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J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life

A series of three illustrated lectures from the Wasatch Gnostic Society

On Making Sense

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I remember, as a small child, being fascinated with anything that was just beyond the grasp of my developing consciousness-- the cover illustration of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends in which two children seem to peer over the crumbling culmination of the sidewalk at the edge of the world or the puzzling behavior of "my son John" who went to bed with his stockings on, one shoe off and one shoe on" (the possibility that he had been drinking before he fell asleep was still well beyond me). Like all children, I couldn't let these odd images go. I relished their strangeness and, to this day, I feel a reverberation of wonder when I recall anything that then caused me confusion. I remember what it felt like to feel my mind growing. I still love that feeling-- at least as much as I love anything else.

This article from the October 5 New York Times reports on the suggestion by researchers that encountering what seems to be a nonsense scenario, something that could not be expected to exist in the everyday world, sharpens the mind by causing it, through anxiety or just an innate desire to make sense of things, to work harder to find patterns in what it perceives. Even if the perceiver is unable to make satisfactory sense of the original experience, subsequent experiences are sharper and subtle patterns more visible. Thus, order comes out of apparent chaos. This got me thinking.

I do not believe that it is possible to perceive utter nonsense. Order is not what we see but how we see. It is the organization of the data that allows our minds to congeal objects and events out of what would otherwise be the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of raw sense experience. As thinkers such as Rudolf Steiner and Henri Bortoft have pointed out, thinking is involved even in the act of simple seeing. We would not be able to see (make a phenomenon out of) incoherence any more than we would be able to read (make a word out of) a string of consonants. Stumbling upon a lamppost in a wood (as young Lucy did when she entered the world of Narnia) is unexpected, yes, certainly improbable but not impossible. It is not strictly nonsense but, rather, not-yet-sense. Even in a story, magic wardrobes and talking animals make sense within the context of the story. Discovering how they make sense is very good for us. It tells us something essential about ourselves and the world. It tells us that there are other worlds hidden within our own.

Any incongruity, the lack of those ready categories that allow us to navigate an experience without actually having the full available experience, has the potential to cause us to suspect a deeper order, to cause us to suspect that the world is more wonderful than we had supposed. (Of course, the wonderful world is always with us but, when we are preoccupied with avoiding a collision with a tree, we need only register its presence, location and a vague sense of its properties. The thrilling coarseness of its bark and the delicate vein pattern of its leaves are of no consequence). The gift that comes to us when we read Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" or Ionesco's "The Lesson" is that we do understand it on some level, that we do find order there. What we find, in fact, is the pervasiveness of order, itself. It is an opportunity to wake-up a little to the inherent sensicalness of the cosmos which is the source of all beauty.

The name that has been given to this process of waking up is deautomatization. In The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science, Henri Bortoft uses the term, borrowed from psychologist Arthur Deikman, to describe a process of coming to see the thought habits by which we organize our perceptions then learning to see beyond them. You can think of it as paradigm-busting. "Philosophy," according to Owen Barfield, "is the most wakeful part of a people's consciousness" and it has historically been the task of philosophers to "get outside of the plane of consciousness in which they normally lived." It has, in other words, been the task of philosophers to reveal a deeper order by, as Goethe expressed it, opening up "a new organ of perception." It is time that we all learned to see ourselves as philosophers.

These thoughts raise other thoughts. What first comes to mind is Tolkien's theory of "subcreation" which is a way of communing with the qualities that make up phenomena by using our imaginations to separate those qualities from our habitual, usually ego-based way of encountering them. I believe that this process, one that we would think of as artistic, has much in common with Goethe's scientific method of "exact sensorial imagination" and that both are ways of unlocking the extraordinariness of the ordinary. My second thoughts are about Rupert Sheldrake's contention that the laws of nature, including I assume those that govern our ability to perceive, should be regarded more as the habits of nature. Since our consciousness is part of nature and, in fact, participates through its organization of sense data in the creation of nature as we know it, I cannot help asking if a human ability to transcend thought habits might not amount to something like the ability of nature to transcend itself. Deautomatization, indeed.

These, however, are complex questions and will have to wait for another post. I am still trying to find a way to say a lot in a small space and I am afraid that I have not succeeded so far. Much is implied, little explicated. I'll just have to keep working at it. Perhaps the beauty of a blog is in the opportunity to watch it evolve.

Recognitions

Recognitions
by W. S. Merwin

Stories come to us like new senses
a wave and an ash tree were sisters
they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost
they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of
as family resemblances features they held in common
the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance
of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree
in summer air and the limbs of the ash tree
recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it
and they wrote to each other every day
without knowing where to send the letters
some of which have come to light only now
revealing in their old but familiar language
a view of the world we could not have guessed at
but that we always wanted to believe.

They Were Magicians

From "Raven's Appearance: The Language of Prophecy" by Peter Kingsely


"There are many, many things that I learn and have learned from these Greeks who lived two and a half thousand years ago. But the key, the one most important thing, that I have learned from them is that there are two ways of talking—just as there are two different ways of perceiving. There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did."

Read the full article.

Just the Facts?

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According to this article, Massachusetts public schools, inspired by the theories of E.D. Hirsch, have performed an education reform “miracle” by implementing knowledge-based standards for students and holding students to those standards through rigorous testing. As the article explains, Hirsch has long maintained that “learning how to learn” is not enough. Students must face the world armed with facts. Context (the hermeneutic circle?) matters as much as text, and without a shared cultural context, some of us grow up without the ability to grasp what the rest of us are talking about.

I agree wholeheartedly that context matters and that facts, far from “lifeless” but enlivened by their very nature with history, language and implied worldview, are indispensible but I worry that a simple-minded reliance on cultural transmission through the authority of a knowledgeable teacher is dangerous because, with it, there comes the risk of forgetting what education is for. Do we teach our children so that they may preserve our culture or so that they may transform it? Perhaps we should aim for something of both, preserving that which deserves to be preserved while transforming or transcending the rest. More importantly, we should ask what we get when we receive a cultural transmission—through art, literature, the findings of science or from someone who has been privileged with an experience that we have not.

Peter Kingsley, a contemporary interpreter of Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles believes that culture as we know it was a gift to the philosophers from the gods. It was not discovered or developed but received by a few human beings with the capacity to stretch human consciousness enough to make room for the gift. Furthermore, he argues, the time has arrived for us to receive something more. When we encounter nature, for instance, or a work of art with an open mind and heart we take into ourselves (perhaps through a deep identification) something that ultimately defies analysis, something that cannot be taught in the way we tend to think of teaching. This “something,” this breath of the essence of what things truly are, is as inexhaustibly knowable as the universe itself. We can never get to the end of it. Therefore, it can never be measured. There is more to see in every vision than is immediately apparent in the vision itself. It is our sight that needs adjusting. As philosopher Jean Gebser puts it, “Every ‘novel’ thought will tear open wounds.” In any cultural tradition (and I can only speak with experience if not authority about the Western tradition), we have in our hands a sometimes clumsy, occasionally precise scalpel with which to perform the operation.

The passing along of information and its context (and, perhaps, the two are not as distinguishable as we believe) is an essential part of teaching but learning, true transformative learning, takes place when we are able to cultivate enough silence, attention and humility to integrate more and more of what the words—and the sights and the sounds and smells, the taste, the touch and the senseless intuition—wordlessly suggest to us about ourselves and our world. It is not the information, itself, or the skills for uncovering the information that changes us but our thirst for knowledge and our knowledge that the thirst was never meant to be fully quenched.

By the way, I am not aware of any research data to back this up but it seems quite likely that cultivating silence, attention and humility will raise your SAT scores.

At this point, all of this must seem more poetic than legitimately argumentative (though perhaps that is not a bad place to start) but it is these ideas that I would like to begin to tease out through a careful look at the works of Goethe, Steiner, Hadot, the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield and Williams), the literary critic Erich Heller and others. I’ll just have to see what happens next.

When the Heart is Really Alive or On Becoming a Fool

"Of course you see a pigeon," rejoined the raven, "for there is the pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.--I wonder now what heart is that dove's mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!"

"How can a pigeon be a prayer?" I said. I understand, of course, how it should be a fit symbol or likeness for one; but a live pigeon to come out of a heart!"

"It MUST puzzle you! It cannot fail to do so!"

"A prayer is a thought, a thing spiritual," I pursued.

"Very true! But if you understood any world beside your own, you would understand your own much better.-- When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts are strong happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker:-- "Here is one of my thoughts: I am thinking it now!" that is a prayer-- a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.-- Look there is another!"

This time the raven pointed his beak downward-- to something at the foot of a block of granite. I looked and saw a little flower. I had never seen one like it before, and cannot utter the feeling it woke in me by its gracious, trusting form, its colour and its odour as of a new world that was yet the old. I can only say that it suggested an anemone, was of a pale rose hue and had a golden heart.

"That is a prayer-flower," said the raven.

"I never saw such a flower before!" I rejoined.

"There is no other such. Not one prayer-flower is ever quite like another," he returned.

"How do you know it is a prayer-flower?" I asked.

"By the expression of it," he answered. "More than that I cannot tell you. If you know it, you know it; if you do not, you do not."

"Could you not teach me to know a prayer-flower when I see it?" I said.

"I could not. But if I could what better would you be? you would not know it of YOURself and ITself! Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!"

But I did see that the flower was different from any flower I had ever seen before; therefore I knew I must be seeing the shadow of the prayer in it; and a great awe came over me to think of the heart listening to the flower."

-- From Lilith: A Romance by George Macdonald