IMAGINATION AND CHARACTER

Imagination is one of the greatest of all human faculties. Without it life would be dull, and life would be dangerous. It is our capacity to imagine that warns us of danger and goads us to walk away from it.  

Our memories are products of our imagination. It is our imagination that enables us to recreate the past and create the future. Without imagination creativity would dry up – and when that happens life becomes absolutely drab, if at all it survives. It is imagination that produces endless possibilities.

Jungian Analyst James Hillman argues that “character and imagination are inseparable” (Force of Character, p. 182). Imagination is not images. Imagination is presence. And we see character as the presence, not just the image of a person.

Our body, Hillman, points out, is not just a composite of anatomical structures. It is also an imaginative structure. It is the imaginative body that creates “dance and sculpture, and impels the rhythms of oratory, music, and writing.” (p. 184).

The character of a person is a “complexity of images.” So “to know you I must imagine you, absorb your images,” writes Hillman. “To stay connected with you, I must stay imaginatively interested, not in the process of our relationship or in my feelings for you, but in my imaginings of you. The connection through imagination yields an extraordinary closeness. Where imagination focuses intently on the character of the other—as it does between opposing generals, guard and hostage, analyst and patient—love follows.

“The human connection may benefit from exhortations to love one another, but for a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships last not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.” (pp. 185-186)

Meditation on FACE AND CHARACTER

In this time Covid-19 when the mask is in fashion, a meditation on the Face may be salutatory!

We have ample time during the enforced lockout to really look at the faces of those around us (both with or without masks), and we may discover aspects of character we may have failed to notice even though living in proximity and relating day in and day out for years.

The word "Respect" comes from the Latin "Re-Spicere," which means to take a second look or to look again. Let's us respect those around us, look and look (I prefer the word "contemplate) at the faces around and we may see very different person than  those we thought we knew. Consequently we may develop a more respectful attitude toward these persons and relate more respectfully as well.
A face expresses the mystery of a lifetime! Unravelling it an be fun as well in the time of Covid-19.

Below are a few excerpts from Jungian Analyst James Hillman's , The Force of Character

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Does the face reveal character or hide it?

"I want to grow old without facelifts. They take the life out of a face, the character. I want to have the courage to by loyal to the face I've made," said Marilyn Monroe.

Joyce Nash, Ph.D, after her cosmetic surgery. " "What I saw was disturbing., and it didn't feel like me. something was lost. A sense of sadness welled up.... The frown lines, the sleepy look, the sagging cheeks and neck were gone."

The extravagance of facial musculature is all for expression of major emotions, yes; but even more for such peculiar subtleties of civilization as supercilious contempt, wry irony, wide-eyed fawning, cool unconcern, smiling, and sneering.

By means of these muscles, our faces make pictures. The psyche displays aesthetically its state of soul. Character traits become intelligible images.

Will his jaw quiver, a tear emerge? Will his eyes shift away or narrow slightly? We watch the face for tell-tale signs.

As we get very old, our mind wanders among images and we are brought back to our bodies by infirmities and the caring attention or neglect of others. As our bodies shrivel, we become our faces. Feet, hams, arms, and shoulders lose their shapeliness, while the face gains distinction, even beauty. The old naked body is unsightly, yet its naked face is a subject for long contemplation. The sagging skin and webbing veins on the body tell only of old age, while on the face they enter the composite portrait and contribute to its significance, sometimes its magnificence. The face makes visible the metamorphosis of biology into art.

"The face of a man is the medium through which the invisible in him becomes visible..."

According to Emmanuel Levinas, the most radical, soulful, and profoundly positive French thinker of the last fifty years, the human face as an archetypal phenomenon bears one message: utter vulnerability. Therefore, the face will be disguised, covered, decorated, surgically altered--or, on the contrary, deprived of all possibilities of hiding, as in the abject condition of prisoner, captive, and victim.

Even if gladdened and tautened and lifted out of its destitution, a face remains the visage of mystery. It is soul present as an image, soul in all its vulnerability. For Levinas, the face expresses a sacred power.

The accouterments of fashion are not merely fashion, decoration for attraction or even expression. Wigs, powders, veils and headdresses, well-groomed facial hair, beauty marks aid in keeping the face under control, lest inmost parts be seen.

A face is being made, often against your will, as witness to your character.

MUSINGS ON THE HEART AND CHARACTER

'There are more hearts than the one that shows up in clinical imaging."

"Could heart troubles in later years also refer to a troubled heart? No doubt, somewhere along the way each heart has failed. To medicalize these painful seizures into failures of the bag of blood inside your rib cage constricts the hart's rich implications."

"Character is concerned with the heart failures of love, inner truth, and honor, and with the suppression of beauty. For it is a daily fact that we tend to keep beauty out of our lives lest it strike our hearts and kindle fierce longings we do not know how to appease. An ECG will not reveal anything about these weaknesses, nor can a stress test expose them. Times when courage failed, when we held back our cordiality, lacked pity, or betrayed our heart's calling can preoccupy later years as much as any lab findings. Heart disease and heart unease may be as near each other in fact as in language."

"...character demands attention to core essentials, which require other sorts of discipline than giving up smoking and cutting out butter. Life review in an armchair can be an exhausting exercise of imagining, stretching the heart-core of character at least as far as a brisk walk with the dog."

"Perhaps it is not only the attrition caused by life's stresses that hardens the heart, but failed contrition for our heart's smallness."

"The heart crushed by its own faults is suffering another kind of massive coronary event that brings deep pain"

"As you lie rigid in your bed or stare out over water, the heart reenacts how you betrayed your friend forty years ago, played the evil sister, the negligent daughter, the shirking friend. You see clearly and feel fully the injuries caused to spouses, parents, lovers, partners, dependents strewn in the wake of your self-centered demands and delusional beliefs. Of all these injuries, those done to your own calling through failure to respond with passion to the heart's imagination hurt most. With its relentless attacks, contrition exposes the heart's failure."

"It is not the past that is tempered by contrition, but the gnawing guilt about it....
Contrition lifts from the heart the weight of the dead past, making mercy possible."

from James Hillman, The Force of Character, pp. 119-124 passim)