The passions of the soul work magic

 

The passions of the soul work magic. This observation, attributed to Albertus Magnus (and loved by Jung) is practical counsel for living fully and creatively.

Our passions can lead us into madness. They can also give us the creative edge to do our best and most original work and the magnetism that generates extraordinary opportunities and serendipity.

The stronger the emotion, the stronger the effect on our psychic and physical environment. This may reach much further, in our nonlocal universe, that we can initially understand. It can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who knew a great deal about these things, write that  “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

There are two conditions for working positive magic with the passions of the soul.

The first is that we must choose to take the primal, pulsing energy of our strongest passions and direct it towards a creative goal. The passion that is throbbing and surging inside us may be love or lust (or both), the fierce desire to give birth or the desperate wish to end it all. The passion may be wild rage or terrible grief. Whatever its origin, the strongest passions of the soul produce the energy to remake our world – if we choose to direct that energy. Imagine a vast body of pent-up water, engorged by a pounding thunderstorm, that is going to burst through a dam with irresistible power. We can choose to harness that force, turning into hydroelectric power that can light our city and warm our homes. Or we can let it swamp everyone and everything in its path, bringing misery and devastation.

The second requirement for letting the passions of the soul work magic is that we must seize the moment when they are running strongest and give ourselves completely to acting in the power of that moment. The time is always Now; but when the passions of the soul are at work the time is also GO. 

I know this as a writer. Often my best work is done when I am in a state of great turmoil, when my passions are running strong but my heart and mind are also conflicted. Such moments give us an edge. I know, from experience, that my best and most original work can come through now – if I use that edge and make myself available to the work any time it is coming through. In these states, like Balzac, I often write for fifteen hours a day, fueled only by coffee, and sleep only a couple of hours out of the 24 – and stream into joy, the joy we all know when we are in the zone whatever our field of endeavor, and are giving our best.

Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of spiritual gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality - and his prodigious literary production - were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination. His early novel Louis Lambert is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by the reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by concentrating a whole reality - even an entire world - inside himself, re-visioning it, and then projecting the new image to fill his environment. But he comes unstuck and unhinged because he can’t ground his understanding in the physical world.

   The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world - or else  go mad.

    Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be." Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us.”

     What kind of desire makes these things possible? “A desire is a fact entirely accomplished in our will before being accomplished externally.”

     The passion that works magic is "the will gathered to one point" so that "man can bring to bear his whole vitality."

     The man who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere”, a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. He produces “a contagion of feelings”.

    Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance. Women, says Balzac, are especially good at this. Watch out for a woman whose passions are high, because she can see and sense things at a distance very clearly.

     Coincidences multiply around such a person, because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space”.

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things by Robert Moss. Puiblished by New World Library.

Photo: RM with Balzac's doppelganger at MOMA in New York City

 

An afternoon with Balzac in Manhattan

I have a great affection for Honoré de Balzac, one of the most prolific writers in literary history. I was delighted to meet him again on Monday, in front of the great picture windows overlooking the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in midtown Manhattan.
    Balzac worked like a fiend. His books did not pour out of him all at once, but he gave them so much time and energy that they were obliged to come through. His daily pattern was to eat a light meal at 5;00 or 6:00 p.m., then sleep until midnight, when he would rise and immediately go to work. He wrote until dawn, fueled by countless cups of coffee. Once he was on a roll, he juts kept going. He thought nothing of writing for 15 hours at a stretch. He said that he sometimes worked for 48 hours with only three hours of rest somewhere in the middle.
     There was the more benign pressure of writing novels as serials that ran in the popular press. When you are under that kind of deadline, with the presses about to roll, you just have to deliver on time; you can’t wait on perfection. I remember this very well from my own days as a journalist.
     He was forever upping the pressure on himself to write. After he became a bestselling author, he squandered his money in ridiculous business ventures that left him broke. He fell for a scheme to process slagheaps left by the Romans in Sardinia. He blew away a lot more money trying to grow pineapples – unlikely to thrive in French weather – on a vast plantation in France.  
     His work habits and wild investments no doubt contributed to his early death. He died at 51, just five months after he married a woman who he first encountered in a letter signed "Anonymous", dispatched from Odessa, which criticized his novel La peau du chagrin but left him so intrigued that he tracked down the author and then courted her for fifteen years until her much older, rotten-rich husband was out of the way. That story would be worthy of a volume in his vast oeuvre, the Human Comedy.   
     Balzac is too little read in the Anglophone world today, but he has had many admirers, including Henry James and Freud, who chose  La peau de chagrin as his last read. The title has been translated as "The Magic Skin" or "The Wild Ass's Skin." It has a double meaning in French that escapes these clumsy translations. Chagrin (as in English) means sorrow or disappointment, often resulting from failure; it also means the rough, untanned hide from the rump of a horse or wild ass once often used for binding books. In English, this kind of leather is called "shagreen". 
     The hero of Balzac's tale, named Raphael, is a penurious scribbler who has decided to kill himself after losing his last money, when he stumbles into a curiosity shop that seems to contain the emblems of a whole world, like a kind of 3-dimensional Tarot deck. The owner shows Raphael a piece of shagreen with magic properties. The young writer can have this for nothing and the skin - covered with indistinct Eastern spells - will grant his every wish. But he would be well-advised not to use it.   
     The skeptical writer decides to give it a try. What does he have to lose? He's already bent on death. He rubs the skin and wishes for a revel worthy of a dissolute king. Instantly we are transported by Balzac's muscular prose into a scene of wild orgy and banqueting. The catch (and there has to be a catch in wishcraft involving lower powers) is that every time Raphael makes a wish, the skin shrinks and when it does so, he loses some of his own life-force.
      Eventually, having wished himself wealth and fame, he is desperately using his money to try to obtain a medical treatment that will reverse the process that is turning him into a shrunken, grotesque little old man. He tries to stop wishing, ordering his servants to provide him with everything he thinks he could desire at appointed times. The plan is overthrown in a scene with a beautiful woman for whom he feels passionate love. She flees from him, bent on killing herself to stop him destroying himself by wishing for her. Exactly the opposite is accomplished. As Raphael pursues her and flings himself on her, the last scrap of shagreen vanishes and he dies. 
       For all the fantastical elements in Balzac's story, anyone who has read him will know that its great success lies in what was more fantastic than fantasy in all his writing: his power of vividly realistic description. The reader is spared no detail of Raphael's decline into an ugly, shriveled wreck. It is impossible not to be moved by the picture of Freud, himself now a shriveled invalid, following this page by page. When he finished, he told his doctor, Max Schur, that it was the right book for him, because it was about "shrinkage and starvation", his lot. That same day, he gave his doctor the nod to give him huge doses of morphine that hastened his death.
     Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of spiritual gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality — and his prodigious literary production — were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination.
      His early novel Louis Lambert is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by concentrating a whole reality — even an entire world — inside himself, re-visioning it, and then projecting the new image to fill his environment. But the protagonist comes unstuck and unhinged because he can’t ground his understanding in the physical world. 
      The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world — or else go mad.    Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be." Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us."  
     A person who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere,” a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. That person produces “a contagion of feelings.” Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance.  Coincidences multiply around such a person, because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space.”   

Thank you for this, and so much more, Honoré. I have dreamed of you several times. Once I dreamed I was walking with you, or like you, along a boulevard in Paris, happy to be alive and drinking the air after one of those long writing orgies. Dreams have pushed me to read several of your novels. I dreamed that, in an old curiosity shop, I found a copy of Les chouans. Waking, I rushed to my favorite used bookstore (dangerously close to my home) and found a copy of the Penguin translation in the stack of new arrivals. In another dream, I attended a performance based on a season in your life, when you managed to turn out page after page despite illness and fatigue. 
     And I must remember not to drink as much coffee as you did after midnight.

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My comments on Balzac's novel Louis Lambert are adapted from my book The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power ofDreams, Coincidence and Imagination. Published by New World Library.