Write on

Since recovering from the surgery (August 29) that removed my cancerous prostate, i've returned to regular work on Turning Words. Having been away from it for a long time, my feel for the task has changed considerably (actually my feel for everything has changed over the past year and a half, but i haven't found a way to write or talk about the change comprehensively).

One thing i've considered is a more systematic attempt to enter into dialogue with readers (especially my friends on Manitoulin Island). This would certainly be instructive for me and would affect my revision of the existing draft. But whether it would improve the book in the long run, i.e. enhance its value for subsequent readers, is another question, and one i have no answer for. So i keep on writing and revising without giving much thought to recruiting readers.

Actually i doubt that any reader would understand what the book was driving at unless they were already driving at it themselves; and in that case, they might well arrive at it (or not) regardless of whether they read my book or not.

Yet i suppose the authors i've read (and, i hope, learned from) might well have had the same thoughts about future readers, and if so, it didn't stop them writing. So i labour on, not because i am convinced that my work will end up being useful to somebody, but because i simply feel as if something quite beyond me is using me to manifest itself. No doubt there are other manifestations of it as well; i have no way of knowing whether the one i'm responsible for will actually reach anyone. The meaning doesn't belong to me, i belong to it. The writing is integral with the total practice of my life that i owe to it. So i muddle on, not even knowing whether anyone will actually read it or not. (And the same goes for this post, come to think of it.)

The explicit intricacy

Today i'd like to introduce a passage from Blake's Milton, a long poem about its own genesis. In Book 1

Milton, who walkd about in Eternity
One hundred years, pondring the intricate mazes of Providence

descends back into the fallen world of everyday life to unite his prophetic inspiration with Blake's, and thus to correct some errors of his earlier life's work. Blake and Milton together become one with Los, who might be defined as the Creative Imagination who expresses, or makes explicit, what Eugene Gendlin has called the implicit intricacy.

The division of being into beings or systems, each with its inside and outside, is what makes it all so intricate. On Plate 26 of Milton we find a vision of the natural environment as the work of Los. Here it is (replacing some of Blake's remarkably quirky punctuation with my own):

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer
Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of delight, artful to weave;
Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,
To touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return –
These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains
The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the darksom sky
Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons
Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity.
But we see only as it were the hem of their garments
When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond'rous Visions.

Our eyes are ‘vegetable’ when they are not animated with the creative power of vision – the same power with which you the universe are at once wholly guided and animated.

Re: vision

The artist possessed by the creative process is inspired, in the groove, in the flow. When the work is complete, it quickly turns into an anchor he has to cast off, a skin she has to shed, in order to re-enter the zone of inspiration.

The seeker of truth wants only to pin it down; her goal is the ‘fixation of belief’, as Peirce expressed it in a famous essay. He imagines a fully understood world in the distant future, and aims to contribute something to that final knowledge. And yet any belief which becomes a ‘fixation’ weighs her down like a heavy chain, or a cross he has to bear. If Truth really is eternal and unchanging, it can only be kept alive by the constant turning of time, presenting it every day from a different angle.

Signs of life-and-death

Thoreau's journals are especially pointed and profound when they take on the prophetic tone of an oracle. The same is true of the fragments of Heraclitus, such as this one:
Ἓν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα.
(‘The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.’)
The genetive form Ζηνὸς for ‘of Zeus’ is one of those meaningful puns often deployed by Heraclitus, as it could also mean ‘of life’. This connects the polyversity of names with the per-versity (the pervasive or ‘thorough turning’) of life-and-death, or birth-and-death as Buddhists call it.

Charles Kahn's comment on this fragment sums up the whole practice and purpose of the oracular style:

If Heraclitus must, like the oracle, ‘neither declare (legei) nor conceal but give a sign’, that is because his listeners cannot follow a plain tale. If they had what it takes to comprehend his message, the truth would already be apparent to them. But since words alone cannot make them understand ‘when their souls do not speak the language’, he must resort to enigmas, image, paradox, and even contradiction, to tease or shock the audience into giving thought to the obvious, and thus enable them so see what is staring them in the face. If they succeed, they will understand not this sentence alone but the unified world view that Heraclitus means to communicate. And central to such understanding will be a recognition that the principle of cosmic order is indeed a principle of life, but that it is not willing to be called by this name alone. For it is also a principle of death. Human wisdom culminates in this insight that life and death are two sides of the same coin. And cosmic wisdom is truly spoken of only when identified with both sides of the coin.

— Kahn (1979, 270-1)

Daybloggers

Last week i discovered The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, in which Greg Perry posts every day an entry selected from one of Thoreau's Journal entries for that same date (except the year of course). I'm now ‘following’ this blog — part of a rediscovery of Thoreau for me (see the
entry on Thoreau in my SourceNet page). This was triggered by a piece i read recently in Loren Eiseley's Star Thrower, which includes some superb readings of Thoreau among other treasures.

Thoreau would probably have been a blogger if the technology had existed at the time. For the last ten years of his life he wrote something in his Journal almost every day. This became the core of his discipline as a writer, rather than temporary place to keep the notes and jottings which he would later recast into essays and books such as Walden. I'm thinking now that any blogger might do well to emulate his practice and try to match the level of Thoreau's daily journal entries. I'm still working on my big book (Turning Words), because some things i need to say will only make complete sense in that context, or so it seems to me. But the bigger the project, the more distant and contingent its completion becomes. Why not try every day to write something that will keep the time in more immediate focus and honor its current significance? After all, the opportunity gnox but once …

Wrevelation

The process of revising the first draft of my book Turning Words has been surprising in many ways. I now have six chapters online from each ‘side’ of the book; the sixth, uploaded this week, had to be almost totally rewritten, which took over two months. It's about ‘revelation’, with special reference to the Gospel of Thomas, and my take on both has been developing and deepening over the 5 years or so since the first draft was completed.

All this effort on the book would make no sense if i didn't believe the outcome to be as true, clear and concise as i can make it. In these days of information overload, adding another 300 pages or so to the millions spewed forth every day is not something i take lightly. However, as you know if you've ever tried it, intense concentration on a text tends to make its rough spots invisible to the writer. That's why i'm placing the chapters online as i finish each one in this round of revision—hoping that a reader or two can respond to it, and thus give me a few clues that might help to carry the process further. It does make some demands on the reader's attention. That's intentional—i think it's important to push the envelope of language a little—but how can you tell in advance whether it will be worth the effort? You can't be sure, but you should be able to guess well enough by the end of Chapter 1, if you follow it closely enough to catch the clues. Anyway, if i didn't think it was already worth a reader's while, i wouldn't be doing any of this. In fact, i'm pretty sure that the current draft of this book has been more carefully thought and written out than many published books. I suppose that makes me a ‘perfectionist’ … Well, nobody's perfect!

A few prospective readers have told me that they need a printed text, since it's too much of a strain to read from a screen. If so, you should be able to print it with your browser, but you may need to make some adjustments before printing in order to reduce the amount of paper you use. (No chapter in this book should take more than 20 pages to print—or 10 if you print on both sides.) First, you can reduce the text size with your browser settings (since i have deliberately refrained from specifying the text size in my HTML coding). Second, you should probably set the side margins at zero in your print settings, because this text has margins ‘built in’ (to make it more presentable on the screen). If you still have trouble printing a chapter, you can always e-mail me for help: gnox -at- xplornet (dot) com. By the way, i still haven't decided whether conventional printing is the way this book should be published after it's finished—which may take a couple more years …

Meanwhile, most of what i need to say these days seems to need the context of the book in order to make adequate sense; so this blog's been pretty quiet. But perhaps this too will change, now that i'm liberated from Chapter 6! We shall see.

Poet, prophet, reader, scientist

Here's a bit of deep dialogue from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied, All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of any thing.

The poet and the prophet speak with utter conviction: if they didn't, they simply wouldn't be poets or prophets. They don't care about consequences or complications. Their task is to make their infinite visions clearly visible to others.

But what about the philosopher and the scientist? Do they believe that a ‘firm persuasion’ of anything makes it true? And how about you, dear reader?

Science, being a way of inquiry, can only begin where the poet leaves off, with a hypothesis to be tested. But a fresh hypothesis can only come in a flash of insight, like the poet's or prophet's vision. The source of this creative insight is what Blake calls the ‘poetic Genius’, and what the prophets call ‘God’. The flash is so bright for the poet, the need to write it down so compelling, that it blinds her to everything else, including the possible consequences of her utterance.

The honest reader's need, though, is to carry those consequences forward. First the flash of insight must illuminate his own experience, and then its truth becomes testable. The very possibility that the poet has expressed a deep truth or wisdom compels the reader to try it out by thinking and living it through. Will it really move mountains? He can only find out by interpreting it in some way that will make a difference to the conduct of life.

In the case of a scripture such as the Bible, the honest reader is well aware of the possibility (nay, the history!) of misinterpretation—which entails a need for reinterpretation. And that is exactly what Blake is doing here, as both poet and reader, in his dialogue with the prophets who went before. He knows very well that their writings, or some readings of them, have indeed been ‘the cause of imposition’. His own ‘honest indignation’ lies behind this inquiry, and leads to his own reinterpretation, not only of those writings, but of prophecy itself.

Poetry and philosophy, prophecy and science, writing and reading, each has its role to play in the semiotic cycle. And now it is your turn to test the wisdom at which Blake's inquiry arrives. What difference will it make to the way you read, think, write and live?

Earwaves

To write something down is only to testify that at some point, in some situation, it meant something worthy of notice. To publish it is an expression of faith that it might mean as much to somebody somewhere else. But can you tell them how to hear it?

Dogen, in one of his Shobogenzo essays, tells the story of a Chinese poet who realized the intimate truth upon hearing the sounds of a valley stream flowing in the night. He wrote the following verse:

The sound of the valley stream is the Universal Tongue,
the colors of the mountains are all the Pure Body.
Another day how can I recite
the eighty-four thousand verses of last night?

— (tr. Cleary 1995, 116)

How can i comment on this? I will close with a bit of Henry David Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. We not unfrequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel to the written and comparatively lifeless body of the work. Of all books this sequel is the most indispensable part. It should be the author's aim to say once and emphatically, “He said,” εφη. This is the most the book-maker can attain to. If he make his volume a mole whereon the waves of Silence may break, it is well.
It were vain for me to endeavor to interpret the Silence. She cannot be done into English. For six thousand years men have translated her with what fidelity belonged to each, and still she is little better than a sealed book. A man may run on confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he made; for when he at length dives into her, so vast is the disproportion of the told to the untold, that the former will seem but the bubble on the surface where he disappeared. Nevertheless, we will go on, like those Chinese cliff swallows, feathering our nests with the froth, which may one day be bread of life to such as dwell by the sea-shore.