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!
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!
Jonathan, I am drinking in your words and thoughts. Thank you so much for sharing them.