Intimations of Mortality: The Force of Character and the Lasting Life

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January 22, 2006

Orcas Island Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

By John Ashenhurst

Over the last few years and especially this last fall, I watched my 88-year-old mother begin to lose her short-term memory, heard her voice thin, and saw her body increasingly fail her. At the same time she became happier and lighter than I'd ever seen her. She laughed easily and often. Once solid and opaque, she was becoming translucent, and soon would become a trans-parent, a parent on the other side, across, beyond. When I sensed her changing, giving up, leaving, I began to mourn her. What would remain when my mother's body was gone? Indeed, what will remain of any of us?

Occasionally this fall, I'd think of the smile of the Cheshire cat, the only thing left, Alice told us, once the cat had faded away. Lewis Carroll was making a joke of course. How can you have a smile without a visible mouth and face? But I think James Hillman might say Carroll was actually on to something. Instead of the smile lasting beyond the body think of character. That's what persists. In fact, for Hillman, the realization and expression of character is what life is all about.

A while back here, I talked about Hillman's book, The Terrible Love of War. This morning I'm going to talk about another of his books, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, published in 1999. That book is perhaps best understood in the context of The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, an earlier Hillman book that uses Plato's myth about the soul's incarnation in this world and the important role our daimon or guardian angel serves in continually bringing us back to our life's purpose, our sense of calling. The Force of Character and The Soul's Code are both available at the library.

Linking the two books, Hillman says in The Force of Character (p 198) “ Character is to late years as individual calling of the daimon is to earlier years; it gives a sense and purpose to the changes of aging.”

Hillman was a student of Jung's. And Thomas Moore, the monk turned husband, father, and author, was Hillman's student. Moore published Care of the Soul in 1994, a book I found insightful and useful.

I recommend The Force of Character, The Soul's Code, and Moore's Care of the Soul. Hillman and Moore are unusual in that they've reintroduced the concepts of soul and character to psychology. From Hillman's point of view, the goal of psychologists like him is to find purpose in all aspects of life. For Hillman and his student Moore, the point isn't to reject and change what we find uncomfortable, painful, or challenging in our lives but to use imagination to understand how what's difficult is important, perhaps essential, to our becoming and being who we are.

One could see Hillman and Moore offering a very peculiar kind of self-help - one that calls not for changing ourselves as much as understanding and re-imagining ourselves. Of course what Hillman and Moore are after isn't so much practical and secular as it is imaginative and spiritual. They are not scientists but rather poets of a sort, or perhaps even prophets.

Summarizing his core perspective Hillman says, “ (p 59) We assume that life is essentially intelligent, not haphazard, and therefore intelligible….So when it comes to aging, I am led to assume there is intelligence in life that intends aging just as it intends growth in youth.” For Hillman aging is part of the plan of the life of the soul, not an engineering defect that needs to be corrected.

What is character?

What is character? The word has Greek origins associated with engraving. Character is a mark, a distinctive quality. Our character is what makes us unique - different from every other person. We are born with our character or what Hillman calls our calling in The Soul's Code. We can't change our calling, our soul, or our character - overlapping concepts for Hillman. But it doesn't follow that our calling or character will be successfully expressed. Circumstances may get in the way, our daimon may be too weak to overcome the distractions of the world, or we may lack sufficient passion

As Hillman understands it, character is an image, a pattern that becomes manifest in the world and as an image it can't be exhaustively described in any finite set of words. But we can and do talk about character, sometimes using words like “honor,”' “dignity,” “authority,” “prudence,” “grace,” “depth,” “mercy,” “courage,” “constancy,” and “loyalty.” Character is best understood in conjunction “ancestor,” “matriarch,” “patron,” “mentor,” “crone” and other traditional and mostly out of favor concepts Finally, in order to use the idea of character to understand life's process, we need to begin to look for “understanding” rather than “explanation;” “old texts” rather than “new studies;” “necessity” rather than “improvement;” “soul” instead of “health;” “philosophy” rather than “experiment” or “statistic;” “insight” instead of “information;” and “idiosyncrasy,” “passion,” and “folly” instead of “empowerment” and “entitlement.”

Character is not, as the Victorians' thought, a set of habits one can acquire through diligent practice. Character isn't acquired; it's inborn. One of the surprises for me in having and raising children and watching them grow into adults is how who they have become was so visible when they were babies.

Character isn't about morality or ethics. Having character doesn't mean following societal rules. And bad character doesn't indicate an immoral person but someone unacquainted with his character. And, for Hillman, there is no such thing as a person without any character. Everyone has a character.

Character isn't confined to human beings. Certainly we can sometimes perceive character in animals, our cats, dogs, or horses. Houses can have character. And I think places can have character. When we talk about a sense of place or becoming native to where we are, we can think of that process as becoming aware of character - in landscape, streams, rocks, sky, wildlife, and even old buildings. To know a place is to know its character or to say it another way, to know the gods of a place.

For Hillman, character is independent of and comes before the body. Over a lifetime character shapes the body, especially the face. The bodies of the very old may not be attractive but their faces marked with character lines speak powerfully and elegantly. And when the body is gone, character can last, its pattern continuing to influence the flow of life, like a rock in a stream.

Heraclitus said that character is fate. The Greeks understood. The philosophers of the middle ages understood. Shakespeare understood. Authors of character driven novels understand. Devotees of astrology understand. But according to Hillman, beginning with, Descartes, philosophers and thus psychologists, went badly wrong, losing sight of character.

Before Descartes, our non-contingent, essential identity was our character. For Descartes our identity was the contents of our consciousness. John Locke went further, saying that children come into the world, tabla rasa, that is, as an empty slate that is filled through experience and training.

So, today, psychology shows no interest in character. And the ability to recognize character in a person and accurately describe it, once an element of common sense, is mostly a lost art.

What is particularly interesting about the historical turn from identity as character to personal consciousness (something that would have made no sense to the Greeks) is that lasting beyond the demise of the body becomes extremely problematic, thus adding a dimension of metaphysical angst to mortality it didn't have several hundred years ago.

Characters

My mother's father, Carl Barkman, an immigrant Swede, was a hunter and fisherman who made his living as a house painter. He is still talked about in his native Bredaryd as the young man who poached a moose from a neighboring estate and brought it back to the village for a feast. On occasion I would go pheasant hunting with Carl. He didn't care where he hunted and ignored postings. One day hunting in the woods near his house we were accosted by a very angry man with a pistol who told us to get off his land. My grandfather didn't respond immediately and didn't make excuses. I think he enjoyed the confrontation. I wondered at the time whether he was going to shoot the red-faced man. He didn't.

When I was six or seven Carl would tell me that I was growing up so fast that soon I'd have to climb a stepladder to comb my hair.

When Carl was 84 and his wife Hilda was gone, my mother asked me to paint Carl's house. I had done some summer painting with Carl and he was a good teacher. I was eager to help. I began painting and he couldn't stand it. Within 15 minutes he was in his painter overalls, painting next to me. I was 24 and he was 84 and he painted twice as fast as I did.

I never talked philosophy or religion with Carl. In fact he warned me against too much book learning. One of his friends in Sweden, he said, had studied too much and then committed suicide.

My grandmother Hilda, Carl's wife, was a wonderful cook and what I liked best, as a child, were her Swedish pancakes. I remember vividly an early Saturday morning in the yellow-walled kitchen of their two-flat on Artesian Avenue on Chicago's north side. Hilda mixed the pancake batter and then begin to fry the pancakes. My sisters and I ate them rolled up with homemade jam. I could never get enough. Hilda would laugh and tease about my appetite. She's loved every minute with her grandchildren. Hilda was a wizard with African violets and believed it was very important to talk lovingly to them.

My father's mother Iola published a neighborhood newspaper on the northwest side of Chicago. Every second Thursday her lady friends would spend the morning at her house rolling the papers for the delivery boys who would stop by after school. On rainy days they'd add a layer of wax paper and tuck in each end. Iola would always serve a spaghetti noodle and cheese casserole with layer of cracker crumbs on top. Iola wore black dresses with white collars and loved Rogers and Hammerstein. She made it a point to stand on her head every birthday, a tradition she carried on until she was 75.

Her husband, Harold died when I was five and I have only vague memories of him. He was a publisher, inventor, promoter, photographer and debunker and always wore a dark suit even when relaxing. As far as I know he never had a real job. During the Scopes Monkey Trial he corresponded with both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan - offering his analysis of the trial. In the 1920's one of his projects was to prove the earth was round to a flat earther by using train and ship schedules and itineraries.

For several years I had a Sunday morning paper route. There were about 200 subscriptions over a two square mile area and the papers were very heavy. The route was impossible to handle by bicycle or on foot - so my father got up early every Sunday morning and drove my sister (my employee as it were) and me around the route, stuffing the papers in the front seat as we leapt out of the car from the back seat, each going a different direction to make door step deliveries. The car always smelled of newspapers and the coffee that my father took along - I suppose to make the two-hour process bearable. Though it must have been a burden he never complained. In our garage at that time was a collection of used offset printing equipment my father bought to start a newspaper. But he never did.

When I was in high school, I took German, and though I have no talent for languages I did OK because I studied conscientiously - with my mother's help. She would quiz me on vocabulary while she ironed in the early morning before the school bus appeared on the corner outside our house on Washington Street. Later in the day, she'd take the bus to Elmhurst College where she got her bachelor's degree at age 42, two decades after being thwarted by the Depression from pursuing higher education.

Lasting, Leaving, and Left

Let's acknowledge with Hillman that people can have a lasting influence and that calling it character makes some sense. But that's not big news. However Hillman is making a larger and more interesting point: life is the living out of a character and old age has a specific purpose relative to the manifestation and realization of character. Hillman says in his preface,

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. Aging is built into our physiology; yet to our puzzlement, human life extends long beyond fertility and outlasts muscular usefulness and sensory acuteness. For this reason we need imaginative ideas that can grace aging and speak to it with the intelligence it deserves….So why do we live so long? …. I cannot support the theory that human longevity is the artificial results of civilization, its science, and it's social networks, yielding a crop of living mummies, paradoxes suspended in the twilight zone. The old as “retards.” Instead, let us entertain the idea that character requires the additional years and that the long last of life is forced upon us neither by genes nor by conversational medicine nor by societal collusion. The last years confirm and fulfill character.

Now that's an interesting thought and I suspect contrary to popular wisdom. If we were to have Ted Grossman interview six pedestrians in Eastsound next week asking them the purpose of old age, my guess is that they'd say it has no purpose other than perhaps as an unfortunate, ugly, and painful interlude before dying.

Hillman says (p 16) “It is not old age as such but the abandonment of character that dooms the later years to ugliness. We can't imagine aging's beauty because we look only through the eyes of physiology. ….Without the idea of character, the old are merely lessened and worsened people….” (p 17) “The last years, so valuable for reviewing life and making amends, for cosmological speculation and the confabulation of memories into stories, for sensory enjoyment of the world's images, and for connections with apparitions and ancestors - these values our culture has let wither.”

Our culture tends to think of the process of physical diminishment as being a kind of disease but for Hillman every loss, every change provides another opportunity for the further development and burnishing of character.

Example: Repetition

Most old people seem repeat the same stories over and over. My grandparents did that and I never minded but when my parents began to repeat themselves I was disturbed and indignant. What's the matter with you? Are you losing your mind? I've vowed never to repeat myself.

Did I tell you that I've vowed never to repeat myself?

Hillman suggests (p 67) “Suppose we remove repetition from the teller to the tale, from an instinct in the person to a power in the story, from modern psychology to archaic tradition. Then we would have to admit that certain stories force themselves upon a teller, an older teller, who traditionally takes part in society on behalf of the ancestors.” So rather than be bored we should look for the crucial point that lies behind the story.

Example: Wakefulness.

It's common for the aged to have trouble sleeping. We lie awake for hours worrying, reliving past problems, encountering new demons. We see this as a problem and look for remedies in exercise, relaxation, and drugs. But, Hillman says, what if we think of ourselves as not merely awakening in the night but awakening to the night, the only time that an invisible world of cautions, insights, and promptings can make itself available. … Waking up to these figures of the night deepens and broadens character. … Lying sleepless we develop a strange intelligence. Is this how the images of the dead communicate, how the ancestors instruct us?

Left - What's Left After We've Left

Hillman points out that (p 156)

People's images survive their passing and, sometimes have more power after they have left. These images are not merely memories, purely subjectively yours….They come uninvited right in the middle of a choice, whispering advice, disapproval, criticism. They inspire. They tempt with longing. They hold us to opinions we might have abandoned long ago. They compel us to hang on to inconsequential objects that crowd our closets and drawers because they act like remains of that character and are imbued with its staying power.

If character is ultimately best understood as an image then it's not a stretch to think of the process of realizing and expressing one's calling, one's soul, one's character as an artistic process, not a moral or practical one. What we leave behind is the possibility of an aesthetic experience, a lifetime as a work of art. (p 201) Hillman says,

“Aesthetics” roots itself in a gasp (aisthou), a sudden short intake of breath in the face of wonder, or horror. Aesthetics begins in the startle of surprise, the breath caught in astonishment….Can a person become an epiphany? Can we entertain the idea that all along our earthly life has been a phenomenal, a showing, a presentation? Can we imagine that at the essence of being a human being is the insistence upon being witnessed - by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself - that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display? The image will out and the last years put the final touch on the image.

Ruminations

So what can we make of Hillman? Does he make sense? What does it have to do with our lives?

My mother died December 18th, the day before her 89th birthday. I spent four days with her as she struggled with her leaving, never, as far as I could tell reconciling herself to it, yelling forcefully at one point, “I'm only 89, I'm too young to die.” But what she said most often was “It's a mess, a real mess.” “What?” I'd ask. “Everything.” Ten years ago, when my father was on his deathbed, he talked about what a wonderful life he had had, how much love he'd experienced. For my mother, life was a continuing struggle that you couldn't yield an inch to. For my father, the universe was complete and perfect as it was. From my point of view, my mother didn't know when to give up and my father gave up too easily. My mother was too practical and my father too ethereal. My mother expressed conditional love; my father loved everyone. I've tried to steer the boat of my life between the two rocks of their contrasting characters.

Carl Barkman showed me the woods, that is aesthetic experience, a continuing source of enormous pleasure and meaning. He also showed me confidence, balance, and a dry, humane humor. Hilda showed me the pleasures of good food and a traditional household. It's said that some men marry their mothers. I married my grandmother.

Harold Ashenhurst showed me gentility, creativity, and the accessibility of worldly success of a sort. Iola showed me social interaction, business acumen, music, and a certain whimsy.

Is character lasting, as Hillman says? In my experience, absolutely, though until we begin to look it might not be obvious.

Is old age important as a time to complete character? That's harder to answer because we're not likely to notice it happening in others and may not be able to see it in ourselves. I'm inclined to think that Hillman has an important insight and I'm going to pay more attention.

Is expression of our calling, our soul, our character the purpose of our lives? Is the alternative that our lives have no purpose? These are very hard and troubling questions. Some people seem to find their calling easily, not their job but their place in the world, their identity, their bliss. Others, like me, struggle. Do I have a calling? Do you? What is it? Of course, Hillman would say, that's just the point. That's the reason for old age. It's to finally understand our character, our calling.

Hillman may be absolutely right but how much time do you want to spent on this stuff when you can read a story to your grandson or watch ravens float in the sky admiring the sunset.

During our opening words period I read a piece my mother had written in 1984, “Accidental Shooting,” as a Cobwebs of the Mind exercise. Cobwebs of the Mind is a senior center program in Colorado Springs that encourages and guides life review writing and my parents participated for years.

My sisters did the organizing for my mother's December 28th memorial service but I was to figure out what to say. Though I wrote something as I had for my father's service, I wasn't satisfied and spent the morning before the service reading my mother's Cobwebs pieces. I was flabbergasted. They were terrific. I felt that I was seeing my mother for the first time and I found her admirable and interesting. I would let my mother speak for herself at the service. Two of my sons and my niece each read stories, one being the account of the accidental shooting. I read excerpts from an ethics essay she had written in college. Elin's character came through. It was wonderful.

After the service the 25 of us that make up the clan met at my sister Marcy's for food and visiting. It was the first time all of us had been together in years. We toasted Elin and told kind but true stories about her. We took pictures. We laughed. And we all felt free of constraints that had bound us into uncomfortable and unsatisfying patterns for years in family gatherings. The matriarch was gone.

My sister Julie told me I was now the patriarch and I realized what she said was true and important. I had new responsibilities to the larger family - one being to begin direct communication with my niece and nephews - instead of through their mothers, my sisters. And now I have to find a couple stories I can tell over and over.

When my sons were born I felt overwhelming love. When my first grandson was born I felt overwhelming relief. With my parents and grandparents gone I feel overwhelming gratitude.

What's next? Maybe a Cob Webs of the Mind on Orcas. Collecting and editing my parents writing. Lots of visits with Yvonne to family and travel to our roots. Great pictures of family faces. Telling stories to grandchildren and having them in the kitchen, the shop, the garden, out on the water, and in the woods. Marveling at character and its affect on my life. Wondering what the effects my character, whatever it is, will have once I'm gone. And trying to make my heart as light as a feather, something my father and my mother accomplished, at least for the most part, in their old age. Cheers!