A Little Book on the Human Shadow

It involves “wu-wei,” not playing any role.

As Plath’s and Sexton’s and Berryman’s lives made clear, nothing has happened at all, and the death energy is still waiting to pounce on the unintegrated soul.

The European artists—at least Yeats, Tolstoy, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rilke—seem to understand better that the shadow has to be lived too, as well as accepted in the work of art.

You know the shadow has found a way for part of it to return when you hear the joyful and primitive music of Vincentine, as energetic as Mozart, as insistent as Australian drums:

Antonio Machado, who did all his academic work in philosophy, describes them also:

As I read Peterson’s essay, I was amazed to see “Metaphors of a Magnifico,” which I had always loved as a zany poem of high spirits, become a serious process poem.

The same mind-set turns up on the Watergate tapes, and working now with more elaborate generalizations, in graduate seminars in English, in which all the details in Yeats’s poems turn out to be archetypes or Irish Renaissance themes.

Basho worked both as a Buddhist meditator and as a haiku poet in awakening the senses:

This is a practical way of reawakening the senses, as walks are.

The senses of smell, shades of light and dark, the awareness of color and sound, so alive in the primitive man, for whom they can mean life or death, are still alive in us, but numbed.