Numen (Latin) -- A supra-mortal power or spirit.
Numinous (as employed by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung) – Charged with magical-seeming fascination and emotional power.
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Greetings, fellow writers! Standing in for SensibleShoes this evening. I’ve never tried to lead a group like this before, so please be merciful!
We’ve had a lot of done a lot of interesting, useful lessons here about technique. Writing samples seem to show a high level of mastery.
Begging your indulgence, therefore, I’d like to poke cautiously at a subject that’s strictly outside of and precedes technique: emotional force.
This has been on my mind while revising my NaNo novel in the last few weeks. Parts of the draft have turned out engaging, even (I think) moving, despite some plot holes. Other parts feel mechanical. Where do the most compelling stories get their motive power? How does a stuck writer tap in?
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One bastion, even for someone who has never consciously felt “afraid” to write, has been The Courage To Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes (Henry Holt, 1995; Owl Books paperback, 1995).
“Any writing that calls on the reader's feeling must first call on the writer’s,” Keyes observed (p. 69). “’No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,’ said Robert Frost. Writers can use devices—comic relief and the like—to go easy on readers. But they can’t go easy on themselves. While writing, they must subject themselves to the full range of feeling they discover.”
“Our best writing results from a partnership of conscious and unconscious,” Keyes also stated. “...The conscious minds is our censoring mind...[W]e must keep its appearance-consciousness from bullying us. Setting the unconscious free...is the best way to do this.” (p. 74)
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Coincidentally, over at Language of the Night, DrLori’s has been holding an extended seminar in recent weeks, over at , about the ideas of Swiss psychoanalyst and Freudian heretic Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).
From a writer’s viewpoint, there is much interesting and suggestive stuff in Jung’s essay “Approaching the Unconscious,” an approximately 90-page piece written for the non-specialist reader, not long before his death. It appeared as part of a 1964 publication, Man and His Symbols. (Page references are to a Dell paperback version dated 1968.)
I don’t pretend to more than the most superficial knowledge. All inaccuracies, confusions and or distortions here are my own fault. And on some points, it should be mentioned that I find Jung and his acolytes frustrating. (Gender issues, notably.)
There is zero doubt, however, that his thinking has been fertile. He’s explicitly influenced writers of stature like Ursula LeGuin and filmmakers like George Lucas.
“What we call the ‘psyche’, "Jung wrote, "is by no means identical with our consciousness and its contents….Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless,” (p. 6)
To Jung, the “invisible" part of the psyche, which he named the Unconscious, is actually the more extensive part of our mind; it is as well, in some mysterious way, transpersonal, universal, connecting the individual potentially with the wider universe.
The Unconscious, Jung posited, produces images in dreams, myths, stories and art that are “natural symbols.” This — for Jung -- emphatically does not mean something that stands for something else in a one-on-one substitution.
“What we call a symbol is a term, a name or even a picture that...in addition to its conventional meaning….implies something vague, unknown or hidden from us," he stated (p. 3). “...Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend” (p. 4).
Symbols, then carry a sort of penumbra of significance that is not possible completely to define.
A similar hair-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck atmosphere accompanies what Jung calls “archetypes,” but these are even more complex, profound and in some sense, active.
“[A]rchetypes,” Jung wrote, “...are, at the same time, both images and emotions...[B]y being charged with emotion, the image gains numinosity (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences of some sort must flow from it...” (p. 87).
“One can perceive the specific energy of archetypes when we experience the peculiar fascination that accompanies them. They seem to hold a special spell” (p. 68).
Such natural symbols “are derived from the unconscious contests of the psyche, and they...represent an enormous number of variations on the essential archetypal images…," Jung clarified. "[C]ultural symbols, on the other hand...have gone through...a long process of conscious development….Such cultural symbols, nevertheless,” he noted, also “retain much of their original numinosity or 'spell.' (p. 83)”
Jung carefully distinguished “archetypes,” by the way, from particular images or situations — what we might call a trope, or meme. “The term ‘archetype’,” he wrote, “is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations.” (57)
For instance, the Garden of Eden — a specific cultural myth — would count as a “motif,” which might be found in poetry, painting, or in the dreams of individuals. “The Original Paradise,” however, would be an example of an archetype, found cross--culturally in many different forms.
Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949) and television documentary series "The Power of Myth” (1988) introduced into popular culture the archetype of the "hero,” with which most of us are familiar.
Jung equally found examples of the “archetypes” in his own dreams and those of other people he knew, friends, their families, patients.
One common figure was an older man who advises, prepares and guides the dreamer or protagonist. This figure introduces the protagonist to a wider — often magical -- world, and to unsuspected powers latent in the protagonist’s self.
Dante’s Virgil; King Arthur’s Merlin; Bilbo’s and Frodo’s Gandalf, Ged’s Ogion; Luke Skywalker’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and later, Yoda; Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Merrick— all are variations on the same archetype. In his own dreams, Jung identified the figure of the old man as an expression of the greater Unconscious self, possessed of wisdom unavailable to the conscious mind.
Archetypes and other natural symbols, then, burgeon with half-hidden significances; a boundless array of related but differing forms and implications can be found in them, depending on the seeker.
They resist reduction to a formula (indeed, the attempt to do so simply falls into cliché), yet exercise an enduring fascination, giving life to a fantastical array stories in differing, unique forms.
As writers, we may find provocative messengers from the Unconscious bubbling up in myths and fiction--but also in our own dreams, the fall of Tarot cards, life’s coincidences, gazing into crystals, the randomness of splotches on a wall.
We know them by the shiver and the sense of unexplained significance they create – in both the writer and the reader.
They are “numinous.”
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Full-scale archetypes might be a little much to handle in a brief writing exercise. What about a little play with emotions and potentially numinous symbols of a simpler kind?
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PREPARE:
1. Choose one from Column A, one from Column B.
A B
Oak tree Fright
Snake Euphoria
Waterfall Rage
Lightning Grief
2. Get ready to write your protag in the first person. Roughly, what’s going to happen? (Use anything in the scene it needs, even other people.)
3. Plan to end the scene with the protag shouting. What? Why?
WRITE:
Estimated five to 10 minutes (or whatever works). Go back and clean it up a little only if you want to; optional; no worries.
Anything of interest?
Any other thoughts?
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