A lovely beginning meditation, my friend. I think of William Desmond's metaphysical reflections and his concern for the porosity that communicates the numinous depths of nature to the contemplative soul. Plato stressed the wonder that is the origin of our questing desire to embrace and be embraced by Sophia. And yet, the path of modernity, the dregs of a Kali Yuga that we existentially encounter, is so often a wrestling with anxiety. Like Kierkegaard, we discover the love of wisdom in that experience as well. The vatic art of the poet plumbs depths both young as the ancient of days, and dark with the sorrows of the earth. I look forward to the sharing of your inquiry. To speak of bells is also to recollect that charming and wise episode of Huysmans that considers the arcana of bell tolling and the ancient practice of baptising bells . . .
Thanks, Brian. Desmond would be one to bring up. Maybe I'll be able to bring him into these letters, though that level of philosophical discourse tends to be above my pay grade. On the other hand, that's true of all the philosophical writers I like to read. Certainly true of Catherine Pickstock, who might come up, and, since you mention Huysmans, Caitlin Smith Gilson. Nice coincidence, that, seeing as I just popped over to the library this afternoon to pick up her book on Huysmans... if that's even the way to describe it. More of a meditation or intricate reverie by the looks of it. I can't work with any of these types of thinkers in the way you can, the way professional philosopher-theologians can. But I will draw on such thinkers and on the mystics and saints in the way a creative writer can, sort of the way Fosse works with Eckhart in Septology. Anyway, we'll see how this book project shapes up and who all shows up in it... Hopefully you'll help me figure that out!
I am fond of Smith Gilson. I have read nearly all her published works. She is idiosyncratic in her approach, not a typical scholar. Unfortunately, as with Blondel who is also a Catholic thinker I find insightful, she is dogmatically attached to an infernalist eschatology that I reject as insufficient to the breadth and scope of the gospel. Nonetheless, she is one of those rare voices that existentially struggles with the mysteries of life and does not simply regurgitate scholastic consensus. I look forward to what you have to say on Septology. I am ambivalent about the conclusion, though in some ways, of course, it is the foreseeable and natural completion of the novel. The purpose of the doubling of Guro and Asle remains enigmatic and somewhat puzzling. It is almost as if one posits a quantum resonance within a single universe rather than the popular multiverse alternative in current fiction. One is given the same personal teleology as it would have been under slightly different initial circumstances, noting what perdures as essential amidst difference. Well, something like that perhaps.
I can think of no better interlocutor to engage for this sort of inquiry, Jonathan. Most of those who largely confine themselves to the philosophical/theological track are only tangentially concerned with the poetic. And yet, it seems to me Incarnation means the poetic and the mystical depths of singularity are the "way of Creation," part of the Wise that cannot be discovered via abstraction or forms of spirituality that would ultimately dismiss the concrete particular as an ephemeral agent of a transcendence that leaves the cosmos behind.
I think I'll write a separate letter about Fosse's project around when the American publisher brings out their edition (early spring). I was supposed to write a follow-up article to the lengthy one I published last year at Church Life Journal about the first 2/3 Septology, all that was then available. When I went to write that follow-up, I realized I didn't have much to say, at least not yet, I already seemed to have said everything in the first article and had more or less accurately predicted how the thing would end. That tells me that the final third of Septology goes astray. While I think Fosse is a brilliant writer and I have great admiration for the project of Septology, I do think the ending was something of a disappointment. There were passages in the final installment that were wonderful -- like the whole thing with Herdis Asen, the young Asle painting her portrait and it (or she) becomes glorious, yet in reality she's sort of pathetic: that was a moment of triumphant mercy. But yeah, I hate to say I think Fosse kind of lost his vision at the end of Septology. Anyway he lost me. I don't think Fosse ever really put the fantastical dopplelgänger trope to a coherent use.
The whole thing felt more like cinema than a novel, to me. I could see Tarkovsky or Bresson having made a film of Septology. Don't know who could do ti today -- maybe Terence Malick. I actually think cinema is better adapted to stream-of-consciousness than writing it. As I argued in the CLJ article, I don't think stream-of-consciousness technically is fiction, and it's a technicality that matters, at least to me. It is the invention of precisely the same historical moment as cinema, but before cinema had the ability to do what it could do by mid-century. The only other stream-of-consciousness writing from mid-twentieth century or later I enjoy is Kerouac and Thomas Bernhard. And now that I write that, I realize my next letter will be partly about Kerouac, and so maybe I should follow that with the letter on Septology. Because I do think that in order to understand where Fosse goes astray one has to look at the technique he employed for that book. It's related to Eckhart somehow, I'm convinced. The way Fosse reads Eckhart led him to write that book the way he did, and I'd like to unravel that mystery just a little.
I do think ultimately the mysticism of the via negativa presents a major challenge to writers or to any artist, including the filmmaker. The renunciation of images (and the passions that go along with them) is not really what art is for: but it can get you right up to the moment of renunciation. Usually though we get that in the voice of the writer or a writer-character. There are plenty of mic drop moments in literature, where the author or the narrator anyway says "I'm done with literature after this." And then the book ends, although the writer sometimes changes their mind later. Rimbaud, Kierkegaard, Melville, Hardy, Knausgaard -- these types take whatever form they're working with and in a way try to destroy it, and when they can't quite do that they quit or at least switch forms. I guess there's a sense any artist who has a deep feeling for the apophatic, the luminous darkness, is going to be at war with themselves. And I guess what we're getting in Septology is a picture of the artist in the pitch of that crisis, which in this case actually kills him.
Okay, but then why the doubling? Is the alcoholism of the other Asle some kind of objective correlative for the sober Asle's lifelong quest to say the unsayable in his painting? But then why do we need that objective correlative? And what about Ales? She seems underdeveloped to me. We get the most of her in the last third, which is structurally wrong. And as for the two Guros, I guess I can see them as Sober Asle's version of temptation -- cf. Drunk Asle's infidelity -- but why is Guro herself doubled? Why does one of the Guros have to die? The book has a body count like an Elizabethan tragedy. Every major character except Asleik and his sister Guro are dead by the end, and in the case of Ales long before the main storyline begins. When I finished the book I was thinking Fosse should have found a way of killing off the priest and the gallery-owner while he was at it. By the way, "Brochmann" the priest's name must be an allusion to Hermann Broch, whose The Death of Vergil is the clear model for Septology. I guess I would include that book in my short list of stream-of-consciousness from mid-century that I like, although I'm not totally sure it would qualify as such. Well, anyway, lot's to think about whenever I get to it
I also found the conclusion of Fosse’s work disappointing. This was partly signaled by boredom on my part. You knew where it was going and momentum was lost, though I suspect I have somewhat more tolerance for stream-of-consciousness. I use it in my own writing, but selectively and not as a continuous mode. I am pretty much always ambivalent about the mystical, embracing it as part of the open porosity of spirit to the infinite depths of being, but when it begins to seem purely disincarnating, I grow hostile. Przywara sought a kind of rhythm between cataphatic affirmation of images and apophatic renunciation, though he ultimately thinks the negative more important in order to guard God’s “ever greater” quality. While congenial towards his student, Balthasar, he felt Balthasar too drawn to the cataphatic. I take his point, but there remains a defensive posture that I think ultimately insufficiently aware of Triune serenity and eschatological joy. I bring all this up because the way Asle wishes to create art in order to achieve erasure of the images in memory is an equivocal desire. On the one hand, there is an implicit requirement to heal tragedy and so one can understand art as redemptive in its aim. Nonetheless, and here is where I see the “tilt” of much mysticism, it largely becomes a hope of being done with creation altogether – even if there is an assertion that the image returns to the Source. Nordic despair permeates the Christian hope too much, imo. In any event, I prefer Gregory of Nyssa. The Nyssan teaching on epektasis is one of infinite venturing forth. This is how I believe one should situate Przywara’s rhythmic movement: the apophatic is always preamble to creative advance, part of the neverending story. So, rather than see the cataphatic as something that needs to be transcended, the weight of glory becomes the ever deepening revelation of the depths of being. Existentially, this ought not to result in the defatigation of the artist, a final renunciation of images, but the renewal of poetic art, the image as endless love letter. In this sense, apophatic ascesis serves further revelation. This also brings to mind Origen and Isaac of Nineveh who teach the rebirth of the infant Christ in the mystic as the advent of the new world (equivalent to the pristine, sophianic creation.) I think this is what is truly happening in the Passion, Christ’s “it is finished” founds the “it is good” of Genesis.
Kerouac interests me . . . and I like Robert Duncan, the poet you have already mentioned. If you want to include Villon, that would please me, too.
p.s. to accompany Smith-Gilson's Huysmans book, I've also just picked up a volume of his letters called The Road from Decadence: from brothel to cloister. I'm really looking forward to it and if I can't intelligently make use of a book like Smith-Gilson's in these letters, I can write about Huysmans' writing. He's long been a figure of much interest to me, as are all artists who experience epiphanies or undergo a great change of heart or 'conversion.' In my next letter here I'll be looking at how that plays out with Thoreau on Mount Katahdin in Maine and for Kerouac in his novel Desolation Angels.
Jonathan, thank you for sharing your writing and your self. I grew up in Cincinnati - many years before you - and Michigan was my northern star. Maybe our midwestern-ness gives us an especial appreciation for Kurt Vonnegut, a Hoosier by birth and heart.
Always a pleasure to run into (even just virtually) another Cincinnatian. Thank you for reading, Tara. This substack project is getting off to a very slow start, as you can tell, but I hope it will begin to gather some steam quite soon, especially over the spring and summer.
I do like Kurt Vonnegut's writing a lot. It's been some years since I've read his books, but they were some of the first works of fiction to find a place in my heart. He deserves more attention than he gets anymore, but maybe his star will rise again someday. I agree with what you wrote in Paul Kingsnorth's substack, that Vonnegut's writing is "religious in the best sense" and Christian without being overtly or even consciously so -- Midwestern might just be the best word for it. An older kind of Midwestern.
Jonathan, I deeply resonate with the wisdom of place, but it hasn't always been so. I grew up during the 50s and 60s when the romance of the road was high. I was born in Tokyo and have lived in several places - Ohio, New Mexico, Boston, NYC, the San Francisco area... Interestingly, everywhere I live, people ask me if I'm from the midwest, lol.
I'm about to move to Washington state, where I have never been. But I carry the love of small things and deep relationship with me. I hope to settle into the community where I land, to nestle my roots into those of kindred folks there, and to work for the healing of our world in whatever way presents itself.
I love many things about this letter, but I will highlight one. You care to *name* the creatures you encounter. It's not just grass; it's big bluestem. Not just trees, but oaks. Not just a big bird, or even just a hawk, but a Cooper's hawk, and probably a female.
A lovely beginning meditation, my friend. I think of William Desmond's metaphysical reflections and his concern for the porosity that communicates the numinous depths of nature to the contemplative soul. Plato stressed the wonder that is the origin of our questing desire to embrace and be embraced by Sophia. And yet, the path of modernity, the dregs of a Kali Yuga that we existentially encounter, is so often a wrestling with anxiety. Like Kierkegaard, we discover the love of wisdom in that experience as well. The vatic art of the poet plumbs depths both young as the ancient of days, and dark with the sorrows of the earth. I look forward to the sharing of your inquiry. To speak of bells is also to recollect that charming and wise episode of Huysmans that considers the arcana of bell tolling and the ancient practice of baptising bells . . .
Thanks, Brian. Desmond would be one to bring up. Maybe I'll be able to bring him into these letters, though that level of philosophical discourse tends to be above my pay grade. On the other hand, that's true of all the philosophical writers I like to read. Certainly true of Catherine Pickstock, who might come up, and, since you mention Huysmans, Caitlin Smith Gilson. Nice coincidence, that, seeing as I just popped over to the library this afternoon to pick up her book on Huysmans... if that's even the way to describe it. More of a meditation or intricate reverie by the looks of it. I can't work with any of these types of thinkers in the way you can, the way professional philosopher-theologians can. But I will draw on such thinkers and on the mystics and saints in the way a creative writer can, sort of the way Fosse works with Eckhart in Septology. Anyway, we'll see how this book project shapes up and who all shows up in it... Hopefully you'll help me figure that out!
I am fond of Smith Gilson. I have read nearly all her published works. She is idiosyncratic in her approach, not a typical scholar. Unfortunately, as with Blondel who is also a Catholic thinker I find insightful, she is dogmatically attached to an infernalist eschatology that I reject as insufficient to the breadth and scope of the gospel. Nonetheless, she is one of those rare voices that existentially struggles with the mysteries of life and does not simply regurgitate scholastic consensus. I look forward to what you have to say on Septology. I am ambivalent about the conclusion, though in some ways, of course, it is the foreseeable and natural completion of the novel. The purpose of the doubling of Guro and Asle remains enigmatic and somewhat puzzling. It is almost as if one posits a quantum resonance within a single universe rather than the popular multiverse alternative in current fiction. One is given the same personal teleology as it would have been under slightly different initial circumstances, noting what perdures as essential amidst difference. Well, something like that perhaps.
I can think of no better interlocutor to engage for this sort of inquiry, Jonathan. Most of those who largely confine themselves to the philosophical/theological track are only tangentially concerned with the poetic. And yet, it seems to me Incarnation means the poetic and the mystical depths of singularity are the "way of Creation," part of the Wise that cannot be discovered via abstraction or forms of spirituality that would ultimately dismiss the concrete particular as an ephemeral agent of a transcendence that leaves the cosmos behind.
I think I'll write a separate letter about Fosse's project around when the American publisher brings out their edition (early spring). I was supposed to write a follow-up article to the lengthy one I published last year at Church Life Journal about the first 2/3 Septology, all that was then available. When I went to write that follow-up, I realized I didn't have much to say, at least not yet, I already seemed to have said everything in the first article and had more or less accurately predicted how the thing would end. That tells me that the final third of Septology goes astray. While I think Fosse is a brilliant writer and I have great admiration for the project of Septology, I do think the ending was something of a disappointment. There were passages in the final installment that were wonderful -- like the whole thing with Herdis Asen, the young Asle painting her portrait and it (or she) becomes glorious, yet in reality she's sort of pathetic: that was a moment of triumphant mercy. But yeah, I hate to say I think Fosse kind of lost his vision at the end of Septology. Anyway he lost me. I don't think Fosse ever really put the fantastical dopplelgänger trope to a coherent use.
The whole thing felt more like cinema than a novel, to me. I could see Tarkovsky or Bresson having made a film of Septology. Don't know who could do ti today -- maybe Terence Malick. I actually think cinema is better adapted to stream-of-consciousness than writing it. As I argued in the CLJ article, I don't think stream-of-consciousness technically is fiction, and it's a technicality that matters, at least to me. It is the invention of precisely the same historical moment as cinema, but before cinema had the ability to do what it could do by mid-century. The only other stream-of-consciousness writing from mid-twentieth century or later I enjoy is Kerouac and Thomas Bernhard. And now that I write that, I realize my next letter will be partly about Kerouac, and so maybe I should follow that with the letter on Septology. Because I do think that in order to understand where Fosse goes astray one has to look at the technique he employed for that book. It's related to Eckhart somehow, I'm convinced. The way Fosse reads Eckhart led him to write that book the way he did, and I'd like to unravel that mystery just a little.
I do think ultimately the mysticism of the via negativa presents a major challenge to writers or to any artist, including the filmmaker. The renunciation of images (and the passions that go along with them) is not really what art is for: but it can get you right up to the moment of renunciation. Usually though we get that in the voice of the writer or a writer-character. There are plenty of mic drop moments in literature, where the author or the narrator anyway says "I'm done with literature after this." And then the book ends, although the writer sometimes changes their mind later. Rimbaud, Kierkegaard, Melville, Hardy, Knausgaard -- these types take whatever form they're working with and in a way try to destroy it, and when they can't quite do that they quit or at least switch forms. I guess there's a sense any artist who has a deep feeling for the apophatic, the luminous darkness, is going to be at war with themselves. And I guess what we're getting in Septology is a picture of the artist in the pitch of that crisis, which in this case actually kills him.
Okay, but then why the doubling? Is the alcoholism of the other Asle some kind of objective correlative for the sober Asle's lifelong quest to say the unsayable in his painting? But then why do we need that objective correlative? And what about Ales? She seems underdeveloped to me. We get the most of her in the last third, which is structurally wrong. And as for the two Guros, I guess I can see them as Sober Asle's version of temptation -- cf. Drunk Asle's infidelity -- but why is Guro herself doubled? Why does one of the Guros have to die? The book has a body count like an Elizabethan tragedy. Every major character except Asleik and his sister Guro are dead by the end, and in the case of Ales long before the main storyline begins. When I finished the book I was thinking Fosse should have found a way of killing off the priest and the gallery-owner while he was at it. By the way, "Brochmann" the priest's name must be an allusion to Hermann Broch, whose The Death of Vergil is the clear model for Septology. I guess I would include that book in my short list of stream-of-consciousness from mid-century that I like, although I'm not totally sure it would qualify as such. Well, anyway, lot's to think about whenever I get to it
I also found the conclusion of Fosse’s work disappointing. This was partly signaled by boredom on my part. You knew where it was going and momentum was lost, though I suspect I have somewhat more tolerance for stream-of-consciousness. I use it in my own writing, but selectively and not as a continuous mode. I am pretty much always ambivalent about the mystical, embracing it as part of the open porosity of spirit to the infinite depths of being, but when it begins to seem purely disincarnating, I grow hostile. Przywara sought a kind of rhythm between cataphatic affirmation of images and apophatic renunciation, though he ultimately thinks the negative more important in order to guard God’s “ever greater” quality. While congenial towards his student, Balthasar, he felt Balthasar too drawn to the cataphatic. I take his point, but there remains a defensive posture that I think ultimately insufficiently aware of Triune serenity and eschatological joy. I bring all this up because the way Asle wishes to create art in order to achieve erasure of the images in memory is an equivocal desire. On the one hand, there is an implicit requirement to heal tragedy and so one can understand art as redemptive in its aim. Nonetheless, and here is where I see the “tilt” of much mysticism, it largely becomes a hope of being done with creation altogether – even if there is an assertion that the image returns to the Source. Nordic despair permeates the Christian hope too much, imo. In any event, I prefer Gregory of Nyssa. The Nyssan teaching on epektasis is one of infinite venturing forth. This is how I believe one should situate Przywara’s rhythmic movement: the apophatic is always preamble to creative advance, part of the neverending story. So, rather than see the cataphatic as something that needs to be transcended, the weight of glory becomes the ever deepening revelation of the depths of being. Existentially, this ought not to result in the defatigation of the artist, a final renunciation of images, but the renewal of poetic art, the image as endless love letter. In this sense, apophatic ascesis serves further revelation. This also brings to mind Origen and Isaac of Nineveh who teach the rebirth of the infant Christ in the mystic as the advent of the new world (equivalent to the pristine, sophianic creation.) I think this is what is truly happening in the Passion, Christ’s “it is finished” founds the “it is good” of Genesis.
Kerouac interests me . . . and I like Robert Duncan, the poet you have already mentioned. If you want to include Villon, that would please me, too.
p.s. to accompany Smith-Gilson's Huysmans book, I've also just picked up a volume of his letters called The Road from Decadence: from brothel to cloister. I'm really looking forward to it and if I can't intelligently make use of a book like Smith-Gilson's in these letters, I can write about Huysmans' writing. He's long been a figure of much interest to me, as are all artists who experience epiphanies or undergo a great change of heart or 'conversion.' In my next letter here I'll be looking at how that plays out with Thoreau on Mount Katahdin in Maine and for Kerouac in his novel Desolation Angels.
Jonathan, thank you for sharing your writing and your self. I grew up in Cincinnati - many years before you - and Michigan was my northern star. Maybe our midwestern-ness gives us an especial appreciation for Kurt Vonnegut, a Hoosier by birth and heart.
Always a pleasure to run into (even just virtually) another Cincinnatian. Thank you for reading, Tara. This substack project is getting off to a very slow start, as you can tell, but I hope it will begin to gather some steam quite soon, especially over the spring and summer.
I do like Kurt Vonnegut's writing a lot. It's been some years since I've read his books, but they were some of the first works of fiction to find a place in my heart. He deserves more attention than he gets anymore, but maybe his star will rise again someday. I agree with what you wrote in Paul Kingsnorth's substack, that Vonnegut's writing is "religious in the best sense" and Christian without being overtly or even consciously so -- Midwestern might just be the best word for it. An older kind of Midwestern.
:-)
Jonathan, I deeply resonate with the wisdom of place, but it hasn't always been so. I grew up during the 50s and 60s when the romance of the road was high. I was born in Tokyo and have lived in several places - Ohio, New Mexico, Boston, NYC, the San Francisco area... Interestingly, everywhere I live, people ask me if I'm from the midwest, lol.
I'm about to move to Washington state, where I have never been. But I carry the love of small things and deep relationship with me. I hope to settle into the community where I land, to nestle my roots into those of kindred folks there, and to work for the healing of our world in whatever way presents itself.
I love many things about this letter, but I will highlight one. You care to *name* the creatures you encounter. It's not just grass; it's big bluestem. Not just trees, but oaks. Not just a big bird, or even just a hawk, but a Cooper's hawk, and probably a female.
Natural history is essential to sophianic vision.