Faerie Iron and Butter Diamonds, Part II.

We here at Silver Door must ask the indulgence of our subscribers. Among many changes, both Nathan and I will have moved and undergone changes in our employment this year, and these have left us with less time than we could wish to service our dear readers with the delectations of curated poems. God willing more regular posts will find their way to each of you apace. As regards the following, I’ve decided to parse the original essay up into slightly more manageable chunks. That said, I encourage reading from the beginning, if there is interest.

The imaginal is transjective, it is the mediating logos; it has the ontology of a word, whose semantic content can be participated in without depletion; it is on the horizon of heaven and earth, so to speak. It is both entirely practical and embodied, and totally transcendent; it is the place where noetic lightning meets the altar of our bodies (I do not mean bodies in the purely physiological sense, but more broadly as those vessels which manifest invisible meaning). Hermeneutics, as the act of interpretation, could perhaps better be construed as interpenetration, “the text is not an objective fact to be interpreted- rather it provides the con-text for an interpersonal dialogue of mutual interpretation between the reader and the Word.” Thus Tom Cheetham sums the hermeneutics of Henry Corbin. As Gadamer takes for an example, Dostoevsky describes so well the stairwell Smerdjakov falls down, that each reader has a kind of certitude in that his own internal representation thereof is authoritative. And yet for each reader, the stairwell is different; and it was different moreover for Dostoevsky himself. Gadamer takes the opportunity here to explore the interesting dynamic of intrinsic referral of the instance, as opposed to extrinsic referral toward an instance: that is, Dostoevsky’s description does not set us looking for an instance of a stairwell which meets his feature-list of qualia, but rather incites in the reader the appearance of a consonant internal instance. But we will not follow him in these explorations, interesting as they may be; however, the notion he raises should be borne in mind henceforward. And now, Steiner trenchantly reminds us of the etymological memory of the god Hermes incumbent in our language, the “messenger between the gods and the living, between the living and the dead,’ and so also, ‘of the resistance of meaning to mortality.” I do not know Heidegger very well, but I suppose the connections would be manifold. It is imperative that we recognize that meaning does not dissipate through participation. However many times a discrete person sits down at the table to partake, so to speak, of a logogram, its semantic nutriment in no way lessens (in some ways, it accretes, or better put, reveals itself in the fullness of its plurality). In this we can see the promise of the leopard that shall lie down with the kid; and moreover this is the Eucharistic sharing of the loaves, the dissemination of the one into the many; the whole being present within each part thereof.

The teleology of hermeneutics is always personhood; its epistemology is analogical harmony, and the gnosiology thereof is embodied participation. As was, I believe, a saying of St. Sophrony Sakharov, prayer is a state of being. And prayer is the Science of sciences, and the Art of arts, so what is true for prayer must be in some sense also fractally true for all else. Perhaps at this point of redundancy I should merely recommend the reader to go and read George Steiner for themselves, if they have not already, for I must continue to indulge in parasitising his prose that is far more lucid and cogent than my own; but he makes very well the point I want to make, and so again: educing the various functions of the interpreter and the interpretive, “An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. He is a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions. He is, in essence, an executant, one who ‘acts out’ the material before him so as to give it intelligible life. Hence the third major sense of ‘interpretation’. An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. A violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation. Such understanding is simultaneously analytical and critical. Each performance of a dramatic text or musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible. The ‘dramatic critic’ par excellence is the actor or producer who, with and through the actor, tests and carries out the potentialities of meaning in the play. The true hermeneutic of drama is staging (even the reading out loud of a play will, usually, cut far deeper than any theatrical review). In turn, no musicology, no music criticism, can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance. It is when we experience and compare different interpretations, that is to say performances, of the same ballet, symphony or quartet, that we enter the life of comprehension.” 
	
We are therefore answerable to our enactment of meaning, as we are to another being; for Steiner goes further in elucidating the dialogic mutuality of the dramatic or the poetic, by invocation of memory; for memory, or re-collection, is to make dialogically fluid the intercourse, the “shaping reciprocity between ourselves, and that which the heart knows.” Christians, particularly in the eastern tradition, know that the nature of Love is to be kenotic; it dies to itself in order to give place to the Other. And so we agree with Steiner, that it is of vital importance that we begin to know our poetry, literature, and music by heart, for that which we “know by heart becomes an agency in our consciousness.” This mode of chaste, or integrous ingestion which can be had through learning a thing by heart, adds to our depth of being (Gadamer provocatively has it, that “art adds to our being”); it folds our dissonance around itself, and smooths out therefrom something melodious. And I emphasize that it is impossible to separate this courtship of the Beautiful from ethics, for the Beautiful is always ethical; though an ethic has an ontological status similar to the performative that stepping over a log has to a log; it is a necessary courtesy of encounter with the Beautiful, but is not essential (though it may be integral) to the Beautiful itself. Steiner claims that “we need a terminology which plainly articulates the intuition that an experience of communicated forms of meaning demands, fundamentally, a courtesy or tact of heart, a tact of sensibility and of intellection which are conjoined at their several roots.” This courtesy is the liturgising of encounter with the Other. So welcome and hospitality, the charisms of Philemon, and of Abraham at Mamre, also pertain to the contemplation of and fulfillment in themselves of the logoi: “for many have entertained angels unawares.” In another context, we might say that theophany and liturgy mutually presuppose one another. Perception itself requires a sort of collusion, for there is never a time when we are discontiguous from our environs; and there is an unavoidable magic, a sort of narrative fittedness appropriate only to story, in the uncoerced approach of phenomena. It is as if one were a stranger at a splendid ball, and all of the dancers were partnered, but one catches sight, as the turns go on and on, of a single woman dancing alone; and as the turns progress, the glimpses one has of her show her to be more close, and more close still, until she is beckoning you with a mysterious beckoning, and you then are dancing in her arms, and a part, really, of her world.