The Seba library treats Dry in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Onians, R B, Bowlby, John).
The reduction of the past to dry facts yields the salt of wisdom that the old are supposedly able to dispense. They only achieve these salty and bitterly true insights after their own emotional involvement has dried up.
Hillman argues that dryness in aging is not mere withering but an alchemical distillation — the evaporation of emotional moisture that yields concentrated, salted wisdom.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
Premature drying only destroys the germ of life, strikes the active principle on the head as with a hammer, and renders it passive. Yes, the opus needs intense heat to dry up the personalized moistures.
Hillman identifies in alchemical calcination the critical distinction between productive drying — the necessary reduction of sentimental moisture — and premature, destructive desiccation that kills the nascent psychological process.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
The dry seed needs moisture anew if it is to begin life anew. So the dry bones, it might be hoped, receiving life-liquid, might live.
Onians establishes that in archaic Greek thought, dryness is the necessary condition preceding regeneration — the state of seed or bone that must be achieved before new life-liquid can take hold.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
According to Orphic belief the soul arrives in Hades ‘dry’. Now, perhaps, it is possible to solve the problem of cremation and understand the purpose of burning the dead — it expedites the ‘drying’, the evaporation of the liquid of life.
Onians demonstrates that the archaic Greek concept of death is fundamentally a drying process — cremation accelerates the departure of the life-liquid, rendering the soul in its proper Hadic, desiccated state.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The Green takes place soon after the death and at it the body is cremated. Only close relatives and friends attend. The Dry is a communal occasion held at intervals of a year or two to commemorate all the deaths that have occurred since the last Dry funeral.
Bowlby’s ethnographic account of Kota mortuary practice presents ‘Green’ and ‘Dry’ as sequenced ritual phases, the Dry funeral completing the social and spiritual separation of the dead from the living community.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980supporting
Circe bids Odysseus and his comrades ‘eat food and drink wine till again you get thymos in your chests … but now you are dried up and lacking in thymos, remembering ever your dire wandering’.
Onians shows that in Homeric physiology, to be ‘dried up’ is to be depleted of the vital liquid that constitutes psychic vigor — dryness as the somatic signature of existential diminishment.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Bob quit school to dry out, then decided to return only to learn that the faculty entertained other ideas.
In the A.A. historical context, ‘dry out’ denotes a purely physical withdrawal from alcohol, which Kurtz implicitly contrasts with the deeper psychological and spiritual sobriety A.A. sought to cultivate.
, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010supporting
ξηραίνομαι ‘become dry’ … τέρσομαι [Hom., Hp] ‘become dry’ … ψύχομαι ‘grow cold, become dry’
Allan’s grammatical catalogue of Greek middle-voice verbs encoding physical change of state preserves the ancient linguistic field within which ‘becoming dry’ was classified alongside cooling, melting, and reddening — changes in elemental constitution.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003aside
ξερόν [n.] ‘the dry (land)’ only in ποτί ξερὸν ἠπείροιο … =>ξηρός.
Beekes documents the Greek lexical root for ‘dry’ as applied to land, anchoring the term in its elemental, geographical sense prior to its psychological and eschatological elaborations.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside