Hillman describes the puer as the spirit of spontaneity, creativity, and risk. The puer is a youthful figure, light on his feet and quick-moving. He has a certain heedlessness about him, maybe even a recklessness. He might be personified by Hermes, the stealer of Apollo's cattle, who manages to talk his way out trouble, charm the other gods, and invent the lyre all in one go.
The senex, on the other hand, is a somber figure associated with age and experience. He is steady, deliberate, rational, authoritative, and concerned with measuring and ordering things. His personification is Apollo, or -- according to Hillman -- Saturn, a somewhat cold and gloomy god, whose heaviness is in sharp contrast to the light-heartedness of the puer. (Saturn is also noteworthy for eating his children.)
Puer and senex characteristics are present in both men and women, at all times of life. They are more like patterns or types of energy than rigid representations of stages of life, though it is possible to see certain correspondences between puer and senex and the respective concerns of youth and old age. I'm wondering if they can also be related to the differences between right-brain and left-brain thinking.
Writing is a skill that requires the use of both sides of the brain, though not necessarily at the same time. When I write, the part I really like is playing with the words and ideas until they come out right. I might have a hunch about something that isn't substantial at all until I write it down, so I'm actually writing to figure out what I think. Writing itself is the way of discovery.
The other aspect of writing is editing, tidying up, and citation-checking, the part where you run the spell-checker and hunt for unmatched quotation marks. I am actually very good at this; I once worked as a copy editor and often had other people wanting me to proofread their work -- but I dislike it. I consider it the necessary finishing stage in writing and am meticulous about doing it but do not consider it fun.
I never thought of myself as a puer, but now I realize that that is exactly what I am when I'm engaged in the creative, exploratory part of writing. This is all risk-taking and not knowing if something's going to fly or not; it requires looseness and willingness to leap without seeing a net. The senex comes in later with the careful, deliberate editing, the consultations with the MLA style book, and the attention to structure and the length of paragraphs, things that usually don't occur to me until the end.
The puer-senex dimension actually explains a lot of things, not just writing. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said that I had more senex in me. I was usually the careful, reasonable, responsible one, always double-checking my work and being thoughtful about the way I approached things. I am still like that. But there was a whole other side of me trying to get out, which explains why I was always scribbling poetry at Starbucks, daydreaming, and driving around without knowing where I wanted to go. I was restless, but I tried to think I wasn't. What was really happening was that my senex was sitting on my puer and trying to eat him. My puer finally fought back and took such a flying leap that he landed on the other side of the country in graduate school.
I'm thinking about the wistful little boy from my dream, the one I wrote about in my first blog post in January. I think he's important on a lot of different levels, and I'm just now recognizing him as an infant puer. He showed up in another dream later on but was bigger and stronger and didn't seem quite so in need of protection. I didn't know I had him in me, but he did.
The senex, on the other hand, is a somber figure associated with age and experience. He is steady, deliberate, rational, authoritative, and concerned with measuring and ordering things. His personification is Apollo, or -- according to Hillman -- Saturn, a somewhat cold and gloomy god, whose heaviness is in sharp contrast to the light-heartedness of the puer. (Saturn is also noteworthy for eating his children.)
Puer and senex characteristics are present in both men and women, at all times of life. They are more like patterns or types of energy than rigid representations of stages of life, though it is possible to see certain correspondences between puer and senex and the respective concerns of youth and old age. I'm wondering if they can also be related to the differences between right-brain and left-brain thinking.
Writing is a skill that requires the use of both sides of the brain, though not necessarily at the same time. When I write, the part I really like is playing with the words and ideas until they come out right. I might have a hunch about something that isn't substantial at all until I write it down, so I'm actually writing to figure out what I think. Writing itself is the way of discovery.
The other aspect of writing is editing, tidying up, and citation-checking, the part where you run the spell-checker and hunt for unmatched quotation marks. I am actually very good at this; I once worked as a copy editor and often had other people wanting me to proofread their work -- but I dislike it. I consider it the necessary finishing stage in writing and am meticulous about doing it but do not consider it fun.
I never thought of myself as a puer, but now I realize that that is exactly what I am when I'm engaged in the creative, exploratory part of writing. This is all risk-taking and not knowing if something's going to fly or not; it requires looseness and willingness to leap without seeing a net. The senex comes in later with the careful, deliberate editing, the consultations with the MLA style book, and the attention to structure and the length of paragraphs, things that usually don't occur to me until the end.
The puer-senex dimension actually explains a lot of things, not just writing. If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said that I had more senex in me. I was usually the careful, reasonable, responsible one, always double-checking my work and being thoughtful about the way I approached things. I am still like that. But there was a whole other side of me trying to get out, which explains why I was always scribbling poetry at Starbucks, daydreaming, and driving around without knowing where I wanted to go. I was restless, but I tried to think I wasn't. What was really happening was that my senex was sitting on my puer and trying to eat him. My puer finally fought back and took such a flying leap that he landed on the other side of the country in graduate school.
I'm thinking about the wistful little boy from my dream, the one I wrote about in my first blog post in January. I think he's important on a lot of different levels, and I'm just now recognizing him as an infant puer. He showed up in another dream later on but was bigger and stronger and didn't seem quite so in need of protection. I didn't know I had him in me, but he did.
