metalogos three

At a very late breakfast this morning with my daughter, there was a table of white-shirted businessmen having lunch. Their chatter drifted over to our table like so many seeds of stainless steel. I’ve been in business meetings. There’s a time and place for them of course despite their sleep-inducing dynamism. And there’s a time and place to burlesque their language in poetry and song. But not always and forever. You can’t let the tin men dominate the conversation. We need to let the scarecrows begin to speak.

A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word—and angel means originally “emissary,” “message-bearer”—how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?

We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects.

-from “Re-Visioning Psychology” by James Hillman

Or as Van Morrison would sing, “Listen to the Lion.”