The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind
(Part I of II)

This fire, these flames, is and are the imagination ablaze across the range and country and prairies and hollows and wildlands that encompass the globe of my mind. Here this mad rush of heat and energy waves both smoke and light on acquired knowledge and endured experience.

This enveloping imagination of mine reaches for whatever it can grab, then, connects it with the larger patch of bursting energy burning across the semiconscious land.

The flames grab Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and her remarks on certain works by Kafka and van Gogh––how the final act of creation occurs when the reader-listener-viewer begins to think:

It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka’s early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.
(The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 184)

And flames of the enveloping imagination found and flung and fed on Arendt’s comments, then, connected them to passages from that tale from 1912––“Das Urteil” (“The Judgement”) by Franz Kafka (1883–1924)––and that tale’s absences of the character of “mother” and of the place of “Russia”––and how those absences reemphasize and highlight the ideas of “mother” and “Russia” rather than negate them:

Two years ago his mother had died, since when he and his father had shared the household together, and is friend had of course been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be realized in a distant country….

Georg stared at the bogey conjured up by his father. His friend in St. Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew too well, touched his imagination as never before. Lost in the vastness of Russia he saw him. At the door of an empty, plundered warehouse he saw him. Among the wreckage of his showcases, the slashed remnants of his wares, the falling gas brackets, he was just standing up. Why did he have to go so far away! ….

 “You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You’ve always been a leg-puller and you haven’t even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there! I can’t believe it,” [said Georg’s father].
(“Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”), trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 78, 85, 83)

And the flames move on. They now consider and consume shoes painted by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890):

(Wiki Commons)

The flames now run wild—consuming and connecting everything before them. Before Arendt, Kafka, and van Gogh, there was Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), who suggests in a line from his play Emilia Galotti (1772), that “one praises the artist most when, in looking at his work, one forgets to praise him.”

(Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Anna Johanna Gode von Aesch, (New York: Continuum, 1991), I, iv, p. 80).

Somewhat following Arendt, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) encouraged readers to ponder the negation and opposition of an idea, if one is to understand the motivations behind that idea. This process of imagining the negative—as in the case of Van Gogh’s shoes––is, at least according to Kaufmann, sometimes but haphazardly called Hegelian dialectic.

(Discovering the Mind Vol. I: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 266).

The fire now burns deep: it compares C. S. Peirce (1839–1914)––a reader, but perhaps, not a follower of Hegel––and how, as Peirce and fellow philosopher-logicians might say that the sociology of humans being is based on semiotics––though non-philosopher-logicians might instead say that a human’s place in his or her community is itself a symbolic relation—a relation where the human is a symbol to the community. As Peirce puts it:

There is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the word homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought….

Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man.
(“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1868))

Flame and soot and smoke and ember—elements indeed of any and all’s imagination––now burn close. Closer to our own time, Umberto Eco (1932–2016) summarizes what Peirce is getting at:

It may seem paradoxical to talk of the icon, which Peirce held was the first moment of an absolute evidence, as pure disposition-to, of pure absence in some way, an image of a thing that is not there yet. It would seem that this primary icon is like a hole, given that we have everyday experience of it but nonetheless have difficulty defining it, and given that 152 can be recognized only as an absence within something that is present. And yet it is precisely from that nonbeing that one can infer the shape of the “plug” that could stop it up.
(“Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content,” Kant e l’ornitorinco (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition), trans. Alastair McEwen, (New York: Harcourt, 1997), pp. 110–11. On the point of the plug, Eco cites: Roberto Casati and Achilie C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994))

Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has also pointed out that space and object probably cannot be logically isolated. My imagination says I should say “probably” because Wittgenstein left some possibility open by suggesting we humans may not have yet exercised our imaginations to the fullest extent—we have not yet burned through everything:

An atmosphere that is inseparable from its object—is no atmosphere.

Closely associated things, things which have been associated, seem to fit one another. But in what way do they seem to fit? How does it come out that they seem to fit? Like this, for example: we cannot imagine the man who had this name, this face, this handwriting, not to have produced these works, but perhaps quite different ones instead (those of another great man).

We cannot imagine it? Do we try?––

(Philosophie der Psychologie – Ein Fragment (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment) [formerly Philosophical Investigations Part II] in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), (II, vi, 50), p. 192)

Or, as Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once put it, imagination “seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived.”

(Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 39).

Do readers-listeners-viewers really sink themselves into Kafka’s quasi-stories and the painted shoes depicted by van Gogh? I really don’t know. But it sort of makes sense to me—me, neither firefighter nor firestarter—me, only a beholder of the enveloping imagination burning across my mind’s land.

The post The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind (Part I of II) appeared first on Bookbread.

The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind
(Part II of II)

Wildfire on the mind-lands, burning books and paintings, consuming ink and hue—this marks the imagination in action. It reaches for Van Gogh one moment, Kafka the next. Flames lick at critical reflections from Arendt and Kaufmann—smoke and soot surround C. S. Lewis and J. S. Mill in Dickensian fashion. The prairie is full of fire. The enveloping imagination burns wild.

Last time at Bookbread, readers were initially presented with comments by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) on Kafka and van Gogh and how the final act of creation occurs when the audience begins to think:

It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka’s early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.
(The Life of the Mind Vol. I. Thinking, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), p.184)

Arendt’s remarks should be compared to those of Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) when he compares the letters of Kafka (1883–1924) to those by Van Gogh (1853–1890). Kaufmann sees a similarity in how each artist was able to almost detach themselves from themselves while thinking about themselves:

If ever a great artist worked under the spell of inspiration it was Vincent van Gogh. He created literally hundreds of the finest paintings in the world in a mere four years. Of his high emotional tension and total, self-sacrificing devotion there is no doubt, yet his copious letters to his brother show how far he was from regarding the fruits of his inspiration as sacrosanct. Even when committed to an asylum, he never lost or disparaged his critical powers. He discussed his works as well as his situation with a rarely equaled lucidity that furnishes a startling contrast to Buber, not to speak of Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger. Freud’s and Kafka’s letters are also free of falseness, pretense, and murkiness but not so intense. All three men—van Gogh, Kafka, and Freud—were distinguished by an amazing capacity for detachment from themselves and could see themselves from above.
(Discovering the Mind Vol. II: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 256)

At one point in the 1919 letter to his father, Kafka’s explains what he’s trying to do with his writing:

I have already indicated that in my writing, and in everything connected with it, I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me.
(Brief An Den Vater (Letter to his Father), trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, (New York: Schocken. 1971), p. 117)

And about forty years before Kafka’s letter, at one point in a letter to his brother, Van Gogh explains what he’s trying to do with his painting:

Of the drawings which I will show you now I think only this: I hope they will prove to you that I am not remaining stationary in my work, but progress in a direction that is reasonable. As to the money value of my work, I do not pretend to anything else than that it would greatly astonish me if my work were not just as salable in time as that of others. Whether that will happen now or later I cannot of course tell, but I think the surest way, which cannot fail, is to work from nature faithfully and energetically. Feeling and love for nature sooner or later find a response from people who are interested in art. It is the painter’s duty to be entirely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work, so that it becomes intelligible to other people.
(“To Theo, The Hague, July 31, 1882,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. (London: Constable, 1929), ed. Mark Roskill, (New York: Touchstone, 2008), pp. 159–60)

But back to Arendt and her observation that “the transformation they [Kafka and Van Gogh’s early works] have undergone when thinking took possession of them”––for C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), the great artist like Kafka or Van Gogh presents a “total response to the world”:

Very roughly, we might almost say that in Rhetoric imagination is present for the sake of passion (and, therefore, in the long run, for the sake of action), while in poetry passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health—the rightness and richness of a man’s total response to the world….

The idea of a poetry which exists only for the poet—a poetry which the public rather overhears than hears––is a foolish novelty in criticism. There is nothing specially admirable in talking to oneself.
(A Preface to Paradise Lost, (Oxford UP, 1942; Galaxy Book, 1961), p. 54)

Lewis is here riffing on an earlier observation by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) that:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or uttering forth of feeling. But if we may be excused the seeming affectation of the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself forth to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action. (“What is Poetry?” (1833))

Between Kaufmann, Lewis, and Mill, readers might surmise: whatever the status of the reader, writer-artists tend to overhear themselves when they are rereading-rewriting their works. As overhearers of their own works, writer-artists must somewhat negate themselves during the act of overhearing (if overhearing here means the process of rereading-rewriting). The enveloping imagination negates as it consumes. Yet a fire cannot catch itself on fire…..

I think Kafka hints at the overhearing-through-reading mentioned by Mill when, in an early story, Kafka’s character of Raban points out the inevitable connections that are made between reading two random works:

“Well, it isn’t so important,” Raban said. “I was only going to say books are useful in every sense and quite especially in respects in which one would not expect it. For when one is about to embark on some enterprise, it is precisely the books whose contents have nothing at all in common with the enterprise that are the most useful. For the reader who does after all intend to embark on that enterprise, that is to say, who has somehow become enthusiastic (and even if, as it were, the effect of the book can penetrate only so far as that enthusiasm), will be stimulated by the book to all kinds of thoughts concerning his enterprise. Now, however, since the contents of the book are precisely something of utter indifference, the reader is not at all impeded in those thoughts, and he passes through the midst of the book with them, as once the Jews passed through the Red Sea, that’s how I should like to put it.”
(“Hochzeitsvorbereitungen Auf Dem Lande” (“Wedding Preparations in the Country”) (1907–08), trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 74–75)

It is as if, while reading, one overhears the comparison of one book to another, or one passage from one book to another (much like how this blog post was written).

Van Gogh was, at least in his early life, notoriously unmethodical (that is, random) in his reading. As his sister-in-law Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger observed:

No other thing has taken its place yet; he draws much and reads much, among others, Dickens, Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Michelet, but it is all done without system or aim.
(“Memoir by His Sister-in-Law,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p. 50)

And as Mark Roskill, editor of Van Gogh’s letters, put it:

It was characteristic of him to identify himself with fictional heroes, and to pick out from the books he read whatever seemed to have a moral and spiritual application to his own destiny.
(“[Note to] To Theo, Paris, February 19, 1876,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p. 94)

Other critics of Vincent have noted:

Van Gogh always needed an intellectual framework for defending his opinions, his projects, and the positions he took. When he fell in love with his cousin Kee Vos, for example, he plumbed Michelet in search of justifications for his stubborn arguments for marriage, contrary to the opinions of everyone around him, and also contrary to the wishes of the person in question. Along the way, he did not hesitate to take quotations out of context, to abbreviate them, to paraphrase them … an effective way of joining ranks with a thinker whose aura and gravity preclude any attempt at further argument.
(Wouter van der Veen and Peter Knapp, Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days, (New York: Monacelli Press, 2009), pp. 40–41)

Yet is there any way the arguments in this blog post could be taken further?

Let the present reader find something more random than Bookbread can feed them—perhaps only then could the argument be carried along to some new place—only by a kind of overhearing of oneself whilst reading….. burning while brooding…. the enveloping imagination transfixed on the unbound horizon of the mind-land prairie it has yet to consume…. yearning to burn all into the background.

The post The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind (Part II of II) appeared first on Bookbread.

Bittersweet (But Better):
Imagined Pain and Painful Imagination

But imagination is not always fun and games. Pain can be imagined. Pain is part of the imagination. One can imagine being in pain. And to actually be in pain may have something to do with the imagination. And by “pain,” I don’t necessarily mean “icepick through the occipital,” kind of physical pain. It can be emotional pain, like sorrow, as with Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400) and his Book of the Duchess (1368):

For [sory] imaginacioun
Is alway hoolly in my minde. (ll. 14–15)

Or imagination can couple with other emotional pains, like anxiety, like depression, as when the character of Satan recognizes early in the Paradise Lost (1667) of John Milton (1608–1674) that:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. (I, 254–55)

Or imagination may bed with amorous pains for a fling, as when Stendhal (1783–1842) recognizes in his exploration of De l’amour (1822):

The difficulty of forgetting a woman with whom you have been happy is that the imagination tirelessly continues to evoke and embellish moments of the past.
(De l’amour, trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale, (New York: Penguin, 1957, 1975), (I, xxxix, ii), p. 129)

But too much labor and toil can wear down (and out) the imagination, as when Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) saw in his first volume of Democracy in America (1835):

In the Southern States the more immediate wants of life are always supplied; the inhabitants of those parts are not busied in the material cares of life, which are always provided for by others; and their imagination is diverted to more captivating and less definite objects. The American of the South is fond of grandeur, luxury, and renown, of gayety, of pleasure, and above all of idleness; nothing obliges him to exert himself in order to subsist; and as he has no necessary occupations, he gives way to indolence, and does not even attempt what would be useful.

But the equality of fortunes, and the absence of slavery in the North, plunge the inhabitants in those same cares of daily life which are disdained by the white population of the South. They are taught from infancy to combat want, and to place comfort above all the pleasures of the intellect or the heart. The imagination is extinguished by the trivial details of life, and the ideas become less numerous and less general, but far more practical and more precise. As prosperity is the sole aim of exertion, it is excellently well attained; nature and mankind are turned to the best pecuniary advantage, and society is dexterously made to contribute to the welfare of each of its members, whilst individual egotism is the source of general happiness.
(Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835), (I, xviii), p. 364)

Even the pains of impotence can be intertwined with the imagination, as when novelist Ian Fleming (1908–1964) writes of his spy character James Bond in Casino Royale (1953):

The doctor had talked often to Bond about his injuries. He had always told him that there would be no evil effects from the terrible battering his body had received. He had said that Bond’s full health would return and that none of his powers had been taken from him. But the evidence of Bond’s eyes and his nerves refused these comforting assurances. He was still painfully swollen and bruised and whenever the injections wore off he was in agony. Above all, his imagination had suffered. For an hour in that room with Le Chiffre the certainty of impotence had been beaten into him and a scar had been left on his mind that could only be healed by experience.
(Casino Royale, (Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 1953, 2012), (XXI), p. 138)

When we see an animal in pain, we fulfill fellow Venetian writer Karl Kraus’s (1874–1936) observation: “When animals yawn, they have human faces.” Or, as fellow-Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) might’ve put it: we interpret the animal’s behavior to mean what a human might feel like in pain. But we don’t imagine a dog experiencing pain in only a way a dog could experience pain. Instead, we hear it yelp and see it limp and know that it is in pain. But how? (Kraus, Half–truths & one–and–a–half truths: selected aphorisms, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn, (Montreal: Engendra Press; Reprint Chicago UP, 1976) p. 120; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009) I. nos. 283, 285, 350.)

Elsewhere,* Wittgenstein explains:

Pain in the imagination is not a picture.

And:

What is in the imagination is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.

*(“Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,” 317–18; Philosophical Investigations, I. no. 300–301)

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Imagining a Conversation on Imagination between
Verbena and Lantana

Can you imagine what the wildflowers have to say to us—especially now in midwinter—can you imagine all the books they’ve read, all those books that they’re ready to recite back to those who look down upon them?

For what else do the wildflowers do?

They shout from where they stand, they recite and re-sight every color, every number, every combination of color and number clawing its way out of the earth and toward the silent sun.

Yes, the wildflowers shout at the silent sun. They shout about what they’ve read.

We can imagine what they read.

We can imagine what they’ve read about the imagination.

Our ears ache as we await their great recitation.

Verbena: We have seen the man with the red beard looking and leaping and weeping and waving paint in our fields.

Lantana: That was old Van Gogh. He refused to speak to us, and only listened. But he wrote some of his letters while in our fields, and we were able to read them while he wrote. Though we were never able to look down upon him, the way he and all humans do to us, we were occasionally able to look over his shoulder. One of the last things he wrote was:

Well, the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak. But still, my dear brother, there is this that I have always told you, and I repeat it once more with all the earnestness that can be imparted by an effort of a mind diligently fixed on trying to do as well as one can—I tell you again that I shall always consider that you are something other than a simple dealer on Corot, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which even in the cataclysm retain their quietude.

For this is what we have got to, and this is all or at least the chief thing that I can have to tell you at a moment of comparative crisis. At a moment when things are very strained between dealers in pictures by dead artists, and living artists.

Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half–foundered owing to it—that’s all right—but you are not among the dealers in men so far as I know, and you can choose your side, I think, acting with true humanity, but what’s the use?
(“To Theo, Auvers-sur-Oise, late July, 1890,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. (London: Constable, 1929), ed. Mark Roskill, (New York: Touchstone, 2008), pp. 339–40)

Verbena: ole Van Gogh (1853–1890), and at that point in his life, what else did he have left to imagine? Even we, the flowers of the field, occasionally wither. But new things are always sprouting up. After Van Gogh came Karl Kraus (1874–1936), a man who had nothing to do with hunting in woods, farming in fields, or feasting his eyes upon wildflowers. But he had imagination. So when you say you saw Van Gogh writing in the fields, I say I see in my mind’s eye what Kraus had to say about the imagination. I see that he said:

Often I prick my hand with my pen and know only then that I have experienced what is written.

When I read it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting….

Word and substance—that is the only connection I have ever striven for in my life.
(Half–truths & one–and–a–half truths: selected aphorisms, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn, (Montreal: Engendra Press; Reprint Chicago UP, 1976), p. 36)

Lantana: Unless I’m mistaken, Kraus also said, of himself as a writer-artist, that:

An understanding of my work is impeded by a knowledge of my material. People don’t realize that what is there must first be invented, and that it is worth inventing. Nor do they see that a satirist for whom people exist as though he had invented them needs more strength than one who invents persons as though they existed. (Half–truths, p. 34)

Verbena: And it was Kraus who reminded us that, at least when it comes to writing about the truth (though perhaps it’s not applicable to experiencing or understanding certain truths):

The real truths are those that can be invented. (Half Truths, p. 60)

Lantana: Then, though still out of Austria, but after Kraus, emerged Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), a man who may have seen a few flowers on a stroll from Grantchester village to Cambridge town proper. What might he have imagined while walking along the banks of the River Cam? We know only what our cousins living in those fertile fields have told us. That it was Wittgenstein who said:

What is in the imagination is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.
(“Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,” 317–18; see also Philosophical Investigations, (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), I. no. 301)

Verbena: Then there are those after Wittgenstein. Remember when C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), a sort of Northern-Irish Oxonian Englishman, appeared in Cambridge? What did he say about the imagination?

Lantana: He said (and I think he meant this both anatomically and musically):

Imagination is the organ of meaning.
(“Bluspels and Flalansferes” Rehabilitations and Other Essays, (London: Oxford UP. 1939); reprinted in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black, (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 49)

Verbena: And there was also Lewis’s friend and intellectual sparring partner, Owen Barfield (1898–1997), who tried to teach humans what we wildflowers already know. That:

Imagination is the marriage of spirit and sense.
(Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 79)

Lantana: Barfield also said:

Perception is what we see; imagination is how we look at it.
(Barfield, “Matter, Imagination, and Spirit,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (December 1974): 621–29 at 626.)

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A Brief Meditation on Using Quotations in One’s Writings

Let this discussion on using quotation begin with a quotation from a recent book review that, for the past several months, continues to stir my thinking concerning writing.

Andrew Louth observes in his review (LA Review of Books, Jan. 8, 2023) of Ian McGilchrist’s two-volume The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021) that:

I [Andrew Louth] felt, however, that his [McGilchrist’s] appeal for their support [from authors whom McGilchrist quotes throughout his book] amounted too often to quotations and too little to real engagement with their thought…. It seems to me, however, that some of these [authors] are sold short when treated as a source for striking quotations. They were all thinkers; it will not do to pass over their modes of thoughts, even their arguments, and treat them as oracular sources.

While I look forward to reading McGilchrist’s seemingly mighty tome, I’m starting to feel that my own nonfiction writings (see here and here) generally contain too much quotation.

Sometimes I quote because I think someone else’s words have already said in the best way possible whatever it is that needs to be said. (But I also recognize a bit of a chip-on-my-shoulder feeling that I’m, intellectually, always playing “catch up” to those who are farther ahead of me.)

Quotation on an informal book blog like Bookbread is one thing, but in more formal writing––as the quotation above by Louth indicates––quotation can sometimes appear as a crutch to a writer’s own thinking.

Therefore, at least going forward in my own formal writings, I will try not just to quote the quotation, but instead, engage with the thinking that went into the quotation by focusing on these several modes:

• When quoting, I will try to consider the thinking that went into the immediate sentences and clauses just before and just after the quotation.
• When quoting, I will try to consider the thinking that went into the entire work from which the quotation was pulled.
• When quoting, I will try to consider the thinking that went into the entire work in relation to the writer’s entire body of work, as well as the writer’s general biography.
• When quoting, I will try to consider the thinking that went into the entire work from which the quotation came in relation to works by that writer’s contemporaries, as well as consider the spirit of the times in which those writers lived.
• When quoting, I will try to consider the thinking that went into the entire work in its relation to all of human history.
• Always remember the dictum from Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) that to quote a text is to interrupt its context, (“The Image of Proust,” Literarische Welt (1929) in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 202).

And just as I will try to be more considerate in any quotations I might use (and not just “name drop”), so too do I consider songs played on guitar (and sometimes sung) by me to be “interpretations” of pieces of music written by others—not cookie-cutter “cover songs.”

For example, here is a recent attempt of mine to interpret Harry Belafonte’s calypso tune “Jump in the Line”—an attempt that in no way tries to “play it the way you heard it” at the end of the film Beetlejuice (1989):

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Learning to Use Quotations Better

In my last post, I discussed what I’m trying to do with my formal writing with regard to quotations–learning to use them better by not just remembering the best lines, but understanding their various contexts.

For example, I thought I might use a line from Arthur Balfour (1848-1930) for an upcoming project. So first, I had to add some scaffolding around the quotation in order to determine whether the line would even be worthwhile to reference or not:

As we cannot extricate ourselves from the labyrinth of illusion, let us at least see to it that our illusions are agreeable.

Arthur James Balfour, Theism and Humanism, (New York: Doran, 1915), pp. 140–41

After the quotation has been found, I then have to start asking myself questions. I tell myself:

When you quote—don’t just quote the quotation––engage with the thinking that went into the quotation through these several modes:

What mode of thinking went into the immediate sentences and clauses just before and just after the quotation?

Balfour’s philosophical works are aloof and muddling—this quotation can stand on its own, although it shows his skepticism against idealism.

What mode of thinking went into the entire work from which the quotation was pulled?

These words were part of Balfour’s Gifford Lectures, where one lectures on religion and philosophy in some way in Scotland.

What mode of thinking went into the entire work in relation to the writer’s other works as well as the writer’s general biography?

Balfour was a politician-aristocrat first, and only secondarily a philosopher. He would not have called or referred to himself as a “philosopher.”

What mode of thinking went into the entire work in relation to works by the writer’s contemporaries?

See below.

What mode of thinking went into the entire work in relation to history?

“On the fringe of philosophy stands the engaging figure of Arthur James Balfour, afterwards Earl of Balfour (1848–1930), who gave up to politics very great suppleness and tenacity of mind. He attracted attention as a writer with A Defence of Philosophy Doubt (1879), a book which was never taken quite seriously, because its title appeared faintly flippant. The Foundations of Belief (1895), Theism and Humanism (1915) and Theism and Thought (1925) were later excursions into philosophy; but they contributed nothing to current thought. Balfour was critical rather than constructive, and wrote mainly to clear his own mind.”

George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, Third Edition revised by R. C. Churchill, (Cambridge UP, 1970), p. 663.

I then must read over these questions and answers several times before I’m able to determine if the quotation can correctly be used in the way I want to use it. And once that is determined, the scaffolding can then be taken down.

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“Faux the Humanities?”
When the (Lack of) Value in Literature
Overtakes the (Lack of) Quality in Literature

A lot of talk going around (this is only one of the latest examples) about the demise of the humanities etcetera.

But I suspect it has something to do with mistaking the past-present-future value of literature for the present quality (which includes quantity) of literature.

Here are three quotations I’ve been pondering lately concerning this subject. No analysis to provide just yet (though that may come later), for there is plenty to ponder:

The first is from Karl Popper (1902–1994):

I admire the mediæval cathedrals as much as anybody, and I am perfectly prepared to recognize the greatness and uniqueness of mediæval craftsmanship. But I believe that æstheticism must never be used as an argument against humanitarianism.

(“Preface to the Second Edition” (1950), The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013, 2020), (ch. 11, n. 61), pp. 663–64)

The next is from Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), on how one can’t draw conclusions from literature:

James Peck: You once said, “It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do.”

Noam Chomsky: That’s perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it’s not only not unlikely, but it’s almost certain. But still, if I want to understand, let’s say, the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions. Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes—Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range—Hebrew literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate. Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.

(“Interview [with James Peck],” The Chomsky Reader, ed. Peck, (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 4)

The last is from Iain McGilchrist (b. 1953):

I readily accept that there is no cast-iron certainty here, but there isn’t any anywhere. So let’s get over it. There are, however, degrees of truth, some of them very great, and carrying increasing conviction with experience. Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account your and many others. It is far from random, but it is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason, might have done, but more reliable. Acquiring a degree of judgment that can make these elements intelligently cohere is—or used to be—the whole purpose of education. It [p. 398] is why we study the humanities. What history and classics and literature tell us is not to be found in the sciences anywhere. Nowadays we seem to have forgotten this crucial insight, on which the future of our civilisation nonetheless hangs. Judgment used to be the foundation of the idea of reasonableness—a concept you may remember, but which we are in danger of losing, if we have not already done so, in a mechanised, bureaucratic society. The popular reaction to this has been only to intensify the mechanistic vision: no longer seeing complex, unique individuals but only representatives of groups, no longer open to appropriately nuanced, but simple ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ positions, and shouting more and more loudly. Reasonableness is as far from unbridled emotion as it is from rote rationality, on the worst excesses of which it acts as a much-needed brake.

(The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), (II, x), pp. 397–98)

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Quotations in Action: My Piece on Round Church, Cambridge

I recently discussed how, as a writer, I’m now trying to use quotations better–to not just quote the best lines, but place them in the context in which they originally appeared.

So, I’m very glad to have my latest piece in The Fortnightly Review, “Cambridge, Round Church,” published–because this is the first piece published elsewhere, where I’ve tried to extensively apply these new rules I’ve given myself regarding quotations.

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The Baptistry of the Imagination

Many things in life have I seen with great incorrectness and understood with immense inaccuracy, yet is it so crazy for me, now in middle age, to compare the human imagination (or at least some of its characteristics) to a baptistry?

Writer Owen Barfield (1898–1997) was something of Anthroposophist, while his friends C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) were themselves, respectfully, a Northern Irish Anglican and a Catholic from South Africa. Not a Baptist to be had (or dunked).

But Barfield (I think) gets it right when he says in his book Romanticism Comes of Age (Middleton, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1967) that the imagination “seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived.” (p. 63). One sinks into the waters to be baptized (when a Baptist); one sinks into the waters of the imagination to begin deep thinking (when a human).

Or let the metaphor be slightly altered: the human conscious sinks into the waters of the imagination, or is enveloped upon engaging in an imaginative (but certainly not imagined!) mode of thinking things through. Let the metaphor be slightly altered by the Venetian wordsmith Karl Kraus (1874–1936), as when he declares: “Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.” (Half–truths & one–and–a–half truths: selected aphorisms, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn, (Chicago UP; Engendra Press, Montreal. Reprint, 1976), p. 48.)

Alas, maybe the metaphor of the baptistry is too idealistic and, like cotton candy, though there appears to be something of substance, upon closer inspection, it turns out that there’s mostly just air there. Maybe it’s not so pleasant to sink into the imagination. Maybe sinking into reality is a better course of action, as it was for the hero of the novel Cien años de soledad (1967) señor José Arcadio Buendía when his creator Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) writes:

Fascinated by an immediate reality that came to be more fantastic than the vast universe of his imagination, he [José Arcadio Buendía] lost all interest in the alchemist’s laboratory, put to rest the material that had become attenuated with months of manipulation, and went back to being the enterprising man of earlier days when he had decided upon the layout of the streets and the location of the new houses so that  no one would enjoy privileges that everyone did not have.

(A Hundred Years of Solitude), trans. Gregory Rabassa, (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 39.)

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), amid recalling Taoist texts, once contemplated the notion of one becoming trapped in a neither-world (neither in reality nor in imagination):

This suspicion that life is but a dream is, of course, among the most characteristic traits of Asian philosophy; examples from Indian philosophy are numerous. I shall give a Chinese example which his very telling because of its briefness. It reports a story told about the Taoist (i.e., anti-Confucian) philosopher Chuang Tzu. He “once dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction!”

The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 198.)

But perhaps my Baptist background has made me incurably idealistic with regard to the imagination. Perhaps it cannot calm brutes and their brute thoughts. In the novel Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1971), the troll-protagonist penned by John Gardner (1933–1982) realizes:

Imagination, I knew. Some evil inside myself pushed out into the trees. I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things, and when the harper’s lure drew my mind away to hopeful dreams, the dark of what was and always was reached out and snatched my feet. (pp. 16–17)

And this same sentiment of a suspicion of the imagination plays out, much more gracefully and without as much brutishness, in the “tragedy of manners” novel The Remains of the Day (New York: Faber and Faber, 1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro. In that text, the butler Stephens has and hopes for grand plans to finally reunite and re-attract the attentions of Miss Kenton. But by being so swamped in his own imagination, he is unable to “see the writing on the wall” regarding their relationship.

But oh! is Stephens so refreshed, so sentimental, so “baptizing” upon his readers. Let us end this discussion with some examples of his imagination at play (sometimes occurring for Stephens while he is engaged in the act of reading):

My receiving the letter from Miss Kenton, containing as it did, along with its long, revealing passages, an unmistakable nostalgia for Darlington Hall, and—I am obliged me to see my staff plan afresh…. (p. 9)

I have, I should make clear, reread Miss Kenton’s recent letter several times, and there is no possibility I am merely imagining the presence of these hints on her part…. (p. 10)

They were written during the thirties, but much of it would still be up to date—after all, I do not imagine German bombs have altered our countryside so significantly…. (p. 11)

I imagine the experience of unease mixed with exhilaration often described in connection with this moment is very similar to what I felt in the Ford as the surroundings grew strange around me…. (p. 24)

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint…. (pp. 28–29)

But by and large, I believe these generalizations to be accurate, and indeed, such ‘idealistic’ motivations as I have described have played a large part in my own career. (p. 116)

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Here are two poems that continue to stick with me—two poems that somewhat involve Texas as a place.

One poem, “Sailing Ashland Avenue,” (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 2023) by Robert Archambeau, spreads from Chicago to Omaha to Texas. And there is much about Chicago and Omaha and Texas––a strange, strong poem.

Another is “Easter 2022” (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 2023) by Michael Anania. This is a poem that spreads from Texas to Lviv, Ukraine to Poland––a fresh, fragrant poem.

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