The Seba library treats Garland in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Hillman, James, Rohde, Erwin, Garland, Eric L.).
I would rather see each of these sinkings as attempts at descent, at misbegotten ways of growing down. It is as if the world that she never reached kept pulling her into it
Hillman reframes Judy Garland’s repeated collapses not as pathology inflicted by Hollywood but as the daimon’s compulsion toward ‘growing down’ — incarnating the calling into ordinary life.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The descent into the world may be painful and costly. Costly, especially, to the family. The price of calling is often paid by the very circumstances in which the acorn has taken root
Hillman introduces Judy Garland as the paradigm case for his argument that the daimonic calling ruthlessly exacts its price from family, body, and intimate relationships.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Eha Kazan describing greatness in performance lists Caruso and Callas, Raimu and Garbo, and ‘Judy Garland at the end of her life.’
Hillman marshals superlatives from Astaire, Crosby, Kelly, and Kazan to establish Garland’s unambiguous artistic greatness as the precondition for his psychological argument about the daimon’s demands.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
pangs of loneliness can strike in the midst of friends, in bed with a lover, at the microphone before a cheering crowd. When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary
In the section directly following the Garland analysis, Hillman generalizes the performer’s existential isolation into a universal archetypal loneliness that accompanies the daimonic soul regardless of circumstance.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
its source, however, seems to be the solitary uniqueness of each daimon, an archetypal loneliness inexpressible in a child’s vocabulary and formulated hardly better in ours
Hillman locates Garland-type loneliness not in biographical trauma but in the ontological isolation entailed by the daimon’s singular image.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Crowning of the dead with garlands, afterwards a general custom, is first mentioned in the ‘Alkmaiwonis’… On the ‘Archemoros’ vase a woman is about to place a myrtle-wreath on the head of Archemoros.
Rohde documents the garland as a chthonic-ritual object in archaic Greek funerary practice, where myrtle crowns belonged to both the dead and the mystai of Demeter, linking the garland symbolically to underworld passage.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894aside
After completing a course in mindfulness training, the addict may become more aware of the automatic addictive habit as it is activated, allowing for top-down regulation of the precipitating negative emotional state
Garland (Eric L.) proposes a neurocognitive model in which mindfulness interrupts the automatic attentional capture underlying addiction, a framework widely cited across the clinical literature in this corpus.
, Mindfulness training targets neurocognitive mechanisms of addiction at the attention-appraisal-emotion interface, 2014aside