A DEPTH PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW
With the help of one Donald Trump, the word “chaos” has now entered the official narratives of modern discourse. Here is an example:
Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself. (Jonathan Rauch contributing editor at The Atlantic Magazine.)
However, and this is a big “however”, the word “chaos” now refers to very real appearances in the world. We are now PERCEIVING chaos in the political arena and social fabric of American society. This emerging language of chaos in the collective is increasingly accepted as being descriptive of the real appearances, i.e. the way the world now actually appears to us. We are witnessing a transformation in the way the world appears! It did not always appear this way. For example the word “progress” has dominated collective discourse and the appearances in the West for a few centuries.
Some individuals noticed the chaos prior to its appearing as the real world where it is too late to do much about it except react, polarize, attack, with all forms of extremism etc. Some apprehended the chaos as an “inner event”, a movement of the living psyche, occurring long before it manifested as the contours of new appearances. Listen to Leonard Cohen (1998) for example:
I feel . . . we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got.
Of course, others long before him have noticed too (Yeats: The Second Coming etc.) but Cohen is saying something very important here: Inner happenings (psychic reality) are leaking into the real world (empirical world)! What is, at first, an “inner” psychic movement, which can be approached psychologically, is coagulating into empirical appearances, which can be therefore outwardly perceived. But there is a decisive difference between apprehending a psychic movement as such and perceiving that movement coagulated in the real world as an outer appearance. Artist souls such as Cohen can participate with the psychic movement as it thinks itself out in their being. Their lives often indeed become chaotic as they do so participate in the psyche’s movements. At the same time, the artist soul can assist in the realisation of the transformation of the chaos into something else, the psyche being the medium of self-transformation of form! Cohen’s life is a prime example of this possibility. Although his life was indeed chaotic, he also produced poetry which could say this:
I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit
But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn’t have the freedom
To refuse
(“Going Home” from Old Ideas)
Can you hear what has transformed here? Cohen has transformed into a mouthpiece. His life is now in service to the other in him, the one who wishes to speak through him to us. At the same time this other has become human, the human being, Leonard Cohen! And from all I know about Cohen’s songs and poetry, this other is Love speaking … to us. This is what can happen if the artist soul can turn towards chaos as a psychic movement, endure its passions, and speak its self-transformation.
We are now witnessing what happens if we miss that opportunity and instead find, to our horror, that chaos is now visibly perceptible as a real appearance of the world. We now encounter chaos not as a psychic phenomenon that can be entered, endured, and transformed into Love (as chaos apparently “wants” to do), but as fate, with all the extreme unconscious reactiveness that we see on the political stage today. Too late for transformation now, too late for mouthpieces. We instead become helpless victims of a fateful turn in contingent history.
Jung saw the destruction of the earth in a vision, near the time of his death, but not all the earth was destroyed, thank god, he said. I think the earth’s fate may very well depend on the individual artist soul that can enter the psychic phenomenon of chaos and participate in its movement towards transformation into Love, as Cohen clearly has achieved in his life. As Rilke says:
the future enters us
in order to transform itself
long before it happens.
Only the artist soul can enter the future as it enters us, participating in its self-transformations “long before they happen”, bringing forth the fruit of such an encounter as a “work of art”, i.e the very being of the artist transformed into a mouthpiece of Love, the child of chaos.
