There is also a report in which Cornell, under the influence of de Nerval, says he saw in a dream “into images miraculous as the Sainte face”; the name Jesus Christ is not used and Cornell evades dangerous territory by writing, “no sooner is the identity established than the objects evaporate—the beauty too much to hold” (p. 257). A case for psycho-pathology could be made by selective emphasis upon such confessions of dissociative states and dreams. They are not trivial and illustrate the dangers of unmonitored “active imagination”, as Carl Jung warned. Cornell preserved such evidence of pathological mental states, having been encouraged by the Surrealists who revelled in Freudian dream analysis. He is unlikely to have invented anything or exaggerated the drama of his inner life, but to have cherished it to the point of revealing what many people would try to conceal. He is known to have rejected the Surrealist cult of automatisms, or psychotic moments induced by automatic writing. Cornell did not cultivate delusional states for their own sake as did Salvador Dali. On the other hand, he fully accepted the authority of dreams, many of which are fascinatingly recorded and deserve study. Much of the verbal disconnection in his journal may be attributed to haste and a degree of carelessness while, when a genuinely dissociative episode surfaces, it is often followed by coherent commentary, or a new subject coherently handled.
Cornell frequently wrote carefully phrased and charming letters to his friends showing his mind working in quite a different register. He would complain of “head pressure” and fears that the “old depression” might recur, but within a framework of rational discourse that alarmed no one.
Equally important are the reparative or healing episodes that abound in the journal. These are esthetic moments of sometimes visionary intensity. For example, Cornell reports that, having overcome the urge to “city wanderlust”, he was working in the cellar on Cockatoo For Pasta (1956), “being overcome again by the great beauty of WHITE in this box”. His entire sensibility was thereby heightened and, emerging into the open upstairs, he saw a “grandiose cloud of cumulus over tree top”. When combined, “Pasta [the box] & clouds again reminded & inspiration again the thread caught up again—this welcome of PRINCIPLE vs. obsession with personal sense of things” (pp. 210-11). The thread Cornell followed led toward impersonal archetypal essences, in this case whiteness, signifying purity and innocence as opposed to dark obsessions rebounding on merely personal associations and their limiting moods. That this was not an isolated incident of symbolic repair appears from an entry the next year: “a billowy sunny white cloud sailing along in the clear blue cerulean. What a beautiful sign what a blessed (benediction) what a (pure joy) this kind of thing that happens with the boxes” (p. 227). Thus box imagery, when derived from nature, served as a kind of emotional intensifier allowing Cornell to see further into the essence of things. It induced an impersonal calming, steadying mood.
Actual behavior was controlled, if not modified, by examining it in words. Cornell reports of a Christmas season resisting a compulsive “urge to splurge—irrational repetitive buying”; he also did not follow through upon seeing “a Polish-type blondish girl on escalator moving upward ....” (pp. 300-1). This is one of the few instances where he acknowledged reading psychology; in this case Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself was beneficial in controlling compulsions. Elsewhere, the language of self-control is religious: when the “unconscious” disturbed him with obsessions upon waking after sleep, he simply brought to mind a “current Bible sermon”. This is followed with talk of “atonement” “to cancel out vileness of a week ago” (p. 364). But preaching to himself from Christian Science is less in evidence than are healing moments in the presence of nature. For instance he wrote in 1956 of seeing “thru cellar window the squirrel and catbird, robin at the bird table under the quince tree with petals falling—the rose pink of azalea bush in full bloom—strong sense of significant form, drama and poetry accentuated by the “spectacle” thrice familiar but from the dark of the underground the garden incident thus framed imbued with the poetry & drama of everyday life that brings joy and inspiration beyond esthetics” (p. 204). This passage shows cornell using his most eloquent and expressive idiom; it is fully coherent without the gaps and hesitations characteristic of his conflicted mental states. In other words, Cornell had skills to emerge from the captivity of a persecuting unconscious into the clear light of day. His partially underground workroom was a metaphor for his half-submerged emotional life: religion and nature stimuli, journal and art could lift him above its darkness.
By turning to nature for relief from defective selfhood, Joseph Cornell joined a succession of nature mystics who were creative artists. From Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans set in the seventeenth-century Welsh countryside, through Wordsworth’s Prelude (begun 1798f) to the “inscapes” of Gerard Manly Hopkins’s verse and Richard Jefferies’s Story of My Heart in the nineteenth century, nature conferred healing when the need was great and the heart prepared. Pantheism is strong in the work of these writers. Each encountered archetypal realities more powerful than their Christian beliefs. once entering into the numinous, outside of constraining belief systems and theology, such artists found impersonal archetypal release from personal ills. Comparative psychobiographical study of such healing would show Cornell to have reached a high level of “cosmic consciousness”, the reward of life-long spiritual questing and ascetic self discipline. Such adventuring is never absolute or final, and it would be wrong to claim for Cornell secular sainthood. The claim is only that his art became essential mood control, self-healing and self-transcendence.
Cornell’s search for true feeling, for freeing-up avoidant responses to people, and for a sense of cosmic connectedness pose larger questions than can be answered here. The problem of trans-personal reality in the archetypes drawn from nature and the cosmos is much debated. For Cornell, discovery of the power of archetypal imagery in sand boxes, birds and cosmic light and darkness, for example, was probably fortuitous. Nor did Cornell systematically promote the development of what “just happened”. There is scant evidence of study of Carl Jung on “active imagination”, the available journal entries showing just two brief allusions (pp. 404 and 441). There are no references to the relevant work on symbols and archetypes in the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade. He appears to have been a sort of innocent who happened upon the deep truths already reported, documented and theorized by those more sophisticated searchers. It is a tribute to Cornell’s art that it so fully parallels the emergence into light from darkness and imprisoning fantasy that cross-cultural study finds as the highest achievements of world religions when they are archetypally informed.