This looks like a huge project. A lot here to digest.
This line stands out for me, though:
The hardest thing of all to see, Baker writes, is what is really there.
I just bought Centuries by Thomas Traherne. I am at the beginning, but Traherne appears to be saying the same thing. Is there a throughline between the two? I would guess there is.
The Centuries is one of the most beautiful books ever written in English. Enjoy...
That's an interesting question about the 'throughline' from Traherne to Baker. Traherne's meditations weren't published until 1908, I believe, and he remains obscure to this day. I don't know that Baker would have read the meditations. But insofar as there is a very strong and ancient tradition in English letters of almost venerating the countryside and the natural world (often in its humbler dimensions), I'd say Baker was definitely part of that, and consciously so. Often this attitude is bound up with the legendary and mythic and folkloric material, and one of the things I will be showing about The Peregrine is how much imagery from an older and a more mythical England it contains. Religious experience and the natural or God-given world are fused in Baker's book in a way that's very similar to what one finds in medieval literature and in Traherne's visionary writing. I'm waiting on a biography of Baker that I hope will prove educational. In the meantime, maybe I should go back to Traherne.
I was nosing around and came across this quote from Nan Shepherd, "I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.”
A leitmotif of a tradition or simply what happens when human beings more or less alienated from nature begin to engage more deeply with the natural world? Both?
I find it interesting that this English tradition arose in the leading industrialized nation. The first country to be majority urban. In a multitude of very significant ways an extremely disenchanted place for so many. But it really shouldn't surprise. Here in the U.S. we are surely in the same position.
There is, as you well know, much talk of reenchantment these days. A trend with which I am in great sympathy. There is certainly great literary richness in this. Much of it, perhaps, still to be recovered and made available to non-scholars.
Not all of us are going to be able devote great amounts of time to being in the unspoiled wilderness (if much there still be). Nonetheless, I wonder how one can use the literary tradition as a means of actual transformation. A transformation, not only of how we see, but what we are and how we can relate and be and even identify with the world, natural and otherwise, in a deeper way.
Thanks for reminding me of Nan Shepherd's book. I first learned of her and The Living Mountain from reading Robert MacFarlane's incredible book Landmarks. Do you know that one? Might be where I first learned of J A Baker too.
Your comment is encouraging, Jack, and you've stated the nature of my project here very eloquently. Re-enchantment is much talked about because it is so urgent. What I'm attempting is, I have to admit, a very tricky balancing act. I'm trying, for the sake of re-enchantment and the actual transformation that requires, to convey the richness of the literary tradition and to some extent other arts. To do that for the non-scholar is hard enough. But I also feel a need in this project to engage the long, beautiful tradition of Western metaphysics: it is not obsolete, it is not dead, but it does need to be revivified, and I don't think that happens except through the arts.
Because of this complex nature of the project, the writing is various, sometimes more technical and sometimes more lyrical or personal and often blended in maybe strange ways -- at least it has to be like this until I hit upon a more unified style. The personal element has to be in there not because I think my own perspective is uniquely interesting, but because as you say if re-enchantment isn't about actually changing ourselves and the way we dwell in this world then it's not worth much. So I have to try to convey just a little of that by reflecting on my own experience, informed as it is by the texts and other artworks I want to write about. Anyway, thanks for reading.
A fascinating project . . . I think there is a kind of rhythmic, musical progress involved in epektasis. The apophatic reaches out beyond the image or perhaps touches upon an aniconic root that then gives birth to new images. Fosse's work lacked that sense of continuing adventure -- and there was something in the desire to renounce memory, the artistic work as a nullification, that is too much purely a disincarnation. The questing symbolic joy is missing. Anyway, it will be rewarding to see how you grapple with all this. I love that David Jones book . . . You should read Peguy's essays, too, btw. You'll see in the ms I sent you just how congenial all these thoughts are to my own mode of thinking.
Yeah, Fosse... man, he's an enigma. The thing with him is Eckhart. And the thing with Eckhart is the troubling question: just how much is mystical or speculative thought like his antithetical to the most basic impulse of art? You read Eckhart and wonder sometimes if the man ever really *saw* anything. Before him there's Aquinas saying the senses are so powerful and physical reality so richly real that you don't even have to receive communion orally, you can just gaze upon the consecrated host. And boom, just like that the Catholic Church has adoration, which I think is one of the most beautiful and prayerful affirmations (cataphasis!) of the created order of being. Eckhart is like the polar opposite of that sensibility. But I am fascinated by the Mass in the last volume of Septology, and when I write on the novel, using Smith's book, that's a moment I'll focus on.
I love the idea of epektasis as musical. That's perfect. Do you know if that analogy is to be found in the literature anywhere? But you know what else that reminds me of is Tolkien's story "Leaf by Niggle," where the analogy in a similar context (I doubt JRRT knew of Nyssa) is to painting. But my own sensibility and training is in music, and sadly very much not in the visual arts, so I get the analogy to music in a deep way. As a penance for my sins and to improve myself as a human being, I'm reading Navid Kermani's Wonder Beyond Belief right now, which is about Christian visual art from a very cultured Muslim (German-Iranian) perspective. Kermani is brilliant. You would love his philosophical book God Is Beautiful, if you don't know it already. He's good friends with German Catholic novelist Martin Mosebach, who appears in Wonder as "my Catholic friend," a recurring tag that makes the volume of essays feel like the sort of goofy/genius modern European novel (or like Murnane) that I love. Kermani can write in the digressive, meandering yet pellucid prose that somehow no one these days can pull off in English -- David Bentley Hart definitely cannot, though he thinks he can: actually Murnane is the one name among anglosphere writers who I think does it. Anyway I recommend Kermani for a totally different angle on this question of the iconic or aniconic.
I haven't seen the musical analogy to epektasis in the literature. It came out of my own synthetic reading and conversations with you, actually. Adoration is a key form of prayer. I think it tells us a lot more than folks imagine -- or rather, it may tell us something about imagination . . . but I'm going to leave that as a tease. I believe D C Schindler has talked about Kermani, but I haven't read any of that work, so now I'm putting it on the list. I liked Mosebach's The Heresy of Formlessness. I started What Was Before but somehow was not drawn in, though in theory I should like that. Packed away with most of my library just now. Look forward to the next letter.
This looks like a huge project. A lot here to digest.
This line stands out for me, though:
The hardest thing of all to see, Baker writes, is what is really there.
I just bought Centuries by Thomas Traherne. I am at the beginning, but Traherne appears to be saying the same thing. Is there a throughline between the two? I would guess there is.
The Centuries is one of the most beautiful books ever written in English. Enjoy...
That's an interesting question about the 'throughline' from Traherne to Baker. Traherne's meditations weren't published until 1908, I believe, and he remains obscure to this day. I don't know that Baker would have read the meditations. But insofar as there is a very strong and ancient tradition in English letters of almost venerating the countryside and the natural world (often in its humbler dimensions), I'd say Baker was definitely part of that, and consciously so. Often this attitude is bound up with the legendary and mythic and folkloric material, and one of the things I will be showing about The Peregrine is how much imagery from an older and a more mythical England it contains. Religious experience and the natural or God-given world are fused in Baker's book in a way that's very similar to what one finds in medieval literature and in Traherne's visionary writing. I'm waiting on a biography of Baker that I hope will prove educational. In the meantime, maybe I should go back to Traherne.
I was nosing around and came across this quote from Nan Shepherd, "I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.”
A leitmotif of a tradition or simply what happens when human beings more or less alienated from nature begin to engage more deeply with the natural world? Both?
I find it interesting that this English tradition arose in the leading industrialized nation. The first country to be majority urban. In a multitude of very significant ways an extremely disenchanted place for so many. But it really shouldn't surprise. Here in the U.S. we are surely in the same position.
There is, as you well know, much talk of reenchantment these days. A trend with which I am in great sympathy. There is certainly great literary richness in this. Much of it, perhaps, still to be recovered and made available to non-scholars.
Not all of us are going to be able devote great amounts of time to being in the unspoiled wilderness (if much there still be). Nonetheless, I wonder how one can use the literary tradition as a means of actual transformation. A transformation, not only of how we see, but what we are and how we can relate and be and even identify with the world, natural and otherwise, in a deeper way.
I look forward to what you have to offer here.
Thanks for reminding me of Nan Shepherd's book. I first learned of her and The Living Mountain from reading Robert MacFarlane's incredible book Landmarks. Do you know that one? Might be where I first learned of J A Baker too.
Your comment is encouraging, Jack, and you've stated the nature of my project here very eloquently. Re-enchantment is much talked about because it is so urgent. What I'm attempting is, I have to admit, a very tricky balancing act. I'm trying, for the sake of re-enchantment and the actual transformation that requires, to convey the richness of the literary tradition and to some extent other arts. To do that for the non-scholar is hard enough. But I also feel a need in this project to engage the long, beautiful tradition of Western metaphysics: it is not obsolete, it is not dead, but it does need to be revivified, and I don't think that happens except through the arts.
Because of this complex nature of the project, the writing is various, sometimes more technical and sometimes more lyrical or personal and often blended in maybe strange ways -- at least it has to be like this until I hit upon a more unified style. The personal element has to be in there not because I think my own perspective is uniquely interesting, but because as you say if re-enchantment isn't about actually changing ourselves and the way we dwell in this world then it's not worth much. So I have to try to convey just a little of that by reflecting on my own experience, informed as it is by the texts and other artworks I want to write about. Anyway, thanks for reading.
Hi, Jonathan,
A fascinating project . . . I think there is a kind of rhythmic, musical progress involved in epektasis. The apophatic reaches out beyond the image or perhaps touches upon an aniconic root that then gives birth to new images. Fosse's work lacked that sense of continuing adventure -- and there was something in the desire to renounce memory, the artistic work as a nullification, that is too much purely a disincarnation. The questing symbolic joy is missing. Anyway, it will be rewarding to see how you grapple with all this. I love that David Jones book . . . You should read Peguy's essays, too, btw. You'll see in the ms I sent you just how congenial all these thoughts are to my own mode of thinking.
Yeah, Fosse... man, he's an enigma. The thing with him is Eckhart. And the thing with Eckhart is the troubling question: just how much is mystical or speculative thought like his antithetical to the most basic impulse of art? You read Eckhart and wonder sometimes if the man ever really *saw* anything. Before him there's Aquinas saying the senses are so powerful and physical reality so richly real that you don't even have to receive communion orally, you can just gaze upon the consecrated host. And boom, just like that the Catholic Church has adoration, which I think is one of the most beautiful and prayerful affirmations (cataphasis!) of the created order of being. Eckhart is like the polar opposite of that sensibility. But I am fascinated by the Mass in the last volume of Septology, and when I write on the novel, using Smith's book, that's a moment I'll focus on.
I love the idea of epektasis as musical. That's perfect. Do you know if that analogy is to be found in the literature anywhere? But you know what else that reminds me of is Tolkien's story "Leaf by Niggle," where the analogy in a similar context (I doubt JRRT knew of Nyssa) is to painting. But my own sensibility and training is in music, and sadly very much not in the visual arts, so I get the analogy to music in a deep way. As a penance for my sins and to improve myself as a human being, I'm reading Navid Kermani's Wonder Beyond Belief right now, which is about Christian visual art from a very cultured Muslim (German-Iranian) perspective. Kermani is brilliant. You would love his philosophical book God Is Beautiful, if you don't know it already. He's good friends with German Catholic novelist Martin Mosebach, who appears in Wonder as "my Catholic friend," a recurring tag that makes the volume of essays feel like the sort of goofy/genius modern European novel (or like Murnane) that I love. Kermani can write in the digressive, meandering yet pellucid prose that somehow no one these days can pull off in English -- David Bentley Hart definitely cannot, though he thinks he can: actually Murnane is the one name among anglosphere writers who I think does it. Anyway I recommend Kermani for a totally different angle on this question of the iconic or aniconic.
And now I must be off to write the next letter
I haven't seen the musical analogy to epektasis in the literature. It came out of my own synthetic reading and conversations with you, actually. Adoration is a key form of prayer. I think it tells us a lot more than folks imagine -- or rather, it may tell us something about imagination . . . but I'm going to leave that as a tease. I believe D C Schindler has talked about Kermani, but I haven't read any of that work, so now I'm putting it on the list. I liked Mosebach's The Heresy of Formlessness. I started What Was Before but somehow was not drawn in, though in theory I should like that. Packed away with most of my library just now. Look forward to the next letter.