Repulsive Attraction

Was du suchest, es ist nahe, begegnet dir schon.

—Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Heimkunft: An die Verwandten

“What thou seekest, it is near, meets thee already.”

That is my word for word translation of Hölderlin’s line. In so translating it, I have chosen to use the archaic English terms thou and thee to capture the intimacy of the German terms du and dir, which embody the familiar form of address appropriate with someone close and familiar, whereas the German terms Sie and Ihnen are  used to address someone with whom one has not established intimacy. In that regard, current German resembles current French, which also still has one term for familiar personal address (tu) and another for more formal address (vous).

I have chosen to use the archaic English terms at issue in order to capture the intimacy of Hölderlin’s poem,[1]an intimacy indicated clearly by the poem’s subtitle, “an die Verwandten.”   The sense of that subtitle is perhaps best suggested by the English translation, “To the Kindred.”        

The line at the head of this post is the second one in the fourth stanza of Hölderlin’s elegy Homecoming, to give the English equivalent of the German Heimkunft.  Hölderlin wrote that poem in 1801.

That was a few years after he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which happened in the late 1790s. The year of 1801 when he wrote Homecoming was also some six years before he was confined to what eventually came to be known as “der Hölderlinturm,” “Hölderlin’s Tower,” in Tübingen, Germany. It was in that tower-home that he was given a room to live until his death in 1843. 

Hölderlin’s Tower, Tübingen, Germany

*     *     *

Who is the awe-inspiring guest who knocks at our door portentously? Fear precedes him, showing that ultimate values already flow towards him. Our hitherto believed values decay accordingly and our only certainty is that the new world will be something different from what we were used to.                                                                                                                                       — C. G. Jung (1975-1961)[2]

 Sometimes, we do not realize that we are going home. We often lack the eyes to see that it is so, and we even feel repulsion rather than attraction. When that occurs, we will often project — to employ a notion often used by both Jung and his mentor Freud — our own repulsion outside ourselves, onto that which we are approaching, the very home to which we are at last but unknowingly returning and about to be welcomed back. Or perhaps we will project it, as the lines from Jung above suggest, as the shadowy figure of some un-summoned guest who is importunately knocking at our door.  

Such projections of our repressed, repulsed attraction are typically the case, in fact, in our truly profoundest, most astonishing — indeed world-changing — “homecomings.” Those most unexpected, unrecognized events of shocking homecoming come to strike us so strongly and deeply as to bring water gushing forth from even the very driest of souls, just as Moses, in the Biblical story of his leading the parched Jewish people through the desert to exit Egypt, at one point draws water from a massive rock by  striking it mightily with his staff.

Such events, which, until they truly do strike, appear to be something very different from celebratory homecomings, are like what is described in the following closing stanzas of another famous poem, to go with Hölderlin‘s Homecoming. This time the poem is  Little Gidding, by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), which ends thus:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Not known, because not looked for 
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-- 
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded 
Into the crowned knot of fire 
And the fire and the rose are one.

    To borrow another term dear to C. J. Jung, between the two poems I have cited, one by a German poet and one by an American poet who found his lasting home in England, there is a noteworthy synchronicity. To deepen that experience of unexpected serendipity, as it were, I’ll close this post with a stanza from yet a third poet, this time by a native English one. The lines below are from An Essay on Man, a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744):

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest.

The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come. 

Alexander Pope, portrait by Michael Dahl



[1] In similar fashion, the great 20th century German-Jewish scholar Martin Buber’s seminal 1923 work Ich und Du was translated into English in 1937 as I and Thou, to capture the personal intimacy that is at issue in that widely read book.

[2] From a letter dated September 2, 1960, as cited in Wolfgang Giegerich, The Historical Emergence of the I: Essays about One Chapter in the History of the Soul (London, Ontario, Canada: Dusk Owl Books, 2020), p. 23. I thank my friend Malgorzata Kalinowska, herself a Jungian analyst in Czeladź, Poland, for calling my attention to Giegerich’s book after she read “Disowning Ownership,” my post of January 9, 2023, available on this blogsite.  

Homesick

“I don’t know my way home.”

“That’s okay. . .  I don’t either.”

That is the dialogue in the closing scene of director Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent 1971 film Straw Dogs. The first line is delivered by Henri Niles, the mentally impaired character played by David Warner in the film. The reply comes from David Sumner, the highly intelligent (perhaps too intelligent) character played by Dustin Hoffman, a character who has just violently defended his rented house against armed intruders—a defense that has resulted in the death of a number of those intruders, as well as some other individuals. 

That closing dialogue takes place after all the violence—at least all the overt violence--has finally ended, and David is driving Henri back to the place where Henri lives. By what each says, neither knows his way home. However, Henri’s not knowing his way home is utterly different from David’s. 

Henri has what he experiences as a home, a place where he feels he belongs and to which he wants to return. It is just that because of his mental difficulties he doesn’t know how to direct David to drive there. 

On the other hand, David no longer knows just where, if anywhere, he has any such place of his own, a place where he feels he belongs and can live his own life. David is homeless in a deep and deeply disturbing sense that Henri’s very impairment protects him from ever having to experience. It is such utter lostness from all home that finds expression in David’s final words, especially as delivered with the enigmatic grin with which Dustin Hoffman delivers them.

 

2.

Do any of us know our way home today? 

Hardly.

Just where, if anywhere, do any of us today have a home at all any longer—any place where, as we honestly experience it, we truly belong? 

Why don’t we know our way home today? Whom in Peckinpah’s film do we most resemble in that regard? Henri or David? Are we of today not all, whether we have been brought to acknowledge it yet or not, just like David Sumner, who is forced by his own eruption into violence to acknowledge that he no longer knows his way home, at the end of that so graphically and disturbingly violent film? 

Even more crucially, isn’t the all too ever-present threat of our own eruptions into extremes of violence itself rooted in the very same radical homelessness to which David’s own eruption into such violence finally calls his attention?

In the scene at issue at the end of Peckinpah’s film, the underlying sense of David’s verbal acknowledgment of his own lack of knowing the way home any longer is something that only David himself can discern. It is an acknowledgment really directed solely to himself, not to Henri, the only other person in the car. Henri’s mental impairment assures that he will not understand what David is saying, and David knows that perfectly well. In what he is actually saying, David is talking to himself.

In so talking to himself, David is at last receiving a gift for which his whole life up till then has been preparing him. If he continues to be open to it, that gift will eventually bring him home again, but letting him truly know his home for the very first time. The gift to David, as it were, of his own outburst into violence is the shattering of his illusions about himself, and the revelation to him that he is indeed utterly homeless.

David’s violence shows him that he is homeless in a way that has nothing to do with having some “house” to defend against intruders, as—in an earlier scene in which the violence is just beginning to erupt into the open—David says is what he is going to do. David’s homelessness has nothing to do with the lack of adequate housing. Rather, it is rooted entirely in the deeply ingrained tendency to erupt into violence against anything or anyone who augurs to reveal precisely one’s very homelessness itself to one, a homelessness far more radical than any such lack of housing. 

 

3.

What is David’s problem, and by implication our own? Just why can’t David and the rest of us find our way home anymore? Henri’s inability to find his way home is due to his mental deficiency; but what about David—and all the rest of us by implication? What is the cause of David’s and all of our inability any longer to find the way home? 

Is that condition due to some sort of moral failure on our part? Something for which we ourselves are to blame, such that with a bit more courage and discipline we might have been able to avoid having lost our way home in the first place? Or is it something else?

It is something else.

Our homesickness is rooted in our own involuntary uprooting. We are wandering aimlessly in search of home, having lost all sense of where we are and how to get home again, because we have been torn out of what previously provided humans their home: We have been torn out by the roots from our “native soil.” 

Understanding that, however, leaves us to ask just what our true “native soil” is

That is a question that we all need to ask, alone and together. I will therefore let it remain open, as I should—at least for now.


Final scene of Peckinpah’s film

Final scene of Peckinpah’s film