Insightful, as always Jonathan. Tolkien as a founding poet properly sees that his vatic enterprise is far more than the characteristic reception of his work as escapist fantasy or neo-archaic saga that simply rejects the modern postulates. The ambiguity of the enchanted is an important consideration. I am reminded of Stephen R. L. Clark's assertion that Descartes' prosody and method was a disenchanting spell that ultimately allowed the equivocal powers of faerie to act covertly whilst a flat, mechanist myth induced widespread cultural blindness to nature's complex reality.
As a creative type rather than particularly literary, historical, or philosophical, you get me wanting to write speculative fiction dramatizing this idea, say, several future civilizations in the bud, each one founded upon the discovery of just one ancient author's manuscripts. Maybe the Tolkienists are horrified to meet up with Lovecraftians, Hubbardites, and ... the list could go on and on. It could be a travelogue in the vein of Swift, really.
Yes, even the unserious is covertly dangerous, and much of what appears a lark is more foreboding. I remember decades ago when one of the "superstations" was showing the Hayley Mills comedy, The Trouble with Angels, which is a relatively anodyne film about a mischievous youth in a girl's school run by nuns. The unexpected turn is when the heroine is surprised by the lure of vocation. It's sweet and strangely powerful, but the marketing wing of the station had intros to the movie with zany, psychedelic graphics proclaiming the entire work "Weird." Fast forward thirty years and a satanic ritual on network tv is greeted by a CBS tweet that "we are ready to worship." (They have since erased the enthusiastic servility to the diabolic.) The power of words and image, the nature of fiction as enacting strategic moves of spiritual kingdoms, none of that is conceived by folks who are basically an incoherent fusion of positivist nihilism and ideological ersatz religions with their own tests for orthodoxy and intolerance for the heretical. But you know if you say these things, one will be quickly dismissed as a fundamentalist who is opposed to Halloween and Harry Potter. The sage wisdom needed to discern entirely escapes contemporary mores.
Jonathan, I've been following this conversation with interest & delight: thank you for it. I am on the alert everywhere for signs of reemerging transcendence in literature right now & am eagerly awaiting the connections you'll make next!
Insightful, as always Jonathan. Tolkien as a founding poet properly sees that his vatic enterprise is far more than the characteristic reception of his work as escapist fantasy or neo-archaic saga that simply rejects the modern postulates. The ambiguity of the enchanted is an important consideration. I am reminded of Stephen R. L. Clark's assertion that Descartes' prosody and method was a disenchanting spell that ultimately allowed the equivocal powers of faerie to act covertly whilst a flat, mechanist myth induced widespread cultural blindness to nature's complex reality.
As a creative type rather than particularly literary, historical, or philosophical, you get me wanting to write speculative fiction dramatizing this idea, say, several future civilizations in the bud, each one founded upon the discovery of just one ancient author's manuscripts. Maybe the Tolkienists are horrified to meet up with Lovecraftians, Hubbardites, and ... the list could go on and on. It could be a travelogue in the vein of Swift, really.
Yes, even the unserious is covertly dangerous, and much of what appears a lark is more foreboding. I remember decades ago when one of the "superstations" was showing the Hayley Mills comedy, The Trouble with Angels, which is a relatively anodyne film about a mischievous youth in a girl's school run by nuns. The unexpected turn is when the heroine is surprised by the lure of vocation. It's sweet and strangely powerful, but the marketing wing of the station had intros to the movie with zany, psychedelic graphics proclaiming the entire work "Weird." Fast forward thirty years and a satanic ritual on network tv is greeted by a CBS tweet that "we are ready to worship." (They have since erased the enthusiastic servility to the diabolic.) The power of words and image, the nature of fiction as enacting strategic moves of spiritual kingdoms, none of that is conceived by folks who are basically an incoherent fusion of positivist nihilism and ideological ersatz religions with their own tests for orthodoxy and intolerance for the heretical. But you know if you say these things, one will be quickly dismissed as a fundamentalist who is opposed to Halloween and Harry Potter. The sage wisdom needed to discern entirely escapes contemporary mores.
Jonathan, I've been following this conversation with interest & delight: thank you for it. I am on the alert everywhere for signs of reemerging transcendence in literature right now & am eagerly awaiting the connections you'll make next!