On What I Know and Who I Am (Becoming)

(image source)

In Night Operation, Barfield offers advice for those suffering from "library-terror," that feeling that there is endless recorded knowledge in the world but nowhere to begin to understand it. Barfield's remedy is "to keep following always one particular thread of inquiry"—presumably with an inkling that eventually anything will lead to everything or at least to everything you need to know. Almost as long as I can remember, I have followed a thread. I have been in pursuit of something, something I knew not what and I have come to believe that this pursuit is coeternal with my being. The experience of receiving what I needed to receive when I needed to receive it, most commonly through reading but also through hearing or even mishearing, from thinking, being told or through what seemed an unbidden insight, is an experience that I cannot deny. It is not correct to conclude from this that my mind did not grow through direct experience. Alert receptivity (when we manage to achieve it) is the definition of direct experience, whether of art, nature, intellect, love or heartbreak.

One could argue, however, that I cannot step outside of my life to evaluate how it, how I would be now had I learned one thing when, in fact, I learned another. It is possible to conclude that, of course, everything seems as it should be because that is how it is. I know and love my life as it is. Had it been different, I would have loved that life, too. To that, I answer that my life is an unfolding, and just as it is possible to discipline ourselves to see becoming, to see not a leaf but leaf-ing, not natura naturata but natura naturans, I can learn to see—even to quite literally see—the thread of my life as the thread of my Self. For his part, Barfield looked forward to a time when ""a man is no longer regarded as a lunatic who divines that the things which happen to a person, and the order in which they happen, may be as much a part of him as his physical organism."

I am not an object acted upon, am not distinct from what happens to me, what occurs "in" my life. I am what I seek. I am what I learn—the serendipities and the disappointments. I am what I am coming to know and this is much larger than the appearance of myself as phenomenon. In What Coleridge Thought, Barfield explains that Coleridge, often accused of plagiarism, did not generally "borrow" the ideas of others but "adopted" them. The difference is that, in borrowing, one merely apes the insights of another. In adopting, the ideas come alive in one's self. One mind rises up to meet another in Mind. It is possible to adopt only what had been on the tip of one's own tongue to begin with. From this understanding, it is a short step to realize Coleridge's imperative that we should recognize our own creative activity as the creative activity of the Universe. Just as it is possible, as Steiner did, to think of a butterfly as "a flower liberated from its stalk," it is possible to experience Life, the same Life that animates everything else, transmuting itself, displaying itself, reveling in itself through me—through each and all of us all the time.

Many, many blessings for the New Year!

"The Poetic Narrative of Our Time" by David Whyte

Excerpt:  "It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. This is poetry's province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life."

From Night Operation

(image source)

Owen Barfield's novella, Night Operation, can be described as his "Allegory of the Cave." Through its characters, he explores what it means to see, to think and to create as well as the difficulty, when we are true to ourselves, of distinguishing between the three activities:


"There are two kinds of seeing.  There is just seeing—and there is being shown."

___

Words were uttered by the Gods at the start. Very well—but they have since been spoken by men, and most of them spoken very much amiss; and the things have followed them. Men call themselves 'creative' and fill a Library with books and pictures, and the world with things they have made. But in the end, for good or ill, they can only do what the gods are doing in them. It might have been otherwise if they had ever been fully born. As, who knows, perhaps they nearly were.

___

We shall do whatever we find to do, whether it's big or little, not because we think it's likely to succeed but because we are bound to. I don't mean compelled. I mean bound by the shape of what we've seen and by the fact that we've seen it. We shall know the direction in which our faces are turned, because there is only one way in which a face that has looked on that could be turned. And that's all we need to know. Prospects and hope are bunk. The only reality is resolution.

We also find the three protagonists experimenting with exact sensorial imagination as it is described in this passage:

Nevertheless, as Peet pointed out, amid all variety that same particular blossom with its own particular shape could be seen recurring over and over again. He made them concentrate on one of these to begin with, until they could recognize it when they saw it in another place. 'We haven't got a name for it,' he said, 'but that doesn't matter. Perhaps it is all the better. The point is we must become able to say to ourselves, 'This is this flower and not another.' After which they went on and did the same with a few more.

"Nature Fulfilled by Grace"

One of the readings from yesterday's Charles Williams' New Christian Year was this two-line gem from Coventry Patmore:

"I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."  Not because they are so unlike your mortal experiences, but because they are so like.

--from The Rod, the Root, and the Flower.

This led me to explore the full-text of The Rod, the Root and the Flower where, so far, I have been delighted to discover that there are more gems where that came from.  The first passage is from the introduction:

A systematic Philosopher, should he condescend to read 

the following notes, will probably 
say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed 
the stars for the first time, " How untidy the 
sky is ! " But who does not know that all philosophies 

have had to pay, for the blessing of 
system, by the curse of barrenness? Sensible 
people will feel shocked at my "paradoxes," 
which, however, are not mine, and are, as Coleridge says, 

the only mode in which realities 
of a certain order can be approximately expressed.

_____

Lovers put out the candles and draw the 
curtains, when they wish to see the god and the 
goddess; and, in the higher Communion, the 

night of thought is the light of perception. 

_____

Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural, 
but is supernaturally natural. 

_____

Direct teaching cannot go much beyond pointing out 

the conditions of perception, and the direction 

in which it is to be looked for. 

_____

Goethe said that " God is manifested in ultimates";

that is, in facts of human nature of which 
we not only see no explanation, but also see 

that no explanation is possible. 

_____

The most pregnant passages of Scripture, 

of the wise ancients, and of great poets are those 
which seem to you to have no meaning, or an absurd one. 

_____

"Detachment" consists, not in casting aside 
all natural loves and goods, but in the possession 
of a love and a good so great that all others, 
though they may and do acquire increase through 
the presence of the greater love and good, which 
explains and justifies them, seem nothing in comparison. 

 

More from Robert Kelly

(image source)

Theology of Mind

When I say mind, I mean desire. When I say desire, I mean you. When I say you, I mean your skin. When I say your skin, I mean the way in. When I say the way in, I mean the way into the dark. When I say the dark, I mean the place where there is listening. When I say listening, I mean listening to the word. When I say a word, I mean a bone. And when I say bone, I mean the ocean, but when I say ocean I mean a book. And when I say book, I mean the law. When I say law, I mean tethers and fetters. When I say fetters, I mean a knife. When I say knife, I mean wisdom. When I say wisdom, I mean your body. And when I say your body, I mean your mind.


--Robert Kelly

"Hedgehog" by Paul Muldoon

"Science" by Robert Kelly

 (image source)

Science

Science explains nothing
but holds all together as
many things as it can count

science is a basket
not a religion he said
a cat as a big as a cat

the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

--Robert Kelly

Barfield on Art and Science

"It is no longer enough that an occasional artist here and there should see his parcel of truth and speak it out, while the actual direction taken by civilisation continues to be wholly determined by a soi-disant scientific method of knowledge.  Science must itself become an art, and art a science; either they must mingle, or Western civilisation, as we know it, must perish to make room for one that may have spirit enough to learn how to know God's earth as He actually made it."

--Owen Barfield, from "Thinking and Thought" in Romanticism Comes of Age

"This Lime Tree Bower My Prison"

The following poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes me as almost an unconsciously developed manual for Goethe's "exact sensorial imagination," the practice of seeing deeply into nature by, first, observing a natural phenomenon carefully and faithfully, then enlivening and extending the image of the phenomenon retained in the mind.  In his poem, Coleridge at first grieves his inability to follow his friends as they traverse a landscape with which he has become intimately acquainted.  As he travels the landscape in his mind, however, he realizes, not only that Nature is fully present in even the humble bower that he had cursed as his prison, but that the contemplation of the natural is, itself, an expression of Nature's vitality.  With this understanding, he finds himself in the presence of "Love and Beauty" and, in the final line, is able to attribute to one of his wandering friends a sentiment that could well be the motto of those who are awake to the potential of the Ugly-Beautiful: "No sound is dissonant which tells of Life." 

This Lime Tree Bower My Prison

ADDRESSED TO CHARLES LAMB,

OF THE INDIA HOUSE, LONDON

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; -- that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
                                    Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven -- and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
                                            A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight; and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On The Next Big Thing

Although my idea of a video game is still something along the lines of Space Invaders or Pitfall (remember Pitfall?  I made up a whole backstory about that little pixelated guy), I found this gaming article in Slate interesting.  Here's an excerpt:

While gaming feels too much like a boys' club for my liking, the goal of  'trying to make more games that appeal to women' is problematic. The television shows that attain not just ratings but cultural admiration—like Mad Men—aren't usually created with gender targets, but with the goal of telling a story that captures the nuances of human experience. I would guess women like Mad Men just as much as men do, even though the values of the show's characters are overwhelmingly sexist. Similarly, I don't think gaming will broaden its audience by focusing on subject matter so much as execution and intention—the why that Hecker asks developers to consider in his talk.

After reading that, I stumbled on similar sentiments from The Guardian concerning Harry Potter:

As is often the case with cultural phenomena, it seems to have helped that Potter defied the conventional wisdom of the time. A focus group would surely have concluded – as the eight publishers who turned down the original manuscript presumably did – that there was no modern market for stories about a bespectacled wimp at a boarding school. But within a decade he was a billion-dollar brand.

The lesson here seems to be that, like life from the Primordial Stew, culture should be allowed to bubble-up from whatever pool it was born in.  Attempts to manipulate audiences by manufacturing cultural phenomena may succeed but they will not endure.  For me, this is another reminder that real shifts in mass consciousness should be regarded as gifts from the gods.  We can teach ourselves to receive them but we cannot create them.

A Utopian Vision

(image source)

A few weeks ago, I finished Peter Dickinson's children's trilogy The Changes in which the inhabitants of the British Isles are one day without obvious cause overcome with a revulsion for technology. People flee the cities but what follows is not the establishment of an agrarian utopia because, with the people's disdain for machines, comes superstition, suspicion and cruelty. What has stuck with me about the story is its fairness in casting medieval provincialism and contemporary machine-dependence as equally symptomatic of deadened minds. It is unwise to relax too completely into the corporate mind of any era. Our relationships with nature, with each other and with the artifacts of our culture require our vigilance to remain healthy relationships.

Particularly in Heartsease, the second of the three novels, it is clear that some characters have an affinity with animals and some with machines and, while Dickinson seems saddened that it is not common for people to be able to commune with both flesh and blood and metal and gears, he suggests that the feelings are not that different in either case. Almost every few pages into Heartsease and the final novel, The Weathermonger, one encounters a fascinated description of the personality of either a horse or an engine. In The Weathermonger, a young woman who fears technology more because of socialization than internal inclination realizes that the marvelous antique car on which she had come to rely has become to her more like an animal than a lifeless machine. The implication is that the vitality in our relationship with technology depends on us, on how well we make things and how well we care for them, in how we respect the life of the world that we have harnessed to make them go. This caused me to wonder what a society would look like if we all had minds like those of certain medieval Islamic scientists who thought of themselves as midwives when they were mining metals from the earth. How would we live, learn and work? What would our professional lives look like when our idea of knowing something is more like conaîttre (to be familiar with) than savoir (to know as a fact)?

To begin with, I think our first task as children would be to learn to submit to the guidance of love, to find our kindred entities, to commune with that with which we most desire to commune. In this, there would be tremendous power to live the lives of our choosing. More obstacles are overcome by passion than technology. Goethe, for example, was in love enough with plants to travel everywhere he could to see the different conditions under which they grew, to keep endless journals, make endless drawings, to animate endless pictures of vegetable life in his mind.  He was in love enough with rocks and with animals to make the same kinds of efforts on their behalf and go to great trouble and expense to procure specimens because he, being who he was, could not do otherwise.

There is a reason that, even now, people talk about being "moved" by something.  We recognize the power of receptivity.  When we love something enough to surrender ourselves to it (or, to use my new favorite phrase, to see it "for itself" instead of "for ourselves") then its fullest nature opens up in our imaginations and we know just what to do with it, while the thought of doing something to it never occurs.  Kandinsky loved circles and saw them everywhere in nature.  Seurat saw points of light.  Nabokov saw shadows and mirrors.  They only had to grow confident enough in their relationships with these qualities to look as deeply as they could into what was already presenting itself to their minds.  The result was a collaboration, between themselves and their non-human partners, that stretched rather than violated the boundaries of nature.

If, as Rudolf Steiner believed, part of the evolution of a phenomenon is our concept of it—because it comes into being as the phenomenon we know through our knowing it—then our knowledge of a phenomenon is an essential part of the thing itself.  We and the world complete each other while, at the same time, we each have our very own world to bring into being, guided by our own particular love.  In a society that takes this fact as fundamental, doctors would never talk about diseases but would use their imaginations to sense the arc of their patients' whole being and help them to discover what they need to thrive.  Carpenters and mechanics would work with their materials in the way that Michelangelo produced sculpture, chipping away the stone to find the statue already inside of it.  They would love their materials enough to bring them to new life and the objects we "use" every day would be alive to us because of it. They would be our companions. 

Scientists in this society would be like artists whose job it is to help us see their vision of the world.  We would all be artists.  Teachers would exist to help us surrender ourselves to our art but without telling us what to see.  We would understand the world like we understand music.  Without stopping to consider what it means, our only care would be to sing our world for others.  Maybe we could think about our task as human beings as the creation of a kind of universal harmony of all our songs—because it is our job to express, not to explain—or maybe another analogy would be to imagine each of us bringing our own world into being through our own expression so that all of those worlds would come together as distinctive facets of a complicated crystal.  As we advanced in our love, becoming more and more sensitized, more and more at one with our own kind of knowing, we would be able to use our sensitivity to open up more and more to the knowing of others so that our world and The World would just grow and grow forever and ever.

“Life was a cosmic holiday.”

Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass was perfectly visible—either by the light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out from our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and color, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and the macrocosm were at length atoned—at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home—to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me—sense after sense indescribable, because no corresponding word, no likeness or imaginations exist wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed—yet ever expanding, ever making room to receive—was the conscious being where things kept entering by so many open doors! When a little breeze brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which responded their sweet TIN-TINNING**, myself the joy of the sense, and of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean upon which a ground-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new waves; yet the joy was ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.



--George MacDonald, from Lilith: A Romance

"Missing the Point"

From The London Review Blog

Excerpt:  Thus as I walked around the Frieze show in London in October, it was easy to see that everything was all shiny and shallow, and that it was really a show for children with chequebooks, or adolescents with attitude. The work was silly. Maybe it could have been argued that it was all significant, part of a new movement towards something or other, away from abstraction towards a brash figuration, but I have never been able to listen to arguments. One of the artists had made a big ceramic thing and he was wearing girls’ clothes and looked like Little Bo Peep. I liked him.

Art is not a Dream

(image source)

In Wim Wenders' film Until the End of the World, a scientist who hopes to give the blind a way to see inadvertently creates a device that makes it possible to record a person's dreams and play them back at will, just like watching a movie. It does not take long for the characters who have access to this technology to start behaving like the most desperate addicts, uninterested in anything other than viewing their own dreams over and over again. I think that, obsessed as I am with myself, if a device of this kind fell into my hands, I would meet the same fate almost instantly.

A dream is a perfect, personal metaphor, a metaphor that only its creator can truly understand because it is not separate from its creator. A person knows in dreams things about himself that he could articulate in no other way, things that he may never be able to access in any other way, things that he may never even know that he knows. In our dreams, everything has meaning.  Everything is itself and at the same time something else. We are everything in our dreams—the characters, props, landscape and perspective. It is our mind come to life and knowable as our own backyard, more knowable than ever our waking selves may seem to to us to be.

Art is not a dream. Art is wakefulness. If dreams—most dreams, anyway, with the exception of True Dreams which come not from us in the way we usually understand our own being—are produced from and out of our own minds, art (True Art) has no truck with the psyche, or if it does, it is to show us the mind as it is in its nature, not as it appears to itself. Art is not a medium merely for expressing emotion, for highlighting a state of affairs or for teaching any lesson that can be taught in any other way. The artist and her life are incidental even, when it achieves the level of art, in the most unaffected memoir.

Erich Heller in his Art and the Artist's Self teaches us that, when the lens of art is focused on the life of an artist, even her suffering makes sense. What would otherwise seem flawed or broken is able to communicate perfection. Through art, we can experience the most profound sadness without becoming unhappy and the most sincere disgust without becoming cynical. Schopenhauer or Hegel would have us believe that art redeems the world but I believe that, through art, we are redeemed because we no longer wish to stand against the world, to fight against Nature, to see things the way they were not meant to be seen, to become something that we were never meant to be.

James Geary, metaphorically speaking (TEDtalks)

Lewis and Tolkien on Chronological Snobbery

...if we are to use the words childish or infantile as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing; not to those which every sane man would keep if he could and which some are fortunate for keeping.

__________________

If we are resolved to eradicate, without examining them on their merits, all the traits of youth, we might begin with this—with youth's chronological snobbery. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism


Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the "nursery," as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.


--J.R.R. Tolkien, from "On Fairy-Stories"

On “Chronological Snobbery”

(image source)

Recently, in preparation for guests, I spent some time cleaning the house more thoroughly than I normally would. (I am no particular lover of tidiness).  As I sorted through my stacks and piles of neglected objects, I recalled how much more present things seemed to me when I was a child. I remember a mushroom-shaped pin cushion with a heavy gold-plated stem and luscious green velvet top that seemed amazed at its own worthiness to display my mother's pearly-tipped dress pins. Then there was the salt and pepper shaker set—tiny red glass strawberries balanced on a prickly silver vine-- and the venerable, marvelous blue button box. It was my great-grandmother's button box, though it was a cookie tin in actual fact, and it rattled with so many buttons, so various and interesting that I wanted to tip the tin over my head and let the buttons trickle down the back of my neck or tilt the box onto the floor so that I could flex my toes amongst the treasure. Now, when I lose a button, I buy a new shirt. I am much less sentimental about objects—I don't really care what hangs on the Christmas tree and one tea cup is as good as another—but in achieving this grown-up detachment it is possible that I have stunted the growth of my relationship with the life of the world.

I understand now that boxes are for containing things and do not get lonely on the shelf and that my bathroom mirror has nothing to tell me that comes from inside itself and is not merely reflected from the space between it and the opposite wall. The problem is that my childhood intuitions were not wholly or inherently wrong. It was only when I began to think about them that they became a problem. It is not accurate to say that, when I was a child, I believed that all in the world was alive in the same way that I was. It was only gradually, in a confusion of thought and sensation, that I began to believe anything or have any ideas at all.  It is silly to look back on a feeling and say it is wrong because it does not match your subsequent idea when feelings and ideas are two different ways of knowing.

If our feelings, our intuitions, are misrepresented by our nascent ideas then maybe, instead of simply replacing feelings with a newer set of (more rational) ideas, we would have been better served to allow our feelings to grow-up, to inform and be informed by our ideas, so that we didn't end up trapped in the belief that one is "just a feeling" and the other is "just an idea."  If our early, egocentric beliefs about the world amount to clumsy attempts to explain our previously unreflected-upon intuitions (what Shelley called the "before-unapprehended relations of things"), the problem is not with the original intuition but with the ineffective attempt to explain it, with the very belief that anything can be explained through representation.

At this stage of our development, it is rationality that has not gotten its feet yet.  It is rationality that is the pretender-god, thinking it can grasp the ungraspable, but we laugh away our intuition because our rationality says that intuition is the way babies know the world and, of course, babies can't really know anything because they can't think about anything.  I assure you that there is nothing on the earth or in the heavens that is not possessed of some degree, some kind of life but, in my rush to maturity, I put this knowledge away with as much shame as I attached to my security blanket or first, unbearably awkward crush.

Perhaps the relationship between feeling and rationality should be imagined as more like a continuum than as a series of succeeding stages (something that is more subtly fluid even than Ken Wilber's "transcend and include" model).  A child cannot make a sophisticated aesthetic judgment (a judgment made from an intuitive sense of wholeness or, at least, a sense of how things fit together) because the child's judgment of an object cannot be separated from the immediate, visceral effect the object has on the child (the child feels that he likes or dislikes something based on egocentric, almost animal drives).  A child needs individuation, perspective (in other words, rationality) to see the object for itself, rather than for himself.

When a child has his needs met by food and affection, the world is a seamless perfection of regularity and proportion.  Objects are a functional part of that perfection, not distinct from it, but, when a child begins to distinguish the world from himself, perhaps he begins to expect the same principle of regularity and proportion to exist as conditions for (and within) the existence of objects (including other beings) as well as a condition for (and within) his own existence.  Everything breathes together, so to speak. 

In other words, he senses that everything is alive and, in a provisional sense, distinct from each other but nothing could be either alive or distinct from his internal world unless it was a function of the same rhythmic principle (manas or logos, we adults might call it) upon which his internal world operates.  All of this is felt and not thought, not consciously reflected upon.  It does not exist as a stage of oceanic, egocentric consciousness or as a stage of individuated, non-egocentric consciousness but somewhere along the continuum between them.  Empathy, a sense of kindredness, is only possible when we on some level know ourselves to be the same but different from the object of our empathy.  The less we feel our connection to objects, the fewer objects seem worthy of our empathy.  This is how we lose our feelings for rocks and trees and fail to see that this loss is as pathological as a loss of feeling for each other.

I do not want to remain a child forever. I want to use my rationality to understand the worth of an individual and the vital necessity of keeping my individual head above the crowd of sensations that is the undifferentiated world. I want to be able to appreciate objects for their own nature rather than simply love them because they are umbilically attached to myself but I never want to fully sever the cord. Abandoning the intuition of one stage of consciousness for the rational mistrust of another precludes the possibility that we can shape an intuition into a solid, reliable, grown-up thing—informed by our analytical mind that loves to distinguish but grounded in our empathetic mind that loves to relate. This will change, not only the way we think about rocks and trees, but how we feel privileged to make use of them. Perhaps when we understand that everything has a soul, we will cease to contrive such unworthy vessels to contain them. Then, all of our homes will be filled with objects that speak to us.

To His Books

Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man's posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
The dead alive and busie, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven's white decoys!
Who lives with you lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the sun.
Beneath you all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in wants both health and sight.
    By sucking you, the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more:
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance. For man dyes
Oft ere 'tis done, while the bee feeds and flyes.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed,
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know — what was too much for thee!

--Henry Vaughan

On Losing Yourself (and Finding Yourself) in a Good Book

(image source)

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.  The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself.  The seconday impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.  In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.  Obviously this process can be described either as enlargement or as temporary annihilation of the self.  But that is an old paradox; "he that loseth his life shall save it." 

_______________________________

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.  Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism

From a Speech Delivered at a Farewell Party

"To speak of remembrance as you do is merely a clumsy way of expressing oneself.  Whenever we have experienced something great or beautiful or significant, it need not be recalled as if it were recaptured from without.  On the contrary, it must from the very beginning become interwoven with our inner being, become one with it, make us into a new and better person and thus creatively  live on forever within ourselves.  We must not long for the return of anything that has passed: in a sense there is no past; there is only the ever new that is formed from the elements of what we call the past; longing must always be creative..."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Once Forever

 (image source)

I spent the evening rewatching the film Once with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  It put me in mind of a universal truth and of its equally true opposite.  Nothing lasts.  Everything passes away.  At the moment of perfection, the unraveling has begun.  We cannot continue breathing-in forever, no matter how good it feels to take in the air. Eventually, very soon, we must allow our lungs to release.  Yet when I was younger, and more recently but less regularly, I had the experience of stepping into a moment as into the frame of a photograph, of stepping not only into the scene but into my body, gesture, knowledge and emotions with the assurance of a dancer precisely hitting her mark.  I knew that, after I felt myself moving on, the moment would remain forever as it was.  This knowledge invested even the horrifying moments, and the awkward and confusing ones, with a flawless radiance.  Every breath was inexpressibly satisfying but sad.  Made up of longing and fulfillment and longing again, each was full.  Each was endless.  Nothing passes away.  Ever.

Link to a Song