The new transcendentalism (part 1)
introducing my novel, Absolute Music, and the larger movement it is part of
On the first of July my novel Absolute Music was published by Slant Books. It was precisely four years, eight months, and two weeks from the day I wrote the first sentence of the first draft. The novel was accepted for publication about two years and three months before it was published. Considering that a pandemic intervened in that time, and my publisher went from being an imprint to its own independent press, that’s not too bad for contemporary publishing—and especially for a small independent press.
When I began writing Absolute Music I had no real idea what I was doing, beyond imitating the writing of Gerald Murnane, which I had just discovered and written on for my MFA thesis. I was a newly converted Catholic, a new father, and a new resident of Michigan. Now, I am going to have to explain my book to various groups of people, and I do not feel and think the same way about many things as I felt and thought when I was first writing the book, or when I was submitting it for publication, or even when after that I was revising it. One of the odd things about me is that, as creative authors go, I am rather scholarly and intellectual, so it’s easy for me to analyze my own book. But such analysis is not very useful, and it is very boring for most people—including for me.
And yet I do wish to explain myself, for I am no Hamann, writing to be misunderstood. I wrote in my latest post at Slant’s blog about Gerald Murnane—Actually, no, I didn’t write about him. I paid him the highest homage I know, by imitating him. If I pulled it off (not sure I did), then the sentences of that post ought to seem elegant, pellucid and correct, yet lead you to wonder at the end what in fact I’ve been writing about and to ponder many strange questions. You may even have the eerie and astonishing feeling—or just a glimpse or trace of the feeling—that reality is very much richer and more layered and mysterious than we normally feel it to be. That, at least, is what reading Murnane did for me.
Gerald Murnane is a key figure in a somewhat new, somewhat archaic mode of writing in which I hope my novel, and every book I will go on to publish, participates. The time of the Death of God, the flattening of reality, the reduction of reality and life to materialism and scientism and psychologism which has lain upon Western culture like a pall these past centuries—that is at an end. Slowly the sense of the sacred and transcendent is returning. Not all perceptions of the transcendent are equally valid, and not all cultural expressions of those perceptions are equally good: not now, not before, and not in the future. Nevertheless, as Horace said (and Tom Waits sang): You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come running back again. We are beginning to recall the full amplitude of Nature after a time of indefensible ignorance.
Just as I tried to honor Murnane by imitating him, and on a much larger scale by writing my own novel not so much imitating him as influenced by his work, so I’d like now to introduce or comment upon my own work by telling a brief series of stories. I will tell three, all of recent occurrence. In the early Welsh literature you have these wonderful groups called Triads. This is deep-down stuff, going back to sub-Roman Britain and maybe earlier. There’s wonderful material to read about in the Triads, figures like Arthur, to be sure, but also the Three Great Cows of Britain, or the Three Catastrophic Axe-Strokes of Britain, and so on (I’m translating from memory, don’t have my reference materials with me at the moment, so forgive if you happen to have the Welsh Triads at hand as you’re reading this… at least some small portion of my ideal readership probably would). Anyway, today I post the first part of this triad that will be concerned in all three parts with… wood (thus the image heading this letter), and forests—and the spirits (and one great spirit) that imbues them.
A scholar and writer I mentioned in a previous letter, Abigail Favale, was kind enough to endorse my novel. I’ll be writing on here soon about her new book, The Genesis of Gender (which is superb), because at least one fantasist I intend to look at here, the very odd and sadly neglected E R Eddison, built his philosophy on what—if he had been a Christian or a Jew—he might have called the nuptial nature of reality. That is to say that for him, there is a generative, dynamic, cosmic masculine and feminine, much as you find in Kabbalah and in the Mariology and Sophiology of the older, mystery-focused Christian traditions.
Not that those traditions have a corner on cosmic sexuality or Eros. In fact I think Eddison points to a later fantasist, the not at all neglected Robert Jordan, insofar as Jordan (who was, let it be said, a devout Episcopalian who received communion multiple times a week) also built his fantasy around a cosmic masculine and feminine. Both Eddison and Jordan strike me as having been influenced (albeit through very different channels and circumstances) by Buddhist and Taoist thought, and that intrigues me. For Taoism—particularly as I’ve studied it in the embodied art of Supreme Ultimate Boxing, otherwise known as tai chi (supreme ultimate boxing is the literal meaning of taiji quan, the modern way of transliterating the name of the martial art in question, and the first part is a metaphysical term, not hyperbole)—well, Taoism and tai chi have kept me a religious man during a time in my life when I might otherwise have thrown in the towel on religion and metaphysics.
Fantasy as a literary genre and mode, and a rightly conceived cosmic Eros, are certainly themes of my novel. They are also, I think, crucial in the new transcendentalism—the new awareness of and yearning for the sacred—that is on the rise in our much troubled, much confused Western culture. That is why I think Favale’s book and others like it are so important. If we are to have a sane future (sane meaning both healthy and truthful), then we need to recover, or better yet reimagine, an honest understanding of man and woman. There will be no revitalized religion without that primal pair made newly vital.
But my novel, like the best currents of the new transcendentalism, also thinks about religion very much in terms of the sense of place (or should that be the other way around?). And really this is part of the same idea about human embodiment, for we are always embodied somewhere. In the foundational myth of our culture, that somewhere was a garden. On the other hand, the final destination of redeemed humankind is a city. I will have more to say about this generative and perhaps gendered overlapping of place and sex when I write on the Pearl Poet (that will be my next post at Slant, and the subject of the next letter after this Triad). For now I just want to say that I don’t think we get far enough in thinking about place and the sacred—as I am about to do in this Triad—if we are not at the same time thinking, at least subconsciously as it were, about how a cosmic Eros or yin-yang dynamism is involved.
But it’s time I addressed those two mainly wooden objects in the photo above: a now broken cross and a rosary. One I’ve had for eleven years and the other I only acquired last Ash Wednesday. Given some details about the two artifacts which I will divulge, most people would consider they have almost nothing to do with each other, apart from pertaining to the same religion (or, technically, two branches of one religion). I mean to suggest here how they are truly related. But I can do no more than suggest.
I must digress first, however, out of the path of Christianity, and declare that I love that wood is one of the five core elements in traditional Chinese natural philosophy. This seems intuitively right to me, and in missing wood as a primal element of earthly existence, I think we in the West, even anciently when we thought in such elemental terms, show one of our cardinal and original errors.
In qi gong, which is a gentler mode of exercise related to tai chi, we often go through something called the five elements exercise: fire, water, wood, metal, earth—in that sequence. Wood is my favorite part of the exercise, because it seems to me the subtlest but also the most effective and most resilient. (They are all important, though, each in its right place or moment.) Fire is everything hard and fast, all at once. Water is the paradoxical power of flowing, falling, letting yourself be moved. Metal is very firm and solid and strong, but also brittle, inflexible. Earth is strong in the sense of being rooted, but it is static. Wood has strength both to move and to resist or adapt to force exerted against it. When you do a “wood” push you probe, listening with the hands, not just violently launching somebody away from you, as in a “fire” push. If you’ve ever seen someone send someone else sprawling across the floor without seeming to expend much effort, that’s a “wood” move. Think of a tree growing up through stone or concrete. There is incredible power in wood, but it is a power that can only manifest through careful, attentive patience.
So then, eleven years ago I was living in Chicago, and my best friend and I decided we wanted to cycle around Lake Michigan. It was a journey of over a thousand miles, which we ended up doing in ten days: we left on the eve of the Feast of Saint John the Baptist (June 24th), traditionally the great Christian midsummer holiday, and today, July 3rd, is the eleventh anniversary of our triumphal return as fireworks were going up all over Chicagoland. It was one of the most beautiful and enjoyable tours I’ve ever done, even if I did nearly freeze to death in my tent a couple of nights around Traverse City and Petoskey. But nothing else bad happened to us, not so much as a flat tire. I attributed this good fortune to the small wooden cross in the header image of this letter. (I would probably have preferred a rosary, if only for the feminine companionship of the piece—rosaries are aspects of Marian devotion—but I had nothing to do with rosaries back then.)
The night before we left Chicago, my friend and I bought and drank a bottle of wine from Devon Market in the far north side of town, where I then lived. Devon Market was a wonderful place, owned by a man from Bosnia. The employees were a mixture of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and from the Balkans. The symphony of languages you typically overheard while shopping there was delightful. It was thanks to Devon Market that I discovered my love of kashkeval cheese and wine made from vranac grapes. The wine my friend and I bought the night before our tour was made by monks in Moldova. It was sweet and high in alcohol—more like a port—which we didn’t realize when we bought it because no language we could read appeared on the label. Affixed to the neck of the bottle was the cross, intact of course.
You probably can’t make it out in the photo, but the writing on the cross is in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is the alphabet used by the slavic-speaking Orthodox peoples. I don’t really know any of those languages beyond a few words, but I can read the alphabet, so between the power of phonetics and the internet, I was able to sound out spasi i sokhrani and learn that this was a traditional prayer meaning save and protect. I wasn’t a religious person back then; nevertheless, I looped the cross around my handlebars, and there it remained not only for that tour around Lake Michigan, but for every ride I took over the subsequent eleven years. It’s just a cheap little thing, made of I guess a kind of pine (it’s very light) and I think hand-carved, because it was obviously asymmetrical when it was intact. But this dinky little charm became precious to me, and I was rather saddened when I returned from Washington Island, Wisconsin the other week (more on that location in the second part of this Triad) to discover that at some point between my last ride on the island and unpacking my bags at home, the piece broke—not in an epic crash, not stolen or deliberately mutilated… I think it fell on the floor of my home office and I rolled over it in my chair. In the very clumsy desultoriness of the incident there’s a fitting symbolism, I think: Do we not so often fall into sin, err from the great Tao, not out of malice but stupid obliviousness?
I placed my once-cruciform charm by the rosary because the rosary’s beads are wood, but also because of its medallion, which commemorates the alleged Marian apparition (it has not been officially confirmed by the Roman Church) in the town of Medjugorje in Bosnia—Bosnia where the owner of Devon Market (at least when I was a regular customer) hails from. And here, because tomorrow is the two hundred and forty-sixth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I will make yet another digression to note that the owner of Devon Market was, I’m pretty sure, a Croat or in other words a Catholic Bosnian. There was a very large Croatian Catholic church right up the road from the Devon Market. The vranac wine I mentioned, and which I might singlehandedly have kept in stock at that store, was from Croatia.
If you know anything about the history of southeastern Europe, you know how it has suffered for a thousand years from the Great Schism of the Church, between the Orthodox and Catholics. It has been torn for longer even than that between the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean world and the Latin-speaking west. And when the Ottoman Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire, that only added a new and worse layer of division and strife. Yugoslavia, comprised of Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims, split apart violently in the 1990s. I remember refugee kids from Bosnia—Catholics—arriving in my high school in the sheltered world of suburban Cincinnati.
And yet in the Devon Market, only about a decade after the fighting in the former Yugoslavia ended, there were products from all parts of the former Yugoslavia, and from both the Catholic and the Orthodox regions of southeastern Europe: the vranac I kept on the table and the Moldovan wine we bought specially as a “stirrup cup” for our ride around the Lake, and from which I got my crucial charm. However one may feel about America these days as a political experiment, that coincidence of peoples and goods in Devon Market strikes me as emblematic of our better aspirations, and the reason a thing like the Declaration of Independence might be celebrated as a testament to the natural law and its justice.
But the coincidence of the rosary, with its medallion of Our Lady of Medjugorje, and my cross from a Moldovan monastery, is the kind of falling together (that is what coincidence means) that I want to draw attention to now as exemplary of the new transcendentalism, at least as it is manifest in certain works of fiction. This geo-spiritual and objective or artifactual coincidence is exactly how I put my novel together. It’s how Gerald Murnane puts his novels together. If I were writing a work of fiction rather than a substack letter, I would devise a means of linking the rosary and the broken wooden cross within the timeline of the fiction (rather than just arbitrarily taking a photo of them together): that is, I would link the objects in the plot. It is important to remember, though, that plot is superficial, no more than a tool. (This is why you should never care about “spoilers” and why there are few things more tedious than someone rehearsing the plot of a movie or story to you—it’s like listening to a cobbler explain exactly how he uses an awl.) The point of the plot is ecological, if you like. It is there to show how the objective, physical, embodied world is endlessly interconnected, but in ways we usually can’t perceive. D H Lawrence a hundred years ago said the point of the novel is to show interconnection, and in the future novels would do a better job of this. I think we are finally proving him right.
Another way of putting all this is to say that one of the solemn but also joyful tasks of the novel of the new transcendentalism is to disprove and debunk the notion of coincidence as meaningless chance. Only an age that has truly gotten the most fundamental things backwards and upside down could mistake the connections between things for randomness and meaninglessness, rather than as signs of an all but invisible order given for the good and the care of all things.
There is in any case great power in bringing together imagery—again, that is to say the embodied world—as in nuclear fusion. The revelatory power of association and seeming coincidence has a thrilling and liberating effect on the intuition. Or it might be better to say that this ancient method of literary art (and arguably the other arts as well) works on what Saint John Henry Newman called the illative sense: things juxtapose and converge until, without losing sight of the distinct things themselves, one perceives the pattern or flowing more than the individual faces of reality: one perceives the great Tao.
Maybe the power of that perception, which usually works cumulatively, building gradually and growing in unpredictable ways, is not so like the violence of atomic weaponry and more like the power of wood I referred to earlier. A subtle power like the “wood” moves of tai chi and qi gong, a power that finds its way out and up through cracks and crevasses, in the weak spots of what appears overbearing and indomitable. This power of relating things, of revealing relation (this is essentially the power of metaphor and of figurative language more broadly), at last—if you let it—replaces the idea of coincidence with the far more awesome ideas of providence and grace, without which we do not live in a cosmos.
Jonathan,
I look forward to reading and commenting upon Absolute Music. I think you are right about the new transcendentalism. You and I both tangibly participate in it. I owe you a debt of gratitude for many things, not least for introducing me to Murnane and R. A. Lafferty. There is much in this richly evocative piece worthy of further elucidation. I offer here only a few reflections. I am drawn to the observation of Horace and Tom Waits: “You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come running back again.” It seems to me that our contemporary cultural moment just now is yet highly hostile to Nature. Scientism, the fruit of Bacon’s Novum Organum, proposed what Heidegger came to see as an objectified, dead resource, the standing reserve of modern Western technocracy. Already, this is nature as ideological construct hiding behind the ever growing prestige of quantified data and pragmatic success in medicine and war (those dubious twins), manifest in the proliferation of consumer products following the criteria of a utilitarian mindset. However, we have gone beyond that. Even as the West beckons to a global economy of mutual gain and international prosperity, naively duped by its own propaganda into ignoring the bad actors that play by different rules (I am thinking mainly of China), the more insidious threat is corruption from within. As William Desmond points out, once you begin to understand Creation as surd Nature, an accident of stochastic variation lacking inherent meaning, every attempt to project or instill goodness into the nihilist abyss remains futile, no matter how celebrated by popular culture, institutions of education, corporate manipulation, and the coercive mob of social media. And so we have the transformation of the rainbow from a sign in Genesis of God’s divine care for plurivocal Creation to the symbolic assertion of an ethics of perversity whereby the repudiation of natural forms is valorized as revolutionary freedom resisting the dim certitudes of the non-existent Supreme Fascist worshipped by deplorables.
The poets, of course, play the long game. Or rather, what separates the poet from the sophist is that the latter invokes technical virtuosity with language and art to further a political agenda of knowledge as power. But as Plato’s Socrates understands, the genuine poet announces the pellucid insight of divine madness, the gift of a Good that defeats our attempts at possession and the arrogance of our claims to bestow meaning apart from divine largesse. What I see in the little histories that contribute to the poesis of your art is reflective appropriation of the gift rooted in receptivity and the middle voice. I talk about this in my own novelistic essays, but it’s plain that your own tactile knowing involves listening to the communication of being inherent in something as seemingly insignificant as the grace in a tiny cross of pine adorning a bottle of port-like potable from Bosnia. And the relation of that history suggests the way private narrative is transmuted into the space of community by personal art. What I mean by middle voice is both the music of the Muse, but also the result of the remarked porosity to being that allows creative openness to the meaning that is discovered rather than imposed. Murnane is good on this, the way being winks at one sufficiently attentive to the kind mystery in creatures and artifacts.
Finally, I am pleased by your appreciation for Lawrence. I have a feeling that Lawrence, like the now roundly despised Kipling, is often dismissed by the Enlightened nowadays. He is an astute critic, like Woolf, capable of sharp remarks (and therefore interesting), a writer of sensitive, lyric poetry, and someone whose almost Wagnerian quest to capture the power of erotic sympathy between the sexes can now be seen not as the moralists thought, as precursor to modern hedonist passions, but as defense of fundamental Nature opposed to the machining impulse that reduces everything to the fungible, the tawdry, that which can be comprehended by an economy of commercial scarcity. The art of the new transcendentalists must recall the gift of the aniconic, the source in the darkness of plenitude, that rich Silence from which language arrives. (Max Picard tried to keep this awareness alive for the poets). And I think this means that creativity is ultimately a proactive “fore-given,” that we must speak the divine names that summon the creature to existence from the nothing, proposing the fictive as healing art that resists the crime-ridden world of mundane facts with the child-like kingdom of God’s truth. The art of the genuine poet is not sophistic manipulation or license to nihilistic violence (what is indulged as freedom of expression in that manner erupts elsewhere as psychosis and murder.) On the contrary, it is an eschatological anamnesis that urges care and compassion in the hope of engendering attentive listening to the logoi of small things.
Hi Jonathan,
I particularly liked this sentence, "Another way of putting all this is to say that one of the solemn but also joyful tasks of the novel of the new transcendentalism is to disprove and debunk the notion of coincidence as meaningless chance" and your last sentence. I have your book and am looking forward to reading it soon!