3: Life Is Always In a State of Flux

INTRODUCING SPIRITUAL MUSINGS, VOLUME 4

THE MAGNIFICENCE OF SOUL

 

3 

Life Is Always In a State of Flux

          Enantiodromia is a strange and difficult word to pronounce. It is a Greek word coined by the psychiatrist C. G. Jung out of two Greek words, enantios (opposite) and dromos (running course). Literally enantiodromia means “running counter to,” and for Jung it refers to the “emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”

My first encounter with the word enantiodromia was in Jung’s book Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Though the word was coined by Jung, it was implied in the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and in Jungian psychology this phenomenon of enantiodromia “practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; (and) in time an equally powerful conterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.” 

This “conterpositon” that is built up Jung calls the “shadow,” which is the unconscious side of our personality and what I’m exploring in a book of stories that I’m currently writing; but this morning while reading Hermann Hesse’s book of collected writings called My Belief, I experienced a coincidence that confirmed the thought I had yesterday of writing a spiritual musing on this mysterious principle enantiodromia.

I was reading the weekend paper this morning when I was nudged to read Hesse’s My Belief that I had started to re-read yesterday (every so often I dip into this book just for the inspiration it gives me), and I flipped the pages to his piece titled “Variations on a Theme by Wilhelm Schafer, 1919”, and the following words jumped out at me:  

“A good, a real truth, so it seems to me, must stand being inverted. When something is true, then it must be possible for its opposite to be true as well. For every truth is a brief formula for the appearance of the world seen from a certain pole, and there is no pole without its opposite” (My Belief, p. 96).

Hesse captured the Jungian concept of the “emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time” in his realization that “there is no pole without its opposite,” and his insight into this eternal play of opposites that was central to Heraclitus’ philosophy was the synchronistic confirmation that I needed to write a musing on the principle of enantiodromia; and I humbly implore my Muse to help me unveil this mystery… 

My interest in the principle of enantiodromia was sparked by the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn that I saw on television last fall, starring Clive Owen as the world famous writer Ernest Hemingway and Nicole Kidman as his third wife, the journalist/author Martha Gellhorn. The movie was based on their romantic affair and tempestuous marriage.

Martha Gellhorn stormed out of Hemingway’s life, calling him a pathological liar and the most self-centered man she knew; which only confirmed what many people who knew Hemingway thought of him; but that’s what made him a great writer.

Hemingway had an oversized ego (some people said it was “monstrous,” especially when he was drinking), which I never doubted from all the accounts that I had read on his life; but Hemingway’s life was fraught with a paradoxical mystery that perplexed me: he was both an insufferable egoist who lied when it suited him and a writer so true to his craft that he inspired generations of writers with his “one true sentence” principle.

In the wistful memoir of his apprenticeship days in Paris between the years 1921 and 1926, the last book that he wrote before taking his life, he wrote: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know…If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut out that scrollwork or ornament and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline” (A Moveable Feast, pp. 12-13).

And in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, four decades of selected articles and dispatches, he wrote: “Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.”

This was the paradox of Hemingway’s life that fascinated readers and scholars and frustrated the hell out of me because the more I learned about his life the more I grew to hate the person; but this never diminished him as a writer. And then I saw the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn, and the perplexing paradox of his character dissolved before my eyes as I caught the principle of enantiodromia at play in his passionate life, and at one point in the movie I exclaimed—“He had to be a prick to become a great writer!”

To my astonishment it suddenly occurred to me that Hemingway’s ego provided him with all the drive he needed to become a great writer, and the more successful he became the more his ego grew; but so did the repressed side of his daemonic personality, to the point where his shadow had so much power over him after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature that he had to have electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester to check his delusional behavior; but as A. E. Hotchner tells us in his revealing memoir Papa Hemingway, it was too late to save him from himself, and early one morning at his home in Ketchum, Idaho Ernest Hemingway took his own life with his favorite shotgun.

It never occurred to be before I saw the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn that the two extremes of Hemingway’s life made both the writer and the man, and that they were not separate from each other. In one blinding flash I saw the enantiodromiac play of the polarized opposites in Hemingway’s lustful life (he lived to write, hunt, fish, eat, drink, box, and have sex), and my heart went out to him because I knew that he had come to the sad realization as he wrote the last pages of his memoir that the price he paid for his world-wide fame wasn’t worth the cost of the one great love of his life: “When I saw my wife again (his first wife Hadley) standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs of the station, I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her” (A Moveable Feast, p. 208, italics mine).

Ernest betrayed Hadley with his affair with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer; and his betrayal led him down the road that gave him all the material he needed to write such great stories as “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and the novel that garnered him the Nobel Prize, The Old Man and the Sea.

The movie Hemingway and Gellhorn shifted my perspective on the ontological nature of man from that of being and non-being (authentic and inauthentic) to the enantiodromiac nature of man, which is the ontological blending of the two polar opposites of man’s being and non-being—a fluid state of becoming. As Sartre expressed the enantiodromiac nature of his own egotistical life, “I am what I am not and I am not what I am,” so was Hemingway both the being and non-being of his own paradoxical life.

The movie made me see that Hemingway was both true and false at one and the same time; a fluid blending of the polar opposites of his nature, which would best be symbolized by the Taoist symbol of the circle divided in two, one half white and the other black. Hemingway was not yet one whole individuated self; he was still in the enantiodromiac stage of his becoming and human, all too human like so many conflicted artists.

And the moment I saw that he was both his true and false self at one and the same time and realized that the two sides of his paradoxical nature needed each other to fuel the enantiodromiac principle of his individuation process, I stopped hating the man for his insufferable egoism and accepted him in his authentic/inauthentic entirety.

The poet Adrienne Rich defined poetry as “an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what is.” This definition applies to all the arts, and the artistic genius of the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn transformed the reality of their tempestuous marriage into a deeper perception of their relationship, which dramatically played out the contentious nature of their enantiodromiac individuation process; meaning quite simply that through their tumultuous relationship they grew in their own identity.

Ernest Hemingway became more himself through his relationship with Martha Gellhorn, and Martha Gellhorn became more herself through her relationship with Ernest Hemingway until they could no longer stand to be with each other; and they parted company to continue their individuation with other people. Hemingway went on to marry his fourth wife Mary Welsh, and Martha Gellhorn went on to become an iconic war correspondent and author in her own right, for such is the imperative of man’s enantiodromiac nature. And when the movie ended I no longer saw life as black and white—good and evil, true and false, being and non-being—but a constantly moving and variegating shade of amorphous gray, which brought me to the same conclusion that Heraclites came to, that life is always in a state of flux.

 

 

COMING SOON

 THE LION THAT SWALLOWED HEMINGWAY

A LITERARY MEMOIR