Your Eminent Image

I’m clearing out books. Over the years, every time I’ve chosen books to give away, I’ve always ended up keeping those in philosophy and psychology. Recalling that many books in my personal library are on the humanities (along with pounds and pounds of piano solo literature), I thought, ‘Yep, that’s me—that’s my calling.’

As I began writing this piece, I hoped exposing what is assumed my escort might remind us that we can interrupt and expand our usual way of discerning choices.

While emptying shelves of books, and packing them into boxes that would be delivered to the next round of readers, I asked, ‘What will I read next?’ Then, I saw Dr. James Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, and it might as well have fallen off the shelf into my hands. I should have known I’d get a quick answer—one of those “Surprise!” nudges, it was!

From memory of the first reading of Hillman’s book, I asked, ‘Is it I who is choosing, or am I intuiting a presence that chooses on my behalf? Who or what’s prompting the choices, and making me aware of the best possible choice available?

I remembered my escort was exposing itself; still pledged to remind me of deep satisfactions for the performing arts and humanities, and the calling forth of artistic expressions.

Dr. Hillman is known as a renegade psychologist, so asking, ‘Who’s prompting the choices? Who’s doing the choosing among those choices?’ are ideas few consider, or have forgotten. Hillman’s book fit the pick for my next read. ⁽¹⁾

This is Hillman’s acorn theory in a nutshell: Each life is formed by a particular eminent image, an escort that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny, just as the mighty oak’s destiny is written into the tiny acorn. Plato and the Greeks called the image daimon; Romans called it genius; Christians, guardian angel; and, depending on the context, today we use terms like character, soul, calling, vision, paradigm, passion, and so on.

An eminent image, thought too as partly reflected in your physical presence observed in a mirror, exemplifies the extraordinary power of calling to a particular path, and, to acknowledge and make use of that eminence is to see extraordinary people’s biographies of qualities also called forth in yours.

Extraordinary people like Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Diana, Walt Disney, Truman Capote, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, George Orwell, Leonard Bernstein, bear the better witness because they show what we ordinary mortals simply cannot.

Clearly, we are engaged neither in a worship of the rich and famous nor in a study of creativity and genius, of why Mozart and van Gogh, and Newton and Thoreau were as they were. Yet our destiny must be woven by the same universal complexities. Extraordinary people are not a different sort; the workings of Universe in them are simply more transparent.

Is it too much to ask, then, to replace what we’ve come to presume another’s pathology and abnormalities with extraordinary and exceptionalities, letting the extraordinary be the vision against which our ordinary lives are examined?

Everything these days seems to call for endless assessments, analyzations, evaluations, and even researching the methods of research itself. Is restless inquiry the only kind of knowing; self examination the only kind of awareness?

Have you noticed a child’s invisible escort shows up convincingly, with such candor, unconstrained by pretence-cloaked behavior and thoughts? With or without our adult pretences, are we cognizant of our escort’s nudges to keep our choices in line with our path?

An escort belongs to everyone; an eminent image, a genius or daimon or angel, et al, is an invisible nonhuman escort. It is not to be confused with one’s conscience nor moral instruction, and it isn’t your ‘self.’

The legion of words and names do not tell us what ‘it’ is, but they do confirm the mysteriousness that it is. What was for centuries perceived as reliance on an eminent image must now, in post-medieval monotheisms, squeeze itself into shadowy hints, intuitions, inklings, sudden urges, oddities…

James Hillman’s acorn theory moves nimbly down the middle between these two contesting dogmas, institutional religion and institutionalized science, barking at each other through the ages and which traditional imaginations fondly keep as pets.

If you’re unaccustomed, esteeming your eminent image may be too ambitious and provocative, so you may instead call it your dream or ‘who you are.’ Looking backwards on life to see its invisible blueprint, or to observe how an escort helped style your choices and behaviors are other ways of approaching a big question mark of life—not your lifestyle, but your breathing, cognizant, accountable self—especially the exceptionally challenging, unsugar-coated choices in life.

[…] genius can be bounded in a nutshell and yet embrace the whole fullness of life.
~ Paul Thomas Mann (b 1875), German essayist, novelist, social critic, philanthropist, Nobel Prize laureate, noted for the psychology of the artist and intellectual

⁽¹⁾ James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House, New York, 1996, ISBN 0-679-44522-6.

James Hillman (b 1926), Jungian analyst, psychologist, originated post-Jungian archetypal psychology, scholar, author, taught at Yale University, University of Chicago, University of Syracuse, University of Dallas, USA

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead