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The problem with wanting to argue that the interpretive grids with which we understand ourselves, the world around us, and the history of ourselves and the world around us are essentially correct, but not quite, is partly one of audience, and partly one of context.
Audience, in that the interpretive grids themselves are a matter for graduate study, and nobody wants to stop what they are doing—making art, reading John Crowley, watching Desperate Housewives, whatever—and master the basics in order to understand whether the proposed modification is even worth arguing about.
Sometimes, as with Ezra Pound’s eccentric speculations, it is worth arguing about, but it is wrong anyway. Then the folks who only pick up on the modifications turn into cranks because they don’t have any idea what it is they are supposed to be modifying, much less any idea of whether the modifications are worth pursuing or not.
I think there is insight to be gained in pursuing how some of the people I have written about in this journal exemplify lives lived in between the acceptable alternatives—Charles Williams edited the collected letters of Evelyn Underhill, for example, and plumped for the publication of English translations of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s life in between the acceptable alternatives of atheism and orthodoxy we know about, but Underhill’s mash-up (to use the pop American term of the moment) of mysticism and modernism, psychoanalysis and premodern analysis of experience, situates her suggestively in the liminal territory I like whenever I encounter it. She discovered William Blake with delight, and “once wrote of her halfway house between agnosticism and Catholicism as a kind of ‘border land,’” to quote Jeff Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism— a title that is all but guaranteed to chase away the people who would most profit from reading it.
I’ve never read Underhill because from age twenty onwards I assumed any book with a title like Mysticism would be treacly, and I preferred to be mired in the mucky borderlands between Thomas Merton and Thomas Altizer rather than to be drowned in a vat of molasses. And indeed, Underhill’s epistemology apparently sucks, to use the American idiom again, simply because of the decades in which she lived: one can’t get beyond the level of theoretical insight encoded in one’s historical circumstances, except in small and always distorted ways. Something about base and superstructure, or stuff like that.
But the perceptions can always be cleaned up (my molasses metaphor again), or at least smeared with the kind of muck we find more palatable. Here is Kripal on Underhill’s notion of doctrinal assertions as inadequate maps (and forget, for now, that his book is about, in part, what Wendy Doniger calls the “myths lived by scholars who study myths,” or in this case mysticism, and the “textual, doctrinal, psychological, and sexual” borderlands inhabited by scholars of such stuff):
“Maps, …like symbolic dogmas, poems, paintings, and mystical visions, … are the products of artistic vision and speak of fantastic psychic lands yet to be explored. …More radically, the subjective nature of comparison and her mapmaking project does not trouble Underhill since, following Bergson, she believes that all human perception, including and especially that of the ‘real’ world, is the result of a similarly selective activity. The brain is a kind of filter, and its senses are normally attuned to only a small fraction of what the human being is capable of experiencing.”
Which of course is true, else we couldn’t be bamboozled by such crap as credit default swaps or the even more complex financial chicanery described by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone whereby the city of Birmingham, Alabama was seduced into bankruptcy. Marx never knew the half of it.
Which, by the way was something Charles Williams in his perennial financial insecurity also suspected, along with more marginally respectable intuitions.
Williams and Underhill both joined branches of the Order of the Golden Dawn at a certain point in their development from skepticism to, uh, what both Williams and I would call skepticism, but the thing had splintered so badly so quickly that they didn’t join the same branch of it. One more unstable borderland between belief and unbelief, or knowledge after which forgiveness becomes increasingly difficult. Both of them recognized the intrinsic foolishness of the interplay within occultist circles, and went their own distinct way thereafter.
We have come back to why anybody should want to know about this when they would rather be reading John Crowley (or, if they are John Crowley, writing more novels).
Some folks enjoy such messes, and, however regrettably, can do no other.
Audience, in that the interpretive grids themselves are a matter for graduate study, and nobody wants to stop what they are doing—making art, reading John Crowley, watching Desperate Housewives, whatever—and master the basics in order to understand whether the proposed modification is even worth arguing about.
Sometimes, as with Ezra Pound’s eccentric speculations, it is worth arguing about, but it is wrong anyway. Then the folks who only pick up on the modifications turn into cranks because they don’t have any idea what it is they are supposed to be modifying, much less any idea of whether the modifications are worth pursuing or not.
I think there is insight to be gained in pursuing how some of the people I have written about in this journal exemplify lives lived in between the acceptable alternatives—Charles Williams edited the collected letters of Evelyn Underhill, for example, and plumped for the publication of English translations of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s life in between the acceptable alternatives of atheism and orthodoxy we know about, but Underhill’s mash-up (to use the pop American term of the moment) of mysticism and modernism, psychoanalysis and premodern analysis of experience, situates her suggestively in the liminal territory I like whenever I encounter it. She discovered William Blake with delight, and “once wrote of her halfway house between agnosticism and Catholicism as a kind of ‘border land,’” to quote Jeff Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism— a title that is all but guaranteed to chase away the people who would most profit from reading it.
I’ve never read Underhill because from age twenty onwards I assumed any book with a title like Mysticism would be treacly, and I preferred to be mired in the mucky borderlands between Thomas Merton and Thomas Altizer rather than to be drowned in a vat of molasses. And indeed, Underhill’s epistemology apparently sucks, to use the American idiom again, simply because of the decades in which she lived: one can’t get beyond the level of theoretical insight encoded in one’s historical circumstances, except in small and always distorted ways. Something about base and superstructure, or stuff like that.
But the perceptions can always be cleaned up (my molasses metaphor again), or at least smeared with the kind of muck we find more palatable. Here is Kripal on Underhill’s notion of doctrinal assertions as inadequate maps (and forget, for now, that his book is about, in part, what Wendy Doniger calls the “myths lived by scholars who study myths,” or in this case mysticism, and the “textual, doctrinal, psychological, and sexual” borderlands inhabited by scholars of such stuff):
“Maps, …like symbolic dogmas, poems, paintings, and mystical visions, … are the products of artistic vision and speak of fantastic psychic lands yet to be explored. …More radically, the subjective nature of comparison and her mapmaking project does not trouble Underhill since, following Bergson, she believes that all human perception, including and especially that of the ‘real’ world, is the result of a similarly selective activity. The brain is a kind of filter, and its senses are normally attuned to only a small fraction of what the human being is capable of experiencing.”
Which of course is true, else we couldn’t be bamboozled by such crap as credit default swaps or the even more complex financial chicanery described by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone whereby the city of Birmingham, Alabama was seduced into bankruptcy. Marx never knew the half of it.
Which, by the way was something Charles Williams in his perennial financial insecurity also suspected, along with more marginally respectable intuitions.
Williams and Underhill both joined branches of the Order of the Golden Dawn at a certain point in their development from skepticism to, uh, what both Williams and I would call skepticism, but the thing had splintered so badly so quickly that they didn’t join the same branch of it. One more unstable borderland between belief and unbelief, or knowledge after which forgiveness becomes increasingly difficult. Both of them recognized the intrinsic foolishness of the interplay within occultist circles, and went their own distinct way thereafter.
We have come back to why anybody should want to know about this when they would rather be reading John Crowley (or, if they are John Crowley, writing more novels).
Some folks enjoy such messes, and, however regrettably, can do no other.
