"And when it comes to vision, we need to be able to see contrary things and believe them both true: “Without Contraries is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), despite the scorn of rationalists whose single vision rejects anything that is not logically coherent...
...I believe this, too. Single vision is deadly. Those who exalt reason over every other faculty, who condemn those who don’t respond to life with logic but allow themselves to be swayed by emotion, or who maintain that other ways of seeing (the imaginative, the poetic, etc) are fine in their place but the scientific is the only true one, find this position ridiculous. But no symphony, no painting, no poem, no art at all was ever reasoned into existence, and I knew from my youth that art of some kind was going to be the preoccupation of my life. Single vision would not do. “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Blake, “Jerusalem”).
If I didn’t know that from experience when I was young, I know it now. We find the truth of it most forcibly when twofold or threefold vision fails, and we fall into the state described by that great Blakeian WB Yeats as “the will trying to do the work of the imagination”. It’s a condition, I dare say, in which most writers and artists have found themselves marooned from time to time. To get lost in that bleak state when inspiration fails is to find yourself only a step away from an even darker labyrinth, which goes by the entirely inadequate name of depression. A savage deadly heaviness, a desolation of the spirits, an evil gnawing at the very roots of our life: if we’re unlucky enough to feel that, we will know from experience that the opposite of that abominable condition is not happiness, but energy. “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In its absence, goodness, intellect, beauty – and reason, too – are listless, useless phantoms pining for the blood of life."
Oh boy.
In the piece, Pullman also talks about his BODY responding to certain lines of poetry, and that resonated strongly, too. My own split from my body is old and troublesome and I've only just barely been taking any steps to address it, but I do know that inner vibration I have gotten from poetry, and it is as intense and real a sensation as I have ever had. And this is part of what I was talking about before. That sensual engagement with art and with spiritual experience and with mythology and symbolism. That it is "real" and that it deserves dignity, and that it is another type of vision, of seeing, of knowing. I actually had a strange thought while listening to the sacred music the other day, being transported. I remembered a warning in some spiritual book or other about the dangers of using certain spiritual joys "for the flesh" and I think music was included. I am pretty sure the idea was that if you focus just on the thing itself and not on the deeper experience or meaning, that you're missing out. But I didn't take it that way. How I became such a vicious puritain towards myself I'm not sure. But anyway, that little feeling, very old, that maybe I was doing something wrong by just enjoying the music and the church and the words and the candles in a sensual way.
Funny. But that's the thing. I have only my senses. They are how I engage with the world. They are holy. I've been finding some new flourishing of interest in Auden, another poet I have cared for but not spent enough time with. I am attracted to the paradox of his being, in so many ways, a worldly and sensual person, of his passionate love for another man, and for his devoted faith. How he managed to synthesize it all. And his poem "Precious Five" has recently taken on a strong personal meaning:
Be happy, precious five,
So long as I’m alive
Nor try to ask me what
You should be happy for;
Think, if it helps, of love
Or alcohol or gold,
But do as you are told.
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing.
In the piece, Pullman also talks about his BODY responding to certain lines of poetry, and that resonated strongly, too. My own split from my body is old and troublesome and I've only just barely been taking any steps to address it, but I do know that inner vibration I have gotten from poetry, and it is as intense and real a sensation as I have ever had. And this is part of what I was talking about before. That sensual engagement with art and with spiritual experience and with mythology and symbolism. That it is "real" and that it deserves dignity, and that it is another type of vision, of seeing, of knowing. I actually had a strange thought while listening to the sacred music the other day, being transported. I remembered a warning in some spiritual book or other about the dangers of using certain spiritual joys "for the flesh" and I think music was included. I am pretty sure the idea was that if you focus just on the thing itself and not on the deeper experience or meaning, that you're missing out. But I didn't take it that way. How I became such a vicious puritain towards myself I'm not sure. But anyway, that little feeling, very old, that maybe I was doing something wrong by just enjoying the music and the church and the words and the candles in a sensual way.
Funny. But that's the thing. I have only my senses. They are how I engage with the world. They are holy. I've been finding some new flourishing of interest in Auden, another poet I have cared for but not spent enough time with. I am attracted to the paradox of his being, in so many ways, a worldly and sensual person, of his passionate love for another man, and for his devoted faith. How he managed to synthesize it all. And his poem "Precious Five" has recently taken on a strong personal meaning:
Be happy, precious five,
So long as I’m alive
Nor try to ask me what
You should be happy for;
Think, if it helps, of love
Or alcohol or gold,
But do as you are told.
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing.
The "precious five", of course, are the five senses. Experience again, seeing, but also feeling, tasting, hearing, touching, smelling. Experience, and then "Bless what there is for being." Whether or not I get it or understand it or am told what the hell is going on. That's all I'm doing, or trying to do.
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