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.
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!
Thank you, Christina, and thank you for supporting my novel. I hope you enjoy it! I appreciate as well the question you asked at the Zoom reading--hope I'm remembering it right--about Christianity and enchantment. It's difficult to address briefly (for me anyway), but the writing I do here, which is part of a book in the making, is all oriented towards that question.
Hi Jonathan, where I was coming from with that, is that very recently I audited a summer course in Tolkien on Zoom from St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry. I felt that what Tolkien said in justification of his writing what he called "faerie stories" was important, that we humans need this sort of thing to enrich our ordinary lives. People will sometimes be more receptive to the truth when they hear it in a story, but that's a different point. Tolkien was a devout Christian. In the class, we explored how he expressed his Faith through his art. In your interview at Slantbooks' Close Reading blog, 7/7/22, I felt you had expressed the idea that there was also some reason to distrust or be careful with "enchantment." That intrigued me. It is interesting the progression of events in our lives sometimes, how I would not have had that insight into Tolkien had I not just taken that class (but I've got to catch up on the class reading!). I'm glad to have discovered you and your writing through Slant Books. Wishing you every good thing as you explore these questions!
Christina, I hate to lob so much of my writing at you all at once, but apropos of Tolkien's Catholic faith and an enchanted cosmos, you might be interested in two articles I wrote for Eclectic Orthodoxy about a year and a half ago. You can read the first one here with a link to the second one at the end: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/desiring-dragons/.
In the interview you mention (where I was working with a strict word count!), I brought up the dark side of enchantment that is evident in the old prayer to the Archangel Michael that is still used in some Catholic parishes. Tolkien speaks about the realm of Faërie as perilous as well. The idea here is not that enchantment as a whole is bad, only that that whole must include a dark side. Reality has the structure and quality of a quest, which means danger, risk and reward.
And then somewhat but not completely separate from that issue is the two-fold nature of fantasy, broadly understood. I think you'll see my novel can be read as the narrator's meditation upon--even his attempt to grapple perilously with--that double nature of fantasy, its false lures and its true light. I won't go on about it now, except to say that the history of the word is complex but does trace a clear arc which may be worth pondering. At first, "fantasy" was a Greek word used by the first Christian ascetics to denote diabolical hallucination. There was nothing good about it. A few centuries later Scotus Eriugena, a philosopher dear to me (his work enjoys a cameo in the novel), contrasted fantasy with theophany, which has the same root in the Greek word that means both to *merely* appear or seem, and to shine or show forth. Fantasy was still bad but by being associated with theophany it was on its way to redemption. And then finally in Dante, half a millenium after that, we have the invention of "high" fantasy, that is, fantasy that is not bad at all but a vision of the divine more direct even than the theophany Eriugena wrote about. By now, fantasy has an almost totally positive or at least pleasurable connotation, though I think we are perhaps beginning to understand its dark side again.
Anyway, I am very interested in this dialectic or mutual interdependence of the dark and light or good and bad aspects of enchantment and fantasy. There is another rather different but still related version of all this available in Taoist thought and practice, but more on that perhaps in another post...
Thank you, Jonathan! I'm truly interested in this topic. I'll be glad to read those articles you wrote for Eclectic Orthodoxy. I'll have more time in about two weeks for further discussion--but you may be into your teaching then. At any rate, I look forward to talking again--hopefully in the not-so-distant future.
Oh, and thanks for mentioning that summer Zoom course. I didn't know about that institution or that it offers such things. Sounds great, maybe a little like Signum University -- do you know about that school? There is clearly very widespread and growing interest, among Christians and others, in mythopoetic literature and the role it plays in re-enchantment.
This I did not know! And I had not heard of Signum University. I wasn't sure if it was okay to post links. I hope St. Bernard's will offer the Tolkien course again for free audit next summer. The teacher was wonderful. Here's the best link I have for it, for now. https://www.stbernards.edu/free-audit-opportunity. And I see on Facebook that Hillsdale College is offering a course on Dante. "free forty day study group taught by Prof. Stephen Smith." https://online.hillsdale.edu/study-group/dantes-divine-comedy.
I would love, love, love, to stay and talk about all this, right now, but deadlines loom. If you'd permit me to say something which might seem to be veering off-topic, but maybe this will be of some interest, for in our brief "acquaintance," I see you as a person with far-ranging interests.
Part of my interest in this subject is my own fiction writing, and part of it is in looking back to times and places in history when "law" (more broadly defined than it often is today) and poetry were more closely connected, something I was led to in researching "The Merchant of Venice" in terms of Francis Bacon, law, and Shakespeare. When judges were bards in Ireland, say, or in the twelfth century legal renaissance in Italy when jurists (legal scholars, teachers of law) like Placentinus wrote satire and personified Justicia as a goddess of justice.
There's a recent book on these 12th century jurists that tells their biographies in a very readable style, a collection by various writers, edited by Orazio Condorelli and Rafael Domingo, "Law and the Christian Tradition in Italy: The Legacy of the Great Jurists" (Routledge, 2022). In this same vein, since Dante was mentioned .... an Italian professor of canon law, Andrea Padovani, has written a book, in Italian, "L'insegnamento del diritto a Bologna nell'età di Dante" (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2021, "The Teaching of Law in Bologna in the Age of Dante"). I need to learn to read Italian!
All this might seem slightly tangential, forgive me; but it's looking at the roots of how we got to where we are today, and the great divide between fact and fantasy, I think. So maybe it's not too far afield. There are so many interesting topics to explore! How much might Tolkien have been influenced by Dante? I do not know. But I do know I'm looking forward to reading your book at the earliest possible opportunity!
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!
Thank you, Christina, and thank you for supporting my novel. I hope you enjoy it! I appreciate as well the question you asked at the Zoom reading--hope I'm remembering it right--about Christianity and enchantment. It's difficult to address briefly (for me anyway), but the writing I do here, which is part of a book in the making, is all oriented towards that question.
Hi Jonathan, where I was coming from with that, is that very recently I audited a summer course in Tolkien on Zoom from St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry. I felt that what Tolkien said in justification of his writing what he called "faerie stories" was important, that we humans need this sort of thing to enrich our ordinary lives. People will sometimes be more receptive to the truth when they hear it in a story, but that's a different point. Tolkien was a devout Christian. In the class, we explored how he expressed his Faith through his art. In your interview at Slantbooks' Close Reading blog, 7/7/22, I felt you had expressed the idea that there was also some reason to distrust or be careful with "enchantment." That intrigued me. It is interesting the progression of events in our lives sometimes, how I would not have had that insight into Tolkien had I not just taken that class (but I've got to catch up on the class reading!). I'm glad to have discovered you and your writing through Slant Books. Wishing you every good thing as you explore these questions!
Christina, I hate to lob so much of my writing at you all at once, but apropos of Tolkien's Catholic faith and an enchanted cosmos, you might be interested in two articles I wrote for Eclectic Orthodoxy about a year and a half ago. You can read the first one here with a link to the second one at the end: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/desiring-dragons/.
In the interview you mention (where I was working with a strict word count!), I brought up the dark side of enchantment that is evident in the old prayer to the Archangel Michael that is still used in some Catholic parishes. Tolkien speaks about the realm of Faërie as perilous as well. The idea here is not that enchantment as a whole is bad, only that that whole must include a dark side. Reality has the structure and quality of a quest, which means danger, risk and reward.
And then somewhat but not completely separate from that issue is the two-fold nature of fantasy, broadly understood. I think you'll see my novel can be read as the narrator's meditation upon--even his attempt to grapple perilously with--that double nature of fantasy, its false lures and its true light. I won't go on about it now, except to say that the history of the word is complex but does trace a clear arc which may be worth pondering. At first, "fantasy" was a Greek word used by the first Christian ascetics to denote diabolical hallucination. There was nothing good about it. A few centuries later Scotus Eriugena, a philosopher dear to me (his work enjoys a cameo in the novel), contrasted fantasy with theophany, which has the same root in the Greek word that means both to *merely* appear or seem, and to shine or show forth. Fantasy was still bad but by being associated with theophany it was on its way to redemption. And then finally in Dante, half a millenium after that, we have the invention of "high" fantasy, that is, fantasy that is not bad at all but a vision of the divine more direct even than the theophany Eriugena wrote about. By now, fantasy has an almost totally positive or at least pleasurable connotation, though I think we are perhaps beginning to understand its dark side again.
Anyway, I am very interested in this dialectic or mutual interdependence of the dark and light or good and bad aspects of enchantment and fantasy. There is another rather different but still related version of all this available in Taoist thought and practice, but more on that perhaps in another post...
Thank you, Jonathan! I'm truly interested in this topic. I'll be glad to read those articles you wrote for Eclectic Orthodoxy. I'll have more time in about two weeks for further discussion--but you may be into your teaching then. At any rate, I look forward to talking again--hopefully in the not-so-distant future.
Oh, and thanks for mentioning that summer Zoom course. I didn't know about that institution or that it offers such things. Sounds great, maybe a little like Signum University -- do you know about that school? There is clearly very widespread and growing interest, among Christians and others, in mythopoetic literature and the role it plays in re-enchantment.
This I did not know! And I had not heard of Signum University. I wasn't sure if it was okay to post links. I hope St. Bernard's will offer the Tolkien course again for free audit next summer. The teacher was wonderful. Here's the best link I have for it, for now. https://www.stbernards.edu/free-audit-opportunity. And I see on Facebook that Hillsdale College is offering a course on Dante. "free forty day study group taught by Prof. Stephen Smith." https://online.hillsdale.edu/study-group/dantes-divine-comedy.
I would love, love, love, to stay and talk about all this, right now, but deadlines loom. If you'd permit me to say something which might seem to be veering off-topic, but maybe this will be of some interest, for in our brief "acquaintance," I see you as a person with far-ranging interests.
Part of my interest in this subject is my own fiction writing, and part of it is in looking back to times and places in history when "law" (more broadly defined than it often is today) and poetry were more closely connected, something I was led to in researching "The Merchant of Venice" in terms of Francis Bacon, law, and Shakespeare. When judges were bards in Ireland, say, or in the twelfth century legal renaissance in Italy when jurists (legal scholars, teachers of law) like Placentinus wrote satire and personified Justicia as a goddess of justice.
There's a recent book on these 12th century jurists that tells their biographies in a very readable style, a collection by various writers, edited by Orazio Condorelli and Rafael Domingo, "Law and the Christian Tradition in Italy: The Legacy of the Great Jurists" (Routledge, 2022). In this same vein, since Dante was mentioned .... an Italian professor of canon law, Andrea Padovani, has written a book, in Italian, "L'insegnamento del diritto a Bologna nell'età di Dante" (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2021, "The Teaching of Law in Bologna in the Age of Dante"). I need to learn to read Italian!
All this might seem slightly tangential, forgive me; but it's looking at the roots of how we got to where we are today, and the great divide between fact and fantasy, I think. So maybe it's not too far afield. There are so many interesting topics to explore! How much might Tolkien have been influenced by Dante? I do not know. But I do know I'm looking forward to reading your book at the earliest possible opportunity!
Jonathan, I am drinking in your words and thoughts. Thank you so much for sharing them.