself is a dismembering punishment. The particular flavor of Dionysian tit for tat vis à vis the Titanic is dramatically depicted in Euripides Bacchae and is explored in depth in Rafael Lopez-Pedraza’s Dionysus in Exile. In Bacchae, a grown Dionysus returns in disguise to his late mother’s city of Thebes. Dionysus’s cousin Pentheus now rules the city and steadfastly refuses to pay homage to this new emergent deity (Dionysus) who is drawing followers, mostly women, into the mountains for wild, frenzied ritual and celebration. Pentheus throws some of Dionysus’s followers in prison, mocks the androgenous appearance of their leader (Dionysus himself in disguise), and vows to put him to death. Lopez-Pedraza posited that “Pentheus represents the Titanic part of human nature in opposition to Dionysus, the forces of power and of a repressive establishment” (2000/2018, p. 70). Dionysus focuses his ire on this archetypal, Titanic foe; he plays with Pentheus’s sanity, induces him to dress as a bacchant, and draws him into the mountains where he sets his followers, whipped up into a manic state, upon their king. The bacchae tear Pentheus limb from limb; his own mother Agave, “in the grip of the god and the god’s frenzy” begins the assault and afterwards places her son’s head a pike, mistaking it for the head of a mountain lion in her altered state (Roberston & Euripides, 2014, p. 59).
The great dust storms the Dust Bowl, the “black blizzards”, were an overwhelming, frenzied, maddening, and dismembering phenomenon. The storms tore the paint off of cars and houses, rasped the skin off of people and livestock. Like a full solar eclipse, the most intense storms completely obscured the sun. Imagining ourselves into the blackness of a dust storm, we can see a parallel in Slater’s reflections on the sinking of the Titanic:
These moves against Titanic inflation are all concerned with a turn to the dark, beginning involuntarily through the revenge of the gods, then leading to an acceptance through endurance and sacrifice. When connected to such themes, the Titanic’s demise corrects the sun-drenched logos of modern technological vision and moves us into the less defined, less focused, less mechanical world of mythos (1998, p. 117).
How do we respond to this “turn to the dark”? Does it lead us to acceptance through endurance and sacrifice, or do we keep on keeping on with our Titanic expansiveness and optimism? This question brings us to our third and final image(s): the wrenching final scene of Steinbeck’s 1939 novel and the strikingly different conclusion to the 1940 Hollywood film. In the novel, Tom Joad’s younger sister Rose of Sharon has just delivered a stillborn child. Seeking shelter from the rain (the long awaited return of moisture), the Joad family finds a seemingly empty barn. Inside, however, they find a young and bewildered boy trying to tend to his starving father. Rose of Sharon and her mother exchange knowing glances, and Ma shuffles everyone out of the barn except for Rose of Sharon and the dying man.
[Rose of Sharon] moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. There. Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously. (Steinbeck, 1939/2002, p. 455)
Steinbeck’s novel ends with redemptive, reconnecting, nurturing moistness, a return to the moisture of the soul. The exhausted Rose of Sharon nonetheless evokes the Dionysian maenad, who, desiring milk “had only to scratch the earth with fingertips, and there was the white stream flowing for them to drink, while from the thyrsus a sweet ooze of honey dripped” (Robertson & Euripides, p. 70). Hillman stated that, “milk restores the psychic connection with others and with oneself by feeding the primordial levels of the soul,” and the “milk [of the anima] expresses the dependency of the ego on the anima for its life” (1967/2021, p. 305, 307). The pathos of the novel, a result of Titanic expansion and the subsequent exile and vengeance of Dionysus, concludes with the moist-lipped smile of a young woman who will not be a bearer of new life but a revitalizer, a restorer to life of humanity at its weakest, frailest, and most humbled.
In the film version, the repression of Dionysus holds sway and our parting image is not one of soulful moisture but of a hard and dogged endurance in the face of Titanic pulverization. There is no intimation of renewal and reconnection with mystery and the divine, just a “keep calm and carry on” image of sheer will and perseverance. In the film’s concluding lines, Ma and Pa Joad, driving their family in search of work in California’s farms and orchards, contemplate their past, present, and future:
Pa: We shore takin’ a beatin’.
Ma: (chuckling) I know. Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa. We’re the people. (Ford, 1940)
The people may indeed go on forever, but whether they persist as uprooted, atomized particles carried hither and thither by the dust storms of existence or whether they find moist, nourishing soil in which to sink deep, relational roots makes all the difference. The Great Depression may have momentarily tripped up Titanic expansiveness, yet within forty years of Black Sunday, the United States Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz was lambasting farmers to “get big or get out” and to “grow fence row to fence row”. Nowhere is the Titanic impulse more insistent and omnipresent than within agriculture, for the Promethean advent of agriculture itself represents a caloric fire stolen from the Gods and the spread of agriculture to every corner of the globe is perhaps the most enduring Titanic legacy. But while agriculture once had many Gods, Goddesses, and demi-gods to moderate, constrain, and sacralise it, modern, industrialized agriculture has long been without a sense of the sacred, without a sacrificial gesture. It expands and extracts, obsessively focusing on maximum short term yield without tending to the long term health of the soil. Its pulverizing, untethered Titanism sends Dionysus and his moisture into exile and invites the frenzied, dismembering, maddening wrath of the Dust Bowl. The words of the unhappy Theban messenger who witnessed the violent madness of the bacchae and had to bear word of Pentheus’s death to the chorus remain wise council two and a half millennia after Euripides penned them: “Moderation and reverence for the gods are a mortal’s best possession” (2014, p. 60).
References
Egan, T. (2006). The worst hard time: the untold story of those who survived the great American dust bowl. New York, NY. First Mariner Books.
Hillman, J. (1975). Revisioning psychology. Harper.
Hillman, J. (1977). An inquiry into image. Spring, 1977, 62-88.
Hillman, J. (1989/2016). …And huge is ugly. James Hillman uniform edition vol. 6: mythic figures. Spring Publications.
Hillman, J. (2005). Senex and puer. (G. Slater, Ed.). Spring Publications.
Hillman, J. (1982). Anima mundi: The return of soul to the world. Spring,
1982, 71-93.
Lopez-Pedraza, R. (2000/2018). Dionysus in exile. Chiron Publications.
Paris, G. (1990). Pagan grace. Spring Publication.
Robertson, R., & Euripides. (2014). Bacchae
Slater, G. (1998). Re-sink the titanic. Spring, 1998, 104-120.
Steinbeck, J. (1939/2002). The grapes of wrath. Penguin.
Whitman, W. (1855/1904). Song of myself. Roycrofters.
Figure 1: The Grapes of Wrath
Figure II: Black Sunday