focusing for writers, Part II

Longing for home is a soul condition. For writers, writing is a way of seeking home and one day, perhaps, finding home. Yet so much of the creative process is wandering. Some of it is helpful and necessary, some of it is painful and distracting. How might wandering writers befriend Hestia to dwell with their topic and stay centered in their work, no matter how eccentric or erratic the journey?

Another aspect of Hestia may help answer this question. Her virginity is chosen. It is more than a sexual quality and bespeaks something of Hestia’s inviolable character. She is without a partner because she is “one in herself,” self-sufficient, psychologically virgin, to borrow Esther Harding’s definition (1965). Archetypal virginity is not exclusive to females or the feminine; it is not gender specific. Rather it is a mode of being and a way of knowing equally available to men and women. For the writer, Hestian virginity implies a quality of privacy, containment, and remoteness. Writers who want to get anything done at all cherish their privacy, insist on it, and thrive in it. In fact, they may become quite irritable without it: a fair warning to those who live with writers.

Hestian virginity is a paradox, however, a concatenation of social solitude and deep, intimate relationship with the images, figures, and ideas in the work. It is as though shutting the door on the external world is a necessary prelude to opening the door to the inner world.

Being remote and self-contained is something increasingly problematic in the contemporary world, a world in which we are held within an invisible digital mesh, rendering us available to anyone any time. Welcoming Hestia into our lives may be the ideal antidote to distracted times. She is a very restful companion.

“Within her pristine position, Hestia is able to guard images … because of a power of illumination which never fails, sees all things, and which also fosters all things” (Kirksey 1980, 107). Thus Hestia offers a stable ground that also preserves and protects the delicate imaginal work that goes on in the midst of writing. It is not just the author who is warmed by Hestian fire, the images and ideas who are gathering on behalf of the work are warmed there, too, as I have written elsewhere [ link to Writing as Method essay ].

Sometimes writers have not made a home for themselves, the images, and the ideas. Or they once did, but the home has been neglected. This is a matter of importance because, as Hillman reminds us, in an ensouled world, the anima mundi, soul is the depth and interiority of all things, including the actual places where we do our work.

Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. … Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing. God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street. (1982, p. 77)

The actual, physical home for our writing matters. It has soul, expresses soul. We might ask, What sort of thinking and writing space have we created for ourselves? Is Hestia welcome there?

I conjecture that without Hestia our work will not succeed, because one of the great challenges of the solitary writing life is remaining at home, or returning home after a fertile bit of wandering, and rediscovering the heart of the work. Through a fortunate etymological happenstance, the heart of the work is the Hestian hearth: the word for hearth in Latin is focus. The wandering author, out of balance, off-center, possibly even chilled or bereft because passion for the work has cooled, needs the warmth of Hestia. Perhaps by coming to her hearth, we will rediscover the quiet, steady fire that burns at the center of the work—its focus.

References

Boer, C., Trans. (1970). The Homeric hymns. Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press.

Harding, E. (1965). The “I” and the “Not-I”: A study in the development of consciousness. New York: Bollingen Foundation.

Hillman, J. (1982). Anima mundi: The return of the soul to the world. Spring 1982. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, pp. 71-93.

Kirksey, B. (1980). Hestia, goddess of the hearth. In Facing the Gods. Irving, TX: Spring Publications, pp. 101-113.