Hello from Maryland. It’s been balmy here, even while the leaves turn and the days shorten—an odd seasonal limbo. Today’s post is the penultimate in the cellar series. After next week’s final post, I’m planning some adjustments. There’s a lovely poll at the end where I’d welcome your thoughts on two questions.
November’s “Talking Back to Walden” will finally look into Thoreau’s cabin. After much pondering, I realized what I want to say about houses—something tender I’ve been avoiding for months. If you missed October, we considered how trees teach us to let go and let be. You can read it here. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
commented recently on the intro post to this cellar series about her qualitative study of daydreaming, which, how cool is that? I love that people study daydreams.Last week, we considered the cellar’s architecture, from the thick walls that hold back the weight of the earth, to the steep stair that connects the underworld to day-world and beyond. In her comment on that post,
anticipated today’s topic. It’s a perfect intro for this week’s exploration of the cellar as both place and idea:“I’m curious about how the cellar offers both a womb-like safety and a beware-what-lurks here unconscious feeling. Even the verticality of the building suggests a womb, world, and afterworld.”
After a brief foray into the cellar’s role in social stratification, we’ll go down into the unconscious. Bring a candle. Or two.
Social hierarchy
Architectural forms are often analogized as parts of the body. (Reading that, did you just think of, Eyes are the windows of the soul?) In the colorful street slang of 1909 London, “cellars” were boots, and the “garret” was the head.1 My cellars have been languishing in the closet all spring and summer. If only the cold would come.
The cellar is also a metaphor for the disadvantage of low birth as a starting place in life: “I came upstairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar.”2
Cellar dwelling under deplorable conditions was not uncommon in overcrowded medieval walled cities. While this was eventually outlawed in 19th century England, cellars continued to house servants. Murray’s English Dictionary mentions legislation passed by the “cellared population,” suggesting that those with cellars have wealth and political influence.
This polarity of cellar and attic implies a vertical hierarchy that developed as the social stratification of “upstairs – downstairs.” Aside from the 1970s British series of that same name, we’re all familiar with the cellars of Downton Abbey.3
Here, every space supports the lavish, pampered life of the nobility on the floors above: butler’s pantry, scullery, kitchens, food storers, wine cellar (under lock and key), servants’ hall, boot room, laundry, as well as private bedrooms for Butler, Housekeeper and Cook. These were all connected via hidden “back stairs” to the floors above.
Dreaming and the unconscious
And here we arrive at the indelible fascination of the cellar. Working on this series, I’ve asked myself why it’s still so powerful in my imagination. The cellar has taken up residence there as a place of hidden passions and irrationality, a manifestation of the unconscious. Here’s Carl Jung:
“The maze of strange passages, chambers, and unlocked exits in [dreams of] the cellar recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld, which is a well-known symbol of the unconscious with its unknown possibilities. It also shows how one is ‘open’ to the other influences in one’s unconscious shadow side, and how uncanny and alien elements can break in.”4
Our natural fear of the unknown prompts an aversion to the cellar and motivates attempts to “rationalize” it. Remember, though: Jung insists that the unconscious must not be suppressed. He advises us to befriend, accept, and integrate what he calls “the shadow”—in all its messy darkness. Therein lies the treasure, the gold.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." ~ Carl Jung.
In his painting, “The Philosopher,” Rembrandt depicts this need to look inward, to recognize that the “search for knowledge . . . begins in the buried cellar, the nearby stairs offering a slow, laborious climb towards increasing insight and perspective.”5
To Emily Dickinson6, the house is the setting for thoughtful self-consciousness, a place to go deep:
Remembrance has a rear and front, — 'Tis something like a house; It has a garret also For refuge and the mouse, Besides, the deepest cellar That ever mason hewed; Look to it by its fathoms Ourselves be not pursued.
In Modernist architect Le Corbusier’s 1922 art studio, Maison Ozenfant, the womb-like library vault reverses the image of Rembrandt’s philosopher. Raised above the studio floor, the sanctuary for self-reflection is reached at the end of a climb.
Rooting around in the cellar of my own psyche has not always been a positive experience. Unpredictable, unpleasant aspects of my persona resist rationalization or assimilation. More darkness always seems to lurk in the shadowy corners, swallowing my feeble light. Bachelard compares the conscious to a man who rushes to the attic for assurance after hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar:
“In reality, this prudent man did not dare venture into the cellar. . . [D]arkness prevails both day and night, and even when we carry a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. . . [T]he creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious.”7
T.S. Eliot taps this same imagery in his 1936 poem, “The Hollow Men,” a criticism of the modern lack of spiritual values, our disbelief in the self, and the consequent loss of meaning. In a Jungian reading, it’s about the unconscious part of the psyche, those lost qualities of feeling and intuition so much needed in our overly-rational civilization.8 Here’s a taste9:
I. We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar. Shape without form, shade without color, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
Architecture of the irrational
Architectural examples of this understanding that we need places for individual seclusion and self-discovery can be studied for their own formal qualities, and how they relate to their context. One of my favorite examples is the Maison Carrée in Nimes. Talk about a dialogue between rational and irrational, collective and individual, conscious and unconscious! This 1st-century CE Roman temple “provided not only a residence for the god or gods, but a secluded and private place where the individual could have a direct and secret communion with the god he was praying to or petitioning.”10
The plans and sections show a distinction between the highly ordered ideal space of the ceremonial temple above and the chaotic, earthy subterranean rooms below. The porch of the ceremonial temple provides a sense of directionality and focus, tying it to the larger context of the city, where below there is no orientation, except inward—to one’s soul. The placement of the stairs suggests the special effort and determination required to enter, the difficulty a preparation for the coming trials below.
For all his reputation as a strict rationalist, French Modernist Le Corbusier had an artist’s soul. His work celebrates this tension between rational and irrational, ceremony and silence. The side chapels of his Monastery of La Tourette provide for deep introspection in contrast with the idealized shoebox volume of the sanctuary—where, when I visited as a student, an ordination took place.
The monks worship alone in a womb-like jewel-colored space buried in the hillside beside the main church. The chapels are curvy, lit with dim drama from above. From the outside, the organic forms contrast with the ordered box of the sanctuary, expressing affinity with the swells of landscape beyond. Artificial in dialogue with organic, community with individual.
Next week, we’ll wrap up this exploration of the cellar by delving into literature and architecture in response to this gem from C.G. Jung: “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
Please share your thoughts
In the chat
Readers shared marvelous photographs of what October looks like where they live in our Building Hope chat. I started a new one for us to fool around with integrating the shadow (just something light and fun . . . maybe a Jung-meme-fest!).
Read past installments of “Digging into the cellar” here:
Part 2: Where we encounter deep time, birth, death, and a return to origins
Part 3: Finding refuge, permanence and timelessness
Part 4: Leaving the known world behind
Part 5: Cosmos, chaos, walls and stairs
Part 7: Knowing and transforming our darkness
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. It’s always the highlight of my week.
Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8th ed. (New York: MacMillan & Co., 1984).
Geoffrey Cumberledge, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p.115:11, quoting Congreve.
This fabulous wiki has a photo and description of many rooms in the house. And did you know about the feud between the two shows?
Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday & Col., Inc., 1964), p.170.
Jill Bretherick, “Degagement,” unpublished paper submitted to the University of Virginia, p.24.
Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leet Hampson, eds., The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1930), p.56.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p.18.
Robert H. Canary, T.S. Eliot, the Poet and His Critics (Chicago: American Library Assoc., 1982), p.42.
Anthony L. Johnson, Sign and Structure in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot (Pisa, Italy: Editrice Tecnico Scientifica, 1976), pp.171-174.
John Gloag, The Architectural Interpretation of History (London: A. & C. Black Ltd., 1975), p.113.
As a Texan who has grown used to 100 degree plus temps, The cellars that my grandparents had, were wonderful places to escape the heat. From the first step down to the last step, the temp dropped about 15 degrees, if not a little more. Sometimes up to 30 degrees. Outside it would be 99, inside the cellar about 70. That's where they kept fruit they didn't want to spoil, or mason jars full of jellies and jams.
I loved the cellar.
After the daydreaming study, quite a bit after, I became interested in what happens to your folk psychology when you study a more formal psychology course. I came at it from the perspective of bringing into consciousness what you've been doing more subconsciously, so was really looking at it as an interaction between explicit and implicit learning. I became fascinated with implicit, intuitive leaps in learning, deep insight etc than arises, without really knowing how, after a more conscious, rational effort. It often happens during the time you leave it be and come back to it later and suddenly get it, when your conscious brain goes offline and gets out of the way.
The cellar in that respect is not so much a dark shadowy world of the unknown, but a rich, colourful realm of possibility if you let whatever is down there do its thing until it's ready to come up the stairs and reveal itself.
Great, thought-provoking post (and thank you for the mention)!