James Hillman quotes that touch,
... even if not entirely understood.
Then every mistake of life
every weakness and error in and of analysis
instead of being set straight in repentence
or wrung for its drop of consciousness
or transformed and integrated,
becomes rather the entrance to failure,
an opening into the reveral of all values.
Rather than as a block in Eros and the flow of life,
we might consider failure as constellated,
intended, and even caused, by the underworld
which wants life to fail in order that other attitudes
governed by other archetypal principles
be recognized. ...
When I am in despair
I do not want to be told of rebirth;
when I am aging and decaying
and the civilization around me collapsing
from its over-growth that is over-kill,
I cannot tolerate that word "growth",
and when I am falling to bits in my complexities,
I cannot abide the defensive simplistics of mandalas,
nor the sentimentalities of individuation as unity and wholeness.
These are formulae presented through a fantasy of opposites -
the disintegration shall be compensated by integration.
But what of cure through likeness where
like takes care of like?
I want the right background to the failure of life.
I want to hear with precision
of those Gods who are served by and thrive upon
and can hence provide an archetypal background to
and even an eros connection with
the defeat, decay, and dismemberment,
because these dominant would reflect the experienced psyche
(not in its Aristotelian conceptualization as belonging to life),
but in the actuality of its only known goal
which is also both its way and its substance,
death.
(Hillman, "Failure and Analysis", in Loose Ends, pp 103-104)
