“Personifying has always been fundamental to the religious and poetic imagination, and it is today fundamental to the experience – and to thinking about the experience – of archetypal psychology” (Hillman, 1975, p. 1).
In our normative, sane world we are only allowed to bestow subjectivity on ourselves. What is human is allowed that particular interiority. Certianly not animals, or trees, or the wind. If we find persons there, we are presumed to have put them there ourselves. Our interiority, our personhood transferred to them as “a defensive mode of perception, a projection, a “pathetic fallacy,” a regression to delusional, hallucinatory or illusory modes of adaption” (Hillman, 1975, p.2).
But we treat things differently that we allow personal interiority. We give precedence to soul. Slaves were said to not have soul. Women were said to not have soul. It would appear that what we want to control, or what we want to treat like shit, we de-personify. If something is objective dead matter we can treat it however we want.
But objective dead matter also lacks a certain, deep-seated beauty. Because ultimately what we see when we see beauty is that particular inner spark, that numinosity. But you can’t see it – and you can’t interact with it – if you don’t think it exists in the first place.
“But on this expedition we shall penetrate the interior realm of animism. For we are in search of anima, or soul. From the outset we are assuming that the close connection between the personified world of animism and anima – soul – is more than verbal, and that personifying is a way of soul-making. That is, we are assuming that soul-making depends upon the ability to personify, which in turn depends upon anima” (Hillman, 1975, p. 3).
To personify then is to be open to a broader, deeper reality. To extend the borders of the possible down and in until they drift off the edge of the earth itself. To extend them until they hit the boundary of what we call imagination and then, with a little rhetorical coaxing, to go through that boundary, into the unknown space where these differences are trifling details.
What color were the sheets? Who cares. The sex was amazing.
Feeding our lives through a perspective that has the capacity to personify anything – and by personifying we do not mean making shit up. We are not putting our personality on the world. Nor are we sailing our ships to new lands for cotton and sugar. We are not looking to meet new persons in order to colonize them. To bend them to our will. These are beings unto themselves. With their own logic, their own pathos, their own love, their own surrenders. That has nothing to do with us. We can – should we find ourselves lucky enough – notice them. We can – should we work at it – take inspiration from those who have come before. We can take our cues from them and perhaps, add a few nuances of our own. But most importantly, we can listen to the persons we find in this former dead matter. We can strain our senses through the gauze of our illusions and fears to find the voices that are everywhere.
“The modern vision of ourselves and the world has stultified our imaginations. It has fixed our view of personality (psychology), of insanity (psychopathology), of matter and objects (science), of the cosmos (metaphysics), and of the nature of the divine (theology). Moreover it has fixed the methods in all of these fields so that they present a unified front against soul. Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled. But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning. A fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness” (Hillman, 1975, p. 3).
