Sober Passion

2010-05-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

TOWARDS THE RECOVERY OF HONOR: THE ART
OF VERBAL SWORDSMANSHIP

This version completed March, 1996. Revised and edited, 2010.

I. The Footing

A little ripple on the surface of recent history occurred when the President of the United States said that he would like to punch a noted journalist in the nose for having made remarks impugning the honor of the First Lady. This little ripple was seconded, a few days later, by Richard Grenier in The Washington Times, who said that he would not want to let this incident pass “without grieving at the disappearance of the noble institution of duelling.”

In the hope that sentiments such as these may swell from a ripple to a tide, I add my assent to the above expression: only adding the caveat, that in the Modern Age the swordsmanship I speak of will -- and in all probability, must -- be carried out with words, not with swords.
It is not that we have ceased to make points -- to convey thoughts that have the power to pierce as well as to enlighten. There is indeed a kind of verbal duelling that is still practiced. The television show “Crossfire” is an example of it. But who really cares about the budget or the ephemera of politics, in which the Conservative View and the Liberal View and the Feminist View etc. are duly debated? Yes: duly and dutiful, but a far cry from the soul’s honor.

The verbal duelling I have in mind has to do with honor. Here the Southern Tradition is a great help. It was a notable Southerner, Richard Weaver, who wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences. It could have well been entitled, “Towards the recovery of intellectual honor.” For honor must be recovered as an intellectual value before it can be propagated as a moral value; i.e., a code of behavior.

The first idea to be recovered is the idea that ideas do, indeed, matter. The words by which ideas are conveyed refer to real things. Knowledge consists at first in learning the right names for things. This is the doctrine known as Realism, and Richard Weaver looked all the way back to the Middle Ages, to the fiery debates between the Realists and the Nominalists, for that first falling-away from the notion of honor. For the Nominalists won the debate; Weaver thought we are still living with the consequences.

For honor does not matter in a world in which words are mere arbitrary signifiers. Indeed, how do human actions matter in such a world? What grounds are there for making any distinctions regarding the quality of human action when words and deeds merely portend style rather than substance?

Some of Weaver’s critics have pointed out, that if Nominalism had not gained the upper hand, modern science might not have arisen. For Nominalism loosens the hold of Being in words. But I think that Weaver's critics may have missed the point. Science put man on a different footing with respect to Nature. In theory, it was the ‘real-world,’ rather than Being itself, that was to provide the reference. But something else insinuated itself between ourselves and our object. It was a different definition of what scientific knowledge was about. Knowledge came to be seen not as testing by the real world but as power over the real world -- the conquest of nature. The doctrine of “Might makes Right” crept in -- that is, if we can do something, we should do it.

Nature, no longer our mistress, the check upon our actions, becomes our subject, the stage for infinite symbol-manipulation. It is an idea of language corrupted by a military metaphor, and far removed from the notion of intellectual honor. If I speak now of the Southern Tradition, it is because that tradition is closest to me. But the “Christian Tradition” or the “Tradition of English Poetry” or the “Western Esoteric Tradition” for that matter: all of these “traditions” are a way of binding language to history and geography and to the real action of human life.

The ground the Southerner stands on is historical ground. It is not one of arbitrary symbols, mere signs or counters of an ever-shifting nature. It is the geography of historical integrity which can inform the new notion of honor -- the new Realism. And it is this footing we must gain before we defend our honor and our faith. For it is not possible to grasp a sword properly, or for that matter an idea, if our footing is precarious.

The first affirmation of the verbal duellist is, therefore, an affirmation of our place in the world: the affirmation of our integrity as historical beings. This is what gives the grounding to our words, and the force and verve of our challenge.

II. Hunger for Engagement

Many people today do not allow ideas to pierce their souls. I am not speaking of ill-educated people either. What strikes me is not so much a diminished capacity for intellect as a metaphysical lack of appetite. One does not want to be worked upon. One would rather rule over an empire of ideas than subject oneself to any one idea. Hence there is not much passion for following an idea through to the end, for getting to the bottom of things.

Modern theories of society and mental health do not take account of the factor of intellectual hunger, and few there be -- I can only think of James Stephens, the Irish poet -- who have dealt with Hunger as a philosophical problem. In The Crock of Gold the Great God Pan questions a little girl about the two greatest things in the world, and she replies: Hunger and Common Sense. And later Pan replies: No, the Divine Imagination is the greatest thing in the world. But it may be that the way to the Divine Imagination is through the little girl’s Hunger and Common Sense.

For no less an authority than the New Testament informs us of the blessedness of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ sake: and the landscape in which they are gathered to hear the divine pronouncement is the landscape of parable and imagination.

To affirm hunger is to affirm life and common sense. Those dieters-to-the-death among us, the anorectics and bulimics, have understood only too well that repletion is no longer connected with hunger. It is a superfluity that hides the starved mentality. Their effort to experience hunger to the depths is a spiritual protest -- much deeper than merely being a response to the decree of fashion that people should be thin. They are on a hunger-strike, not for fashion, but for truth: or rather, against the fashionable notion that derides the search for truth.

In modern society people are basically seen as talking stomachs. How to satisfy appetite is the be-all and end-all of intellectual inquiry. But this theory cannot explain why people in an age of repletion would rather choose hunger.

Hunger is connection. Hunger, intellectual or physical, takes us out of ourselves so that we acknowledge that we are not self-sufficient. Hunger is our one possibility for working out of the toils of egotism, and modern philosophy has no place in its world-view for it. It skips over hunger to get to satisfaction.

One object of verbal duelling is to remind another of his hunger. In this it is unlike the Socratic dialogue. Hunger is not fundamental to it, in the sense that much of the Socratic dialogue is dedicated to the making of distinctions -- to distinguishing one thing from another. This act is supremely important to the act of thinking, to civilization itself. But it can be done only in a society sure of its relationship to civilization -- by people who are already ‘filled.’
The act of making distinctions can only unfold after the fundamental keynote of relatedness has been struck. Such is not our present condition. The part of thinking -- that of making distinctions -- needs to be sustained by the other part, perhaps the better half: that of showing relations.

This Relation and Connection I call Honor.

Honor is the stage upon which the scaffold of distinction may safely be built. Was it not upon the stage of relation that the distinctions that unfolded in Genesis took place? All that began begins with, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” This is the fundamental relation. After that, God gets down to the business of making manifold distinctions: of days, weeks, years, creatures.

Man, too, begins with the relation, the conjunction: “Male and female created he them.” And after that the distinction-making faculty unfolds with the descending articulations of bones, muscles, joints and skeleton coincident with that of speech: for ‘articulation’ refers both to bones and to speaking. Only at the tail-end, or rather the rib-end, of this cadenza of articulation does actual, physical sex emerge. The male-female of the original conjunction has symphonically recessed to make way for the dominant theme: the manifestation into physical life. Here is the orchestration of Divine Imagination carried out through the instrumentality of substance. To hear it -- to be able to listen -- indicates a hunger of the spirit. And at this stage of the unfolding it may be incumbent upon women to renew the art of listening.

Here is an affirmation for the relative silence of women throughout history, indeed a real affirmation, such as to present a contrast to the envy and resentment of the feminists. What if the relative historical silence of women has existed in order that the faculty of hearing might become spiritualized? It is the principle of reculer pour mieux sauter -- hold back in order to leap forward. Both to hunger and to hear enable us to form an empty space, a silence, fit for reception and waiting. Such a contrast to the spilling of our substance in the moment, the consumption and wastage of the spirit in fitful politics.

Here is an entirely different thought from that offered by the vulgar cause of Feminism. Feminists would detest to hear me say that a woman’s highest possibility lies in Obedience (which means, by the way, hearing, being able to hear)-- that is, to the solar principles of thinking. But the woman who embarks upon the Path of Honor has already left feminism far behind. It is but a new theory of repletion, and she has learned it is much more interesting not to be filled.

III. Ethics of Engagement

An Ancient American once said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” True: because he knew that the pen is rather like the sword. He, who had to sharpen his quills before he wrote, might have agreed that his flourishes were “Written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond.” Because those flourishes had to do with the honor of the mind: there are rules of honor in fighting as in thinking.

Progress has permitted us the luxury of no longer having to sharpen our quills, and the Darwinian idea of survival has clouded in our minds the notion on what terms we shall do so. That is, honor seems less important than survival. We are left to flounder after a primitive good -- that is, survival. Having thrown everything else over the boat in order to ensure that it keep floating, by a strange logic of reversal the thought of ultimate sinkage becomes a possibility. Survival and annihilation are linked concepts.

The Path of Honor takes account of this “strange logic of reversal” in our world of thought. It says that this strange logic is a characteristic not only of thinking but also of our relation to reality. Is there a middle way between survival and annihilation? -- a middle term by which “strange logic” may be converted into human logic?

Here is the matter of the footing once again -- but this time in an even broader, deeper sense. It is the metaphysical question concerning man’s place in the world. Modern man does not trust that mankind verily belongs in this world. But the belief that the appearance of human beings upon earth is merely a matter of chance has been deeply questioned by the latest discoveries of modern physics. Even without the anthropic principle -- which links “the nature of the universe with its potentiality for the evolution of men,” (Polkinghorne, 1986) there are too many wonders and close calls for us to view our presence here with complacency.

The astronomy of Ptolemy was earth-centered. The astronomy of Copernicus is solar-centered. The verbal swordsman includes both in his world-view: earth-centered in terms of the matter at hand, the what-is; solar-centered in terms of the rules of engagement. He himself must be the mediating term, the medicinal anthropic principle that heals the poisoned spear that has been thrust into our side.

The “sickness of cognition” that poisons the modern world has to do with our relationship to what is: that is, the relationship of mind to world through the medium of Language. The Path of Honor is defined as being true to what is: true, steadfast, and unswervingly faithful. Honor seeks to direct the Copernican sunbeam upon the Ptolemaic material by means of anthropic responsiveness: a new three-fold integration.

The problem consists in the determination of what is. The art of verbal swordsmanship, which involves the placement of the maximum load of thought into the smallest possible compass, is viewed as a process between two persons who have voluntarily agreed to engage in a mutual determination of what is according to clearly defined and mutually agreed-upon rules. The process of discovering these rules, stating them openly, weighing and evaluating them in the light of fairness to the two parties concerned, may be said to be a large part of the determination of what is.

The object of verbal swordsmanship is the engagement with honor: not to wound or demean the opponent, but to maneuver him into an engagement with truth, i.e., the processes in his own soul. There is no other end in view but the means. All that matters is the process. For: remember our threefold integration. We need to approach the matter at hand in the light of honor by means of anthropic responsiveness. It is only through these small mutually-agreed-upon oscillations of process that the ‘matter’ can be determined. We ‘weigh’ by means of light.

This is not to say that the Knight of Honor cannot make mistakes. In such situation, the Knight can accept handicap: i.e., admit that he is wrong. The important point is the recovery of honor: that the Knight be able to deflect the mistake back into the process. Likewise, the same rule applies to the opponent. The acceptance of handicap is made out of deference to the process.
Cases of bluntness, plain speaking, moral righteousness and judgment do not automatically incur handicap. Each incident has to be weighed and evaluated by both parties. Even a well-crafted insult is, from a certain point of view, an admirable thing. But insults, and compliments for that matter, are “points” only insofar as they serve truth. Truthfulness is the only thing that matters. But it is incumbent on the one who accepts handicap to discover the means by which combat can be continued.

The Rules of Engagement follow strict laws of formality, courtesy, logic, consistency and what may be called “moral consciousness” or “moral imagination.” It is recognized by the Knight of Honor that what is being attempted is the handling of ‘esoteric energies.’ It is the aim of the Knight of Honor to become a Master of such energies, and in his practice enable his opponent to contact such energies in himself. This is what is meant esoterically by the phrase the ‘saving of the soul’ of another.

Normally, energy is viewed in the light of ‘efficiency’ -- that is, employ only so much energy as will accomplish the immediate task. Esoteric energies involve the concept of surplus: that is why terseness or brevity is the aim of the deft s-wordsman. Here is another example of the “strange logic of reversal” -- that surplus manifests in terseness. There is an analogy with the beauty and universality of a scientific equation -- the beauty which, according to the physicist Paul Dirac, is an index of its truthfulness. As for terseness, one physicist remarked that the equations pertaining to the script of the world can be written upon the back of an envelope.

It is toward a perception of the supernatural in Man that the Knighthood of Honor is pledged. Only then can we approach truly the what is. For what is is not, in itself, sacred. The pledge of the worth of the what is was granted by the Coming of the Savior into the flesh -- into the world, into the what is. With respect to the problem of truth, it is recognized that on this point even the Savior elected to remain silent. (John 18:38) It is the Savior who deflects dead ends back into processes. Such an example informs the practice of the Knight of Honor.

IV. The First Attempt

Mental effort demands sharpening of the quills of thought. The Deconstructionists have reminded us about this “sharpening of the quills” in a rather odd way -- odd in the sense that their disquisitions aim to strip us of the will to fight. That is, they acknowledge beforehand that all intellectual activity involves an assertion of power. By bringing our attention to the element of swordsmanship in all argumentation, they have thought to disarm us. For, after all, to name something by its correct name is to foil the opponent. To expose is to make a point.

But soon, too soon, they back down from this position of Realism: i.e., the idea that something can be rightly named. They use Realism to check their enemy, and switch to Nominalism when their enemy shows signs of checking them. Their Nominalism comes out in full force when they disparage the whole purpose of the engagement. “The fight for truth!” To them there is no such thing: for truth is a mere name, not a right name.

How easily a sinuous language may slide from the substantial and real to the merely stylish and formal: without so much as the bat of an eyelash. Snakes, I am told, have no eyelids. Therefore I will not deal with snakes and Deconstructionists, but with the situation of persons whose first care is for their words, and for the honor of words.

Learning to care about the honor of words is not among life’s first necessities: viz., food, clothing, and shelter. In the process of coming to terms with life’s necessities, however, we are presented at times with occasions that call forth our passions, our reason, our imagination, and yes, our honor. With the possible exception of Reason, these other qualities that engage us figure in no known scheme of political economy devised since the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment settled once and for all the proposition that a great light directed upon a tangible fact will cast a long shadow. We are still living in the reach of that shadow and are somewhat uncertain of the territory circumjacent to it. Aside from our teeming fictions that rise, now and then, to the status of bestsellerdom, we have learned our lesson. The business of the world is Politics and Economics. Period.

Or is it? A man -- I will call him Noted Author -- once made some statements publicly insulting to the Christian Religion. I despatched forthwith to him a letter, which act he correctly interpreted as being “intrusive.”

I admit it. Dear Reader, I was shameless. I told him I considered his remarks unworthy of his soul and of his literary eminence. Descending still further down my sleeve, on which I wore my vices, I preached. I did not say, in that first letter, that I expected him to see beyond the obvious (my preaching) and get my point: i.e., that I was challenging him to a duel.
My mistake, as subsequent events revealed, consisted not in making the first too obvious, but the second too subtle. His reply, somewhat unsurprisingly, was rather nasty. Still, I gave him infinite credit for responding. In any case, in my second letter I acknowedged my faults and thus granted him the right to think of me as numbered among the Benighted. I only remarked that I was sorry that my faults as a messenger led him to decline the challenge of the message.
To this olive branch in the form of clarification of my purpose he disdained to reply: which silence I took to be his way of acknowledging my right to interpret as an act of cowardice.
All in all, the result of this little contre-temps, this mini snuff-out of an affaire d’honneur, was disappointing. Had I supposed that Noted Author, a sterling member of the class of the Beautiful People, might agree to debate the truth or falsity of the Christian Religion with a mere cipher of the Benighted Class? I suppose I did suppose it.

My femaleness I considered as of being no account one way or another. Had he perhaps suggested that he could not engage in debate along swordsmanlike terms with a Lady, I, who respect all forms of honor including the old-fashioned ones, would have graciously conceded to such a gentlemanlike notion so sincerely held.

That seemed not to be the case here. I believe he was more shocked that I should refuse to identify myself with the Beautiful People, than that I should wish to call him into account because of words uttered against my Religion. This, I may say, is almost as interesting a response than if he had replied with his objections to Christianity. But it is a response that is challenging in a different way than a response to the issue would have been.

I have no need of recapitulating what Thomas Sowell has so eloquently written of, in his book The Vision of the Anointed (1995) where he contrasts the Anointed and the Benighted, and says that the technique of the Anointed is “to replace intellectual discussion of arguments by the moral extermination of persons.” That certainly was the case here. I can only add this example to Sowell’s brilliant diagnosis of the condition.

We can only bring a counterforce to the “Vision of the Anointed” with the “Practice of the Benighted.” Let the benighted be knighted Swordsmen of the Word: those who, agreeing to abide by rules of honor, issue their private challenges to the consternation of the Chattering Classes.

V. The Question of Gender: Can A Lady Duel?

Duelling has historically been associated with the code of the gentleman. Richard Weaver comments:

“As long as the Western world could maintain a gentleman class...
it retained a measure of protection. For it had here a group not wholly
absorbed or obsessed, who held a general view of the relationship
of things. . . By far the most significant phase of the theory of the gentleman is
its distrust of specialization. It is an ancient belief, going back to
classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a
freeman.” Ideas Have Consequences, 54-55, 56

It is interesting that Weaver mentions that this view, that the gentleman holds “a general view of the relationship of things,” goes all the way back to classical antiquity. Here is our keynote of relatedness once again -- the broad view of things, the general culture.

Of this broad view of things, honor is to be the guardian. But the Gentleman has gone the way of the Generalist -- the way to dusty death. There is no class of persons in modern life who see their task as preservers of general culture. The idea that civilized life or general culture might carry with it the obligation to defend it strikes many persons today as obscene or ridiculous.
Yet the duelling culture has not died altogether. It has been up to the novelist to preserve the art of verbal duelling. Ideas have had to travel the underground route of romance rather than make the overland trip by philosophy.

Some of Jane Austen’s heroines are great verbal duellists. The case that springs most naturally to mind is Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of Pride and Prejudice. Her happiness (though she does not know it) depends in fact upon the acquisition of the art of verbal duelling. She duels for a worthy purpose: not for love at first, but for the truth of love, or the truth in love. Nor will she have love on any other terms. Truly, this is noble.

What Elizabeth must discover -- and after having discovered it, be obedient to it -- is the what is, the truth of the situation. She believes Mr. Darcy to be responsible for Mr. Wickham’s misfortune, and for ruining the happiness of her sister Jane. In making his first proposal to her, Mr. Darcy acknowledges that his feelings came about despite his better judgment. He was aware of her social inferiority.

Elizabeth replies:

“In such cases as this it is, I believe, the established mode to express
a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally
they may be returned. . . But I cannot, -- I have never desired your
good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly.
. . . The feelings which you tell me have long prevented the
acknowledgement of your regard can have little difficulty in
overcoming it after this explanation.”

Mr. Darcy says:

“And is this all the reply which I am to have the honor of expecting!
I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavor
of civility, I am thus rejected...”

Elizabeth then goes on thus:

“ ‘I might as well inquire,’ ” replied she, “ ‘why, with so evident a
design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that
you liked me against your will, your reason, and even against
your character? Was this not some excuse for incivility, if I was
uncivil? But I have other provocations. ‘”

Elizabeth then proceeds to detail her objections to the gentleman -- his pride, his disdain for the feelings of others, his interference in the romance between her sister and Mr. Bingley, and finally the matter of George Wickham.

It is quite a catalogue, and time alone, and the favorable turn of events, will allow Elizabeth to view these matters in a different light and with greater penetration. After the debacle of the proposal, Mr. Darcy gives Elizabeth a letter explaining the circumstances that lay behind her accusations. She does not want to believe it -- it is a struggle with herself:

“Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror oppressed her.
She wished to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, ‘This
must be false! This cannot be! This must be the grossest falsehood!’
and when she had gone through the whole letter . . . put it hastily
away, protesting she would not regard it, that she would never
look at it again. In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on
nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the
letter was unfolded again; and collecting herself as well as she
could, she again began the mortifying perusal . . . ... when she read and re-read, with the closest attention. . . again was she forced to hesitate . . ...

every line proved clearly that the affair, which she had believed
impossible that any contrivance could so represent as to render
Mr. Darcy’s conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a turn
which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole.”

Thus is Elizabeth led to embark upon the long and mortifying journey of acknowledging her former mistakes and prejudices, of granting that a large part of the failure to apprehend the what is lay with herself.

Thus does she commit herself to the honor practiced by the verbal duellist, who does not spare himself in the confrontation with truth. Elizabeth admitted her handicap; she admitted that, in large measure, she had been wrong. The effect of such an effort of thought upon life is the capacity to overcome, by degrees, one’s own egotism. It is to make the refusal of false repletion.

VI. The Second Attempt

A letter to a writer in the Hartford Courant:

Dear Mr. B:

I was interested in what you had to say about Hartford’s literary clubs in “Won’t You Join Us?” NorthEast, Feb. 11.

As a newcomer to Hartford, I was glad to know of the existence of a group of people who meet to discuss ideas and topics of educational and cultural importance. This seems to be a rarity in America these days. Walker Percy reminds us how few Americans actually read books --

“... let me say a word about the general state of American letters. It is poor. In the
first place, only about two percent of Americans regularly read books. Of this
two percent, only a small fraction read serious novels. We’re talking about a
hundred thousand people at the most. Whereas sixty million watched the episode
in Dallas which solved the mystery of who shot J.R.”

Signposts in a Strange Land, p. 170.

The tone of your article -- fashionably ironic, deprecating, flippant -- was anything but a serious response to this situation. You seemed more intent on ridiculing a “self-massaging highbrow club” (at the same time letting the reader know that you were honored with an invitation to join the Twilight Club) -- as if to assure us of your impeccable politically-correct egalitarian sentiments. You said, despite all, that you were glad to be a member, but that we, the Excluded Middle (Middle America, that is) would, naturally, want to take “our highbrow, elitist, self-massaging club, fold it four ways and stick it where the moon don’t shine.”

This, Sir, I find offensive. You disparage us as well as those doughty Twilighters who are trying, as best they can, to improve their minds. Or is this effort, too, merely ridiculous? If so, according to your lights, how are people ever to develop beyond the default position of smug complacency? I challenge you, Mr. B., to observe how the liberty of your own mind is compromised, when you could not describe an old custom of voluntary intellectual fellowship without making ritual invocations to Diversity and Inclusion -- in order to appease the Great God Leveller.

I do not think that the Twilighters, by making themselves into a Society, meant to slight me, nor that people who appreciate excellence and taste are to be so cavalierly dismissed as belonging to the set of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Your article pandered to envy and resentment, but I reject it. I like for things to have the integrity of what they are. You belong but you jeer and deride. The cognitive dissonance deafens. How can you bear it? Mr. B., where do you stand?

You may, of course, elect not to accept my challenge. But if you do decide to do me the honor of responding to this letter, I would like you to defend the proposition that all old civilized customs and associations of fellowship are to be rejected out of hand because they do not conform to Standard Lowbrow. Remember de Tocqueville? --

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real
freedom of discussion as in America.”

Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 263.

I defend the assertion that the liberty of the members of the Twilight Club to form their own association in however means they choose actually supports and helps to maintain my own liberty. Indeed, I defend the liberty of the mind with the liberty of association. The one is ideal, the other real; and true civilization is the work of this coupling. But what is the contribution to civilization of such cynical complacency as found in your article?

I think that we all ought to have some “fire in the belly” about our current cultural decadence -- which, it seems to me, the literary clubs, for all their foibles and old-fashioned elegance, are trying to resist. Are they not at least trying to affirm the idea that excellence can be distinguished from mediocrity? The value of mental effort? Far be it from me to resent such a statement of purpose! I found the tone of your article -- that excellence itself is to be despised -- far more patronizing and insulting than anything the Twilighters could ever dream of.

Be assured, Sir, of my cordiality within these sincere expressions of my disagreements,

[signed]

As of this writing I have not so far received a reply to this challenge. Upon reading it again, it seems to me that I might have made the challenge clearer: for example, after the words, “You may, of course, elect not to accept my challenge,” I might have added words to the effect that, “I like verbal duelling; however, this is something I realize that not everyone has the time for.”
The mere proliferation of information and opinion -- of people writing articles, of things said on television and radio, the omnipresent media -- offers to the verbal duellist a world of opportunity. Hardly a week need go by that does not present the verbal duellist with the possibility for making a one-on-one challenge by letter.

But even at this stage I am bid to remark -- after having dispatched only two letters of challenge -- that, depressingly, few seem to respond to the dashed glove of combat. I am sure that the recipients think of me as a sort of nut, albeit a literate one. But I am not concerned with what they think of me, only with what they think.

Perhaps someday one of my letters will strike some future recipient with the charm of novelty. That we are accountable for the ideas we entertain is certainly a novel idea to many. But it may be important to think about the issue of charm, for the likelihood is that I will not succeed in enticing anyone else into combat without it.

VII. Duelling Contests

Americans in recent years have become spectators of duelling contests in the context of Supreme Court appointments. It has not always been so. Two of the greatest contests of our century, the duel between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over the teachings of evolution (the Scopes trial), and the duel of Senator McCarthy against everybody else over the issue of Communist allegiances -- these were both concerns that transcended the narrow focus of law.

Yet there is a common thread that runs these four duels: evolution, communism, the nomination hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court. This common thread has to do with the question of whether there is a moral dimension in thought. It is whether the statement, “I think...” puts one into a moral position in relation to the world.

The Scopes trial has to do with man’s place in the world; the McCarthy hearings with man’s place in society. The idea of evolution is not the real culprit -- the Bible is the most evolutionary document in the world, being the history of the transformations of man from the Garden to the Holy City. No, it was the idea of chance that threw the monkey wrench into the monkey trial. For chance is a strange form of determinism that dispenses altogether with the need for thought.

The communism controversy took up where Scopes left off. There can be no distinction made between loyalty and treason when societies differ only as one strain of corn to another. Of what purpose is cultivation, of distinguishing one thing from another, of judging one thing to be better than another? Even the idea of allegiance begins to seem like a sin against the open air.
Some of these themes form the background to the two great controversies that occurred in recent years concerning Supreme Court appointments. By the time President Reagan offered Robert Bork’s name for the judgeship, two great issues had already been decided and negatived: nature and society. All that was left was the law.

For law is man’s bond with nature and society, though anyone who has the temerity to suggest the existence of such a bond is headed for trouble. The bond is twofold: through thought and custom. Robert Bork, in showing the world how he struggled with these bonds, in acknowledging that such a struggle had taken place within him, was already challenging the American Doctrine: which is, mental habits rather than thinking.

When Senator Patrick Leahy (D.--Vermont) used the term “metamorphosis” to describe Judge Bork’s intellectual journey, he was voicing more than the accusation of the timid and static mind to a living and active one. It was a bubble of truth percolating upwards from Leahy’s somnambulistic depths. For metamorphosis never means change in the sense of “more of the same.” Its meaning has the idea of persistent unity through death and rebirth. It is self-transformation through confrontation with tension, polarity, paradox. It is the manner of growth of all living things, and also -- of living minds.

So much of the Bork confirmation hearings had to do with rights: rights of majorities, rights of minorities, rights of women, rights of individuals. But what is the purpose of rights? They exist in order that people may fulfill their human nature without undue constraint from the social order. But the final goal of all unconstraint is the unconstraint of ideas -- that is, liberty of thought. In the last resort all rights are worthless if their fundamental underpinning is removed, the right to liberty of thought.

One’s attitude toward Judge Bork depends, therefore, far more upon one’s attitude toward thinking and the role of thinking in the achievement of identity and fulfillment, than upon whether one is a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative.’ What we saw, in the Senate Judiciary hearings, was a man who had achieved a certain identity, a self, put before a Committee whose Democratic spokesmen, at least, kept trying to get him to take off his “mask.”

But thinking, if that is what a man does, is not something that can be put on or taken off like a mask. The yeast of thinking ever works its way into the raw elements of the soul. It is not a man with a mask. It is a man constitutionally incapable of responding to anything except thoughtfully. The novelty of such a persona struck the Democrats as with the force of a disguise.
The hapless Howell Heflin (D.--Alabama) whose interminable fence-sitting finally culminated in a no vote, confessed to needing “a psychiatrist to get inside Judge Bork’s mind.” He could never tell, he said, whether Bork was a judicial extremist or in the mainstream! Another example of unconscious truth spoken by a torpid mind. For certainly the attitude of believing that thinking is a necessity to the manifestation and making-real of a human personality is an extreme notion -- deviating so surely from American Doctrine that only a psychiatrist can figure out what is going on!

My interest in the Bork hearings is not so much legal or constitutional as it is the desire to distinguish true thinking from its counterfeit: thinking as opposed to mental habits, discarnate mental processes. In the habits of mind of the nine Senators who voted against Judge Bork I find evidence of discarnate mental process: a thinking which is abstract, atomistic, or automatic. I will discuss each in turn.

i. Abstraction. Of all the Senators who voted against Judge Bork’s appointment, only that of Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-- Pa.) seemed to carry real weight. Of all the senators, only Sen. Specter seemed willing to engage in close questioning. His no vote was, accordingly, the most disappointing.

In his Oct. 9, 1987, editorial in The New York Times, “Why I Voted Against Bork,” Sen. Specter said, on the issue of majority and minority rights, that “The majority in a democracy can take care of itself, while individuals and minorities often cannot.”

As a purely abstract proposition, this is no doubt true. But the point is, and was, that in America today, the majority often feels that it cannot take care of itself. In essence this goes to the issue of judicial imperialism, which Judge Bork contended so valiantly against. If judicial imperialism exists, this indicates that the majority cannot take care of itself, for by definition judicial imperialism is a usurping of power from the people and their elected representatives. But if judicial imperialism does not exist, why is such a fuss being made over Robert Bork? You can’t have it both ways.

Sen. Specter’s point therefore begs the question: for the question is, indeed, whether the majority can take care of itself. But in a more fundamental sense as well Sen. Specter’s point is an abstraction, removed from social conditions as they are today. The glue of social cohesion, that once made the ‘majority’ a recognizable entity, no longer holds. Tradition, religious and moral sentiments: these exist, to be sure, but they are no longer real arbiters of anything. Nowadays all real questions are decided by the law courts. Even churches must go to the law on bended knee. A majority that has to buttress itself at every turn with recourse to the law is a majority in a state of disintegration.

But Sen. Specter’s view of majorities was echoed down the line. All of Judge Bork’s opponents dealt with the question of majorities in a way that was either faintly or openly contemptuous. Faintly, when the hammering at Bork dealt with the question of minorities and their rights; openly, as in the case of that cadre of law professors from Harvard, whose only term for the majority was the pejorative “Moral Majority.”

ii. Atomism -- Senator Edward Kennedy (D.-- Mass.) unknowingly exposed the atomism and disjunctiveness of the trivial mind when he said to Attorney Elliott Richardson, who spoke on Bork’s behalf, something to the effect that “you want us to look at the forest instead of the trees.”

But the Democrats gave a whole new meaning to the term “intellectual incoherence.” Take Sen. Joseph Biden (D.--Del) Chairman of the Committee, in his closing statement. He boiled down the difference in his view of rights from that of Judge Bork’s view in this wise: “I believe that we have rights just by existing, but Judge Bork believes that we have only those rights that are conferred by the Constitution.”

But Senator Biden’s remark reveals that he is coming from utopia, not the real world. Of course we have rights by existing. But it is a moot point, for none of us exists alone. The fact of our communal existence together is the only real starting point for an understanding of the Constitution and our rights. Senator Biden’s point would lead us to dispense with the Constitution altogether -- which may be what the liberals want -- but it was not the supposed subject of the Bork hearings. The supposed subject of these hearings was about differing views of Constitutional interpretation, not about Constitutional interpretation versus something else.
But the problem originates in the atomistic thinking so characteristic of Judge Bork’s opponents. One can either see the Constitution as a document primarily guaranteeing our rights, or one can view it as a document setting forth the conditions for a limited government. That government should be limited is actually the best guarantee of our rights. But of course the advocates of illimitable rights do not see it that way. In America today rights have become the equivalent of bread and circuses, and in the Bork hearings they were the sop thrown to the mob outside the walls.

iii. Automatism -- The question of rights brings us finally to the axiom of contemporary liberalism, which is the proposition that an increase of rights for some will automatically increase the rights for all. Judge Bork, by assailing this proposition, brought down upon his head the wrath and incomprehension of minds unaccustomed to examining ideas purely on their own merits. Even Sen. Specter who, notably, was not given to making unfair charges, misunderstood Judge Bork on this point. In his editorial, Sen. Specter wrote: “I was further troubled by his writings and testimony that expanding rights to minorities reduced the rights of majorities. While perhaps arithmetically sound, it seemed to me morally wrong.”

But Judge Bork was not saying that he believed this idea was good -- he was merely saying that he believed it to be true. If an idea is true, it does not demand from us, initially at least, that we take a moral position about it. It demands merely that we acknowledge it and take account of it. The moral position implicit in our acknowledgement of an idea is not whether or not we agree with it, but whether or not it becomes part of our view of reality. Morality thus arises out of whether our view of reality is more comprehensive, or less so: which is to say, in essence, that morality arises out of thinking.

Again and again, in this instance as in so many others, we are driven back to take stock of fundamentals: what is thinking? What is reason? What is morality? What seems to have happened, in the Committee hearings, is that the Senators thought they were disagreeing with Judge Bork’s opinions. But what they were actually objecting to was Judge Bork’s reasoning. Judge Bork attempted to put forth reasoned opinions. But it was in an atmosphere in which reason itself was no longer considered to possess moral value.

Well, one may ask, what is the moral value of saying that the liberal axiom -- that an increase of rights for some leads automatically to an increase of rights for all --is not true? Why recognize the contrary proposition as a fact of political life?

For one thing, this is what the Constitution does. To say that an increase of rights for some leads to an increase for all, blurs the constitutional distinction between majority and minority altogether. Such thinking renders the distinction void and impotent, and nullifies the fine balancing act which is constitutional interpretation. More and more rights for everybody -- so goes this automatism of thought -- so that we can all become happier and happier!

Judge Bork attempted to illuminate the point during a question session with Sen. Paul Simon (D.-- Illinois). He gave the example of a community that passes an ordinance banning the public expression of obscene language. Quoting Chesterton, that it is the right of a free people to pass their own laws, Bork said that in this case the community banned something they considered to be a moral harm. Then, the Supreme Court comes along and strikes the ordinance down on the grounds that “One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.” Thus the Court has deprived the people of the community of their right to make their own laws.

This concept proved too difficult for Sen. Simon. Unwittingly playing the part of Simple Simon, all he could do was repeat words to the effect that, “But I think that if you extend liberty to some, you extend it to all!” But is the concept really that difficult? The liberty of a community to ban public obscenity and the liberty of some to practice it can hardly be the same liberty. They are not only not the same thing. They are clearly opposed to each other.

Judge Bork wrote in more detail about this case, which was an actual one, in his Francis Boyer lecture, Tradition and Morality in Constitutional Law. He took issue therein with the new theories of moral relativism which have become dominant in constitutional thinking. He says, if one cannot judge something to be obscene, how can one distinguish, for example, the reckless driver from the safe one? “The answer in both cases,” he writes, “is, by the common sense of the community.” And continuing, he says: “A society that ceases to be a community increases the danger that weariness with turmoil and relativism may bring about an order in which many more, and more valuable, freedoms are lost than those we thought we were protecting.”
It is a pity that the man who wrote those words could not be met, in the hearings on his nomination to the Supreme Court, with something approaching a fair understanding. Here is the tragedy for America in these hearings: the total obliteration of the distinction between reason, grounded in moral principles, and ideology.

For it is not the thinking mind but the ideological mind that runs along the ruts of abstraction, atomism, and automatism. For certainly a reasonable man is fallible. But at least he is awake. Sleeping men hardly know the difference.

Finally, it must be said that events, and the time in which they occur, take place in a context in which deeper meanings may be read. The Bork confirmation hearings took place at the same time as the bicentenniel celebrations of the Constitution. But what happened is that the cognitive frame of mind needed to understand and maintain the Constitution went down into ignominious defeat. Not to worry. It’s the celebration that counts.

VIII. Duelling Contests, continued.

The contest between Clarence Thomas and his accuser, Anita Hill, took place in the five-hundreth year commemoration of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, October of 1992. There is poignancy in this conjunction of events -- as if race were more fundamental a factor in the American founding than even the efforts of the Founding Fathers to form a constitutional republic.

Constitutional founding has to do with thought; race has to do with life. The basic question has to do with the relation of thinking to instinct, to life. The bond between these two forces is morality, when the activity of thinking is understood to comprise a moral dimension.

But in America this bond is forbidden fruit. For, as we have seen, in American life the bond between thinking and the moral dimension has been dissolved. Ostensibly the issue in the Clarence Thomas hearings was that of sexual harassment. But in a world in which the act of thinking takes place in a moral vacuum, the fact of sexuality itself is bound to seem an offense. For there is no way that a man can be with a woman, or a woman with a man, that is not otherwise than invasive, confrontational, challenging, unsettling. Such is the nature of instinct.
Sexual harassment may be taken as the metaphor of thinking in such an age, in which moralism parades as morality, and mental habits parade as thought. For ideas are invasive, confrontational, challenging, and unsettling too, where there is a real connection between the self, the ideas, and the world.

But in America, no thought is given to the problem of channelling the instincts because the connection between instinct and thought has been declared to be abolished. Thus do we prostrate ourselves to instinct in our pop culture, or take our revenge against it in the moralism of our political culture.

Not a happy situation, to be sure. We owe to the feminists, Anita Hill’s supporters, the genuine discovery that sexuality resembles thought. They made this discovery unwittingly, though it evolves naturally from the premises. For sex is from secare, to cut, to divide. Here we are with our endless cutting and dividing and distinguishing and separating. Where, oh where, is the unity of Relation that can make all these divisions tolerable?

After it was all over Anita Hill could say, of the Senators who questioned her, that “Because I and my reality did not comport with what they accepted as their reality...” (American Spectator, December 1992) Here is a soul divided into a multitude of fragmented parts. She could more truthfully have said, “My name is legion,” like that demon-possessed man spoken of in the New Testament. American “private morality” has collapsed into private realities. The collapse revealed the terrifying absence of common ground.

Thus do I say that the real issue of the Anita Hill business was not sexual harassment but a modern variant of demon possession. It is the inability of different persons to agree upon a common world, not so much of fact, but of discourse, or reason. In such a common ground lies the only hope by which the unequal struggle of human sexuality (unequal for both men and women at different times and in different ways) can be transformed into something worth affirming. For otherwise, all manner of hell is let loose, not the least of which is the fury of scorned women.

IX. An Early 19th Century Duel between a Lady and a Gentleman.

Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president, John Adams, was a great lady duellist. She challenged the third president, Thomas Jefferson, and the letters they exchanged are appended to the two-volume set of letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

My attention was drawn to Abigail Adams through Fawn Brodie’s biography of Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. This book was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1974. This book is upwards of 500 pages, written by a professor of history at a California university, heavily footnoted, bibliographied, and indexed, and published by a reputable commercial firm.

All of these filters seemed to guarantee that some residue of historical truth would seep through. I had no idea of the book’s reputation nor any reason to distrust its presentation or its arguments. After all, books do not carry warning labels, though perhaps this job could be added to that of the weary office of Surgeon General. But Fawn Brodie’s book presented the occasion for a contemporary, and ongoing, duel among scholars regarding the reputation of Mr. Jefferson.
It all began back in 1802, when an unscrupulous newspaperman, James Thomson Callender, published stories about Jefferson’s slave mistress, Sally Hemings. Jefferson was president at the time. In the previous Federalist administration of John Adams, Callender had viciously attacked the Federalists, been tried under the Sedition Law, imprisoned, and fined. As president, Jefferson repealed the Sedition Law, released Callender from prison, and promised to pay his fine.

The money was slow in coming. In the end Jefferson paid some of it out of his own pocket. In the meantime Callender was nursing his grievances and duly responded by attacking Jefferson, circulating as facts certain rumors then current in Charlottesville.
It is true that children of mixed race were being born on the Monticello mountaintop. In The Jefferson Scandals (1981) Virginius Dabney examines the case and gives a convincing argument why the paternity of these children should not be ascribed to Jefferson. He invited Mrs. Brodie to respond to his arguments, but by the time his book was published, this lady had unfortunately died.

Fawn Brodie’s belief that the stories published by Callender were true thus remained unchanged thanks to the silence of the grave. In her biography of Jefferson she argues that Jefferson had an affair with Sally Hemings lasting some thirty-eight years, beginning from the time of his diplomatic residence in France.

Here is Jefferson the frustrated widower who finds solace and “years of private happiness” in the arms of his faithful slave, dusky Sally.

It’s beyond belief, of course, but a mountain of historical untruth is easier to swallow than a molehill. But Jefferson’s was not the only character ground to bits by Fawn Brodie’s ax. In a minor but very revealing way Abigail Adams was also defamed by Brodie, and it is this I want to address.

Jefferson the third president and John Adams, the second, were of opposing political parties. These and other differences drew them apart, and for many years they did not communicate. They had had, in previous years, especially during their respective sojourns in Europe, a cordial relationship.

When Jefferson’s daughter Maria Eppes died in 1804, aged 25, Abigail Adams wrote to Jefferson a letter of condolence. A correspondence then ensued, very honest and forthright between the two, and unknown to John Adams. Fawn Brodie: “Abigail, no doubt taking enormous secret delight in carrying on a political debate with the President of the United States without her husband’s censorship.” Remember, dear Reader, that Abigail Adams was not an adolescent girl, but the wife of a former president and mother of another. Thus does Fawn Brodie cast aspersions.

Jefferson, in responding to this letter, made a “restrained but certain gesture” (Brodie’s words; no quarrel there) towards repairing the friendship. He mentioned at the end it was only Mr. Adams’ midnight appointments of district judges, just prior to his own administration, that he, Jefferson, considered as “personally unkind.”

In response Abigail Adams explained the circumstances of these appointments, exonerating of her husband of any personal animus against Jefferson. She then said, “I have never felt any emnity towards you Sir for being elected president of the United States. But the instruments made use of, and the means which were practiced to effect a change, have my utter abhorrence and detestation, for they were the blackest calumny, and foulest falshoods. . .”

The reference is to Callender, who began his rabid attacks against the Federalists in 1797. Abigail Adams reproached Jefferson for liberating “this wretch,” Callender, from prison and for remitting his fine. “When such vipers are let lose upon Society, all distinctions between virtue and vice are levelled.” She noted too that, “The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him.”

This hardly sounds like the reproach of one likely to give credence to Callender’s stories, but to Fawn Brodie apparently it does. Brodie omits altogether Abigail Adams’ criticisms of Jefferson with respect to his annulment of the Sedition Law. Jefferson, in his reply, did put this action of his in a more plausible light.

Mrs. Adams in reply did get down to the one thing she found it hard to forgive Jefferson for, and that was his removal from minor offices of a group of persons among whom was her son, John Quincy Adams. Jefferson in reply clarified the circumstances of this business, -- saying that he had no knowledge that young John Quincy held this office -- to which in response Mrs. Adams was able to say at last that her fears of personal unkindness of Mr. Jefferson with respect to the Adams family were “all together unfounded.”

To Fawn Brodie the entire correspondence seems to hinge upon Jefferson’s guilty secret. Here is her final quotation from Abigail Adams:

"Having once entertained for you a respect and esteem, founded
upon the Character of an affectionate parent, a kind master, a
candid and benevolent Friend, I could not suffer different political
opinions to obliterate them from my mind, and I felt
the truth of the observation, that the Heart is long, very long in
receiving the conviction that is forced upon it by reason.
Affection still lingers in this bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight."

Fawn Brodie sums it all up as follows:

"Callender, it seems, had opened to her the terrible truth -- Jefferson was not an affectionate parent nor a kind master nor a candid and benevolent friend. What she feared when she first saw Sally Hemings in London had come to pass; Jefferson had betrayed his slave, his daughters, and his friend, Abigail Adams, who had genuinely loved him.Thus she cried out in protest, not only for herself and for white women generally, but also for every married woman to whom this gentle, gallant widower had managed to communicate the feeling that she was peculiarly important in his life. . ."

Here is Abigail Adams reduced to a character in a soap opera suffering the pangs of unrequited love, Jefferson the Don Juan of two continents leaving a chain of broken hearts behind him, his daughters the victims of paternal neglect, and the affairs of state nothing more than a melodrama of blighted affection.

To return to the real world, allow me to quote the very next sentence of Abigail Adams’ letter, which follows upon the word, “flight,” quoted above:

"It was not until after circumstances concured to place you in
the light of a rewarder and encourager of a Libeller whom you
could not but detest and despise, that I withdrew the esteem I
had long entertained for you."

There you have it. Abigail Adams’ intelligent comments on national affairs have been distorted to a degree that can only be considered willfully malicious.

The issue was the Sedition Law. Abigail Adams “expressed the Federalist argument that freedom of speech and of the press could be defined only by the English common law, and that the First Amendment had not deprived congress of the power to pass a sedition law. The Republicans [i.e., the party of Jefferson] argued that the First Amendment ‘not only rejected the English common law concept of libels against the government, but also prohibited Congress from adding any restraint...’ Smith, Freedom’s Fetters, 136, 140. This note concludes the correspondence between Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, University of North Carolina, 1959, Lester J. Cappon, editor.

The concerns of Abigail Adams have, in Fawn Brodie’s book, been dragged down to the level of James Thomson Callender’s slanders. Those concerns are an early statement, in the context of politics and government, of the essential motif: whether thinking has a moral dimension. Abigail Adams thought that Jefferson’s adherence to the doctrine of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights was too rigid and unbending. Indeed, the phrase “freedom of speech” can be used to discount the moral effects of certain forms of expression, and thereby to undermine the purpose itself of thought and expression: which is, indeed, to have an effect, an impact.

It is thus not those who resist the idea that slander ought to be protected speech who stand by the side of philistinism and narrow-mindedness. Those for whom “Freedom of Speech” is everything are the real emasculators of thought -- the real dogmatists. Those who recognize that thought has impact are more often willing to place some constraints -- if not upon thought, then at least upon expression. Who is the liberal, who the conservative? Do those terms even begin to encompass the ironic implications involved in these positions?

Abigail Adams saw these implications, and she carried out her battle with Mr. Jefferson in the spirit of true knighthood. I commemorate her as a worthy Lady Duellist.

X. The Glow-Worm: A 15th Century Duel

When I was in library school, I took a “History of the Book” course under Dr. Barry Neavill, a scholar in the field of bibliography. Before the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century, books were written by hand. I became an enthusiast of the early Renaissance period in Florence, which was a center for the development of script. The humanists, as they were called, -- the scholars and literary men who were spearheading the revival of classical studies -- were those actively experimenting with writing styles. The humanistic book-hand became the precursor of the later italic and roman type fonts of the printed book.

At that time -- from about 1350 to 1450 -- the revival of classical studies was a matter of some controversy to the Church. That people should read and study the classical pagan authors as a matter of course was not widely accepted. Although many of the respected in the Church were classically educated, such an education took place after a solid grounding in the faith. How the development of the humanistic script played out in the context of this Christian and pagan-classical dialogue became the focus of my particular interest.

The early humanists, scouting the territory for classical manuscripts, found many old texts written in the time of Charlemagne. The humanists were very taken with the beauty and legibility of this old Carolingian script. The “Carolingian renaissance” refers to that earlier revival of learning that took place at the court of Charlemagne; the learned persons who gathered at Charlemagne’s court were greatly occupied with the production and transcription of texts.

The script in usage at the time of the humanists, six hundred years after Charlemagne, was Gothic or its more rounded cousin, Italian rotunda. Anyone who has ever seen a text written in the crowded Gothic script will understand why the poet Petrarch complained, in 1366, that it was so difficult to read.

The Carolingian hand was the fruit of another renaissance, but one quite different from the later Italian one. Walter Ullmann, a medieval and Renaissance scholar, in his essay “Medieval Origins of the Renaissance,” in The Renaissance: Essays in Interpretation (1982) remarked that “It is certainly one of the most remarkable features of medieval and Renaissance historians that they disregard the consequences of man’s own regeneration or renaissance, which he experienced on becoming a Christian.” He describes the Carolingian age as one in which “a whole society was to be collectively reborn on the model of individual baptismal rebirth.”

A very different theory of man and society was working its way through the humanistic renaissance. In the six hundred intervening years, Aristotle had been worked very thoroughly through the mental mills of the Scholastic philosophers (fl. circa 1100-1300). With reference particularly to Aristotle’s Politics, Ullmann commented that “It was the mature expression of a world order conceived in physical terms... man... reacquired a status which through baptismal rebirth he had lost... Within the secular-mundane public order, this renaissance postulated full attention to man as a natural product, as a man of flesh... After centuries of hibernation, unadulterated natural man had acquired an appropriate place in the cosmological order.”

To Petrarch, these “centuries of hibernation” were called the “Dark Ages” because in that era, “it was not man himself who directed the path of history. It was baptismally reborn men... who were moved (or said to have been moved) by divinity and by norms not of their own making.”
What, then, Ullmann asks, was that which in the Italian renaissance was reborn? It was not just classical studies. “The object of rebirth was nothing other than man himself.”

Evidently, a new theory of civilization had to be devised. A new explanation was needed for collective life, for how people get along in society, for what constitutes a citizen.
Hence humanistic studies. To our ears humanistic studies refer to nonscientific ones -- the humanities simply, literature, language, history, philosophy, etc. But to the humanists, the studia humanitatis were simply those distinguished from the studia divinitatis. Humanistic studies were concerned with “the human substance of unregenerated man.”

Nowadays, of course, we think of humanistic studies as belonging to a more regenerate part of human nature, the part that can acquire a liberal education, think freely on most subjects, and acquire an open, inquiring mind. The change in meaning is very significant and illustrates the new theory of civilization that was taking shape. It was to be the quest for learning and the re-appropriation of the classical past which would lead man to transcend his instincts and become a citizen of his city and the world.

This is the context in which we need to understand the pagan-Christian dialogue. The question was not merely whether people should read pagan works. It was rather -- What is man? And how should society be organized? What is to be the animating idea of the new civilization?
One of the persons troubled by the progress of classical studies was a monk living at San Miniato near Florence. He wrote to a pupil of Coluccio Salutati, one of these humanists, trying to dissuade him from pursuing these studies. Salutati (1330-1406) is credited with being one of the founders, if not the founder, of the revived Caroline script. Salutati’s reply to this monk, on January 25, 1405, is, according to B.L. Ullman, one of the important documents of early humanism. (Confusingly, two Renaissance scholars have very similar names. This remark from B.L. Ullmann, Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 1955.)

Coluccio in this letter devotes close attention to the question of metaphorical or figurative language. (Some of Culuccio’s letters are gathered in Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny in the Italian Trecento, Harvard, 1925.)

“Do you not see that sacred literature, the whole body of Holy
Scripture, is, rightly considered, nothing else in its method of
expression than poetry? For, when we are speaking of God or
of incorporeal beings, nothing is literally true, but beneath that
surface of fiction there is nothing that is not true.”

Coluccio comments, for example, on the passage in Scripture where it says “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and says, “How can a corporeal act be reported of the spirit of God which is an incorporeal thing?”

We are seeing, as if through a microscope, the decline of the ancient participation. Thoughts are diverging from things. Indeed, figurative language would be an important tool for persons who no longer inhabit a participated world. The literal interpretation of Scripture is indeed an absurdity in such circumstances. Owen Barfield reminds us that in a participated world phenomena carry “the sort of multiple significance which we today find only in symbols.” (Saving the Appearances, 1965, p. 74.) But already by Coluccio’s time this participated world was considered old-fashioned.

And again, the loss of the old participation would give added force to the humanist arguments about the worth of classical studies. These studies, embracing rhetoric, poetry, and all types of figurative expression, would only serve, in their minds, to preserve the Christian faith. For the truths of dogma would be reached over the bridge of metaphor.

Upon reception of Coluccio’s letter, the monk of San Miniato turned for reinforcement to another monk, one Giovanni Dominici -- a man, says Emerton, “of wide learning but of the old school.” Dominici, a Dominican monk living at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, believed that pagan literature should be studied only by persons sufficiently grounded in the faith. He was a zealous promoter of the idea that the education of youth should be a Christian enterprise. Only after the establishment of Christian character could youth be entrusted with the ‘dangerous charms’ of the pagan authors.

This monk, Father Dominici, wrote a long treatise in 1405 which he dedicated to Coluccio Salutati. In responding to this challenge, the worthy monk sat down and wrote nothing less than a whole book -- an act which merits if nothing else a page or two in the annals of verbal duelling. Called the Lucula noctis, “The Glow-Worm” (or alternatively, “The Fire-Fly”) it is a work of 47 chapters, each chapter beginning with a letter in the sequence Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebre eam non comprehenderunt. In 1908 this work was edited for the first time by a French Dominican in honor of his fifteenth-century colleague, a text later published in 1940 as Iohannis Dominici lucula noctis in the Notre Dame series of medieval studies.

According to Emerton, “A cursory examination of the ‘Glow-worm’ leads one to have every sympathy with the modern editor, whose loyalty to the memory of his Dominican colleague cannot conceal the tedious barrenness of his task. A glimmer of sense in the darkness of a huge mass of unrelated metaphysical elaborations indeed is this last protest of a defeated cause.”

But if nothing else, in the annals of duelling lost causes hold an honored place. According to Edmund Hunt, editor of the Notre Dame edition, Dominici in Scholastic fashion set out all the humanist arguments before proceeding to combat them. Coluccio, at any rate, admired the thoroughness with with Dominici set out the humanist arguments, and he responded --

“Vidi, venerabilis in Christo pater, librum tuum verum liquidumque
meridiem, qui tenebris non admittit, non, ut ex humilitate nuncupas,
Luculum noctis...opus quidem ingens... "

“I have read your book, venerable Father in Christ, and find in it
a veritable splendor of noonday in which is no darkness at all,
and not, as you in your modesty call it, ‘A light shining in the
darkness,’ ... truly an enormous work...

Other scholars have commented on The Glow-Worm, from which in closing I quote a few representative passages:

---Nancy Streuver (1970): “... the attack of Giovanni Dominici on poetry which Salutati attempted to repel is one aspect of a conservative reaction to the growth of a lay culture...”

---B.L. Ullman (1955): “The war against medievalism was in part fought on this front and the direction that the Renaissance was to take was partly determined by these early forays.”

---Charles L. Stinger (1977): “[Dominici’s] lengthy attact on classical studies... used a systematic Scholastic format and rigorous dialectical argumentation to assert as illicit any education based on the classics... This extended controvery over the study of the classics marks a decisive phase in the growth of humanism...”

But in my view only Walter Ullmann got to the nub of what was going on. This is from his essay previously cited (1982):

“The opponents of a new scheme sometimes highlight
its essence much better than its own advocates,
because they apprehend the implications much
more directly... A good example at the turn of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries is the fiery, anti-humanist Cardinal Johannes
Dominici: he had no quarrel whatsoever with the ‘revival of the
classics’ or the imitation of classical writings, or aestheticism and
the like, but concentrated his fire on the real issues of humanism,
its secular-mundane-human aspects which involved an entire
reorientation and intellectual revolution, with far-reaching
consequences in the social and political fields. Here too there is
a passionate advocacy of the cherished and time-honored
principles of totality, unipolarity, and universality.”

XI. Charm: The Metaphysics of Duelling

I promised to think about charm. The good monk Fra Dominici failed to measure up in this respect, according to Ephraim Emerton, who characterized The Glow-Worm as a tedious mass of barren metaphysical speculation.

As one unfortunately deficient in Latin, I am not in a position to agree or disagree. It would be interesting to inquire of Mr. Emerton whether he thinks that metaphysical speculation is by nature charmless, or whether the charmlessness of The Fire-Fly is due to a reason other than the preoccupations with metaphysics.

One thing that almost all modern persons seem to agree on, is that metaphysical philosophy is obsolete. Like getting around on horseback, modern man with his internal combustion engines has no need of it. The only places where one is apt to encounter metaphysics are in the pages of New Age publications and advertising flyers, where for a hefty fee one may sit at the feet of someone who can tell you that All is One. Gurus are the only people who still teach metaphysics with a straight face, and usually for no additional fee they will throw in meditation and angelology to boot.

But, given the low repute for metaphysics in the world at large -- that meaning the world of fashionable opinion -- it is no wonder that, like theology (the only branch of knowledge lower on the scale even than metaphysics) it has emerged in a multitude of disguises. Metaphysics comes masked in the language of science, as political ideology, as literary theory, as reigning doctrine, -- which no one thinks to question with the honest tools of thought. How can one question the metaphysics of people who eschew metaphysics? At best they will let you argue with their facts or interpretations. What is the swordsman to do, given these shifting sands?

Where metaphysical assumptions are not debated -- that is, the Big Questions --all debate is in danger of becoming dishonorable. It becomes a contest for power rather than truth and contributes to inflexibility and hardening of the mind -- a condition which not even the most strenuous, purposeful and tactful swordsmanship can rectify. Because the presupposition of all verbal swordsmanship is that ideas have the power to change people’s minds -- a presupposition that both parties must share: the verbal duellist by his affirmation of it and the opponent by his resistance to it. Like the stolid matron who threw out the baby because the bathwater was dirty, the modern intellectual is attentive at all times to proprieties, not realities. Paradox, belief, reverence, conscience, imagination, feelings of mystery, gratitude, appreciation, reverie -- these are all improprieties, to be done out of the house by this new breed of loaf-baker who is four-square prose in all her corners.

XII. Charm, continued: The Metaphysics of Formality

Modern people have agreed that it is better to be informal and casual than formal and dignified. This belief follows directly from our refusal to entertain metaphysics. Casualness and spontaneity are anti-metaphysical.

The verbal duellist challenges this doctrine by regarding reality as anything but casual and the language he employs as ever capable of being polished and perfected as a fit tool of accuracy and expression. His language is formal, dignified, colorful, courteous, forceful, highly literate, and even charming. He is thus like a china-shop in the bull-ring of ideas.

Charm, generally speaking, can only occur in participatory universe. When two things meet and form a third, that is charming. Courtship and the formation and the wetness of water follow this law, which is why they are both charming. But a single individual, or isolates like hydrogen and oxygen, are not charming. They simply are what they are: which is to say, they are not what they are. For how can a being be when “not-ness” is everything else? What are you, if you are altogether surrounded by a not? You cannot be. You can be only when you have a bond, a link: an “is-ness” which is your drawbridge out of the not.

This is called, in philosophic terms, predication, and a mighty important thing it is too. Hillis Miller, the deconstructionist, says that “is” derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “lost in a forest.” How typical of the deconstructionist to produce an etymology that no one else has ever heard of. My copy of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary informs me that “is” derives from a word that means “dwelling.” This makes a lot more sense. “Is” is our pathway to shelter, to a dwelling-place. That we may make a multiplicity of dwelling-places in the course of a day or a century does not militate against the integrity and utility of our shelters. It only suggests that nomadism is a feature of our intellectual history as of our social: thinking, like certain wandering desert tribes, resists the too-fixed abode.

To say that styles of dwelling-places change over the years is also not equivalent to saying that language, being a tissue of metaphor, refers to nothing real. It is only to suggest that we dwell in a tent until the roof leaks; but the point is not to be tentless. St. Thomas Aquinas was aware of the dimension of linguistic or perceptual subjectivity: “quicquid recipitur, secundum modum recipientis recipitur,” “Whatever is received, is received according to the mode of being of the receiver;” and “cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognoscentis,” “What is known is in the mind of the knower according to his mode of being.”

St. Thomas here enunciates the law of charm, of participation; and identity is nothing without charm, which is to say, identity is null without participation. The law of charm is the real reason why things get started and keep going in this world. It is the movement of participation from stability into identity, from the universal into the particular -- the golden thread that runs through language as the world.

Consider the example provided by Wilbur M. Urban, author of Language and Reality (1939) -- “Mary sleeps.” This would seem to be a particular, he says. But no: Mary perceived must be Mary walking, running, writing, etc. “The individual Mary is a universal, as a connecting link of her own varying states.”

It was the earlier nominalism that denied the reality of universals. The new nominalism -- Urban presciently says, for remember, this was years before Deconstruction -- denies the reality of individuals. It eventuates in a “pan-fictionalism, according to which to name a thing is to turn it into a fiction.”

This new nominalism is correct in knowing that language has the power to charm. Many of these new nominalists and Deconstructionists write charmingly while laboring under the belief that charm has nothing to do with reality. There, their nominalism draws the line. Charm for its own sake, isolated charm: a contradiction in terms. Lucifer knows about charm of language and he has taken it upon himself to appropriate all charm for himself. He is the charming devil, he is the one with devilish charm. Did he not promise to Christ the vision of all the kingdoms of this world in a moment of time? Was that not the temptation of panoptical vision, to see all of history merely as merely a “history of style”?

Satan, on the other hand, knows what knowledge of the law of charm would do to his kingdom. It would destroy it. Full knowledge of the law of charm -- the law of participation -- would cause all of his victims to become self-responsible citizens. For this reason he has stolen all the charm from men’s minds and buried it under the polar ice caps.

Only Christ knows the full story of the law of charm. And because he exemplified and embodied it to the full, being both Man and God, he could tell it, or let it be told through him. Spiritual truth, when read by man, is read in reverse -- once again, an example of the “strange logic of reversal.”

That is why the true story of the charm of the universe was told in terms of the most unimaginable suffering, of the deepest and most penetrable crucifixion.

XIII. Winning and Losing

“It matters not if you win or lose, but how you play the game.” This was an old maxim of honor which was meaningful to the extent that there was a place, in the society of Ladies and Gentlemen, for honorable failure. It was not losing, but cheating, that caused one to be expelled from the right society -- like that well-born rogue in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia who was banished from that city for cheating at cards. He ended by making a name for himself in Savannah, hardly the Wild West, liberal enough to overlook the peccadillo but genteel enough to appreciate the pedigree.

Honor, being allied with the blood, bridged both failure and success. It takes, as someone remarked, three generations to make a gentleman. Time is factored into the bloodline, in much the same way that it is factored into the making of cheese or wine. It is mellowness that yields the best flavor.

The modern swordsman is unprotected by such customs having to do with life and bloodlines. It may be a trivial observation, but two of the most popular mass-circulation magazines in America are named Time and Life. Time and life, fallen from the mode of custom, came back in this way as mediators of the popular culture. But as long as the Code of Honor formed the nest for the eagle of cognition in the boughs of the Tree of Life, the eagle could not do too much damage. Wars and rumors of wars, to be sure: but not the end, not the annihilation of everything. But the American Eagle has flown the nest, and the question is, whether Honor, loosened from life, can be grafted to Cognition. What cognition has to grapple with is the idea of continuity itself.

The divergence of Thought from Life has come to a head in our time over the abortion issue. That the freedom to destroy one’s young should be touted as a constitutional right, that it should be hailed as a grand new liberation, surely must rank in the wonders of independent thought. Independent from everything, that is: anti-thought, the idea of “not-ness” masquerading as thought. Modern cognition has long been accompanied by the notion of liberation from history. The moderns, so it is believed, discovered Reason and therefore Progress. Nothing therefore need impede the march of Better to Better.

Cognition without ideas relating to continuity, birth, death, resurrection, metamorphosis, becoming, growth, etc. becomes mere intellectualism. There is no life of the mind in such circumstances. The totalitarian intellect destroys all that would give it fertility and life: memory, honor, faith, eccentricity, charm, rootedness, manners, distinction, difference.

Thus is abortion the political expression of this totalitarian intellect, in which the idea of “un-bornness” is equated with that of “context.” For what is a human being, apart from the context of family life, law, language, civilization, culture. Not much -- not much more than a “piece of tissue.”

Roe v. Wade gave to the woman the right to choose whether the child would live. The role of the male, the vote of the male in the decision, was completely disregarded. Giving men no say in an abortion decision was an anti-biological, anti-family idea, an insidious intrusion of the State into the male-female partnership.

A second major consequence of Roe v. Wade was that the State would no longer consider itself duty-bound to protect the weak. It thus pulled the rug out from under its own moral justification for existing. It was not only that a phase of human life was declared beyond legal protection. In principle it was weakness itself which was declared unworthy of protection. Roe v. Wade enshrined anarchy as law when it gave the strong the right to destroy the weak.
Thus did America forsake the rule of law when it welcomed abortion rights to its bosom. It is the war of all against all: putting women above the law, men outside the law, and unborn children beneath the law. Abortion has been, and will continue to be, the focus of many of our national duels. It is the political revelation of the cognitive process in the act of destroying itself.

XIV. Unconsummated Duels

There are duels that never take place or that occur only in imagination. The challenges I addressed to three opponents were unresponded to -- one being answered, it is true, but not on terms I would characterize as honorable duelling; the others not answered at all. This raises the question of whether Unresponsiveness is a characteristic of our age -- not as a psychological quality but as metaphysical condition. The responsiveness I mean is a metaphysical position with respect to the world of thought.

There is a difference between a psychological and a metaphysical need. Responsiveness to the world of thought is a metaphysical need having to do with the perception of the seamless nature of that world. Responsiveness in a psychological sense discharges itself in the need for intimacy, for “sharing.” In a metaphysical sense it may take the form of announcing opposition, of demanding clarification. It seems to be the opposite of “sharing.”

That is because, in perceiving the seamless nature of thought, the verbal duellist may encounter “holes” in that fabric of thought, places where the fabric of thinking may need to have something restored to it. But as I have discovered, most of the people to whom I have addressed these challenges of restoration have not been willing to engage. This raises the question, for me, of the nature of the unconsummated duel. According to my premise, the seamless fabric of thought may yet benefit from my having added my own thoughts to the matter at hand. Unfortunately I do not gain the satisfaction of a duel honorably carried out. But perhaps in some sense the thought-world is better for my having tried.

The people who refuse to meet my challenge are all contemporaries. Theoretically it is possible to define the point of honor, dispatch a challenge, and carry through with a duel with a contemporary. But it is not possible to do this with human beings who lived before us -- who are not contemporaries. For some people, and for some circumstances, it is history itself which is the stage of the unconsummated duel.

Let us look, then, to an historical example of the unconsummated duel, and see what we can find. There is the interesting case of Julian the Apostate who, when he died, is said to have uttered the words: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” His was a duel with Christ -- with the victory of Christ in history. Here indeed is a worthy unconsummated duel -- a duel over a grand cause!

Julian, half-brother to Constantine the Great, felt the loss of the old empirical mysticism of the pagan cults very keenly. Upon Constantine’s death in 337 A.D., the palace of intrigue in Constantinople, the seat of the Empire, geared up to mass slaughter. All of the male relatives of the royal family were murdered with the exception of Julian (then about six years of age) and his half-brother Gallus. All of the others were considered to present a threat to the throne.
According to the Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Julian, “Embittered by this tragedy, lost all belief in Christianity.” By then Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire. The happiest moments in Julian’s later youth occurred when he spent some time in Athens studying Greek philosophy. Later recalled to the life of a soldier, he went to the north of Europe and subdued the Frankish tribes along the Rhine. At Sirmium on the Danube he declared himself a pagan.

History did not stop for him; in 361 he became Emperor -- “which opened up to him the government of the world.” He adopted a policy of toleration towards Christians and Jews, but tried to reinstate the Mysteries to their former place of honor.

It did not work, and his life was short. He was mortally wounded by a spear-thrust to his liver -- some say by one of his own men -- while on a military campaign in Persia in the summer of 363.
The Jesus of history could not satisfy the burning thirst of this worshipper of the sun-god, who was allied, in mysterious ways, with the Old Gods Underground. Jesus had claimed history: but what was to become of nature and the cosmos? Julian tried to coax from grove and grotto the old superearthly music. He became an initiate in the Greek Mysteries of Eleusis, whose secrets, we are told, were to be revealed only on pain of death.

But the world had been turned upside down -- or perhaps inside out -- and Nature was god-haunted now, not god-filled. In the salveless, dissatisfied soul of Julian, the Old Gods Underground flared up one last time. But it was the end.

It was already past the end. Expansion cannot get along with contraction; and Julian did not like Paul the Apostle, who proclaimed the teaching of the new Christian inwardized consciousness. Thus in a manner of speaking Julian’s was a three-way duel: with Christ in the background, but against St. Paul in the forefront. Though also, in a manner of speaking, a one-way duel, as St. Paul lived three hundred years before him. It would as though one of us were to pick a quarrel with the men of the Enlightenment -- which, as it happens, happens all the time.

This Paul, or Saul as he was then called, could not know that as he plodded in the sands toward Damascus that the old pagan ekstasis -- that is, the soul’s leaving the body during clairvoyant perception --was about to be superseded by the new principle of indwelling brought on by Christ. And that, moreover, he, Paul-to-be, was to become the chief instrument whereby this transformation would be accomplished.

He was on his way to Damascus still “breathing threats and murders” against the Christians, to carry on his persecutions. He never made it. Rather, he was overthrown, his purposes ground to bits and scattered. The gnostics had a saying about being crushed in the teeth of wild beasts, to emerge as the pure bread of Christ. Maybe those teeth belonged to his own murderous self; but in any case it is a vivid image for Paul. From this cryptic beginning he emerged to become, according to Albert Schweitzer, “the patron saint of thinking in Christianity.”

Through Paul, conscience, synderesis, “the essence of the soul which unites with God,” and syneidesis, “the awareness by man of the cooperation of invisible higher beings” (Emil Bock’s definitions) were enunciated. “For his [i.e. Paul’s] Christian mind the historical Event of Christ’s death-resurrection has the power of myth to transform man’s life, lifts history to a new level while remaining absolutely historical,” says Andrew Welburn. Resurrection becomes the principle of transformation. It was, says Welburn again, a concept “far more subtle and intelligent than the bizarre doctrine of the standing corpses of the later Church.”

Perhaps only Death itself -- or rather, Resurrection -- could become the mediating principle between two such opposing parties -- the Apostle and the Apostate, Contraction and Expansion. Only an esoteric deepening, the inwardizing of pagan empirical mysticism allied with historical consciousness, could bring the reconciliation Julian never experienced. His short life is a monument to the unconsummated duel.

XV. The Angel with the Flaming Sword

I still have not said much about winning. I would be committing a sentimental falsehood if I offered an easy promise of victory. “In sorrow wilt thou bring forth children,” says God to Eve. “In striving wilt thou bring forth failures,” says the Angel with the Flaming Sword to his followers. But I would be likewise sentimental and false if I pretended to despise winning.
The sickness of the modern world of cognition is such that winning a verbal confrontation has a whole new meaning. To win is to get someone to engage with you. To win is to get someone to play the game according to the rules. To win is to get someone to see that walking away from the engagement is losing.

The Angel of the Flaming Sword accompanies us all through history as St. Michael -- “the great prince of all the angels and the leader of the celestial armies.”

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable continues with this description --

“In art St. Michael is depicted as a beautiful young man with
a severe countenance, winged, and clad either in white or armour,
bearing a lance and shield, with which he combats the dragon.
In the final judgment he is represented with scales, in which he
weighs the souls of the risen dead.”

Indeed, St. Michael’s sword is the sword of pure intelligence:

“Its purity is that of pure light. It has a sure force which contains
in itself no violence, a freedom which radiates sincerity yet
contains no license, and endless power of giving, in which is
no weakness.” F. Rittelmeyer, Meditation.

Honorable swordsmanship exists in perfect counterpoint to the evil in the world that it is combatting. Evil is the triumph of a momentary success which cannot last. Verbal swordsmanship, an effort which more often than not is crowned with failure, forms that history of memorable and remembered deeds which is the reservoir that civilization draws upon. It is its spiritual capital, the transformations of failure into fruitfulness.

The iron in our physical bodies is the result of self-sacrifice. It is one of those heavier elements that is created only when a star heats up to the point where its own destruction results. The supernova explosion allows for the creation of elements needed for a second generation of stars.
Likewise, the spiritualized iron of St. Michael’s intelligence has been forged in stars that lived long before our own sun. His sword of intelligence is planted in the earth where sacrifice can be mysteriously transformed into fulfillment. For this reason verbal swordsmanship lasts forever. And may this thought be

The End
of this book.

2010-03-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

This is the origin of the title of this blog:

TO A SOBER PASSION

God, defend me from the poets
Who say all the rules are dead.
Unseen rules run underground
Along each deep connecting root,
Stronger still for being mute.
Talking no longer carries quite the air
Of fruitful suffering or of dereliction,
Just self-winding monologue,
Thrown to people who think they listen.

May God grant a little sober passion!---
To carry across the soul’s wound
And let it lick its own in private,
Away from the beneficient glare
Of what’s left of the book-buying public.
Train up interests to outrun mere self;
Give the grace to listen to someone else.
Hunger, eat; need, think; speak, communicate:
Here’s the state I’m in and I will keep it,
If only you, sober passion, will sometimes visit.

2007-02-25T06:43:00.000-08:00

STORYTELLER IN TIMES SQUARE
With Linda Sussman, 9 August 2002

On the night before the play began,
The story Ovid told in Metamorphoses,
We strolled the half-hour in Times Square,
Beneath tall buildings where convergent streets
Opened in a spoon-shaped gap.
Crowds swarmed everywhere ---
All the living poured into these streets
To learn transactions of the air,
From souls to bodies, from air to ground,
And back to neon throbbing atmosphere---
All exchanges are now commercialized,
With bodies and souls undergoing
The transforming traffic of the financial,
With the compound interest from the old
Persisting, multiplying and potential.
Yet, curiously enough,
Bright legends still cash up undisguised,
Like the giraffe’s head, floating in the dark
Above the Toys-R-Us, streaming
Pure liquid longing from its eyes --
---- Canyoned advertisements,
Disgorged in steel, concrete, air and light,
To thousands under the pulsating signs
Of their garish electrified and spouting hulks,
As if the terrible lizards had come down
To suck the last geysers of the Carboniferous . . .
We hurry on.
Perhaps to come---
This saurian luxury will be tamed by vigilance
That first has tamed the beast within----
For you turned, and with a dwelling look,
Said---“All this, what it means to be aware,
I feel I’m kind of in a trance. . .
My senses cannot advertise – all this!”
And I too spun in all this circumstance,
But watched you standing and unwinding
Clues of thousands of threads, gesturing,---
“All these people and their stories, here!”
To unbewitch old Chaos from her ancient stare,
And free Perseus from stumbling in his fear.

2.

Cave paintings, Dordogne:
Every muscular tension shone
Against fire below ground;
Sinew, horn, hoof, and gut,
All the swallowing followed
Whole and carefully walled
In pigment, paint, and juice of nut;
What you need ranges in the brush.
Steadying need strengthens dart;
Hunger drives each brush-stroke.
The prey that runs above was art
Before empty innards filled.

3.

Energy in economy translates into money,
As money into selling, as selling into buying,
Of cars and houses and things to fill them in
With easy credit, mounting debt,
Mortgages cheaply bought and steeply rising,
Metamorphoses of energy, source and all,
From marshes filled with peat and slime,
From whence came Oil.

Black Gold,
Richer, blacker, than any heart-of-dark,
A magical El Dorado Negro,
Rainbow bridge and Scarlet Woman,
She who holds a book with secret script
Where all may read and add their line or two. . .

But here the storyteller pauses and is unsure.
“There is a square in time’s tapestry,
Cut out by some marauding host.
Is this the ghost of the old and singing unicorn,
The one captured on the tapestried wall,
But now removed, no longer there? Lost,
Head bent down and wounded mortally? . . . “

4.

As a child you played at cowboys
And Indians with the best of them;
Until the sun sloped into the westering sky
And your companions left, one by one,
To go to school, to marry, or to die.
In those last sunsets of childhood
Great wild horses are rounded into pens,
And flame-like clouds trim sail, sail by.
There is a tinge to everything that passes,
And they go, not face-to-face, not looking,
The sun sometimes glinting off their glasses.

5.

When I first came to see you,
We walked into Lower Manhattan
Where the World Trade Center had once been.
“It looks now much like any building project,”
You said, “The site does not reveal
What once happened here… except for these,”
And we turned towards St. Paul’s Church,
Its railings hung with remembrances:
Drawings, poems, photos, clothes, and shoes,
A variety of all the miscellanies of the world,
Of child and man and animal too.
We circled round the upheaved ground
Shuttered by a running wall, where spy-holes
Opened for people to look on wreckage---
To see, but not to see too much.
Perhaps because there’s so much to see
From any window that looks out on our age,
We’d rather that it keep to small, the aperture,
And not let words go running after vision,
To outrun and overtake it before the end.
But what vision and what end?

We Americans did first
Conceive the soul’s language as a commerce,
And we celebrated ever after that new learning,
Building many towers to commemorate the thought—
Many buildings before and since these two were struck.
So, is their striking-down the blow of justice
Aimed at haughty wealth, the richest empire---
The warning of a warning against all this?
Let us not be haughty with the truth, but walk
Around it quietly as a graveyard where many lie.
We did, perhaps, take too much pride in commerce—
A case of words overtaking vision, and eye-holes
Clouded by self-success. The difference
Between the power to act and an act of power
Is as thin as the thread of conscience
That upholds the love of liberty and law.
To know this difference is the true America.

No, Calvin Coolidge,
The business of America is not business---
Rather, business belongs to that world soul
That longs to make an America of the world—
And this thought walks all the way to the middle
Of the danger, into the very needle’s eye.
Let us thread our way with care, holding
To our slender truth that we must carry through,
And not wax it up for slick dishonest passage.
From the soul of the world America was begotten,
And if we made ourselves greatly after that,
Recall what the world gave to us.
Let us love
The world in all its ways. In patient work
And patient days, let us love and remember
The world is ours because we belong to it---
As those who died belonged to us, and dying,
Want us to remember them and truth.

6.

Emerged from subway cave we joined
Our thronging kind on the streets of light.
The tale-told shadows were singing at our back,
Those story-creatures we saw living in the fire.
The vision sharpened us for going out.
I saw New York through you, Storyteller,
This new surge of an old adventure,
While on mountains in America and the world
Signals from observatories travel through the sky
Looking for the beams, some galaxy, a star,
To tell us why we came and who we are.

2007-02-11T10:14:00.000-08:00

Correction and Update

I received a reply to my letter from Miss Heather MacDonald, and wish to acknowledge my thanks.

2007-01-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

City of Swine: Re Atheists

I sent the following letter to Dr. James Wood, with a copy of the poem on Melville inspired by his book. Any word from him? No.

December 30, 2006
Dr. James Wood
c/o The New Republic
1331 H Street, NW Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 2005

Dear Dr. Wood,
I have followed your writings with interest ever since you published that great article on Melville in The Broken Estate – an article I turned into a poem. I read your review, "The Celestial Teapot," in the Dec. 18 New Republic, and was sorry to learn that you have not been able to recover your faith. Your intellect and discernment place you in a category far above such unfortunates as Dawkins, Dennett, and Derbyshire, yet there is no question but that atheism has become fashionable again. I have to wonder what it is that people see in it? The faults of faith are so obvious that for that reason alone it ought to be enough to abide in it, whereas the faults of atheism never quite reach accountability since atheism denies accountability. I suppose the prevailing positivism causes us to abhor the visible faults of the former while remaining blind to the unseen costs of the latter. In some sublime sense we have yet to understand, the truth of atheism doesn’t matter, whereas even the falsehoods of faith carry the perpetual sad reminders of a losing team – and come down in the end to loyalty more than intellect, chivalry rather than self-interest.

There is eternal destiny, and there is realpolitik – where the latter is concerned, loss of Christian loyalty only serves the Judaic cause. It becomes in this way the intellectual counterpart of debased Protestantism. Which is to say, Christian Zionism for the masses, atheism and liberal ideology for the elites. I am sorry to put the matter so indelicately, so bluntly – how dare I? But I have to wonder why our fashionable intellectual elites are marching so gaily and insouciantly to the tune of ethnic betrayal. I hate to see you, Dr. Wood, being swept along in this whirlwind. You have the capacity to accept atheism – or choose the foxhole.

Sincerely,....

Letter to Heather MacDonald of City Journal,
whose defense of "conservative atheism" has been making the rounds of American intellectual life. Any response from Heather? No.

January 14, 2007
Miss Heather MacDonald
C/o City Journal/ Manhattan Institute
52 Vanderbilt Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10017

Dear Miss MacDonald,
I take the liberty of writing to say how much I appreciated your article in the American Conservative on religious faith, and also the article "God and Man and Human Suffering," which I just downloaded from the City Journal website and read. I too am appalled by the slogans of religious piety so frequently resorted to in so-called conservative religious circles, although, unlike you, I see it as pseudo-Christianity rather than the genuine article, and more in the line of a slick and calculated pretence of religion for political gain. The other possibility, that it to some extent genuine (though full of self-deceptions) and springs (mainly) from a corrupted Protestantism (although there are also opportunistic Catholics as well) I see also as equally likely.

I did not write you to talk about myself. But I will say a few brief things. I am probably a sort of anima naturaliter christiana. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights era (and despite its problems, this era was the last time for the public expression of genuine Christian values in the USA, I think) to secularized Unitarian parents who had migrated from mainline Protestant denominations. My father, having served as a Navy lawyer 20 years previously at the Nuremberg Trials, had had his eyes opened to "man’s inhumanity to man," and became an active supporter of civil rights – a stand that cost him his job in the family law firm. My parents had "Christian hearts" (whatever that means) but like many moderns, the head was elsewhere. Reconciling head and heart became a strong theme of my life. I studied Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, later became a Quaker, and finally, last year, was received into the Catholic Church.

So much for me. My purpose in writing is to address a few points in your excellently-written and lucid essay, "God and Man and Human Suffering" – although, in truth, my remarks would probably apply even more to Mr. Novak, who in my opinion is one of those Catholics who are trying to subvert the faith by bringing Rome’s values in line with those of the American Enterprise Institute. Like you, I am simply unable to reconcile "free will [coexisting] with God’s omniscience and omnipotence…" Nor do I believe that "the Christian concept of God" is as you put it: "that He has absolute power over the world and could make it otherwise in an instant." I feel that both of these characterizations of God as omniscient and omnipotent, or as absolute despot, are fundamentally anti-Christian in concept. What could be a more powerful image of the powerlessness of God than a man nailed to a cross? But neither AEI nor the American conservatives you rightly deplore wish to bring forward this aspect of the divine being. It’s too uncomfortable, and might call into question their neoconservative crusade where God is allied with the worship of the State. This is worse than Constantinian Christianity, or rather it is a Protestantized version of same – without even the "just war" teachings or countervailing concept of religious authority invested in the papacy.

Then you write: "I am going to take it as a Christian truism, then, that God’s will is manifest in the most minute detail of human events. Nothing happens without—at a bare minimum—his ‘permission,’ and everything that happens, in God’s view, is ‘good, and he loves it,’ to use Mr. Novak’s phrase."

I most heartily repudiate Mr. Novak’s glib assertions here, and agree with you, that I want nothing whatsoever to do with this God. But may not the confusion lie in the concept of providence – that is, whether it is personal or impersonal? May I bring your attention to a passage in Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, where she illuminates this problem. She is writing about the loss of Greek science with the advent of official Christianity, and says:

"…A transformation had taken place in religion. I do not refer to the advent
of Christianity. Early Christianity, as we can still find it in the New Testament,
…was, like the Mystery religions of antiquity, perfectly capable
of becoming the central inspiration behind a strictly genuine science. But
Christianity suffered a transformation, probably connected with its
transition to the rank of official Roman religion. After this transformation, Christian thought
… no longer admitted any other conception of divine Providence than that of a personal Providence.
This conception is found in the Gospels, for God is there referred to as the
Father. But the conception of an impersonal Providence, and one in a sense
almost analogous to a mechanism, is also to be found there. "That ye may be
children of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the
evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust…(Matt 5: 45)
Thus it is that blind impartiality characteristic of inert matter, it is that
relentless regularity characterizing the order of the world, and because of
this so frequently accused of injustice—it is that which is held up as a
model of perfection to the human soul. It is a conception of so profound a
significance that we are not even today capable of grasping it; contemporary
Christianity has completely lost touch with it." (pps. 250-251)

There are many other passages in your essay that strike me as worthy of further discussion, but I do not wish to burden you with my thoughts, except to say that it seems to me that the case for Christianity cannot be made in terms of the issue of human suffering. If there is to be a case, it has to be made on the grounds of truth, and truth alone. Anything less seems to me an evasion.

Thank you for reading this far, and let me say again that this "naturally Christian soul" finds much more in your writings to approve than in many of the writings of the "Christians." You may enjoy my blog – http://from-the-catacombs.blogspot.com/ – whose motto is this: "Catacombs: then, where Christians in the Roman Empire hid from rulers who called themselves Gods—Now: those who hope to save Christianity from rulers who call themselves Christian." I invite you to peruse it and leave a comment, should you be moved – you might enjoy the piece I posted just yesterday on Toynbee.

Sincerely,.... etc.

_________________________________________________________________

The "City of Swine" is a metaphor to which the sage historian Arnold J. Toynbee - whose history I am in the process of exploring on my "Catacombs" website -- often adverts. It concerns a brief passage in Plato's Republic -- such a "city" being one in which human beings have all their physical needs met - a "city" without spiritual striving, and lacking excellence.

In the City of Swine, there are atheists and there are believers, and perhaps one may as likely stumble across a responsive atheist as a sullen Christian. Nevertheless, I hereby charge James Wood and Heather MacDonald for behaving like swine, for not giving so much as a token acknowledgement of my letters - my e-mail address having been conspicuously printed in the letterhead of my stationery.

Responsiveness is one of the few redeeming virtues of mankind, and it would be of real value, perhaps, to open a discussion as to the respective influence of religion vs. atheism on the quality of responsiveness. We have, in the current intellectual class of the USA, unresponsiveness magnified and immensified, rationalized, glorified, bloated, self-justified, and "religionified" in the pompous and self-righteous messianic crusades of our bureaucratic class and their intellectual enablers. I don't blame Heather Macdonald and James Wood for their revolt against this insidious national pasttime of glorifying swinishness. But I blame them for merely exchanging the complacent pieties of pseudo- religion for the bland reductions of atheism.

The metaphor of the City of Swine runs right through Western history like a terrible warning - from Homer's Circe to Plato Republic to Orwell's Animal Farm - and doubtless there are others I have forgotten. But apparently Heather MacDonald and James Wood have forgotten the warning. They have both just found a different way to say the same thing. And both have refused to engage the argument-- with me.

2006-12-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

MELVILLE

With thanks to James Wood’s ‘The All and the If: God and
Metaphor in Melville,’ in The Broken Estate: Essays on
Literature and Belief. New York. 1999

Illustration: Julian Horner

His words bathed the fleeting thought, the new-born,
Emerging from "the warmly cool, clear, ringing,
Perfumed, overflowing, redundant days" in the poem
Of America, chasing down the great white whale.
In 1876, only two Americans bought the epic.
Who were they? The question troubles me,
Not the two who did, but the hundred thousands others
Of our countrymen mooned in pyramidal silences
Of things and business. The poetry, inescapable,
Changed the shape of the continent to a destiny,
While mute stumbled over mute, loudly knocking
Out the question--- Is anyone there?--man or God,
Returning on a quakered curve: "Silence
Is the only voice of our God." There were only two
Who purchased hearing.
Or three: for Hawthorne heard.
"It is strange how he persists," he wrote,
"Wandering to and fro over the deserts dismal
And monotonous as these sandhills. He cannot believe,
Nor can he be comfortable with his unbelief. He is
Too honest and courageous not to try
To do the one or the other."
To do the one or other:
Hawthorne’s metaphor of forking.
To pace along the rim of brimming brain,
Between the desert and the ocean,
To think, beholding thought, and think again:
How can the key so tuned to human
So dissound belief and unbelief?
Melville beheld in Chladni figures
Dusting the waves that came to him
Thinking, an image of the desert.
"Is the Judean desolation the result,"—he wrote—
"Of the fatal embrace of Deity?"
James Wood
Disagreed with this, but for once he missed,
And said Melville was merely being
Over-ripe with metaphor. No. It’s not
Merely Melville’s metaphoric swelling---
(For remember the Whale, says Wood:
"Truth kaleidoscopically affronted—
The portly burgher, the Ottoman,
Book, language, script, nation, Sphinx,
The pyramids, God, and Satan---") True,
There’s "a mad persistence to this metaphorizing—"
But the question is, what kind of birth is to the true,
As opposed to all mere making?
It was
No mere metaphor of despairing absence
Or prophecy of millennial drought
That came to Melville in the holy dust;
Even in America the presence is,
Even for Americans busy with their business,
The ground incarnates what is God’s and ours.

2.

In the last chapter of James Wood’s book
There is, as if in musical remembrance,
A cadenza of belief to unbelief.
The youthful author, raised Evangelical
In Church both conventional and charismatic,
Learned to Praise the Lord in school and home
And be called forth for testimonial.
For a child, perhaps a bit too much, he says—But
"Evangelical is most impressive for the intensity
It bestows upon our power to choose . . .
Its apprehensions of momentousness."
Sunshine came into this valley of decision
In the cathedral singing-school; he sang
Day by day against the everlasting fire,
Dispelling the vapors of the born-again
To the cloudless sky of Palestrina,
Purcell, Tallis, Byrd, and Bach,
All the masters of the singing art.
About fifteen, he says, "I tore myself away
From belief in God." With a notebook
And five or six objections: the problem of evil,
Senseless faith, cruelty of hell, dead litanies
Lacking the life of blood, the blood
Paganized through sacrifice.
Even the atheisms are all old, he says.
Life with God is pointless with a purpose;
Life without, pointless also posing
As a purpose. The advantage of the latter:
False purpose you know is man-invented—
You can "strip it away to reveal the actual
Pointlessness."
Longer, though, and more to point,
The argument of the freedom of the will:
Terrible that evil should guarantee real freedom—
Couldn’t God have figured out another way?
"A world without freedom would be God-controlled,
Where God spoke without the need for faith."
But does not the argument resemble this?---
When all controls are put in place
And waking sleep contends with automatic grace,
What’s left to choose? The choice is vain,
And issues into pointlessness again.
The point is not a point, I think;
Our lives are on the line that rings
Allowing interruptions in.
Can I choose not to answer? I have that choice—
But yes or no, there’s still that interruption,
And the cast-off message saved to later check.
Whether God exists or not, belief or unbelief,
Seems to me much the same. A God saved
Into the message machine may still exist,
Even though I listen only to press delete.
It’s still a message that I have to deal with.
If you have a telephone
You have agreed to move from point to line;
That little step--- and you agree to everything,
Including asking whether pointlessness exists.

3.

This argument, you say, seems false—
Comparing God to a ringing phone,
As if we hadn’t heard that call before!
And what of Melville’s God of Silence?
What if you answer and there’s no voice?

4.

True. I doubt that God speaks English
Or any language that I know.
If you’re in doubt just hold the line,
You never know what may be unfolding,
Even if it’s only a recording.
Which it probably will be,
Given that God spoke so long ago.

5.

O.K.—
I grant that old messages still come into our day,
But why hold the line if God’s not speaking now?
Is this not the need of faith to know—time-wise,
That the message, old or new, still counts?
Besides, you have not addressed my main objection,
Which is that God’s a human construction---
Though I took your point that pointlessness
Is no God either.

In the older days when people thought
That man was God’s construction,
The thought stood six millennia, more or less.
Now people say that God’s man-made—
But reverse of prior thought’s still thinking.
And think you must—you cannot help it.
Think on thinking—that’s how you may
Let the overturning heavens have their say.
Let’s round it off, my friend, with Melville,
Alone with thoughts connecting sea to sea,
In metaphoric mind – a man,
Though sadly unbefriended by his countrymen,
And endlessly at sea and far from land.
"He who thinks for himself can never remain
Of the same mind," he wrote, perhaps
Remembering a little of the extinct Pequod,
--- Or some dynamic similar to God.

2006-06-29T05:26:00.000-07:00

VERSALVERE
Thursday, June 29, 2006
“Through the indwelling of the Logos the capacity of cognition has been given to us.” Georg Kühlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos, 1985

The journey that led to the poems began with an act of violent disagreement. I was, in those days – 1984 – still living in the Berkshires and my main circle of friends and interests revolved around the work of Rudolf Steiner – Anthroposophy – which had been built up in the area. There were a couple of Waldorf Schools nearby, several farms, and many business, artistic and educational initiatives arising out of this deep local interest in anthroposophy.I recall attending a lecture, at the Waldorf School in Harlemville, NY – just across the Massachusetts border – given by one Georg Kühlewind, who was a rising star in the anthroposophical lecture circuit. Dr. Kühlewind was a native of Czechoslovakia – I believe – or perhaps of Hungary – and he was a scientist by profession but pursued Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology as a path of philosophical and spiritual deepening. The name “Cool Wind,” was a pseudonym, formed as a protective camouflage against the Soviet bureaucracy. The “Wall” still existed in those days.

Dr. Kühlewind gave a very interesting talk on these epistemological themes and interests, a talk well received by the attentive audience. I did not, I could not, disagree! And in truth I did not – for who can disagree with the call to make the act of thinking experiential - and for the recognition of a superconscious dimension to the mind?" Logos is not word, law, sense, reason, measure, etc. It is everything that makes these possible: a common relationship to the world, a common world. It is the connecting element..."

I do not and did not disagree with this characterization of the Logos from Becoming Aware of the Logos: The Way of St. John the Evangelist --the title of Dr.Kühlewind's book and which I imagine was pretty much the substance of what he spoke about that night. And yet, my first reaction was to break away from this common world. Something stung me – like a burr in my hair or a catch in my throat, or a rash – a violent reaction, one might say, to an idea – which I do not even remember what it was and which, to be perfectly candid, was in all probability, completely unexceptionable.

The lecturer was staying at the home of Christopher Bamford, head of the Anthroposophic Press, and I recall the next day, in a state of continuing agitation, I called Chris’s home and asked to speak to Dr. Kühlewind. I first thanked him profusely for his talk and went on to raise the point that was simmering in my mind in such apparent turmoil – a point which, as I say, I now have no recollection at all. I doubt I made any sense. I may have been completely incoherent. The word may be "inchoate."If I had been older and wiser I might have known that I was having an emotional reaction rather than a philosophical contention. Perhaps one's first reaction to a powerful idea comes about in this seemingly perverse form? - a "turning against" before there can be a "turning around"?

Dr. Kühlewind was perhaps surprised at this excited caller. He remained noncommittally polite, as I recall.A sentence from Dr. Kühlewind’s book forms the epigram or motto to the poems which followed... so many years later: “Through the indwelling of the Logos the capacity of cognition has been given to us.”

To explicate each of these terms – ‘indwelling,’ ‘Logos,’ ‘capacity of cognition,’ ‘ has been given…’ would take volumes, maybe multivolumes – and then, such explanations would leave the reader cold who has not had a corresponding experience whereby the words and concepts would gain meaning for him.Some time after - I do not know when it began - I commenced regular sessions of what I called "recreational visualizations." My notes of these initial experiences are unfortunately lying in an Archive in Birmingham, Alabama, and whether I will be able to recover them is as yet an open question.

But it was during these sessions that the Beings who later took the form in the poems first appeared. I would go into a state of waking sleep, and after each session I recorded my thoughts and experiences in a journal. The Beings who came, came as they were named. The Name and the Being corresponded. But the question that never ceased to occupy me was this: in what sense are these Beings "real"?

Friday, June 30, 2006
What is a gloss?

If anyone is curious about what this blog is about, he or she could do no better than read friend Andrew’s response... Andrew states succinctly what these explorations are about:“Well, a good place to begin seems to be the fact that the word 'poetry'—derived from the Greek word poema
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Monday, July 03, 2006
What’s Not So Good about Dr. Cool Wind

Dr. Cool Wind’s first book was Stages of Consciousness. Here are a couple of quotes from it:
“All our knowledge and information result from and are generated by our activity of thinking and can only be retained, expressed, and communicated in the form of thoughts” (p. 38) and “Thought is not produced out of and through feeling. On the contrary, one has thoughts and these evoke a feeling through their inner content.” (p. 53)

Both of these statements seem to me simply wrong. 'Thought' seems to mean everything, and if thought is everything, it is nothing. And it also seems to me indisputable that feelings and emotions stimulate and provoke thinking – indeed, real thinking may have an emotional undertone - almost like a keynote. Confusions like these seem to have been somewhat mitigated by Dr. Cool Wind's second book, by which time he begins to acknowledge the existence of wordless thoughts. But it was clearly in opposition to the anthroposophical over-emphasis of the cognitive sphere that my first poem was launched – “Grandmother Funda.”

I did not know at the time that the fundus was part of the womb- n : (anatomy) the base of a hollow organ or that part farthest from its opening; "the uterine fundus" –someone later pointed this out to me. But if there is a “sensibility” to be communicated about Grandmother Funda, it is the idea that consciousness is, well, gestational. The nurturing of experiences, feelings, memories, conversations, etc., distil, ultimately, to “ideas,” which are modes of ordering and vision. An “idea,” from the Greek idein, is after all only a “window” – a seeing-into.

Over-emphasis on “ideas” leads to extreme idealism. An insufficiency of the ideal realm, on the other hand, can lead to over-submergence in experience and absence of ordering vision. We need “ideas” to light the way down, the path of winding down, to recollection of concrete experiences.

Thanks to this “motion,” movement – thanks to this “emotion” -- we can remember.Most emphatically I reject the notion that “To have the world before it as an object was given naturally to humanity” – though whether that statement was from his first or second book I cannot recall. On the contrary: we are not presented with an “object.” We are presented with the grey lady ---

Call her
The grey lady of the summer,
A sudden clearing in a swift rain
Or wakeful remembrance in a green wood
Whose paths wind down, always down,
Into the heart of past seasons . . .

It is actually the Grey Lady who calls us. To be a human being is to be called; there is no mere “natural development.” And that moment in the composition of this poem when I changed the first line introducing Grandmother Funda by means of a bland description to that of the imperative – “Call her” – marked a signal moment for me with this poem. It is imperative. It is urgent. And the urgency of the imperative is the epic tone: “Sing to the goddess, O Muse!” Great things are at stake.

And why “grey”? I suppose because all of our experiences ultimately come to be revealed in the “crown of age,”- and even when we are young, we are building up this crown of grey hairs. The “grey lady” brings forth from the chaos of gestational experience the ordering relationships, provided we have accompanied her down into the heart of past seasons. This is my living and poetic reproach against all Cool Windian “deadness” of the past – a point he never tires of hammering because he always wishes to emphasize the “present” or “presence” when the act of thinking is living – or should I say, when thinking is in act.

But it does not follow: the “presence” of thinking in act does not mean that the past is “dead.” For it is by means of this past experience that it becomes possible to think at all – to take and transform what has heretofore been gained up into a new level. Rather than “dead,” one should say that the “past” has not been adequately gestated – that is, remembered, awakened, summoned, made conscious. It means we have refused to offer hospitality to the Grey Lady – and thereby have not fully accompanied the Logos into our past.

Spiritually, the past is all we have. It is the past in which we have endured repetitions, and repetitions of repetitions – which we call learning:

You have been here so many times
You cannot even recall them,
For the words of remembrance
Entered your body long ago: They came into your secret stillness,

And by means of learning, memories:

Flushed from Grandmother Funda’s lap,
A covey of pictures, greetings, signatures,
That she released to you:
At firstShe held them up, and you merely gazed –
While she held them between her two fingers,
To the light, so: and whispering (As the rain, as the wind, whispers)
Remember me.

First of all you need to get to the place of beholding. Being able to see, mark, name, observe, perceive, these experiences, etc. is the first stage, the indispensable beginning to being able to become a knower, that is, a keeper, a steward of ideas. A

nd remember, too, that everything you “hold up to the light” also has the rain and the wind: that is, a certain emotional tone and force. The Grey Lady is a seasonal being -- as all the beings in these poems have their seasons -- of Summer: for at the season of maximum fruitfulness there is also a relinquishing:

Thus they fell
To you: she gave them over, made them yours,
While she passed beyond into them:

“Beyond into” – the mystery of the relationship words. But soon it will be your turn to make fruitful and to relinquish. For by being an individual rememberer, in a specific time and place, there will be – inevitably, I should think – grief and loss.The inner experience of entropy has accompanied human experience in all times and places, but I think since the Industrial Revolution and most particularly since the Oil Age, ushering in the era of Moloch – whether of ideology or economy - this feeling has only grown in intensity.

Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory describes this sense of loss from the Russian angle when he writes that, “I would… submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known.”

“Hoarding up impressions” is something of the activity of the soul under the tutelage of the Grey Lady. But she also teaches us how to let go, with feeling:

Now it is your turn –And you, lingering,
Press them into your mind, crying“This is all I have left of her!-This is all I have!”
In a handkerchief wet with your tears
Crumpled in the bottom of the garden.

This opening piece of “Grandmother Funda” seems to me remarkable in that it was inspired by Cool Wind and yet was wholly oppositional to his way of viewing consciousness and thinking.The Grey Lady subsists in every human experience that manages to integrate feeling, memory and ideas. Recollection of the grandmotherly aspect of experience is the emotional and concrete counterpart to “becoming aware of the Logos.”

Overall, concerning the poems in general: in contrast with many modern poets, who seem to have little philosophy but much complexity and difficulty in their language, I have much philosophy but at the same time, great simplicity and directness in diction and language. I would like to say that in these poems I discovered and was able to bring forth music from thinking, or music in thinking – if it did not sound so immodest. So let me be immodest! – if it means standing for great things!But I have given myself permission-- in these talk-writings, to be proud and reckless. Let others shoot me down – if they wish!

Tuesday, July 04, 2006
ii. A Visit

On a cool summer afternoonI came to Grandmother Funda’s house.
She opened the door to me,
I walkedDown the long hall to her drawing room.
There we drank tea, and had some cakes,
While with the chill of evening coming on
The hearth fire hissed and cracked,
Long into the afternoon and past,
Until night’s shadows rose up in our minds.
She roseTo ring the butler’s bell, but changed --Herself so strange -- to a lizard, sliver-green,
Regarding me from the couch, intent.
I blinked;
Again she changed, and now a lounging youth
In heavy boots and smoking on a tar
Leered at me from the easy chair.
I asked herWhat she meant -- she made as if to speak --
But paused: her being formed into a dome
Curved from hearing into remembrance --
It was a chime of echoes, a ruin of footfalls,
The wrangle of deed with consequence
That she consented to listen to;
To all of this she at last agreed;
She came to herself because she heard.
It was night by now,--
And with such effort as now required,
Not hearing her across from me
But myself her means of sounding
There -- I fell asleep:
While sparks
Went humming beyond my mind into the fire,
And I too dwindled like that ember
Carried by the oval flame of summer night.

Notes --- The human ear:
from Portrait of a Man Standing by Salvador de Madariaga –
"The ear is perhaps the most mathematical of all biological machines. The laws of optics show what an admirable degree of geometrical perfection the human eye has reached; but the ear may be more perfect still, for it is able to place in outer space the sound it perceives in its own inner space. In order to achieve this natural miracle, the ear registers the three coordinates of the spot where the sound vibrated, by means of the three planes into which the inner ear is shaped; and in order to achieve this astounding result the brain instantaneously resolves three differential equations… Musical perception is based on logorithmic laws, the basis for which is established by auditive consciousness. "

From a Notebook (Nov, 2000) I wrote: "Stages from experience to art: the 'meditations' that formed the basis for Pictures from the Speaking Stillness. Clearly, a different order of experience from so-called normal consciousness, but jumbled, confused, and chaotic. Order defined itself as a Being. The second stage: remembering and writing down. Another stage of loss, degradation of energy, inevitable distortion. Filling up notebook pages. Then the thought comes (it was not there in the beginning) to recast all of this into poetry. So after 12 years it emerges with a kind of clarity it never had in its origins."

In this second portion of the Grandmother Funda sequence I seem to be struggling to define or characterize a modern form of 'participation.' The 'transformations' are an old theme of spiritual experience and literature, and it is almost as if I had to note this 'classical' form of myth or spiritual experience before launching into the new thing that this poem tries to express. That Grandmother Funda may have momentarily been a lizard or a smoking youth is a thing of less wonder than this new thing which is expressed in the following lines: the 'being' formed as the curvature of hearing from remembrance, and the fact that this being, too, must wrestle with physical and moral facts, and the interpenetration of spiritual and physical and moral, in her 'consent' she gives to being. Through this active wrestling and inner consent she 'comes to herself.' And now it is I who must deal with these same physical and moral facts. She is actually and physically 'across from me' but inwardly and really I become, through her deed, her means of sounding there. It is thus that we become, for one another, 'means of sounding.' It takes an effort, so much so that I am unable to maintain myself in awakeness. But the night and the sparks take us both up into itself.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Towards Versalvere

Kathleen Raine visited the Berkshires in the early 1980’s, when I was living there. I had the inestimable privilege of hearing her read her poetry at Christopher Bamford’s house in West Stockbridge. Perhaps it was Kathleen Raine who inspired my image of the "Grey Lady." If so, it was her appearance of grace and wisdom, and the beauty of her poetry – rather than to the torments of her inner life which she chronicled in her autobiographies and about which I have written elsewhere...

Raine’s book, Defending Ancient Springs, the scholarly manifesto of the visionary poet, was published in 1985. A few passages:"True art is at once the embodiment and the normal means of transmission ofimaginative knowledge. But to this study of those works which embody andtransmit the hidden order of the soul all great poets must come in theirmaturity; it is the secret language of the initiates…

"The imagination does not see different things, but sees things differently…

"The great gulf lies not between tradition and the visionary, but between tradition and vision on the one hand, and positivism in all its manifestations, whether academic or revolutionary, on the other…Visionaries are not iconoclasts…."

"Above all, the voice of true imagination is never ironic; that is the mark of a divided mind, whereas the imagination is above all at one with itself, the principle of unification and harmony."

If I mention Kathleen Raine now, it is because the turmoil of her inner life, which she chronicled in her autobiographies, reminds us that the path of the visionary poet is often marked by a form of spiritual suffering unknown to the apologists of materialism. To cherish the vision is to announce to the Gods a certain willingness to suffer – one’s conviction that life is a book to be read and understand in one's heart -- not merely skimmed -- ". . . not just leafing through."

I don’t know if anyone has exactly and precisely correlated materialism with triviality. But I am sure that we awaken from the superstition of materialism to the degree that we allow ourselves to be moved – to be changed – to hear – and to suffer. Is this not to tell the will not to will?

No wonder that the first step towards Versalvere is often accompanied by the experience of resistance –Guards closed round me the last time I came.

Who are these "guards"? Perhaps the resistance of my own self to going deeper, perhaps some kind of vengeful god of materialism demanding tribute.

Loudly they enfolded me, demanding: but I found
On the edge of each clutch of pages that they held
A path of signatures:

The "signatures," as any adept in the art of the book will know, are the letters at the bottom of each group of pages to mark the sequence in a sewn volume.

"I am heading for what is dear to me,that I may read and understand,"
Said I, "and not just leafing through."

The materialists give themselves away – the order of the world defies their central dogma, and they are unable to reason without self-contradiction. Just yesterday I saw George Gilder's superb refutation of Darwinian materialism, in which he draws attention to this self-contradicting nature of materialist thought, quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true, and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

But even more to the point was Dr. J. Budziszewski's essay, "Escape from Nihilism," where he reminds us about the central flaw of modern ethics: "it assumes that the problem of human sin is mainy cognitive - that it has to do with the state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don't know what's right and wrong and that we are trying to find out. Actually the problem is volitional - it has to do with the state of our will."

It is this idea that underlies the statement that the journey to Versalvere must at some point or another encounter the guards, resistance, the sense of hostile or oppressive figures, without or within. The problem is volitional. But likewise they can be surmounted if the will is pure:

And they closed behind to let me pass.

There are storms in the natural world as in the spiritual, and the dogma of materialism will leave chaos in its wake:

But Oh! The house was dark, the shutters torn,
And glass of shattered windows on the grass!~
The door was swinging on its hinge, the squeal
Of scraping iron: I ran and saw my aged friend
Curled upon her couch. "I had a storm,"She said, "Or was had by one," and smiled

~But Grandmother Funda is irreducibly "herself"

–She arose from her shawls and stood before
The empty gaping windows and expelled a breath;
They were paned again by means of glowing air.

And it is now that this Being, Grandmother Funda, begins to wax and increase into truly awesome dimensions:"There are words to use for all of this," she said,"Trying to sleep awake."

Grandmother Funda affirms the Logos, the ordering principle, and in so doing grows beyond mere philosophy into religion or possibly even beneficent magic:

She turned aroundAnd raised her arms, pointing, peristrephic,
And hallowed all the earthdrow, blessing it,
And all that moved upon it by meaning of the fireglow."

Peristrephic" -- to turn around, revolving, rotatory. And what is "earthdrow" but "earth-word" – that is, all that is created upon the earth by means of the Word – encompassing "breath" as well as "fire"? It is movement not by mere means but by meaning of – perhaps this would lead to a theory of motion yet to be elucidated.A nd then she begins her lesson, the teaching she gives to me, and which essentially forms the inner teaching of all these poems:

"You have dead habits of perceiving," she resumed,
And she taught me keening: mournful seeking sharpness
From the knees, kneeling:
This I did according to her word,

"Keening" – the Logos in thinking as in perception. As I wrote before: to bring thought-content into poetry and pictures into thought, leading to a deeper affirmation of things through re-experiencing how we come initially to experience them:

Inspiralling the sonic shadows, keening Versalvere,
While luminous in stillness the Wordmage posed unspokenly.

The shadows of our separation are "sonic" – not only in the sense of the music in verse, but because echoes of participation and relation accompany us through all phases of our separations, and it is our task to "inspiral" them – to restore a luminous motion to the world. And this task involves overcoming "dead habits of perceiving."And the summation of the experience? Already, with the last two lines, I seem to be looking into a "past" which is simultaneously "the way things are" or the ways things now and newly are.

The names are no longer solely "attached," as it were, to the "things." They have become the periphery, the circumference of the world:

And the names of the things were written into the oval
Light, and the name of the place was Versalvere.

Thursday, July 06, 2006
In the Garden

... Grandmother Funda's flower is the bergamot - but I believe the wild, not the cultivated, variety. I don't know why, but at some point during the composition of the poem I met up with a wild bergamot, in Boston no less, and I am sure I knew Grandmother Funda was winking at me.

We will continue with these reflections tomorrow or soon, meeting other strange and marvellous Beings in the course of our journey.

From my window I glimpsed the bergamot;
Its pungent scent, though faint, had woken me.
I saw Grandmother Funda walking in the garden;
She carried clippers and wore gardening gloves
To gather flowers for her table: wild daisies,
Black-eyed Susans, blue irises
And widow’s tears. She gazed long
And thoughtfully upon her growing ones;
The air was fluid and clear, with scintillas
Of light and scrolls of dew ever spiralling
Around her: it was hers, the moving light,
The draught of liquid of a summer morning;
It was what she poured out into the garden,
In the summer morning of the freshest rain.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Moral Motion
In a Notebook (2000) I remarked on "the internal energy crisis… the ceaseless extraction of wonder from the cosmos and its conversion into knowledge."

One of the major turning points of this process was the extraction of the concept of motion from the participatory nexus in which it had been metaphysically embedded. This new concept of motion led to the modern or Newtonian concept of gravitation – which, ironically, leads to a certain feeling about motion as stability. I mean, don't we all rather think of the "stars in their courses' as stable and in a sense, immovable? The new concept of Motion came about through the overthrow of the Aristotelian concept of the Mover. Motion thus came to ‘rest’ in a universe deprived of a Mover, of the animating principle of desire.

This new and strangely immobilized modern concept of motion taught us how things remain but not, perhaps, how they sustain, how they can be sustained. Did the metaphysical Motion have to die in order for the technological dynamism to arise? These are the kinds of interesting historical questions that few people seem to ask, but which seem to me utterly significant and important.

In any case, the ‘remains’ of the Scientific Revolution lie all around us -- in machines which have harnessed dynamic Motion. Our modern civilization has completely overhauled (if not killed off) metaphysical motion only to turn it into its opposite – that is, to make the dynamic inert. Making motion stable, static, and predictable, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of metaphysics has lost caste. In past ages it was not 'motion' that was considered the stabilizing principle, but metaphysics. I believe it had this meaning up until the time of Kant, and that perhaps even Kant thought of metaphysics in this 'stable' way.

As we know, Kant’s "dogmatic slumber" was challenged by Hume’s assertion that it is merely thanks to habit that we put notions together like causality, relation, etc. Hence he questioned such concepts as metaphysical realities. Kant, as we know, attempted to resuscitate thinking philosophy and metaphysics from this accusation of ‘lethargy of custom,’ as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it. Kant attempted to restablize metaphysics after Hume had toppled it.

But beneath the stabilizing concept of metaphysics there is perhaps another, and more radical notion, lurking beneath the surface – a notion I may have stumbled upon in a journal entry of Jan. 7, 2000: "I define metaphysics as that which seeks to suspend or disrupt what is purely automatic in us." Perhaps Hume did not think of this? Hume said we cannot metaphysically validate seeing because of habits. But the poet's answer is to crawl underneath the habits and discover, not a rationalizing but a motional metaphysics. The seer and the thing seen are on a journey together in a moving world. Perhaps this is the effort to reconvert knowledge to wonder.I'm not sure, but I think that is a large part of the effort of these poems.We will continue with these notions - and motions - in due season.

Saturday, July 15, 2006
Are the Beings of Recreational Visualizations Physically Describable?

I was having lunch with some colleagues the other day and I began telling them of my new poetry blog, and how it came about that I "met" the Beings that I later cast into poetry. They found the idea intriguing, and Kaye asked if I could tell what these Beings looked like, if they were describable. I found the question oddly hard to answer -- odd first of all because the experience of these Beings was entirely "inward," and secondly because the overwhelming impression I had of them was that their being corresponded to their name. The correspondence of Name and Being was the true key or index of description. "Physical description" as such played a minor role.

I suppose that in these poetic pursuits I was more like a medieval Scholastic than a modern scientist. Owen Barfield writes, in his chapter "The Texture of Medieval Thought," in his book, Saving the Appearances, that "'Knowledge,' for such a consciousness (i.e. the Scholastic) was conceived of as the perfection or completion of the 'naming' process of thought... for all creatures were in a greater or lesser degree images or representations, or 'names' of God." And in the next chapter he says:

"Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of -- what shall we say?-- of 'meaning,' if you choose. It seems the most adequate word. Aquinas's verbum intellectus was tanquam speculum, in quo res cernitur - 'like a mirror in which the object is discerned."

But now that I think of Kaye's question, it seems to me that the series of poems describes Beings in a diminishing scale of "describable." The first of them, Grandmother Funda, is eminently describable. She is my grandmother, your grandmother, grandmotherness itself.

"Asa," the second in the series - to which we will come shortly - is loveliness itself, the feminine in its full blush of beauty and grandeur. She was clothed in a "very velvet gown," and of course, she was tall, and perhaps dark-haired, although the poem does not get to that level of description.

The third of the series, the Ringbinder, concerns Hovering Black, who has something to do with preserving memories. I picture Hovering as rather slender and rather shy and perhaps a bit whimsical - though these last two qualities have left the realm of physical description altogether.

The fourth poem concerned a being easy to describe - my cat. Pangur jumped into this series of poems a bit unlawfully. All I can say is that I took a bit of liberty here.

"Bettina Piccolo" - is any description necessary? Don't you already know, just from her name, what she is? Bettina Piccolo's little poem is just a thread inserted into the fabric.

"Maiden Glass" is a beam of light shining through a window pane -- Made-in-Glass.

"Th'Emagdrow," reverse speech for "Wordgame," is a type of beast who rages through your mind when it is dancing. He is impossible, of course, full of slipshod punning, endless jokes, manias of significance (and insignificance) and besides, he eats up all your citations. But such is the price of life fermented in words. Emagdrow is very fat, and terribly shapeless.

"Frank Key" is the mysterious man who summarizes the whole and who has no physical description whatsoever.

In "The Gravity Robe" the reflective poetry seems to leave the physical world altogether and encounter gravity from the inside of it. The Gravity Robe is perhaps physically describable as the swell of the sea.

Sunday, July 16, 2006
Mysterious Visitations

"In modern times, the ability to produce truth out of oneself is revealed in the abstract capacity to work out the abstract truths of mathematics and pure physics quite independently of sense-perception and experiment. This procedure - which may be traced back to Newton originally - produced the conceptual scaffolding and outlook fundamental to all the natural sciences. Such pure thinking, if applied to other fields, could create the possibility of thinking with mathematical precision about spiritual realities. Thereby the activity of the Spirit in man would truly begin... Perceiving the Logos, the spirit could assume its true function: to investigate the obstacles which stand in the way of realizing consciousness-in-the-present... For the spirit of the Comforter does not yet dwell in man. To dwell and to remain are one word in Greek: menein. To remain, in the Greek sense, meant: enduring presence, real living, not just 'visiting.' In modern man, the spirit acts like a 'visitor.'... But, since the intuition does not remain, but blazes up and goes out, man does not live, i.e., experience, the spirit which is active in the intellectual intuition. The spirit's remaining or dwelling would be an experience which continues in time. It would mean that one remains in the spirit, that one lives in the 'super-worldly' realm, in living thinking, i.e., life."
George Kuhlewind, Becoming Aware of the Logos, p. 90-91.

It is deeply interesting to ponder the above words in the light of the Christian teaching about grace. Men fought for centuries to define it, or if not to define it, to define the conditions of its appearance and action.

The "living thinking" of anthroposophical epistemology is not exactly grace, although I believe that some anthroposophists may hope that it is possible to live 'in a state of grace' insofar as one's cognitive activity meets the requirements of pure sense-free thinking. Although this may be an over-estimation of human possibility, I believe the anthroposophists are right to pinpoint thinking and cognition as the important battleground of the present - and future - of the action of grace. They are right to say that it is essential to become conscious of one's thinking. Or as John Lukacs put it - we need to "think about thinking."

The first question I would raise here is whether it is possible to identify so closely the Holy Spirit with cognitive activity as such. Jacob Needleman, in his worthy study of the Eastern Fathers, Lost Christianity, remarks somewhere in that amazing book that cognitive activity is only the lowest rung of the ladder. It is not actually the Spirit, or Holy Spirit - indeed, the disciplined devotions of the Early Fathers were directed to finding "the place of the heart" - where the real work of contacting the Holy Spirit begins.

This astonished Needleman, who says that the most important aspect of their research was embedded in the simple words about "finding the place of the heart." What appeared to be simple and obvious was, in fact, the most difficult and elusive of all.

My second reservation has to do with the anthroposophist's insistence on "pure sense-free" thinking. For this argument I turn to Salvador de Madariaga once again, whose book, Portrait of a Man Standing, provides a course-correction, and which, besides, is full of graceful and sharp insight.

In this book he contrasts the vertical and horizontal tendencies in man, having begun his discourse with a close look at a tree and a cow:

"The tree and the cow, the vertical and the horizontal, remain the two coordinates of man's life. They command the primary impulses behind his doing, thinking, feeling... The vertical urge which is man... is after all incarnated in an animal and belongs, therefore, to a species that, as such, is under the sway of a horizontal impulse on which it depends for its life, and therefore, for that of its individuals... For the species to remain and endure, animal, collective, horizontal tendencies are indispensable in order to counterbalance the urge skyward. Man lives thus in a continuous dynamic equilibrium between his vertical and his horizontal worlds, between solitude and multitude."

This Spanish grundwelt gravitates the anthroposophical pitch skyward. But it is in particular de Madariaga's next point which I want to emphasize:

“…And here we come across one of those paradoxes of which nature seems to be so fond. Yes, the vertical posture has separated the several vital levels, but the vertical impulse that caused it tends to keep them united, threaded together... while there lives in man, even when decanted into several levels, a definite horizontal tendency... that incites him to live flat along every one of his 'storeys,' or in other words, to accept the decantation and separation of his several levels with cowish placidity...[but] it is a fact, though perhaps paradoxical and odd at first, that life will be more fully human if and when the individual succeeds in preserving at each level the taste and touch of the other ones."

This is a long and roundabout way of saying that the anthroposophical thinker runs the risk of living in his head. He pours all of his energy and enthusiasm into exalting the 'vertical' impulse of cognition while his life-energies, so to speak, drain out of a hole in the bottom.

Thus has it happened that followers of anthroposophy are sometimes to be recognized by their lack of spontaneity, their dampened personalities, their obliviousness to race, religion, nation, history, politics, and all 'personal' or even sometimes stubbornly moral expression.

According to de Madariaga's analysis, all this verticality lands one in a new horizontal plane. "Epistemology is destiny" indeed!

It is thus I have some deep reservations about this anthroposophical exaltation of "sense-free" thinking. I believe I wrote these poems out of a deep disagreement with the "sense-free" dogma of anthroposophical thinking -- while holding on loyally to the anthroposophical valuation of thinking as indispensable to the path of spiritual development. Thus agreeing, I found I disagreed; and yet though disagreeing, I continued to agree. Or to put it another way: I walked with the anthroposophists until I turned a corner, and then I lost them. Or they failed to run after me.

I know not if there are readers who would have an interest in subtle disagreements at this level. But thinking is an act of minute perturbations. Only that which is minutely felt and followed can vitalize our other levels - taste, touch, feeling, sight, the moments of life. Only thinking - being 'spiritual' - can penetrate.On this note I close for the day -- this philosophical prologue to the next poem, "Asa," which will follow in a day or two.

July 17 2006
ASA

Grandmother Funda arises from the depths, but Asa is a being of the heights:
Asa stepped through folds of blue,walked majestic on columns of air
curling and uncurling, up and down,like children's paper whistle toys;

Asa is the closest I have ever come to experiencing a Greek Goddess. Her name, the same spelled backwards as forwards, is also expressive of her 'Greek' character.

Asa is spatial and a-temporal, where Grandmother Funda is intimately connected with time and the past. Asa is present, pure presence, continually in the act of 'descending'

–she ranged down the solid draughts of atmosphere, textural and felt,l
ike her own very velvet gown,and slipped between the old and the new
of moments coming, but never there,and passing by before they're known;--

Asa is the presence between one moment and the next:

but Asa stood present in each one:she trod the moments like a stair,
descending, always coming down,
holding endless banisters of air.

Asa's natural stance is aloft, and it is only with difficulty that one gets a glimpse of her between the moments. But the effort to maintain alertness in the presence of this 'grandeur' - the grandeur of the minute, amidst the slightest perturbations of thought or of consciousness - can perhaps also be -- for less fine-grained beings like ourselves, tiring:

I leaned my head against the sofa
tired from seeking Versalvere,
when Asa came down the curving stair
bringing from her attic what she called
a coat for moments never worn;
It fit every time I tried it on.

Here is some wordplay. Is the coat never worn or the moments 'never worn' - unexperienced, newly arising? Why does it fit 'every time I tried it on'? And why I am tired from 'seeking Versalvere' - am I not 'already there'?

Poetry puts certain questions to us, only it answers them in a different way from philosophy or discursive thought:

It was in a style of patterns culled
from voices racing past us in the sky;
we stood upon the terrace watching
their cloud-hung faces scudding by
~they looked at us, statuesque and still,
when all at once I turned and fell . . .
I stumbled back into the room;
my moment coat had made me full.

And now, with my 'moment coat' and the fullness it gives me,with Asa experience dissolves into feelings, colors, sensations -- though 'dissolving' is perhaps not the right word, because things are things, things are what they are, things are:

O, such feelings did I do that noon!~
I clasped the chairs, loving the waves
the ribbings made in cushioned corduroy,
the ridges rising through my hands;
in smooth and darkening softened octaves
Asa moved through velvet-curtained sounds
,retreating from my fingers' press:
now lifting, they felt a brighter joy of cotton -
it was the shirt I wore~and my feet,
hatching in their nestof woollen socks,
stood up at last:

I have often thought of these lines as a tribute to a mentally damaged boy I knew when I worked at Berkshire Children's Community, a home for retarded children. Eric could say only a few words, and two of his main activities were riffling the pages of a telephone book or fingering the corduroy ridges of his pants. All day, to run his fingers along the corduroy ridges.

with Asa, before the time was past,
riding majestic on folds of blue,
slipping between the old and the new.

Sunday, July 23, 2006
What is Thinking?
(i) or, Coexistence as a Principle

In 1997 I was reading Ortega y Gasset, and I was beginning to view Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology through the lens of Ortega y Gasset's notes on the history of philosophy.

Here is a note from my journal on January 11th of that year:

“…Ortega’s critique of Descartes: ...that he discovered the indubitable reality of thought, but could not rest content with this, but had to push on to make thought a “substance,” a res cogitans. Had he rested within thought he might have discovered that thought includes both subject and object: world and thinker are linked together. Instead, he liberated thought and then enclosed it in a cocoon. Modern idealism, subjectivity, thus drags hermetism and docetism in its wake.

Cf. Rudolf Steiner: “The only knowledge which satisfies us is one which is subject to no external standards but springs from the inner life of the personality.” (p. xxvii, Philosophy of Freedom). This is pure hermetism, pure subjectivity.

The anthroposophists believe that Steiner overcame Cartesian dualism when he said that “Thinking produces the ideas of subject and object just as it produces all others.” It is true that Steiner grounds his philosophy in the indubitable act of thinking. But how then does he get to the world? This is still unclear to me.

It is significant that Rudolf Steiner says that thinking “produces” the subject and object, where Ortega says that thinking presupposes subject and object.

That is: thinking exists. I am thinking about a table. This thinking-about the table says nothing about the real existence of any specific table, only that real tables exist somewhere, and that I am thinking of one: these are both true and included within my thought. My real existence and the table’s real existence are both presupposed.

“… I am that which sees the world and the world is that which is seen by me… If there were no things to be seen, thought about, and imagined, I would not see, think, or imagine; that is to say, I would not exist.”

It is true that Rudolf Steiner does come close to this thought when he says: “The reason why we do not observe the thinking that goes on in our ordinary life is none other than this, that it is due to our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce, appears in my field of observation as an object; I find myself confronted by it as something that has come about independently of me. It comes to meet me. I must accept it as something that precedes my thinking process, as a premiss. While I am reflecting upon the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is focussed upon it. To be thus occupied is precisely to contemplate by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to the object of this activity. In other words, while I am thinking I pay no heed to my thinking, which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking, which is not of my making.”

But Steiner draws near only to skirt away again. It may be said in justification that Rudolf Steiner’s purpose with his epistemology is not to establish the mutual reality of thinking and world but to establish thinking as a primary organ of the spirit and so effect a rescue from materialism. The point is well taken -- The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (preferred to the title Philosophy of Freedom) was published in 1899, and thus followed upon the high tide of 19th century materialism.

Steiner stressed that thinking is the “unobserved” element in our knowledge, and in this I believe he was correct. “We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For both subject and object are concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying that before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood.” (p. 35)

But how is it possible to understand thinking apart from some specific content? Even in my "recreational visualizations" there was some specific content, or 'input,' or 'experience,' in the form of Beings whose generalized, and at first hazy, 'presences' ultimately crystallized in the poems.

On the other hand, though I raise this question of Steiner, I am quite willing to suppose that the ultimate 'Stuff' of the Universe is, in fact, thought. But there is a big difference in holding this idea as a belief, or as a possibility, and actually arguing it successfully in philosophy. This is just the type of question that ought to exercise those in the field of Intelligent Design - the kind of thing that would need to be argued with full intellectual detachments, each having stores of powder and armory to lay against the sodden foundations of positivist-postmodernist naturalism. And in some of those stores and armory, I think, there needs to be a reserve of ammunition-- for imagination. The pictorial qualities of thought need to be addressed.

We live in a world where pictures - manufactured images - have all but driven away thought. But the human capacity to imagine, to produce pictures of one's own, has correspondingly become extremely impoverished, along with the capacity for empathy and understanding. Truly, philosophy for the future needs a 'therapeutic' mission - to rescue the life in thought by integrating rational thought with the pictorial imagination.

Next, Rudolf Steiner remarks: “Thinking lies beyond subject and object. It produces these two concepts just as it produces all others.” (p. 43) But I find this hairsplitting. Let us grant that thinking “produces” the concept, object, but it does not “produce” table in the same direct way which Ortega describes, and which Steiner himself acknowledged in the previous passage where he admits that things simply appear in his field of observation.

Where Descartes “substantialized” thinking, Steiner seems to “spiritualize” it. According to Olin Wannamaker’s commentary on Steiner's epistemology, [it] “… places the human spirit in the act of thinking within the sphere of objective spiritual reality.” And: “thinking, free from preconceptions… leads to the knowledge that man lives in a true spiritual world.”

My journal entry continues in this wise:

“I was profoundly influenced by the importance that Rudolf Steiner gives to the act of thinking. That thinking is a path to the truth, to the spirit... this was extremely important to me. Rudolf Steiner’s path gave me a spiritual world, it is true – but I wanted a real world. I did not want spirit as a substitute for the world; I wanted the spirit of truth to penetrate the world, be in it, realize itself in it… Yet this idea – thinking-as-spirit – is tremendously fruitful, perhaps the only real genesis of fruitfulness – as proved by all that Steiner was able to do with it… "

In the list of real-world problems and concerns, the question of whether thinking includes subject and object or produces them must rate pretty low on the scale. And yet, isn’t it just here that, by really thinking the matter through, and what is more, really feeling it as a life-issue, feeling dissatisfied with a lack of clarity on this issue – would not this elastic dissatisfaction be enough to propel one into an altogether different philosophical world?

Probably one advances in philosophy to the extent that such elastic dissatisfactions cause one to grasp the tiny corner of a single philosophical problem – a tiny part that, for some reason, really matters to me.

In any event, it was startling to move from the world of Steiner to that of Ortega, who could have been addressing Steiner with the following:

“… the first thing we do about something can never be thinking about it; in order for me to engage in this peculiar activity, the thing I deal with must have been involved in a previous relationship with me, which was not merely a matter of thinking about it.” Some Lessons in Metaphysics, p. 79

Ortega says that the root assumption of the modern age is that our primary relationship with things is thinking about them; that therefore things are what they are when we think them. On the contrary, he says, things are what they are when we are not thinking about them, when we are simply counting on them, taking them for granted, living them.

Which is why, for Ortega, the chief philosophical issue, problem, reality, etc. is life itself -- and not 'spirit,' 'thinking,' 'science,' 'knowledge,' etc. For what good are all these to us if -- as it says in the last book of the Bible - 'You have a name, and you are alive, but in reality you are dead'?

Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Meeting Richard Wilbur

I met the American poet Richard Wilbur many years ago in Savannah. I was eighteen; I believe Mr. Wilbur at the time was about thirty-five. He had come to Savannah to address the Savannah Poetry Society, a wonderful organization which I hope is still in existence. I met Mr. Wilbur and made some flippant or theatrical remark; he seized my hand and kissed it.

I have always ever since held Mr. Richard Wilbur in the highest annals of Honor. I have also thought he was one of the few American poets to achieve recognition who did not sell his talent to cheap fads.

Some years later a little exchange occurred on an Owen Barfield e-list, and someone quoted two lines from Wilbur's poem, "Epistemology" --

"We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."

To which I answered in kind:

But the cream of the matter--
there's no other udder.

I indulge in these faint recollections to make a little interval, a bridge, from our ponderous reflections on Epistemology to take up the next aspect of the soul - Memory - to follow in a few days.

Friday, July 28, 2006
Is Complementarity the Same Thing as Coexistence?

No.
The next poem-discussion is coming soon, but before we get there, I wanted to make a note on something I said in the post-before-last.I was reading Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, where he is talking about "The Perversity of Physics" (his Chapter Two).

He is discussing the famous Uncertainty Principle, or Principle of Complementarity, where sometimes a particle acts like a wave, or a wave sometimes acts like a particle, and he quoted Werner Heisenberg, who discovered, or enunciated this principle:

"The concept of complementarity is meant to describe a situation in which we can look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference. These two frames mutually exclude each other, but they also complement each other, and only the juxtaposition of these contradictory frames provides an exhaustive view of the appearances of the phenomena."

Certainly the principle is useful, if only to remind us that an event may be viewed in different perspectives. What is interesting is to see how perspective itself was being incorporated into the very structure of science. But then Heisenberg goes on to say that,"

"What the Copenhagen School calls complementarity accords very neatly with the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind."

But this is just what it does not do - or rather, it seems to me an unjustifiable leap from the principle of complementarity applied to the fundamentals of reality to a philosophical discussion about matter and mind. Is he suggesting that the wave-like state is mental and the particle-like state is matter? Indeed it is "neat" - it is in fact too "neat."

Because by saying that complementarity accords with the matter vs. mind distinction, he has thereby abolished complementarity itself, or he is rendered it useless by removing its sting and its power to surprise. Complementarity itself, both in its wave-like and particle-like aspects, belongs to the "matter" side, in the sense that it is the mind's construction or interpretation about what it sees.

Complementarity says that now the mind "sees double" where before it reduced everything to the purely material entities -- "of single vision and Newton's sleep."

In this sense the complementarity idea has failed to live up to its promise. The most startling thing one can learn from the principle of complementarity is that there is dynamism inherent in perceiving-thinking itself. One should say - "This is what thinking looks like - from the outside."

In essence, complementarity is a perceiving of thinking - but I wonder if this has even been realized?

What is left for a thinking that thus so dramatically... sees itself revolving between act and process?The same old dead cognitive habits, the same dead dessicated intellectualism - which came perilously and gloriously close, in the Principle of Complementarity, to the living picture, of life in the form of Mind. But turned aside in the end -- because these old habits were not up to the new revelation.

Instead of making thinking more dynamic, complementarity only contributed to making the picture of the world less rational. The Principle of Complementarity should have been a feast for kings. Instead, it was thrown to the dogs.

The point of this little essay being, when you think about thinking, even something as mundane as the proper places of subject and object therein, the world begins to whisper its secrets to you.

Saturday, August 05, 2006
Heisenberg Revisited

Concerning my last post: I had the feeling that the quote from Heisenberg regarding the indeterminancy principle as an illustration of Cartesian dualism might have been something the great physicist tossed off in a careless moment. This sense has been reinforced today, for I was just reading John Lukacs' chapter "History and Physics," from Historical Consciousness, where he quotes Heisenberg:

"...Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought but it makes the sharp separation between the world and the I impossible..."

Heisenberg then makes the comment that the Cartesian partition has penetrated very deeply into the human mind over the past few centuries, and that "it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality."

To which John Lukacs assents: "We cannot avoid the condition of our participation." I have always thought that this great book, Historical Consciousness, originally published in 1968, was a signal moment in our intellectual life. In its densely interwoven arguments about the nature of history and thinking, the participation idea returns after a prolonged sleep since the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

There - according to Owen Barfield, whose inspiration is very evident in John Lukacs' pages

- "In the work of Thomas Aquinas, in particular, the word participate or participation occurs almost on every page, and a whole book could be written - indeed one has been written - on the uses he makes of it. It is not a technical term of philosophy and he is no more concerned to define it than a modern philosopher would be, to define some such common tool of his thought as, say, the word compare. "
Barfield, Saving the Appearances (1965) p. 89.

... Christianity has had a century of struggle with Darwinism, but to Cartesianism it seems to have accomodated itself without much of a murmur.... The participation idea faded from men's minds coincident with the rise of science, and its disappearance certainly facilitated the "manipulative" attitude towards nature that obtains today. This manipulative and controlling attitude is still much in evidence in our scientific and technological society. But it has also come to a certain place of limits - perhaps even of diminishing returns. We are running close to the energy limits. But the people who know it or who pretend not to know it have no plans to subject the domineering attitude to a radical self-questioning. Instead, they have other plans. History is their new field of operation.

How much can you stage-manage events, wars, assassinations, financial catastrophes, invasions, subversions and the endless parading of thoughtless, corrupted, contemptible and deceiving people in the leadership spotlight of the world? How far can you go in casting out the participation of decent people? When do you reach the moral limits?

These are the kinds of questions that arise in any consideration of participation - which begins, for us, with its presence or absence in political affairs and then becomes a larger, or deeper, question about how we perceive, how we configure sensations into things, and occurrences into 'events.' It becomes a question of what we are and how we think and act - a question of historical consciousness. Today, it is becoming the question of how - if - history will continue.