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S O U L 

Soil and Soul

 

I wonder and I hope:

Are we are

nearing that point of the story where

the snake eats its own tail,

where we forget what we have forgotten

and step back, with a sense

of déjà vu, into a world

ensouled, into the

Anima Mundi?

 

Charles Morse, Soil & Soul 1: Anima Mundi

 

A small farming town in the Midwest of the United States. A sea of genetically modified corn and soybeans extends to every horizon; a biplane sprays fungicide on an adjacent field. Towering crops and clouds of chemicals dancing in the breeze are indicative of two notable aspects of this county: the natural richness of its glacial soil and stratospheric rates of cancer. Less than 150 years ago, a different scene greeted the eye of a travelling poet as he passed through this part of the country. Comparing the grandeur of the landscape to Yosemite Valley and Niagara Falls, Walt Whitman wrote “the prairies and planes, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape (Whitman, 1882/1995).” From abundant prairie to industrial agricultural wasteland in the historical blink of an eye; this is the all too representative phenomenon I have been trying to understand for my entire adult life.

Soil and Soul brings together two seemingly disparate fields, agriculture and depth psychology, and holds them in dynamic, creative tension. A collaborative, web-based work of poetry, visual art, and scholarship, Soil and Soul was created to accompany a presentation I recently delivered to the C.G. Jung Society of Vancouver. The work employs a depth psychological lens to bring greater conscious awareness to the profoundly disruptive and transformational impacts that the advent of agriculture has had on the planet and the human psyche. There is a cautionary link between the disruptive impact of agriculture upon soil, which can ultimately lead to desertification, and the impact of unbalanced, highly-rational ego-consciousness, which leads to a desertification of the soul.

The aforementioned Midwestern town of rich soils suffused with carcinogens, where my great-great grandparents arrived in 1861 as part of the wave of settlement that “broke” the prairies, where my father spent his youth, and where, in my adulthood, I moved to entertain the notion of transitioning the family land back to grassland is named Odell, Illinois. The questions I circumambulate in Soil and Soul are not particularly new to me; their resonance is both personal and ancestral. What is new in Soil and Soul is my orientation towards the questions, and that will be the focus of this paper.

Soil and Soul is a work of Jungian Arts-Based Research (JABR), a research paradigm that embraces multiple epistemologies, or ways of making and discovering new knowledge, and recognizes that the creative process itself can be an important and valid means of knowledge generation (Rowland & Weishaus, 2021). While JABR is a new and expansively articulated formulation, its emphasis on integrating the rational and the irrational, the scientific and the poetic, Logos and Eros, passes through a historical lineage that includes the works of Jung, Goethe, and Dante among others. JABR is an approach uniquely suited for the exploration of the psychic split at the heart of humanity’s ongoing agricultural experiment because it is a research technique that explicitly acknowledges and works toward the healing of that very split. I will presently turn back to JABR, some of its notable historical predecessors, its influence on Soil and Soul, and the particular significance of Joel Weishaus’s The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico. But first, we must set ground markers and define a few terms.

Like Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung hypothesized that the totality of the human psyche includes processes and dynamics of which we are consciously aware as well as those we are unaware of, the unconscious. Whereas Freud believed that the unconscious was comprised of repressed, exclusively personal instincts and urges, Jung postulated a deeper strata of the unconscious shared by all, the collective unconscious (Jung, 1966). The patterns and dynamics of the collective unconscious, what Jung referred to as archetypes (from the Greek arkhetypon, or primal mark, first pattern), exist as a priori potentialities within every individual psyche. While we cannot observe an archetype directly, we can discern something of its underlying form through its distinct personal, cultural, or mythic manifestations. For example, the Greek god Hermes, the Norse god Loki, and Coyote in several Native American cosmologies each express elements that deepen our understanding of the archetypal pattern we refer to as Trickster.

For the Jungian arts-based researcher, the unconscious, archetypal strata of the psyche lies within the field of research. Because we experience the world through the psyche, our understanding is severely limited without some insight into the deeper currents and patterns of the unseen, fluid magma upon which the thin crust of our conscious awareness rests. The unconscious, however, is by its nature obscure, perceived only indirectly through what Jung termed images. For Jung, the image – whether emerging from a dream or a sudden insight – expresses an inner, psychological truth rather than an external, objectively verifiable fact. The Jungian image exists in a psychological edge zone; image is the bridge, the lingua franca between the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche. In Psychological Types, Jung elaborated on this hybrid quality of image:

The image is a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole, and not merely, nor even predominantly of unconscious contents pure and simple… The interpretation of its meaning, therefore, can start neither from the conscious alone nor from the unconscious alone, but only from their reciprocal relationship. (Jung, 1921/1971, p. 442-443)

It is in this estuary of image, where the fresh water of consciousness and the salt water of the unconscious mix in a complex, ever-shifting ecological environment, that the field studies of Jungian Arts-Based Research are uniquely well suited. Jungian Scholar Susan Rowland draws the connection between images, the creation of art, and research of the psyche.

The Jungian psyche is always producing images, some of which are symbols connecting the known to the unknown. Such images of varying psychic intensity and in any media, from the aural, visual, verbal etc., become the material of art. Images thus materialized in art communicate on multiple levels within the person and throughout society. (Rowland & Weishaus, 2021, p. 15)

In this sense, the artist, by working with the fluid, primordial image and giving it form as music, sculpture, etc., is also a researcher in that through her the hidden is made visible, the archetypal is made manifest, and the frontiers of human knowledge may be expanded. She is also, in a sense, enlivening her materials by infusing them with archetypal patterning.

Key to JABR is the Jung’s distinction between sign and symbol. For Jung, a sign pointed to something known or knowable, of a fixed and generally agreed upon significance. A stop sign, for example, is just that: a sign. It has a known, unambiguous meaning. A symbol, by contrast, indicates something inherently ambiguous and essentially unknown. Jung stressed that the difference between a sign and symbol is ultimately one of perspective (Jung, 1921/1971). The symbol acts as a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, and it serves as a reminder of the partiality of conscious knowledge. Jung felt strongly that the cultivation of what he called “the symbolic life” is essential for psychological health by establishing linkages between limited, time-bound ego-consciousness to the timeless, archetypal realm (Jung, 1954/1976). Works of Jungian Arts-Based Research – whether expressed through painting, music, poetry, or scholarly writing – are united in that that they emanate from and encourage the symbolic attitude.

Drawing upon Jung’s work and that of Arts-Based Research Shaun McNiff, Rowland introduces Logos and Eros into the JABR vocabulary (Rowland, 2021, p. 61-62). Logos knowledge is characterized by discernment and separation, reducing complex wholes to their constituent components. Logos knowledge is the driving engine of reductionist science and has held a position of privilege in the Western world at least since the time of Plato. Eros knowledge, by contrast, is intuitive, relational, synthetic, and holistic. Logos unbalanced by Eros misses the forest for the trees (and is likely to clear cut the forest in the process). Eros unbalanced by Logos lacks focus, direction, and distinction. The union of Logos and Eros, which Jung saw symbolically represented throughout religious and mystical imagery (through the marriage of Sol and Luna in the work of the medieval alchemists, for example) is a central aim of both analytical psychology and JABR. Through his own deep inner work, Jung came to understand that the successful union of Logos and Eros creates something entirely new, a type of comprehension that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Jung helped increase our conscious awareness of Logos and Eros as principles within the psyche, but he was not the first to recognize the dangers of their separation and the benefit of bringing them together through art and scholarship. Two towering figures of the Western canon who had a strong influence on Jung, Dante Alighieri and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, both articulated the need to integrate diverse ways of knowing and expressing.

 

Dante’s great works, Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia, are imaginative explorations of love, theology, morality, civics, and history. Dante’s poetry is rich and symbolic, and yet he was simultaneously committed to tethering his work in rational framework consonant with the 13th and 14th centuries, a framework in which there was little daylight between science and religion. Dante scholar T.A. Hipolito notes:

Dante was only too well aware that imagination and poetry may err… [his] answer to the problem, as we have seen – apparently life long and unquestioned – was the scholastic faculty of reason as learned through Aristotelian logic. Section twenty-five [of Vita Nuova] stresses the poet’s obligation to follow reason. By implication this is a different activity from following imagination; reason trails behind, but should be able to verify, imagination… The poet, then, owes it to his art and to the world to be able to state in clear reasonable prose anything he… has written in verse. (Hipolito, 2003)

In Jung’s terminology, Dante understood that Logos and Eros need and support one another, that “poetry and prose” should be able to point to the same underlying truth, albeit from different angles. Five hundred years after Dante, the German statesman, artist, scientist, and author Goethe seems to have heeded Dante’s advice literally, but in reverse. Years after publishing his watershed study on plant morphology, The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe wrote a lengthy poem of the same name to express his scientific insights more symbolically. Goethe purportedly wrote the poem version “in an effort to make his scientific theories and pursuits more palatable to his wife and women friends (Goethe & Miller, 2009, p. xxiv).” This comment sheds light on the gender roles and dynamics of the time, but it also reflects an inner need for Logos (often associated with the archetypal masculine) to speak the language of Eros (associated with the feminine) and vice versa.

From his historical vantage point straddling the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era, Goethe lamented the developing schism between science and the arts. His varied and prodigious works often sought a rapprochement between the two. “Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united,” Goethe reflected. “People forgot that science had developed from poetry and they failed to take into consideration that a swing of the pendulum might beneficently reunite the two, at a higher level to mutual advantage” (2009, p. xxiv). Goethe’s innovative approach to scientific inquiry, which was studied and systematized by Rudolf Steiner a century after The Metamorphosis of Plants, bears many of the hallmarks of JABR. The four phases of Goethean scientific inquiry, exact sense perception, exact sensorial fantasy, seeing in beholding, being one with the object, begin with straightforward, Logos-oriented observation and transition to a more Eros-oriented sensing and relating. The ultimate goal of the inquiry, seeing in beholding, is holistic understanding, the offspring of the union of Logos and Eros, comprising and transcending them (Bortoft, 1996/2010).

Facilitating the interplay of Logos and Eros to encourage a more holistic understanding of a psychologically fraught subject matter is at the core of poet Joel Weishaus’s work, The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico. The forty prose poems of Nuclear Enchantment were originally composed in response to an equal number of photographic collages by the artist Patrick Nagatani. Weishaus accompanied his poetry with scholarly notes and citations he refers to as paratext. Rowland explains how Weishaus’s paratext blends epistemologies and encourages the mingling of Logos and Eros. “Nuclear Enchantment is not poetry with notes, it is scholarly prose and poetic prose juxtaposed into an organic and multiple relationship… Paratexts bring other voices into dialogical relationship with the poetry” (Rowland & Weishaus, 2021, p. 114).

I was deeply moved and inspired by The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico – it brings nuance, beauty, terror, mythic perspective, and even humor to the most petrifying subject matter: the development, testing, and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Rowland argues that nuclear weapons can be understood as a cultural complex, a “split-off portion of the psyche” (Jung, 1922) that has developed out of an ignorance or unwillingness to face the dark side of our nuclear reality (Rowland & Weishaus, 2021, p. 112). After reading Nuclear Enchantment, I saw parallels between the nuclear cultural complex so elegantly illuminated by Weishaus and what might be called the agricultural cultural complex, the long unconscious shadow of humanity’s shift from hunting and gathering to the domestication of livestock and food crops. Unlike the nuclear cultural complex, however, which arrived practically overnight with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the agricultural cultural complex has developed incrementally over millennia. Through poetry, paratext, and visual art created for the project by the artist Debra Goldman, Soil and Soul circles around the notion of agriculture as a fundamentally disruptive force. Etymologically, to disrupt (from the Latin dis- rumpere) means to break apart. As the primary factor behind the deforestation of half of the world’s forests, agriculture has fundamentally disrupted Earth’s ecosystems, soils, and climate. In revolutionizing humanity’s most essential connection to our environment (i.e. how we procure food), agriculture has not only shifted our relationships with the other than human world, it has contributed to the dis-ruption of the human psyche. Hunting and gathering requires relational, somatic, and intuitive intelligence vis-à-vis the environment. It necessitates Eros. Agriculture rewards and encourages rationality, careful planning, and maximal control of variables. It favors Logos. The conquest of hunter-gatherer and pastoral groups by agricultural societies is both a cause and effect of the ascendance of Logos over Eros.

Soil and Soul is not a primitivist manifesto; it is no more possible to revert to a pre-agricultural world than it is to return to a time before nuclear weapons. Furthermore, to examine the dark side of agriculture is not to diminish its countless direct and indirect benefits. Rather, Soil and Soul asks us to approach agriculture with a symbolic attitude, to look afresh at this most fundamental human link to planet Earth. Agriculture, of course, is not monolithic: there are nearly as many approaches to farming as there are farmers. The degree to which we are conscious of agriculture’s shadow, however, determines whether we perpetuate forms of agriculture that disrupt to the point of utter depletion, or whether we make space Eros, for relationship, and practice a regenerative agriculture.

Like Nuclear Enchantment, Soil and Soul utilizes paratext to juxtapose many voices – from futurist Filippo Marinetti to horticulturalist Bill Grundmann, T.S. Eliot to the King James Bible – and binds them loosely together through the relational sinew of poetry, luring the reader into a symbolic engagement with language. Myth, particularly the Judeo-Christian story of Cain and Abel and the medieval grail legend of Parceval and the Fisher King, is evoked to illuminate the archetypal dynamics of humanity’s increasingly Logos-oriented relationship with our home (Greek: oikos, origin of “eco”). When cooked by the slow heat of attention and the symbolic attitude of the reader, my hope is that the diverse ingredients of Soil and Soul intermingle and coalesce into that most essential nourishment: meaning.

 

When we penetrate a little more deeply below the surface of the psyche, we come upon historical layers which are not just dead dust, but alive and continuously active in everyone—maybe to a degree that we cannot imagine in the present state of our knowledge. (Jung, 1966)

Like Homer, Dante, and Goethe before him, Jung’s quest for knowledge led him to use his imaginative faculties to dialog with the past, to speak with the dead. Just as the collective unconscious links the psyche of every living person (and, some would argue, permeates all matter itself), Jung believed that psychic currents flow like a river from one generation to the next, connecting past, present, and future. Commenting on Jung’s Red Book, psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani notes, “[Jung] comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions (Shamdasani & Hillman, 2011, p. 9).” Jung’s downward descent to the depths of the psyche was also a journey into the past, a “descent into human ancestry" (2013, p. 9).

My own journey, of which Soil and Soul represents a set of field notes, is also a descent into the past, an attempt to find some answers to the unanswered questions of my ancestral agricultural lineage that stretches into the mists of time. Anima Mundi, the first of Soil and Soul’s eight poems, begins with a reference to well-known lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding: “And the end of our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate.” Anima Mundi imagines an Edenic return, not to Paradise, but to a world in which Logos and Eros strike a generative balance within the human psyche. To heal from trauma, we must symbolically return to the original wound. Our collective wound, the split of Logos and Eros and the resultant psychic dualism, is bound up with the advent of agriculture. Descending into our human ancestry, perhaps we will one day arrive where we started, the anima mundi, the world ensouled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Bortoft, H. (1996/2010). The wholeness of nature: goethe’s way of science. CA, Lindesfarne Books.

Goethe, W.J. (1790/2009) The metamorphosis of plants. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Hipolito, T.A. (2003). Ancient and the modern in dante’s vita nuova. Renascence. 55 (2), 110 – 132.

Jung, C. G. (1966). On the psychology of the unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 7. Two essays on analytical psychology (2nd ed., pp. 1–119). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1943)

 

Jung, C. G. (1976). The symbolic life (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 18. The symbolic life (pp. 267-290). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1954)

Jung, C. G. (1966). Psychology and literature. In R. F. C. Hull (Trans.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 15). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1950)

Rowland, S., and Weishaus, J. (2021). Jungian arts-based research and “the nuclear enchantment of new mexico”. New York, NY: Routledge.

 

Shamdasani, S. & Hillman, J. (2013) Lament of the dead: psychology after jung’s red book. New York, NY. W.W. Norton & Co.

 

Whitman, W. (1882/1995). Specimen days & collect. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.

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