James Hillman: Because our Western culture declared “Nature abhors a vacuum,” we abhor emptiness.
The Void in the Vessel
Each vessel has its particular shape.
Inside is emptiness.
Each vessel is shaped around this emptiness.
Because our Western culture declared “Nature abhors a vacuum,” we abhor emptiness.
(“Empty” from Old English meaning “at leisure, unoccupied,” that is, not working, unfunctional.)
For us, the void in the vessel is just that: empty.
We regard vessels from the outside, admiring the glaze on the pot, the cut of crystal, the weave of a basket, and handle of a jug.
When valuing the inside, then by measure only: how much does it hold?
A pint, a quart, a bushel?
In Buddhism, the void is less a vacuum than a positive force.
The inside shapes around itself the outer visible form.
The “stillness” of the Chinese jar (T. S. Eliot) begins inside; the exquisite shape we see is the stillness emanating from the void.
Always this specific void inhabits this specific shape.
Culture affects the shape of vessels and therefore they reveal mysterious qualities of a culture that its other arts and written texts might not as well express.
Strange shapes, perfected forms of different Chinese dynasties, Greek pots, Etruscan, Phoenician, French Roccoco, Picasso’s ceramics, Morandi’s clusters of quiet bottles.
Barrels and casks, pitchers and jugs.
The long-neck beer bottle, the old Coke bottle, the milk bottle with the bulge for yellow cream.
The Roman futile that could only tip over, the goat skin of wine, the metal canteen shaped differently for each nation’s army.
Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.
Western phrenology and Romantic medicine expressed a similar idea, attributing the contours and crevices in the human skull to the force of the brain, and within that organ, the power of mind or soul.
Phrenologists penetrated to the “inner nature” of a person by studying and measuring the palpable bumps of the skull.
They claimed to read a person’s gifts and deficiencies, the very inmost character, from the hills and valleys of cranial topography.
These ways – Oriental and Romantic – of considering inner emptiness suggest that each emptiness has its individual shape and is contained in a quite particular manner.
Your void is not my void, and hers is different again.
The way a person holds his or her lacunae is already a revelation of what is being held.
General terms, simplistic diagnostics – abandonment, need, identity crisis, low self-esteem, depressive mood, dependency, masochistic helplessness – cannot adequately describe, let alone understand, the force of the void.
Because our collective Western natures abhor a vacuum, we reach out to fill the emptiness with anything, everything from junk food to junk self-help, from drink and shopping and the novelty of games and gadgets to the commiseration of soulmates, or simply endless tears.
Alchemy, however, suggests these feelings of emptiness are indications of a vessel forming.
The void is building a shape, a particular shape.
Perhaps several vessels.
Modes of containing.
Modes of measuring.
Modes of differentiating.
The reality of the psyche is forcing its way into life and reshaping one’s life by means of the feelings of emptiness.
Sometimes the void can be located physically.
Right here, in my belly; just behind my heart I feel light-headed, dizzy.
Sometimes it appears in a dream as falling through space, a pothole, a dark cave, a huge vacant lobby, an egg-shaped object.
So long as we do not attribute formative power to the hidden inside of the vessel, we will continue to read its function in one direction only.
The pitcher holds water, the vase holds flowers, the basket, fruit.
The void inside is merely a receptacle; the water, the flowers, the fruit are what count.
A reverse reading says the jug is moistening, the vase flowering, the basket fruiting.
The master painters in Holland and in nineteenth-century France showed the poppies and irises and roses, the pears and apples and grapes emerging from the hollowness of their containers, the void as source of beauty. Alchemical Psychology, James Hillman, Page 24-25
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