Faerie Iron and Butter Diamonds, Part I.

An Attempt at an (Orthodox) Aesthetics of the Imaginal

The following is the first several pages of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago in the attempt to articulate for myself the relationship between the imaginal, aesthetic experience, hesychasm, and negative theology. It has all the faults that a private essay is likely to have: esotericism, convolution, general lack of structure and concern for the reader. That said, re-reading it today, I find the material very useful. Hopefully some of you will find it so as well. There will likely be three installations of the essay over the coming weeks: afterwards perhaps I’ll post the whole thing as it was written. One may recognize what I later came to call ‘The Hermeneutics of Glory’ inchoate here. The current title of this series is a working title: don’t read into it.

For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of the martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.

This essay does not intend to treat its subjects to exhaustion, because, as the author soon realized upon beginning to write, there is no topic so totally discrete as to be housed within a network of referents minute enough not to imply so much reading and erudition, as would include the entire pedigree of mankind’s activity and cognition. This especially applies when one sets out to write about writing, about language and semantics, about perception, cognition; as the reader will be reminded many times throughout this paper, the snare of the ouroboric loop is always a present danger, for there is a trouble in trying to circumscribe any thing by means of itself. One may refer to Gödel here, if they should wish. In part, this indeed is why the author set out to write. This essay is not meant to convince one of anything, for if there are propositions herein they are only suggestions, and if there are arguments they probably fault themselves in detail; this essay rather, is meant to induce in the reader a fresh state of perspective, to offer the reader a stance in relation to the world and to the Other whereby “a terrible beauty is born.” And yet that is not a trivial matter; as one poet has it, “you are not yet serious enough, my son, to be childlike; for to be childlike is not to be a child, but to be a man, and strengthened for a lack of ignorance and for a surplus of hope once more into the thewy yoke of childhood’s simple and delightful industry.” And to be childlike indeed is to enact the stance of which I speak. It is to corroborate the unrequited hopes that flee the heart, fearing, like Yeats’ squirrel, to be caught, lest they should be killed. And yet, we shall hear now them say, “All I would do/Is to scratch your head/And to let you go.”

The author also would like to further clarify his lack of expertise in any of the areas he shall be expatiating upon; the queries (articulations of limiting questions, the gordian knots which interlabyrinth the frontier-lands of explicit knowledge) and speculations in this essay should be taken only as seriously as one is wont to take the pseudo-scholarship (but I prefer to think of what I do here as a kind of meditation) of a mostly uneducated dilettante, new to the tradition he is writing within, and writing only because he, for his own sake, must. The patience of the reader, whose greater expertise the author assumes, is hereby humbly implored.

Our subject is the imagination — not the imagination whose ephemeral sweetness Keats laments,

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
         As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.

But rather imagination, or imaginal participation, as a faculty or activity which reveals the world as impregnated with hidden pearls, planted therein by the lighting of Christ’s incarnation; as mysteriously adduced by St. Maximus the Confessor, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” Imagination as labourer and as gardener: for “it is only the ill-bred, that is, the uncultivated imagination that will amuse itself where it ought to worship and work,” as MacDonald has it so pithily; and that is the sort of imagination that is our true quarry. 

People do not often perceive anything with an effort of clarity more than a handful of times. Having seen a tree, and likely enthusiastically explored the bark and roots, the smells and various attendant insects, nest-birds, and mosses thereof with great tenacity and expectation as a child, they have allowed the experience of the tree as a constitutive extrinsic morpheme in the arena of being to retreat into the commonplace; that animal having been, so to speak, tamed. The commonplace becomes a zoo of presences which do not merit re-cognition. Rather than discovering oneself anew to a wild and naked world, instead the banality of a gloss is apportioned foregrounding. This perhaps is practically necessary; however there seems to be but little recourse to a venue for ecstatic pilgrimage back into the region where the tree makes itself initially and erotically present. Somehow, Basho and his disciples were able to write scores of verses about the cherry blossom, with undiminished admiration and delight. This is simply because they saw, or endeavoured to see, every cherry blossom, not merely the spectral stand-in which most of the time is substituted for a genuine encounter with a thing as itself, in its irreducible irrepeatability. The difference is, in part, the difference between a subjective monologue and a trans-jective dialogue, which difference later I shall expound further upon. And this endeavouring of Basho and his pupils is precisely the vocation of the poet. The problematic being briefly set, I will present tentatively a grammar which I have begun to use for myself, of an embodied poetics, which employs a vocabulary familiar to Orthodox Christian tradition, and lends itself, should it prove worthwhile, to easy grafting upon existing orchards of aesthetic and metaphysical thought. The syntactical modalities I employ herein are those of unknowing, chastity, hospitality, otherness, veiling, charity, and (borrowing from George Steiner) welcome and courtesy. 

Imagination is the teaching of a school-master (poetry, in this case) that sensitizes the perception to the resistance of beings to be scrutinized, consumed. Hans-Georg Gadamer claims that it is art which teaches us how to see; art teaches us also, I think, what to see. Thus, MacDonald recommends his readers put a painting of good quality in the fulcrum of their home, for it is from thence that the patterns in the rest of the home will take their cue; and something very beautiful will not admit either kitsch or vulgarity. He says further that so doing will in fact aid us in being, by degrees, moral, healthy, and righteous. As to how and what one should see, we return to our consideration of imagination, for the imagination knows beings as dressed in fire, so that they cannot be approached except obliquely, through antinomies and the semantic depletions of orgasmic loquacity. The world approaches one folded up; it shows the world to one as virgin, who becomes the

…glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

As the fragrant essence of a being veils and unveils itself, chastly seducing its partner in a dialectical encounter. “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, with naked foot, stalking in my chamber.” Ultimately this erotic call and response traces its fractal pedigree to the Songs of Songs, the very name whereof elevates it as the meta-type of all diology, and roots any such encounter in the unique person’s progressive union with the Uncreated God. Is not the internal semantic content evinced by these lines of MacLeish

Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough

Convincingly authentic? Is there not therein some residue of the radiant quintessence of the Day, Dream, and the White Peach Bough, mutually enriched by their propinquity, reciprocally informed, so that each is aspectually revealed in a way that is not generically disclosable? Is this apophatic slip into the inexhaustibility of condition which is latent in any discrete sign not enough to demonstrate the illimitable semantic apparel which can obtain to it? There is something mysterious that can happen when two uncommon signs are placed together by the shepherding of the poet. It is as if the dialectic space had been so broadened, the dialogical avenue so distended as to incorporate and commode (bring in-between themselves) a semantic content (a more capacious logos) unfamiliar to the lapsarian cubicles which we quotidianly inhabit, wherein beings are distributed throughout themselves in time and space, and impervious to their consubstantiality with other created beings (including their own several, multi-aspectual instantiations: we can, for example, be infidelitous to our own future selves). Thus Tolkien can be infatuated with his green sun (an image he was said to have been very fond of): it is part of the transcendent polysemous indisclosure of the sun qua sun, that it cannot now be so unfolded in its energies (those parts of its nature in which we can participate) all at once. So history also is both completed in Christ’s death and resurrection, and being still “coaxed to roundness” through the economy of the Spirit. As with all things, Christ paramounts this principle; he is excruciated between the intensest of antinomies: He is the King of Glory, throned in heaven, murdered as a thief, born in a cave, with no place to lay his head; He is the infinite beyond infinite, clothed in the finitude of the flesh, the Almighty made powerless, the Deathless One put to Death. Thus the chain of created signs, their nested cycles of mutual indeterminacy and teeming loops of referents (the lexical conundrum of postmodernity that leads to a blanket vacuum of meaning), are broken asunder and flooded with fire; the babel of semantic nihility is led victorious out of the vanity of death, for, as St. John the Damascene says, Christ is the only new thing under the sun (and this syntactical problem is further reknit, restored, and redeemed at Pentecost, but we shall leave that consideration for another time, as it is beyond the scope and subject of this essay). The extremity of the antinomic approaches silence: for silence is not to be understood solely as negation, but rather positively, as an in-gathering; it is beyond but not in opposition to the vocal or the articulate; the articulate is necessarily defined, that is, it has definition (boundaries); therefore something expressed (pressed out into an adumbration) is semantically exclusive of certain meanings, or at least, further away from them. Silence is broader far (see Max Picard), however even silence cannot be accessed abstractly, and as such there will be a harmonious and particular entry into the wholeness of meaning, which does not obliviate the syntactical sequence of the positive: “the darkness of apophaticism is meant to be the fecund darkness of the womb, a place of maximum development and change, a place out of which a trans-rational Logos can be born.” As Rilke has it in his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, 

We cannot know his legendary head
With eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
Is still suffused with brilliance from inside, 

Though the purpose, or the head, is absent from our vision (for the sculpture is a headless one), the torso “gleams in all its power.” And he continues,

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star,

That is to say, that the aspects are recapitulated in the apophatic space of the head, but the torso still has ichor in its veins; we feel the antinomies of sculptured marble and wild beast’s fur guiding us up to where the headless stone, “from all the borders of itself, burst(s) like a star.” And suddenly thereafter the semantic profusion is such that, “there is no place that does not see you.” For the invisible head sends its smile, “through the placid hips and thighs/to that dark center where procreation flared.”

(If A and B are positive statements antinomic to one another, C is the negative 
apprehension/dimension to which access is afforded thereby.) 

All particularity, whether tactile, lexical, or otherwise, conduces the apophatic; particularity is by virtue of engagement, both an extension, and a withholding. I quote at length from David Abrams: “From the perspective of my bodily senses, there is no thing that appears as a completely determinate or finished object. Each thing, each entity that my body sees, presents some face or facet of itself to my gaze while withholding other aspects from view. The clay bowl resting on the table in front of me meets my eyes with its curved and grainy surface. Yet I can only see one side of that surface- the other side of the bowl is invisible, hidden by the side that faces me. In order to view that other side, I must pick up the bowl and turn it around in my hands, or else walk around the wooden table. Yet, having done so, I can no longer see the first side of the bowl. Surely I know that it still exists; I can even feel the presence of that aspect which the bowl now presents to the lamp on the far side of the table. Yet I myself am simply unable to see the whole of this bowl all at once. Moreover, while examining its outer surface I have only a glimpse of the smooth and finely glazed inside of the bowl. When I stand up to look down into that interior, which gleams with curved reflections from the skylight overhead, I can no longer see the unglazed surface. This earthen vessel thus reveals aspects of its presence to me only by withholding other aspects of itself for further exploration. There can be no question of ever totally exhausting the presence of the bowl with my perception; its very existence as a bowl ensures that there are dimensions wholly inaccessible to me- most obviously the patterns hidden between its glazed and unglazed surfaces, the interior density of its clay body. If I break it into pieces, in hopes of discovering these interior patterns or the delicate structure of its molecular dimensions, I will have destroyed its integrity as a bowl; far from coming to know it completely, I will simply have wrecked any possibility of coming to know it further, having traded the relation between myself and the bowl for a relation to a collection of fragments.” Our perception inalienably is connected to our body; it is co-extensive with it, but, as Abrams elsewhere notes, the body is not an enclosure, but a permeable layer, wherethrough the breath exits and returns, into which sunlights pours, and through which we are immersed in the world. And Steiner corroborates, “The meanings of poetry and the music of those meanings, which we call metrics, are also of the human body.” I do not think it would be overmuch a stretch to say that the turning of the seasons, the topography of mountains, their folding synclines and anticlines, are grammatically intrinsic to perception. And this would account for the certitude with which Basho says of great poets, “Achieving artistic excellence, each holds one attribute in common: each remains attuned to nature throughout the four seasons. Whatever is seen by such a heart and mind is a flower, whatever is dreamed is a moon. Only a barbarian mind could fail to see the flower; only an animal could fail to dream a moon. The first task for each artist is to overcome the barbarian or animal heart and mind, to become one with nature.” In fact, I do not see how otherwise one could come to account for the possibility of metaphorical likening at all; but this is too big a problem here to undertake the answering of, though much that I write will be pertinent probably to some means of its resolution. 

Basho assumes an ascetical dimension to the poetic act; for though the body is permeable, it can be made more so; refined, and so more sensitive to beauty, to joy and to the suffering of others. It may at first seem strange that Basho should recommend overcoming the animal mind, in order to “become one with nature,” as we might usually equivocate between animality and nature. However, Basho seems to assume a compatible rationality between the human mind and nature, and invests the human mind or spirit with something like an Adamic office. The artist (or more generally the person) is called to be above (atleast, to be the crown of) and within nature at once; to become an aqueduct through which a vivifying ray can enter into unnominated nature. The highest calling of the artist is essentially sacerdotal, contemplative, ascetic, and transfigurative (we might add, eucharistic), for his ultimate hope is that nothing whatsoever that is good or beautiful will forever perish, and that within his hands he may proleptically mediate between the double aspectuality of beings, in their tension between the now and the not-yet. This is the imaginal journey undertaken by the poet; the apotheosis of his art is to be had in the chaste and hospitable unknowing of others; he wraps them in laudation, pulls them close to his heart, but leaves them utterly free. 

Perception as dialogue is summated in wholeness. There is absolutely nothing within created bounds exempt from marginal participation in the semantical divulgence between two created beings. To touch the outmost anchor of a spider’s web, is to send ripples throughout the whole of its silken architecture.
To be a good poet, to interact splendidly in the world and with the world in such a way as to translucify it, within and without, is crucially ascetical. It presupposes a mode of being toward the Other grounded in charity: for to become one who sees as a poet one must learn to take beings into one’s heart, to incorporate them, to eucharistically offer them back to themselves, and up to God, before partaking of them. Ingesting, as Steiner says, rather than consuming. MacDonald in his wonderful story, At the Back of the North Wind, has this sequence: the boy Diamond is asked of a poem he particularly likes, “What makes it yours?

‘I love it so.’
‘Does loving a thing make it yours?’
‘I think so, mother- at least more than anything else can. If I didn’t love baby… she wouldn’t be mine a bit. But I do love baby, and baby is my very own...’
‘The baby’s mine, Diamond.’
‘That makes her the more mine, mother.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Because you’re mine, mother.’
‘Is that because you love me?’
‘Yes, just because. Love makes the only myness.”

And so we can also make sense of St. Silouan’s saying, “If the Lord is ours, all things are ours. That is how rich we are.” For if we love the Lord, and the Lord loves all things, then all things are ours in loving Him. Thinking along these lines, I am reminded of Borge’s daydream that perhaps every man reciting Shakespeare is, to some extent, Shakespeare (he is certainly be-ing Shakespeare, but what was Shakespeare be-ing when he gave mouth to the in-spiration which came down on him from above, or welled up in him from below?). At another time it would be beneficial to explore this question in relation to the orality of poetry, how it can be distributed and differently manifest throughout a culture (for instance, the unconscious way in which the Homeric epics shape our being and identity) and the gnoseology of the personal, creative moment; for a poem that is not shared or sung is but a phantom only.