Northrop Frye's late notebooks, 1982-1990: architecture of the spiritual world 0802047513, 0802047521, 0999328468, 9780802047519, 9781442677876, 1442677872

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Abbreviations......Page 10
Notes 52......Page 16
Notes 53......Page 209
Notes 54.1......Page 262
Notes 54.2......Page 278
Notebook 46......Page 288
Notebook 47......Page 297
Notebook 48......Page 303
Notebook 11h......Page 307
Notes 55.1......Page 317
Coda......Page 322
Notes......Page 324
Index......Page 490

Citation preview

Collected Works of Northrop Frye VOLUME 6

Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World

Collected Works of Northrop Frye

Alvin A. Lee, General Editor Jean O'Grady, Associate Editor Nicholas Halmi, Assistant Editor

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O'Grady Assistant Editor Nicholas Halmi Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Eleanor Cook J.R. de J.Jackson Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Roseann Runte Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World VOLUME 6

Edited by Robert D. Denham

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

Victoria University, University of Toronto (notebooks) and Robert D. Denham (preface, introduction, annotation) 2000 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 080204751-3 (Volume 5) ISBN 080204752-1 (Volume 6)

Printed on acid-free paper Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 Northrop Frye's late notebooks, 1982-1990 : architecture of the spiritual world (Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 5-6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 08020-4751-3 (v. 5) ISBN 08020-4752-1 (v. 6) i. Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 - Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. I. Denham, Robert D. II. Title. III. Series. PN75.F7A3 2000

8oi'.95;O92

099-932846-8

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In Memory of My Mother and My Father

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Abbreviations

ix Late Notebooks, 1982-1990 Notes 52 419 Notes 53 612 Notes 54.1 665 Notes 54.2 681

Notebook 46 691

Notebook 47 700

Notebook 48 706

Notebook nh

710

viii

Contents Notes 55.1 720

Coda 725

Notes 727

Index 893

Abbreviations

Frye's own abbreviations have been expanded in square brackets, with the following exceptions: AC (Anatomy of Criticism), AV (Authorized Version), c. (century), El (The Educated Imagination), FS (Fearful Symmetry), GC (The Great Code), N.T. (New Testament), and WP (Words with Power). The abbreviations that follow are used in the endnotes.

AC AV Ayre BG CP CR CW DG DV EAC El

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Authorized Version John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Collected Works of Northrop Frye Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.

x Erdman

FI FS FT GC Hughes MC MD MM NB NF NFC NFCL

NFF NFL NFR

NFS NP

NUS

Abbreviations The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. John Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Notebook Northrop Frye Northrop Frye in Conversation. Ed. David Cayley. Concord, Ont: Anansi, 1992. Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Northrop Frye Fonds Northrop Frye Library (the books in Frye's personal library, now in the Victoria University Library) Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding "The Great Code" and "Words with Power." Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O'Grady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Ed. Robert Sandier. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1986. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. No Uncertain Sounds. Toronto: Chartres Books, 1988.

Abbreviations OE RE RSV RW SE SeS SM SR StS TS TSE WGS

WP WTC

xi

On Education. Markham, Ont: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Revised Standard Version Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935-1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Northrop f rye's Student Essays, 1932-1938. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Typescript T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature." New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

This page intentionally left blank

Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World VOLUME 6

This page intentionally left blank

Notes 52

These are typed notes that Frye wrote during the time he was working on Words with Power. When they arrived at the Victoria University Library, the leaves of the typescript had been placed in a file folder more or less randomly. The twelve pages containing entries 862 to 977 and the four pages containing entries 384 to 417 were hand-numbered by Frye; other pages are numbered but not sequentially. The folder in fact contains a series of typescripts, which have now been arranged into separate units. Although the place where one unit ends and another begins is not always easy to determine with certainty, a new section is most often signalled by a blank space (Frye simply stopped typing before he filled a page) or by a new typewriter font. Paragraphs 108-24,144-82, and 694-731 were typed by Frye's secretary, Jane Widdicombe; paragraphs 183-7,194-200, 228-32, 243-56,672-90, 761-77, and 862-993 were entered on a word processor, also by Jane Widdicombe. The original typescripts for these sections of material were not preserved. As paragraph 776 begins in mid-sentence, at least one page of the typescript following paragraph 775 is missing. The symbol § is used to mark those places where there is an obvious break between different units of the typescript, which is in the NFF, 1993, b°x 2, file 6. The various units of material were clearly not placed in the file folder in chronological order: Frye writes in paragraph 177, for example, that he "started these notes" with a remark about "the cynic at the feast," which is a reference to material in paragraph 721. Internal evidence indicates that at least some of the entries were written after 1986. In paragraph 191, for example, Frye mentions that he is reading Ernest Becker's Denial of Death for the second time, the first reading of which is recorded in Notebook 27—a notebook that he completed on i January 1986. And in paragraph 208 Frye says that after twenty years he reread his book on Romanticism, which was published in 1968. He also refers to his Wiegand lecture (1982), his Jerusalem lecture (1982), and the death of Helen

420

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Frye (4. August 1986). Beyond these dates about all that can be said is that thematically the material fits those years after 1982 when Frye began working on Words with Power. The absence of foreign accents means, apparently, that Frye was using a typewriter without them. The occasional one that does appear has been inserted by hand.

[i] 0. Introduction. The question of the authority of literature, which is the same as the question of the social function of literature. Comparison and contrast with science. What I've written on faith and hope criticism looks rather funny, but it may belong after all. Anyway, the major principle I'm taking over from GC is: the text is the presence. I just wonder if that isn't a variant of "the medium is the message." By the way, Stanley Fish seems to have a form of my focus-of-community principle,1 so I'd better look him up. This introduction should also introduce the conception of primary and secondary concern, and contrast the hierarchical and authoritarian structures of secondary concern with a possible "undisplaced" or "classless" myth of primary concern. [2] i. The Cosmos of Authority: what I have on the growth of the Christian-dominated four-level cosmos that grows up in the early Christian centuries and lasts until the i8th c. The two levels of nature, and so on. [3] 2. The Cosmos of Revolt: the addition of the Eros theme to medieval poetry by the poets, and the elaborate counterpoint to Christian ideas that resulted. How this, in the Romantic, period, turned the older construct upside down and released the "drunken boat" one for the nineteenth century.2 [4] 3. The Eros-Adonis Cycle. This seems to me a horizontal cycle, incorporating the historical cycles of Spengler and Vico as well as the Frazer complex, and coming to some sort of dead end with Robert Graves. As was foreshadowed in the Bible, it ends in the domination of a female cyclical symbol, the white goddess, who in the Bible is converted into the black bride. Perhaps one could introduce the theme here of man as symbolically woman, and as such the fourth person of the Trinity. [5] 4. The Prometheus-Hermes Cycle. This seems to me a vertical cycle,

Notes 52

421

incorporating the themes of network, communication, expansion and contraction, and, of course, "hermeneutics." Eureka3 and similar cosmologies, if there are any similar ones. The amnesia and twin themes from the romance book, and their culmination in the theme of the prison of Narcissus.4 The metaphorical analogies of new scientific discoveries. Religious scriptures and the breaking of doctrines (e.g. the Lankavatara).5 The transition here to the Bible won't be easy: it looks now like the crux of the book. [6] 5. Dialogues of Word and Spirit (I). Creation as conscious recognition of things as ecriture. The proletarian Israel emerging from the Egyptian establishment as the type of the community beyond hierarchy. This dialogue corresponds to the literal level of meaning. The second dialogue is that of law and its response, wisdom. I have some ideas on this, such as the role of ritual (Passover) as the play-response, continued in the girl-with-skipping-rope image of wisdom, answering the daughter in Proverbs.6 [7] 6. Dialogues of Word and Spirit (II). Tropological and anagogic extensions. Prophecy as the alien vision of human situations, associated with thaumaturgy and the U-shaped narrative. The future as an implication of the present. Gospel as the spiritual community's response to prophecy, the crucified Christ being the summing up of the prophet's message, continued in the unwelcome and unrecognized (unacknowledged legislators, Shelley says)7 authority of literature and the arts. The panoramic apocalypse as an image of (a) the repeated deluge or destruction of mankind (b) the completion of work or secondary energy images, hence the new creation and the final epiphany of the Word. The participating apocalypse as the response to that.8 [8] 7. Conclusion. Maybe there won't be any. Jesus' conception of the Other as the Father and not an external world has to go somewhere, and what is still a meaningless phrase, the otherness of identity, keeps running in my head.

§ [9! This is an attempt to think about the blue chapter.91 feel that the two chapters on the cosmos of authority and of revolt are clear enough, and

422

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

that the third one on the Eros-Adonis cycle won't be too tough: I've written a lot about them before, and the Frazer-Graves cycle is clear enough in my head. I have a feeling that if I could only unify my graduate course, which falls apart after the Graves Juan poem, the second chapter would come off.10 [10] I've got stuck in my noddle the two names Prometheus and Hermes, and am beginning to feel that, apparently just for reasons of symmetry, there must be a second cycle incorporating the bulk of the imagery of modern poetry that doesn't get into the Eros-Adonis cycle. I'm putting it in the strongest terms a hostile critic would apply: because I've got a pretty pattern to apply, the facts have simply got to conform to it, and naturally with that attitude I'll succeed sooner or later. I'm familiar with that kind of shit. You can't be original unless you work with hunches and treat them exactly as a paranoiac would do. Of course I find what I want to find in the texts themselves: what else does the double meaning of "invention" mean?11 [11] Well, anyway, the hunch says that the Prometheus-Hermes axis is a vertical one. Poe's Eureka, though I'll have to read it again, ends with an expanding-contracting vision, the unimaginably large in astronomy, the unimaginably small in nuclear physics. That has a dim relation to the way up and down in the Quartets [Eliot, The Dry Salvages, pt. 3,1. 6.], one seeking a circumference and the other a centre. In fact I suspect Heraclitus, who informs Yeats's Byzantium as well as the Quartets, is close to the key of things here. Hermes the psychopomp, whose quest is first of all for nothingness, then for the world where, as Yeats says, chance and choice impinge on each other,12 comes into the Mallarme Igitur pattern.13 The hermeneutic that reads riddles and the hermetic or sealed book of instructions (cf. the undersea episode of Keats's Endymion Ibk. 3]) are close here, also the sense of trickery, treachery, abandonment of "Hermes the thief." [12] As for Prometheus, he means forethought or the predicting aspect of science and technology; he means revolution when he's unbound; he means man conscious of himself as Man. Both are aspects of the low and formerly demonic world, yet both seem to be mirrored in the sky. Christ on the cross is humanity chained down by the Father, like Prometheus; Christ descending into and harrowing hell is psychopomp Hermes.

Notes 52

423

Also, the Eros-Adonis cycle is driven by the anxiety of continuity; patterns of discontinuity and mosaic seem to cluster around the other one. That again is an example of the way in which poetic imagery develops metaphorical analogies of contemporary scientific principles: the quantum mechanics of our century posits a universe where discontinuity and randomness get into poetry. Whether these analogies are good or bad, as analogies, I don't know or care: I don't know what kind of standards apply. [13] Something the Levy woman reported from Malekula (I think) about the souls of the dead meeting a spirit-figure who draws a half-pattern in the sand they have to complete (very vague memory) I find haunting:14 it has overtones of Oedipus and the sphinx; something like it seems to be in that Mumbo-Jumbo book of Ishmael Reed's;15 its ramifications go as far as Browning's notion of the next world completing the pattern of this one.16 [14] One of my hunches is that the prison of Narcissus, the world of Mallarme's Igitur, is the end of the Prometheus-Hermes cycle (if it is a cycle), and that breaking out of this prison forms the connection with the second half of the book. Note that Narcissus is in the mirror world: an essential symbol of human fallibility is the exchange of a three-dimensional life for the two-dimensional one in the reflecting world—because what Narcissus does isn't to drown, but to exchange his identity for his reflected identity in the pool. I have to look at Jay's book,17 of course, and that woman in Lund.18 [15] And something about the Critique of Judgment and Poe's Domain of Arnheim hunches: the way the creation impinges on the recreation, and the fact that the word beauty may actually mean something after all.19 Of course I have always said that Yeats's two Byzantium poems represent the panoramic and participating apocalypses.20 [16] I'm pretty sure that the Vico-Spengler historical cycles are just eptensions of the Eros-Adonis one. The one I'm looking for must have something to do with the apocalyptic-demonic separation. [17] Naturally, one of the themes involved is: what sort of being has non-being? That's part of the old pun on nothing as not anything and as

424

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

something called nothing, as in Stevens' Snow Man.21 The revolution of consciousness I've been connecting with plays, where the notions of reality and illusion you bring into the theatre with you get reversed, is certainly relevant. The reality of non-being is linked to the reality of a dream, and to the dream-reality reversal. Most of what we call reality is the debris of previous human constructs, that is, the blockage of the past, the voice of memory and the accuser. The alien vision of the sun brought into the flickering shadows of the cave. [18] Amnesia and twins, the whole commedia dell'arte bit, have to do with falling into and returning from a dream world. In the dream dreamer and hero of dream are split: in self-recognition scenes like Marina they're reunited and the prison of Narcissus escaped from.22 Big deal. [19] The release from the Narcissus prison could only take the form of the discovery of a new dimension. In physics this extra dimension is time, added to the three in space. In the social sciences it's the historical dimension, the sense that everything is socially conditioned in specific ways. In the world of the imagination it's the prophetic dimension, the alien vision that life is a U and not a straight line. The prophetic vision is counter-historical. Israel never did get free of Egypt: it's still in it, but the vision of the proletarian society released from all hierarchies and establishments is still the vision of the 2Oth c., moving from secondary concerns to the primary one. [20] The prophetic vision is fragmentary, and it takes busted people to expound it. That's because it ends in interpenetration, not conspectus. Hence the chosisme,23 descended from the ecriture of creation, the shored fragments of Eliot [The Waste Land, 1. 431], the found or invented object, are all worlds in a grain of sand [Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1. i]. The disparate is epiphanic precisely because it is disparate. In time, I suppose, the disparate—hell, it's gone. [21] I don't think towers and winding stairs are quite it, because they're successive and based on degrees. Still, the spiral emancipates the cycle. The Troy dance is linked to that Malekula business.24 [22] Stevens' Sunday Morning is the contemporary answer to the Mutabilitie Cantoes: those envisage a final separation of being and noth-

Notes 52

425

ing out of becoming, whereas Stevens realizes that being and nothing by themselves are equally dead. Stevens says something very perceptive about Easter in one of the Adagia,25 and Sunday Morning, whether explicitly or not, is an Easter poem. The real separation, as I said in GC, is between the change headed for death and the "change delectable" of Raphael's heaven [Paradise Lost, bk. 5,1. 629].26

§ [23] The text is the presence. I know this sounds a little like "the medium is the message," but at least it gets over the Derrida hurdle of a written word deferring to an oral word deferring to a pre-verbal situation of events.27 [24] In the beginning was the event, is the axiom of all false literalism. The opening verse of Genesis means something more like "to begin with, everything is a (divine) creation," the word divine being bracketed for tactical reasons only.28 [25] Creation is not environment. A scientist exploring geology or astronomy doesn't need God to explain the phenomena he studies. But he's trying to make intelligible sense out of what he studies: that means that he's trying to respond to the element of creation within the environment. ("Within" is inexact, of course.) [26] The Sabbath means among other things that God withdraws from his creation, becomes objective to it.29 That's a kabbalistic doctrine, I understand, and explains why all God-based hypotheses about the order of nature are rubbish. [27! The criticism of faith says "I believe there were certain historically true events, or logically valid propositions, of which the words we find in the Bible are the servomechanisms." That's balls. The criticism of hope says "I don't know what the hell happened, and probably never will know, but I sure hope it was worth all the to-do that followed." That's balls too. The criticism of charity says the text is the presence. The response to the above rendering of the first verse of Genesis is not "Yes, I believe everything is a divine creation," but "I assume that what I am still about to read is roughly consistent with this."

426

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[28] The creation produced a mass of ecriture, of things rather than nothing, as Heidegger says (only somebody else says he stole it from Leibnitz).30 Nature is traditionally a second Word of God, a book of things to read. When we read an object, we project into it something subjective. Thereby it ceases to be just a thing and becomes an intelligible or emotional thing. Things are not just edible or inedible, not just neutral or menacing. [29] So the primitive and fundamental form of consciousness, the response to the creation within being, is a process of evoking presences associated or identified with objects. Sacred trees and stones; then presences of fauns and satyrs among them; then gods identified with them. [30] The evoked presence identified with an object is a metaphor: sungod, sea-god. Most metaphors are statements of identity in their grammatical form: Issachar is a strong ass; Joseph is a fruitful bough [Genesis 49:14, 22]. The statement contains its own opposite: this is that; any fool can see that this is not that. Hence the playful, teasing quality in metaphor that gives the gripey the gripes, by homeopathy.31 [31] Metaphors are not attempts to force identity through overstrained analogies that leave out everything important. They are verbal energycurrents carrying out the first act of consciousness, trying to overcome the gap between subject and object. Creation wasn't necessarily made for the sake of human consciousness, but consciousness is the human response to creation.32 [32] The mass of ecriture provided by the creation survives in the more specialized forms of reading we're particularly concerned with. E.g., Henry James' golden bowl is an object which is also a focus of consciousness: it seems to contain the whole secret of the story; it's a riddle to be read. Similarly with Eliot's objective correlative, Mallarme's preference of the effect on the subject to naming the object.33 Naming is the first act of dominating nature: it's quite different from evoking presences, which is creative. Chosisme in Robbe-Grillet, the cult of the "found object," where the pun on "invention"34 is involved, etc. [33] But this subliminal reading of things goes on all the time, from primitive reading of weather-signs to divination-reading like astrology. It can become a type of specialized meditation, where I become that, but

Notes 52

427

that's rare: usually the read object relates itself to a group. Totemism would be one example. [34] I've tried to work out a sequence of dialogues of Word and Spirit, an epiphany of the Word, like creation or law or prophecy, being responded to by the formation of a specific type of response (which always has to be a social response, not a series of individual ones). It won't work out in that exact form, but I think there are three forms of intelligibility, the creation or world of things, the law or world of controlled action, and prophecy or world of expanding comprehension. Similarly there are three forms of social response, the delimited community or Israel, the elite community of the wise, the evangelical or spiritual community of the gospel. The apocalypse is of course the climax. [35] I've also tried to see these progressions as conforming to the four levels of meaning, the creation, at least, establishing the literal meaning, the law the allegorical, the prophetic the tropological. Similarly Israel is the literal society, the clerisy or community of wise is the allegorical one, the church the tropological one. I don't know if this is anything but bald and arbitrary schematism. [36] Anyway, I think I'll keep my remark that these dialogues of Word and Spirit (the two words that seemed to emerge from GC with a peculiar significance) constitute everything that's creative and constructive in human life. Outside these dialogues, humanity is only a criminally insane Oedipus with only two aims in life: to murder his father God and rape his mother Nature.35 [37] The role of Israel in the Bible is essential as marking the turning away from the Nature cults that make us all embryos within her womb. Nature is not the real otherness our identity is in quest of. That turns out to be, according to Jesus, the Father. [38] In this set-up the female role is reversed (in my jargon, from the white goddess into the black bride). The fourth person of the Trinity, if such a thing could exist, would be redeemed man, except that man in this context is woman. [39] Also that the apocalyptic vision is not only interpenetrating but vortical. Paul speaks of "Christ in me" [2 Corinthians 11:10], implying

428

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

that he as individual is a whole of which Christ is part, his genuine individuality. He also speaks of God as "all in all" [i Corinthians 12:6, 15:28], implying that God is a whole of which we are parts. This continued turning-inside-out is the real form, I think, of the "I am that" business in Hinduism.36 Koestler's whole-part dialectic won't quite work: it goes only one way.37 [40] I want to avoid phrases that sound as though I were a Jungian trying to psychologize everything: it's not just human creation but human response to something other that I'm interested in. Jupiter and Venus were never real until the human element in their creation became obvious; but they aren't just human creations: they're evocations of forces common to man and his environment. [41] If the Father is the objective focus, the whole of which we are parts, and the Spirit the subjective focus, individual of which the divine is a part, the Word would be the revelation that shows them to be the same thing, or substance. But I doubt if it's that simple. [42] I want a criticism of charity transcending the imbecilities of faith and hope. Charity annihilates history; faith criticism, with its obsession with continuity, conversion and labels, is bound to extending the past; hope criticism assimilates the Bible (or at least the Gospels) completely to fiction, and so far as it gets beyond that relies on some kind of future. [43] I still have an uneasy sense that resurrection, reviving in a tomb, is not the real but a misleading form of genuine resurrection. The latter seems to me to be transfiguration, or metamorphosis in Greek, where the Word is in its proper context, between law and prophecy.38 [44! Hierarchies impose only a limited order; and similarly with hierarchies of nature like the chain of being or man as king of animals guck. They force a unity within that order: note how medieval encyclopaedias were called speculum, or what I call the prison of Narcissus.39 [45] Work being a means to an end, the panoramic apocalypse, or prefatory one, is dominated by images of human work. [46] All stories begin in the middle, because it's impossible to think of a

Notes 52

429

beginning of time. There's this guy, see, and there's this dame, okay? From there there are always two questions: what's going to happen to them, and how did they get there? So even the opening verse of the Bible is a vertical slash down the temporal continuum. [47] A mythology is a structure of human concern, not a proto-science. Science examines the environment; it's a different kind of structure. So when in modern times we get philosophers or poets or critics talking about evolution or quantum jumps or relativity or principles of uncertainty or genetic codes, they're not applying these scientific principles to different fields. They're making metaphorical analogies to these principles. Whether they are good or bad analogies is not my concern: I don't know what the standards of good and bad are in such matters.40 [48] Kidnapped mythologies may be ascendant-class ideologies or they may be pressure-group ideologies. Christianity was one of the former in the Middle Ages; it's one of the latter now. Advertising is a pressuregroup ideology; propaganda usually an ascendant-class one (allowing for the fact that the ascendant class is usually now just a fat-assed bureaucracy hanging for dear life on to its privileges, such as they are). I don't understand Whitehead when he says that philosophy is a critique of cosmologies,41 as a cosmology is a literary structure. A philosophy that was a critique of ideologies would have something. [49] I've got the Oedipus remark in above [par. 36]: Cummings's "busy monster, manunkind."42 [50! Perhaps the discussion of wisdom is the place for that Moebius strip stuff about Christ as part of the individual and the whole of which the individual is part.43 Anyway, I've said that nobody can say "I am a wise and good man" without suggesting that he clearly is not: compare Jesus's dislike of being called "good" [Matthew ig:!/].44 The reason is, I said, grammatical: wisdom and goodness simply won't fit any statement beginning with "I am," because they're not qualities of an ego.45 Similarly of course with Milton's God. Hence Buber's "I-Thou" dialogue needs revision: in those areas you can't tell where I stops and Thou begins. Of course anybody can talk to himself: the genuine form of such dialogue is apocalyptic, one that cuts off the ego entirely. As I said (but didn't say in GC, everybody has a lost soul, and should make sure that it

43°

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

gets good and lost.46 But the lost soul is perhaps the only one we have, the psychikos body, unless it's the material for the forming of the spirit, as the phrase "lost soul," meaning that there's nothing left to form spirit with, seems to imply.47 [51] Concern may be primary or secondary. Primary is the preference of life to death, happiness to misery, freedom to slavery, the concern implanted by our genetic codes or whatever. Secondary is concern for order, stability, a clear source of authority and leadership, the anxiety of a privileged class to protect its privileges, of the underprivileged to get along as best they can in such a set-up. Secondary concern produces hierarchies, limited orders, unity, comprehensiveness, philosophical systems, specula (only the mirror-metaphor in speculation and reflection indicates the Narcissus origin). It also produces counter-concerns like the cosmos of revolt. The twentieth century is the time when, because of things like nuclear bombs and the pollution of the environment, secondary concerns are rapidly breaking up and primary concern is moving into the foreground. We need more flexible thought structures to live in such an age.48 [52] So I start with the cosmos of authority, follow it with the cosmos of revolt, then start on parts three and I suppose four at least. Three would begin with Poe's Eureka and Valery's essay on it pointing out that cosmologies are literary products (as Poe himself also says),49 and note its expansion-contraction shape. Or perhaps I simply start expounding the Eros-Adonis cycle, from John Barleycorn through to Graves, taking in Frazer and expanding it by way of not merely the white goddess (whom Frazer leaves out) but the historical cycle in Spengler (except that he doesn't have a cycle) and Vico (he does). [53] I think my Prometheus-Hermes chapter, if there is such a chapter, is heavily involved with twins and the struggle-of-brothers theme in the commedia dell'arte and the Bible, in Finnegans Wake, where it's linked to Bruno's unity of opposites, and with the self-recognition, the union of the dreamer with the twin brother who's dreaming him, which separates apocalyptic from demonic and liberates from the prison of Narcissus. How that connects with towers and winding stairs and upward and downward spirals I'm not sure, not that I'm sure about anything yet.

Notes 52

431

[54] The network image is in De Quincey, very explicitly, and I suppose it's involved in Eureka too. Cf. The Staple of News.50 The network is a horizontal form of hierarchy, I suppose, as the apocalyptic-demonic dialectic is a vertical form of the Eros-Adonis cycle. I suppose I don't need to distrust towers and winding stairs too much just because they're in Dante: after all, the apocalyptic world would be the ideal form of the one envisaged by the cosmos of authority, just as Urizen would still be on top in Blake's regenerate world. [55] Then there's the whole complex I stumbled over in the Wiegand lecture:51 Kant's Critique of Judgment, the revival of the notion I've been avoiding about the beauty of nature, Jung's geometrical mandalas as symbols of the integrated mind, and the kind of creation that meets nature halfway in Foe's Domain of Arnheim. Notable by the way in that story how insistent Poe is on finding one particular spot somewhere— the Utopian fallacy—instead of realizing that in an interpenetrating world everywhere is the one particular spot. [56] The word "faith" tends to mean acceptance without evidence, which isn't a virtue. Real faith is the creation of reality (in one's life) out of a fiction (the Word, which has to be recognized to be a fiction according to Stevens).52 Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for, the elenchos of things unseen. I think hypostasis is substance, as the AV says [Hebrews 11:1], rather than assurance: Paul uses the word in the latter sense, but Paul isn't the author of Hebrews. Cf. Hebrews i:3.53 Stevens also should be quoted as stressing the otherness struggled with in fiction: "much more, not ourselves" [Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, pt. i, st. 4,1. 15]. [57] I should think about whether the Exodus core is really the formation of Israel or the ritual response of Passover. Perhaps what I've been trying to call the literal response is the sequence of seven contracts in Genesis and Exodus, the sabbatical one being the Sinai revelation following the Passover. [58] Prophecy is the alien vision, the thing from outside. That's why the first prophets, Elijah and Elisha, are thaumaturgic, and why there are miracles connected with Christ. Note that, as in that medieval poem on Stephen, a miracle doesn't convince a tyrant; it merely infuriates him.54

432

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Ultimately of course the point of all miracles is revealed to be the passage through death. [59] I suppose only the Swedenborgians really went all out for the identification of Word and Presence (written word, that is), but otherwise I'm close to Barth, and like him seem to be concentrating on creation and reconciliation as the two nodes. The latter is with the Father and not with Nature, but it includes the regeneration of Nature.

§ [60] I said until I'm tired of saying it that faith is not what we say we believe but what our actions show that we believe.55 What I mean by that is that there is a primary and a secondary faith. Secondary faith identifies and labels: it commits one to being a Catholic or Protestant or Jew or what not; it always has a sales pitch up its sleeve, a "join our club" dilemma it's heading for. Primary faith is founded, first, on the New Testament definition of it as the hypostasis of what's hoped for, the elenchos of things unseen [Hebrews 11:1]. In other words primary faith is the same thing as charity. So we get movements today toward religion without Christianity (or any other name of a religion), and, more subtle and penetrating, Bonhoeffer's Christianity without religion, i.e., without the apparatus of secondary faith. And Ricoeur evidently backs my hunch that the language of myth is the only appropriate language for conveying such a religion.56 [6il The Bible provides hints and suggestions for cosmologies without providing any hierarchic cosmology. But it does seem to be the source of a classless cosmology, the apocalyptic-demonic binary structure, the circle where every point on the circumference is a centre, and so on. Just where I go from there I don't see at the moment. Anyway, the people who say I'm anti-historical are blithering: I think the Bible itself is counter-historical, which is what the word Heilsgeschichte means. The counter-historical can only be mythical.57 [62! So secondary faith is attaching yourself to a set of doctrines "above" reason; primary faith is trying to identify yourself with a myth, creating an existential reality out of what is accepted as a fiction (not as an event reported by words, which makes words secondary to die That).58

Notes 52

433

[63] Language moulds man, not the other way round. The first epiphany of the Word was the creation, which is as I said something different from an environment.59 Although I suspect the alien nature of the "fallen" world, the exploited and dominated nature, is a product of the subjectobject split. The rise of primary concern and primary faith would include a regenerate nature. Providence, in the sense of asking God to intervene (usually in our favor) in the operations of nature is an exceedingly unreliable method of getting something for nothing. (If my hundredparagraph scheme really comes off, I could insert fables into it, and the Baal one would go here.) But I think the indifference of God to our fate in nature may be a product of our conscious feeling of separation from nature—Blake seems to have thought along this line. [64] Well, anyway, the first epiphany of the Word was the creation, which differs from the natural environment essentially in being a mass of ecriture, signs, things or objects in nature which have consciousness projected on them precisely because they're things and not nothing. This silent ecriture, as I've tried to show, underlies the whole reading operation later on, and is still surviving as the focussing symbol, the scarlet letter, white whale, or golden bowl.60 [65] The second epiphany of the Word was the law, which I haven't too many ideas about: one is that ritual is a form of play or dramatic action, an illusion we make real by identifying ourselves with it. Something like Butler's analogy conception61 seems to be at the heart of the extraordinary fervor with which orthodox Jews observe the Torah regulations. The end of the law is the internalizing of the law: I don't think that notion is peculiar to Christianity by any means. Then there's the third epiphany of the Word, prophecy, the alienated vision that comes on us from without, as it were, and creates a new dimension out of the human situation. The fourth is the panoramic apocalypse, and apocalyptic has always been assumed to have been a late form of, or substitute for, prophecy. [66] The responses of the Spirit are, first the nation, second the elite or clerisy (an immensely important conception, however strong the prejudice against it at the moment), third the church or spiritual society. I hope the participating apocalypse winds it up: drinking the water of life is the last exhortation [Revelation 22:17],and that symbolically combines

434

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

baptism (which it reverses) and Eucharist. But it's because the end of the law is the internalizing of the law that the spiritual response to it is wisdom. [67] One of the key ideas taken over from my earlier books is that of concern, the desire of human beings to form and remain in a community.62 Biology so far knows only of an individual genetic code, the socalled selfish gene63 that fights for its own survival, but sooner or later they'll come up with the discovery of a communal side to the genetic code. In civilized situations man is seldom ready to die fighting for himself, but he'll die by the millions for a community. [681 Well: there's primary concern and secondary concern. Primary concern is based on the largest and baldest of platitudes: life is better than death, happiness better than misery, freedom better than slavery. These apply to everyone. Secondary concern is based on the specific community: its structure of authority, its class system, its status codes and laws and beliefs. It includes the desire of a privileged class to maintain its privileges and the desire of the non-privileged classes to get along as best they can in such an arrangement.64 [69] The central social fact about the later twentieth century is that it is gradually outgrowing secondary concern and moving into a global sense of a primary one. Nationalism is old hat now: patriotism is not, but we know that we can no longer afford a nuclear war; we can't even afford the squalid luxury of assuming that "our" survival, whoever we are, is ever so much more important than "their" survival, whoever they are.65 The pieces that make up the political world, whether huge like the United States or tiny like Singapore, are slowly becoming cultural units rather than economic ones—economic developments tend to sprawl over several of even the biggest nations. Being restricted to culture means further decentralization. [70] Hierarchies create limited order, and there can never be a global hierarchy: the Roman Catholic Church is not really Catholic simply because it's got a Pope. Some dictators have come close to be,ing world rulers, but they're all types of Antichrist, and the genuine Antichrist probably couldn't exist. [71] Cosmology is the effort to create a universe of the imagination: it is,

Notes 52

435

as Valery says, a literary art,66 and attempts to provide a context for literature. In the age of authority and hierarchy, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the cosmology fitted the general scientific and philosophical view of the world: when the scientific world-picture blew apart the cosmology became more and more confined to literature. [72] In my graduate course I've tried to show how this cosmology operated as a four-level universe, God, then the perfect created world of human nature, our home and destined future home, then the "fallen" world, then the demonic order. Note how this implicitly distinguishes a creation from an environment. [73] Well, as I've said, the emphasis in this cosmology was overwhelmingly on natura naturata.67 The poets however insisted on including Eros, which had been left out of theological calculations, and which emphasized also the importance of natura naturans. With the eighteenth century and the collapse of authority, the Romantic movement came in, inverting the old system and standing it on its head. That, as I've observed so often, is only an antithesis. In George Johnston's Festschrift there's a contribution by one Furchta [Furcha], who's interested in the i6th c. Anabaptists, mainly Sebastian Franck. He says Hans Denck published a set of paradoxa or contradictions in Scripture in 1526, with little comment except the remark: "Whoever leaves an antithesis without resolving it lacks the ground of truth."68 [74] Well: that means I have to stir myself and look for post-Romantic cosmologies. The first and most obvious one is Eureka; my hunch that there were hints of one in De Quincey's mail-coach essay was I think sound; D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse and Psychology of the Unconscious69 belong with Yeats' Vision (though that's a dinosaur). I think that in proportion as we move away from secondary concern with its hierarchies to primary concern our cosmology will decentralize, become increasingly classless in its assumptions, and come to focus on the central idea of interpenetration (I note that Owen Barfield is interested in this).70

§ [75! Let's try it again, on an eight-chapter basis this time. [76] i. Primary and secondary concern; metaphor and creativity; my-

436

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

thology and cosmology; collisions between concern and creativity and the authority of the arts; the Faust mistranslation [pt. i, 1. 1237] and the identification of book and presence; hierarchical and decentralized cosmoi. The four epiphanies of the Word: creation as ecriture; law as verbal control of action; prophecy as alienated vision, culminating in the transfiguration; panoramic apocalypse as the metamorphosis of reality. [77] 2. The responses of the Spirit: the formation of the community out of the hierarchical establishment, forming an impulse as fundamental as "the selfish gene";71 the crystallizing of the elite of the creative, the wise, the "saving remnant" in wisdom; the spiritualized community, where social and individual impulses merges [merge] (gospel); the participating apocalypse, or drinking the water of life, or eating the book. [78! 3. The Cosmos of Authority formed in the early Christian era and surviving to the i8th century; its two levels of nature and its descending (Incarnation) movement of order. The gradual reversal of this natura naturata structure through the poetic emphasis on Eros (natura naturans) into the Romantic Cosmos of Revolt. The "drunken boat" construct.72 [79] 4. The movement toward transcending the antithesis of authority and revolt. The Eros-Adonis cycle (Vico, Spengler, Toynbee, Frazer, Graves, Lawrence, etc.); the white goddess and the black bride. [80] 5. The Hermes-Prometheus cycle: network communication imagery from De Quincey on;73 contraction and expansion imagery in Eureka and elsewhere; choice and chance in Mallarme;74 fantasy and reality in science fiction and elsewhere. [81] 6. Return to the Bible as the model of the classless cosmology: Jesus' incorporation of the Other as the Father; redeemed man as woman; the vortical relationship of part and whole in the divine-human relation. [82! 7. Hegel's Phenomenology and the "levels" of meaning; re-establishment of the literal and the progress to the anagogic or death-facing on that basis. [83! 8. The interpenetrating cosmos; the opened centre; time and space in the other vortex.

Notes 52

437

§ [84] At the moment it looks like a twelve-chapter deal. Part One is my graduate course, amplified by my primary-secondary conceptions of concern and of faith. It introduces the themes of concern, mythology, metaphor and cosmology; it proposes the problem of the authority of the arts; it distinguishes (on the primary-secondary concern basis) a classascendant from a classless cosmology, and relates this cosmology to literature as the background which points to literature's social function. There follows what I have on the Cosmos of Authority and the Cosmos of Revolt, with Eros playing the key role. Four chapters. [85] The general idea was simply to introduce this theme and then devote Part Two to the Awakening of Spectres theme, four chapters. The general idea is to show a movement between Romanticism to our own time that tries to get beyond the mere antithesis my course keeps getting fucked up in: Poe's Eureka, Mallarme's critical articles, De Quincey's mail-coach essay, then on to Spengler, Frazer, Graves and Jung. The movement I'm talking about is away from classbound ideologies toward a primary concern to which the keys are interpenetration and decentralization. [86] Part Three would introduce the Bible, at last, as a dialogue between Word and Spirit, with the turnaway from the earth-mother with her human embryos and the Other being, for Jesus, the Father, not Nature. Creation and primary or primitive ecriture; law and the word of action or command; prophecy and the alien vision; apocalypse and the windup. Four responses of nation, elite or clerisy, spiritual community, and final participation. [87] Part Four is wide open: it includes whatever I can find to say about Hegel's Phenomenology, the four levels of meaning, the Druid analogy75 and its apocalyptic vortex, and the like. I seem to have talked myself into sixteen chapters, which I hope will fold up into eight, in accordance with my usual accordion tactics. [88] Oh, God, what a tour de force this will have to be if it comes off at all. How can I insert references to the Bible throughout the first two parts without the general scheme that comes into the third? Eros, for example,

438

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

involves the Eve-as-garden imagery of Genesis and the Song of Songs; Adonis, to say nothing of the discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantoes, the two directions of metamorphosis, and so on and so on.

§ [89] The criticism of hope is the "demythologized" view of the Gospels which says: something no doubt happened; we don't know what and perhaps never shall know, but we can only hope that it was something worth all the to-do that followed. [90] The criticism of faith relates to the past: professions of faith, and the conversion that so often accompanies them, have to do with discovering the right tradition or context in history for oneself. The criticism of hope relates, greatly against the general tendency of those who advocate it, to the future, the next life, the after-life, or sometimes, in a secular form, the fulfilment of oneself in one's posterity. Only charity is a presence. [91] The relation of God and man is vortical: Christ is the genuine individuality in each of us, so the individual's a whole of which Christ is the part. Then again God is all in all, so God's a whole of which the individual is part. [92] Eureka expounds a kind of systole-diastole movement; the image of the network with a centralized intelligence is, quite explicitly, in the mail-coach essay. I must look up Jonson's Staple of News and that New Zealander's paper on it—McKenzie.76 Interesting that De Quincey associates electricity, writing in an age when steam vehicles were coming in, with the "galvanic cycle" of man and horse—the one going out rather than the one coming in after steam.77 Anyway, communication imagery seems to turn on a[nl egocentric spiderweb versus the decentralized bee. I suppose it's part of the Prometheus complex. [93] Hermes the psychopomp belongs to the whole Freudian descent to the dream world: De Quincey's oracular dream that repeats the fall, Finnegans Wake, the oracle with the drugged or drunk sibyl, the discontinuous or fragmented utterance—note the sparagmos image of the sibyl writing oracles on leaves and scattering them around.

Notes 52

439

[94] Part One: Distinctions of primary and secondary concern, primary and secondary mythology, primary and secondary faith and hope. The Cosmos of Authority. The traditional universe and the incorporation of the positive analogy, first erotic-Classical, then aesthetic and others. The Cosmos of Revolt.78 The Romantic movement starting with Rousseau and Blake and the set-up in Freud, Marx, Schopenhauer and Darwin that resulted, along with their literary expounders.79 [95] Part Two: Towards a Primary Concern Myth, Part One. The Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead (Eros, as I've outlined it; Adonis in Graves, Frazer and elsewhere; Prometheus I think in the network image in De Quincey and the communication cosmos today; Hermes perhaps in the Eureka contraction-expansion, systole-diastole imagery and the discontinuity (see above)80 in Mallarme and elsewhere). Interpenetration and decentralized myth the goal I'm heading for. [96] Part Three: Towards a Myth of Primary Concern, Part Two. The contrapuntal analogies of comparative religion and the like (Francis Thompson vs. Pound point);81 the shape of the Christian Bible, separated from class-ascendant ideologies and dropped into the argument somewhere around Chapter Eleven; Conclusion: the source of authority in the arts. [97] Re the above on faith and hope [pars. 89, 90]: clearer to say that secondary faith relates to the past and its traditions and continuity (faith of our fathers); secondary hope to a future either in this world for posterity or another one for ourselves; primary faith and hope are identical with charity. Note that the book will have to open with the premise of a concern for the community as one of equal importance with the "selfish gene" of the individual.82 [98] If I can bring it off ... It won't be an "I," of course.

§ [99] Before reading develops, society is dependent on the oral storyteller. But of course he's a visual focus as well: there is all the body language of gesture and the like: we're even told that we do a certain

440

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

amount of unconscious lip-reading. All these things are forms of reading, before the more specific activity generally known as reading makes its appearance. A shepherd making his living in the country may be technically "illiterate," but he's constantly reading the signs of the weather and the like, often with uncanny accuracy. The whole conception of nature as the second book of God develops out of this primitive form of reading.83 [100] All such reading focusses on riddle: what is that? That is, what's its context and predictability of behavior? All writing that preserves the sense of the visual, like Chinese with its ideograms and its emphasis on calligraphy (merging of writing and drawing) also has an affinity with riddle, as I've said.84 [101] There's been an anti-narrative, anti-teleological movement in the arts for thirty years at least. The idea is that narrative conceals a sales pitch. That's my "kidnapped" view of romance: there are certain forms of romance that present ascendant-class ideologies; but there's a romance relatively free of such things nevertheless. In our day the antinarrative tendency takes the form of a search for the oracular, the source of the oracle, still to be reached, like the Delphic one, by drugs and the like, being assumed to be in the unconscious. But Herodotus says that in the Persian invasion the Greek oracles prophesied a Persian victory— because they had been bribed with Persian money.85 Similarly, our oracles are just as fraudulent: all our unconscious oracles are bribed—bribed by our own social conditioning and bid against by our revolts against our social conditioning, which produce exactly the same result. Oracles are just as likely to be wrong as narratives. [102] Actually a lot of this anti-narrative art—Robbe-Grillet's chosisme and the like—is a reversion to primitive reading, of seeing things as symbols of verbal concepts.86 That's the secret of the immense power of the film, that it can concentrate on such visual symbols. I must do more thinking about this subliminal reading process that underlies specific reading, but is of course much less linear in movement. Mosaic and discontinuous techniques may emphasize the lessening of the linear drive, but that's about all they do, I think. "Overdetermined."87 [103! "In the beginning was the word." Everybody mentally translates

Notes 52

441

this as "in the beginning was the spoken word." But that isn't what it says. The creation was, for the most part, a display of ecriture. [104] Typology of Christmas: Maccabees on Hanukkah (the cleansing of the defiled temple, a type repeated in the ministry of Christ) [i Maccabees 4:59]; Wisdom on the descent of the destroying Word of the plague (Advent theme); the Protevangelium on the stopping of all things in their course at the birth of Christ (for the new Joshua);88 Isaiah prophecy on "kings to the brightness of thy rising" [Isaiah 60:3] as origin of legend transforming the wise men into three kings; perhaps the Zechariah bit on Judas as part of the "shepherds" routine [Zechariah ill; Revelation xii on the birth of the Messiah as a dragon-killing (repetition of creation) theme; Fourth Eclogue of Virgil;89 Christmas as a non-N.T. date partially (apart from the Hanukkah business) adopted from pagan sources as a kind of Brunner point of contact90 or centripetal symbol drawing in everything about new births. [105] Begin in the middle, says Horace of epic [Ars poetica, 11. 148 ff.]. Actually every story begins in a middle of some kind. There's this guy, see, and there's this dame, okay? You can go in two directions from there, onward into what happens to them, back-ward into how they got there and who they are anyway. I think this is just a retake of my Secular Scripture passage, where realism is the causal backward movement, treating the surface data as effects, and romance the onward movement.91 [106] My old pals the scarlet letter and white whale and golden bowl are descendants from the ecriture of creation. Small but worth noting, this tradition. [107] Incidentally, my notion of Eureka et al being metaphorical constructs that affect the literary imagination but not, directly, science or philosophy seems to have been anticipated by Ursula Le Guin in (I think) the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. At least she says all fiction is a metaphor, which is what I'm getting at.92

§ [108! Hart Crane and others of his generation talked a good deal about

442

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

absorbing the machine as a part of modern poetic consciousness. But not much absorption took place: however, there's science fiction in prose. What's its tradition? Is it cosmology, the machinery of the universe? [109] So I get to the highly unsatisfactory position that if you put another twist on my centrifugal-centripetal theory of meaning, you get a sequence of "explanatory" contexts for the higher centrifugal, a sequence starting with the archetypal or literary-context one and going down through the historical, biographical, and finally the grammatical. But the higher centripetal remains as untalkable-about as ever. Also that there's a lurking value distinction: the purely conventional work that adds nothing to anybody's imaginative experience dissolves into its centrifugal explanations; some poems and novels and plays on the other hand won't go away but remain in that goddam "unique" situation people used to tease me about. Well, O.K., but I'm right where I started. [no] Only, I find an excitement in tracing at least the archetypal context, and sometimes the others too, in a work I really love, whereas it does nothing for me to say this dreary Elizabethan sonnet is in the Courtly Love convention about the disdainful mistress. There is a distinction like my "original" one: the interesting poem regroups the factors in its context in a fresh way and thereby shows us the origins of literature. The hell with this: I'm not getting anywhere. [in] Eros Regained starts with the homosexual refined Jesus lying on the bosom of a male beloved disciple, trying to get away from his mother but still so hung up sexually that he insisted his father was not his father and that his mother was a virgin, rescuing a bride symbolically but saying "don't touch me" as his last words to a woman.93 This is the first phase of Graves' sequel, the mother-son one, where the son has to be "pure" to stay away from the Oedipus situation.94 She does too, of course. There follow the bride-bridegroom or Song-of-Songs situation, the siren-forsaken lover one, not Christian but part of the Eros response, and the hag-victim one. I think the refined pure youthful Christ who's been such a pain in the ass to later ages goes with the perversion of his teachings into a Mother Church. If I'm right about the Virgin as (this also seems to be Jung's view) the glorified creature, or Man as the fourth person of the Trinity (except that it's Woman), the Catholic cult of the Virgin is really a kind of narcissism.95

Notes 52

443

[112] There are two kinds of rebirth: the rebirth of the old, or rebirth of the same, which is the symbolism of reincarnation and is always thought of—can only be thought of—as a mechanical process, a wheel; and the rebirth of the new, the coming of a new individual to replace the old. Note how the latter conception, the only one that corresponds to actual experience, is the discontinuous or prophetic one, the former being of course continuous. Perhaps what the Oriental religions are trying to say is that we have to learn to look on the discontinuous process as actually a continuous one, "literal" reincarnation being a symbol for the fact that there's no ego, or at least no substantial ego. [113] Maybe my phrase about traces of processes in GC was profounder than I realized.96 The word "God" in the Bible in a sense is a trace of a process, partly in Derrida's sense of the word "trace."97 So the work of God is Heilsgeschichte, or Providence, where no design ever reveals itself beyond an occasional possible insight. [114] Well: the first chapter on the four levels is straight going; the next one on mythological time, Incarnation and Resurrection, is a bit tougher, but with nothing really new in it. There's little that's new either in the next two, beyond mythological space and time, except that I hope to integrate a number of rather miscellaneous hunches. The conception of redeemed man as the fourth person of the Trinity, and as symbolized not by a man (Adam) but by the Virgin Mary, bulks largely in it, but must be very carefully handled. Beyond space is interpenetration, and beyond time is a kind of temporal interpenetration I don't have a name for. It includes another very dicey subject, the kind of reincarnation that's not "literal," but isn't wholly metaphorical either. Incidentally, I notice that a lot of speculations in nuclear physics seem to be about angels. [115] That is, physics started back in the early years of the 2Oth c. with a planetary model, where electrons formed orbits around a proton but could engage in a kind of dance, jumping from one orbit to another. Questions about whether they occupied space or not, whether they travelled in time and space or simply manifested themselves elsewhere, about whether each particle of matter had its counterpart in some opposed world, came up just as they did in scholastic philosophy in a macroscopic framework. The real "spiritual world" seems to have turned out to be subatomic.

444

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[116] The Eros and Adonis chapters are the ones where I have to establish Classical mythology, which is based on the annual cycle of seasons, as a positive or redeemable analogy of the Biblical one, ending with the transformation of Hermes from logic into linguistics, the Alpha and Omega. [117] If redeemable man is actually conceived in female form as the Virgin Mary, it follows that the horror and hatred of the Mother Goddess who contains the dying god within her grasp is really directed at fallen Adam, man who insists in making the magic temenos98 of the cycle of nature his horizon. Horizon is an interesting word, in view of its Urizen connections. [118] No creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist, says St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Th., I, 63). Note the role of the Transfiguration in the Mutabilitie Cantoes: the Greek word is metamorphosis, or close to it, and Spenser must have been aware of the diagrammatic contrast between the downward metamorphoses of Ovid, glanced at in the Faunus story [canto 6, st. 42 ff.], and the upward one of Jesus, where it seems he rose to a higher condition of nature without ceasing to exist [canto 7, st. 7!." [119] Jane Harrison's Themis, and Campbell's HTF [The Hero with a Thousand Faces] following her, has a vase-drawing of Jason emerging from the mouth of a leviathan, said to be a version not found in any written source.100 That must have been the source of my hunch about Theseus originally emerging from the labyrinth with the troop of redeemed behind. Campbell's HTF (a book I'm now finally reading for the first time) also quotes Coomaraswamy as quoting Nicholas of Cusa to the effect that the wall guarding Paradise is the coincidence of opposites and the guard or flaming angel the highest power of reason, who has to be overcome.101 That should be a part of my Hermes chapter on the transmutation of Hermes from a logical or reasoning logos into a genuine Word. The former is the psychopomp or leader of souls toward death; the latter the leader of souls out of the world of death back into life again. [120] Proserpine rises from the earth and Aphrodite from the sea: Adonis is the lover of Proserpine for a third of the year and of Aphrodite for the other two-thirds. Linked to my subterranean and submarine points. The

Notes 52

445

Eleusis mysteries of course celebrated the anodos or anabasis of Kore (Persephone).102 [121] Oceanus, which girdles the earth, is an obvious ouroboros symbol, and in fact is said to be represented in that form in old maps (that MarieLouise von Franz Jungian dame on Creation Myths).103 Then the four winds in the corners—I have also a book on four-quarters symbolism.104 Logical approach to the mythological universe—note that the two groups of symbols, the ouroboros and the four winds, form a circle within a square. [122] Graves connects his red-white-black imagery with the phases of the moon: the new moon is white, he says, the full moon red, and the waning moon black.105 The "white" goddess is presumably first a virgin mother, then a bride, and finally a hag or crone. Seems to me there's an intervening phase of siren or temptress, where the lover is tantalized but not yet victimized. This seems to me typically the "white" period, the first one being rather green or gold. [123] Prometheus: the Prometheus story is one of a great many myths in which there's a friend of man in an assembly of gods who are mostly hostile to him. This is the role of Enki (I think) in the Sumerian myth of the flood,106 and I think the same theme appears in the Egyptian story that corresponds to the flood: something about a deluge of blood or red beer or something and the goddess Hathor.107 In the O.T. of course this theme has to be censored, but the Gnostics re-established it in making Jesus the defender of mankind against Jehovah. As I remember, Enki is both the friend of man and a trickster god: the two may be normally connected.108 One of the stories about Prometheus, the cheating gods out of good meat one, associates the two themes in him.109 [124] Eros: this chapter will turn a good deal on the Song of Songs, and on the erotic spectrum from the original sex-bath to the St. John of the Cross sublimation. Here again there seem to be antitheses: the closing up of the Eros-Agape one is the theme of the chapter.

§ [125] It's becoming clearer, for the moment, that Prometheus is the

446

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

demonic level turning Atlantean, Eros the "fallen" level turning into the complementary-nature one, Adonis the paradisal one turning into ordinary experience, and Hermes the astronomical one turning into the divination one. Science fiction and such would go mostly in Hermes; Spenser's Gardens of Adonis and assorted cunt imagery would turn neatly into life imprisoned in the womb of birth and tomb of dead;110 the Eros argument I already have fairly clear in my mind; the Prometheus one I suppose would begin with the demonic imagery attached to smiths and work in a general Los direction. In this view of it I don't see much place for anatomy and Utopia themes in Prometheus, but that may clear up in its own time. [126] The third part, the cycle of the Spirit, would I hope be the recognition scene of the book, trying to place the four elements of imagination in a circular structure as I originally had them, and leading to the suggestion of a new mythological model based on expansion and contraction rather than ups and downs. [127! One principle that is going to be very important is one that I've been really assuming all along but haven't, so far as I know, expressed very clearly. In studying a myth the historian, anthropologist, and such goes as far as he can back to the original source of the myth: literary criticism moves forward, on the basis that poets get the essential structure (i.e. its essential relation to their own mythological universe) clearer and clearer as they continue working on it.111 Thus the Grail legend would be looked at in one way by historical scholars, a way that would denigrate Jessie Weston's book; but Jessie Weston's book was incomparably the best book on the subject for Eliot to read for the Waste Land. The reason is that she got her intuitions out of Wagner, and Wagner, in working on Parsifal, expanded from Wolfram, who has a lance but not Longinus' lance and doesn't think of the grail as a chalice at all but as some kind of stone (lapis exilis or whatever it is), partly back and partly forward to get the whole thing clear: lance and grail images developing out of Celtic magic cauldrons and carrying with them the sexual attributes of male and female.112 [128] Naturally a kind of illusion arises about the purity and completeness of some original form of the myth, but if it's there we can't reach it, so it's best to treat it as an illusion and work forward. The Bible owes its

Notes 52

447

peculiarly piercing insight to the fact that it's at the end of a long mythological process, not the beginning of one, and keeps recasting its own material into clearer and clearer forms. Incidentally the arrogance of such creators as Wagner is necessary too: one has to assume that one's insight into myth is authoritative, and the meek don't inherit that earth.

§ [129! My original hunch for this book was another Loch-Ness-monster diagram113 of epiphanies of the Word at the top and responses of the Spirit at the bottom. The first epiphany of the Word is, traditionally, the Creation: the formation of the society of Israel in Egypt was the eventual response to it, a long process starting with Abraham if not with Noah. The second epiphany was the Law, the spiritual response to which was Wisdom, a conservative response which is the highest normal form of social functioning. The third epiphany was Prophecy, Jesus being the last and greatest of the prophets, and the spiritual response to that was the Gospel. Because the Gospels don't really give us the teachings of the prophet Jesus: they contain them, or some of them, but contain them within the framework of the primitive Church. The prophet always condemns every social institution, including the one that responds to him. [130] If that works, then my first two chapters, the Cycle of the Word, would take in the authoritarian universe of the Middle Ages and the revolutionary reversal of it in the eighteenth century, as a historical development contained by the two conceptions of Incarnation, or the descent of authority, and Resurrection, or the ascent of revolution. As such, they represent also the original sin that's in Christianity as well as Marxism, a sin that perhaps enters at the Law stage. Then Part Two can move centrifugally out into Prometheus, Eros, Adonis and Hermes. I've more or less got Eros as moving from the old to the new level three: what occurs to me now is that the other three represent the other three levels. The fourth level, moving from the demonic to the Atlantean, is Prometheus; the second level, from Eden to experience, Adonis; the first level, from heaven to the sky-mirror, Hermes. [131] Then Part Three, the Cycle of the Spirit, can deal with whatever seems to be led up to by those investigations. I'd guess an expanding and

448

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

contracting model, expanding in inspiration and contracting in expiration, the two movements of the Spirit. The descent which consolidates the Church must be a contraction. I'll have my work cut out to figure that one out. [132] Prometheus: it isn't Atlantis, except in Blake and Shelley: it's usually the germ of the future hidden inside and downward. In the authoritarian outline there's no real place for the future. [133! And of course the authoritarian diagram is a contraction, as its opposite is an expansion. [134] I'm still looking for leads in modern literature: Calvino's science fiction skits, Cosmicomics and t zero"4 illustrate two things. One is the extent to which the discovery of the DNA molecule has accentuated the imagery of ecriture, the code written or imprinted at birth. Another is the extension of my principle about identity to evolution. That is, I've said that the clearest example of a metaphor is one's feeling of identity with one's self at the age of seven, even though no material particles are in common. The panorama of evolution suggests the continuity of this identity from the first forms of life. [135] Borges has several stories, notably The Aleph, which illustrate the principle of interpenetration, everything everywhere at once.115

§ [136] The first two chapters outline my graduate course, and also the first two phases of revelation, creation and exodus. They also outline the cycle of the Word. The movement is that of the first epiphany of the Word and the first response of the Spirit in the creation of the society of Israel. The poles are, in Christianity, Incarnation and Resurrection, both of which are conceptions taking us well past any "paranormal" speculations about what "really" happened. [137] The last two chapters, dealing with the two aspects of revelation, outline the cycle of the Spirit, as projection and recovery. [138! In between come the awakening of the spectres of the dead, in the

Notes 52

449

forms of Prometheus or law, Eros or wisdom, Adonis or prophecy, and Hermes or gospel. These categories are expendable, except that the Prometheus-law one looks pretty solid. The entire book falls into the categories of three epiphanies of the Word and three Responses of the Spirit, after which apocalypse takes over. The first epiphany of the Word was the appearance of nature, or creation; the second one was the repetition of creation in law; the third was the incorporating of the spiritual response in prophecy. The fourth of course is the second coming when every eye shall see him. The first response of the Spirit is the forming of Israel in the Exodus; the second is the individualized response of wisdom; the third is gospel, because the gospels record the life of Jesus within the framework of the primitive church: Jesus himself was clearly the last and greatest of the prophets, but the prophetic element in him has to be reconstructed from the construct of the new society of the primitive church or new Israel. The social side of wisdom, by the way, is the council of wise men. [139] What the early Christians saw, of course, was the gospel in the prophet's message, the Incarnation-Resurrection consolidation of the U-shaped prophetic vision that made Jesus' particular prophecy definitive. At the same time they were concerned to carry on their new institution, so the apocalypse had to conclude the series. [140] The first epiphany-response sequence is relatively simple, because it's my graduate course; the second one takes in all my Utopia and education ideas. It's the third one that I haven't thought too much about, and I haven't thought much either about where the Biblical part of the study is to be or how it's to be distributed. There should be something that includes a conspectus of mythology: that will go I suppose in the Eros-Adonis-Hermes section, but a lot of thinking still has to be done. [141] Only the damn book has to be a lot more concentrated than this. The three epiphanies of the Word, in creation, law and prophecy, are all inside one another like Chinese boxes, and the Christian view of the culmination of prophecy in the Incarnation-Resurrection framework of Christ is there from the start. The three responses, society, wisdom and gospel (as we have it) all stress continuity: Israel tracing its descent from Abraham, wisdom doing the done thing, gospel celebrating the continuous Eucharist. They all maintain the beat of time, as the Word interrupts it.

45O

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[142] To create is to set in order, hence it's also law; to create is also to descend and return, hence it's also prophecy in the Christian sense. I suppose in a way the law and prophecy manifestations are horizontal and vertical respectively, forming the cross. And the prophet cancels out the central pattern of wisdom, the individual crystallizing from his community: the prophet faces and condemns the community. [143] Note the number of creation myths in which the creator is not only the Word but the Son, who either separates a fucking father and mother in an archetypal primal scene or else somebody who takes over from a Father.

§ [144] But I wish I had a chapter to re-summarize my seven/eight phases: the coming of prophecy is such a pons asinorum, the crucial turn from wisdom to folly where earth becomes middle earth again and both upper and lower gates open. [145] The third chapter, probably[,] is the one where I examine the implications of hierarchy. Hierarchy seems to be an inevitable feature of what I call post-revolutionary societies: the chain of being organized the medieval one, and evolution and related theories have organized the present post-capitalist world. [146] This is in the present book, if not very explicit: the spirit breaks its metaphorical connection with nature and is united to God instead, but eventually a regenerated nature is added to it again. The sexual imagery gets very complicated: humanity is a woman, symbolized by the Virgin Mary, the top creature, but when nature regenerates another female figure is added and humanity turns symbolically male. Maybe this is what the Lilith story means. Anyway, the conception of a female tanist, the ultimate black bride, seems to be a very pervasive one. [147] Certainly the male tanist, e.g., myself as character in my dream about myself, is a major theme. In the O.T. there are all the brotherstruggles I've already mentioned, and the mysterious Thomas theme associated with Jesus [John 11:16, 14:5, 20:24-9]. Even in the canonical gospels there are twins, the sons of Boanerges [Mark 3:17].ll6

Notes 52

451

[148] Hierarchies create local order, they say: so a universal church would have to get rid of such things. I think hierarchy also goes with postponements: you stay in the place God put you or else. Maybe one day there'll be a cosmic tearing apart into life and death, but that's not your business: you stay where you are. Why were the Gnostics and Neoplatonics so obsessed by this kind of language? I know they had a more mobile notion of ascent and descent; you fell a long way and have to scramble back up again. But all ladders and staircases mean degrees, and rationalize a degree-ridden society. So whenever I say that a cycle is a failed spiral I'm falling in with the same habit of thought, spirals being hierarchical degree structures. Creation in the Bible isn't a gradual or hierarchical process: it begins with turning on a light. New or recreation must be the same kind of thing. [149] Of course the staircase among other things is a symbol for or metaphorical expression of a spiritual awakening in which, as St. Thomas says of the Holy Spirit, there's no intervening space between being-there, or Heidegger's Dasein, and being there.™7 The upward metamorphosis of the transfiguration in the gospels is again symbolic: note that Peter's proposal to stay "there" is explicitly condemned [Matthew 16:21-3]. The Zen and Taoist view that there is nothing to be done, and that that nothing is the same thing as everything, may be right in theory. [150] Prometheus is concerned partly with getting over the either-or antithesis between the individual and the social; Eros is concerned partly, if not mainly, with getting over the either-or antithesis between the spiritual and the physical, Agape love and Eros love. The mysticaltheology commentators on the Song of Songs deny the spiritual body and go back to the bodiless soul. [151] I suppose the mystics are the people who have started with the Christ-in-me situation and made all the rest of the "me" into an anima or female principle, an individualized bride or spouse. Certainly Jung and his damn mysterium conjunctionis and all the alchemical reveries seem to congregate around here somewhere.118 So far I've been thinking of the Prometheus and Eros chapters as summarizing what the names of Marx and Freud respectively appear to symbolize to the modern consciousness. Adonis and Hermes would then be Nietzsche (with the recurrence

452

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

bogey in the middle of it) and perhaps Heidegger, though speculations of this type at this stage are seldom rewarding. [152] The word "allegory" has its uses in criticism, certainly; but whenever it assumes an either-or category of thinking it becomes junk. Thus scholarship on the Song of Songs tends to maintain that it is either a purely physical song of sexual and erotic passion or that it is an allegory of something fuckless: the love of Christ for his Church or what not. I'm saying that both views are conceivable, on condition that neither is wholly rejected. The great Biblical principle that there is no metaphorical contrast between the individual and the social, the male and the female, the physical and the ideal, holds here as everywhere. [153] Graves, noting that the word eleusis means advent,119 suggests that the Christian Advent, celebrating the birth of a divine child, was imposed on top of the Eleusinian mysteries, where the divine child was presumably female, Proserpine. I have often noted how Shakespeare stresses the female nature of the dying and reborn central character: Perdita, as I've said, has three kings for putative fathers, one of them Libyan or black, as well as a shepherd foster-father. And the odd ProsperoProserpine echo keeps nagging. There's also Imogen with her curious name of Fidele: I used to be haunted by the notion that Cymbeline was a Roman Catholic allegory, but maybe it's about something more universal than that.120 I think I have something in this notion that the redeemable humanity is to be symbolized as a woman, and therefore presumably as a female divine child. If one rejects the either-or approach to this notion, and go [goes] back with Graves to a mother-dominated fatalistic cycle, one gets the demonic parody. (I should have said "accepts," but was thinking of what I have to do.) [154] I don't know why I talk about Heidegger for the Hermes chapter, except that he's a digger and I'm thinking of the ending as going down with the psychopomp. Hegel's a climber, of course. But clearly one of the things I have to do is work out my suggestion in GC that the Phenomenology is the four levels of meaning again, and provides a scheme for working out the implications of the royal metaphor.121 [155] Chapter two is the time part of the spatial universe expounded in one: the movement downward assimilated to the Incarnation (Spenser's

Notes 52

453

Hymn to Divine Love [A Hymn of Heavenly Love]) and the movement upward assimilated to the Resurrection. Christianity emphasizes Jesus' repudiation of what he finds at the bottom of the world, which is death and hell; but the quest incorporates the whole Virgilian descent as well, and there must be a treasure there as well as a dragon guarding it. Similarly, Jesus is traditionally supposed to repudiate the physical world when he returns to Godhead, but that won't work with the doctrine of a spiritual body. Some change in the divine nature is postulated by implication at least. So probably this is the chapter for the pagan myth as positive analogy that one finds in early Milton and elsewhere. [156] I have to read Raphael Patai's book122 carefully: unfallen creation isn't so much the lost phallus as the complete union of a divine male and female principle. When man sins he separates the male and female principle in the divine nature. I still think my hunch that man is the female Godhead, and that the Christian Virgin Mary and the Jewish Schekina123 are symbols of it, is sound, also my antithesis between the white-goddess harlot and the black-bride figure of redemption. Evidently there's Kabbalistic speculation about the Godhead as being a male and female locked in perfect sexual coordination, as in Yeats' poem about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.124 The Lilith-Kali figure, the separating female, Blake's female will, is, I think, the rotating cycle of nature with its attendant fatalism. [157! Evidently Kabbalism also says explicitly that God is powerless unless united with the feminine principle. As long as man is just woman whoring around, God is impotent, stuck in the sweet by and by. I must find out more about Milton's "in Saturn's reign" point [// Penseroso, 1. 25]: obviously such a female principle couldn't be confined to wife or daughter (as wisdom) or mother (as Mary), but would have to be the lot of them. Innocent incest. Anyway, I'll have to take Graves' white goddess figure as demonic parody, with its virgin-mother theme produced by forgetfulness rather than memory (i.e., she renews her virginity every spring and forgets her last year's lover: cf. the forgetting of one's former identity in reincarnation theories). [158] The Eros chapter is gradually clearing a bit: Patai collaborated with Robert Graves on one book,125 and I'm also rereading The White Goddess. A lot of it, as I knew before, is demonic: the female-will cycle that

454

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

keeps the imagination embryonic and unborn. But the parody principle works here as elsewhere, and one can get to the black bride through her. Maybe I should explicitly use Blake's Lucy—:I don't know why I've dropped it in the course.126 Pope's commentary on the Song of Songs127 keeps disgorging fascinating stuff about the number seven as the number of virginity (Philo), hence of the Sabbath as the virgin bride of Israel. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday, which is Venus' day: white goddess modulating into black bride. I'm sure the Tempest masque and the exclusion of Venus from it are connected, what with the insistence on preserving Miranda's virginity. Lacan is wrong: it isn't just the phallus that's lost,128 but since the Fall every sexual union has had, or been, a screw loose. Yeats' poem on Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is the one to consult. [159] Well, to go back to the general outline of the book: Part One, Chapters One and Two, on the mythological universe in space and time respectively. Part Two, the four awakenings, Prometheus, Eros, Adonis and Hermes. Part Three, the completion of Part One, the world beyond space and the world beyond time. The former will contain all this choiceand-chance stuff at the bottom of the world I've been mooning about for so many years.129 Anyway, Rabelais is one of the very few major French authors who seems to know balls-all about the Bible. His Holy Bottle is, in one edition, baqbuq, the word used in Kings and Jeremiah for a flask.130 [160] Also, Screech says that Rabelais refers very specifically to Plato's Cratylus in the fourth book (he doesn't deal with the fifth, unfortunately, and takes the usual pedantic view of it).131 [161] So I think Rabelais will be the main figure of the Adonis chapter, as Dante should be the main figure of the Eros one, and the figure to represent the continuation of the Virgilian tradition of creative descent. [162] Creating a hierarchy also creates great anxiety about those lower than we assume ourselves to be. A patriarchal society tends to think women are stupid and unreliable; a slave society creates an animal mythology around its slaves, as igth c. America did with blacks (tremendous sexual powers but otherwise sub-human). I think that the whole tradition running through Christianity without a break into 19th c. evo-

Notes 52

455

lutionary doctrines took similar views of animals and plants, in a way which works contrary to the Biblical vision of an eventually regenerate nature. [163] In the Song of Songs the word "navel" [7:2] to describe one of the beloved's charms has been said by many authorities to be a euphemism for the vulva. But the passage begins with the bride in "sandals": if she has her shoes on she's more likely to be dancing than in bed, and in dancing the navel is, so to speak, called to the lover's attention. It seems to me that all sexual union in this poem is hypothetical and subjunctive, postponed until after the poem. [164! What is really wrong with "literal" meanings in the Bible is the either-or assumptions: this means A, and therefore cannot also mean B. There's a traditional view that allegorical passages, when obviously so, have allegory for their literal meaning; but who decides when a passage is obviously allegorical? [165] If there are two kinds of descent, the confrontation with nothingness and the creative descent that finds a treasure, there should be two kinds of ascent, perhaps the two indicated by the doubling in the gospels, resurrection followed by ascension. In resurrection the hero explodes from below with soot on his face; in ascension he simply sloughs off the lower world as an encumbrance. His prototype in ascension (not in resurrection) is Elijah, going up into the sky and throwing down a cloak [2 Kings 2:11-14]. Perhaps the death of Moses which was so curiously not a death [Deuteronomy 34:7! is a prototype for the resurrection, though it's hard to see just how. I think my point about Moses' vision of the P.L. [Promised Land] as superior to Joshua's conquest of Canaan has something.132 [166] Anyway, the old creation features the separation of the female principle from God in the form of wisdom, and the separation of sexes in the human world. Hence the new creation re-establishes the union of man and woman in the human world and of male and female in the divine nature.133 [167] That's Eros: Prometheus is the place for the paradox of tyranny, where the good ruler and bad ruler are more like Edward I and Henry III

456

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

than like good or bad people. In the state of bondage the king is the man over there, not the god hidden inside you. The reason why "Christ is in me" is not the same statement as "I am Christ" but its exact opposite is that practically all of "me" is a stupid and rebellious mob, forever setting up its own muddled leaders. Hence all the metaphors, from at least Plato's Republic downwards, about the wise commonwealth as an allegory of the wise man's mind, and of the latter as a dictatorship. The Christ in me can never be a dictator: all dictators turn out to be Antichrist sooner or later. Blake suggests that the one who comes forth from the tomb is not the God of resurrection but Lazarus, who starts a new cycle of history with a culbute.134 And I've said myself that the Moses who sees the Promised Land is closest to deity; Joshua only enters it and conquers what turns out to be one more Canaan.135 [168] I'm getting closer: the first million miles are the hardest. After that you get used to it. [169] When I wrote my Norton lectures136 I kept falling over twins: twins and amnesia turned up everywhere in descent or threshold imagery, and most of the romances I read after I'd finished the book featured twins and amnesia in some way. In Jesus' descent we have to remember that the real king Jesus is the concealed "Christ in me"; the outward visible Jesus is his twin, but the twin who suffers the usual tanist fate of martyrdom. [170] Linked to this is the concealed extra number, the most familiar one being thirteen. There are thirteen tribes of Israel, because of the division of the Joseph tribe into two, but what is interesting is the number of lists, ranging literally from Genesis to Revelation, that give twelve and leave out one. There are always plausible reasons for the omission—Dan is the tribe of Antichrist, hence left out of Revelation; Levi got cities and is hence left out of the Canaan map; Simeon was absorbed by Judah, so is left out of one list, and I think Gad is omitted in another. The reasons don't matter: what matters is that thirteen visible presences is unlucky: we have to have twelve with a concealed thirteenth who's the essence of all of them. Thirteen presences in the Gospels, as at the Last Supper, mean martyrdom. The concealed presence is the Resurrection one mentioned in the fifth part of Eliot's Waste Land [11. 360-6].

Notes 52

457

[171] I have to work out some more of these: the fourth concealed in threes, such as the Trinity; the eighth concealed in sevens; the concealed number you get by adding all the numbers before the one you're interested in: that is, the sum of the numbers up to seven is twenty-eight and up to twelve seventy-eight, both of which have important overtones in various places. [172] This links with the Thomas-twin stuff in the background of the Gospels: it was Thomas who demanded substantial evidence for the risen Jesus. Most of this theme appears to be occult: maybe the JamesJohn pair was substituted for it. I think there's also a dim tradition that James the brother of our Lord was a twin brother. Also, of course, the other pairings: Moses-Elijah and the struggle of brothers stuff I have in GC.137 At the transfiguration there are six figures, assuming a separation—no, you don't need to assume anything: there are six. Point? Well, three, seven and twelve appear to be the numbers of order, authority, and descent: hence four, eight and thirteen would be the obvious numbers of ascent. But the latter three could be substituted for by the sum-numbers of the first group, which are six, twenty-eight, and seventy-eight. I noticed a lot of seventy-eights in Rabelais, without getting a clue about why. [173] Then again, there's the dialectic of self and persona. I don't ordinarily think much of myself as a public figure, but when I do see myself on television and realize what other people see, which is no more what I feel myself to be than a cigar-store Indian, I realize the kind of contrast involved in my own separation of the Jesus within each potential resurrection and the Jesus of the gospels. [174] I've always said that the sheep and goats of Jesus' parable [Matthew 25:31-46] can't be people: they're states of mind, but if they're people we get that frightful bastard that chases everybody to hell, and he won't do. Once again, I should remind myself that everybody has a lost soul, and should make sure it gets damn well good and lost.138 At the same time the Judge of that god-awful parable [Luke 18:1-8] can't be wholly inside, because that's reducing it to psychologism and saying that he's "not outside," which is precisely what I can't say. [175] The symbol of the new state of man is the revolution which is the

458

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

revenge that Lazarus gets on Dives/39 but that, being an antithesis, can't be the whole truth. I suppose the Gospel writers couldn't do anything but what they did in making the resurrection identical with escaping from a tomb, but in other respects they blew it.

§ [176] I've picked up my copies of Rabelais again,140 as I always do when I get to thinking about a book on the verbal universe. Rabelais is probably the writer who most clearly grasped all the dimensions of language and verbal communication. There's the episode of Panurge speaking every language known [bk. 2, chap. 9], of the Limousin talking a barbaric monkish Latinate in defiance of humanist etiquette [bk. 2, chap. 6]; there are parodies of what is now called body language and gesture [e.g., bk. 2, chap. 19]—there's practically nothing to say about words that he hasn't said somewhere. He seems to have a clearer grasp of my fourth phase of language point than anyone else, even his macaronic contemporaries like Folengo (Merlin Coccaius) and the author of Hypnerotomachia.141 [177] There are also a lot of recondite things in him [Rabelais], like his curious fondness for the number 78, particularly in the final descent [e.g., bk. 5, chap. 36]. In my two first chapters I have to distinguish the demonic descent and the voluntary descent of Christ from the descent of discovery, which Christianity tended to bypass but is certainly the point of the Fifth Book (I'm not going to take seriously the guess that Rabelais may not have written this book). As Cohen says in his introduction, his wine and drinking imagery is partly symbolic: wine means exuberance and enthusiasm, and also sexual activity.142 He develops out of the point I started these notes with: the cynic at the feast.1431 note he seems fond of Aulus Gellius.1441 suppose the Sufis would claim him, though I imagine they claim too much. He didn't like Calvin, just as a liberal today might dislike capitalist laissez faire and still not think Communism had anything better. But whether he'd have applauded everything those dreary old fuddy-duddies did at the Council of Trent, passing one reactionary resolution after another, and setting the Catholic Church up for a most horrendous crash in the twentieth century, I doubt. [178] Then again, he's full of all the choice-and-chance stuff at the bottom of the imaginative world:145 the long lists of divination devices [bk.

Notes 52

459

3, chap. 25], games of chess in the fifth book [chap. 24], and the like. The bottle-oracle is partly that too [bk. 5, chaps. 44-8]. [179] My present scheme for the book is three parts. Part One, the Western imaginative universe in space (chapter one) and in time (chapter two). The first chapter covers the ground of my graduate course, and ends, so far as I can see, with the lesser antithesis, the Classical one turned upside down. Also, I suppose the Classical positive analogy along with the demonic one, by way of Comus. The second chapter is the figure-of-eight one, the double gyre of incarnation going down and resurrection coming up, with its various allotropic forms. The Secular Scripture, which is part of this argument; the demonic descent to the visio malefica probably has to be dealt with, though I don't yet know what the return from it is. Anyway, at the bottom there's death and life and death, the intuition I got from Mallarme about the dice-throw followed by the Igitur of a new creation.146 Curious—well, not curious really—how pervasive Rabelais is [in] French literature. The giant is a child's aggressive release, and Ubu Roi147 is as close to Rabelais as anything is. It's beginning to look too as though my notion of Rabelais and the resurrection of the body, which is as early as the Blake book, might bulk prominently in the Adonis chapter. [180] I think a metaphor connected with my numbers game is important: there are twelve zodiacal signs, or symbolically twelve stars: these surround a thirteenth, the sun. The twelve stars are visible at night when the sun is invisible; the sun is visible by day when the stars are invisible. Similarly with my 78: that's the number of cards in the Tarot pack if we count the Fool one instead of zero. As zero, it's the essence of all the others. This metaphorical interchange between the unity and the variety of identity may turn out to be important. [181] The conception of the fire of life is very central in Berkeley's Siris, where it's identified with the heat of warm-blooded animals.1481 wonder whether (as a note of mine suggests, I don't know when written) the end of alchemy wasn't to bring the world's hidden fire into light?149 Gold is thus the symbol of visible earthly fire. [182] Obviously I have to reread the Siris, a wise and profound book, even if there aren't any panaceas. In our day of gullible publics for all

460

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

kinds of spiritual nostrums, it would be worth remembering that there are no mental panaceas either.

§ [183] The Prometheus chapter deals with Utopian literature and Menippean satire, among other things of course; the Eros one with the Courtly Love tradition and its Plato-Ovid origins, finishing with Lawrence & co.; the Adonis one will feature Rabelais and the creative descent; the Hermes one, covering the two aspects of apocalypse, will, I think, devote some attention to Grail literature. [184] I've been reading Loomis and A.E. Waite on the Grail.150 Loomis often seems to me an erudite ass: he keeps applying standards of coherence and consistency to twelfth-century poets that might apply to Anthony Trollope. Waite seems equally erudite and not an ass. But I imagine Grail scholars would find Loomis useful and Waite expendable, because Waite isn't looking for anything that would interest them. It's quite possible that what Waite is looking for particularly doesn't exist—secret traditions, words of power, an esoteric authority higher than that of the Catholic Church—and yet the kind of thing he's looking for is so infinitely more important than Loomis' trivial games of descent from Irish sources where things get buggered up because the poets couldn't distinguish cors meaning body from cors meaning horn. Things like this show me that I have a real function as a critic, pointing out that what Loomis does has been done and is dead, whereas what Waite does, even when mistaken, has hardly begun and is very much alive. Not that this is new. [185] The Grail stories seem to me linked with the Song of Songs in many ways, including the basis in a pre-Christian fertility ritual that is not allegorized in the Christian treatment but realized. Jessie Weston's book151 was based, I should think, on the Gnostic fallacy of diving for the pearl at the bottom of the sea. There isn't any pearl at the bottom: it's suffered a sea-change into the sea itself.152 [186] As for Rabelais, I'll have to get Screech's book,153 even if he doesn't deal with Book Five. I've just reread the first two books: the second one, written first, ends with expanding Pantagruel into a kind of leviathan, the inside of his body another world [chaps. 32-3]. I suppose some

Notes 52

461

allegory of the subject-object relation may be involved. The first book on Gargantua reads like a kind of autobiography: the war with the Picrocholes refers to Rabelais' own legal struggles Ichaps. 48-9], and the Abbey of Theleme at the end the emergence of the Utopian humanistic ideal [chaps. 52-7]. As for the contrast between Gargantua's pre- and posthumanistic training, that speaks for itself. Curious how sympathetic the father-figures are: Gargantua himself and his father. When his mother Gargamelle dies, Rabelais remarks he doesn't care about her or any other woman Ibk. i, chap. 37]: curious that he's so aware of his great major defect as a writer, his inability to see women as human beings. As for what this has to do with the Bible, I think it has a good deal. 1187] Referring to Waite again: a remark he makes, not in the Grail book, but in the Tarot book, suggests something like this: Christ is the buried {male} individuality in each of us; the rest of our individuality ought to become a unified symbolic female; these two unite, as in the conjunctio symbol of alchemy,154 and the child they produce is the eternal youth of the resurrection.

§ [188] Actually Blake's view of Newton does seem fairly relevant to the Hermes section, as a crucial step in that argument is obviously the sense of the loss of presence. When God is withdrawn from the star-world there's only a dead mechanism left: the organism on earth may be superior in some respects, but it's intrusive: the objective model is dead. [189! The difference between a mechanism and an organism is not one of intellectual capacity or even consciousness. I have no difficulty whatever with machines thinking or being intelligent: they clearly can calculate a lot faster than brains can now: they've only started on their development, and eventually, I suppose, we'll have machines that stand in the same relation to the ordinary human brain of today that the jet plane of today does to ordinary human feet. But unless computers are equipped with DNA molecules and genetic codes impelling them to fight every instant of their lives for survival, competition and reproduction of their own species, I don't see how they can escape from the category of machines, who [which! can do anything we like but have no will to do it left to themselves. A car can run faster than we can, but left

462

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

unused in a garage it will rust away to nothing without the slightest sign of impatience. The difference between a mechanism and an organism is in will, not in capacity.155 [190] Let's assume a working title of "Word and Spirit" for the second volume. The cycle of the Word is a series of epiphanies—creation, law, prophecy and apocalypse—and the cycle of the Spirit is a series of responses—exodus, wisdom, gospel and participating apocalypse. The true response is the historical one turned inside out. Not just upsidedown: that's the other half of the Word cycle. But the Bible uses the updown metaphors in the crucial first two chapters of Acts. What gets turned inside-out, as I said in GC and have been stumbling over all my life, are the categories of time and space.156 At present we tend to think of eternity and infinity as time and space indefinitely extended, which they are anyway, and they have to go into a real reverse, another vortex. Somehow or other I've got to figure out the verbal formulas for this. The four "spectres of the dead"157 are allies. It's beginning to look now as though I should start with Hermes, not Prometheus, and work clockwise, which on the Logos diagram is down. The fact that they are in a circle instead of four layers is, of course, part of the vortex of reversal. [191] Well: I'm reading Ernest Becker's book on the Denial of Death for the second time,158 and the second time it says a lot more to me. He's groping after the contrast between illusory and genuine security. The illusion projected by the ego transfers loyalties and the like to society, or a loved mistress, or some other idolatrous substitute for God. But even the God of such a transference would still be an idol. The ego has to stop doing anything at all, as I see it: he draws from Kierkegaard and Otto Rank, and says we have to give up what he calls the "causa sui project" and realize our creatureliness.159 Fine, but the renouncing of that again lies, apparently, beyond his range. We have to absorb a creator who is not ourselves, and discover that he is our real self, and that's why he's not ourselves. This seems to me the psychological aspect of the epistemological reversal of time and space. [192] Adonis, as I've said, is also Oedipus,160 and I suppose that's where all the Golden Age and lost Paradise themes so plentiful in the Romantic period go. In miniature, it's the theme of Hawthorne's maypole of Merry Mount, which, faked as it is (the person who set up the maypole was

Notes 52

463

hunted down by the Puritans not because they were killjoys but because he was selling liquor and weapons to Indians), is one of those descentfrom-Paradise-to-the-world stories there are so many analogues to. I can find the Biblical foundations of this easily enough. In Eros, St. Augustine has a sermon in which he speaks of Christ ascending the Cross as a bridegroom:161 the conception of the Crucifixion as a Liebestod seems to be important. Compare Jung's mater-material and hyle etymologies and associations.162 What's in the Bible is not death but the redemption of the mother. Wagner's Ring provides me with a good image of the eventual Promethean burning up of the gods, and Parsifal is the brotherhood or fraternity of the Spirit subjected to illusion (Klingsor's possession of the spear) and consequently impotent. [193] The Spirit's response to the Word is bound to reverse it, partly because creation and law at least are finitizing (if there is such a word) activities and the Spirit has to transcend them. Catholics won't like my books from here on, because the Pope can't be infallible in any language except the metonymic.

§ [194! So the second part, as it is now, of the book would deal, first, with the Prometheus theme. If my present hunch works out, the four sections summarize the phases of revelation in GC starting with Exodus and ending with the (new) creation.163 Prometheus, then, would emphasize the persistent revolutionary theme in Biblical religions, and trace the way in which revolution collapses, first, into an antithesis of what it revolts against, and then, inevitably, into an identity with it. How law enters this gradual process of reversion I'm not sure, except that every revolution contains a hope of transcending law, a hope that fades in proportion as it succeeds politically. [195] Well, the Eros chapter is clear enough: my Song of Songs notes164 give some idea of how I propose to tackle it. Many of its themes would continue into the Adonis one, except that that, as mentioned above [pars. 161, 179, 183], makes more of the resurrection of the body and the creative descent into the world of death. [196] The Hermes chapter revives an old interest of mine, the tradition

464

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

represented by the Cambridge Platonists and Berkeley's Siris, which fascinated me at one time because it was so close to Blake and yet so far (because Blake never forgot the revolutionary Promethean ingredient).165 It suggests that creation took place at the awakening of human consciousness, not at the beginning of nature, which had no beginning, and that the future awakening is the new creation. Also my hunch about alchemy, that gold symbolizes the manifesting of the world's inner fire,166 and, of course, all the Christian speculation about Christ manifesting what was hidden in the Father, what he manifested being a new creation according to Paul. [197] I admit that Rabelais is not exactly a feminist writer, hence it won't be easy to put together his giants and my theory that redeemable man is symbolically woman—well, it isn't my theory, but some aspects of it are. I think this link develops from the very first chapter, where the "fallen" world of experience modulates into the energy of natura naturans—the last two lines of the Epitaphium Damonis is the kind of thing I mean.167 And while our conception of the Virgin Mary (like our conception of Jesus) is of a quiet and self-contained person, we also have to look at things like the Bacchantes. Not Our Lady of Pain, but the Maenad and the Bassarid. [198] My Utopia ideas go into Prometheus, and perhaps the point about the creation of a hierarchy increasing randomness in general. Note the anxiety in a structured society: in a patriarchal society the patriarchs are constantly fussing about the instability and light-mindedness of women; in a slave society the masters keep repeating cliches about the innate inferiority of slaves, and so on. [199! Blake says nobody is interested in a virtuous character, and that all the interest in literature groups itself around the "bad" characters.168 I'm reading a translation of Celestina at the moment.169 Why this should be so would be worth thinking about: of course the primary reason is that "good" characters conform to established norms, and so don't raise questions about them. [200] Part One: The Cycle of the Word. Chapter One: The Universe in Space (red).170 creation Chapter Two: The Universe in Time (orange), exodus

Notes 52

465

Part Two: The Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead. Chapter Three: Prometheus Unbound (yellow), law Chapter Four: Eros Regained (green), wisdom Chapter Five: Adonis Revived (blue), prophecy Chapter Six: Hermes Unsealed (indigo), gospel Part Three: The Cycle of the Spirit. Chapter Seven: The Universe beyond Space (purple), apse [apocalypse] i Chapter Eight: The Universe beyond Time (black), apse [apocalypse] 2171

§ [201] In the present situation Marxist countries demand the subordination of the arts and literature to their political concerns; this subordination is sometimes part of what Marxist intellectuals living in non-Marxist countries call "vulgar Marxism," but is commonly the announced policy of Marxism whenever it comes to power. In the U.S. there were also frenzies like the Comstock and McCarthy movements, which fell into the regular pattern of regarding serious culture as their enemy rather than as the spokesmen of genuine concern.172 [202] Today few writers in U.S. or Europe feel any particular loyalty to "capitalism," or are even continuously conscious of living under it; but many of them do feel a loyalty to "democracy." And by democracy they mean something that includes a respect for the authority of their art. Some of them of course project their dissatisfactions with their own society on some imaginary Communist system, identified with some pastoral-myth conception of Russia or China: this is a central part of the trahison des clercs. But it is no wonder if a large number of writers are politically fools: literature has no obvious standards to appeal to: it represents a second twist on concern itself, and I see no way of demonstrating that it is a second twist. [203] The fact that concern has its own case, and shouldn't invariably bow to the demands of science, becomes clear in this age of environmental pollution, energy crisis, and the human response to the possibilities of genetics, cloning and the like. This fact has, I imagine, strangled a good deal of poetry in Marxist countries, which used to be devoted to the praise of technological development. Also with literature. One may give a certain importance to wrong-headed books (I speak with conviction

466

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

but without demonstrable arguments) like Lawrence's Plumed Serpent or Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. But there was my experience as a youth on the train with the anti-Chinese thriller, which concern would now, quite rightly in my view, declare illegal.173 But I doubt if trying to look for articulated standards will work.

§ [204! Of course the female figure is the primary one in the Adonis section; and that expands into the cycle of birth, copulation and death that's the primary female empire. Cleopatra in Shakespeare is the purest example of that: she's not a spectacularly successful mother, and ignores Caesar's threat to her children that would destroy another woman. The one really maternal image is that of the serpent-baby at her breast, and that's combined not only with her death but with various erotic images, like the lover's pinch that hurts and is desired [Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.312-15, 298-9]. The points of birth, sexual contact and death are all the same point: I found this in a different (and male) context in Dylan Thomas' Winter's Tale.174 [205] This leads up to the Hegelian reversal of the white goddess into the black bride,175 which I think is a move from the Adonis sphere to the top one, which was Hermes and is now Prometheus (I'm by no means clear on this yet). Can the four levels, either of the traditional system or its opposite, be aligned in any way with the four levels of meaning? [206] The question of beauty is one that must be seriously examined here, beauty being traditionally associated with the creation of God and also, in another context, with erotic attraction. I found a useful remark in Poe's Domain of Arnheim. [207] I suggested in GC that the authority of the arts and sciences was what corresponded in our day to the authority of prophecy in the Old Testament.176 At present the theory of criticism is in a state of Pyrrhonic skepticism, but that's only the cycle of fashion turning, or, more accurately, criticism signing off and going to sleep. [208] In the Romantics book I discovered, on rereading it after twenty years, that I had made a good deal of a curious reversal of the traditional

Notes 52

467

view of the Trinity: that a force originates in the Spirit, proceeds to the Son, and then goes on to whatever the equivalent of the Father is.177 Shelley has this very explicitly. I wonder if I could make anything of Melville's Clarel, the story of a pilgrimage that starts in Jerusalem and ends in Bethlehem, in the reverse direction of the life of Christ. [209] The Feuerbach principle, that man creates God in his own image, is the one that all religions apply to all other religions except themselves. But it can of course be applied to them by others. I haven't the least objection to having it said that my religion is essentially my own creation. I feel that it must be that way because my understanding of anything is finite; but I think the position I do hold is one that enables me to crawl a little farther and discover a bit more. Faced with a Jew, a Moslem, a Catholic, an atheistic humanist, I should not deny for a second that they also have positions from which to advance. All this is very elementary: one assumption I've so far left aside. I am what I am because of certain historical events: the Protestant Reformation, the Anglican settlement, the Methodist movement, the transfer of religious energies to the New World. Hence if I express a tolerance that grants to any position the capacity of moving nearer whatever truth is, I am also annihilating history, assuming that all religious theory and practice today begins in a kind of apocalypse in which past history has exhausted its significance as such. The nineteenth-century obsession with conversion, mainly from Protestant to Catholic positions, was a desperate effort to keep history continuous: I think it no longer works, if it ever did. §

[210] The first chapter raises, first, the mythological universe, with its sacred centre and secular periphery, and then the growth of cultural elements out of a central controlling concern. The conflict between religion and science doesn't involve religion, but a pre-scientific mythological construct. That science must have its own authority even when it conflicts with concern is fairly well understood now, because of the kind of criteria that science can appeal to. [211] But the arts are existential and a higher degree of concern itself, hence the question of a conflict of loyalties is more complex. Everybody knows that literature and the arts do have an authority of their own, and

468

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

writers who stick to that authority even when it involves them in a fight with concern, as in the Soviet Union today or the cultural revolution in China or the lynching-mob frenzies in the U.S. under Comstock, McCarthy, et al, are regarded with respect, for the most part.178 [212] Hence a work of literature can be ideologically wrong, or thought of as such by the general attitude of concern: Kipling's Kim and Lawrence's Plumed Serpent would be examples. But no one sympathizes with assaults on them. On the other hand I read a trashy thriller on a train once that suggested that all Chinese in American cities were involved in kidnapping white women and selling opium. It would be against the law in Ontario now to write such stuff: I thoroughly approve of the law. But when we get a "moral majority" organized, it always tends to regard genuine literature as its enemy, instead of as the thing it ought to be defending. [213] Solving this problem would mean finding out what literature is, what its social function is (basically another twist on the spiral of concern, I think), and what the elements in it are that demand a writer's loyalty. [214] Somehow or other this leads, first to the thesis of authority and the antithesis of revolt, then to the four powers, and finally to a conclusion. [215] The conclusion would start, I suppose, with combining the downward authority and the upward human effort, the two together being the Tao, the axis of stability between heaven and earth. I doubt if I'll ever get to the point of writing a chapter on the total symbolic universe, or what I used to call the Druid analogy; but two things I have to be concerned with are, first, dropping in another view of the structure of the Bible as the pectin coagulating the whole argument; and, second, a return to the four levels of polysemous meaning via Hegel. [216] This scheme doesn't start with a recapitulation of GC: it starts with the conception, once again, of a "secular scripture," and works toward the Bible, not from it. The end, as usual, has to be some form of interpenetration. [217! I had thought of the second chapter as concerned with analogies:

Notes 52

469

postponing the erotic analogy for the ER [Eros Regained] chapter but dealing with the official and the humane views of Classical mythology. Giles Fletcher; Milton in PR [Paradise Regained]; Petrarch's Secretum; Cowley's "fiend Apollo"; the implication of the sixth elegy of Milton for NO [The Nativity Ode]. The Marsyas and Glaucus images in Paradiso i.179 [218] The Eros chapter is straightforward enough: the third world of the old construct becomes the second of the new, and similarly the second old becomes the third new. The former is Adonis, the latter Eros. Reincarnation and identical recurrence, along with the Frazer-Graves and Vico-Spengler cyclical patterns, are Adonis, who is also Dionysus. This is an expansion of the older construct, which apart from Virgil's 6 Aeneid didn't much feature such recurrences. Prometheus is old four and new one: that is, the mechanical model of the stars is the Promethean concern with technology, although one can't overlook the Atlantis pattern of land emerging out of the sea. Then Hermes would be old one and new four: the devising of the music of the spheres, the upper labyrinth, turning into the kind of descent we have in Igitur. [219! I'm probably trying for too symmetrical a pattern here: in any case I'm realizing more clearly the importance of the stabilizing conception of the Tao that incorporates both old and new. [220] I'm still playing around with the idea that my eight stages of the Bible break into four epiphanies of the Word and four responses of the Spirit. The first epiphany of the Word is creation, the manifesting of physical nature, the postulating of Heidegger's problem of why there are things rather than nothing.180 The second epiphany is that of law, which is peculiarly the epiphany of man as not merely a perceiving but a reflecting being: it completes the activity of consciousness which creation begins. The third epiphany is that of prophecy, which is where Judaism (Moses) and Islam (Elijah) still are. For Christianity, Jesus is the manifesting of the pure individual in the midst of society, though still a historical presence pointed to by the words of the New Testament, hence still part of Derrida's "metaphysics of presence."181 I think the primary or panoramic apocalypse is involved in this too, except for the prominence of the sealed scroll and its opening, which points in the direction of the total identity of Word of God as book with Word of God as presence.

47°

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[221] The four responses of the Spirit start with the forming of a specific society, a response to creation because it arises out of the sea of chaos like the corresponding creation. The sense of a corporate group is primary in consciousness. Wisdom is the response to law, the setting up of standards of precedence and order, of hierarchy and seniority, of education in time, of visions of the past and prudence in regard to the future. Prophecy breaks through and into that; but gospel is the response to prophecy. In the gospels the Church contains and formulates the conditions of the prophet's appearance: his teachings are of no importance apart from the life that lives them; and the shape of that life is determined by dogmatic needs. Hence again it's a corporate sense, accompanied by frantic anxieties about staying within it and not straying off somewhere to another communion. The final or participating apocalypse is as far as I can see in this progress: it's the interpenetrating of society and individual, working with prophetic authority without being subordinated to it and so sealing it off. [222] I think that's a fairly important, as it is certainly a comprehensive, conception. But it's new and complex, and perhaps shouldn't be just thrown at the reader at the start: I made a tactical mistake in throwing the three stages of language at him in GC.182 Perhaps this is my notion of an eleventh chapter, the recapitulation of the Bible inserted just before the end. [223] Anyway, wherever it goes, the first chapter is beginning to involve some consideration of the social conditioning of writers as reflected in their prose styles. I notice how completely we are committed today to what I see as the direct descendant of the "prophetic": to writers of piercing if often partial insight. For anyone today who values, for example, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, for whatever reason, such an author as Cicero is the pits: he's nothing but a ragbag of platitudes and cliches. Yet Cicero represented the summit of style, good taste and authority down to the i8th c, because he was the spokesman of an acknowledged social structure. I find this Ciceronian magisterial style still in Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon in the i8th c.: they would seldom have agreed with each other, but they have in common a sense of speaking out of the centre of social rationality. Take Johnson's famous remark about Addison: "He thinks justly, but he thinks faintly."183 The "thinks faintly" only means he's a dope, but the assumptions behind "thinks justly" are completely out of our present range. It would never

Notes 52

471

occur to us to say of any writer we deeply admired that he "thinks justly," unless he happened to be writing on some key issue like atomic warfare. That means we're moving toward individualizing as the essential sign of social progress. [224] As I said in my preface to Innis, Communism began by regarding itself as an evolution out of capitalism; but no capitalist country evolved into Communism; Communism was established in a pre-industrial country and the two systems simply entered an adversarial relationship. The situation repeated that of the sixteenth century, where the Reformers assumed that they represented an evolution of the Catholic Church into a higher form; but no body of the Catholic Church in any country accepted this, and again a mere adversarial relationship grew up.184 [225! In the Middle Ages it was axiomatic that concern should dominate every aspect of culture: in the seventeenth century science began to separate from the Christian pre-scientific myth. The authority to which science can appeal established the principle that the scientist had to recognize an authority within his own science, and feel a loyalty to it, regardless of the demands of concern. [226] My old fetish of a hundred sections is coming up again.185 This time I think of my eight phases of revelation as a progressive dialogue of Word and Spirit. Creation is the first epiphany of the Word, the presentation of a world with things in it to consciousness, who cooperates in the creation. Exodus is the first response of the Spirit, in the form of the nation of Israel. Law is then the second epiphany of the Word, where the seven days become the Sabbath observance, and where the injunction "this do" is imposed. Wisdom, the individualizing of the law, is the second response of the Spirit to this, and is symbolized by Solomon, the king of the nation Israel in its one moment of glory. Prophecy is the third epiphany of the Word, born mostly out of defeat and humiliation, and Jesus is the last of the prophets, the end of the sequence symbolized by Moses and Elijah. Gospel is the third response of the Spirit, because the Gospel is not Jesus speaking but the primitive Church preserving his sayings and putting his life into a ritual framework. The panoramic apocalypse is the final epiphany of the Word, obviously, and the participating one the final response of the Spirit, who has finally become identified with and as the Bride.

472

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[227] The hundred sections would result from the fact that each group of two might logically have twenty-five: twelve for the Word's epiphany, thirteen for the Spirit's response. Seven and twelve are the great epiphanic numbers, and twelve is the Zodiacal one. The tribes of Israel who got out of Egypt are thirteen, not twelve; the gospel is the rotation of twelve disciples around a central figure. The Spirit responses centre first on the ark of the covenant, then on the temple, then on the Church, and finally on the identity of one and many.

§ [228] Perhaps establishing this graduate-course outline will make a long enough chapter, and I can't go further without bringing in the theme of Chapter Two, the mythical universe in time and the conflict of authoritarian and revolutionary movements up and down (i.e., down and up). But the table of imagery in GC throws a new light on the old microcosmos conception.186 The animal, vegetable and mineral orders have their apocalyptic forms in human work, the creative transformation of the environment. The divine, angelic and paradisal orders are not achieved but provided, and symbolize a provident God, who's so damn difficult to believe in in ordinary experience. Of the provided orders, the divine and angelic are projected only, and suggest modes of experience beyond what we have: only the paradisal order is in imagery we can attach to the achieved vision. [229] The human order comes spang in the middle, and has always been thought of as a mixture of the achieved and the provided. To minimize the power of achievement leads to an irresponsible fatalism; to minimize the power of provision, however, leads to that confusion of the human with the all-too-human that's always been the sticking point of all "atheistic" conceptions of the universe. [230] I think the Blake line on this is that the old-style authoritarian fourlevel order is the fallen Urizen or Nobodaddy, the ghost of the old man in the sky, and the new-style rebellious inversion of this is Ore, who turns into Urizen. In proportion as the power of human energy is transferred from the revolutionary to the creative, its counterpart becomes female, the responsive "emanation" of the world to the genuine recreation that the arts symbolize. That, of course, is the union of Los (time)

Notes 52

473

and Enitharmon (space). I think something of this is built into the Song of Songs: it's certainly built in to the "Beulah" and similar married-land concepts in the prophets. How to work this out without simply rehashing Blake isn't clear yet. It goes through, in Chapter Two, the distinction between resurrection and rebirth, to which there's a corresponding distinction on the descending side, something analogous to the law-gospel transcendence. Or perhaps the real metamorphosis is best worked out in terms of a descending Spirit with a gift of tongues transcending the various ramifications of Vico's thunderclap.187 In Jung the shadow turns into the anima. [231! This doesn't conflict with my central idea that redeemed man is woman, because "redeemed" means accepting what's provided. The world of achievement is symbolically male, and descends from the centrifugal hunting rhythm that completes itself by going back to the centripetal female hearth.188 [232! But there is a difficulty there: that relation turns inside out. It seems to be established (Erikson) that when children are left to play by themselves, the boys build tower-structures and the girls enclosurestructures.189 That leads to the female as environment, what surrounds the male, the Enitharmon-space. (I think the male-above, female-below relation where the garden is the female body and the rain or wind coming from above male is a perverted and chauvinistic relationship, as Milton indicates in his guilty-nature image in the Nativity Ode [st. 2].)

§ [233] Pink folder:190 Introduction: Summary of The Great Code, and statement that the skeleton of this book is provided by the fifth chapter of that one. [234] Red folder: Creation. Creation as the presentation to consciousness of a world of things rather than nothing, appearing in a (finite) shape because the Word is the real creator, and is therefore human as well as divine. The projection of creation as the authoritarian four-level universe of medieval and Renaissance Europe. [235! Orange folder: Exodus. The first response of the Spirit to the first

474

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

epiphany of the Word, taking the form of the exclusive nation of Israel. The projection of this as the revolutionary consciousness of the modern world from the i8th c. on, including Romanticism with its upside-down version of the previous mythological construct. [236] Yellow folder: Law. This is the beginning of Part Two, which has the running title of "The Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead," and has for its main theme the overcoming of the antithesis set up in the first two chapters. In its Biblical context law is the incorporating of creation into human (national) activity, the synthesis of the first epiphany and the first response and the second epiphany of the Word. The way in which this got to identifying moral and natural law, human action and the observed behavior of nature. Prometheus Unbound, though he doesn't get really unbound here. [237! Green folder: Wisdom. Eros Regained, tracing the cult of Eros as the connecting link between authoritarian Christianity and modern revolutionary attitudes. That's the modern version; the Biblical context is the permeation of individual life by the law. Hence it corresponds to democracy or the emancipation of individual life in the modern world. [238] Blue folder: Prophecy. Adonis Revived, partly because in the Biblical context the sequence of prophets ends with Christ and the badge of prophecy is martyrdom. The perspective of prophecy as seeing the direct challenge of what lies beyond (one's own) death. [239] Indigo folder: Gospel. The Spirit's third response to the third epiphany of the Word. This is because the gospels as we have them preserve the teachings of Jesus but aren't Jesus writing: i.e., Jesus is caught in the web of the primitive Church, the Church being the successor of the nation of Israel and the community of the wise. The two previous sections should have dealt with some of my Utopian and educational-contract speculations. In its modern sense this section plainly has to grapple with the authority of the Church. Ah me. [240] Purple folder: Panoramic Apocalypse. The Second Coming or final Epiphany of the Word, as the infinite divine-human. [241] Black folder: Participating Apocalypse. The Resurrection and As-

Notes 52

475

cension of the Spirit, now also the full emerging Bride as well (anabasis of Kore archetype). [242] The probabilities suggest that my next volume will, or may, get as far as Wisdom: the rest of it I may not live to see.

§ [243] The Biblical metaphor-cluster was an outstanding example of a mythical universe, the way of looking at the environment which is conditioned by social attitudes. As said in GC, there are no noble savages; no society lives directly in nature without a transparent cultural envelope.191 The first chapter is devoted to describing this mythical universe in its spatial aspect, then going on from there to describe the shape of that universe in the Christian centuries of culture, and its final overthrow in the eighteenth century. [244] Very broadly, the main thesis is this: the Bible suggested to later philosophers and theologians a universe on four levels. On top was heaven, in the sense of the place of the presence of God. Below was paradise, symbolized by Eden and the Golden Age, the place God intended man to live in. This place has disappeared, and all that is left of it is heaven in the sense of the sky. The stars are made of quintessence and revolve in regular circles, so they still symbolize the vision of creation, the universe as made by a divine intelligence. [245] The third level is "fallen" nature, the world we're born in. Animals and plants and stones seem to be adjusted to this level, but we're not: we are faced at birth with a moral dialectic and must rise upward to the second level, which now exists only within us, or sink below into sin, a level the animals can't reach. The lowest level is the demonic world or hell. [246] This gives us the main outline of the universe accepted from early Christian times until roughly around Newton's time. It's an authoritarian construct: everything good comes from above downward; it's a value-bound construct, because the higher up the world the better it is. It's a perfect example of the way a hierarchy creates a strictly limited order, and of course it reflects the hierarchical organization of medieval and Renaissance society.

476

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[247] After 1700 this construct began to weaken its hold on the Western imagination. Newtonian science had abolished the myths of quintessence, circular motion, immortality and perfection from the sky-world, and the great revolutions, American, French, industrial, put its authoritarian aspect in question. So from the Romantic period on the poets who understood something of the connection between poetry and mythology began to reshape the universe. Blake was almost certainly the first person in the modern world who grasped the problem in its proper context. [248] The post-Romantic universe is essentially the earlier one stood on its head. On top is the sky, now a symbol of loneliness and alienation, and represented by tyrannical figures like Urizen, Shelley's Jupiter, and Hardy's Immanent Will. The stars in their courses no longer represent "harmony" but only a mechanical order. Hence the highest category of experience must be the organism. The state of experience, corresponding to the third or fallen world of the earlier construct, lies directly under the mechanism of the stars, and is continually tempted to fall in with their mechanical and predictable patterns. [249! Under the state of human experience is something within nature that is other than human and yet complements humanity. This may be thought of as benignant, as in Wordsworth, or as awful, as in theories descending from the 18th-century sublime, or as ruthless and terrible. It's already clear that this construct has nothing of the strictly moral hierarchy of its predecessor. In the more pessimistic thinkers, Schopenhauer for instance, we get the "drunken boat" archetype I've analyzed elsewhere.192 Below it is what corresponds to the earlier demonic world. [250] But this lowest world is frequently thought of as the place of the treasure guarded by a dragon. In Christian centuries the theme of creative descent was minimized, because the "lower" world was hell: only the prestige of Virgil kept it alive in literature. But in Shelley, for example, we see the beginning of a construct in which the quest-hero is no longer a climber but a digger. Atlantis emerges from the sea in Prometheus Unbound, and something rather similar happens at the end of the second part of Faust. Again, moral values may be ambivalent: the place of the source may be paradisal or may be blasted by a curse: the creative genius may be a poete maudit.

Notes 52

477

[251] Well: that's the guts of my graduate course. It's not satisfactory in itself, because it ends in a mere antithesis, and I've been looking for something that will get beyond the antithesis for a long time. What follows are relatively new speculations for me, though some of them have old roots. [252] Start with an old one. The older mythical construct tried to account for man's sense of alienation in nature. It inherited thousands of years of mythology in which man had struggled to regularize his sense of his environment with the aid of the cycle, the turning seasons of the year and the rotating heavenly bodies. The Bible, as GC tried to show, revolted against this as "idolatry," and substituted a revolutionary (except that it didn't stay that way) attitude to nature in which nature was a fellow-creature of man but no longer a dwelling-place of the numinous. Its "gods" were really demons: the sense of the numinous could be discerned through it but not in it. [253] With the Romantics there came a sense of man's essential partnership with nature, the fact that he was a child of nature and involved with its processes and its highly ambivalent morality. This in itself was not new, but there came a strong new emphasis on the sense of natura naturans, the feeling of nature as a force or energy of which man was part, a new sense of the Dionysian. It was essentially the greatly increased emphasis on this (Milton had written In Adventus Veris,193 and the older poets knew all about it: I'm speaking of a question of degree of emphasis and influence) that transformed the old third world of experience, in which man was physically akin to but morally alienated from his natural environment, into a new state of identity in which something other than man was yet something that he was. Once this shift had been made, the other three worlds fell into line. [254! It's essentially this transformed third world that creates the drunken boat construct: before that the drunken boat was the city on a hill that held down the gates of hell. [255] That takes me back to the general shape of the mythical universe. I think I can get the general outlines of this out of Mircea Eliade's Cosmos and History book and G.R. Levy's Gate of Horn, with some detail from the brilliant and fantastic guesswork in Robert Graves. The centre is the

478

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

temenos or sacred space, which grows into the central city on the central hill with its central temple, the winding staircase leading from earth to heaven. This can modulate to the world-tree with its encircling serpent, and so on. Maybe this description can go in the introduction, but I don't think so. I think the introduction summarizes GC in a way that prepares the reader for this book. [256] When the third level of the old construct turned back into a still older natura naturans conception, it recreated the Eros the poets had never allowed to die out, the unsublimated Eros that's also the metaphorical world of unified subject and object.

§ [257] I was lecturing on Biblical wisdom and Ecclesiastes today, saying that "there is nothing new under the sun" [1:9] is a statement about knowledge, while "there is a time for all things" [3:1, 11] is a statement about experience, and means that in that realm everything is new.194 A very bright girl asked me about this, realizing that the vision of the natural cycle with which the book opens coincided with my creation myth of the revolving mother. In answering her I had to say something I had not thought of before: that as soon as you say "there's a time for all things" you've invoked the creating father and his appearance in time. [258] A second student asked me about the difference between analogy and metaphor. I said that such a statement as "God is love" could mean that love, a mere finite word, was being used as an analogy to something infinite, or that the two were being metaphorically identified. It then occurred to me that the metaphorical meaning was only possible in an incarnational context. Useful people, students. [259] I see my eight parts of revelation now as four dialogues. Each is a manifestation of the Word and a response of the Spirit. That wipes out my "Cycle of Word/Spirit" idea. But: the Creation-Exodus dialogue is Prometheus; the Law-Wisdom one Hermes; the Prophecy-Gospel one Adonis; the two Apocalypses Eros. Different order from what I'd thought; but it's all right if they're the central part of the book and not necessarily all of it.

Notes 52

479

§ [260] I think my Introduction is fundamentally the right introduction, and I'm reasonably pleased with it. The first half of the book seems clear, and if the second half likewise clears it'll be a good book. [261! Well: My overall scheme, which at times I've wondered about as over-symmetrical, is one of four dialogues of Word and Spirit in the Bible: first, Creation and Exodus; second, Law and Wisdom; third, Prophecy and Gospel; fourth, panoramic and participating Apocalypse. Creation, law, prophecy (which includes at least the teaching career of Jesus) and panoramic apocalypse are four epiphanies of the Word: Exodus, Wisdom, Gospel (i.e. the Church's formation around Jesus) and participating apocalypse are responses of the Spirit. [262] I've had recurrent feelings that all this won't work in its application to literature. But I'll give it another try. First, Creation produces the ladder archetype, the descending ladder, and Law reinforces that descent. Exodus produces the climb up the ladder, the purgatorial ascent through the desert; wisdom envisages the ascent as completed in the body of the bride or garden. That I think has enough of both Biblical and literary material to balance.195 [263] The second half of all this is what's been eluding me. If the first pattern holds in repetition, then Prophecy should produce an archetype reinforced by the panoramic apocalypse, and Gospel and participating responses should similarly be parts one and two of the same archetype. At present I think of the Prophecy-Gospel dialogue as connected with the archetypes of buried worlds, seeds, paleolithic and other caves, submarine kingdoms like Atlantis, natura naturans (although there's probably enough emphasis on that in the second, and the seed imagery suggests a close dialectical (I hope) relation between two and three). Most important, if I can bring it off, is the conception of the seed of spirit in the soul-body mortal unit, of spirit as the hypostasis or true substance of the body, as producing its own body, and as consequently introducing the theme of immortality, or at least another dimension of existence, into the sequence. (The ladder and its responses are confined to the Old Testament conservatism, which has no such dimension.)

480

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[264] I think of both apocalypses as essentially based on the archetype of fire, the hidden flame in the fennel-stalk/96 followed by the burning (consummation) of the world and the emergence of the true or spiritual world. I note that my fourfold sequence seems to follow the Eliot Quartets quite closely: air for the ladder, earth for the climb up, water for the buried world, fire for the conclusion.197 Question is, how does fire reinforce seed, cave, or Atlantis imagery? Of course Noah built a fire and burned up a colossal number of animals, with a smell gratifying to the Deity. The symbolism of sacrifice is mainly in the first two archetypes—I mean dialogues—but I suppose it comes into them all. [265! So I'm reading at random like a dog on a false scent (which is precisely what I am), wondering if I can get at some theoretical core to the 19th c. French symbolistes that will give me a clue. Mallarme's Igitur, for example, indicates that the traditional demonizing of the lower world, the Biblical Witch of Endor, fallen angels, and New Testament hell, is a stage one passes through on the way to something deeper (Eliot Quartets again). Something connected with (a) nothingness (b) the cave where oracle meets wit (incidentally wit has fire associations}. [266] The ladder is Eros Regained, the garden Adonis Revived. What I'd wanted was Hermes Unsealed and Prometheus Unbound for the last two. Hermes the thief carries animals off to his cradle-ark. Prometheus is a giant—most giants are demonic or stupid, but Pantagruel swallows the second book of Rabelais. I've also been trying to read Boehme because of his fire imagery and the way he talks about Urgrund and nothingness,198 but I've never got much out of Boehme. [267] Anyway, Hegel ought to be the climax of the first half, the fulfilment of wisdom as far as the archetype of climbing the ladder goes. [268] It looks as though the first two dialogues were on the purely human plane, and that the last two expanded the scene to the point where divine and human really begin to merge. Hence the opening (I think) of the third dialogue concerns the fall of the angels, the opposite to which, repeating the story of Enoch, is the ascent of Elijah. Angels are spiritual and not just soul-body beings. [269] Also, I wanted the last two dialogues to be concerned with the

Notes 52

481

gradual shift in the Bible from a "logocentric" authoritarian beginning, which results in the fall of man and the knowledge of good and evil thereby acquired, to an apocalyptic end where the knowledge is that of primary concern, of the life-death polarity in contrast to the good-bad one. Uyo] Little people and big people in the lower world: the little ones are bits of one giant man, as with Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Also they're seed from a giant tree. [271] All right, I'm expanding from human imagery in earth and air to spiritual imagery in water and fire. But if the conception of literature I've had all my life is sound, the spiritual imagery is at the very least implicit in traditional literature: it simply can't have begun with Baudelaire or whoever. [272] The Winter's Tale of Dylan Thomas: the points of birth, death and love are all the same point. The imagery is snow and fire—white and red, with a good deal of black. Similarly in Shakespeare's Phoenix and Turtle—red and white birds, with black and white in the swan and crow. [273] There's also the Domain of Arnheim complex I've associated with Kant's Critique of Judgment [pars. 15, 55, 206, 350!. I think it's primarily linked to the bride-garden, but I'm not sure that exhausts it. [274] Tragedy is part of the ladder complex, because it's movement set up by something done (the deed may be verbal, as in a boast, but it's still an act). The journey to the garden recaptures a lot of my comedy stuff— this is partly a summarizing book. True romance bursts the boundaries of the human world, and satire begins with the Hamlet discovery that the real prison is not what you've done in the past, but what you are in the present. [275] Everything has its demonic parody, of course: the white goddess is the parody of the black bride—so what else is new. Female images: the intensity of the female desire to continue the temporal line—Tamar, Lot's daughters, perhaps even Ruth, who quite frankly seduces Boaz. Also the Leah-Rachel pattern of the double bride. The passing over of the firstborn in GC:1" Matthew begins with a genealogy he instantly scraps

482

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

and follows that by having John the Baptist say that God could raise up his own children to Abraham [3:9]. The rejection of the firstborn (Israel) is very deeply buried in the NT, it's not just Paul. [276] The deluge; the wandering in the wilderness; Jonah; Jesus' command of the sea [Matthew 8:24-7]; Moses on top of Pisgah [Deuteronomy 3:27!; Paul's wanderings and shipwrecks [2 Corinthians 11:25-6]; seas of brass in temple [i Kings 7:38-44; 2 Kings 25:13] and glass in Apocalypse [Revelation 4:6; 15:2]. The demonic sea, of which the deluge is also the archetype—Red Sea, Dead Sea over Egypt and Sodom, Tyre— I've got all that. The emergence of an Atlantis earth from under the sea (Faust, Shelley, some creation myths) doesn't appear to be Biblical. Yes it is: there's the no more sea business picked up in Dylan Thomas's longlegged bait poem.200 [277] And the saving remnant. I've got a hazy tribal-decentralizing of culture association in my mind that may not come to anything, but the saving remnant is central, I think. It's the core of the gospel response. [278] I got the self-alienated moi from Lacan201—the escape from Narcissus is, I think, a major theme of the second part. I wish I knew what the opposite of logocentric was—apart, that is, from whatever Derrida writes and scratches out again.202 Well, I can leave that. To know as we are now known: that's Paul on the spiritual awakening from the logocentric knower [i Corinthians 13:12]. [279] The great Promethean theme is the recovery of romance and myth, a post-Hegelian climb, not to absolute knowledge but to absolute vision. Poe's Eureka ends in a vision of concentration and diffusion—systolediastole movement. Has something for a scientific world of astronomy and the sub-atomic—I don't know what the metaphorical equivalent is.

§ [280] i. Ladders. The down ladder of Incarnation, authority, and the "logocentric"; the up ladder of antithetical revolt against this. [281] 2. Floating boats. I can try to show how this thematic stasis derives from the ladder one, but otherwise it's quite different from the ladder: a

Notes 52

483

lost Atlantis, a sea or desert of exile, a precarious ark, maybe a rainbow— that's a different setup. [282] 3. Cycles and vortices. The cyclical rhythm isn't enough to base a chapter on: it has to be incorporated in a study of double gyres. Polarization, the complementary rhythm to the cycle, is the thematic stasis of the quest, which is double. The quest of getting from here to there has to be complemented and completed by the quest of getting from there to here. [283] 4. Concern, mythology, language as metaphor, interpenetration, and whatever the hell Derrida means by differential language, if anything: so far everything seems to be logocentric except what Derrida writes and scratches out again.203 [284] Biblical parallels: i. To ladders. Jacob's ladder is the antitype of the Tower of Babel; a ladder of arrows turns up in most folktale analogies to the fall story; in the New Testament the Word descends and the Spirit (apparently) ascends at the Incarnation, then the reverse (Ascension and Pentecost) occurs at the opening of Acts, tying up the confusion-of-tongues business [2:1-13]. [285] 2. To floating boats. The Deluge story; the wandering in the wilderness, the desert being a symbolic twin of the sea of exile; Jonah; Jesus' command of the sea [Matthew 8:24-7]; Moses' "rainbow" vision [Deuteronomy 34:1-4]; Paul's wanderings and seafarings [2 Corinthians 11:25-6] (don't see how they belong, but surely they do); seas of brass in the temple [i Kings 7:38-44; 2 Kings 25:13] and glass in the Apocalypse [Revelation 4:6,15:2]. [286] 3. To gyres.204 The spiral temple with the bride laid out on top forms part of the Song of Songs complex and the garden as the body of the bride. The levirate stories (Ruth, Tamar, Lot's daughters); the role of the forgiven harlot, etc. part of the theme of redeemed man as woman. The cycle of mother-bride-daughter. [287] That seems to be a fairly close approximation to what I'm after: the four stages of the Word-Spirit dialogue. The redemption of man as woman goes along with my notion of the birth of the Spirit from the

484

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Father/Soul-Mother/Body hierarchy and the latter's consolidation into the self-alienated ego. Also the quest must have a lot to do with getting beyond the Narcissus stage of seeing in everything you know what you bring to it.

§ [288] Creation: the creation story in Genesis was never intended to describe the origin of the order of nature. If it ever had been, one would expect it to have been a little cleverer, and not have God creating the trees before he created the sun. The fact that (in the Christian version) the creative agent is the Word means that creation implies, first of all, the presentation of a world with things in it to consciousness. The philosophers say that consciousness is always consciousness of something.205 Incorporated into the idea of creation is the idea of form or shape: curious how so many languages don't have words for space but only for place, or space-there. Form of course means something reduced to the finite, accommodated to the human mind, but as we continue to study the implications in a word like "universe," the one-turning cosmos, it becomes something infinitely (in more than one sense) greater than the merely finite. [289] Creation was neither a beginning in time, for time has no beginning, nor, as Augustine maintained, a beginning of time. The latter is only a consolatory verbal formula, as the irritable passage in the Confessions half recognizes.206 Creation is appearance, a phenomenon, within the context of time and space. Hence creation is partly a matter of awakening consciousness: that is, calling God a Creator is in part a projection from our own creative powers. Man becomes conscious of a world and begins to see an infinity of things in it—the word "it" indicates how the cosmos formed out of chaos is a unity as well. There's no difficulty in assigning man half the creation of the world, as long as the real Creator is a Word, a divine force uniting itself with human consciousness. [290] One of Homer's formulaic units is "winged words." The Word as a mode of communication, from one consciousness to another, is metaphorically a bird, who is also, and necessarily, a metaphor of the Spirit. The tell-tale bird of folktale is a parody of this; the dove itself, or at least

Notes 52

485

the pigeon, has actually been used as a mode of communication. Raven and dove seem to have a relationship like that of spider and bee elsewhere: the subjective brooding contrasted with the flight that lands somewhere. [291] To create is to set in order, hence law is the repetition of creation. The identifying of moral and natural law, which I treat as largely a superstition in GC,207 perhaps has more to be said for it. Law as a phase of revelation incorporates human society, the first response to creation, into the order of creation. Hence while wisdom is not primarily the study of nature, the study and knowledge of nature are by no means irrelevant to it. Law creates distinctions: the distinction between clean and unclean animals may be in large part nonsense, but to make and observe the distinction helps to sharpen the consciousness, though I welcome the Christian abolition of the law, and wish Christianity hadn't promptly thought up another law of its own. [292] Knowing what creation is, however superficially, gives one an insight into what revelation is. Revelation is not any kind of special knowledge: later, in the wisdom books, wisdom is explicitly separated from any type of knowledge. Revelation is the power of expanding one's consciousness. As pure myth, creation is a story about something that happened long, long ago: it's natural for stories to begin with "once upon a time." As a phase of revelation, creation is the presenting to consciousness of a world with things in it, an ambivalent world which both is and is not related to our consciousness. We didn't "make" it: but if that were the only point the creation story is making the world would be a place of pure alienation. We do see it and hear it: the creation begins with light and air, the means of seeing and hearing. [293] The Genesis creation story is neither the oldest nor the most primitive form of creation myth we have: that fact comes out in the monotheism it implies. A god, as distinct from gods, suggests, as above, oneness and unity: this oneness is what we continually try to make out of the world, despite the fact that there is obviously an infinite number of things in it. Coleridge was right, whatever his etymology was: the creative power is the power of creating one.208 Man is included among the animals, and as long as he thinks in terms of personified natural forces greater than himself he's still half an animal.

486

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

§ [294] Well, at least I do know something about this third chapter: it's the stuff I've been writing and rewriting for twenty years or so. The authoritarian four-level universe extrapolated from the Bible but not actually there, with God on top, a linguist model of all things man can conceive of but not attain, then the original Eden world now confined to the stars, still a condition of mind if not a place, the world of human nature and man's original home where art and nature are the same thing, etc., etc. Then the third level or fallen world man is is [in] but not of, with moral dialectic and purgatorial quest (whether an actual purgatory on the other side of time is postulated to complete it or not). Then the demonic level, always down. [295] The four experiences of time and space (usually place, or spacethere) in each world. The importance of a beginning-and-ending view of time. The chain of being as the conceptual skeleton. Systems of correspondence of a type now surviving only in occult systems. Everything good in this cosmos descends: harmony in music, order, the Incarnation, and kindred notions. Milton on liberty. The double quest of Christ (to the earth and back; to hell and back). Such a cosmos is there to rationalize authority, whether of the feudal medieval kind or the Renaissance-prince kind. The Mutabilitie Cantoes. [296] The insistence of the poets to have Eros somehow in the picture, and the elaborate parallel to Christianity that resulted. (Incidentally, of course, if Christianity hadn't developed we'd have got the same cosmos anyway from Classical sources: Hesiod's two levels of Eris209 correspond closely to the two levels of nature in the Renaissance.) The double metamorphosis theme, up and down. The demonic parody and the positive analogy. [297! By the eighteenth century it becomes obvious that the cult of Eros is not just a determination of poets to sing of love: it's also an insistence on the natura naturans aspect of nature, which the heavy emphasis on natura naturata leaves out. So Eros turns into a force that expresses man's essential unity with nature, benevolent with Wordsworth, sinister with de Sade. For the first time there's an otherness to be reckoned with that isn't God (of course there's Milton's In Adventu [Adventus] Veris and the

Notes 52

487

last two lines of Epitaphium Damonis).2W At the same time, after Newton the heavens closed down as an image of divine forethought and became one of alienation; the dream world and various Atlantis symbols opened up below, and the Eros world was thought of as under the world of experience. So the traditional order got stood on its head, in a cosmos of revolt directly reversing the cosmos of authority. [298] Make sure the drunken-boat sequence comes out clearly at the end, with probably the illustration from Auden's For the Time Being.211 Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Darwin, are all different variants of the second-third levels of the cosmos of revolt.

§ [299] A metaphor ("Joseph is a fruitful bough," etc.) is a statement of identity, A is B, which at the same time conveys a much stronger sense of denial: anybody can see that A is not B. What follows from this includes: [300] 1. The ironic. Metaphors of this kind are tentative: they say "even if this isn't true, and it's utterly obvious it isn't, still it's worth making statements of this kind." It's irony in the face of glum reality. Casual couplings, not life-time marriages.212 [301] 2. The apophatic. Such a metaphor can be easily turned inside out, made an assertion by means of denial. Chairman introducing guest of honor at a banquet: "I will not remind you of his innumerable public services," etc., and goes on for half an hour listing them. What the metaphor says is rather different apophasis from this: it says "maybe not this, but—well, something beyond." That is, it's a temporary assertion of an identity that in a very long run actually exists. Counter-logical, not illogical.213 [302] 3. The tentative, as above [par. 300]. The metaphor can be easily abandoned, because it isn't taken very seriously in the first place. Even metaphors like "Christ is God and Man," which are the basis of Christianity because the real nitty-gritty of any religion can only be expressed in metaphors, are like a rope bridge across a gorge. You may commit your life to a belief that it will get you across, but there will be moments when you wish you hadn't.

488

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[303] 4- The participative. Every metaphor suggests an identity between an aspect of personality (Joseph) and an aspect of natural existence (fruitful bough). It opens up a current of energy between subjective and objective worlds, and points the way towards the first serious kind of metaphor, the god, who, whether sea-god or sun-god or whatever, identifies a personality with an aspect of nature. [304] 5. The questing. Every metaphor, however casual, is ready to embark on a journey toward the myth, as above [par. 302]. As I said in AC about the drowned Mary in Kingsley's poem, it's not a question of "pathetic fallacy" but of being an embodiment of myth [AC, 36]. Reversing this principle, metaphors are the exfoliation of myths. Fictions, literary stories, are the dialectic of mythology. [305] 6. The juxtaposing. This is the Ezra Pound principle that you don't need the "is," and that a metaphor is two images copulating, so to speak, trying to become one flesh, the "is" being often an unnecessary pedantry.214 Eros is the muse of poetry.215 [306] 7. The centripetal. There is no metonymic "this is put for that" about the metaphor: there isn't any separate order of signifieds. Hence the arbitrary relation of word to its meaning hardly comes into the discussion at all; hence too the differences among words are not primary. If it's conceivable that Joseph is a fruitful bough, it's equally conceivable that Issachar is, or that Joseph is a strong ass. Hence, as above [par. 305], the relation of words in metaphor is erotic. [307] 8. The metaphor doesn't point to a signified but to a solid & permanent union of spirit and nature. The royal metaphor points to an identity of the one & the many.216 [308] 9. It's metonymy that's apophatic: part of the Biblical reversal of myth-metaphor from hypothetical to existential. [309! 10. Leibnitzian optimism: words chosen are the best of all possible words.217 [310] Biblical reversal leads to vision of creation.

Notes 52

489

§ [311! In AC [Antony and Cleopatra] the fivefold division of experience, divine, romantic, social, ordinary and ironic, is much plainer than in the previous tragedies. One reason is the pressure of history: sovereigns of Egypt were regarded as divine beings, and because they attempted more than human experience they fell below it more noticeably. When Cleopatra maltreats the messenger bringing news of Antony's marriage [2.5] we feel chiefly that when people are given so much power they will behave like spoiled three-year-olds as well as like (sometimes) people larger than life. Similarly with Antony's flogging of Thidias [3.13] and that idiotic remark about Caesar harping on what he is instead of what he was [3.13.134-52]. (Actually, almost the only likeable streak in Caesar is his genuine respect for what Antony once was.) [312] Anyway, the dramatic effect is to expand the stage to include both gods and puppets as perspectives on human behavior. So the romances (except The Tempest) have gods in control of the action, but the characters] are more puppet-like than the titans in the great tragedies. [313] King Lear (I may have this) though in some respects the spookiest of Shakespeare's tragedies, has nothing supernatural in its action corresponding to the witches in Macbeth or the ghost in Hamlet. We have only the demons deliberately summoned up by Edgar for both Lear and Gloucester. The reason is that the setting of Lear is pre-Christian with fair consistency: the audience sees the two levels of nature in Lear's monarchy and Edmund's goddess, but the characters themselves are far less clear about them. Hence Biblical echoes, Cordelia on her father's business [4.4.22-9], "twain" bringing about the curse of Nature [4.6.20911], Kent's "master" calling him [1.4], have a greater resonance for the audience than for the speakers. Similarly, I suppose, with the "good years" sequence of Old Testament allusions. (Also in AC [Antony and Cleopatra] with Charmian's scrambled Gospel story [1.2.25-30].) [314] Cleopatra is the serpent of old Nile, with the baby at her breast in the form of another serpent [5.2] (the only thing she's ever expressed any maternal feeling about), which bites like a lover's pinch that hurts and is desired [5.2.298-9], and kills her—that is, the points of birth, consumma-

49°

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

tion and death are all the same point. "That Herod's head I'll have" [3.3.4-5]—check to see what Plutarch says about Herod. She really is a white goddess, a Salome in triumph in the old dispensation (more accurately Herodias). [315] The Winter's Tale is a perfect combination of the folktale theme of the calumniated wife with the story of Demeter and Persephone.218 Except that there is no suggestion of anything supernatural about Perdita's birth, as there so often is in other versions. I've often wished for the impossible, that King Lear's queen, Cordelia's mother, were involved in the play, though the fact that she was also the mother of Goneril and Regan would raise insoluble problems. But in WT we have the whole Lear father-daughter complex resolved through the resurrection (not the transfiguration) of Hermione. In Pandosto the Leontes figure attempts incest with his daughter, and suicides when he can't get it.219

§ [316! Eros: the Cosmos of Polarity. Start with the Virgil-Ovid stuff, which in turn comes from Plato, then the medieval developments. Note that Eros literature has always been a thrust against the Hermes establishment, from Aucassin on. This despite the snowing under of Beatrice between the Vita Nuova and the Paradiso, of Laura in the Rime, and so on.220 [317] Romaunt of the Rose and the taking of the (this time female) tower. Why the Promethean upthrust in Shelley, though there, is really a form of Eros upthrust. [318] The dialectic of separation of life from death as resolving the deadlock of good and evil. Role of woman as partly pushing from behind (the Mothers in Faust), partly a donkey's carrot ahead, as in the concluding lines.221 [319] Anyway I can't get along without reproducing once more the table of apocalyptic and demonic imagery. [320] I don't know what I can do, if anything, with my notion that Eros survives the Hermes regime, throwing increasingly heavy emphasis on

Notes 52

491

natura naturans, and that the upside-down world of Prometheus is really a world where Eros is no longer just the "fallen" world we're born in, but the complementary world to the really fallen one, Adonis above it. [321] Certainly the modern cult of the balls as the only thing left that's complementary to human nature seems to fit this: students looked so baffled when I tried to expound it to them that I gave it up. In the upsidedown diagram it's the old Edenic world moved into a subterranean place, which belongs in a lot of places—Endymion, for example.

§ [322] Adonis: the Cosmos as Cycle. The central text I suppose is The White Goddess: anyway the Mental Traveller cycle with male and female principles revolving in opposite directions is.222 [323] Cycle of sun, seasons, water and the moon would come first, focussing on the Adonis elegy and Lycidas. Then the historical extensions of Vico and Spengler and The Waste Land, then the reincarnation bit. [324] Virgil's Book Six as summing up most of these themes: perhaps there I could introduce the Igitur descent too. And that takes me into the oracular-laughter Rabelais climax I've been stewing over since Seattle days.223 [325] Finnegans Wake and the question of the cycle as the only image to suggest whatever's beyond the cycle. Ouroboros and the rest of course.224 [326] Golden Bough cycle of death and revival: I really must get this by the balls—I mean primarily the psychology of sacrifice and the logicality of the divine-king succession (son, criminal, prisoner, Sacaea substitute, bread-and-wine spiritualizing, etc.).225 [327] If Graves is right about the red-white-black business coming originally from the old moon-moonless-new moon sequence,226 the red represents the Biblical redeemed harlot, the white the Jerusalem bride, the

492

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

white goddess reverse, and the black the black bride of the Song of Songs, reversing the Lilith figure, of course. Similarly the Magdalen red figure reverses the Great Whore.227

§ [328] Hermes: the Cosmos of Authority. Artificial creation myth: God as "up there." Secondary creation myth: God as making a perfect world, completed by an alienation or fall myth. Third or "fallen" world; demonic world metaphorically "down there." (Dante and Milton.) [329] Important point the two levels of nature. The circularity of arguments about what is "natural" to man. Nature is art on higher level; clothes, social discipline, religious sacraments, etc., all natural to man but not to the rest of nature. [330] Emphasis on natura naturata because of the importance of rationalizing authority. In theory the animals and plants are affected by the fall too. [331] Central importance of the rise from third to second world; dialectic of human beings in nature. The rise is impossible without a previous descent. (Spenser's love and beauty are the rise of Eros; heavenly love and beauty the descent of the Logos and Sapience.) [332] The point of incarnation. The ziggurat symbolism in Levy and elsewhere: the winding stair or mountain with its (usually) seven turns and the bride on top.228 [333] Biblical form of this in Eden, reproduced as individual body of the bride (hortus conclusus).229 Also: the top of the ziggurat as the kernel of the church (typified by Noah's ark according to St. Augustine),230 which is between heaven and earth. Temple in Jerusalem the type of the body of the incarnating Logos. [334] Study of (a) Dante and (b) King Lear. Then perhaps Spenser: upward and downward movements of metamorphosis (upward one the

Notes 52

493

Transfiguration; downward one ignored in the Bible except for Lot's wife[)j; the Ovidian type of metamorphosis. [335] Vaughan's Biblical vision of this in "Regeneration": paradoxical and analogical forms of it in Marvell's "Garden" and elsewhere. The masque as an epiphany of authority; Jonson's and Milton's treatment of Comus compared and contrasted.231 [336] The debate on the "natural society" in the eighteenth century: Shakespeare's Tempest. Swift vs. Bolingbroke; Burke vs. Rousseau.232 [337] Towers and winding stairs in Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce (mustn't forget ladders). Also in Stevens.233 [338] Look up Walter Ong's point about the Scotism in Hopkins234 and the two different emphases in the creation Scotism and Thomism go back to. [339] On the third or "fallen" level of experience Nature is white-goddess nature, going through the cycle from Mother to Bride to Witch or Whore. On the second or redeemed level the concentrating vision is that of the Virgin Mother. [340] Distinction between this cosmos as a rationalizing of authority and in itself. Latter still going strong in the Eliot Quartets.235 [341] The counterpoint of Classical imagery and the way it's used in, for instance, Milton's Comus. Try to clear up in your mind the exact status of elemental spirits, which I've never quite got, although I suppose chainof-being and Ptolemaic-universe diagrams have to go in. [342! Sense of four levels of time and space. Time as pure present, from Nosce Teipsum236 and elsewhere, for God. Time as dance in Dante and Davies (a recent fool article, exaggerating and missing the point of the Antinous setting, says it's all satire, a description of vertigo).237 Correspondence vision in Burnt Norton.238 [343] The extent to which Blake incorporates this Hermes construct:

494

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

innocence of Lamb vs. experience of Tyger, and latter in an uncreated universe. [344] The shifting of the seat of intellect to the brain brings with it the upper "labyrinth" image. [345] I suppose I should drive myself through Childhood's End: anyway I want some science fiction that will show the Hermes construct with beings from outer space as the new gods (I know about von Daniken, but I want something more imaginatively genuine).239

§ [346] Prometheus: The Cosmos of Revolt. Descent themes largely demonized in Christian centuries, kept alive only through prestige of Virgil. Up and down gods in the Classical world and the prognostication of future in the down ones. [347] Association of descent with reversal of social order: Lucian and the Kataplous;240 Rabelais and the cannibal giant Pantagruel. Other cannibal giants at the bottom of the cosmos. [348] On the third level, more emphasis on natura naturans (Milton's spring elegy,241 etc.). Emphasis too on circularity of arguments for the superiority of the world of human nature or art. Growing sense of alienation in the skies, certainly after Newton. [349] The full upside-down world in Blake and in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Then the "drunken boat" construct in Schopenhauer and the rest. Poe's Eureka (which I don't think is a primary document for this point). [350] Difficulty about the beauty in the creation (the strict Prometheus vision would make only man a creator): Kant's Critique of Judgment and Poe's Arnheim story. [351] Climb upward in older system has to be motivated from above; emphasis easily shifts to the autonomous climb. Even the aesthetic revaluation of mountains may be relevant here.

Notes 52

495

[352] In Blake the Prometheus vision, once attained, reverses itself into a purified version of the Hermes one (the Four Zoas re-established with Urizen on top). [353] The erotic nature of mathematics, Yeats's "Pythagoras planned it" [The Statues, 1.i], is linked to the Arnheim business. Outer space doesn't have to be just alienation. [354] The descent as, eventually, the rediscovery of the mother: resistance to this in the Bible but its antiquity (Paleolithic) and persistence (Hesiod). Revival with Shelley's earth-mother and, more important, in the second part of Faust.242 [355] Among the drunken-boat people some have a clear Atlantis resolution: Marx has one in his classless society and withering away of the state anarchist vision (ignored of course in practice by Marxists). Freud apparently doesn't have one: there remains a perilous tension between mental establishment and mental repression. That's why Jung has the vogue he has, although Jung is so weak on what Freud does have, the strength of the dialectical battle waged above, that his influence has remained pretty secondary. [356] In Schopenhauer, as nearly as I can tell, the Atlantis is simply the reflection of the ark, the world-as-idea. [357] Sense of reincarnation never far away from the Prometheus vision: Baudelaire's vie anterieure.243 When we get down there we're getting close to the mother with her womb-tomb cycle. [358] There's a lot of semi-occult fascination with Atlantis in the last two centuries: one very fine book (despite its obvious weaknesses and lapses) is Merezhkovsky's Atlantis /Europe, which tries to go all out for the historicity of Atlantis and doesn't mention Thera, but is really based on an ascending-ladder diagram in which we go on to the future, unless we get caught in the same cycle again, while Atlantis is our buried or forgotten past. He links the Timaeus and the Book of Enoch is some curious ways, coming close to a lot of the von Daniken mythology, but he's better than that: an example of how yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text.244

496

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[359] Most of the occult tradition belongs here: one aspect of wisdom which is a part of Prometheus is the ascent of the soul ridiculed in Yeats, where it goes up to nothing and vanishes in the All. It's not the end of wisdom in the Bible so far as I understand it, where the end of wisdom seems to me a little girl with a skipping rope.245 [360] Anyway, the Magus figure, in Prospero and elsewhere, is a Promethean figure who renounces his magic in order to come to terms with the Hermes establishment. [361] This comes very close to Pythagorean mysticism of numbers, of course; Yeats seems to regard that as closer to Eros. I suppose the pragmatic test is whether it goes in the direction of the upside-down cosmos or the polarized one. [362] Knowledge of the future is the central attribute of the lower world; yet that assumes a curtailing of free will, which denatures the Promethean rebelliousness. Still, think of Shelley's Car of the Hour.246 [363] Speaking of Yeats, I suppose the Promethean set-up is much the same as its rival, and the two may be related like Yeatsian gyres. The bride on top of the staircase is Leda getting screwed by the swan coming up; the Virgin Mary getting her ear tickled by the HS [Holy Spirit] coming down. That would at least enable me to get some more Bible in, specifically the Virgin Birth motif. Note that Spenser's Gardens of Adonis are Venus' cunt, according to all the critics. But what does putting it up so high mean? Tain't mamma's cunt; that's underground. [364] Again, maybe you have to have three females (diva triformis); one at the bottom of everything; one at the top of the earth just within reach of a heavenly prick; one further above that who's already had it, essentially. The perfectly proportioned temple, and all the stuff about Solomon at the beginning of Purchas,247 fits the same pattern. Anyway, it belongs in the same folder.248 [365] I suppose the ascending movements, especially the Prometheus one, depend a good deal on whether the ascent is to some Platonic or Neoplatonic invisible world above more real than ours, or, whether, as in

Notes 52

497

the Biblical tradition, the invisible serves only the function of enabling us to see the visible. [366] In Eliot the way up is into plenitude, the way down into the dark night of the soul. In Yeatsf] Dialogue of Self and Soul, these are reversed. Depends on where you start, I guess. Anyway, the Igitur cluster seems to be down all right. [367] In my Jerusalem lecture about the survival of Eros,249 a Jew remarked that Talmudic and Cabalistic Judaism corresponded more or less to my down and up movements. Certainly the occult seems to have mainly Promethean associations, though its traditional knowledge of the future may be a red herring, as Eliot certainly thinks and as a lot of Indian gurus say. A

[368] Up and down the ladder: Descent from i to 2, Creation; from i through 2 to 3, Incarnation; to 4, Descent to Hell (not Biblical, but diagrammatically necessary). Ascent from 4 to 3, Harrowing of Hell; from 4 to 3, Resurrection; from 3 to 2, Ascension; from 3 through 2 to i, Transfiguration or metamorphosis (upward). Ovidian metamorphosis is mostly 2 to 3. The whole duty of man, of course, was for centuries considered to be an ascent from 3 to 2. [369] Descent themes, 3 to 4: (a) the satirical kataplous from Lucian through Rabelais to Holberg,250 where the main point is the reversal of hierarchical rigidities on earth (b) the inquiry of the oracle concerning the future, the Odyssey xi and Aeneid vi themes (c) the descent to the mother. Except for the business in Faust II, which Goethe himself didn't understand,251 I don't know much about that; cave-drawings in the womb, I suppose, fit.252 [370] When the general set-up is Promethean the descents are to him, as in Shelley, or to the Earth-Mother who protects him, Shelley likewise, or some Atlantean symbol. Why big people and little people? The only hunch I have is Emerson's "low degree of sublime" [Nature, 6, par. 9) Cannibal giants are easier.

498

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[371] And then of course the cyclical vision also ends in the vision of the mother, only this is the white-goddess one, identified in the Middle Ages with the wheel of a female Fortune. [372! The Platonic Eros climb goes from object to idea (3 to 2, more or less), thence to Plato's equivalent of i, which is union of Soul and Form. [373] Maelstrom descent imagery: De Quincey's structure in the Mail Coach and elsewhere, a maddeningly discursive meandering that suddenly begins whirling in a crisis—the Murder essay even more strikingly.253 Only in the Mail Coach it goes all the way into the dream world—that's of course a (d) to the above list of descent themes [par. 369], into dreamland. [374] The point about the concentering vision is that it leads metaphorical construction out of the cycle of hypothesis "upward," and links with Beatrice or other Ewig-Weibliche images because the Bible is symbolically female, the container of the Word. This black or veiled bride is the polarized opposite of the white goddess, as I've said.

§ [375] Conclusion. I've gone through a stage where I thought the four phases of the cosmos would be a book in itself, and one that I could write reasonably easily because of having the main cards in my hand, however much reading would be needed to fill it out. [376] Now I'm wondering if my "concentering vision" won't go in a concluding single chapter, the whole dialogue of Word and Spirit being squeezed into it. After all, the more I think about it the more it sounds like repetition of what I've said. It would be a longish chapter, but that's better than having to write another book.254 [377] So: Hermes would be both Creation and Law, the two establishment visions; Prometheus both Exodus, social revolution, and wisdom, individual revolution (it would amount to that in the long run, however much "prudence" got into it). Adonis would be Prophecy, the long sequence of martyred visionaries, and Panoramic Apocalypse; Eros would

Notes 52

499

be the Gospel or spiritual community, symbolized as a sexual union of two souls in one, and the Participating Apocalypse, ditto. Hermes and Adonis would be epiphanies of the Logos, as primarily Word and as primarily Flesh; Prometheus and Eros epiphanies of the Spirit and its response (as in the Little Gidding double pyre). [378] It would be interesting anyway to try writing this as a single essaychapter. [379! I can see that everything belongs in it that's simple follow-up of The Great Code, except for the four levels of meaning. And maybe that belongs in the Eros chapter: otherwise there isn't much for it—well, there is if I include the historical Eros poetry stuff. But the sublimation of Love has been traditional since Plato, and I used to say that Hegel's Phenomenology climb was up the ladder of love. [380] I'm confusing myself with my doubling of right-side up and upside-down patterns: Hermes may be the typical Logos, the Creator, and Adonis the—well, not really antitypical—but executive Logos, the one that keeps going.

§ [381] I'd thought of working out my four primary organizing rhythms of literature, descent of authority, ascent of revolt or aspiration, cycle and polarity, and then adding a final chapter on something like "The Concentering Vision" (from F.Z. viia),255 squeezing everything I've got to say as a follow-up on GC into one chapter. Well, maybe it'll take at least two chapters: if a conclusion follows that, I'll be back to my ogdoad again. [382] Anyway: four epiphanies of the Word, four responses of the Spirit. Creation, Law, Prophecy and Panoramic Apocalypse are Logos; Exodus, Wisdom, Gospel and Participating Apocalypse are Pneuma. The point is I had another possible idea: that each of these four phases, each WordSpirit dialogue, represents a different level of meaning. Creation-Exodus is literal; Law-Wisdom allegorical, Prophecy-Gospel tropological (concerned with action, hence the thaumaturgic theme), the two Apocalypses anagogic.

5QO

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[383] Creation is an epiphany that we can't behold directly; we have to become a creature to see it. Part of the argument of Job is steering Job away from examining the creation, as I've said. Faust was more foolhardy and drew the Erdgeist, couldn't take it of course, and so went on his futile journey back in time to youth, at the opposite pole from Dante, who turned away from the three beasts and got the whole visionary pie. However, he found that with a whole bevy of Beatrices he could finally get towed up again.256

§ [384] My professional career has been concerned with the study and criticism of literature, and so I have been aware, from the beginning, of two contexts of the word literature. Literature is an art of words, hence one context emphasizes the "art," the other the "words."257 [385] The emphasis on the verbal quality of literature is naturally the main interest of the developments in semiotics and allied disciplines, which have advanced very considerably in the last quarter-century at least. If I say relatively little about these, it is not wholly out of ignorance or prejudice, however well stocked I may be with both, but because I feel that there are major aspects of literature, considered as an art in its own right, that have still to be considered. {For Victoria talk, Paul Bouissac will be talking about that anyway.}258 [386] If we look at the verbal aspect of literature, we soon see that there are no sharp boundaries marking off the literary from other kinds of verbal structure. Many writers, including Plato, Nietzsche, Rousseau, the later Heidegger, and others, present a texture where it is hard, or more accurately unnecessary, to distinguish the literary from the philosophical dimension of what is being said. So a study of literature or philosophy or whatever is composed in words will eventually expand into a study of the nature of words themselves, and move from the literary or philosophical into the linguistic area. [387! Here we become aware, first of all, that a word is a signifier related to some kind of signified, and that the relationship is arbitrary, or more accurately conventional. Then again, what makes a word a word is its difference from other words, so that in this kind of study puns and

Notes 52

501

ambiguities, where the same word means a number of different things, need to be straightened out. [388] Then we realize that a text is not the direct transmission of what a writer has to say, because it is full of suggestions of alternative meanings and approaches, elements within the orbit of what he is saying that he is screening out. It is a corollary of this that what is read is primarily written: there is a long-established convention, not confined to literature by any means, that an author is present to us and speaking to us, and that the written form of what he "says" is subordinate to this. But in the context we are now looking at, what is read has to be primarily written, and writing is logically prior to the spoken word. [389] I suggest, however, that there is a practical and common-sense distinction which leads us to call Goethe's Faust a poem, whatever its philosophical importance, and Hegel's Phenomenology a philosophical document, whatever its literary importance. This brings us into the other aspect of literature, as an art along with music, painting, sculpture and architecture. Here we soon see different areas of emphasis. Words are still signifiers, but our main concern in this context is the relation of signifiers to each other, the signifier-signified relation being still there but subordinated. The resonance of signifiers is what the reader of literature, more especially poetry, contemplates first of all: it is the importance of this resonance that we hear in all the rhyme, assonance, alliteration and metrical patterns of literature, where sound is as important as sense. [390] Here a personal voice is present, but it is not a voice directly addressing us. It is, as I have insisted since the Anatomy, an overheard voice, though of course simulations of direct address are common enough. In this sense there is no such thing as written literature: writing comes into existence because the speaking voice is not directly addressing us. But when there, the written text becomes, not the absence of a presence, but the recreation of the person. [391] The personality of the poet may enfold us as disciples, or it may cause the revolts and deliberate misreadings chronicled in Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, but in any case it is inescapable. In the linguistic context, the boundary disappears between creation and criticism, because every act of reading is a recreating of the text. The text is a focus for a commu-

502

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

nity,259 and there can be no definitive criticism, even as a goal, because no one critic is all the others. In the aesthetic (or whatever) context, we are dominated by the double meaning in the word "invention," which is both something we make up ourselves, subjectively, and something we find in the external. All we can say is that an invention that works must have some roots in the world external to the inventor. So we invent our text, in a mood of Leibnitzian optimism that the words being used in it are the best of all possible words.260 [392] Considering literature in the context of a specific art, we find ourselves in a verbal area where figured speech is primary. We have figured speech, the devices of rhetoric, whenever the words turn away from their primary relation to signifieds and start primarily echoing each other. The simplest and most direct relation of words is the one expressed in the grammatical form of the metaphor, A is B. The stock example I use for metaphor is Jacob's prophecy in Genesis 49 about the twelve tribes, where we are told that Joseph is a fruitful bough and Issachar a strong ass. [393] These metaphors do at least two things. First, they make the assertion A is B, two things being said to be the same thing even though they are different things. Second, they carry with them a denial of the assertion which is equally loud and clear. A is quite obviously not B, and nobody but a fool would imagine that it was. Again, such metaphors are casual and arbitrary: it is just as conceivable that Joseph is the strong ass and Issachar the fruitful bough, or that both might be identified with something quite different. So the first problem here is to see what the point is of saying that A is B when A is not B.261 [394] (Paragraph I now have on p. 2 and p. 3, leaving out the Buber point but including the Eros point.} [395] Let us now put this into some kind of historical context. In the earliest traces of human creativity we can discover, such as the cavedrawings in Altamira or Lascaux, we see pictures of animals, drawn with joy and exuberance under the most fantastically difficult conditions of positioning and lighting. We can isolate various aspects of the impulse to produce these paintings, the most obvious being the magical impulse, to ensure a plentiful supply of game. But no single aspect, magical,

Notes 52

503

religious or aesthetic, brings us to the centre of the titanic will to identification with the objects represented. That seems to be what has been called a participation mystique, a sense of identity with the object which is not verbal but existential. We notice that some of the figures are those of sorcerers or shamans dressed in animal skins, another aspect of identification. Similarly, the earliest use of music seems to have been primarily ecstatic (as on p. 4). Also rituals.262 [396] In this context, the verbal metaphor represents a cultural stage where there is a strong sense of a cleavage between subject and object. Positively, the metaphor creates what Martin Buber would call a world of "Thou" between the worlds of the ego and the "it." So even in religions that no longer accept deified nature-spirits, the language about God still has to remain largely metaphorical, as it does in the Bible. The central Christian doctrines, for example, are still metaphorical in grammatical formulation, as in "Christ is God and man." But to the extent that the sense of a subject-object partition of experience grows, metaphor becomes increasingly hypothetical, and hence confined to the literary orbit of experience, where we make no assertions or denials but only imaginative postulates, play (Bacon).263 [397] {The bridge of ropes comment.}264 Much of the conviction expressed by so many contemporary writers about the death of God and the disappearance of the religious dimension of experience is derived from the negative and ironic aspect of metaphor, the feeling that these are "only metaphors after all." One writer who shared this view of religious experience was Ovid, whose main theme is metamorphosis, in the sense of the collapse of a personality into a purely natural object, in other words the breakdown of metaphor, the expression of a god's maintaining of the balance. Existential identification, in ritual or elsewhere, is now something to be distrusted: it is Don Quixote at the puppet show, the inability to distinguish reality from fiction; it is hysteria and mob frenzy. The kind of self-identification with fictional figures that we all probably make in childhood is also thought of as immature. [398] {Paragraph on the Anatomy and my subsequent interest in the Bible; also modern physics, as on p. 4.} There has also of course been a revival of ecstatic and hysterical mob emotions, but a growing feeling that not all of this sense of identification is sinister.

504

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[399] Existential identification survives in literature, most obviously in the drama as a performance. The function of literature is to keep alive the metaphorical attitude of mind. But why should it be kept alive? Parallel with McLuhan's tribal-civilized-retribalized dialectic.265 [400] We sometimes use other arts as metaphors for the intensifying of experience. In the visual arts, Biblical religions attacked idolatry, or identification with the image, and substituted the icon, the intermediary transmitter. But ut pictura poesis suggests an iconic concentration that goes "beyond words," as we say. Pater is interested in experience, and so tells us that all the arts aspire to the condition of music.266 This suggests also an intensity of experience "beyond words." What is the verbal "beyond words," if there is such a paradox? It can't be the resuscitation of the signified world. (One thing involved here is the royal metaphor as the thematic stasis of metaphor, the one person who is one with one nature. This was Christ in New Testament metaphor; now it's Dylan Thomas's "Man be my metaphor" or Stevens' central or major mind.267 The intensifying of experience, the LSD mirage in some writers, also heightens the sense of identity in perception.) (Note the visual metaphor of "structure.") [401] |I may be getting ahead of myself here.) The ironic or let's pretend aspect of metaphor makes literature a possession of the cultivated. But the metaphor is not simply illogical or even anti-logical: it's counterlogical, an imaginative human protest against an alienating world we're thrown into. Also its affirmation of the spirit-nature identity is counterironic as well. It points to a communion of identity (the whole "body of Christ" imagery in the church relates to this: note the re-emergence of ecstatic phenomena in the primitive Christian period.) [402] Metaphor, the spearhead of the verbal effort to unite human consciousness with what it is conscious of, is stabilized by myth, the story about the god (the typical myth at least) of the kind we find in the Homeric hymns, which assigns him his characteristics and archetypal actions. Quote Buckert or whatever his name is: distinguished from folktale by social function and not by structure.268 Torah: instruction in the essential truths of society. [403] Myth, like metaphor, both asserts and denies: it says "this hap-

Notes 52

505

pened/' and conveys "this almost certainly didn't happen in precisely this way." The latter may be concealed or suppressed by gullible fatheads, but it's there, and its presence is what gives to myth the popular meaning of "something that didn't happen or isn't true." As history develops, the words history and story separate, and myth becomes increasingly confined to the literary and hypothetical. Hence the element of ironic distancing recurs in it, and literature absorbs both the playful element of folktale, the story told for entertainment rather than instruction (however much it may be assimilated to instruction) and mythologies that are no longer believed in, like the Classical in medieval and Renaissance Europe. [404] Some poets, of course (Dante and Milton) devote their major efforts to imaginative recreation of the received mythology. They rely on an analogical use of metaphor that comes between identity-metaphor and allegory. Particularly Milton (note Raphael's comment about the similarity of heaven and earth [Paradise Lost, bk. 4,11. 430-2]): Dante has more of the straight allegorical. (I haven't this clear, but I think it's an essential link.) [405! Myth originates in concern, the verbal aspect of the effort to build a human society out of the natural environment. Hence myths form mythology, which is a structure of concern and not a proto-science. Its core is almost invariably law (the Greeks, who got their mythology into literature {Homer} earlier than the Biblical tradition, were more relaxed in this as elsewhere). Primary concern and secondary concern: the latter is ideology. [406] How and why the twenty-first century, if we survive that long, may become the first age in history when primary concern is really primary. Every poem in the meantime an expression of ideology or secondary concern, and this is I think the real "anxiety of influence," not Bloom's psychological Freudian kind, which I think is a by-product of the law of copyright. [407] The further myth detaches itself from history, the freer it is to become the primary mythology that expresses primary concern, not the ideology that subscribes to a socially conditioned secondary concern. Shakespeare: Henry VIII is "All is True";269 Henry V is still full of

506

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

secondary cliches: in King Lear history is far enough away to modulate into legend, and a much more concentrated and primary form of mythology emerges. Similarly with the treatment of the purely mythical Arthur: resonance of Tennyson's last two lines not possible with a historical theme.2?0 [408] We normally speak of myth (story) as "following" history: Shakespeare uses Holinshed et al with certain licenses, permitted because a poet is too dithery and feeble-minded to stick to his sources. Actually, the myth doesn't follow history: it contains it. [409] There is a positive aspect of metaphor in which it is counter-ironic and counter-logical, a revolt against the tyranny of the category of ordinary time. Similarly, there is a positive aspect of myth in which it incorporates history but also has the power to arrest it, and confront us with it. The Crucifixion of Christ is an historical event (because even if Jesus weren't crucified a lot of other people were); but as an historical event it's impotent: only as a myth does it have the power to confront us. [410] I suppose about here I should introduce the theme of thematic stasis: A is B points in the direction of the god (Poseidon is the sea), and the god points in the direction of: consciousness is nature (i.e. what one is conscious of). Looked at in the contemplative way, this gives us the royal metaphor of the Biblical apocalypse and the "major man" and other things mentioned above [par. 400]. Similarly, the thematic stasis of a mythology is a cosmology, which is (Valery) a literary construct.271 Here analogies from the static arts predominate. [411] The other aspect of thematic stasis is fictional intensifying, where musical analogies predominate. The fictional intensifying of metaphor is the kind of ecstatic union parodied by LSD cults and the like; the fictional intensifying of myth is the critic's or reader's recreation of what he reads (performances of drama and the like are closely related). The intensifying process brings closer to the surface the suppressed gigantic emotions that make us recognize Lear and the Ninth Symphony. Wilde's remark about music.272 [412] My crazy Oedipus point should go somewhere near here.273 Anyway, I think I should close with the contrast between a purely hypotheti-

Notes 52

507

cal (playful, as Bacon said)274 literature, ironic and distanced, as a cultivation one possesses, and an experience of literature that has gone beyond that to something we unite and identify with, on the other side from immature self-identification. [413] Also the fact that as literature continues to recreate mythology, it can move (without itself improving in quality) in the direction of setting forth an increasingly profound understanding of what a myth says. Thus Shakespeare in the romances: the Winter's Tale. Pandosto my ass:275 it's about Pygmalion, Demeter-Persephone, and the Calumniated Wife. [414] Obvious minor point: poetic "licenses" are in the direction of adding symmetry to a narrative, as when Prince Hal and Hotspur are made the same age in Henry IV. [415] And, of course, you'll eventually have to pull the whole goddamned verbal universe in, in the trail of literature as verbal. "Structure," being a metaphor from architecture, eventually has to be discarded, along with the "deconstruction" which is part of its fallacy. [416] This is nonsense. Poets use the other arts as metaphors of intensification. Lycidas has both an "oat" and "thus sung" [sang] [11. 88, 186]— the fact that you can't sing and play a wind instrument at the same time doesn't bother Milton: any metaphor will do as long as it suggests that the poem is music and not words. Iconic meditation or concentration on an object assimilates poetry to the visual arts (concrete, etc.), as in the Elizabethan ut pictura poesis. That's the basis of the "structure" metaphor. Post-structuralists say that it's illusory to use the spatializing metaphor of structure, but that's just the idling machinery of negatavism running on its own: to gain a simultaneous understanding of a poem as a unit is both possible and highly desirable. The only thing is that it isn't an ultimate goal: as soon as you've reached it you discard it like a snake's skin or a nautilus's shell. [417] Somewhere in the passage from a god to God, from personalities identified with aspects of nature, the problem of a total consciousness of which we are a part (or which is part of us in other contexts) emerges. And here is where one has to get serious about the authority of poetry, and perhaps about its relation to religion.

508

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

§ [418] i. The first chapter should follow the general outline of the Washington paper,276 but should include the four levels of meaning and apply them to the development of all language out of metaphor. Metaphor (and myth) form the literal level; perhaps the allegorical one is ideological concern, the tropological primary concern and the anagogic of course is the universalized metaphor. [419] 2. The second chapter can take off from there, the dialogues of word and spirit through creation (literal word), Israel-society (literal response, because it's a centripetal one), to the two kinds of apocalypse. Conclusion is that Spirit is human, if not the whole of humanity. [420] 3. That's clear: what isn't clear is the sequence of the next two chapters. I should think the psychological one, where parental obligation-figures dominate at first and finally the birth of the spirit-child forces them to combine into Lacan's moi or self-alienated ego,277 would be next. [421] 4. In that case the study of the literary forms of the Bible, rising to a tremendous breakthrough in Job and ending perhaps with the parable as microcosmic kerygma, would come last. [422] 5. Up and down the ladder has always been the theme of this chapter, except that I've thought of the up movement as forming a separate one. I think it makes for a richer texture to combine them. [423] 6. Similarly there's a richer texture in combining the two themes of the awakening of the four spectres with the movement from white goddess to black bride. [424] 7. This chapter turns around my hunch that something new in the way of cosmological shape begins with Nietzsche and Mallarme, but it's very vague as yet, and Nietzsche is so Bloody stupid. What intelligent people like the post-structuralists get out of such chicken-shit as his Dionysus and Antichrist and eternal recurrence glop I don't know. [425] 8. The concluding chapter should logically be the universalizing,

Notes 52

509

or perhaps better secularizing, of the spiral of literary forms in relation to primary concern.

§ [426] Try this: i. The Odyssey of Metaphor. More or less the argument of the Washington paper,278 starting with early pre-Biblical ecstatic metaphor279 and its traces in the Bible, the development towards the literary, the rise of linguistics and its new conceptions of language which suggest that metaphor is a microcosm of language, and the conception of a single universal consciousness. The origin of the latter notion in early Christianity. [427] 2. The Mutations of Form. Here is where I read up on Alter and company,280 and survey the form criticism of the Bible from myth through sage and emblematic vision, with a tremendous imaginative breakthrough in Job, a more centrifugal interest in the Susanna, Jonah, Ruth and Esther (Judith) stories, to the parable as the unit of emancipated teaching, the model or metaphorical structure that doesn't stay being just that. [428] 3. Conflict of Authority and Autonomy. The soul-body hierarchy and its gradual displacement by a Spirit that begins as a child and grows until it forces the parental soul-body figures to consolidate into a selfalienated ego, Lacan's moi. [429] 4. Dialogues of Word and Spirit. Creation and the inability to meet it directly; the forming of a specific mythological society as a result; the dialectic that moves this into law, the second appearance of the Word; then wisdom as response to law that goes into the birth of prophecy, the sequence of prophets ending in Jesus that brings about the spiritual community of the gospel, and the end of the sequence in the two apocalypses, which turn out to be at last the vision of creation. [430] 5. Down the ladder: the descent of authority completed in the Incarnation. Up the ladder: the response first to authority and then to the inner promptings of spirit. Dying lives and living deaths from Purgatorio to Byzantium; the central point at the top neither Incarnation nor Resurrection but Transfiguration. Survival of Eros in Romantic movements.281

5io

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[431] 6. The White Goddess and the Black Bride. The interplay of Eros, Adonis, Hermes and Prometheus movements from an embryonic centre to the vision of redeemed man as woman. [432] 7. Imaginative movement from birth to apotheosis: the Igitur descent into nothingness and the impinging of chance on choice, oracle on wit; then the expanding movement of this: my transfiguration point really belongs here, perhaps. [433] 8. Epilogue: the present position of the creative imagination in society. [434] I think I see a correspondence between each chapter of Part I and the corresponding chapter of Part II, which may lead to something.282

§ [435] There should be first of all an introduction, probably separate, including the following points: [436] Every society produces a mythology. Why I call it a mythology: analogues of the term in other writers (Cassirer, etc.). Body of stories with a specific social function and a product of concern. [437] Primary and secondary concern: former perhaps emerging to primary place in our day. Similarly a primary and secondary mythology. Latter kidnapped by an ascendant class or influential pressure group; former a world-wide language, though perhaps not one expressing "truth" in any doctrinal sense. Mirage of this in former ages (e.g. the Cabbala or esoteric Torah). [438] Because a structure of concern, not a proto-science, and doesn't conflict with science except when it's far enough developed to make assertions about the natural order. By that time it's a cosmology: difference between mythology and cosmology has to be established. [439! It's probably bound up with the difference between myth (story) and metaphor (constructive unit). How myth and metaphor don't "follow" history or argument, but move in the opposite direction, including them but also confronting them. Crucifixion is historical (if Jesus wasn't

Notes 52

511

crucified plenty of other people were), but its real meaning is mythical, bringing a past event into the present and shoving it down man's throat, so to speak. [440] Myth says "this happens," which unites "this may or may not have happened" and "this probably didn't happen, at least in exactly this way." Similarly, metaphor says "A is B" when any fool can see that A is not B. It makes an assertion, but the suppressed denial speaks louder than the assertion does. What it does is release a current of energy between the personal and natural worlds, and the central metaphor is the god. [441] Valery on cosmology as a literary structure: his comment on Poe and the need to postulate a "universe," or one-turning reality, in spite of all those galaxies.283 Mythology as the matrix for what, when it grows and complicates, becomes or includes the context of all works of literature.284 [442] Universe of, e.g., authority both part of the total structure of mythology and a specific historical development of it, emphasized because it lends itself to authority. [443] Remember: your book fails unless you can convincingly explain why, e.g., a flood myth has to be part of a fully developed mythology. [444] I don't know if I can repeat my Anatomy suggestion that literature informs social science as mathematics does physical science [AC, 16,3504], but I think I should try. [445] Bible itself, as I understand it, doesn't convey either a specific mythology or total mythology, but provides endless hints and suggestions for both. Robertson Smith's notion that the Hebrews were a totemic society285 has to be given up, but the essential idea of totemism is still present in the "Lamb" business in Revelation [5:6,13:8]. [446] I think this first chapter, or introduction, is the place I have to introduce my point about the analogical counterpoint to Biblical imagery in Classical mythology. Compare Francis Thompson with Ezra Pound:286 the Biblical or doctrinally Christian doesn't have to have primary authority.

512

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

§ [447] The traditional view of time and the creation is that before the creation there wasn't any time. The same conception is being applied now to the big bang theory: nothing happened before that. What I've been saying is that, in our ordinary experience of time, it is impossible to realize the conception of a beginning of time: we can always say "yes, but before that?" [448] What I call realizing something is, perhaps, pictorializing. That implies that we can construct verbal formulas that let us out of the prison of pictorializing. I've always been suspicious of this practice because it's so facile, or can become so. We can make up verbal formulas about anything. But still there is a special pleading in the word "realize," if it really does mean pictorialize. [449] Something here that connects with the pun in "invention," which means making up (subjective) and finding (objective). A new law or conception in, say, physics describes what has always been there waiting to be identified and described (objectively), and represents a scientist making up an arrangement of phenomena out of his head (subjectively). Both aspects have to be there, and have to correspond. [450] The development of linguistics into semiotics, from Saussure to Derrida and others, is based on the concept of difference. A word is a signifier arbitrarily related to a signified; it has meaning because it is different from other words. Nobody can challenge such postulates; but I think metaphor provides an identity beyond difference, a construction beyond deconstruction. In metaphor the statement "A is B," being usually absurd on the face of it, carries with it the implication "A is not B, and nobody but a fool would imagine that it was." This latter implication is the basis of the present linguistic development. The assertion itself is made in order to open up a current of energy between subject and object: from the point of view of the denial, metaphor can never achieve anything except hypothesis. I got this far in the Anatomy, and am now trying to see how [much] further I can get with the Bible, which is metaphorical and yet is clearly concerned with something other than hypothesis.

Notes 52

513

[451] I've made this point often before, but it's still central: most contemporary scholarship on myth and mythology focuses on the earliest stages that it is still possible to reconstruct. Quite right too. But myth also goes on recreating itself as it enters and takes part in the historical process. Hence there is a place also for scholarship concerned with the telos or development of myth. The Bible is useful here because it's a retrospective mythology: it's continually reflecting on and recreating its own sources, and the form in which we have it is relatively late in the history of the Near East. [452] Two things are important in this change of perspective. First, the meaning of a myth emerges more and more clearly as it continues to be reshaped by literature. Second, the original mythology grew up in a period where literature was not clearly separated from other cultural elements, and the study of the direction myth takes in its social development leads to expanding the boundaries of its influence from the purely literary into (a) other arts (b) other verbal organizations.

§ [453! The second chapter deals with the four responses of the Spirit in the Bible. The first response, the response to creation itself, is the forming of a (proletarian) society out of an establishment, the genuine community. This involves at least saying that the sense of community is as primary as the "selfish gene" we hear about now:287 many more people have died for their community than in defending their own lives. Hence the whole psychology of sacrifice belongs here, circumcision, baptism in Christianity, and the whole sacramental bit as community response to an Other. It's a tricky business explaining how the sense of the objectivity of God, as in the Agag story [i Samuel 15:8-33], buggers up the whole process. [454] Anyway, the response to law is wisdom, the permeation of the individual life by the law. Wisdom implies another form of creative minority or saving remnant, just as Israel in Egypt implies the primary form of it. The conception of an elite or clerisy seems inseparable from wisdom, yet we remember that spontaneous "playing," the little girl with a skipping rope,288 is the ultimate vision of wisdom. Also that when

514

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

we reach wisdom the ego dissolves: you can't say "I am wise" without demonstrating the opposite, because wisdom won't grammatically fit any sentence beginning with "I am," just as Jesus hated being called good. Of course the association of wisdom with prudence, walking the tightrope of continuity, is limited, but it's essential all the same. [455! The response to prophecy is gospel: the gospels we have are products of the early Church, and the Christ they portray is imprisoned within "those things which are certainly believed among us." The Church is also obsessed by continuity and, of course, by hierarchy and authority, but the idea of the Church is the free and equal community that no establishment can ever digest, just as no triangle can absorb a square with a side equal to its base. The idea is a fully internalized law where the distinction between social and individual needs begins to dissolve and self-conflict fades out without becoming automatic subconsciousness, like an insect society. [456] The response to the panoramic apocalypse is the participating apocalypse, the drinking of the water of life that pours through the book, the eating of the scroll which is the real and ultimate Eucharist at the end of time (identifiable with the last page of the Bible).289 The end of that is the achievement of the spiritual body which is also the verbal body.

§ [457] The ladder and its extensions (tower, mountain, spiral, time-ladder, and eventually way). It's based on the creation as "literal" Word, and the ultimate response to it, the ex-hodos or way-breaking-out-ofway, is not simply social but tribal. [458] The law is allegorical or sacramental Word, Word as pointing to something, and wisdom is the response to it. The law prescribes work and rest; wisdom finds its telos in play. [459] Prophecy is the "outsider's" view of society: it begins in thaumaturgy and culminates in the teaching and healing Messiah. The prophet addresses himself to the question of what we must do, the tropological or moral level. The gospel is the spiritual community united by its faith,

Notes 52

515

faith being essentially the vision of what to do. It's the leap outside the aesthetic play of wisdom. [460] Apocalypse is the vision of the "full Word,"290 where time and space interpenetrate. [461] So the ladder-way is the dominating image of literalism, the worldas-to-be-read, and the garden-city is the dominating image of the lawwisdom stage.291 The Promised Land appears in the distance from the ex-hodos, but wisdom reaches the kindergarten. [462] The gospel is the buried seed, the grain of mustard seed descending from the buried body of Christ, whose original burial was in the maternal womb, then the ark-manger. Threatened birth, banishment or exile, death and disappearance are all aspects of the same image. But, like Altamira-Lascaux ark-cave underground (and under a good deal of water too, I gather), the world-egg hatches. Hermes unsealed is Atlantis emergent. It carries on the theme of wisdom, just as wisdom carries on the theme of Promised Land. [463] Apocalypse is the hidden flame lit up, first setting the world on fire, then shining in its own light of awakened consciousness (omnia sunt lumina).292 [464] Types of apoc[alypse]: the two visions of Isa. & Ezek. (vi & i); burning bush.293

§ [465] My present set of hunches tell me that Hermes and Adonis are tragic and Prometheus and Eros comic in direction. The Hermes one now seems to me the old four-level of authority; Prometheus is the Romantic reversal of that; Adonis is the tragic or ironic cycle, with Eros assimilated to it; Eros itself is the breaking through of the cycle into the polarized apocalypse. The image of the first two is the ladder or winding stair of descent and ascent; the image of Adonis is the circle or ouroboros; that of Eros, I'm beginning to think, has something to do with explosion from a centre into a circumference. I must see if [Foe's] Eureka is any help.

516

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[466] Of course the regeneration of Nature, the turning of the white goddess into a black bride, is central to Eros symbolism. The thing that's bothersome is the elimination of Eros from the New Testament: the Bible evidently thinks of the erotic as solely bound up with cyclical dying-god Adonis stuff. My Hermes authoritarian construct corresponds to Eliot's Burnt Norton; Adonis to East Coker, which is dominated by cycles; Prometheus to The Dry Salvages, where the Atlantean emergence from water is the central symbol, and Eros to Little Gidding, where the descending spiritual fire of Agape kindles a response symbolized by the pyre of Hercules. We don't actually have a name for this response, as distinct from the descending movement that prompts it, and Eros would do as well as any other. [467] Well, I can find Promethean symbolism in Byron and Shelley and Victor Hugo, and Adonis symbolism in Lawrence and Graves; but who has the explosion? Is it the "abnihilization of the etym" in Finnegans Wake? Think about other explosions—the gas jet in Ulysses;294 the stories like that one of Henry James that end with everything burning up (Heartbreak House);295 visions of course of nuclear warfare as the negative side of that. [468! The Spoils of Poynton is what I'm trying to dredge up. One key idea for this chapter is the Wordsworthian notion that for the poet there is no such thing as a commonplace experience: the statement "this experience is commonplace" is identical with "this perceiver is half dead or asleep." Hence all experience is potentially epiphanic: this runs straight through to W.C. Williams and his rejection of ideas about things,296 to younger people like Ammons, and so on: it's something always potentially in poetry but, I think, not formulated as a creative axiom until the Romantic period. The Rousseau solitary walker is a modulation of a relatively new type of sensibility also. [469! The three stages of apocalyptic vision are, then, the epiphanic, the interpenetrative, and the polarized. In the third of these the demonic shadow is separated out. All three stages relate to the first or panoramic apocalypse. [470! In applying the four Spectres of the Dead to the concentering vision, Creation and Law are both aspects of Hermes; Prophecy and

Notes 52

517

Panoramic Apocalypse of Adonis; Exodus and Wisdom of Prometheus; Gospel and Participating Apocalypse of Eros. [471] The responses of the Spirit are especially female: in the concentering vision the Holy Spirit is always intertwined with his female origin. Hence the Prometheus vision ends in the discovery of the mother; the Exodus part is Shekinah and the Wisdom part the daughter playing before her God. Or sometimes, as with the Greek Athene, Wisdom can be a sisterfigure. I can't get too schematic here: Yeats' primary is female and antithetical male, and Wisdom is primarily the defining of the individual within the primary social mass. Montaigne and Butler's High Ydgrunites.297

§ [472] Book in two parts of four chapters each. Part One is my old "Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead" idea, slightly revised. I don't like the old title, which sounds less impressive and more pretentious to me now than it did: I did look up, however, the relevant passage in Four Zoas, and found the Spectre of Urthona saying in Night 73: Urthonas Spectre terrified beheld the Spectres of the Dead Each Male formd without a counterpart without a concentering vision298

[473] Not "saying," of course. This clicked with the fact that my four Spectres were all males, however important the female role in them was. Anyway: [474] i. {Hermes Unsealed} The Cosmos of Authority. This is my old chestnut, elaborating into various tower-winding stair patterns with the garden/bride body on top. [475] 2. {Prometheus Unbound) The Cosmos of Revolt. The reversal of this construct in Shelley and elsewhere, and the drunken-boat pattern it converges on. [476] 3. {Adonis Revived} The Cosmic Cycle. The white-goddess/Ore pattern, with historical decorations by Spengler and Vico. [477] 4. {Eros Regained} The Cosmic Polarization (or something like

518

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

that). Apocalyptic and demonic parallels; contraries and negations; Bruno brother-struggles, etc. [478! All of which outlines the literary cosmos as we have it, except for the "concentering vision." Part Two, a study of the Bible, attempts to supply this. The Biblical part takes up the GC notion of eight phases of revelation and makes Creation, Law, Prophecy and Panoramic Apocalypse four epiphanies of the Word. Revolution, Wisdom, Gospel and Participating Apocalypse are the answering responses of the Spirit. [479! Incidentally, this means that the Bible is symbolically female, an apocryphon with seven seals, or locks as Jay says,2" the womb containing the Word. But there's no great difficulty there: I daresay some kabbalistic doctrine says the Torah is female, like the Shekinah. [480] Perhaps the resistance to female gods in the Bible actually means "I'm it, stupid." The black-covered book could be the black bride who's the opposite of the white goddess, the first consort, Nature being the second "Word of God."

§ [481] Creation in Genesis is not, of course, a narrative about how the order of nature began. The modern pictures of evolutionary development and, before that, the big bang and other conceptions have to do with that. The reason why "creation" is an important conception is that it is the element that links mind and objectivity together, the element of design that we see without having to believe also that it was "put there." [482] This is not very clear, either in expression or in my own mind. I think Kant's Critique of Judgment is probably the key to what I'm trying to say: purposiveness without purpose, design without a designer.300 The reason why there isn't a designer is that God objectified the creation to himself, the inherent meaning of the Sabbath. [483] Exodus doesn't have just to rehash the GC stuff about the revolutionary mentality: it also has to make my "pre-revolutionary" point, that the last thing we ever get or can expect after a revolutionary act is revolution. The world where Socrates and Jesus are still alive, their

Notes 52

519

programmes as yet not ossified by Plato or by the Gospels and Paul, is what is wanted. Some of the new people in France talk about reason as possible only within a social context of "masters/' just as the Greeks denied that slaves and women had anything to do with reason.301 What I think is important about the revolutionary mentality is not anything that heads for revolution, but something that incorporates the slave-women discourse. [484] Also the revolutionary mentality incorporates my point that only Moses saw the Promised Land, and that Joshua got only Canaan, the mere dregs of it. It's part of the trahison des clercs to follow Joshua: what his antitype Jesus did is something else again.302 [485] Also the discussion of the "gospel" section should be in part a discussion of canon: the notion of closed and open texts—I glanced at this in the last chapter of GC 3°3—and the whole process-incorporation of the imperfect. I suppose this begins with prophecy, where oral oracles are written down but not necessarily arranged—the Q stage of the gospels.304 I suppose Lacan would say that there's a continuous verbal context for the oracular potentially present, which is certainly what I used to think myself and probably still do. [486] The same thing is even more obviously true of the ritual things commanded by the law: one of the functions of myth, everyone recognizes, is to cover the continuous-verbal implications of that. How far do they have to be continuous? Is that only a Greek illusion arising from the assimilating of logos to sequential reasoning? Surely what I mean is simultaneous, a larger interconnected pattern, usually placed on a sequential narrative grid for convenience, but actually intended to be taken in as a sort of gestalt. [487] Simultaneous also means that the individual oracle can be, as in my last chapter, an epitome of the entire pattern. [488] Now my foreground problem is where to start: either half of the book could in theory go first, thus beginning with the familiar universeof-authority structure or with the creation. But which one would annex itself more naturally to the primary-secondary concern and mythology stuff? It's more natural perhaps to think of it as a prelude to the specific

52O

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

example of a mythology of secondary concern developed by historical Christianity, and in the Word-Spirit dialogue part I'd thought of it as coming under Law, meaning by Law Torah or the essential instructions. [489] If the Creation is primarily about the emergence of human consciousness, it begins with an apocalypse: the sun turning into darkness and the moon into blood wouldn't be half so terrifying as the environment suddenly becoming intelligible. From there it moves backward, as myth does, towards a (new) creation. Of course the assumption that the emergence of intelligence was sudden may be wrong; but if catastrophe theory is coming back into fashion again, there ought to be something on the other side.

§ [490] The last chapter (of course it may not be that) brings the Bible back into the discussion again. Here one of the central problems is the otherness of nature, its apparent lack of concern for human values. The regeneration of nature is certainly prophesied in the Bible, and for Christianity the possibility of this arises when Jesus identifies the genuine Other as not nature but the Father. [491] One of the skeletal ideas of the book's arrangement is the equation of the four levels of meaning with the four stages of the Word's epiphany and the Spirit's response. The Creation was the literal Word of God, the world of things to be read. The Exodus, the forming of a proletarian Israel out of the ruins of the Egyptian empire, was the Spirit's literal response, but perhaps the enacting of a ritual (Passover for Jews, Eucharist for Christians) is the core of it, otherwise we might get trapped in the Faust fallacy again. However, the historical slant given to the origin of Israel would certainly account for the bias toward that fallacy.3"5 [492] Law is the allegorical word of God: it uses conceptual and abstract language, and though it tries to guide human action through words, it tries to make those actions neutral and predictable, the same for everybody. Wisdom is obviously the individual response to this, hence its devotion to prudence and precedent. With wisdom we move out of the ego's orbit, on the principle that "I am wise" is, to start with, ungrammatical.

Notes 52

521

[493] Prophecy is the alienating vision that upsets the predictable: that's why it's so constantly associated with thaumaturgy (Elijah and Elisha; the miracles of Jesus). It survives in our society as the creative, whether in art or in science. So the gospel really takes the form of the creative community: I know that puts me back to square one with Blake, but I see no escape from it at the moment. The association of analogy with apocalypse is self-evident, but this notion of prophecy and gospel being tropological is new to me: it's control of action (quid agas), but of what (using that metaphor again) might be called the evolution of action.

§ [494] The first chapter announces the book as a sequel to The Great Code, and sets out the introductory themes of primary and secondary concern, the way the verbal temenos [sacred space] gets established as a mythology before the rise of abstract thought, the role of metaphor as the primary verbal creative effort to break down the subject-object gap and set up a current of energy between a thing and an aspect of personality, and the connection between such metaphors and the god. Then the way a mythology insensibly takes on the form of a cosmology, and the Valery principle that all cosmologies are primarily literary in reference.306 Perhaps the distinction between primary and secondary faith (and hope) and the universality of the Faust mistranslation [pt. i, 1. 1237], belong here too. [495] In any case what does belong is a recapitulation of the seven/eight stages of Biblical revelation, and a division of them into four epiphanies of the Word and the four responses of the Spirit. The principle stated in GC that "Word of God" suggests an identification of the Bible with the presence of Christ,307 there being no series of antecedent events that have priority over the verbal ones. Hence Derrida's "metaphysic of presence,"308 the written word deferring to the spoken one and that again to the pre-verbal situation, doesn't apply. [496] The first epiphany of the Word (God said let there be light at first) is the creation. A creation is not an environment, and Genesis is not talking about an alternative account of the history of the order of nature to that of Darwin and modern geology. Otherwise it would have been cleverer. It's talking about the presenting of the consciousness of man

522

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

with a world of things rather than nothingness. But things looked at by a consciousness aren't merely things; they're signs. In other words the creation takes the form of a mass of ecriture, later called the second word of God. A subliminal symbolic reading of objects, including naming (the animals), results and underlies our whole specific reading experience. Hence such focussed images as the scarlet letter, the white whale, the golden bowl, the jar in Tennessee.309 Hence the cult of chosisme in contemporary literature,310 which results partly from the extraordinary power of the film to highlight such consciousness-focussed objects. I suppose this is the radical meaning of symbol. [497] The second epiphany of the Word is the law. Creation is divine consciousness ordering the natural environment (hence the response of the Spirit has to include images of work or humanly transformed nature). Law is the word ordering human action. It includes the rhetorical word of command that starts off action, and is connected with the aural nature of Biblical metaphors, which turns away from the visual symbol because of the danger that the latter will become numinous and part of the body of an earth-mother who keeps the imagination embryonic. Otherwise I haven't so much to say about law as yet: so much of it is horseshit, it seems to me. I suppose the Butler analogy principle,3" which transforms work-energy into play-energy, or a mimesis of spiritual life, is a central part of the answer. I can see the ritual-play link all right; also the equality principle emerging from the Exodus. The paradox of abolishing the law by fulfilling it I understand, and the anxieties of continuity, such as precedent. Continuing a family line by levirate marriage seems to be important in the Pentateuch (Tamar, Ruth, etc.).312 [498] The third epiphany of the Word is prophecy, the alienated vision that comes to human consciousness with its vision of the U-shaped predicament and destiny of man, and breaks up the sense of continuity as the one thing needful. Jesus is emphatically a prophet and the last of the prophets, and the climax of his prophetic message and mission is the Transfiguration, where the final or Last Word is there along with the voices of law and prophecy. I have to distinguish Jesus as prophet from the form of the gospels themselves, which belong in chapter two. The only thing the prophet "prophesies," in the sense of foretelling the future, is the restoration of Israel, i.e., the future return to the original vision. [499! The fourth epiphany is the panoramic apocalypse, the vision of

Notes 52

523

total metamorphosis, where the apocalyptic and demonic are finally separated and the demonic designated. This includes the sense of all reality dissolving into something unpredictable, one of the major sources of unrest in the contemporary world. Images of human work form the introduction to its imagery, and images of human leisure and play in the city and garden form the conclusion of it.

§ [500] For a while, anyway, I'm going to experiment with a twelvechapter scheme, though it may, and I almost hope it will, reduce to eight. The master plan is three parts. Part One, tentatively called The Cycle of the Word, recapitulates the introductory things, the verbal temenos, the use of metaphor to open up currents of energy between subjective or personal and objective or natural orders (which makes metamorphosis, of course, a fall symbol as well as a passing-of-the-gods one), the growing autonomy and authority of the arts as well as the sciences, the subsiding of mythology into cosmology with the loss of belief in gods and the coming of abstract language. Perhaps a comparative study of the Bible, with its beginning and end in time and its doctrine of special creation and apocalypse, and the Classical mythology, with its focus on death and rebirth within the goddess Nature (not that this is true of the later phases of it), is involved, with the positive and negative analogies made by Christian poets. [501] If this really takes two chapters, it's clear sailing, because the next two would naturally be about the thesis of authority, the four-level universe down to the eighteenth century, and the antithesis of revolt, the one that comes in with Blake. [502] For Part Two I've always had the title "The Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead," though I may not keep it, as it's both pretentious and misleading. It deals with Eros Regained, the adding of the Eros theme from Ovid and Virgil to Christian poetry and its merging into a new sense of natura naturans after Rousseau's time. Also Prometheus Unbound, the sense of a world of giant world [sic] beneath this world, knowing the future, equipped with technology, associated with Atlantis and the rising of land out of the sea. Also Adonis Revived, the FrazerSpengler-Vico-Graves complex about dying and reviving historical cycles and the like. And finally Hermes Unsealed, about which I have few

524

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

concrete ideas except that the centre of discussion will probably be the symboliste poets, especially Mallarme, and the later Valery-Rilke lot and the explicitly hermetic Italians. Some of the speculations of subatomic physics will get into it too. [503] Part Three, the Cycle of the Spirit, deals with the reintegrating of the antithesis set up in Part One, the four powers of the soul each having two poles. Two chapters on imagery-space and narrative-time seem to be involved; Hegel's Phenomenology will be used a good deal, particularly in such things as the passing of the white goddess of the Adonis cycle into the black bride of the Hermes one. The eleventh chapter will be a summary of my Bible book in terms that bring it into contemporary focus within a general overview of contemporary symbolism. [504] In this third section there will be, centrally, an axis mundi that will unite the above and the below, the above being without repression and the below without the kind of revolution that turns cyclical. The Jungians say the mandala is a two-dimensional representation of the tree of life. [505] The tentative working title of the book is "The Way of Ignorance," a phrase from the Quartets, I think East Coker, where Eliot is paraphrasing St. John of the Cross and saying to arrive at what you do not know you must go by the way of ignorance [East Coker, sec. 3,11. 39-40]. [506] The section titles Cycle of Word and Spirit [see par. 200] may be junked too, because I think one of the themes is the reconstruction of my eight phases of the Bible as an epiphany of the Word followed by a response of the Spirit. Creation, Law, Prophecy and Panoramic Apocalypse are the four epiphanies of the Word; Exodus, Wisdom, Gospel (because worked out within a Church) and Participating Apocalypse are the responses of the Spirit. [507] I find I'm very willing to renounce titles, however long cherished, but find unthinkable any alteration of my Eros-Adonis-PrometheusHermes scheme. I note this as a possible weakness, no more. As Luther says, here I stand until convinced otherwise by arguments drawn from properly authoritative sources. 1508] A.M.D.G. [ad majorem Dei gloriam]

Notes 52

525

A

[509] The first two chapters, outlining the introduction and general position, are in red folders. The next two, outlining the authoritarian and revolutionary universes, are in orange ones. The positive analogy point goes in the first two. Then, I suppose, Prometheus-Eros would be yellow (we'll pretend it's gold) and Adonis-Hermes green. Nine and ten, the space and time of the reintegrated universe, are blue and the last two, dealing with the Bible as apocryphon, the presence of the written word in all this, and the interpenetration that is the experiential result, are purple. I always abandon these schemes sooner or later, and they bugger up my notes, but I seem to have to go through them.313 [510] The best motto of the book I can find is from Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller: "Archytas made a woodden dove to flie; by which proportion I see no reason why the veriest block in the world should despayre of anything." (Quoted from memory.)314 [511! The chief difference between this and former schemes is that it puts the summary of GC into chapter eleven, near the end, instead of opening with it. That way, we don't start with the Word itself but with the distortions human society gets into in trying to absorb it: the Church, in short, which pretends to be in cahoots with the Spirit that responds.

§ [512! This is supposed to be about what I've been calling the PrometheusHermes axis. I don't know whether there is anything corresponding to this notion or not. But it does seem to me that there are other dimensions of imaginative experience since the Romanticism cosmos of revolt that don't belong to the Eros-Adonis cycle. [513] The first things to look at, I suppose, are Poe's Eureka and De Quincey's mail-coach essay. Eureka ends with a contracting and expanding vision that reminds us of the infinitely large world of astronomy and the infinitely small one of subatomic physics. Valery's essay on it notices how, in a science that recognizes a practically unlimited number of other galaxies, the word "universe" is still clung to.315 Perhaps "universe" is another example of the transforming of a scientific hypothesis into an

526

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

existential metaphor. Anyway, De Quincey's network of communication image is a suggestive one too.316 [514] There's no point looking for images in this way unless they build up a pattern. I think the fourth and fifth chapters may come to some kind of crisis on the theme of "the prison of Narcissus." In the age of authority we had encyclopaedic treatises beginning with the word "Speculum": the whole world of knowledge, including knowledge of nature, was man's mirror. The word "reflection" is again a sign of how we adapt our consciousness to what it's presented with.317 It's clear that the Eros-Adonis cycle is a squirrel cage without exit in which man remains an embryo. [515] Well, I must see what Stevens says: I think he's the brightest hope, though Mallarme and some of the science fiction patterns (Solaris)318 have to be examined too. The paradox of nothing. One can only get out of the prison of Narcissus by raising the level of consciousness: maybe religion today has to pass through the Oriental meditation techniques. But then I've always insisted that works of art are also objects of meditation no less than mandalas. [516] In fiction, the universality of the amnesia-twin theme is worth going back to: I might take a look at Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear again, a book I reread after I'd written the Norton lectures, but didn't read for them. This has to do primarily with what I'm beginning to call the prison of Narcissus, which seems to be looming up as the climax either of this or of the preceding chapter. [517! One way out of the prison of Narcissus is to reverse the Narcissus operation: in other words the self-recognition of Eliot's Marina. This brings one to the uniqueness of the New Testament's Moebius strip: Christ as the true individuality in man, part of the individual whole; Christ as the totality of which we are parts; the Other as the Father and not Nature; otherness as the final discovery of identity. I doubt if any sacred scripture has that except the Bible: such things as the Lankavatara don't teach a doctrine; they teach a technique for breaking up and escaping from doctrines. Beyond that they don't go.

§ [518] In Chapter Five, I'm trying to deal with what I think of as a vertical

Notes 52

527

axis. Surely that means among other things that ladder and staircase images, spiral towers, winding stairs, seven-storey mountains, in Eliot, Yeats, Pound and the rest, return? I found a descending spiral staircase image in De Quincey: the descent is not always Charybdis or Maelstrom. In Pound the bride is laid on top of the seven turns, awaiting the god:319 again the body of Eden is the bride; again redeemed man, or rather Earth, is woman. It seems to me that this doesn't really belong in Four, the Eros-Adonis axis, because you get it in places like the Eliot Quartets, where the context is utterly different. But neither does it seem to be going in the direction of the prison of Narcissus, or being confined to Flatland the mirror. [519] Well: in teaching my graduate course I always felt a bit selfconscious in spending so much time on the Eliot Quartets: they sounded so damn Christian, and I wasn't trying to convert anybody. But if they're on the direct line from Narcissus to the escape from Narcissus, alias the Bible, they make more sense. [520] Two rat-traps to stay out of: one, the belief of the author (Hopkins' imagery doesn't have to be Catholic, however Catholic it was to him); two, the notion that everything expands after the cosmos of authority gives way. The whole point of the book is that things don't happen that way: winding stairs in Dante are just as useful as those in Pound. [521] Solomon's temple had "winding stairs" (I Kings 6:8), even if it didn't have any sprawled out brides at the top. [522] The sense of identity in Palaeolithic cave-drawings with bisons and the like is pictorial metaphor, but it modulates very quickly into acquiring the quality of the animal, not just being identified with it. The totemic set-up is pure metaphor; the sorcerer or shaman with a beast mask is moving in the direction of techne, manipulation, magic, doing things with the identification. To manipulate things is to deprive them of will.

§ [523] I think I have to attack the second volume through the weakest part of the first, which is the section on the Gospel. The spiritualizing and individualizing of the law, which is how I used to explain the Gospel

528

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

in Milton,320 isn't good enough: that's really wisdom, and the Pharisees were quite capable of it. Acceptance of the Gospel means seeing Incarnation everywhere you turn. The "creation" of art isn't just a bad pun any more, because creating reality or a life-style or whatever is part of the reception of incarnation. [524] Also, of course, that Moebius strip, where the part-and-whole relationship reverses itself, comes to complete fulfilment in the Gospel. I am in Christ, a part of a whole; Christ is in me, a part of a whole: that was the challenge Simone Weil threw up that I mentioned.321 How one verbalizes a paradox like that I don't know. [525] This is connected, in a way I haven't got clear, with the superstitious belief in the impersonal, as though man could somehow create an aggregate that would make up for all his individual deficiencies. Progress, science: I suppose the impersonal superstition is another form of the mechanical one. Just as we worship wheels after we've invented them. [526] Suggestions that might do for the Wiegand lecture:322 In the Book of Kings Elijah calls on Jehovah, who sends down fire from heaven, burns up an offering soaked with water, which impels the people to endorse a total massacre of Baal's priests, then brings a thunderstorm out of a clear sky and breaks a drought. The priests of Baal shout and invoke and pray and cut themselves with knives; Baal opens one eye, says "the hell with all that crap," and goes back to sleep [i Kings 18:18-40]. Which is closer to being the true God? Why, Baal, of course. Whoever heard of a real god jumping around on cue to do stunts, like a sorcerer's apprentice (which is really all he could be)?3231 remember an evangelical hymn of my infancy: A better day is coming, The morning draweth nigh . . . When God the Lord shall listen To every plaintive sigh, And stretch his hand o'er every land With justice by and by.324

Translation: it's true that our God seems to be asleep or on a journey, but just you wait: sooner or later he'll wake up and really show you. O.K.,

Notes 52

529

but the point is that whatever gets projected into the future, the God they're worshipping right now is sleepy Baal, not jumpy Jehovah. [527! I've said that play is energy expended for its own sake, whereas work is energy expended for a further end in view. Thus a work ethic is a donkey's carrot society. (Something I had in mind that I lost.) "Puritans" concentrate on work ethic, minimize ritual and other play aspects of experience, and postpone the play-world to an after-life, if then. Communists do the same thing with a historical future. I said in GC that the Bible doesn't emphasize a superior order of invisible reality: the invisible exists primarily to make the visible world visible.325 This connects with the whole homo ludens thesis I'm now applying to Shakespeare: that Shakespeare studies man as theatrical man. What he is exists only to help make him appear: this, I take it, is partly what Jesus meant by letting one's light shine. But something's gone.

§ [528] Marvell's Garden turns on the paradox of the garden as the real mistress's body, where the narrator moves from physical embraces ("Ensnar'd with flowers, I fall on grass" [1.40]) to the mental sublimations that take him to the limit of regeneration. This last word reminds us that an explicitly Christian poem, like Vaughan's with that title, can make the Eden and Song of Songs identifications explicit too.326 [529] Identification on a poetic level like Chester's indicates convention,327 because it can't indicate anything like originality. Anyway, with the Romantics Eros becomes the essential link between man and the natura naturans he's sprung from, a point the Renaissance keeps playing down (except for really great achievements like Shakespeare's Cleopatra). Hence the link in Plato between the erotic and the creative is reestablished, especially in Shelley. Shelley never, I think, uses the word "love" in its Christian sense: he always has the Platonic Eros in mind. Something that starts with human sexuality and ends in a vision of intellectual beauty. Seeing the world as beauty had always been a part of the Platonic-tradition, of course, even in the Renaissance. Let's not get fucked up in that. [530] The fourth level, the demonic descent, was wholly demonized in

53O

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Christianity, and only the immense prestige of Virgil's sixth book kept it alive. And even then it was only the descent-to-hell theme that got carried on: the vision of the future, with its suggestions of reincarnation, got squeezed out. In Romantic times this modulated to the Prometheus ("fore-thought") vision: the descent to the underworld of inner space, now that the up and the down are modulating to the out and the in.328 Here the vision of the future, though still deprecated by old-fashioned poets like Eliot, can become creative, though in Graves and Yeats it tends to fall back again into the pagan cycle. [531] The Prometheus vision is the recreation of the old demonic descent to learn the future; the Eros vision is the recreation of the latent link between man and his natural origin. The Adonis vision is the recreation of the old Eden story into a mode of perceiving actual experience. Hence it moves from the white goddess to the black bride, from Cybele to a regenerate Mother Nature. It includes the Oedipus theme, and resolves its conflict. [532] The Hermes vision is the recreation of the old higher heaven into the scientific vision, from the astronomical perspective to the subatomic physical one. Actually I suspect that what I've been calling Adonis and Hermes are really female figures, the counterparts or emanations of Eros and Prometheus respectively. The female emanation of Eros modulates from mother Venus, the white goddess, to Psyche, the Cinderella or black bride. The female emanation of Prometheus is the white queen to his red king (Alice, by the way, is a white queen, and the story ends by asking whether it's been the dream of the white queen or of the red king). The Hermes figure or Mercurius of alchemy is always androgynous. We're moving into the cycle of the Spirit now, and the Spirit can't be separated from female counterparts. [533] The nearest I can get to stating the theme of Part Three, the Cycle of the Spirit, is to say that instead of moving within the spatial metaphors of up and down, it moves, as the GC did, from totality to total decentralization or interpenetration, from inspiration to expiration. [534] From Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, p. 203: "To understand the views of Aristotle, as of most Greeks, on physics, it is necessary to apprehend their imaginative background. Every philoso-

Notes 52

531

pher, in addition to the formal system which he offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realizes that it won't quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved."329 Well, it's these simpler and crude systems, which aren't that but simply more concrete and metaphorical, that I'm interested in. They're the ones the poets deal with. [535] Whitehead: "Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring [colouring] of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning." "The Greek view of nature . . . was essentially dramatic."330

§ [536! The general idea of the book is: first an introduction summarizing GC, then the medieval-Renaissance mythological universe founded on the descending movement of incarnation, with its four levels, presence of God, "good" created world, "fallen" world, and demonic anti-natural world. All initiative goes from the top down: liberty, peace, order, harmony, authority and the like. This gets mirrored in the structure of secular power, especially in the Renaissance, as the dramatizing of the masque shows. [537] Also there are two levels of nature, one of ideal human nature and the other of actual physical nature. Arguments from one don't affect the other; but the question of what is really natural for man, being determined only by the existent structure of authority, is completely circular. All this is very familiar: some new patterns are beginning to emerge from the reverse direction. [538] The standard upward movement is of course the purgatorial one: the sacramental, or be-a-good-boy practice of religion, morality, obedience and the rest of it. The definitive statement of this is the Purgatorio itself, the movement backward in time to Dante's original birth as a child of the unfalien Adam, with free will restored. Only Dante hasn't the guts to stop the spanking mamma from coming in to take over again. But

532

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

then, that's logically a part of the whole sacramental con game. The mystical, or cloud-of-unknowing, movement is toward the wordless apprehension of the hidden divinity that's beyond all categorizing.331 [539] Apart from these, there are the various positive analogies: I call them that to distinguish them from the negative analogies, which are demonic parodies. First, and most important, is the erotic analogy, where the indwelling God is Eros and not Agape, where grace means the lady's grace, and where the cruelty and disdain are erotic counterparts of the besieging of the genuine heaven of God. The "phoenix riddle" of Donne and Shakespeare is the erotic counterpart of resurrection, as The Ecstasie and the same Shakespeare poem are erotic counterparts of the merging of the soul with its divine origin.332 [540] All this comes out of Virgil and Ovid rather than Plato; but Plato has the analogy of creation. I can quote Puttenham on this: the same quotation I used in FS, but noting this time the irony of the allusion to the "fantastic" Platonics. They may be fantastic, but they gave him the creative analogy: it isn't a Biblical idea. In Genesis the term used for "create" is never used for anything that man can also do, but in the Timaeus the creator is not God but a Demiurge who works from a model as a human craftsman would do. That plus the Ovidian "est deus in nobis" set up the whole analogy.333 [541] There are other positive analogies, I think: possibly kabbalism; certainly the magic that controls the inferior elemental spirits, as the higher elemental spirits, or angels, control, or at least guard, the souls of men and planets. I suppose alchemical symbolism is linked too as one of the dangerous but possible ascents. Dangerous because of ecclesiastical vigilance and intolerance; possible because linked to mystical forms of ascent. [542] All these positive analogies are, I suppose, founded on the conception of law as something internalized by the gospel, which means that one element in law is annihilated, corresponding to the demonic parody, and another element fulfilled, the positive analogy. Perhaps Shylock and Jessica respectively have connections, along with the Jacob-Gobbo who runs away from his blind master—I mean of course his master and his meeting with his blind father [The Merchant of Venice, 2.2].

Notes 52

533

[543] Part Two, perhaps, deals with the expansion of the positive analogies into the four powers of the soul. What I don't know yet is where to put the reversed diagram of Blake, with its Schopenhauerian centre: I could put it in Chapter Two as the other half of the Cycle of the Word, as I'd planned all along, and then use Part Two to fill up the historical connections. [544] Eros: the tension between Agape and Eros, and the parody-symbolism of the latter, is marked in Petrarch. In the Secretum Petrarch writes an ironic dialogue between himself and St. Augustine, a motherfixated saint whose view of Eros, however sublimated, was never exactly genial. There are many metaphorical identifications of the mistress' body with the garden of Eve, very crude in Robert Chester's long poem, subtler in Fulke Greville and Campion and elsewhere.334 [545] This third chapter, if I have it right, is the "dialogue" one on the four epiphanies of the Word in the Bible and the four responses of the Spirit. The sequence corresponds to the four levels of meaning. [546! Literal epiphany and response are the Genesis and the Exodus of the Bible. That is, the Creation is not an account of the origin of the order of nature, and was never intended to be: it's a vision of total intelligibility, the wholeness that must always be the only goal of life. [547] As such, the vision of creation is too much for us: it's Faust's Erdgeist that he couldn't take.335 We turn away from it (the Fall) and then move toward it the other way, toward the apocalypse, which is of course the vision of a "new" creation. [548! The literal response to things, or the created world, is the forming of a tribal society, where the individual is simply a unit within a centripetal interlocking response. This dialectically produces the sense of an "Israel," a marked-off society with a temenos of mythology, and so moves toward the second epiphany of law. [549] I still don't know what the hell law is or why it's there, but it is. The response to it is wisdom, which begins in prudence or observance of law in the individual life, and moves toward the spontaneity of the outsider's perspective (prophecy, that is).

534

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[550] Prophecy is outside the predictable, hence it begins in the ecstatic and thaumaturgic and moves toward the .spiritualized law. Jesus is the last of the prophets; the Gospel, which is a product of the Church, is the spiritual response to prophecy, the forming of a spiritual community, where the individual once again is a unit of a larger body, but has a full and not an embryonic individuality. [551] The spiritual community or church moves toward the City of God, the panoramic apocalypse, which is the second coming or full epiphany of the Word, and provokes the response of the participating apocalypse, which starts just after the Bible ends and winds up the whole show.

§ [552] If the first chapter is on the word, in the sense of the logocentric universe, it's among other things on the birth of the Word. Hence the second chapter might well be on the birth of the Spirit. All I have on this is a hunch that we start with a sense of hierarchy and authority derived from the contemplation of nature and reinforced by parental figures. After a while the Spirit is born, which like the Word starts as a puer aeternus but forces the obligation or superego figures to combine into Lacan's moi or self-alienated ego. [553] If I can bring this off, then the third chapter, not this one, would be on the dialogue of Word and Spirit.

§ [554] The seed complex in the Bible includes the seed in John that "dies" (dies as a seed, that is) and then grows up [John 12:24]. Hence the parable of the sower: Word as seed [Matthew 13:18-23]. Hence the Eucharist: the swallowed body of Christ is the emblem of the seed of the genuine or spiritual individual. This is linked again with Ezekiel's eating of the scroll given him [Ezekiel 3:1-3]: the eaten Word is the starting point of the second apocalypse [Revelation 10:8-11]. [555] Jesus as seed in a virgin's womb, then as hidden among men, then as buried underground, then as carried out of a garden into the sky while the Spirit comes down the other way with the fourth great

Notes 52

535

emblem, the flame. Threatened birth, "burial" in Egypt; exile and wandering. [556] Seed inside is the ark, the container of all living things in a dying world. Noah's ark with the animals; Jesus' manger with ox and ass; ark of the covenant in the wilderness, then the hidden and empty Holy of Holies as the spiritual temple. Starts back with the paleolithic cave, a mother's-womb link, likely. The pulling of animal energies together awaiting emergence in a redeemed nature. [557] The seed is the book as apocryphon, the sealed book to be opened when its time has come. The cipher message at the South Pole (Foe's Pym) or bottom of the sea (Keats' Endymion). [558] Jesus as exile and wanderer (nowhere to lay his head) places the Incarnation squarely in the desert. World-egg hatches. The reluctant seed, who thinks April is the cruellest month,336 stays a little hard pellet of ego, Blake's pebble.337 [559] Of course I feel sure that the birth of the Spirit from the Father-Soul and Mother-Body is the central theme here, but how to integrate it with the above I'm not so sure. The meanings of spirit and soul in the Bible may vary, but the words are surprisingly consistent: ruach and pneuma are almost invariable for spirit, nephesh and psyche for soul. I said everything begins in the demonic parody, and the d.p. of spirit is the "vanity" of Ecclesiastes which works its way toward wisdom. [560] That may be the link with the nothingness that also seems involved with this complex, and that originally made me assume that Mallarme's Igitur (not "therefore" or ergo but "whereupon," the osmosis between the oracular and the witty) was linked too. Yeats' Chance and Choice meeting.338

§ [561] I wanted the fourth chapter to be on the literary units of the Bible, but without the usual narrative-technique approach one gets in literary studies of the Bible as a rule. But what I have so far is very vague. [562] My scheme seems to be one of introducing the verbal universe and

536

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

locating its origin in the Word of the Christian Bible; then introducing what Blake would call the Poetic Genius339 as the true man and locating its origin in the Holy Spirit of the Christian Bible; then dealing with the Bible as a sequence of dialogues of Word and Spirit. [563! So a fourth chapter might have to deal with something like the intervention of the Father. This seems involved in the emphasis that Jesus gives to the Father in his teaching, and it seems to have something to do especially with the inspiration of the prophet and with the great breakthrough in the Book of Job. [564] I have a notion that "deconstruction" is involved in this intervention of the Father, but I don't yet know how. Moses on Pisgah, being buried apparently by God himself [Deuteronomy 34:1-6], seeing but not entering the Promised Land, and thus being the only person who really saw it, all Joshua saw being the historical Canaan.340 Elijah on Carmel proving that Baal was the true god, because no real god goes jumping around on cue doing stunts.341 This episode is a type of the intervention at the end of Job, where God really does descend to the altar and kindle a flame there [41:19-21!. Isaiah and Ezekiel, of course—their visions, I mean [Isaiah 6; Ezekiel i]. [565! In Christianity the Holy Spirit is associated with Pentecost, which is when the Jews read Ruth. Why is levirate marriage so damn important? It's in the stories of Ruth and Tamar and somebody else, I forget who.342 And the Zelopehad [Zelophehad] business [Numbers 36]. Connected with one of my central themes: that redeemed man is woman. Levirate absorbs the white goddess theme.343 [566] Gethsemane: the silence of the Father there is probably crucial. [567! Perhaps it isn't the Father but the Spirit that deconstructs the Word. That is, the Word by itself creates the ontological hierarchy reflected in traditional conceptions of creation (the primacy of the identified thing), law (the primacy of the order), and prophecy (the primacy of the uttering presence).

§ [568! I think the Washington paper should give a fair outline of this first

Notes 52

537

chapter.344 I start by saying the book is a sequel to GC, and also say that in AC I got to the "hypothetical" point about literature. Then I had to go on into the Bible, because in that also myth and metaphor are the literal bases of meaning, and yet the Bible isn't content to stay hypothetical. [569] In poetry, whatever Derrida may say, the oral takes precedence over the written, because poetry is being referred back to an original performance. The personal poet has to be represented by somebody, however remote from the poet or however silent. But, of course, the poem is not a direct address, but broadcast like a radio program. [570] Metaphor is the attempt to open up a channel or current of energy between subject and object. It begins in ecstatic metaphor (Stone Age painting and "primitive" music), and literature develops in proportion as the sense of a split between subject and object becomes habitual. [571] The link with religion is there because metaphor creates a "Thou" world between the I and the it, and the god is the stabilized metaphor. This "Thou" originates probably in the sense of the mother, and hence the "white goddess" aspect of poetic imagery takes its rise. Theseus on the lunatic, lover and poet: the lover has to be there because Eros is the original inspirer of the poet and because sexual love is a throwback to ecstatic metaphor [A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.3-22]. But of course the actual union of two bodies in one is possible only in Oedipal fantasies. [572] What I have to add to the Washington paper345 is the fact that metaphor is the microcosm of language, and that the whole of language is also built on the metaphor's effort to unite subject and object. This probably introduces a renewed treatment of the four levels of meaning, where the metaphorical is the literal, the "allegorical" signifier-signified relation what is usually meant by literal, the tropological the Pisgah view of the hypothetical preliminary to absorbing it into action, and the anagogic the universalized restatement of the literal. [573] For this of course I'll need whatever I have to say about the Phenomenology.346 [574] The simultaneous yes-and-no statements of myth and metaphor. [575] What the argument leads to is (a) the conception of a total con-

538

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

sciousness, mainly of Christian origin, where it's identified with the Word and (b) the interchange of reality and illusion that the arts help to bring about, reality being what we make (verum factum) and not what we look at. [576] Primary and secondary concern the reason for primary and secondary mythology (secondary is ideological). [577] This chapter looks as though it were going to be on the logocentric universe, and the hell with Derrida. On the other hand "deconstructive" perspectives may enter the next three chapters. [578! Myth and history: the myth or story confronts, and forces us to adopt a less purely sequential response.

§ [579] What am I trying to do in this book? First, to arrange my eight phases of revelation as a sequence of four "dialogues" between a specific epiphany of the Word and a specific response of the Spirit appropriate to that epiphany. The epiphany of Creation (broken by the Fall) brings out the response of the chosen people, the "seed"; the epiphany of Law brings out the response of Wisdom; the epiphany of prophecy, ending with John the Baptist and Jesus in his aspect of teacher and healer, brings out the response of Gospel, enclosed within a Church or spiritual community; the final epiphany or second coming brings out the response of the participating apocalypse. [580] Second, to outline the mythological universe, with the Bible as the "concentering vision" for Classical and other mythologies, in which a ladder-tower-spiral-mountain cluster, a garden cluster, a cave-seedfloating boat-ark cluster, and a hidden flame-furnace-final illumination cluster, seem to be the main elements. [581] Third, to set up the creation vision as a logocentric, authoritarian, hierarchical vision, and treat the sequence following it as a gradual, and ultimately, with the apocalypses, total, reversal of that. [582] Fourth, to indicate how the "logocentric" conception of a body

Notes 52

539

dominated by a soul-consciousness is eventually revolutionized by the birth of a Spirit. With the Spirit present, soul and body become parental father and mother figures, and eventually consolidate into the narcissistic and self-alienated ego, the lost soul everyone has and should get rid of. [583] Fifth, to suggest at least how progress in consciousness isn't just joining larger and larger entities: in the N.T. the Word is a whole of which we're parts, and individual man is a whole of which the Word is part: it's only in that constant and paradoxical interchange that we can reach the end of the vision.

§ [584] The Great Code one of a good many books (a) by literary people, or scholars with literary interests (b) by scholars interested in the specifically literary forms of the Bible. [585] My own book difficult to grasp, perhaps, because I was not, like most people writing on Biblical literary forms, considering these forms in their Sitz im Leben.347 I was interested in the future influence of the Bible as it permeated, infiltrated and structured Western imagination. Hence I could deal only with the translated Bible, Vulgate and English. [586] But: I didn't have room to take in the whole subject, as the book itself confined me to the Bible. Hence some people thought I was dodging the question of Biblical influence on later work. [587] Certain elements in the book naturally carried over from the Anatomy and other earlier books. Thus the conception of myth as distinct from folk tale, the Bible as a source for later cosmologies (though this again was something I couldn't get around to), the attack on the muddle over "literal meaning," and so on. [588] What particularly interested me about the book was (a) the analysis of the imagery and narrative unity of the Bible (b) the varieties of linguistic idiom (metaphorical, metonymic, descriptive). [589] The conception of humanity having a single consciousness is closely related to my thesis that literature is a unified order of words and not just

54O

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

an aggregate of works. This conception seems to me of Christian origin. In the N.T. Christ is the metaphorical key to the whole verbal universe, the "hero with a thousand faces," etc. [590] The metaphor follows a quest like the second half of the Odyssey— the least-likely-to-succeed old beggar turns out to be not only the master of the whole house but the body of the house. That is, metaphor, the bridge between consciousness and nature, is the microcosm of language. [591] Sexual imagery (this is out of line): patriarchal emphasis in Bible not purely that. The mother is the parent we have to break from: goddess-worship keeps man in an embryo and a squirrel-cage. We can overcome this, but only by turning the white goddess into the black bride, realizing that redeemable man is woman (the Virgin Mary as the highest of creatures), and that all "souls" are symbolically female. [592] I haven't got this all clear yet, but there's a double helix movement from a hierarchy of soul on top and body underneath, where the soul gives the laws and the body grudgingly follows as best it can until it's thrown away, to the birth of the spirit within the soul, the child produced by the father-soul and the mother-body. [593! The spirit grows and grows and grows, and proportionately as it does so everything that isn't spirit shrinks into a self-alienated ego, Lacan's moi. This moi is the "lost soul" that everybody has and ought to get rid of. [594] Myth and metaphor proclaim themselves and their opposites: A is B, but of course it isn't B; a myth happened but of course it didn't happen. "Literal" writing and thinking destroys [destroy] them. But we learn what a myth is through the study of literature. [595] Verum factum: we understand only what we make, and have to look for reality in what we make and not in what we stare at.348 When a work of literature confronts us, as a royal metaphor that's a focus of a community, it compels us to see it in a dimension of time beyond that of mere sequence. [596! Creation is not the story of the origin of nature: it's the vision of the world as the product of a divine mind. Consequently we can't see it until

Notes 52

541

we're ready for the apocalyptic vision, which turns out to be the vision of creation—look at Faust with the Erdgeist. [597! The introduction I think is pretty well what I want, and at present, at least, I have no plans to expand it. There's primary and secondary mythology, corresponding to primary and secondary concern, and similarly there may be primary and secondary metaphor, the latter being perhaps a form of metonymy. But I don't know: I can't follow that up, now, anyway. [598! So there would follow, first, the briefest possible introduction to the place of the Bible in Western culture, as a definitive myth extending from creation to apocalypse. Then follows the main principle of analogy: the establishing of demonic parody (which is in the Bible itself), then of positive analogy, including the aesthetic analogy. [599] Then I go immediately into the two accounts of the creation and of the way in which they seem to be the originating points of the cosmos of earth and air (although the other two elements are certainly there). So the two chapters on ladder and garden clusters would logically follow. [600] I think I have the outline of these two chapters fairly clear: the next two are a complete haze. The first, on the seed-ark-buried world complex, starts with the reversal of the ladder in Romantic times, with the persistence of Eros and the way it turns the old four levels upside down, with the "drunken boat" diagram in Schopenhauer, Huxley, Kierkegaard, Marx and Freud.349 This leads to the theme of the creative descent (its ancestors are Aeneid VI and the Lucianic satire tradition, via Rabelais), and of the world below hell. Then at least three of these descents, Aurelia, Saison en enfer, and Igitur. The last (which would have to include the Coup de des) brings up the Being-Nothing polarity.350 [6oil Then comes the fire imagery, starting with the buried seed of fire (the buried-world cluster includes the apocryphon or buried word, and the Wordsworth Prelude passage. Apart from Little Gidding, I haven't much on this, though I suppose Bachelard ought to help—he's got two books on fire.351 [602] Anyway, the next chapter is the real show-stopper, I hope. I'm going to transfer the four-dialogues business to here, and make a whole

542

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

chapter out of it, showing how the eight elements in these dialogues are the special indicated examples of nature (or universe, i.e. the anthropocentric view of nature), history, social conditioning, philosophy and science, the arts, the community evolved through the arts, and the destructive and constructive aspects of primary concern respectively. [603] It's possible I'll need another chapter somewhere on narrative archetypes, such as the growth of the spirit-child within and the shrivelling of the parental ghosts into the self-alienated ego; the descent into dream, separation from the double, identification of the separated double from the forest or whatever world, and reunion and escape from the prison of Narcissus. [604] Maybe I'll need also some consideration of gaps or null points in the Bible, i.e., the places where other mythologies supply themes that the Bible deals with only by disregarding, although their existence may be established by our own consciousness of a gap. Thus the dragon-killing romance theme behind the creation; the fall of the rebel angels as having preceded the creation, and so creating a pre-existent spiritual world into which the poetic imagination expands after passing the earth-air boundaries; the continuous life of whatever historical figure stands behind the Jesus of the gospels. [605] Wish I knew what the hell I was talking about.

§ CHAPTER ONE: MYTHOLOGY AND CONCERN [606] Myth as story with a social function. The social function takes us toward ideology; the story form links up with folk tales and takes us toward literature. [607] The secondary concerns expressed by ideology: faith in God, loyalty to one's country, belief in certain social or metaphysical causes. [608] Primary concerns are for food, for shelter, and for sexual satisfaction. Also for freedom, in the sense of release of energy from work into

Notes 52

543

play. (For play see Gadamer as well as Huizinga,352 and keep in mind the Critique of Judgment). [609] These concerns are being constantly frustrated, with resultant anxieties. Concern for food creates the anxious rituals in Frazer, sacrifices for good crops, and the like. [610] One can't live a day without being concerned about food, but one can live all one's life without being concerned about God: hence the religious concern, even if "ultimate," as Tillich says, isn't primary. [611] Ideological or secondary concern becomes aggressive, because its guiding principles are theses which imply, in fact have really already expressed, their own opposites. Hence the ideological deadlocks of our time: let's go to war to smash somebody else's ideology.353 [612] Literature descends directly from mythology, though it is also a product of a contemporary ideology. The latter is the surface meaning or "overthought" of the work;, the underlying myth is the "underthought." Examples in Shakespeare, e.g. Henry V.354 [613] "Deconstruction" is actually the analyzing of the ideological content in order to get down to the underlying myth. Notice how stories with a strong narrative (mythical) interest are placed like buried treasure, told by someone else or discovered among old papers. [614] Criticism (Stanley Fish) is the act of community response to a text.3551 still think Derrida is making far too much of what's really just a convention, that the written words are being spoken by somebody.356 Of course it would be true that in oral discourse the words are unborn, attached to an enclosing presence; but the text is the presence. I think the analogy of the convention that a poem is sung rather than spoken goes a long way. [615! The question of a poet's authority is bound up with his communication of myth through ideology. This is connected (a) with the fact that so many poets are led to expound foolish ideologies (b) with the terrible self-doubts they feel because they're not coinciding closely enough with

544

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

a current ideology. Maybe I should take Shelley's Witch of Atlas more seriously as a declaration of mythological independence.357 [616] All through history secondary concerns have taken precedence over primary ones; that's not possible any more. Ezra Pound and his paradiso terrestre.358 [617] Ideological man cannot go behind the fall and original man, hence he turns out to be a crazy Oedipus killing his father (the source of his life, whether we call it God or not) and fucking his mother (Nature) until the supply of air and water gives out.359 [618] In our day we must give up the absolutizing of ideology as "right" or "established," as Marxism ironically enough still does, and look for the real underlying source of power in more abundant life. Morris's Earthly Paradise. Vision of hope not one of finally refuting Moslem or Marxist arguments. [619! Fertile ideology (one aware of its own opposites) and sterile (the persecuting one that insists on one view and tries to destroy the other). [620] I started AC with a hunch that the contrast between centripetal and centrifugal meaning would take me all the way. The latter is often called "referential" meaning. I soon found that there were two stages of the referential: the first was the context of the individual work of art; the second was the expansion into conventional or dictionary meaning. What I then started to look for was not a monomyth but a holomyth, a map of the verbal imagination that would provide a context for individual works. I think the Bible comes closer to indicating what such a holomyth would be like than any other work in our culture. [621] It's ironic that Marxism, which began by pretending that it had no ideology and that ideology was something only the bourgeois had as a rationalizing defence, turned out to be in our world the great absolutizing of ideology. Such people as Walter Benjamin say, quite consistently, that myth is an oppressive dragon about to be slain by some ideological knight of the classless society vision.360 [622! All through history secondary concerns have taken priority over

Notes 52

545

primary ones: we want to live, but ideology says we must go to war and risk death. This century the first in history where primary concerns must become primary, or else.361 [623] Myth not a proto-science, but a structure of concern, hence cosmologies (where mythology begins to merge with ideology) can be structural principles of poetry and the poetry doesn't go out of date when they do. "Universe." [624] Real "anxiety of influence"362 is the poet's struggle with contemporary ideology. Development of underthought and overthought as a means of expressing a myth underneath an ideology. Henry V.363 Myth always in present tense: as a historical event the crucifixion of Jesus merges with other crucifixions: as myth it focusses on and challenges the reader. 1625] Not much interest in reviving gods or nature-spirits today: rather a feeling of a common consciousness engaged with total nature. Notion of common consciousness in all the serious religions and the scientists too—Schrodinger.364 Antithesis between religious and secular doesn't work any more, if it ever did. All religious phenomena have a secular aspect, and vice versa. [626] In proportion as subject-object antithesis becomes illusory, the intelligible, world connecting them becomes reality, a reality Stevens calls a supreme fiction. Interchange of reality and illusion in, e.g., The Tempest. Viconian principle of verum factum, reality in the world we make and not the one we stare at.365 [627] And, of course, there's the all-out principle that every verbal structure whatever has a centripetal and a centrifugal movement built into it, and that the centripetal movement is always to some degree literary, therefore all verbal structures have a literary aspect. [628] In the generic referential stage, when a work originally designed to be "non-literary" becomes more and more literary, like the Anatomy of Melancholy, the contextual references change in emphasis only: e.g., the "anatomy" features of Burton's book loom up in importance as compared with the medical contexts (Hercules de Saxonica and the rest).366

546

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[629] In my essay on Ruth367 I found that Ruth combines three recurring themes of narrative about females in the Bible. First, levirate marriage, archetype Tamar, mentioned at the end of Ruth [4:12]; second, late (often miraculously late) birth of son, associated here with Naomi in the phrase "a son is born to Naomi" [4:17]; third, the bride from the strange land, condemned by the Ezra-Nehemiah squad [as in Ezra 10; Nehemiah 13:23-7] but admitted, often grudgingly, if the woman gives up her "idols."368 [630! Moses married a "Cushite" [Exodus 2:21], probably a black and perhaps connected with the black bride of the Song of Songs; Joseph married Pharaoh's daughter Asenath [Genesis 41:45], to the dismay of the romancer who had to whitewash the story by talking about Asenath's miraculous conversion; Solomon married many foreign women and his mother was probably a "Hittite," whatever that means. [631] A parody of levirate marriage occurs in the story of Lot and his daughters, who engendered the Moabites and Ammonites respectively. Racist story of the worst kind, so the explicit statement that Ruth was a Moabitess must mean something (though of course the inevitable rabbi cropped up to explain that the law in Deuteronomy banishing Moabites and Ammonites from Israelite communion [Deuteronomy 23:3] didn't apply to women). [632] The beginnings of a scheme are forming in my mind: the male quests (and quest is something I haven't yet worked into my theory of primary concerns) is the descent to the belly of the monster. The archetype for this quest is derived from the fall story that was later added to the P creation story, which is the fall of the demonic, not the human. The J creation story is centered on woman as initiating both the fall and the redemption of man. [633] In Luke Elizabeth repeats the story of late birth [1:38-45], the Isaac, Rachel and Hannah themes. The birth of Christ from a Virgin isn't late particularly, but of course it's miraculous, and the Magnificat repeats the Hannah theme of social overturn.369 [634] Marvin Pope's commentary on the Song of Songs,370 for all its tremendous erudition and wealth of detail, is curiously disappointing on

Notes 52

547

some aspects, such as: why does the Bride seek her love, and why does she get beaten up? He hints, rather than says, that the descent into the garden of nuts and similar phrases are traces of underworld quests. But he does seem convinced that the destruction of Death by Love is what the whole poem points to. [635] In Tobit the bride, though in a foreign land, is Jewish: she's guarded by a jealous devil who kills all her suitors on their wedding night—seven in all [2:7-8]. In II Esdras 10 there's a parable about a mother who brings up a son and finds a wife for him, only to have him drop dead on his wedding night. It's explained that the mother is Zion, the son Jerusalem (or something related) and his death the destructions of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and others. Levirate marriage thus expands into the symbolism of Jerusalem being guided through the collapse of a series of protectors. Note the Gospel antitype in the Sadduccee [Sadducee] question asked of Jesus, who says marriage stops in the Kingdom of Heaven [Matthew 22:30]. [636] Tobit thus combines the levirate continuity theme with the male descent to belly of fish theme: out of the guts of the fish come the remedies that take care of the devil.

§ [637] The main point of this chapter (Three) is the shoving back of hypothetical metaphor through the erotic to the existential. For Theseus this last is lunacy [A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.7], and lunacy is certainly identification, of a kind. [638] It doesn't matter if the poet "is" "mad"—the quotes indicate how irrelevant this is. Madness is a social judgment by a mad society. That society can protect or seclude those who are helpless or dangerous to it, but it can't judge madness as such. The prophet is invariably mad, and society has no criteria for distinguishing the prophetic standards, the mantic from the manic. [639] It doesn't matter if the poet doesn't exist. Our greatest poets never existed: Homer, for example, and Moses (I don't know where the neoMoses point comes). The Newfoundland riddle song with its last line.

548

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

For all my distrust of interpretation, I wrote out eight sentences, each a paraphrase of what the line could conceivably mean. There's a ninth sentence: "it doesn't mean anything really: it's just a mistake in oral transmission." This happens to be true, and relevant to certain aspects of criticism, but for experiencing the line it is totally irrelevant. (Has no relevance whatever.)371 [640] Two levels of experience: the level of possession is obvious in painting, where one can buy and obtain exclusive possession of a picture. My Last Duchess: indicates why this level of experience doesn't necessarily go with high qualities of character.372 [641] As a technique of focussing the mind, literature is a medium of meditation. We haven't got as far as the mystics, who speak of becoming what they behold: we don't become a literature of literature,373 but we may become something else through it and by means of it. This starts with recognition: that we have probably lived through what Lear and Gloucester have lived through, though no doubt on a smaller scale and certainly unconsciously, for the most part. [642] (I think the whole-and-part exchange must belong in FOUR after all.) No it doesn't.37* [643] Anyway: I'm beginning to feel pretty sure that the coincidence between the four modes of chapter ONE and the modes in the first chapter of AC, reversing the historical operation, begin here. Perhaps I mean belong here. Stress one phase of the transition from ironic back to myth: the neo-descriptive fiction of Watt and Les gommes;375 the thingitself in Williams and Stevens' title;376 magical realism; Zen Buddhism and its doctrine that you wake up to see the same world; parody through LSD drug trips. All suggest a descriptive attitude in total consciousness. Well, practical criticism in fiction derived from me is mainly a matter of seeing the mythical skeleton inside the ironic or whatever body. Nostromo, e.g. That way, you realize that literature is always and everywhere polytheistic. Here are gods, says Heraclitus, lighting a fire; Heidegger, speaking to an audience 2500 years later, says the same thing of the water-judg [jug] on his desk.377 Recovery of the confiscate[d] gods.378

Notes 52

549

[644] Going the other way is a voyage into idolatry. Laforgue's Galatea;379 the doppelganger (i.e., the dreamer and his dream); Blake's Jerusalem.380 Going the right way is into metaphor, as Laforgue says in another passage I have only in English.381 Eventually we realize that literature with its gods leaves out another initiative, the uniting power of the personal and natural aspects of a metaphor. This is spirit. [645] One of the things relevant to the intensifying of consciousness, the growth from seeing into vision, is beauty, the sense of the purposelessness in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Whenever we insist on purpose we stick ourselves with another god. [646] Another thing is the gradual loss of the ego-self, as Laforgue's couplet implies.382 Why you can't say you're wise and good (that's probably in GC).

§ [647] Chapter Eight. I think the containing framework of this chapter is the U-shaped comic one as contrasted with its demonic parody, the tragic inverted U. The comic one runs from pre-history to post-history, from childhood to the recovery of childhood, and the intervening descent is to something like Boehme's Abyss.383 The tragic one is of course simply the cycle of empires, which follows the parabola-shape of birth, life and death. [648] Implicit in this contrast is the contrast of rebirth and resurrection, the former being the illusion (though in a different sense from above) of the latter. [649] Somehow or other the Oedipus complex is involved here, being (as Yeats never quite saw) the impetus of cyclical movement. The opposite of it starts with things like the Renaissance in Europe, the attempt to recreate the father-image, and ends with the epiphany of the Father, who's the fire in the fennel-stalk, the abyss of wrath at the bottom of the world who eventually breaks through to an apocalypse. The intervening stage is the resurrection, as a permanent dialectical change to another world. Only I wonder if the transfiguration doesn't precede it: the Word

55°

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

as Word reversing the metamorphosis of death, then becoming the rising of the Word as flesh, then becoming the full reality of the Word as Spirit. [650] The descent to nothingness takes me into Igitur, of course, and I still have to struggle with Boehme and his abyss-fire-wrath world. I looked up the furnace of Abraham in Smart and found two lines above it "For Fire hath this property that it reduces a thing till finally it is not."384 [651] If I'm right about the Transfiguration, of course, the Mutability Cantoes belong here. [652] Deliverance from duration or continuity: Igitur's ancestors; the family. Narcissus? {Return perhaps to Introduction}. The vacuum of kenosis in the control of community. [WT?] journey of sun at night.385

§ [653] Chapter Six: I want another paragraph or so on the mythical point of the Virgin Birth, a miraculous birth in the same league with Sarah's conception of Isaac, but essential to the birth of a God-Man for reasons different from all the crap about "purity." It has something to do with the androgynous ambiguity of the adam, female to God but male to Nature and to human society. [654] If I can work this out, then comes the short paragraph beginning: mother, virgin, wife: no Council ever said these were three persons in one substance, etc. Incidentally, what about the daughter-figure of Sophia, who in the Greek Athene myth is also a virgin birth? [655] Then the demonic parody of the white goddess. Start, perhaps, with Marvell's coy mistress stretching over the whole of time; then the revolts and self-conflicts like Shakespeare's discovering a new kind of power through the misery of his stupid boy's indifference ("I see a better state to me becomes").386 Then the Graves cycle, the rather different Mental Traveller cycle, and not impossibly Valery's Jeune Parque.387 [656] The Temple in the city.388

Notes 52

551

§ [657] Chapter Seven: Start with a recap of the four levels, explaining the difference between the myth itself and its perversion into an authoritarian ideology. [658] Then incorporate what you now have about Freud's future of an illusion, i.e. that only illusion can have a future.389 It's the absence of reality that is the reality of such things as the axis mundi. Something I missed here. [659] Now: I'm starting with an approximate "consciousness," which is intensified and brought to a focus with the mythology of ascent. [660] The four levels of time and space, ending in the real present and the real presence. [661] The hierarchical perversion puts a pure soul on top: Marvell's drop of dew.390 Not that that isn't there: it's the hierarchy that buggers it. [662] Central axis mundi myth the erect human body: the "purity" obsession with getting away from excretions, including those of love. Soul arising in all its bumless and gutless purity. Marvell is right:391 cf. the severed head in Mallarme and M. Teste392 (Zeno too). [663! Importance of satire in this connection: Swift and his shit;393 Lawrence if he'd only been a satirist. [664! Now switch to the tree metaphor, with what you have now, the introduction to the descent myth. Reinforcing instead of concentrating. [665] Blake's innocence-experience diagram as the key to the Schopenhauer etc. drunken boat world. [666] Expands (rarely, but cf. Shelley) to four levels, the bottom one an Ararat or Atlantis.394 [667] Now, somehow, I'm going to have to make a transition to the

552

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Frazer drama of the eaten God-Man. The metaphorical intensity of the paleolithic caves is one obvious point, and the metaphor of roots assimilating nourishment (this chapter is based on the primary concern of food). What's the demonic parody? It is, of course: it's the Christian development of it that isn't. And where does the symposium come? Is it just chance that the world's greatest symposium writer also gave us the Atlantis myth?395 [668] Buried treasure & conspiratorial group: Tom Sawyer, T.I. [Treasure Island] P.L. [Paradise Lost] i. Nazi myth.396

§ [669] I think the first part, probably at the end, should devote a long passage to The Tempest, which has all the points I can make and some more.397 My last lecture on The Tempest gave me some clues to it. [670] The search for the powers of man takes one through some very anti-Christian areas, such as Rilke and more particularly Rimbaud; but if one keeps the "spirit" principle in mind they do fit together. Emily Dickinson may have to be revived for this book because she knew the name of what poets are searching for, and didn't assume that it was captured by a church of any kind. [671] Aucassin says he'd rather go to hell because everything that makes life in the least worth living is quite obviously headed for there, whereas nobody wants heaven except a bunch of old crocks who are good for nothing else.398 The gossamer-light humor doesn't conceal the fact, or alter it rather, that many of the author's contemporaries would have said practically the same thing in grim earnest.399

§ [672] The first chapter is about the inherited universe in space: it's full of hierarchy and authority and order descending from above, repeated in the structures of authority in society. The second chapter deals with the Romantic revolution against this and the rise of an ascending rhythm.

Notes 52

553

[673] So the first chapter is informed by the conception of incarnation, the second by the conception of resurrection. [674] The weakest part of GC is the section on the gospel. I should have said there that Jesus' teachings are inseparable from the shape of his life, which is a U-shaped structure descending at incarnation and rising again at resurrection. This conception of incarnation is what distinguishes Christianity from Judaism or Islam, which stick at the prophetic stage, and therefore can't get beyond the panoramic apocalypse stage, or legal vision. (Neither, of course, can any form of official Christianity: that's what I have to extract from the establishment structures.) [675] At present we have capitalist and socialist societies, but the old notion of socialism as the fulfilment of capitalism, so sacrosanct in my youth, I don't believe in now. I think socialism as it got established was only the antithesis of capitalism, and the fulfilment is ahead of us. The core of the fulfilment is what we call democracy, which I see, at least at present, as a tension between politico-economic and cultural rhythms. [676] Every society today has gone or is about to go through a major revolution: the age of post-revolutionary societies is the reverse of that of the pre-revolutionary ones, very loosely. America, the new found land, is the oldest country in the world to have gone through a revolution; European countries followed it, with South America; then came the big Asian countries, Russia, China, and Japan, then India, and the last of all, the "Revolt of Islam," is still ahead of us. The determining factors of such revolutions are economic and political: they can be progressive if the society is lucky, or regressive, as in South America today or South Africa, if it isn't. [677] Culture goes in the opposite direction. In spatial metaphors, it decentralizes, forming relatively small units while political and economic units get bigger and more centralized. In temporal ones, it moves in the opposite direction from revolution toward a pre-revolutionary stage of consciousness, where Jesus and Socrates are still alive and where their ideas can still be dangerous—that is, toward a society where the speculative is still wide open on all sides. The tmhison des clercs occurs when intellectuals give way to their constant itch to be socially important, to help turn the wheel of history.

554

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[678] This conception of the move back to the pre-revolutionary connects with my point about previous works of culture as being still in, so to speak, an age of innocence, whatever their original social context. A society where Jesus is still alive is one where his body still speaks: where he's taken over somebody's flesh and prophesies. The written word is the buried seed, the apocryphon waiting to be unsealed. A book may be public property and still sealed, as the evil in Macbeth is to kids who read it in grade nine. [679] The pre-revolutionary aspect of culture was suggested in GC in connection with Plato in the Laws as the betrayer of Socrates and a persecuting Christianity as the betrayer of Christ.400 It's linked with my other point that the politico-economic establishment has a culture of its own which is not un-creative but is anti-creative, not because it wants or intends to be, not because it doesn't have creative people working for it, but because of its social function. [680] Hence in our society genuine culture is a counter-culture, not a sub-culture, as the latter either doesn't exist or gets quickly absorbed into the establishment culture. It is set up to fight the ascendancy of advertising, in our society, or propaganda, in socialist societies. Its ultimate aim is the creating of a counter-environment, the opposite, as I said in my FILLM paper,401 of the one being built by the architects of desolation, the anti-creators of a uniform world. [681] These points have to be introduced into TWO but they run all through the book and in particular form a transition to THREE, the Prometheus and law chapter, where Utopian models and the like are part of the theme. [682! I think I'm gradually blasting my way through to some kind of synthesis of pre- and post-Romantic universes: this point that modern writers have to be anti-establishment for all the wrong-headedness that results, instead of speaking for it like Spenser or remaining neutral like Shakespeare, is a clue. Of course in this form it's still overstated. [683] More important is the fact that the spatial authoritarian universe is a manifestation of incarnation, and the revolutionary one a manifestation of resurrection. Now I have to figure how those conceptions are geared to the perspective of the gospel, and how they fulfil themselves as

Notes 52

555

panoramic and participating apocalypses respectively. Note that Chapter One, in this scheme, is establishment of order (Creation), and Chapter Two exodus or revolt. [684] Perhaps this also belongs: the authoritarian universe goes with the desperate effort to preserve a definitive interpretation of sacred scripture. The modern universe follows another rhythm entirely. Montaigne said his book was consubstantial with himself, a speaking or written double of himself.402 The dream of all one's work forming a single structure of this kind—Burton, Wordsworth's cathedral, Valery—goes very deep. It's linked with the sense of the apocryphon not so much as a hidden book as a hidden aspect of an inexhaustible book. Kabbalism says the Torah contains all possible books; similar things are said about the Koran somewhere in Islamic traditions; in Christianity there's the last verse of John.4031 suppose it's a metaphor derived from the alphabet, the potential source of all utterance (God as Alpha and Omega). [685! Obviously I should return to the idea of calling part one, the first two chapters, "The Cycle of the Word," because that's exactly what it describes. The Word rises bodily in the Resurrection and mentally in the Ascension, when he time-travels into the past. The Spirit descends with the gift of tongues, the cure for Babel and the starting-point of the panoramic apocalypse: the phenomena corresponding to the Resurrection and Ascension of the Spirit are still beyond me.

§ [686] I don't know whether this should be introduced in One or could wait for Three: from the two levels of nature, the paradisal and the "fallen," there develops an intermediate order which is that of traditional human society. This is the one that gradually takes over from the paradisal, which has disappeared, and comes to be substituted for it. So when the Romantic rearrangement comes, the lowest or fallen level becomes man incorporated with nature and part of its often destructive movement—natura naturans. The intermediate level then becomes the ark floating on the deluge. It's only assimilated to natura naturata by virtue of its imitation of the mechanical movements of the sky. [688] I still want to keep my two levels, the lower one of the legal vision, where man is still in the subject-object rut and thinks of God as up there,

556

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

and the higher one of the pre-fall vision of freedom and consciousness that transcends law. The latter, according to the prophets, is accompanied by the regeneration of nature: if we try to go native prematurely we get caught up in the swirl of natura naturans and are destroyed like Pentheus in the Bacchae.404 [698] Legal vision turns on the work-play distinction: work is energy expended for a further end, and in rigorous religious set-ups that further end can only be life after death. So legal obligations are sacramental imitations of all that pie in the sky. Hence the horror of sour religiosity of art and all achievements of the playing imagination. [689] This (yellow) chapter is "Prometheus Unbound," the opening chapter of Part Two, and corresponding to the conception of law. Hence its main theme is Utopian or model thinking about society. One central theme is the difference between conservatives like Burke, who regard the facade of society as indicating its real form, and radicals like Paine, who regard the facade as an ideological mask concealing a power-structure. Ultimately, of course, the whole four-level universe begins to look like the concealing mask of a power structure which has its roots in nature. Hence the Darwinian development and its Malthusian rationalizations. [690] Anyway, "natural law" is a conception attempting to assimilate moral law to the order of nature. A good deal of what I'm looking for is in the actual theory of law—in Bentham, for example. I need Halevy's book405 here. The key metaphor is, as in GC, individuals incorporated into a larger body, as in the Hobbes frontispiece.4061 suppose my conception of the educational contract is the solution here: if so, Rabelais does belong in this chapter.

§ [691] I have naturally found Sparshott's violent critique of The Great Code407 very disheartening reading, and have wondered ever since if I should simply abandon the idea of a second volume as something that perhaps always was a mirage. But that would be weak. The cliche about such things is not to take it personally, but it depends on what one has to take. The remarks about an old man's book, where the word "senile" is

Notes 52

557

being suppressed with so much difficulty, remind me of how little time I have to accomplish anything at all now, and surely one hardly needs such reminders. The main line of what he says is already in my own introduction, of course, as Peter Richardson, who liked the book quite as little, remarked.408 One reason for writing the book I did that isn't in the introduction is that the legend of the book was becoming intolerable: publishing The Great Code might disappoint people who were looking for something definitive, but that was better than being crippled for life in the way that Woodhouse was.409 [692] Certainly the first chapter, in particular, is full of loose-jointed generalizations, but considering the quite genuine novelty of what I had to do I don't think the book is wrecked by them. If I do get a second volume done, I could approach HBJ, if they haven't completely gone over to hippopotami by then, about the possibility of publishing the two volumes together and revising the first volume. I can see that revision is needed, but I couldn't see it at the time. I need both more material for the weaker parts and cutting of the more reckless statements. Perhaps the intellectual atmosphere will be different when the second volume is ready, if it is. Blake said, of course, that if the fool were to persist in his folly he would become wise:410 I wish he'd added that there's some chance that other people may become wiser too. And then, of course, there's the fact that the book as it is is quite obviously not regarded by hundreds of people as "appallingly bad": it found its public, and surely that's evidence that such a book was needed. [693! Sparshott is a hysteric.411

§ [694] My present view of the second volume is that, like the first, it will have eight chapters divided into two parts with four chapters each. The second part I think I have at least the titles for. It's to be called "The Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead," and its four chapters are to be called, I think in the given order, Prometheus Unbound, Eros Regained, Adonis Revived, and Hermes Unsealed. [695] The first chapter, after introducing again the conception of the mythological universe, will outline the pre-Romantic four levels of be-

558

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

ing, and then show how by way of the shift from the third level of experience to a conception of natura naturans, which placed natura naturata on a new level of experience imitating the upper level of stars, now turned from a symbol of divinity to one of alienation, the postRomantic order turned the earlier one on its head. I have all the material I want for this in my graduate course, except that I have to reread Dante, more particularly the Paradiso. [696] The second chapter will deal with the framework in time, as the first one deals with middle earth, or the framework in space. I don't like the word framework much. Here the important thing is that Biblical time concentrates on beginnings and ends, and that all beginnings repeat or anticipate the Incarnation, and all ends repeat or anticipate the Resurrection. One preserves the conservative aspect of the chain of being in the descent of law and order, the other the revolutionary aspect of Biblical religion in the emergence of a new body from the depths. [697] The third and fourth chapters are much vaguer in my mind at present, and as I see it they constitute the main difficulty of the book. The third chapter goes beyond space into the conception of interpenetration, the fourth one beyond time into the conception of "mystical dance," or time as interiorly possessed contrapuntal movement. Perhaps I'd need explicitly musical examples for it: it would be nice if I could fulfil a lifelong ambition and actually get something original said about music. I suppose the hero's quest, which normally goes through death to a new life, would belong here (i.e. in the time chapter). The third chapter would incorporate the Biblical symbolism of going back to the wandering pastoral life, as in the 23rd Psalm. [698] The second part of the book would repeat these themes, and one of its organizing conceptions is the emergence of the human fourth through the authoritarian Trinity, as part of the filling in of the rising rhythm. The Prometheus chapter outlines the authoritarian conception of order and the revolutionary rhythm that begins to fight against it from the i8th century on, passing through Milton on liberty as part of the descending movement. Eros deals with the earlier poetic insistence on the central importance of Eros as against the exclusive Christian emphasis on Agape. Agape is really the shadow of Venus, metamorphosed into the Holy Spirit, and the traditionally homosexual Jesus.

Notes 52

559

[699] Again, the Adonis and Hermes chapters are much vaguer: Adonis would have to incorporate the whole dying-god sequence, the psychology of sacrifice, the containing within the womb of nature, and perhaps the conception of reincarnation, the cyclical conception of time expanded to include human life, and adopted almost everywhere outside the Biblical tradition. The Bible has it metaphorically. As for Hermes, that's the climax, and I suppose it modulates the Logos from the national to the linguistic. [700] To bring off the book I have to work through my graduate course and get its underlying shape absolutely clear. At present it outlines the pre-Romantic thesis and post-Romantic antithesis and leaves it hanging in the air: I've never really worked out the further developments that are potentially present in the material I have. [701] Michael [Michel] Foucault has written about the control of a space of visibility as the central idea of 19th c. hospitals and the like, and cites in particular Bentham's invention of a Panopticon.412 Ramifications include 1984 and its "telescreen." The idea of a watching God, developed partly to inspire children with guilt feelings about masturbation, is closely bound up with the sense of shame about sex, the need for covering the body which Adam felt when he realized that God was looking for him and wanted to see him. The etymology of dragon means the all-seer. The God who watches is a demonic God; as I've said, the true God is invisible because he does the seeing. But what does he see? Something to do with seeing to recreate and not to judge, much less punish. The taboo about seeing God is of course the reverse side of this. [702] I suppose that's part of the Hermes complex, having to do with wisdom. The Eros part I suppose turns on those three books, de Rougemont's on the Liebestod, Nygren's on Eros and Agape, and d'Arcy's on the Mind and Heart of Love.413 The first is wildly wrong, the second stupid, and the third half-assed. I don't think reading will help much: the organizing idea of Part Two is the infiltration of man into the three persons of the Trinity: it's no good seeing the redemption of man as an interaction among the three persons of the Trinity, man being crucially involved and yet unable to participate. But I wonder just how far the notion of rebirth as human would take me in studying the Adonis-Adam complex: I've always thought the reincarnation bit was horseshit, and I still think it must be in a crude literal form.

560

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[703] The first chapter has to make the point at once that while a mythology is a human insulation against nature, a sort of cultural skin, we can't go on to say it's illusion and the nature outside it reality. Every age of science has corresponded with the mythological world-view contemporary with it. [704] Two chapter headings I've always been attracted to are "The Cycle of the Word" and "The Cycle of the Spirit." Don't know if they fit the present chapters two and three or not. I'm obviously prescribing myself an immense reading program in English literature particularly, including the rereading of things like that De Quincey Mail Coach essay. For instance, I should check the opening of the Cursor Mundi about the intellectualized God as the source of light.414 [705] I suppose a certain amount still has to be said about man's desire to live in hell and his concentrated creation of it. Also my point about Dante on Edward I and the perverted morality of the "strong man," as in Shakespeare's history plays, as examples of devil-worship in ordinary society—I have to make it much clearer than I did in GC that the devil is frequently confused or identified with God. [706] The circularity of natural law is not the only point about it: there's also the superstition about positive law: that man simply has to be given a lot of crap to do to keep him out of mischief. I've heard Jews rationalize the Torah precepts on this basis. [707] The psychology of sacrifice comes in what's beginning to look like a structural element in the book: the ascending gyre of resurrection and the descending one of incarnation. The theme of this is set in the first chapter, of course, but has to run all through the book: perhaps the Adonis chapter is the one where it comes into focus. [708] Naturally I'll doubtless keep shifting things around, and perhaps the four-level chapter is really two, being concerned with the descending and ascending gyres of Incarnation and Resurrection. Or the first chapter could simply outline the two schemes and deal with things like the Mutabilitie Cantoes, the social symbolism of the Jacobean masque, the last line of Epitaphium Damonis,415 and other elements from my graduate course. I suppose the whole Song of Songs tradition, and its many

Notes 52

561

echoes in Elizabethan literature—I have some among my mimeographed sheets—might go more naturally in the third chapter, and be one of the structural beams of the imagery. Its modern developments in Lawrence and others would make it pretty conspicuous. [709! The essential point is, if the second setup in [is] the first turned upside down, what's the new scheme, or have any hints of it yet emerged? Anyway, I'll need to read Dante pretty early on, and perhaps Hooker or somebody on natural law. I've just reread Ariosto, so I shan't have to do that: Tasso is still to come. [710] In the Romantics, I wonder if my bewilderingly complex schematism for Sartor Resartus, and corresponding ones I haven't worked out for Matthew Arnold and others, belong anywhere. I've always been fascinated by the "galvanic cycle" and other such phrases in De Quincey's Mail Coach essay,416 and might pick up something there. I hope the book will provide a motive for reading a lot of stuff I've never been able to get through before. [711] In a Renaissance painting the frame defines the shape of the painting; in a typically Baroque painting the frame contains its expansion out of the canvas. I think the natum natumns business really gets going in the seventeenth century. What's important about the Mail Coach essay is the corresponding expansion of the upper order of nature in the new setup— the world of experience and mechanism, or persuaded into mechanism by the Newtonian conception of the stars. Actually I may be able to boil down all my history-of-English-literature notions into this book. [712] One often sees medieval pictures of the Coronation of the Virgin, and some of them have not just the Son but the Father flanking him and a dove over her head. I've said that one of my major themes is the entry of the human fourth into the Trinity [par. 698], and of course the human fourth would be symbolically female. This lines me up with the Jungians, but I can't help that: some of their intuitions are sound, despite all the tedious preaching they do. [713] I originally wanted this second book to follow the sequence in the fifth chapter of The Great Code,417 and some of that sequence obviously has to reappear. In the wisdom phase the two poles are the wise man

562

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

who's inside the intellectual establishment, and the fool who's outside it. The transition to prophecy comes with the sense of the positive fool, the man who deliberately places himself outside society to get a different perspective on it—Blake's Rintrah. There are a lot of Biblical references to prophets as fools, and I have the list somewhere in the previous notes. Such people form a powerful negative focus in society: John the Baptist retreats into the wilderness and people swarm out to find out why he doesn't like them. [714! The Classical equivalent of this positive-fool figure is the cynic, the pivotal point of the Menippean satire, with its ramifications into Athenaeus and others. Note that there seems to be no such figure in any of the Platonic dialogues. But already in Anglo-Saxon literature we have examples of the Solomon-Saturn dialogue, of the type that finally emerges full-blown in Diderot's Neveu de Rameau.418 The archetype is the mocker of the gods—note how this modulates in the O.T. with Elijah's ridiculing of Baal and his priests [i Kings 18]. The thaumaturge figure has a different origin, but, by way of his smith connections, not totally separate. [715] There aren't many leads to the third and fourth chapters in the Bible, but some related questions might help: for instance, what is the conception of time and space implied in prayer? Also the N.T. references to the O.T. as having been delivered by angels: angels, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, belong in a pure presence and don't have to move in space, their real or universal form being the Holy Spirit, who, being everywhere at once,419 is the pure principle of interpenetration. [716] Clearly this book has to be a combination of The Great Code and The Secular Scripture, and some of my descent-through-twins imagery enters it. The second chapter in particular would have to rehash Joe Campbell and Rank420 on the hero's quest, and go from there to evolutionary myths of one increasing purpose. That doesn't take us away from the Bible: the typological structure of the Bible takes care of it, as I've shown. So I may have to look again at Bergson and Bernard Shaw and Lloyd Morgan on emergent evolution—stuff I always thought was pretty dreary and unrewarding, besides being based on a false analogy between biological evolution and historical progress. [717! The Adonis chapter, as I've said, would have to take the reincarna-

Notes 52

563

tion bit seriously, because it is everywhere outside the Bible, and is a natural expansion of the cyclical rhythm of poetic imagery. The metaphorical reincarnation in the Bible will be a tricky bit of explaining: the Bible thinks of Incarnation, and the historical process which is.tied to it, as emerging out of the cycle of repetition, not, as in the Far East, separated from it. Hence its conception of reincarnation itself doesn't have to be so crude. Anyway, Adonis is subservient to a female figure who is, as I said, the human fourth joining the Trinity [pars. 698, 712], a sort of Eve with the Lilith principle incorporated in her and the negation cast out. [718] This means that there's a cyclical female, the white goddess, and a dialectical typological one, the one I've called the black bride. Also a cyclical male, the dying god whose role Jesus assumes, and a human Spirit linking itself with the divine one. [719] Eros as sexual love, Prometheus as human liberty, Hermes as human wisdom, are all part of a human response that lights a fire which burns its divine opposite without burning it up. Hermes would involve what Jung apparently thinks the alchemists are trying to say: that wisdom, like love and power, has a human basis that's redeemable and in fact must be awakened if the divine work is to do its stuff. I've been reading a book on alchemy by a Jungian woman who promises to explain why an apparently sane man would write a book like Mysterium Conjunctionis [Coniunctionis].421 So far she hasn't. Probably Frances Yates would give me more clues. [720] There seem to be an extraordinary number of words in the Bible translated "nothing" in the AV. I wonder if I could find my distinction in them between nothing as not anything and nothing as something called nothing, which is its exact opposite. The following dialogue, for example, makes sense: A. There is nothing to be afraid of. B. Wrong. There is nothing to be afraid of.422 [721] The third and fourth chapters, as I see them now, involve a comprehensive study of the kind of poetry that the French symbolistes inaugurated: the use of metaphor as the grammar of a fourth age of language. In English, the closest to this movement is probably Hart Crane, and I should try to approach the French through him or someone

564

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

else in English—it's not the difficulty with the language but with the context: I simply don't know how French literature as a whole echoes and reverberates. Certainly in his personal life Crane was one of those "prophetic" types who smash up their lives and write poetry out of the fragments, descending from the cynic at the symposium, the Saturn or nephew of Rameau outside the wisdom of the establishment.423 That's the kind of thing I'm looking for. His life reads as though he'd swallowed a poltergeist, and of course in the long run evil spirits try to destroy everything genuine in the place they inhabit. The poetry that eludes them, however, has a powerful out-of-Jonah's-whale vitality. [722] In an essay called "General Aims and Theories," Hart Crane speaks of a logic of metaphor "which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thoughtextension."424 That I've more or less figured out on my own. But when he says: "It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but selfevident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward,"425 he's saying the kind of thing I'm now looking for. The poem itself as new word—that's a bullseye. It's of course what I mean by a metaphor-cluster. As word, I suppose it could also be a letter, or rather a hieroglyph, like Crane's own broken tower poem,426 which is one of the Tarot trumps, whether he knew or cared about that or not. Perhaps this is really the thing I'm getting at in my "archetype" theory, which I admit is a pretty heterogeneous mixture of things at present. One could even call this hieroglyph a mandala, except that that again is a Jungian term, and the only mandalas Jung recognizes are geometrical doodlings expressing the rather static symmetry his individuation process seems to go in for. [723] It is only in its centripetal aspect that this poem-as-word is really new. In its centrifugal aspect it repeats a word out of the past, like the broken tower, which echoes dozens and dozens of other poems from that point of view. It's new as utterance, as this poem, not as a poem. So all my points about the repeatability of myth and the like appertain to the language of the past recreated: the whole centripetal, this-poem aspect of every poem, no matter how long ago it was written, relates to the future and the as yet uncreated tongue. Many years ago young Woodberry [Woodbury],427 when a student of mine, spoke of the trivial-

Notes 52

565

ity of "archetype-spotting," and I've always tried to recognize that. I'm beginning to recognize more clearly the identity of what it doesn't consider—I mean my repetition approach. Within the last century or more, and starting with the symbolisme movement, poetry began to get increasingly self-conscious about the centripetal this-poem approach. I think I must be verging on chapter four here, the escape from time. [724] At the same time I don't know how much of the centripetal meaning can really be communicated in criticism: I think still that it's really the direct experience of literature that eludes critical formulation. Hart Crane explained his Melville poem brilliantly to Harriet Monroe,428 but that explanation was a matter of filling in the quantum jumps, so to speak, between the metaphors. With other poems he just gave up and said the whole poem has to affect you, and that's all. [725] I haven't yet said that the Spenglerian dialectic is an essential part of modern poetry, and therefore has to come somehow into the book. On the principle that every failed spiral is a cycle, his account of history is a more cyclical one than he intended it to be. The other side of Spengler is of course the Marxist theory of revolution, which fastens on two specific examples, the English lyth century one and the French 1789 one, as models for a world-wide revolution, of which the Russian was the first. But this model is the antithesis of the capitalist revolution, and historically the Soviet revolution ended the antithetical phase: China tried to ignore this and assume that the same conditions held, but they no longer did. The Marxist model is closely related to my post-Romantic worldview, and we're in the age of an interpenetrating model now. Incidentally, the age of Augustus-Jesus was the trough of a Spenglerian transition—I'm not sure if his "Magian" theory429 accounts for it or not. I've always felt that Toynbee was one up on Spengler there. [726] Wonder how far the authoritarian model of order and law descending from the old man on high is a rationalization of the downward pull of an organism's life as it gets into its later phases? [727] The N.T. contrasts the prophetic hermit John the Baptist, who withdrew from society, with Jesus who came among men eating and drinking. I suppose it's Paradise Regained that exhibits Jesus as a Rintrah figure, totally withdrawn from the human world in order to get a per-

566

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

spective on it. He completes his prophetic mission at that point, and enters on the gospel. [728] One theme in Chapter Three would be the idolatry of place: the desire of Peter to remain forever on the mountain of transfiguration is mentioned with sympathy but condemned [Matthew 17:4-9]. Similarly with the lotus-eater motif: Housman's inertia of clay and movement of blood.43o [729] Perhaps I could approach Chapter Three by saying that all narrative (the main subject of Two) is displacement because the central thing is intuited. One tries to get beyond the narrative by studying the simultaneous metaphor-complex. How to do that without returning to spatial categories is the question. The spatial layout is the beginning of the quest, the so far unmoved; at the end of the quest we return to the same point renewed by the quest. The starting point is the tree of knowledge; the point at the end is the same tree metamorphosed into the tree of life. [730] Hierarchies create local meaning, but increase randomness in general— at least I think that's what information theory says. The great preand post-Romantic antithesis consists of a hierarchy followed by a reversed hierarchy, though the second is admittedly more elusive in its moral rankings. But the apocalyptic vision in the long run isn't a hierarchy—that's only the traditional view of it, adapted to a class ascendancy. It's a vision of plenitude and interpenetration, which could be pure randomness in its demonic form, or whatever the opposite of entropy is in its apocalyptic one. But of course polarizing the demonic against the apocalyptic creates another hierarchy. So goes the round. [731] This perhaps should have been in GC: Paul's "Christ in me" [Galatians 2:20] is not "I am Christ," but its exact opposite. The latter is the demonic parody of the former. The ego is a lost soul: this means that everybody has a lost soul, and should make sure that it gets damn well good and lost.

§ [732] One of the most familiar and best told stories of the Old Testament tells how the prophet Elijah encountered five hundred priests of Baal on

Notes 52

567

Mount Carmel and challenged them to see if they could get their god to break a drought. They made a tremendous din, shouted and danced and cut themselves with knives as a rain charm, while Elijah mocked them and remarked that Baal was probably asleep or on a journey. Finally, after all their efforts had failed to rouse him, Elijah addressed a prayer to Jehovah, fire descended from the sky, burned up an offering soaked with water, and all the people fell on their knees shouting "Jehovah is God." Elijah then called for a total massacre of all the priests of Baal ("let not one of them escape") and then proceeded to more prayers to break a drought. Out of a clear sky there finally came a tiny cloud, and eventually there was a deluge of rain as Elijah ran in triumph ahead of the king's chariot back to Samaria [i Kings 18]. [733! I like to imagine that there was one prophet of Baal who escaped from the carnage by slipping away quietly before the final demonstration. He had far greater visionary powers than his colleagues, and had caught a glimpse of Baal sleeping far away, perhaps on top of Mount Hermon. The noise troubled his sleep; he opened one eye, muttered something that sounded like "the hell with all that crap," and went back to sleep again. The priest went back to his home in Phoenicia and built another temple to Baal, whom he now knew to be the true God. Who ever heard of a real God jumping around on cue to do stunts like a sorcerer's apprentice (which is all such a God could be)?431 [734! This seems to contradict everything in the Bible about the incessant activity of God in human life; yet of course the Elijah scene was never repeated, and it is conceivable that he thought it a mistake. The scene is a type of the New Testament episode of the two disciples saying to Jesus, after being rejected by some community, "Shall we call down fire from heaven on them?" Jesus answers, in effect, don't be silly. Since Elijah, thousands of people have been murdered for their beliefs, but God has left them all on the cross or at the stake without a sign. One of the disadvantages of aging is that memories come out of the past of experiences that one would have been quite as well off without: one of them, for me, has been the memory of an evangelical hymn that went, as I recall, something like this: A better day is coming, The morning draweth nigh . . .

568

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990 When God the Lord shall listen To every plaintive sigh, And stretch his hand o'er every land With justice by and by.432

Translation: right now our God seems to be asleep or on a journey, but just you wait: before long he'll wake up and really show you something. But whatever is being projected into the future is clearly of secondary importance. The God that is being worshipped right now is sleepy Baal, not jumpy Jehovah. [735] There is a kabbalistic doctrine that God created the world by withdrawing from it, and certainly some such movement seems to be implied in the Genesis account itself. The culminating act of creation is the Sabbath, the day of rest on which the creation became separated from and objective to its creator. The fall of Adam was signalized by the corresponding movement on man's part: Adam was afraid and hid himself. Since then, God and man have tended, with many lapses, it is true, to respect one another's privacy. The motto placed in Puritan nurseries, "Thou God seest me," is merely one more item in the impressive body of evidence that the God being worshipped was really Satan. Satan the accuser, going to and fro in the world and walking up and down in it [Job 1:7!. [736] Why did man, or God, or whoever it was, bother to write the Bible anyway? We get the answer at the very end, in Revelation: the real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come. Readers of Orwell's 1984 will remember the pathos of the opening, where Winston Smith finds a real notebook and hides it away in the one corner of his room that the telescreen can't reach, to start a diary: his one move out of the hell of the all-seeing eye. The Bible is largely a book of catastrophes, of the disasters caused by the determination of God to interfere in the pattern of human life. It is also a book of refuge and exile, a book of absence, and to that extent a book of comfort. Those poor bastards of Jews and Christians who insist on taking up its burden of the presence of God are denied this comfort. The worst thing we can say of God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself.

Notes 52

569

[737] Introduction. Conception of a mythological universe. Projection of Biblical universe on Western theology: the four levels. Human destiny as a purgatorial progress from level three to level two. The sacramental progress: Dante's Purgatorio. Education, morality, sacraments, virtue, obedience—the be-a-good-boy way. The chain of being: upward and downward movements. The material of the Bar-Han lecture, climaxing with the Transfiguration stanza in FQ.433 A section on Shakespeare's Tempest. [738] (I think the principle of the positive analogy has to come before this: the Eros analogy, the creation analogy, etc.) [739] That's probably two chapters. They turn Biblically on the conceptions of creation as the awakening of consciousness, of resurrection as transfiguration, of the deluge as symbolizing the separation of the two orders of nature—in other words as the final form of the Fall. [740] Now you can begin fresh with the Blake upside-down pattern, moving outwards to other Romantic patterns. The "drunken boat" construct, and how it carries out the above view of the deluge. Incidentally, it completely confirms the rather tentative identification of Leviathan with the present fallen world. [741! Next follows the links between the two patterns. How the analogy of Eros transforms the "fallen" level of experience into the post-Rousseau conception of man as a child of nature rather than of tradition and custom. [742] How the demonic level is transformed into the descent quest in its original form, with the future (Prometheus as forethought) given a purpose and some imaginative visibility. [743] How the second level of paradise is transformed into the redemption of nature: this is where Ruth and the redeemed bride imagery goes. [744] How the first level becomes first an alienation symbol, then the

57O

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

hermetic recovery of intellect. Note that projection and recovery of myth are the main themes of the book. The medieval four levels is a projection, not the inevitable way of looking at the Bible. [745] Then follows an account of the Biblical symbolism connected with what I call the rising of the spectres. Along with its documentation in contemporary literature. [746] So it looks like: Part One, the two projections; Part Two the four resources. Eight chapters. Chapter One: the four levels; Two, their treatment with the positive analogies and their culmination in the Tempest; Three, the Blakean upside-down pattern; Four the drunken boat in modern culture. Part Two are [is] the regular Eros-Prometheus-Adonis-Hermes sequence. I suspect the Trinity may be an adaptation (that is, another projection) of the Bible to the Indo-European pattern of red, white and blue man.

§ [747] What a mythological or imaginative universe is: the verbal form of the world man builds for himself out of nature. [748] Usually based on certain inferences derived from sources given a special authority and sanction by the society, as the Bible was for Western culture. [749] Have to understand metaphorical or symbolic associations, e.g. of nature with the female, which get into life only through a perversion of the "literal" meaning. [750] Biblical mythology characterized by, first, a rebellion against the mother-dominated religions of pre-Biblical cultures. Why they tended to go in a cyclical direction. [751] This cyclical direction continues in Classical mythology even after the centre of gravity has shifted from earth to sky (natura naturans to natura naturata). Stoic cycles. Biblical mythology marks a definite beginning and end. Creates its own problems, because the reason for it—the revolutionary nature of the Exodus-begotten mythology—has

Notes 52

571

to be kept suppressed when Christianity becomes the bulwark of established authority. [752] Sky-father and artificial creation myth chosen over the earth-mother sexual one. But centering on the conception of an omnipotent will, not a will bound to a natural cycle. [753] The Cursor Mundi and the view of God as a sky and sun god. The symbolism of stars. The two levels of nature, unspoiled and spoiled. The destiny of man as purgatorial, an ascent from the lower to the higher level of creatureliness. Initiative however always comes from above. [754] Demonic world as underneath, the old fallen oracles conveying the forbidden knowledge of the future. Virgil's descent in Aeneid VI infernalized in Dante. [755] The fragile and threatened pearl from the upper world: Marvell's drop of dew.434 [756] Poetic insistence on Eros, left out of the Christian synthesis. Yet assimilation even of this to the Eden-Song of Songs symbolism. The description of the female body in Love's Martyr.435 [757] That Fidessa sonnet, and the Campion poem.436 The Mutabilitie Cantoes and Nature's decision there.437 The descent of authority in the Nativity Ode.438 Subordination of the aesthetic canon to the existential one: the High Church imagery in II Penseroso. [758] Shakespeare: the subordination of the diva triformis in MND [A Midsummer Night's Dream], though still powerful enough to transform the action.439 Tempest: a recreation of the Aeneid VI descent theme: vision of past and future. [759] The Eros cult in poetry as the imaginative turning point to Romanticism, where natura naturans comes back into its own. The important thing is not sexual love but the affinity of man to nature. The transformation of the demonic descent into Promethean imagery of the future and Atlantis imagery of reclaimed land follows but is inseparable from this.

572

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[760] Daily bread: quote the Drop of Dew. Quote Vaughan's Regeneration.440

§ [761] Introduction: Summary of the argument of The Great Code, then a statement that its fifth chapter contains the ground plan for the present book. That involves a study of Western culture, more particularly English literature, as carrying on the seven/eight elements of revelation described there. That doesn't mean treating Western history as though it were continually progressive, of course, but seeing elements of all these factors in every age. [762] The book following is to be divided into three parts. Part One, containing the first two chapters, is to be called "The Cycle of the Word," and more or less summarizes my present graduate course. Chapter One, "The Mythical Universe in Space" (I shan't need to explain what I mean by a mythical universe if the introductory summary is properly done), contains the traditional four-level up-and-down world. From there I proceed much as I do in my course, except that there should be more emphasis on the problem represented by the word "beauty." Below man, in this universe, are the images of the work he does on the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms below him: these in turn, the sheepfold, the garden and the city, become images of the world to be regained. But this world was there at the beginning in Eden, hence we can see in Nature some of the vestiges of the original creation. The traditional one, the harmony-producing starry spheres, won't work imaginatively any more, except in occasional flashes like the Hopkins poem about the firefolk in the air.441 But the curious ambiguity in "beauty," which means both the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor and a pretty girl in a bikini, indicates an ambivalence in our attitude to the world: we insist that Nature really is beautiful (here and there), and not just because we're conditioned to see it that way.442 [763] Hence such things as the argument from design, projecting the creative power of man on God or Nature and saying how cute; the arrogant humanism that tries to sweep away the projection and deify the activities of the present shit-and-corruption psychotics we now call human beings (which of course invariably turns from a master-psychology

Notes 52

573

into a slave one); the sense of the paradox of change, which is essential to beauty and happiness and yet in this world has the uniform direction of death. [764] The second chapter deals with the rising or Romantic part of my course, the expansion of the one vulnerable aspect of the older construct, Eros or the participation of man with nature, into the world as will, with the idea on top and the technological achievement below. It's here, I think, that I introduce my idea about culture's having not only a decentralizing spatial aspect but a movement in time, during the present revolutionary period, back to the pre-revolutionary, the world where Socrates and Jesus are still alive, and still potentially dangerous. Also the fact that the descending rhythm, for the Word, is incarnation and the ascending one resurrection. [765! Part Two is called "The Awakening of the Spectres of the Dead," and deals with the way in which four aspects of culture played down by church authority have expanded our perspective. The first chapter, the third in the book, and the one corresponding to law in GC, is about Utopian or model-thinking in society, the role of the individual as the actualizer of freedom, the Arcadian vision of a regenerate nature, and the like. The application to today turns on the fact that socialism didn't turn out to be the fulfilment of capitalism, but only its antithesis, and keeps returning to capitalism, as in the state capitalist set-up of Soviet Russia. The Michael-Satan dispute now is not over who controls the means of production, but over the body of Nature. [766] This chapter is to be called "Prometheus Unbound." Its model or archetype is the law-gospel dialectic of the Bible, not that I'd be ready to introduce the gospel at that point. The fourth chapter, corresponding to wisdom, is "Eros Regained," and it deals with the way that medieval poets insisted on Eros, thereby forcing Western culture to consider the participating role of man in nature, and hence finally achieving the Romantic overturn of the whole authoritarian construct. My ideas on this, which run from the Romaunt of the Rose (along with the PlatoDante sublimation of Eros, of course) to D.H. Lawrence and such things as Yeats' perfect-fuck poem on Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,443 incorporates my conception of redeemable man as woman, Blake's "lapsed Soul"444 as the original union of sexes, the difficulties caused by a "pure"

574

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

or homosexual Jesus, and is probably the key chapter of the book—very likely the one there'll be the most howls about.445 [767] The next chapter, "Adonis Revived," corresponds to prophecy, and I haven't a clue to what it will be about. I suspect it has to do with the revival and renewal in life, more especially in the cycles of nature. Here, perhaps, is my use of Spengler, if he gets in; perhaps too this is the place to introduce something that may not get into Chapter Two. This is the extent to which mythical history shrinks to actual history and then grows to myth again through science fiction or whatever. In my graduate course I talk about the Geoffrey of Monmouth intrusion into English history, about Ariosto, about the use of the Trojan War in English literature, and these are separate bits of information: maybe they could be integrated into a single vision that starts with my cycle in the epic stuff, fastening on Virgil, whose starting-point renewed theme and descend446 halfway through makes him a fascinating figure. Maybe Rabelais goes here too. Well, the Grail romances may be, as Waite suggests, a mythical history with its own kind of authority447—though this seems to be verging on the next chapter. Anyway, my hunches about the Tolkien trilogy as a genre (Eddison before him, then Frank Herbert, Zelazny, Ursula LeGuin and others) which is within the Ariosto conventions may go here.448 [768] The third part of the book deals, very approximately, with the worlds beyond space and time respectively, if by that time "respectively" is still a possible kind of approach. The third part is to be called "The Cycle of the Spirit," and deals with what corresponds to Incarnation and Resurrection in the Word—"inspiration" at the beginning and some kind of upward transformation or metamorphosis at the end. Marvels and mysteries would go here, if I knew any. If the Person they're offered to wants these chapters, they'll no doubt get written.449 The mystery of inspiration is not what is popularly thought to be that, but the whole mandala question, as Jung would call it: the question of how far our frame of seeing produces what is believed to be there. The mystery of metamorphosis of course brings me around to the matter of what speaks to us across our own death, which I dodged in GC. [769! Incidentally, Chapter Six, corresponding to the gospel, should make it clear how weak my section on the gospel in GC is. It's said that the

Notes 52

575

truth of Jesus lies not in his teachings but in his person: I saw that remark the other day. But we get our notion of his person (which in this context is his personality) entirely from his teachings. If there's a "person" that is distinguishable from that, it's the being who incarnates and then resurrects. Of course that's one of the organizing patterns of the whole book, so it'll hardly get left out this time.

§ [770! This chapter has to do with the mythical universe in time. The main theme is, of course, the contrast between the movement downward of authority and commandment, peace, order and regularity, and the upward movement of revolution. The former is the radiation of limited order from a hierarchy, and takes the form of protection from above and obedience from below. It's the movement postulated by the chain of being, the music of the spheres, and, more important, of creation itself. Keeping in mind the fact that this book recapitulates the seven/eight phases of typological expansion in the Bible, this movement is the transition from creation to exodus. [771] The upward movement is generally regarded as demonic in the earlier period, even by Milton in his Gunpowder-Plot symbolism which he brings into Paradise Lost.450 Shelley of course has his benevolent volcanoes [Prometheus Unbound, 2.3.1-10!. But of course I have my table of time and space on the four levels. Space is pure presence on the top level, home on the unfallen one, thereness on the third, and pure alienation and retreat on the demonic. Time is pure present on top, dance or expression of exuberance and energy on the unfallen, a mixture of annihilation and cycle on the third, pure duration on the fourth. But that, of course, is only within the categories of the earlier scheme. In Dante, the movement upward through purgatory and paradise is the movement backward in time from ordinary experience to the dance. [772! So I still have to work out a series of temporal patterns on the rising grid. That won't be easy: I've never thought about this. I suppose Hegelian dialectical incorporation of the negative is one of them. [773! If this problem really does exist where I think it does, it's the central problem of, and the key to, the entire book. Endless time and

576

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

space—well, I'm concerned with time at the moment—endless time is the alienation image of outer space, where beginnings and ends are literally unthinkable. Below this comes time in ordinary experience, where the speed of light is the limit of movement of any sort, and where consequently the notion of "travel" to distant stars is an unreal ambition. The fun starts below that, in the third post-Romantic world where man is complemented by a morally ambivalent nature. This must have something to do with evolution and the kind of time it seems to imply, but I haven't got a clue to it—maybe Bergson could help. Still less do I have any clue to the time at the bottom, in Atlantis. The trick is, as in the other pattern, to find words for an eternity that's not endless time. The only glimmering I have is that evolution is generally conceived as irreversible, and beyond it there may be a more flexible time movement that moves into the past (again time "travel" seems the wrong metaphor). [774] There's also the question whether these are the ultimate categories: there must be a third set, combined of the two orders, that really are. [775! Anyway, the metaphor of travel is very central: in Dante it's theoretically possible to travel to the presence of God: the impossibility of placing the body anywhere near the sun, of getting to even the nearest of the stars: that seems to be an imaginative crux. So the time in the worlds below that would have to have some connection with time warps: science fiction tries to play around with such notions, but in my view doesn't get imaginatively very far. We're still in the Ariosto, or possibly the Cyrano de Bergerac, stage.

§ [776] [.. .I451 symbolically male God and the "ascent" of redeemed man who is symbolically woman. This woman, not, as in the first scheme, a virgin mother but a bride, is the Jerusalem interpenetrated by the temple: hence we're not stuck with a creaturely role all through eternity but are equally involved in creation as well. [777! At present I think of these eight chapters as concerned respectively with the seven/eight phases of revelation as outlined in chapter five of The Great Code. The descent of authority is the view of the world as created, the rebellion against it is the core of all revolution. Eros is the

Notes 52

577

love that fulfils the law, in a way imagined by man if not explicitly taught in the New Testament; Adonis the beauty that isn't split between the changeless and the mortal, and hence recreates wisdom, or participating in the Sabbath contemplation; Prometheus is the power of prophecy that sees the future as restoring a mythical past; Hermes the "everlasting gospel" that speaks in myth and metaphor. The two forms of apocalypse, the panoramic one of a new creation and the participating one of a new exodus, wind it up.

§ [778] Rimbaud's drunken boat tosses on the sea as lightly as a cork. The image is linked to the floating bottle with the MS in it in a story of Poe; with de Vigny's poem Bouteille sur la mer; with the flask in Igitur, and not impossibly even with the baqbuq in Rabelais—at any rate I think the Mallarme flask may be.452 The black bird in Igitur is Poe's Raven, I suppose; but what with the ashes of Igitur's ancestors one thinks of a parody of the phoenix. [779] The thing floating on the sea with a message in it links to the riddle or cipher often found under the sea (e.g. in Keats's Endymion) or at the South Pole (Pym and elsewhere). Also with the floating ark with the baby-hero in it, the "shield-son-of-sheaf" business in Beowulf,453 and all that cluster. [780] The atmosphere of Igitur has the crucial midnight of Yeats, Igitur himself as a "young child," or newborn spirit cutting himself loose from the alienated Narcissus-mof, and a general Wagnerian haze of combining all the arts (which I'm sure is adumbrated in the Hermione final scene of Winter's Tale [5.3], in deliberate contrast to the flower festival of Perdita, where there's no art). Note in the shearing festival of WT [The Winter's Tale, 4.4] the parent appears as the symbol of a tradition the prince (Florizel) wants to break with, and finds himself desdichado in consequence. In the final scene, of course, the tradition-heritage-"race"ancestor business is all reconciled and tied up. [781] In Rimbaud's poem about the poor girl who spends the night in the can before her first communion:454 I suppose husbands in Catholic countries often find the priest already in possession—not physical pos-

578

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

session, of course, but substantial possession. That is, the husband has been anticipated by the droit du Seigneur,455 sc. God. [782] Donne, Devotion xvii: "All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated: God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that Library where every book shall lie open to one another."456 [783] ibid. "The Bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God."457 [784! Incidentally, your reference to Donne's using the figure of angels climbing Jacob's ladder is wrong: it's not in a sermon, but in the first Prayer in the DEO.458 [785! R.G. Cohn's book on Rimbaud (1973) has an amazing footnote on "a mysterious close-of-cycle fusion of death and life, of old man and infant."459 He refers to the New Year symbol (with, I suppose, Santa Claus as the old year), Shakespeare's father lying full fathom five [The Tempest, 1.2.396], Glaucon in Endymion who he says is the spectral father of the poet,460 Mallarme's veillard [vieillard] in the Coup de Des who carries an ombre juvenile in him,461 and a lot of other things. Dylan Thomas' Winter's Tale.462 [786] I have this elsewhere: Swift's notorious poem on a woman's dressing room is usually cited as simply Swift himself being obsessed by the fact that women shit:463 "insanity," says Lawrence;464 "excremental vision," says Norman Brown.465 Well, it's that, all right: if you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. But "Celia shits" isn't Swift screaming: it's Celia's lover Strephon, whose love for Celia is of the insipidly idealistic kind that hasn't taken in the fact that women, mutatis mutandis, have the same physical basis to their lives that men have. Besides, if, like the hero of Berkeley Square,466 one of us were to wake up in the middle of eighteenth-century London, assailed by all those unfamiliar stinks, wouldn't we be just as nauseated?

Notes 52

579

That's the mark of the great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages.

§ [787] Chapter One. Introduction (boy, doesn't that word grab you). Myth and metaphor, as in the Washington paper/67 leading up to concern, ideology, and the source of the poet's authority. Then a bridge I haven't yet made to cosmology, then to the Bible as a "concentering vision" for Western mythology and cosmology. Then the eight phases of revelation, divided into four dialogues of Word and Spirit. Then mythology as a universal language; demonic parody and analogical imagery in Christian views of the Classics. [788] I don't know whether it's at the end of One or the beginning of Two that I should put an announcement of the four image-clusters and, before that, the invariable sense of the world as a "middle earth," with one world metaphorically above it and one below it. [789] Chapter Two. Basically what I have on the four levels and the authority-descending notion of the ladder, following my account of Creation, which introduces the ladder and garden concepts. [790] Chapter Three. The Romantic reversal of the ladder, putting the motive power below, but also with emphasis on the garden imagery and the sense of Eros as something the poets added to the medieval synthesis. The mistress as the body of Eden, the bird's bride, Danae, and the rest of it. The upside-down cosmos. [791] Chapter Four. The seed and the saving remnant: the Ararat or Atlantis the flood returns to; the cave-ark with the animals held there (paleolithic, Noah's, Jesus' manger, Hermes' cave of stolen cattle). If possible, the birth of Spirit out of the endless "put-downs" (lousy pun, that) of the body-mother by the soul-father. Incidentally, wisdom as the playing daughter, and Moses as Pisgah-climber, belong in Three. [792] Chapter Five. The hidden flame; the cannibal giant at the bottom of the cosmos; demonic forms of this; release of giant power in Titans (Prometheus, Atlas); cave of Demogorgon-Eternity in Shelley, Thomas'

580

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

white-giant; Albion and Finnegan; Pantagruel and Gulliver. Final emergence of the flaming giant as the. universal Spirit. [793] Chapter Six. Conclusion: definition of spirit perhaps and Jesus' definition of the Father. Apocalyptic interpenetrating vision. The eaten book and the drunk water of life.

§ 1794! Opening remarks about the Great Code.468 [795] Metaphor: asserts and denies. [796] Historical context: stabilized by the god. [797] Ecstatic metaphor (still vestigial).469 [798] Literature as play (= unserious).470 [799] Theseus; Eros and poetry.471 [800] AC stops here: Bible suggests going on. [801] Myth: asserts and denies. [802] Entrenched superstition insists on wrong "literal."472 [803] Myth and history: myth confronts on another time level.473 [804] Metaphor does much the same thing for space (Shelley). [805] Myth is counter-historical, metaphor counter-logical.474 [806] Myth not a proto-science or anti-scientific, except when superstitious.475 [807! More serious aspect of literature indicated by "concern." [808] Primary and secondary concern or ideology.476

Notes 52

581

[809] In 2Oth c. primary concerns must become primary.477 [810] Evolution (i6th to past, 2Oth to future) vs. adversary situations. [811] All ideological statements wrong: authority of writer is not in making those. [812] Revival of ecstatic metaphor in sixties. Tasso and other conflicts478 [813] Residual feeling of mythical and metaphorical habits of mind (not of gods). 1814] Reversal of reality and illusion.479 [815] Revelation (apocalypsis) is through illusion. [816] Truth is aletheia, the unveiling of forgetfulness. [817] Two levels of archaeology. [818] Not remembrance but recognition, the starting point of "truth." [819] Next step is remaking world: what do you make of it? Truth on other side of that.480

§ [820] The fourth chapter starts off by saying we can't stop with an antithesis (note that Denck quote).481 Eros involves Adonis and the whole white goddess bit as well, so we have to plough through the Vico, Spengler, Toynbee, Frazer and Graves sequence for cyclical imagery, the rotation of life, death, and renewed life within the womb of nature. Lawrence goes here, with his Apocalypse, Psychology of the Unconscious,482 and Escaped Cock imagery—also The Plumed Serpent. The revival of polytheism also has its importance, and of recurrence. [821] The chapter should start off by saying that since Romanticism there's been a largely unconscious effort to move toward a cosmos of primary concern, decentralized authority, and an experience of interpen-

582

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

etration rather than hierarchy. Eureka is the big opening gun, but I have to leave it for the next chapter, I think.483 [822] Also it's perhaps here that I distinguish poets who stay with the traditional pattern. There's nothing to stop T.S. Eliot from writing in the older tonality, and there's the influence of Dante to suggest his doing so. Also the difference between, say, Francis Thompson, comparing the Virgin Mary to Danae where the former's primary and the second peripheral, and Pound's fourth canto comparing them on the same level. This is an extension of the principle of positive analogy.484 [823! I wonder if the contrast of white-goddess and black-bride imagery doesn't belong here too: it'll be anticipated so strongly it might as well be.

§ [824] The first chapter follows essentially the Washington paper485 in dealing with the nature of myth and metaphor as double-edged formulae that deny while they assert. Perhaps there could be a bit more on the suggestion that metaphor is a microcosm of language: anyway, ideology, primary and secondary concern, historical and "classic" views of literature, the revival of ecstatic metaphor and the present crisis in language belong. Seems to me that I could go on to repeat my point that the Bible, by its size and shape, provides a "concentering vision" for the scattered Classical and other myths. If it's that, then by Blake's context it should be female, the spreader of the word in Psalm 68. [825! The second chapter would then arrange the eight phases of revelation into the four dialogues of Word and Spirit. The four falls in Genesis (of vision, of sexual innocence, of civilization, and of language). Perhaps the statement of how the four Zoas come out of the two accounts of Creation (two of them certainly do) and of Exodus (where I'm by no means sure that they do). Note that the trickster-thief god is both Hermes and Prometheus the thief of fire. [826] There are four falls in the Bible: vision (Gen. P), innocence (Gen. J), civilization (Noah) and language (Babel). Ladder, garden, seed, flame are agents of rising again. They come into all four dialogues.486

Notes 52

583

§ [827] The first of the four great emblems is the ladder, which modulates to a variety of other things. [828] In Genesis, Jacob's ladder (really a staircase) is the antitype of the Tower of Babel. The model for the latter is the Mesopotamian ziggurat (step pyramid in Egypt, perhaps), the temple in the middle of the city which is symbolically the connecting point between heaven and earth.487 [829] The ziggurat usually has winding or spiral staircases, which were also in Solomon's temple, even though it had only three stories. According to Herodotus, the ones in Babylon and Ecbatan had seven stories, coloured differently to represent the sequence of planets, with the chamber for the god's bride on top.488 This last is the kernel of the next emblem, the garden or body of the bride.489 [830] The ladder is predominantly the emblem of Eros, and treatments of it have to take off from the Phaedrus and the Symposium.490 NeoPlatonic emanations and aspirations of ascent and descent could be touched very lightly, likewise the Mithraic ladder of planets.491 But of course Dante is after Plato the next central example of it. [831] Fifty years ago we have Eliot's Ash-Wednesday, avowedly indebted to Dante's Purgatorio; Yeats's Tower and Winding Stair books, Pound's temple of Dioce (derived from Herodotus), and Joyce's Finnegan falling off a ladder, equated with the fall of man. Elpenor.492 [832] In the Bible itself there are various rising and falling movements, e.g. of fire going up from the altar in the temple or Mt. Carmel and descending from the sky (link with the thunderclap in Vico that Joyce ties in with the fall). The last one, I think, is the first two chapters of Acts, the Ascension followed by the Pentecostal vision. Not angels this time, but two persons of God, the Word going up and the Spirit coming down. The reverse movement is blocked in at the end of Revelation. [833] The essential point about this emblem is polarization: it leads from one world to another, and when you get to the other one the first world either disappears or becomes the mirror reflection of the attained one.

584

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

The reflection may be analogous or demonic (Whore and Beast at the end of Purgatorio). It's the thematic stasis or conventionalized form of the Way or Quest. [834] Brueghel's Babel and Blake's vision of Jacob are both spirals.493 The smoke of sacrifice on the altar goes upward spirally, as a rule—in Europe Blake uses the word spiral in connection with God sniffing it.494 On the other hand God descends in a whirlwind to Job. [835! Chain of being and the Ptolemaic spatial cosmos are hierarchical ladders, and the Greek word klimax indicates how important the last step is.495 Maybe I haven't even yet got the full irony of the degree speech in Troilus yet, but I can try again.496 [836! Link with two gates of Beulah and the cave of the nymphs:497 the Virgin's body has a spiral entrance at the ear, where the Spirit came in, and an exit where the Word came out. [837] Descent themes (maelstrom and the like) may belong to the cave emblem. [838] One thing I haven't thought much about is the connection of the ladder with articulate speech: the Tower of Babel story is a story of confusion of language, its antitype the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. I suppose Homer's "winged words" are in the ladder context syntactical or progression-words, the steady climb of dialectic towards its goal. (Donne says the angels, who can fly, nevertheless use the ladder in Jacob's vision.)498 That's why Hegel's Phenomenology belongs to the complex, as well as Dante's chain-rhyme scheme.

§ [839] The second great emblem is the garden, identified with the body of the bride of the god, laid out on top of the winding tower-stairs. [840] It's the garden of Adonis also, the top of the seasonal cycle, the locus amoenus, the earthly paradise. It derives from the second account of creation, and the point of Marvell's garden poem is to say that the second creation could have stopped with stage four and not gone on to

Notes 52

585

embody itself in Woman. Milton's elaborate Eden-as-body-of-Eve imagery; Vaughan's Regeneration.499 [841] The fact that the heroine often brings about the comic resolution in Shakespeare is linked to his green-world imagery, and that in turn is linked to the pertinacity of females in the O.T. in regard to levirate marriage. Tamar, Lot's daughters, Ruth (who really climbs into bed500 with Boaz). The late children theme (Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth) is linked, but more remotely.501 [842] Man redeemed is woman, and there can be no redemption apart from the transformation of nature.502 The white goddess and black bride interchange colors, and the red harlot splits into the unredeemed Whore and the forgiven Magdalen figure. Adonis and Adam are both red. The wind in the garden is the father/soul and mother/body alchemic union: they both die and the Spirit is born. [843] I suppose the Spirit should have both sexes, a male god who carries the female body of the redeemed with him. This is not a fruitful line of investigation.

§ [844! The third emblem is the cave, otherwise the ark, otherwise the floating boat. The ark sequence in the Bible, Noah's ark, the ark of the covenant (not the same word in Hebrew), the ark in Shiloh and in Jerusalem, and then in the temple, the empty cave image in the Holy of Holies and the tomb of Christ, the manger of the birth of Christ with its ox and ass, the vision of the open ark in Revelation, and whatever the hell is meant by David and the shewbread [i Samuel 21:6]. [845] The vision of exile, the drunken boat (though, as Rimbaud's is going down the Mississippi, it does have a direction of sorts; cf. Huckleberry's raft), the soul crossing water in the ship of death (Lawrence, Yeats, etc.), the desert with its portable ark a double of the sea of Noah and both images of exile and wandering; Jonah; Paul's Mediterranean voyages, whatever they have to do with anything; Jesus' command of the sea; seas of brass and glass in temple and apocalypse [i Kings 7:23; Revelation 15:2].

586

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[846] The lower garden, the Atlantis that appears in Shelley's PU [Prometheus Unbound, 3.2] and the land coming out of the sea in Faust [pt. 2,11. 7499 ff.], belong somewhere. [847] The paleolithic cave with its animals; Egyptian obsession with tombs; heroes sleeping in mountains; Plato's cave of flickering shadows [Republic, bk. 7]. The Aeneid VI vision as a start, then the demonizing of the descent imagery in the Inferno and elsewhere. As a rule the descent is in quest of knowledge about the future, as in the Odyssey Nekyia,503 the vision of Rome in Virgil, the fact that hellers in Dante know the future but not the present, the future vision of the Bible given Adam by Michael—I've got most of that in AC. The chief Biblical episode is the witch of Endor [i Samuel 28:7]. In the Romantic period, where the ascent is so often to the new (progress and evolution analogies), the descent is often the recapturing of the old, as in the archaeological symbolism in FW [Finnegans Wake] and elsewhere. [848! Mallarme's Igitur, which may not be the igitur of Genesis 2:3, though that's a damn good guess if it's wrong,504 is a descent into the world where, as Yeats says, chance meets choice,505 and the oracular and the witty meet. [849] Maelstroms, Charybdis, Hamlet's mill (the world as mill).506 De Quincey's fascination with a long rambling introduction followed by a sudden focussing downward. The world of dreams—according to De Quincey we re-enact the fall every night507—I'm sure Joyce picked that up. [850] Anyway, this cave-ark sequence is associated with Hermes, who in infancy stole cattle and hid them in a cave.508 [851! The three falls in Genesis are the Edenic fall from innocence, the deluge fall of civilization (as in the Atlantis story, the reason is hybris), and the fall of language in the tower of Babel story. If Hermes turns out to be fundamentally a floating boat archetype, I suppose he reconstitutes the deluge, as Adonis does the garden and Eros innocence. That leaves language for Prometheus, who seems to have to do with furnaces. [852] But surely seed is one of the most important elements in this clus-

Notes 52

587

ter: the subterranean crypt that contains an infinity of life, prototype of the saving remnant so recurrent in history. [853] In the ladder-garden complex, the garden has female associations; surely the seed or cave does here, in contrast to the escaping or exploding flame. Is there anything like an anabasis of Kore509 in the Bible? Eleusis means advent, after all. [854] * in Dante the journey is mainly through earth, air, & fire, but most of the explicit metaphors are sea voyages, climaxing in the "Argo" of Par. 33-510

§ [855] The fourth emblem, if I'm right in general, belongs to Prometheus, and so is associated with flame, perhaps also rocks. Flame hidden in stalk of fennel; candle of Lord hidden in soul; Jesus on letting light shine [Matthew 5:16]; haloes of saints and all the fire-of-life imagery I've already got; city of god and jewels burning in gem-like flames; Nebuchadnezzar's furnace and Abraham's (though that's called a "pot" in the RSV).511 Destructive fires at the end of Spoils of Poynton, Burnt Njal512 and elsewhere. Light of Judgment.513 [856] Well: I wonder if Prometheus isn't really a twin theme (with Epimetheus):514 when we fall asleep we dream about ourselves and produce a shadow-twin who goes into the forest and turns into a stag or what not. The quest of Prometheus (forethought) is not simply to get unbound but to wake up to his true or dreaming self. That introduces into the fourth part all the language business I have still to learn something about. [857] That way, Prometheus links with the other comic archetype the ladder, because that's upward into pure speech. Prometheus is the recovery of myth, the gathering of past and future in present. Because along with the twin theme goes the amnesia one. [858! There are a lot of struggling brothers in the Bible; the herald brother (the prophets to John the Baptist) and the Messiah he points to;

588

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

the exiled brother who's also the rightful heir. Truth as aletheia, the unveiling of forgetfulness. [859] I'm not sure whether the "furnace" imagery in the Bible belongs here or in the Hermes part: they're very closely connected, of course. Abraham's furnace was a pot; Isaiah's a crucible, there are several Hebrew words, tannur, kibshan, kur, and the Aramaic attun for Nebuchadnezzar's in Daniel. However, the LXX [Septuagint] gives kaminos for most of them, and that's also the furnace in Revelation.515 [860] Egypt is a furnace of iron because there's such an emphasis on claustrophobia in the Exodus account, in contrast to the Abraham story, where freedom of movement is what's stressed. [861] In Pound there's a light-water-stone progression, and in the final Cantoes the entire project is described as a great ball of crystal [Canto 116, 1. 23]. Link here with Vaughan's dancing stones and alchemical imagery generally,516 also the white stones and the like in Revelation [2:17].

§ [862] The myth as a verbal temenos: myth as mythos or narrative, resembling other narratives like folk tales and legends in structure but having a specific (and ideological) social function. [863] Nomadic vs. enrooting stories: myths do travel, but more like seeds than like animals. [864] Sense of subject-object split not definite in "early" societies, hence prevalence of metaphor. The central metaphor is the god. Metaphor in Homer. [865] Primary question about a pre-literary myth is not "is it true?" but "do we have to know this?" [866] Separation (in Greek culture there's Ionian philosophy, which raises questions that belong really to science, but the separation of mythical and dialectical uses of language begins with Socrates).

Notes 52

589

[867] Raises contrast in centrifugal and centripetal uses of words: the silly antithesis (poetry untrue, everything true non-poetic) thrashed over since Aristotle. Even yet: "literal" religious sects the ones that increase their membership; anyone who maintains the mythical form of the Bible gets called anti-historical. [868] Faust's mistranslation of John 1:1 [Faust, pt. i, 1. 1237] also that of the whole Christian Church. Trotsky, but it's consistent in Marxism. Strange for Christianity to deny its own central doctrine, which it does whenever it assumes that in the beginning God did something, and the words telling us about it are servomechanisms. [869] Aztec cult of flaying a human victim and putting on his skin to symbolize the death and rebirth of the year. The literal-minded is the bloody-minded. Similarly with the Frazerian dying-god cannibal rite. This gets transmuted first into allegory, then into spiritual literalism. But spiritual always means in part metaphorical, so the literal meaning becomes the metaphorical meaning. [870] Creation myth in a sense the only myth we need, but it attracts other myths and forms a mythology. (Coleridge thought a theory of creativity was the only theory of literature we needed.) Two creation myths in the Bible. [871] The P one is divided into seven stages explicitly; the J one can be so divided also (mist; the "adam"; garden; four rivers; living creatures; woman; statement of state of innocence). (Statement too candid for the commentary-stuffers: History of Rechabites.)517 P narrative stresses division and contrast, recognizes kinship of humanity to animals, and is aware of archetypal rituals ("lights" as "signs"). J puts humans in different category from everything else and makes everything else a human environment. One's natura naturata, the other natura naturans. Obviously neither account ever intended as a history of how the order of nature came into being.518 [872] P creation is the world as it appears to human consciousness; day of rest indicates that the order of creation is objective to man as it was archetypally to God (not just a fusspot deity making sure his rituals

59°

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

won't get neglected): something to contemplate and admire as (ultimately) a second Word of God.519 [873] J account has human consciousness the mirror of creation: bringing animals to the adam to be named. Milton and the fish.520 Would be narcissism without sense of infinite present in ascribing the creation to God. Maybe the original adam was androgynous: story of Fall says world will be patriarchal. Commentary so anxious to make this point that it overlooks the fact that the creation of woman, and of man as sexual being, is the climax of the whole operation. Humanity falls as woman, i.e., as sexual being, and can therefore be redeemed only through woman: there can't be in Christianity a second Adam without the agency of a second Eve.521 [874] Fall brought about a loss of naked innocence, and what Lawrence calls sex in the head.522 Hence morality, the knowledge of good and evil, is founded on the repressing or sublimating of the sexual instinct. [875! No myth of Fall attached directly to the P myth: filled up later with accounts of a fall of Satan and rebel angels, Lilith, and in short the demonic. Most elaborate account (Enoch) didn't make the Bible, but influenced the N.T.523 [876] Narrative moves in time vs. gestalt of simultaneity at end. The joke.524 Ritual too: collect and host; reaped ear of corn in Eleusis; golden flower in Zen Buddhism. Survival in theme or dianoia of literature, often marked by a symbol-title like the golden bowl, rainbow or lighthouse. [877! This simultaneous apprehension of the whole work is both the origin of the conception of "structure" (a spatial metaphor) and of all (I think) literary criticism can use of Derrida's ecriture.525 This ecriture precedes the narrative (which always carries with it some metaphor of speech), in the sense that it's the enfolded seed from which the narrative unfolds. The "structure" metaphor of course doesn't imply that, if it's a major classic, we ever grasp the whole structure: that's a lifetime effort. [878] (I sometimes call this thematic stasis.) GC attempts to study this pattern in the Bible, and finds that Revelation presents it just as Genesis presents the enfolded or seed meaning. The best symbol, corresponding

Notes 52

591

to a golden bowl or whatever in literature, for the P aspect of the Bible is the ladder. This expands into mountains, towers, temples, spiral staircases, ziggurats and what not. Climaxes in the first two chapters of Acts, with God the Word going up and God the Spirit coming down. For the J account the corresponding image would be the world tree of life. [879! Ladder cosmos forged to the front because it suggested a structure of authority, the chain of being and the Ptolemaic universe being both derived from it. This stretched from God above nature to the demonic world below it. All structures of authority imply some resistance to that authority, symbolized by a dragon of chaos in the Bible, the dragon being associated both with the Egypt-Babylon complex and with Satan the adversary or accuser. Both P and J accounts bugger up the arts by suggesting that God is a designer and that nature is the art of God. Browne on the horse.526 [880] P and Job; J and Song of Songs. Latter suggests the Eros ladder, which had already appeared in Plato's Symposium. Forced on medieval cosmos by the poets. Sublimated and adapted to agape by Dante; sexualized in Romaunt of the Rose; popularized in Petrarch. Even in the Bible the tree of life appears mainly in parody, as the ladder does in the Babel story.52? [881] Romanticism brought with [it] the annexing of the demonic to the human. Hence the Cain-Esau-Ishmael figures; the Romantic "agony," the poete maudit.528 [882] Chain of being lingered to the eighteenth century, though Voltaire was suspicious of the echelle de 1'infini.529 Series of "deconstructions" of the ladder image in Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Yeats.530 Beddoes on the devil as the self. [883] Promethean vision in Rousseau, Blake's Marriage, and Shelley. Liberty as a birthright: cf. Milton earlier. Annexing of the demonic by the human means the annexing of the angelic too. In earlier (Dante) periods the descent metaphor was demonized; after Romanticism there comes a sense of a darkness below hell which is creative. Eliot Quartets. [884] Eros vision brings with it a new sense of the relevance of dreams

592

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

(De Quincey). Introduction to Blake's Songs of Experience talks of an "Earth" (female) that's the real "lapsed Soul."531 Shelley's Epipsychidion. Promethean vision expressed revolts against traditional authority, but left nature as an open area for exploitation. We're beginning to see the folly of this now: contract with Noah not apocalyptic. Visionary myths shouldn't be perverted into authoritarian blueprints. [885] The oblique form of "truth" presented in a proverb, or, extended, in a play or novel or poem, integrate[s] a great mass of incidental experiences, like a magnet picking up a pile of scrap iron. That demands an active response, not the passive one to the centrifugal correspondence that's usually called truth. Not that we could ever do without truth of correspondence, but it's really a truth of measurement, and develops toward mathematical language. [886] The subject can't meet the real Other as the Other, but can only encounter it in the intermediate and half-subjective form of language, which assimilates both, myth [Myth] and metaphor are techniques of meditation, getting us to focus our minds on a more intense view of time and space, lifting us from the unreal not-quite present to the real one. [887] (2) Art of words: emphasis on words connects literature with criticism, then both with everything else in words—semiotics and linguistic developments. Such words are primarily written (Derrida): in oral discourse the words are still attached to an enclosing presence, and are hence, so to speak, unborn.532 [888] Emphasis on art of words: practical common-sense distinction, Keats and Shelley poets, Kant and Hegel philosophers. Integrity: Magritte's "This is not a Pipe."533 [889] Accidental resemblances in sounds of words functional in poetry: function is to minimize the arbitrariness in the relation of word to meaning, a quasi-magical connection between the sound-pattern and its centrifugal reference. Semiotic direction makes word a signifiers [signifier]; this direction stresses resonance among signifiers.534 [890] Reader an individual of a community ranging from devotion to ritual murder. Reader invents the text, in the sense of both making it up

Notes 52

593

and finding it. Invention subjective in origin, but if it works it has objective roots. [891] Poem radically an oral production or utterance: poets don't make up but release their poems, which have some autonomy (revision); hence poem is written to preserve its independence. Subordination of writing a literary convention (singing), but one rooted in literary experience. [892] Literature does encroach on visual arts in shape poems, concrete poetry, Cummings designs; otherwise there's always a priority of utterance to writing. [893] Music and wind instrument conventions too. Note that Derrida's principle may apply to metaphysics, where the radical is supposed to be written, but not to literature.535 [894] Metaphor the simplest and typical figure, telling us that one signifier is another signifier, even when both terms keep their own different signified relations. Hence illogical (A is B), unless tautologies with one term (£2 Queen [Queen Elizabeth II]). Why say A is B when any fool can see that A isn't B?536 [895] Metaphor typically identifies personality with natural object, hence god the central metaphor (i.e., polytheistic gods). Socially postulated metaphor, like totem animals in totemic societies. Opens up a channel or current of energy between human and natural worlds. Gods aren't just projections: they're evocations of the powers of nature as well. Ecstatic metaphors (Heidegger). Titanic will to identify in palaeolithic paintings. Primitive use of music also to merge consciousness (with Dionysus or whatever). [896] Actor ecstatically identified with his role in drama. Gods a stabilized social relationship: Neptune is the sea for a community that prays to him or builds a temple for him.537 In proportion as subject and object split, this relation becomes individualized, and so swings over to literature: play or ironic distancing, where nothing is asserted about the external world. [897] Literature becomes detached from "belief": Jupiter and Venus be-

594

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

come poetic when belief in them goes. Ovidian metamorphosis the disintegrating of metaphor.538 Literary age tends to think of ecstatic metaphor as something to be outgrown: identifying with a character in fiction immature. [898] Function of poetry clearly partly to keep metaphorical thinking alive. Why should it be kept alive?539 [899] Lunatic and lover: Theseus thinks of poet as lunatic on a good trip [A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.2-27]; lover as seeking ecstatic union (Browne).540 Extasie and Canonization: one soul but two bodies, a parable of one meaning, two referents in metaphor. Literary allusions in both poems relevant. Convention that poetry results from frustration in love: Eros doesn't care about convention or originality: he just wants to get as many images copulating as possible. [900] Hypothetical nature of literature, as a model of possibilities, as far as I got in AC. But that led me to the sacred book, and that's taken me further. Already noticed that central Christian doctrines were expressible only in metaphor. Dodged that in the existential period of FS. [901! Metaphor as a microcosm of language itself, the uniting of consciousness with what it's conscious of, Ovid's metamorphosis in reverse, transfiguring of consciousness. Specifically, this intermediate verbal order (Humboldt principle)541 would become Buber's world of "Thou" between "I" and "it" (for me, not for Buber).542 [902] Myth (establishing the point that it has a specific social function), like the metaphor, conveys two messages: "this happened," and "this didn't happen in anything like this way."543 Up to Bishop Burnet's (e.g.) time former maintained by brute force: no clergyman could think seriously about prehistory or earth sciences.544 Darwin brought the freedom also to speak of creation, deluge, even gospel myths. [903] Many stories "just" stories, but a great historical play (Henry V) doesn't "follow" history, but transposing [transposes] the essence of a past event so that it confronts the audience. Pun in "presents." Greater symmetry in changes. [904] Totality of community: Christian conception of Christ as total man,

Notes 52

595

also as total intelligible world or word; key to metaphor and the identity of things. Goes beyond Christianity: the old antithesis between the religious and the secular doesn't work any more, if it ever did. Religion linked to ecstatic metaphor: a man's religion is what he wants to identify himself with. [905] Contemporary criticism and its use of religious conceptions, capitalizing "Word," distinguishing verbe, parole, langue, language: do we use language or are we used by it? Stevens and his central mind and major man: his poem on thinking of the relation between metaphors.545 Schrodinger.546 [906] Could postulate the opposite of all this just as easily; what's important is the interchange of reality and illusion brought about by language. Quote Laforgue547 and Samuel Butler. In the cloven fiction, the poet is an unpopular and ineffectual leisure-class entertainer, limited function and no authority. Moving up from this, we reach Vice's verum factum, reality is in the world we make, not the world we stare at.548 [907] Crazy Oedipus the triumph of illusion: response to indwelling Word the only sensible reason proposed for our being here. [908] I see the work of literature as the centre of a cross like a plus sign. The horizontal bar is the ideological concerns of the poet's environment, which his work is bound to reflect. The vertical bar is his mythological concerns which give him his literary convention, his genres, and his essential place or tradition in literature. This doesn't mean the people he read, though it generally includes the people it would have been interesting for critics if he had read.549 [909! The poet is a subordinate voice in the ideology of his time: he doesn't derive his real authority from it. He's feeble in impact compared to the mass media, and the general assumption of established authority, that his function is to act as an emotional correlative to what that authority is going to force on people anyway, doesn't give him a very interesting function. [910] He gets his authority from the Spirit or Muse of poetry and its traditions, but he doesn't usually know this, and so tries to work out some absurd or perverse ideology—at least Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, and

596

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

to some extent Eliot did.550 Yet the twentieth century is full of poets murdered by ideological fanatics because they didn't come in on the chorus fast enough. [911] The trouble being that poetry doesn't speak the language of ideology: you get that at its plainest in "verse," not in poetry. [912] The language of myth goes back to the conception of a mythological universe. I can give some notion of this from the Bible, but it isn't a developed subject. But there does seem to be a curious link between mythology and primary concern. Frazer and twelve volumes on the food concern; the sex concern; the work (creation and structuring) concern and the play concern (dancing and building in Havelock Ellis's Dance of Life).551 [913] We still don't know how to deal with the play thinker (like me, dammit), despite Nietzsche's Gaya Scienza. Butler is in his grave. [914] Something about the mythological universe keeps getting away from me, but it[s] organizing principles are the gods conceived as states of human consciousness, as in Blake. They might of course link up with the two creation myths in the Bible. [9*5] (3) Narrative movement vs. Gestalt: McLuhan left out the Gestalt and the Derrida people leave out the movement. Convention of speaker in poetry, alternatively music: Epilogue to Lycidas. "Structure" a misleading metaphor whenever it assumes that total understanding of anything of any size in literature is ever possible.552 The reader is not all the other readers, most of whom are in a different time of history anyway, including the future. 553 [916] The Gestalt often becomes an actual sense experience in ritual: synecdoche of symbol representing it: host, ear of corn, golden flower in Zen, the visual metaphor in "enlightened": Zen's popularity linked to television; climax of Job.554 [917] Literal meaning in reading a novel or in reading a newspaper. Analogy of faith means postponing judgment until the whole structure is complete. The Tertullian paradox,555 though there's something to be said for it, won't work now anyway, except for self-supporting hysterics.

Notes 52

597

[918] Are-you-saved-brother extroverts and introverts with their inevitable crises of faith. Pathological extensions take us into the mob, which has to have a scapegoat to project its self-doubts on, like the Jew in Nazi Germany who reminded the Nazis of their own nagging little voices telling them that their racism was shit and they really knew it was shit. "I believe that" is dangerous when we still don't know who I is or what that 1S.556

[919] No distinction between belief and what we believe we believe, except as revealed in actions and behavior. This shows us that all faith is powered by some kind of vision, if it's only a vision of one's own interests. Faith is the pursuit of the for itself in the light of a vision in itself, two things it's practically self-murder ever to separate.557 [920] Hence faith in Hebrews as hypostasis and elenchos. Former I think is more substance than assurance; latter seems to me to mean essentially manifestation or visible form. Consistent with lack of interest in the "invisible world" as such in the Bible.558 [921] Faith the substance of the elpizomenon,559 so it includes hope. "Fear and Hope are Vision" (Blake [legend 13 in For Children: The Gates of Paradise]). Social vision prompts all professional work at least: we work from a model that we know to be a fiction, but that doesn't make it unreal. Interchange of reality and illusion: "reality" starts as largely the debris of former human constructs, and the "illusion" of a cleaner world without them begins with cleaning them off. Faith and hope, belief and vision, are the parents of which James's "works" are the offspring: he's a second-rate thinker, as Luther so clearly saw. [922] Faith therefore not professed faith, Apostle's Creed or what not: faith without vision produces anxiety over trivia; vision without faith (or the energy to realize it) produces an ambience of vague platitudes. [923] Ear and eye as metaphors in the Bible: latter focussed on beginning (before the Fall) and end (apocalypse when every eye shall see him). Apocalypse a vision of a body of imagery metaphorically identified with Christ, not a summary of the Bible's doctrines or narrative. What's not part of the vision is the demonic shadow, the hell-world that begins as parody and ends as nothingness. Note difference in emphasis between the doctrinal (ideology language) and the visionary in every branch of religion.

598

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[924] Stuff I have on primary and secondary concern as producing myth and ideology respectively, except for emphasis on the anxieties preventing food and sex. [925] Underside of what's presented in Henry V: the only "deconstruction" I'm much interested in is the reading of the whole play so as to bring out the underbought of disaster to both France and England as well as the overthought of simple-minded patriotic play.560 [926] Crucifixion of Christ, as historical event, merely another example of human continuous psychosis which is history. Presented mythically in Gospels, and that does entail some degree of arranging the facts (Roman role, e.g.). But positive function of myth in confronting the audience with this crucifixion.561 [927] Hence importance of poetic history: Trojan War: Virgilian Roman history; Geoffrey British history; King Arthur the greatest of all British monarchs. Resonance of Tennyson impossible with recognizable history.562 [928] (Stuff already on transforming present from the not-quite present into the real one.) [929] Industry-based to information-based society cliche: what it appeals to. But information isn't a placid river of self-evident facts: it comes to us pre-packaged in ideological containers, and many of those containers are constructed by professional liars. Information involves extricating oneself from a spiderweb of misinformation.563 [930] Mythology not proto-science: it doesn't talk seriously about the environment, but about human concerns. Hence the abortive scientific development in the pre-Socratic was shunted aside because of the need to get the language of concern properly re-established in dialectic. The pre-Socratics were anti-mythological (Anaxagoras) because mythology had only foolish answers to their questions. The post-Socratics were antimythological because they'd discovered what they felt was a better language.564 [931] Note that contemporary poets can still deal with the phases of the moon, the four elements, even the word "universe"—in short, with out-

Notes 52

599

of-date cosmologies—because cosmology, like mythology, comes eventually to speak the language of imagination. [932] Primary and secondary concern. Primary concern based on (ultimately) food, sex, work and play. Secondary concerns of loyalty to society and belief in a religion are ideological. The relation of a poet to his ideology is his anxiety, not just his influence (by-product of copyright). {Note that this distinction has been in my mind ever since the early satire paper.}565 [933] Why secondary concerns have kept an ascendancy over primary ones all through history, hence war, exploitation and self-inflicted misery instead of life, freedom and happiness. [934] Coming to point (crazy Oedipus) where we can't afford supremacy of ideology any more: let's have a war and smash that guy's ideology. Primary concerns must become primary. (Leads directly to authority of poet, but not in this paper.)566 [935] Feeling that this is so led in sixties to revival of ecstatic metaphor: drugs, yoga, Zen, folk singers, rock music (Woodstock) would bring in a new conception of community. Revitalized tribal culture in McLuhan.567 [936] Metaphorical and mythical habits of mind more taken for granted than they were, though little interest in Holderlin's gods, Nietzsche's Dionysus or Heidegger's polytheism. Identification of total consciousness with totality of nature.568 [937] That is, food is a primary concern, so it's no wonder that Frazer could collect rituals and customs and myths all over the world linked to concern about the food supply. But the anxieties about famine, drought, hailstorms, warfare, get in the way, and force the thought into more and more sublimated patterns, taking on the form of death, disappearance and return the next year (or day or whatever). [938] Supremacy of secondary concerns, as above: at present capitalist and socialist ideologies have settled into an adversarial relation. Becoming obvious that the old device of going to war to smash the other guy's ideology won't work.

6oo

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[939] In our day, as perhaps in all days, anxieties predominate over positive vision, and our literature expresses primary concerns in satire and irony more than in romantic fantasy. Writers who don't realize their own commitment to mythology, or what it means if they do realize it, turn to bizarre and perverse ideologies. Last fragment of Pound's Cantoes: why the earthly paradise?569 [940] Clarified view of what ideological man is is the crazy Oedipus. So the worst thing we can do is to "demythologize" anything. Only mythology in its positive form expresses the vision of hope, a hope focussed on more abundant life for all and not on the hope of silencing the arguments of Moslems or Marxists. [941] Ideology most workable when most tolerant and aware of the opposite side of itself. Religious journals often find atheists more useful, but then there isn't a real "crunch" in this field. No literary critic can doubt the intolerance of secular ideologies to myth, in view of the number of writers driven to silence, exile, imprisonment, suicide or judicial murder by ideology-obsessed governments. [942] The vision of life before the fall in the Bible introduces the conception of the aesthetic, the ability to see the world as beautiful as an objective fact. Kant's formula of purposiveness without purpose (play without work): avoids the fallacy of reducing the beautiful to the functional.570 The revival of gods might well be a part of a revived earthly paradise vision. [943] Final metaphorical vision not hypothetical like literary metaphors, but involves ecstatic or participating identification: "thou art that." When that happens, the third great virtue of agape moves into place as the only virtue there is. Also the sense of initiative moves from the subject into the objective world, however conceived (i.e. an "other" who both enters us and eludes us). When belief and vision merge we have the first step on Jacob's ladder, the sense of a mysterium tremendum, a mystery only mysterious because it's inexhaustible. [944! (4)571 Symbol goes back to two Greek sources: a symbolon was a token or ticket, broken in two and recognized by the identity of the break; symbolos (an adjective used as a noun, I think: I'd better substi-

Notes 52

601

tute the feminine noun symbole) means augury or omen. Emily Dickinson's "checks"572 and Mallarme's ["JToute pensee emet un coup de des."573 George Whalley calls the symbol a focus of relationships.574 Traffic lights are signs the driver completes by going or stopping: the other half of the symbolon. A national flag is a symbolos (symbole), and is metonymic, put for a cluster of phenomena indicating a social contract. Regina vs. Snitch. [945] Symbols like flags or slogans have a tremendous condensing power, like a burning glass focussing a lot of concerns. Yet they're displacements of those concerns, not the concerns themselves. Note condense and displace, Freud's words for what dreams do. Like dreams, it's a mirror of our identity: it speaks to us from a context of silence, and bypasses all mental conflict, again like the dream. Their normal function is to stop debate and initiate action, but the uncritical element in them makes them dangerous. Secular loyalties have a built-in safeguard: they can't be believed to have an ideal form, vs. religious symbols, which can. The church in Onward Christian Soldiers. [946] Carlyle's symbols: intrinsic and extrinsic.575 Confusion of former with symbols (a charismatic personality isn't a symbol but a presence even if he has symbolic attributes like the Pope or King) turned him in a fascist direction. Carlyle thinks of poetry as a poet's rhetoric, but this is a literary convention referring back to an original performance: if you ask a poet what his poem means, all he can do is recite the poem. [947] So the poet, like the king in Kantorowicz, has two bodies (Eliot, Keats, Yeats, etc.)576 [948! Every word is a symbolon (centrifugal reference: matched up to what it "means") and a symbole or symbolos (augury or clue to its own context). A word is a word because it's different from all other words, but words tend to link themselves together in syntactic patterns. A second level of linking up, sometimes overriding the syntactic, is the level of figuration. [949! Objective correlative is metonymy, taking in both centripetal and centrifugal aspects: look at the symbol-titles, golden bowl and white narcissus and the like.

602

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[950] Isaiah 55:12: first part syntactic; second part metaphorical. What we do with the metaphor is look into the empty space between what it appears to be saying and what is untrue about what it is saying. In that empty space we find an internal symbolon (the other half of the first part of the verse) and a portent or augury of a state of innocence. [951] Overthought and underthought: Eliot's dogmeat.577 Syntactic meaning varied and flexible; metaphors used much less so. Metaphors tend to cluster around repeating images. Wyatt's "My galley" sonnet uses allegory, but is really analogical metaphor, two images of lover and foundering ship forming a double mirror staring at each other. ("Lord" and "stars.")578 Imitative harmony suggests "magic" connection between sonnet and world it's said at. End of this process absorbs reality into Stevens' "world of words to the end of it" [Description without Place, pt. 7, 1.5]. [952] Poetry speaks total language, subconscious and conscious, emotional and intelligent. Every verbal construct, like a metaphysical system, is founded on metaphorical bases, usually a diagram. Metaphor cannot be described except by another metaphor.579 [953] Romantics put poetic language "higher" than reason; Freudians put it "below" in a subconscious; symbolisme in France put them side by side, with their backs turned to each other.580 [954] Edmund Wilson tried to write off symbolisme as pure subjectivity, but this won't work. The subjectivity is there (Des Esseintes' English trip and the conclusion of Axel). It turns on "peak experiences."581 [955! Rilke in his earlier period, influenced by Rodin and blue-period Picasso. Then silence, then Duino and Orpheus. Letter says the world of things had to be interiorized: man evolves from physical to symbolic world. Latter symbolized by Orpheus and by his kind of "angel."582 [956] Mallarme thinks of the poet as a creator creating in the teeth of the creation, a god working in defiance of Nobodaddy. "Man's duty is to observe with the eyes of the divinity, for if his connection with that divinity is to be made clear, it can be expressed only by the pages of the open book in front of him."583 He is "one of the ways the Spirit-

Notes 52

603

ual Universe has found to see Itself, unfold itself through what used to be me."584 [957! Mallarme's is a world where human creation comes to be, where meaning is, where chance is not abolished but where a world that within itself is not chance has taken shape.585 Not subjective: all poets manifestations of the same spirit. [958! Also (point of mine) words intercommunicate through the waking consciousness: it isn't a question of deep calling to deep [Psalm 42:7], as in Jung, nor a matter of the mind recognizing its own built-in elements. If Europe has a traditional and conventional symbol and Africa doesn't have it, Europe's is still communicable to Africa. The poet and the dreamer are distinct. [959] Seeing anything with expert knowledge turns an image into a symbol by linking it to a corpus of significance. Perhaps Cassirer is right in suggesting that the ability to see the image as a symbol, a unit to be completed with the understander (in one aspect) and the context (in another) supplying the other half, is what's distinctively human.586 [960] Symbol originally (Caxton) meant dogma:587 now it means whatever by-passes dogma. Mallarme and Rilke talk like Gnostics, not Christians, yet they not only throw light on Christian understanding but were anticipated by Christian poets, esp. Marvell in "The Garden." [961! Heraclitus on the exchange of fire for all things:588 unity and plurality interchange. Ladder of elements from the soggy and moist to the dry light, after which we go back. "Literally," we can have gold or all things, but not both: But maybe there's more, along the lines of the interchange of whole and part that Paul ascribes to Christ's relation to the Christian.589 These get to be statements of belief. Poe's Eureka speaks of "this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion."590 Almost because he won't believe in the infinity of the universe. Zen on tree and mountain. "Enlightenment" a metaphor like Heraclitus' "fire." [962] (5)591 A convention big enough to include an entire work of literature is called a genre. The genre invites, as any bookshop will show by its

604

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

labels. Why do some conventions seem monotonous and others varied? No answer yet. Except, maybe, the number of sub-conventions that have to be sacrifice[d] to keep the convention intact. Example of pornography. [963] Snobbery about obvious conventions like the detective story, though game-forms have always been in literature. Convention-bound criticism: Johnson vs. that Russian formalist on Tristram Shandy.592 Paradox of "the faultless painter" in Browning [Andrea del Sarto]. "Beauty" often means tyranny of convention: 19th c. thought beauty had been invented by the Greeks. Right now there's a pretence of ignoring convention, hence my toilet training joke. "The privileging of interdiscursitivity problematizes the differentializing of contextuality" doesn't release me from a ticketing obsession.593 [964! Point about Shakespeare being a dramatist first and a poet afterward. The decline first of formal logic, then of rhetoric, finally of grammar. Result is that writers often don't know they're conventional. True voice of feeling fallacy.594 Muses confined to generic territories. [965] Chaotic tendency in criticism to move their neighbor's landmarks: use of criticism to undermine criticism more insidious than Derrida's writing-speaking business.595 [966] Plus sign theory: ideological setting the horizontal bar; source of poet's total anxieties, not just the Freudian predecessor kind. Tasso, Gogol, Rimbaud—even deliberately adopted stances like Hopkins, are dangerous to integration. The really original rediscover tradition on a deeper level, and tradition is the vertical bar.596 [967] Tradition can only be established by comparative generic analysis. Poets don't read what source-hunters feel they should have read; they often read and use sources that have no real significance (Harsnett in Lear),597 and often ignore sources that are very central in their tradition (Rabelais in Joyce). Direct ancestry spreads out to take in everybody. [968! Two dimensions in the study of e.g. Shakespeare. No zero degree of writing.598 Primitives as conventionalized as anyone else. Creation an ontogenetic development that recapitulates its phylogenetic ancestry. Cult of unmediated vision relates to something else.599

Notes 52

605

[969] This is the fact that an author's real source of authority is mythological, not ideological. In latter he's a minority and negligible influence however devoted he is. Realization of this makes some poets seek out the most bizarre and perverse ideologies. Quest for unmediated vision, quest for the recovery of myth, the word-hoard guarded by the dragons of ideology. [970] Mythology and ideology both products of concern, and of course the specific social function of myth means that it always has an ideological aspect. Curious affinity between mythology and primary concern: the food imagery in Frazer, sex imagery in the love poets. Primitive societies don't eliminate poetry in a struggle to survive; on the contrary.600 [971] Secondary concerns produce history; literature reflects them always, but as elements of content rather than structure. (Patriotic and religious poetry usually bad or "verse": general principle the direct expression of ideology.) Mutations of genres occur with class shifts: novel and the bourgeois reading public. But the novel was primarily a new format for story-telling, and the structure of the stories told didn't change all that much. [972] History of ideas deals only with ideology: history of mythology, or real literary tradition, takes a crank or a nut like Frazer or Graves or me. Also mythological history develops a curious optical illusion of complete myths in the past. Actually myths complete themselves as they go on, because the area of communication is the conscious mind, not deep calling to deep [Psalm 42:7]. But whole subject still in the "here be dragons" stage of map-making. [973] Because mythology ride[s] on top of, or gets submerged under (the spatial metaphor doesn't matter) actual history, it suggests a state of innocence or Golden Age. This by definition can't be historical, but accounts for the fact that every age was bloody stupid and horrible and yet may have produced art that we still admire, a continuous age of innocence, the ark still floating. [974] Revival (self-conscious) of myth in early twentieth century prophetic of the age when primary concerns must become primary. The

606

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

crazy Oedipus again. "Framework" is ideological setting; "assumption" takes us down or up to the mythological current; "convention" has two meanings, one suggesting the previous agreement the author makes with a reader, the other suggesting the community that gathers to read what he says.601 [9751 (6) I mustn't overlook the GC point of universalizing the centripetal-centrifugal duality: every structure in words has a centripetal, and therefore ultimately a literary, aspect.602 The "literal," then, is (a) the metaphorical, and (b) the literary. [976] Also that such concerns as food and sex enter literature as startingpoints of a process of sublimation that expands into the mythological. The spark plug is anxiety: famine and sterility of the waste land; frustration and "cruelty" of the fair disdainful dame.603 [977] Work and play, on the other hand, don't seem to start off from frustration in quite the same way. Alienated work or slavery or drudgery is more the concern of ideological language, and work as creative act is a bit too self-conscious to be a frequent subject. Still, there's all the ziggurat bit. Play gets into such things as [Sir John Davies'sl Orchestra.604 In Romanticism, of course, there's no lack of work-poems: Keats's Ode to Psyche is a random example. Note that Shelley's Witch of Atlas was an essay in mythological play, so deliberately removed from ideology that even Mary Shelley couldn't see the point of it.605

§ [978] I've been reading Geoffrey Ashe's book on Camelot and the vision of Albion, and am very impressed with it: it's really the first book I've read that's got enough guts to say that man simply refuses to believe in the reality of death and that no ideology that doesn't recognize this will work. Progress doesn't work: he quotes Orwell as saying that H.G. Wells preached progress all his life and accomplished nothing: Hitler preached a gospel of death so horrific it actually compelled people to see a goal of revival beyond it:606 the thousand-year Third Reich was a steal from the millennium, as he doesn't say. [979] I've been forgetting that my four concerns, food, sex, work and

Notes 52

607

play, are enclosed within an anxiety, the anxiety of whence and whither, why we're born and why we die. I have a hunch that what I call work is directed to a goal of return or revival; what I call play is an expression of belief in resurrection. [980] Artemis was the goddess who mostly presided over women in labour, yet she was a virgin. Maternity is of course a specifically female function: the virginity symbolizes the fact that she wasn't assisting pregnant women in a context of male supremacy. That's more or less what the virginity of Mary symbolizes too: not conformity with male-oriented standards of "purity," but asserting that maternity is self-imposed and not male-imposed. [981] This means of course that all ideological myths that have any appeal at all get assimilated to the primary myths. Perhaps even my secondary myths do, as the anti-Semitism myth derives from the scapegoat one. (The real or mythical scapegoat is not sin but death, Henry James's beast in the jungle who turns out to be nothingness.)607

§ [982] It seems to me that the notion of "travel" in either time or space, the central assumption of science fiction, is a false metaphor derived from the quest-theme of literature. I first began to grasp this point when I was reading that anti-Gnostic science fiction story of Mike Joseph's. He said that the notion of travelling in time was like crossing the Atlantic with a motorcycle: you can travel on motorcycles and you can cross the Atlantic, but you can't do the one to accomplish the other. He said we could travel only through the mind, and this seems to be the general science-fiction assumption now.608 But I wonder if the notion of "travelling" isn't equally fallacious for space, an attempt to put the natural body where only the spiritual body can go. [983] If I could work out some of the implications of this I'd have a clue to, I think at the moment, the Adonis chapter. Also I've been reading, more or less at random, in science fiction for varieties of the parallelworld conception which seems to me a possible exit from the present updown mythical universe dilemma. Reincarnation is now being trumpeted as practically established scientifically: it isn't, and I still think there's a

608

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

fallacy buried in it somewhere, but there's probably a pattern it fits. I read the four volumes of Philip Jose Farmer's "Riverrun" series, but they were a bust.609 Now I'm reading Zelazny's two-volume "Amber" series, which at least has better patter.610 They seem to me a development of the Eddison series,611 where the ideal world is conceived as an archaic one, reminding me of Lawrence's proposal that if men wanted to fight they should repudiate modern hardware, get into armor and have a good old heroic hack.612 Eddison isn't quite as silly as that sounds, but his fantasy world is simply the old chivalric-romance one back again. We seem to be in an age of neo-Ariosto.613 [984! Travel, then, is the survivor of the quest, and the quest was a metaphor for some kind of survey of the mythical universe: something that escapes from mere subjectivity (i.e., daydreaming). [985] I get puzzled at what a bind science fiction seems to be in. Roger Zelazny's Amber books turns [turn] on a Platonic real world (Amber) and a number of shadow worlds thrown by it, of which our Earth is one. They go on different time-schedules, natch. But the real world is just the old revived chivalric world of Eddison again: nothing in it we haven't already had ad nauseam in previous romance. Eddison, by the way, says his world is on Mercury, but in a few pages we're reading about the moon: there's no attempt to persuade us we're on a different planet, or anywhere except in the author's fantasy. Zelazny has his patter about different levels of time and reality, but at the centre of it is, as I've said, just the same bloody old chivalric wet dream. So I suppose other retellings of older myths, such as Evangeline Walton's,614 would turn out the same way. I started Dune and a couple of Asimov books:615 what they recreated wasn't strictly the chivalric pattern, but neither was there any sense of discovery whatever. I'll go on looking, but cautiously: I can't waste time, and they're all pre-Quixote dreams, not that I think a neo-Quixote is the answer either. [986] I suppose every new development of romance is really a new development of polytheism, and a new set of heroes or quasi-god figures developed from the tedious amorality of nature. The Bible did point a way and a direction out of all that: why are allegedly creative people so stupid?

Notes 52

609

§ [987! So the general change (with some recapitulation) is this: [988] Chapter One deals with the mythical universe in space, and Chapter Two with the mythical universe in time. The first chapter begins by outlining the general shape of the mythical universe, as one can collect it from Mircea Eliade (especially the Cosmos and History book) and G.R. Levy's Gate of Horn. The elements, of course, are the symbolic male and female Yang and Yin motifs: the centrifugal hunt and the centripetal hearth. The world-mountain and world-tree with its serpent, along with the temenos motif, the latter being the female enclosure and the former the male extension. Then show briefly how this is enclosed in the Bible and go on to trace the evolution of the four-level authoritarian universe out of it. Then how the third level gradually modulated back again into the old natura naturans conception, and by virtue of that recreated what the poets had never allowed to die out, the unsublimated Eros that's also the metaphorical world of unified subject and object. The result this had in turning the mythical universe upside down. [989] Chapter Two deals with the downward movement of authority from heaven, coming to its climax in the Incarnation, and the upward movement of revolution in the Exodus and Resurrection images. How the first became the controlling movement of the authoritarian universe and the second of the post-Romantic one. These two chapters together deal with the Biblical themes of creation and exodus, but both need a Hegelian negation. The essential truth of creation, as a phase of revelation, is not the beginning of the natural order, however often it's insisted that it is, but the awakening of the consciousness. But that has to be handled carefully, because it's not the awakening of subjective consciousness over against an objective one, though to some degree God is represented as awakening in that sense in Genesis. It's rather a sense of identity between subject and object, man and nature, reinforced by an awareness of that identity which is genuine consciousness. I suppose in the unfallen state the awareness would not be confined to man, but would be the awareness of the unfallen "Soul" of Blake's poem.616 [990] Hence the treatment of the exodus theme in Chapter Two would

6io

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

combine the genuine revolutionary movement out with its neutralizing opposite, Blake's pillar of cloud that modulates into law. My view of the terrorism of a pure society, where the dragon is the seeing one, would be part of this: the rest I haven't worked out yet. Also it can't be as simple as a "betrayed revolution" thesis: I don't know what gets betrayed. But it seems to me that the tremendous vision of Moses on Pisgah, or Nebo [Deuteronomy 34:1-4], or whatever, is its climax, in contrast to the Joshua who conquers Canaan, even though the latter is a type of the Messiah. [991] This theme, however I work it out, is Prometheus Unbound, and there are no lack of literary references in English literature: the ambiguous role of Satan, in Milton and elsewhere from the Caedmonian Genesis on, is a part of it. The demonic smith in Blake and the contrast between two radically different activities both called "sin" by terrified reactionaries, and hence often confused by the radicals. [992] Anyway. Eros Regained comes next, and that's the sublimated Eros of Plato and Dante running into its gonadic opposite that eventually blows up the homosexual Christ with his mother and his beloved disciple, not as Lawrence tried to blow them up [The Man Who Died], because he was full of a lot of other crap, but as Blake did. This is the full love that leads to wisdom because it's the full individualizing of life, as in Yeats's poem about the perfect fuck of Solomon [Solomon and the Witch]. [993] I used to say that our feeling of identity with ourselves at the age of seven was the only illustration of identity I could give. I wonder if this means that "life" means primarily "metaphorical reality." [994] In any case life is clearly a matter of context: when I get a haircut or cut my fingernails or shit what falls off me I no longer think of as alive, even though cellular and bacterial activity would still go on in them. Compare Jesus' remark that it's what comes out of a man that defiles him [Mark 7:15]. His own healing achievements were usually some form of casting out devils, that is, consolidating what defiles one in some form of shit in which it can be got rid of. So whatever remains in context is alive; whatever gets shat is a part of the body of death—excrementitious husk, as Blake says [Jerusalem, pi. 98,11.18-19!. [995] That's all part of what Jung calls the shadow, which he says even-

Notes 52

611

tually, after one has come to terms with it, turns into the anima. The shadow is the lost soul who ought to get lost; the anima is the soul one wants to save, and is always feminine symbolically, in women as well as men. Jung's animus is probably something else. This anima is the part of the psyche that isn't the ego but responds to the Christ in one, the individual form of the female Jerusalem or rescued bride.

Notes 53

These notes are a series of typed sheets for lectures on the double vision of language, nature, and history (later changed to "time") that Frye presented at Emmanuel College, 14-16 May 1990. The lectures developed into the first three chapters of The Double Vision (1991); Frye added a fourth chapter, "The Double Vision of God," before the book was published. All of the entries in these notes appear to have been written between December 1989 and May 1990. It is clear that Words with Power (1990) had not yet been published, as Frye speaks of adding a footnote and inserting material into that book. References to other essays Frye was writing and to current events, such as the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, also point to a 1989 date. In the margins of the typescript Frye wrote "ONE," "TWO," and "THREE," or occasionally "i" and "3," alongside a number of the entries. He then cancelled these holograph annotations, which indicated, at least at one stage of Frye's plans, which of the three lectures would contain or develop the material in the entry. These marginal notes have not been reproduced in the transcription. Notebook 51, which was discovered in Elizabeth Eedy Frye's bedside table following her death in May of 1997, was apparently written about the same time as Notes 53. Thirty-one of its forty-nine entries, all relatively brief, closely parallel material in entries 194-218 of Notes 53. Designated in the Guide to the Northrop Frye Papers as Notebook 8 in the NFF, 1993, box i, Notebook 51 is not included in the present volume.

The typescript for Notes 53, which consists of thirty-two pages, hand-numbered by Frye, followed by one unnumbered page, is in the NFF, 1991, box 39, file 8. [i] I've been asked by Emmanuel College to do a series of three lectures for their alumni reunion in May of 1990. Passing over the question of

Notes 53

613

whether or not it's an imposition to dump an assignment of that size on me with five months' notice, I'd like to make it one of my three-lecture books providing a pocket-sized summary of my GC and WP theses, more particularly the latter, in the way that the Masseys1 were a pocketsized Anatomy. [2] The first lecture would deal with the central issue of both books, the fact that in the Bible the prevailing language is myth and metaphor, and that consequently the literal meaning of the Bible is the poetic meaning. What I've started in the double-space pages will do, I think, with the usual ten-times rewriting.2 I think I can get around being pointlessly controversial in the Catholic-Protestant area if I stick to the fact that the literal meaning is the metaphorical meaning, which actually everyone with any sanity believes anyway. The educated Catholic laity doesn't believe in the autonomous infallible, non-contradictory church any more, and even the upper hierarchy only asserts that it does out of habit. Well, out of desire to maintain power. [3] The usual stuff here: statements of belief like the Nicene creed are not only founded on metaphor; they're not even true in any sense except on a metaphorical basis. The Hebrews definition of faith as the reality of hope and illusion naturally has to be emphasized [Hebrews 11:1]. [4] That doesn't rule out the theological witness altogether, of course: it merely says that unless the literal is the metaphorical the creedal statement not only isn't true: it rules out the possibility of individualized and recreated statements, rules out creative self-dialogue in which doubt is as important as faith, rules out tolerance and respect and a sense of the truth of other positions. Hence the language of metaphor is the language of the spirit and the language of the spirit is the language of love and the language of love is the language of God. [5] The basis of the argument is probably something like Vaihinger's "as if": the fiction is the fact, belonging to the created world and not the there-world.3 [6] The argument passes through the soul-body hierarchy, Hegel's unhappy consciousness,4 Paul's natural man [i Corinthians 2:14], who of course can't get anything right.

614

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[7! Only don't forget that Vaihinger didn't give a damn about literature. Neither did Vico, really, though some people have tried to persuade me that he did. [8] Derrida's logocentric text is a straw man, or rather a cloth-bound man: the real logocentric text is the dogma, the logos that's opaque, intolerant, and malignant. The Logos of John is a use of the word in a greatly extended and more flexible context (coinciding ultimately with mythos): the traditional translation "verbum," which logos never means in Greek, expresses something of this. From Heraclitus to Philo logos means a rational principle within nature: the logoi spermatikoi5 of the Stoics are something else again, but they aren't anything corresponding to the diffusion of spiritual energy, at once divine and human, that is meant by logos as verbum. [9] You can use Hegel or Heidegger, but once you say you believe in them you're an asshole. Same with Marx, as Marx himself said. [10] The main theme of the second lecture is the two aspects of the universe, the objective one studied by science, and the aesthetic one which underlies the etymological link between cosmos and cosmetic. Beauty, emotional responses, things like a sense of humor, all belong in a universe of perception and experience which is not that of science, and not subjective either. Beauty in the eye of the beholder raises a false issue even if it's partly true. There isn't a subjective universe distinct from the objective one, because man is first of all a product of nature, after that a product of his society, and thirdly an individual. [11] So psychological constructs like those of Jung are simply the other side of the objective universe. I have to go carefully here, because I seem to outsiders to be close to Jung, even to derive from him, and I have to establish the fact that the aesthetic world or cosmos doesn't derive from the psychological one; the latter derives from the subject-object split. Kant's Critique of Judgment is the classical text here, although it's tough going. [12] The categories of creation and apocalypse make sense only within the aesthetic cosmos. (I don't like calling it the aesthetic cosmos because that involves me in aesthetics, which I want to keep clear of.) A better

Notes 53

615

term would be the speculative cosmos, or better still something that suggests a constructed cosmos. Things like the speculative aphorisms of the pre-Socratics have a validity to them that isn't proto-scientific (though they may have that too). They're closely related to the poetic universe. Goethe on color vs. Newton; the objectors to evolution who have a real point: the explanation of the how doesn't take in the co-ordinated response to the variety of forms. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World is a book that's influenced me so profoundly I often reproduce its conceptions when I think I'm thinking: the chapter on the Romantic poets, emphasizing Shelley's keen interest in science and Wordsworth's cosmic-speculative idiom, is important here. He notes the Shelley-Berkeley link that Brett6 picked up (of course Shelley made it himself). My point in WP that Wordsworth's nature was an inner paradisal myth—but again not psychological, or not wholly so.7 [13] The words creation and apocalypse indicate the points at which a human construct begins to mesh with something that's constructed but divine or infinite in origin. The answering voice from God to the human construct (which again is not objective) is what I mean by kerygma. So maybe this lecture is after all simply a restatement of the distinction between kerygma and rhetoric.8 [14] Is the world beautiful because it is beautiful or because we've been conditioned to see it that way? That's an either-or question, and consequently is wrong in its assumptions. The human consciousness has three forms of adaptation to the environment for survival value available to it. One of these is the will-adaptation, exploiting nature and using consciousness as an instrument of power. It's produced the technological world, and remains essential even though it's nearly buggered us—may do yet. The second is the adaptation of the intellect, seeing the objective world as a field of study and comprehension. The third is the emotional adaptation that produces the imaginative or created world. Kant's critiques: introduce CJ [Critique of Judgment].9 [15] I think this lecture might follow up on what I said in WP about "Elohim."10 The doctrine that if we have one God we can't possibly have many gods is a construct of the finite human mind, and God probably regards it as horseshit. Sooner or later God must refund us our confiscated gods.11 Including the divine essence in each of us.

616

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[16] Not only does the human mind keep throwing up logical rules telling God what he can and can't do, but our notions of God are all derived from nature, and consequently form a dual heaven-hell projection: the beautiful garden and the awful or sublime sea, the complaisant God and the wrathful God. [17] The theme I want for the third lecture takes me into fields I'm ill prepared to enter, and unless I can connect it with something already central in me I don't know how I can complete it in time. The general idea is that harmony, reconciliation (whether of God and man or of two arguments) and agreement are all terms relating to propositional language. The poetic counterpart is what I've been calling interpenetration, the concrete order in which everything is everywhere at once. Whitehead's SMW [Science and the Modern World] says this in so many words:12 I must have got it from there originally, though I thought I got it from Suzuki's remarks about the Avatamsaka Sutra.13 (I can't make any sense out of these infernal Sutras: they seem designed for people who really can't read). The general line is, I think, anti-Hegelian: Hegel showed how the thesis involved its own antithesis, although I think the "synthesis" has been foisted on him by his followers. Anyway, the expansion to absolute knowledge is too close to what Blake calls the smile of a fool.14 My goal would be something like absolute experience rather than absolute knowledge: in experience the units are unique, and things don't agree with each other; they mirror each other. [18! I keep thinking in spatial metaphors here, but Ecclesiastes thinks in temporal ones. Nothing new under the sun [Ecclesiastes 1:9] refers to the cyclical and repetitive element that's the basis of knowledge; to everything there is a season [Ecclesiastes 3:1] refers to the uniqueness of experience in time. [19] God's centre is everywhere, but his circumference must be everywhere too: things get defined and outlined, not just absorbed. [20] My marginal note on Whitehead's "everything is everywhere at once" refers to Plotinus V, 8, the essay on intellectual beauty, but I don't know why I said that.15 But then I make very little of Plotinus anyway. [21] I have a feeling that this lecture involves history, my view of his-

Notes 53

617

tory, the attacks that have been made on me about my alleged lack of historical sense. True, I regard the Marxist historical process as a superstition: it's betrayed millions of people who tried to believe in it, and it's a dead cock that can't fight any more. It's also been revealed to be another aspect of the grotesque and horrible substitution of progress: starve everybody now and our great-grandchildren will be better fed, except that the present establishment is making sure they won't be. [22] I've realized that my attraction to Spengler, which puzzled me so at first, was the result of divining in him the principle of historical interpenetration: everything that happens is a symbol of everything else that's contemporary with it.16 Such a perspective helps one to escape from the abstracting of culture, including the arts and sciences, from what I've called the dissolving phantasmagoria of political events.17 [23] Seems to me there may be two layers of historical perspective in the Bible: the linear one that descends to Hegel and Marx and their illusions of an ideal to be reached in the future, and the post-Easter history where everything is totally decentralized in the present, and is apocalyptic rather than millennial. [24] Maybe what I've got is a series called "The Double Vision," again from Blake/8 and breaking down, or up, into the double vision of language, of nature, and of history. In language there's the poetic versus ideological language of faith; in nature there's the objective or consciouswill approach to nature and the approach through beauty and the charm of personality (i.e., Blake's "old man grey" inside the thistle). In history there's the present omni-centered apocalyptic vision versus the movingbelt temporal one that produces the millennial illusion, the continuation of the Old Testament prophets predicting something in the future instead of realizing that the future has already happened and is being presented to you right now. The Jewish future Messiah, the frenzy of continuity in Roman Catholic conversions in the igth century; the Hegelian and Marxist superstitions, and the easy perversion of evolution into progress, are some of the consequences. [25] The two components of the double vision are, of course, the vision of the soma psychikon, the conscious soul-body unit, and the vision of the soma pneumatikon, the spiritual vision.19 The latter is usually re-

618

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

garded as "superior," but I distrust hierarchical metaphors even when I use them. The spiritual vision is traditionally thought of as "inner," and hence esoteric, concealed from the multitude—even Jesus talks this way in the Gospels. But after the Resurrection the spiritual vision became openly manifested and displayed. The only thing that's superior about the spiritual vision is that it isn't bounded by the Heideggerian categories of birth, thrownness, and above all death. Otherwise, it's as silly to argue about superiority as to argue about whether the bones or the flesh are more important in the body. [26] The death-limited vision is the one we start with, and that most people end with. The moving belt of time and space-there are its dominant categories. Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him [Job 13:15]. He slays everybody without exception, and yet we trust. I feel very close to breaking through to my own centre here. I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open. [27] I've picked up again Mead's three volumes on Hermes Trismegistus:20 that's always been assumed to be a deservedly forgotten effort of pseudo-scholarship. I think it may be the spiritual vision of that literature: I've read Frances Yates on Bruno, and she's obsessed by the pseudepigrapha side of it; the hermetic literature wasn't written by an ancient Egyptian god or whatever, but, etc. That affects psychikon history, not spiritual history: similarly with Jessie Weston's notion of an ancient civilization behind the Grail legends.21 This is all a part of the Atlantis myth that gets into all spiritual vision in some way or other. What's under the Atlantic is what's inside us: if we uncover it we either find a spring of living water or we get drowned in a new flood just for us. [28] One, myth and metaphor as spiritual language; two, metaphor as the spiritual cosmos; three, myth as spiritual history. [29] Re above: the whole Bible, from the Genesis of "Moses" to the Revelation of "John," is a pseudepigraph, but no less relevant on that account. [30] In the third lecture I want to proceed from the gospel to the Everlasting Gospel, and yet without going in the theosophic direction of reconciliation or smile-of-a-fool harmony.22 The synoptics make Jesus

Notes 53

619

distinguish himself from the Father, as not yet more than a prophet: it's in the "spiritual" gospel of John that he proclaims his own divinity. (That's approximately true, though one has to fuss and fuddle in writing it out.) Yet John is more specifically and pointedly "Christian" than the synoptics: the direction is from one spokesman of the perennial philosophy and a unique incarnation starting a unique event. Buddhism and the like interpenetrate with the Everlasting Gospel: they are [not]23 to be reconciled with it. I don't quite yet know what I mean. [31] Reconciliation uproots everyone from his specific social conditioning: even the Marxists, who so much stressed social conditioning, made that mistake in believing that a uniform gospel of Marxism should spread over the whole world—the missionary error. [32] I know that the theory of metaphor is very complex, or has been made so by exuberant philosopher-critics, but I want to explain its basic principle very simply. A statement of identity like A is B introduces us to a universe in which unity and multiplicity are alternating aspects of the same phenomena. Paul's Christ in me and I in Christ is the obvious introduction for this audience. Again, Whitehead surrounds his principle of interpenetration by talking about the prehension of an event and its relation to other events:24 particularity and totality make nonsense without each other. [33] Idealism and realism, that venerable pair of igth c. boxers, are different aspects, not mutually exclusive, of the same cosmos. There's an affinity between the imaginative and the ideal, or at least the doctrine of internal relations, but of course the old subjective and objective versions of idealism have to be scrapped. [34] Power, wisdom and love are three persons in one substance. [35] Where do I put my lying spirit? I'd thought of beginning one lecture with the story of Micaiah, and going from there to God's inspiring prophets with lying spirits [i Kings 22:22-3] just as Zeus does in Iliad 2. Hence God is among other things a trickster. Where I go from there I'm not sure. Maybe it belongs at the beginning of Three. [36] Schedule: finish the first lecture, which deals with a thesis quite familiar to you, is already clear in your mind, and is extant only in a book

620

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

not yet published. That will do for Carleton.25 Meanwhile, in what time you have, finish the second lecture, and that may be all you'll be in a shape to give to Emmanuel: if the shape of three becomes clear, give it from notes only. [37] I have four primary concerns: Hegel has just one, namely freedom. I think all history is evolving spiritually towards fucking and a bottle, like Rabelais. Nobody knows what to do with freedom: they do know what to do with a bottle and a cunt. [38] I suppose occultism with its schematic patterns is halfway between the objective and the cosmetic universe; so are all the aesthetic canons in the Timaeus and elsewhere who insist that an aesthetically satisfying pattern must be the right one because God must have good taste. "Purposiveness without purpose" must imply some kind of purpose lurking somewhere, though. [39] Anyone who's lived as long as I have can't possibly believe that any society is going to do anything sensible for more than the time it takes to break a New Year's resolution. The current news from Eastern Europe is wonderful:26 I'm waiting however for the hangover. Something sensible may be forced out of people when the alternative is starvation; but all programs of positive action are perverse, like Lenin's. [40] They talk about liberation theology. We've spent centuries realizing that order and authority are not as necessary as panic and selfishness thought they were: spiritual authority, which is order without authority, is all we need. I wonder how the same principle applies to what's called liberation theology: only spiritual liberation will be any good, even though it has to be built on physical concern. [41] The myth of Atlantis, as I've known from the beginning, is another version of the myth of the fall, except that those who deal with it usually try to place it in history, whereas it doesn't really belong in history necessarily. [42] You start on the spiritual path as soon as you move from prayer in the context of asking for special favors to Solomon's prayer for disinterested wisdom or knowledge of the spiritual world [2 Chronicles 1:10]. At that point the next thing you want is to speak the language of that world,

Notes 53

621

without talking about "things unlawful to utter" with Paul [2 Corinthians 12:4]. All gabble belongs to the Tower of Babel. [43] In the summer of 1951, in Seattle, I had an illumination about the passing from the oracular into the witty: a few years later, on St. Clair Ave., I had another about the passing from poetry through drama into prose. They were essentially the same illumination, perhaps: the movement from the esoteric to kerygma. Any biography, including Ayre's,27 would say that I dropped preaching for academic life: that's the opposite of what my spiritual biography would say, that I fled into academia for refuge and have ever since tried to peek out into the congregation and make a preacher of myself. That's why I'm taking this preposterous assignment so seriously. [44] The adolescent tantrum is the parody of the spiritual life: go into your own room, shut the door, and hate your parents. Jesus' remark on this topic [Mark 13:12], incidentally, seems to move in the opposite direction from my version of the everlasting gospel above, assuming that the parents are one's cultural conditionings. Perhaps what is meant is detachment from and awareness of them. [45] Mead again: He's at least read the hermetics, whereas Frances Yates gives no sign of having done so:28 she can't think of anything except the falsity of the traditional dating. He's linked the hermetic literature with Plato's myths of Atlantis and Er, Plutarch on Isis and Osiris, the mysteries, and a lot of other things: in short, he's made his own outline of the mythological universe. My own version might start with the poetic version of history: Virgil's Trojan War, the Geoffrey passage to the Arthurian story, and the like. [46! I keep telling my students that in the 2Oth c. nothing has improved except science and nothing remained stable except the arts. The former is real history, following the continuum of time and giving it shape; the latter is spiritual history, omni-centered and continuously present. [47] Odd coincidences of language among the spiritual: one can't make too much of this though. [48! The beginning of spiritual life is a second birth; it's also a preliminary death, a cutting off of the world in search of one's real source.

622

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[49] By coincidences of languages I mean things like the hermetic "bitterness" that turns up again in Boehme,29 and the seven rulers that turn up in Blake's seven Eyes of God [Milton, pi. 24,1. 7] and the Elohim in de Nerval's Aurelia.30 Probably these could all be definitely located in a source by someone—they could perhaps have been located by me if I'd gone in for another type of scholarship. [50] This notion that thinking the world is beautiful has actual survival value may have nothing in it, but it's worth thinking about. Otherwise, why do we call both art and nature beautiful? It seems absurd on the face of it to apply the same term to a Mozart divertimento and some cutie in a bathing suit.31 [51] The thing that gets me down about the Hellenistic philosophies, including early Christianity, is the incessant war of the soul against the body, where the soul is always right and the body always wrong. This heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation is applied to God and man by Kierkegaard. There's a close parallel with the Indian conceptions of gunas, where we have a Rajas Guna, all will and aggression, and a Tamas Guna, all passivity and resistance. There's also a Sattva Guna that transcends them, not by reconciling them, but by breaking clear of their antitheses.32 Christianity has this third principle in Paul's doctrine of the Spirit, but for the life of me I can't see where Christians made any effective use of it. There's a parallel with Freud's picture of an egocentered consciousness sitting on top of a repressed one. Faith, in this setup, is the soul insisting on the truth of what the body knows ain't so, and telling the body to shut up. The "body" doesn't know anything either, of course, except that the soul is wrong. Not that I know what "body" means in this context. [52] This principle of resolving an adversary relationship, not by reconciling both sides but by breaking clear of the antithesis into a new level, would apply to a lot of things. I think Americans are hardly aware of living under capitalism: what they want is democracy, whatever the economic basis for it is. East Europe right now also wants democracy, but isn't necessarily being converted from Communism back to capitalism. Democracy, or at least the freedom of thought and expression and movement that goes with it, is the Sattva Guna of modern society. The Protestant-Catholic antithesis shows signs of being transcended in the

Notes 53

623

same way. The value in an antithesis is its capacity to raise criticism of each side by the standards of the other. [53] Wild pitch: the nineteenth century was Kant's century, with its critical approach to the speculative reason, the practical reason, and cultural tradition. The twentieth was Hegel's century, with its expanding dialectic which could be either revolutionary or reactionary. Wonder if Schelling's posthumous philosophies of myth and revelation33 could possibly come through in the twenty-first. Schelling sounds like a rather silly man in some ways: I wish though I could read philosophical German fluently enough to know. According to Wellek, Coleridge stole enough from him to make him a significant figure (that's not of course his moral).34 [54] The two cosmoi are the imaginative and the confrontational: I need a proper term for the latter. It's not objective, because that would suggest that the other one was subjective, to be studied by psychology, and it ain't. That identifies, as Freud does, the myth and the dream, which is crap. A link here is with my "lying spirit" point from the story of Micaiah [i Kings 22], which in turn points to a trickster element in God, which is there to prevent the idea of God from becoming predictable, always behaving according to human notions of what he ought to be doing, as with Bohr's remark to Einstein.351 suppose this straitjacketing of God is linked to the Thomist tradition, and is therefore part of what Earth attacks as the analogia entis.36 God's revelation, to Job or anyone else, always has to include, in fact lead up to, leviathan. [55] In Greek hyle means both forest and matter—cf. Jung's matermatter link.37 The word hyle was preserved in, e.g., Bernard de Silvestribus,38 and is said to have connections with the forest of the wandering knights-errant. [56] Evolution is not a myth, but designs constructed from it, like the onward-and-upward construct, are myths. They don't necessarily have to be scrapped for "new" myths, but there's a progression like that of the hallucinations in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.39 [57] A famous English poet tells us that not only are truth and beauty the same thing, but that the knowledge of that identity is all that we need

624

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

to know.40 Or, at least, the poet was contemplating a "Grecian Urn," which most scholars assume to be a chunk of Wedgwood, and the Wedgwood told him that.41 One wonders why so distinguished a poet should venture on so preposterous a statement. If we take historical truths only, practically all of them are quite unbearably ugly, and practically all beauty is based on an illusion of some kind. Then again, both words have become tarnished in the course of time: beauty is a most suspect word now, and truth is pragmatic, what seems to be approximately true for us now. [58! Then there's the word use. The great strength of Kant's Critique of Judgment formula is that it separates the beautiful from the functional, and assumes the former to be the more comprehensive term.42 I, or at least Helen, was brought up on the old Bauhaus crap about the beautiful being the functional, and eliminating the ornamental doesn't work.43 Then again, there's the formula of Morris: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.44 Note the shift of category from knowing to belief. Work & play.45 [59] Over the triad of the good, the beautiful and the true, there overarches the category of making. The good is how we ought to act, the beautiful how we ought to feel, the true how we ought to think. Ought, ought, ought. My ass. All these categories are aspects of how we ought to make. [60] What can man make? He can make objects of art; he can develop science, and that's it. He can't make a society except some form of hell.46 Hence we say that only the grace of God can do anything. When man makes anything that matters, he's making himself in the image of God. Only if God responds does it matter. But God is not God until he becomes man; only the incarnation has any real authority, and the consequence of incarnation or the imposition of order (order without authority, note) is resurrection or liberation. [61] Use again. Legend says Faraday was asked what was the use of what he was doing and said what's the use of a newborn baby? Legend amplifies the asker (it always amplifies) into Queen Victoria.47 The correct answer is: "Madam, who the hell are you that anything should be useful to you?" (Link with purpose.)48

Notes 53

625

[62] Fallacy of the premature consensus: X is a great artist: let's have a conference and establish a consensus to prove it. Ugh. The consensus seeps in very gradually, against the wills of most of those concerned in making it. The providence of God works a fortiori in the same oblique hidden, long-term way. Once a consensus is there, as with Shakespeare, the conference is superfluous, of course: it now becomes a mere assumption. [63] The Critique of Judgment has to do more with the response to art than the production of it: where it dates is in not ascribing a creative or making function to the critic. Judgment is therefore the activity of the critic that has to be outgrown before genuine criticism starts. [64] Grecian Urn again: truth and beauty begin to coincide as soon as we're teased out of thought by the thought of eternity: as soon as time becomes unreal and space is no longer just frozen time.49 [65! It's because I can't rule out the fact of a trickster God from the Bible that I can't believe any "magisterium," or corps of definitive interpreters with authority to say what something means. Remember Selden: all such things are decided by a vote of a committee in which the odd man is the Holy Spirit.5° Two or One?51 [66] Law depends entirely on its two foci: what it meant then and what it can possibly mean now. The laws in Deuteronomy about stoning a woman if the tokens of virginity are not found in her and cutting off a woman's hand if she grabs one of two fighting men by the balls belong to a (speaking mildly) barbaric age [Deuteronomy 22:20-1,25:11-12.]: hence they have either to be junked or rationalized on some oh, well, it doesn't really mean that basis. What then does it mean? Something that can be squeezed into the acceptable. Contemporary conscience is the arbiter. [67] To some degree these foci of the law are found in prophecy too: there's no reason to suppose that Deutero-Isaiah even at his most inspired was thinking about Christ.52 But with prophecy it's easier to handle the two foci, because of the poetic language. [68] Beauty: a word subject to ideological pressures: advance in educa-

626

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

tion is an advance in finding beauty in more and more and less conventionalized things. The first stage is to develop out of nature the character of the unpredictable along with the expected cyclical repetition. These elements of the sublime-awful-wrathful and the beautiful-tamed-oasis are taken from nature and projected on God. The sublime, the mysterium tremendum, is, as is generally accepted now, propaedeutic to the sense of God. [69] The mimetic is associated with what we make; the ecstatic is what gets made through us. Sooner or later we come up against a creation we didn't make; we can only understand it, and on that basis the verum factum axiom53 still applies. [70] Vaihinger seems to be my presiding genius: his as if basis is precisely what I mean by the imaginative basis of faith.54 [71] Critics, like words, discover their identity in disagreement; consensus is achieved in spite of themselves, if that's grammar: it leaks through invisibly and is visible centuries later. The same principle applies a fortiori to the providence of God. [72] My difficulty with Kant's Critique of Judgment is, of course, that I don't believe in judgment, except in a very tentative way. It's bound up with teleology: if a lion kills and eats a deer, the deer's notion is that deer exist for the sake of being deer, and that lions are an unwarranted and arbitrary intrusion into their world. The lion's view is that deer exist for the purpose of being eaten by lions. Humanity has been brought up by all its cultural conditioning to believe that nature exists to be exploited by man, and brought up by some of its religions to believe that humanity itself exists for the purposes of God. As we don't know what these are, we can go ahead living our lives in our own damfool way.55 [73] However, the progress of understanding, whether scientific or aesthetic, is toward recognizing the inner telos of every organism in nature. In fact I think the whole question of teleology is bound up with education. [74] To speak of the purposes of God in regard to man runs up against the flood archetype, where God says to hell with mankind: why did I

Notes 53

627

ever create the foul creature? Note that the opposite notion, that nature exists for human purposes, is considerably loosened up in the N.T. Considering the lilies [Matthew 6:28; Luke 12:27] is a different thing from picking them to make a bouquet. [75] Lenin allowed Lithuania to become independent, partly perhaps because he thought it should be, but mainly (Lenin was first and always a thug) because he thought nationalism had had it and next Tuesday everybody would want to be Communist. Then Lithuania was stolen by Stalin through a remarkably shitty deal with Hitler. Now Gorbachev says: look, we just gotta have it. If history makes any sense, it runs through a total denial of Lenin's notion and towards self-determination of (mostly linguistic) units: an interpenetrative solution rather than a reconciling one. [76] TWO: Seeing the primrose with greater intensity brings you into the human world. [77] Bauhaus doctrine of trying to identify beauty with function one more episode in the history of taste. [78] Argument of TWO: first, detachment from predatory nature as not good enough for man; second, reintegration with the balance of nature. [79] The objective cosmos usually tends to think in terms of a development from chaos to creation and order, from the simple to the complex, from fortuitous collocations of atoms to like attracting like. The imaginative cosmos, on the other hand, thinks in terms of a past Golden Age or a lost Paradise, because it naturally starts with an ideal or model in the mind, of which the present situation obviously is a degenerate form. Timaeus, etc. [80] Try to work out a melodic sequence between your two cosmoi and your view that culture decentralizes while the politico-economic application of the objective one centralizes. [81] All spiritual language is metaphorical, Berkeley says:56 perhaps a summary of my axis mundi map could be included, if only to establish the fact that these lectures are a Coles-notes version of GC and WP.57

628

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[82] Mircea Eliade's Zalmoxis: a wonderful piece of research, like all of his, but with some curiously cryptic remarks I'm not sure I understand, though they sound very important for my theses generally. The preface speaks of "a world of spiritual values that precedes the appearance of the great Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations." He associates this previous world more particularly with his Geto-Dacian locale. Later he speaks of a "mythico-ritual scenario" in Dacia and says: "it is certain that the 'imaginary universes' that are the concomitants of such mythicoritual systems were known in Dacia and in the rest of Europe, for they are found in the creations of folklore." That's more standard, but there's a more specific symbol of the spiritual world in the ghastly ritual of making a new engineering project like a building or bridge more secure with a human sacrifice. The victim's soul is transferred to a new body, the construction, which its death has animated. "We may even speak of an 'architectonic body' substituted for a body of flesh." A footnote adds "this 'transference of life' has its place in the well-known series of religious monuments 'animated' by relics or by representations of vital organs: eyes, mouth, etc." Thus drawing eyes on the bow of a boat gives it "life."58 [83] The second of these three references (p. 161) connects with Jessie Weston's remark about the disjecta membra of an earlier civilization59— an Atlantis archetype—and almost makes sense of it. [84] Other forms of this primordial imaginary universe: the Chinese geomantic tradition and its parallels for ley-hunters and the like in Britain. Perhaps some of the star-maps in Hamlet's Mill, though I've never really got the point of that book.60 Certainly the axis mundi is a pretty random selection from a whole cosmos—the world as mill is something I must think a lot more about. [85] The whole imaginative (or imaginary) cosmos is metaphorical, therefore to some degree anti-scientific as well as counter-scientific: it has, as I've so often said, four elements, a flat earth, and God knows what else: as long as it's schematic its existential (or ontological) status doesn't matter. I'm haunted by the feeling that even WP needs a few extra paragraphs about the imaginative universe, the warning that the axis mundi is an exceedingly arbitrary choice from a whole complex—perhaps even a hint that this may be my next big job, with these Emmanuel lectures the transition between them. How long do I have, angel?

Notes 53

629

[86] Philosophers naturally have their own approaches to the difference between the physical and the spiritual world. Leibnitz's monadology is a particularly fascinating one.61 But their context is so bloody clumsy that it goes out of fashion almost overnight. [87] The metaphor-world cannot be a factual world: it can only be a metaphorical one. As that, its only virtue is in being transparent: when it is, it becomes a gigantic metaphor or symbol for kerygma. Of course it usually includes various speeches from God: they have to be metaphorical too, symbols of kerygma but not it. [88] When myths have become incorporated into ideologies, they keep changing as the social patterns behind the ideologies change: once they are embodied in poems they stay myths. That's why one can use literature to interpret ideology. [89] The Biblical archetype of human society is the union of Adam and Eve, the nucleus of the nuclear family, and consequently of all human society. Behind this union is the union of the adam and the garden, the identity of humanity and nature. Behind that again is the rest of God on the sabbath. At the beginning there is diversification: God separates himself from his creation, becomes objective to it, so man has to start with a moment of leisure, of contemplating an "outside" universe before recalling it to himself. The same is true of the individual vs. society: society appears to children and adolescents as opponents, even enemies: again, society has to be recalled into a state of identity. [90] The New Testament records the growing dialogue between Word and Church. The gospel of Jesus is pure word; but there's also baptism, which Jesus himself did not perform, and the Eucharist, where he says "this do" [Luke 22:19]. Then there's the "water and the spirit" business in the Nicodemus dialogue [John 3:5]; then the growth of the church from Acts 2 on; also Paul dismissed circumcision [Romans 2:25-9, 4:9-12] but apparently accepted baptism; I used to think all this corruption, and in many ways I still do. But there can't be a mature society of the Word unless there's first a primitive society for it to grow out of. I think however that the claim to infallibility and continuous inspiration within the Church is still corruption. As Milton says, the church is always an adolescent (he would have added female adolescent) that has to be

630

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

trained and matured by the Word.62 Hence Luther's "here I stand," which wasn't freedom of conscience, but "here I stand until convinced otherwise by arguments drawn from the Word of God." [91! The language of the Word is mythical and metaphorical; the language of the Church is creedal and prepositional, and usually contains the blasphemous word "anathema."63 [92] Death, sparagmos, and resurrection. The whole of life is in that movement. Ovid's Metamorphoses, appearing at the very time of the life of Christ, illustrates the fall of man from Eden in detail: things fall apart; the centre no longer holds.64 Neither can Caesar or Augustus hold it together. [93] I think in this conception of a Word-Church dialogue in the N.T. I'm coming back to my old historical vs. everlasting gospel thesis. The purely spiritual gospel preached by Jesus is also known to what Augustine called the anima naturaliter Christiana,65 to Buddhists and Stoics and what not. What isn't known to them is the specific historical development known as the Christian Church, which is useful to have around as long as it doesn't make absurd and blasphemous pretensions. It's one of many ways in which the Holy Spirit operates: one can renounce the church without sinning against that Spirit: in fact one may well be working for it. Otherwise, why do contemporary writers on religion keep quoting Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Freud? Fold my ass. There is no such thing as a Holy Catholic Church, but a church that knows it isn't catholic and is sincerely trying to become so is certainly worthy of respect. [94] So I'm back to Joachim of Floris again; the age of the Son is a historical growth establishing the primitive form of the matured religion of the age of the Spirit.66 And I question whether it would be possible to have the mature religion without a primitive embryo still present in society. If only it could remember that it is embryonic! [95] The language of gospel is mythico-metaphorical, transparent, with kerygma sounding through it. What about the language of the Church? The language of the anathema-creeds is of the devil, but there must be something in it to rescue. Maybe its present form is Hegelian. If so, I wouldn't be the only theologian to think so.

Notes 53

631

[96] Death as a process and not a condition: a stone is not dead: when did it ever die? [97] The rush of ideas I get from Hegel's Phenomenology is so tremendous I can hardly keep up with it. I note that there's a summary in my edition that quotes Plotinus as saying that what is beyond is also here.67 So Plotinus has interpenetration, though the buggers don't give a reference, and Hegel doesn't allude to Plotinus. [98] Hegel seem[s] to be retracing Kant's three critiques in his own way: first reason as an observing quality, working within categories imposed by the physical nature of the human body and observing only a phenomenal world. Second the fact that consciousness means primarily a conscious will, an active being, and a practical rather than a speculative reason that can find something akin to it within (or whatever) the thing in itself. Third the critical reaction itself, aware of a purposiveness without purpose, as though there were purpose. Kant's judgment (Urteilskraft) is where Hegel's "Spirit" emerges.68 [99] Hegel's master and slave passages take in Morris's point: in medieval society the workers, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, were also the creators.69 The aristocracy put on a big show, but it was all tinsel and showoff, part of the dissolving phantasmagoria of history. [100] Human society starts with the union of Adam and Eve; with the fall the relation of Adam and Eve becomes the nexus of the master-slave relation, which expands from that. Hegel seems to overlook, or not be interested in, this point. The oedipal desire to kill the father and fuck the mother modulates into the desire to be the father and spank hell out of the mother.70 Jung seems to be saying that the anima or feminine principle grows out of the shadow, or projected evil principle. I've never liked his man-anima and woman-animus set-up: I think both have both, so the above could be readily reversed. [101] Hegel thinks the subservience of slave to master is an essential stage in his development.71 Maybe he'll say later that the only genuine form of subservience is to one's art or craft or vocation, which is so often metaphorically called a master. [102] Mastery began when God told Eve that because of the original sin,

632

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

societies would become patriarchal. The supremacy of man over woman began a master-slave pattern that extended to the family, and was preserved in the Roman despotism of the paterfamilias, and from thence to the enlarged family that included slaves. The spiritual authority of education links on here, as an authority that doesn't diminish dignity: this includes the authority in the arts of the "inspiration" of the muse or genius of the art itself, with its conventions and genres. I think I should stress this aspect of imaginative authority rather than what I've been stressing: the authority of the classic, which is more objective than I want. [103] Anyway, the two cosmoi are external and imaginative, but emphatically not objective and subjective. Subjective reduces the imaginative to the psychological, and is founded on the identification of dream symbolism with myth symbolism. That's crap. Art is a dream for awakened minds [Plato, Sophist, 266c]: it has exactly as much and as little to do with dreams as it has with objects and images in the natural world. Thus in all education the master modulates from the person to the craft. [104] Powerful pull toward the primitive submission to doctrine: I've always been attracted by those who took religion seriously enough to use it as a basis, but then struggled with it like Jacob with the angel. Blake, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, perhaps Rimbaud, certainly Baudelaire. Nobody gets converted to Protestantism: it doesn't provide the right primitive basis. It provides only a medium for struggle and, in itself, only a hard Ersatz primitivism. [105] Marx and Freud are the great emancipating spirits of the 2Oth c. because they attacked the natural-man hierarchical setup in society and the individual: it's nothing against them that more is needed in both areas.72 [106] Two cosmoi, then: one the external or confrontational world (external isn't ideal, but it will do) studied by science, and [the] other the imaginative world. The two constantly interpenetrate, but they're different. The imaginative cosmos naturally has to take account of the external one, and when it does it sees it as a myth of creation by God, thereby introducing into it the elements of beauty and teleology, always connected, as Kant shows.73 In the external world itself there's no purpose

Notes 53

633

until the organism appears with its steadfast purpose to survive, both in its individual life and by reproduction. But linear time seems to dominate everything, and the external world itself has no personally involving element. [107] I'm encouraged by the example of an early essay of Kant's on the sublime and beautiful74 to align the four humors (not of course the actual medical humors but elements of temperament) with my four mythoi: melancholy-romantic; choleric-tragic; sanguine-comic, phlegmatic-ironic. [108] Two elements in the imaginative world, severity and benevolence in the kabbalah; sublime and beautiful in Burke; alienating and attracting aspects of nature, obedient god who does what man tells him he should do and the trickster god. [109] Third essay: gigantic myth of original integration; sparagmos or diversification into innumerable minute particulars (sc. [scientific] organisms); reintegration in an alternating one-and-many perspective. Schelling confirms my view that the age of Virgil and Ovid sums up the vision of sparagmos—the metamorphoses show the personally involving world turning alien. It kept on going, of course: medieval knights wandering in the forest (hyle) building up sagas of their own. In the N.T. the historical doesn't really enter the gospel foreground: what happens is that the historical (the church) separates from the mythical (the Word). Being connected as well as separating, its central figure is spiritual, not Caesar as in Ovid, but a spiritual figure has to be presented mythically. [no] Freudian psychology studies dreams as expressions of primary concerns affecting the individual: Jung goes a step further, certainly, in seeing within dream-symbols the elements of mythological design. But the work of art, the dream of awakened minds, has to pass beyond Jung's collective unconscious into a collective consciousness arrived at through an imaginative consensus and taking on the form of a cultural tradition. [in] First lecture: the only religious minds of any real interest today are those who struggle with their faith like Jacob with the angel, like Emily Dickinson, Blake, Baudelaire, etc. The notion of fighting with one's faith was denounced in Catholic circles until very recently, and of course still is in nearly all official circles. But it's gaining ground even there.

634

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[112! I wonder if the phrase "spiritual substance" doesn't express a wish to have it both ways: the mythical nature of spirit combined with the reassuring Beulah-mattress of substance. Yet what can a spiritual life be if it isn't substantial in some context or other? [113] The soul-body unit is a conscious will. I said that very clearly in my Wiegand lecture.75 There is also an observing consciousness, the spirit, which watches the conscious will going through its routines, including death at the end. Its vision assimilates the dromena [things to be done! of the conscious will to a ritual dream: Jesus, whenever he spoke of "my hour [that] is not yet come" [John 2:4] and the like, was looking at his life as a preordained ritual. [114] I doubt if I have time before May76 to work out a hunch connected with the third lecture. I said that Ovid chronicles the fall of unity into particularity, consciousness into life, which he symbolizes by metamorphoses. I suspect that the doctrine of Pythagoras belongs to a unified design—I think the house of fame does too, if only because so many critics say it doesn't mean anything especially. Then there's the Virgilian historical view. The great quest to destroy Troy is followed by the returns to a great variety of homes; but a new quest sets out from Troy itself and builds a New Troy. Nothing much here, but visionary history seems to preserve this quest-sparagmos-reintegration pattern. [115] Lewis Hyde's The Gift: all culture belongs to a gift economy, not to a grab-and-hoard one.77 First lecture point. [116! I dropped in parenthetically a point I should make more of in the first lecture: the sense of individuality is bound up with the sense of territoriality. It's closely connected with ancestor-worship, or something analogous: the ancestors symbolize the descent of tradition that later becomes associated (by me) with the traditions of art. [117] The Ovid-Virgil point: they both end in deifications of Caesar, the type of Antichrist. Churchill said he didn't want to preside over the disintegration of the British Empire,78 but he'd have been an infinitely greater man if he had: Gorbachev is a later example of a leader whose essence is renunciation. Perhaps Hadrian, with his cult of Terminus, is a corresponding figure in Roman times. I'm yammering, I know: it doesn't matter, or mammer.

Notes 53

635

[118] The soul-body is conscious, but it's a subjective consciousness, and its principles are egoism, differentiation, and territoriality. The spirit is the observer of the soul's consciousness: it's often described metaphorically as a separate being, a guardian angel or daimon or what not. It builds up a body, not a body of matter but of energy, by watching the cavortings of the soma psychikon [natural man]. I suppose if there's nothing there, it could go elsewhere, being the real truth in incarnation, which is otherwise a stupid superstition. God damn it, I mean fucking REincarnation. Satanic verses.79 [119] The soul-consciousness is aggressive and asserts: the spirit renounces. It's the creative element in man, which creates by renouncing expression and accepting conventions of speech. I said that Jung's collective unconscious has to be expanded into a collective consciousness [par. no], and so it does. But that doesn't mean a collective soul-consciousness: nothing could come of that except listen to me, to me, to me. The collective spiritual consciousness is, as I keep saying, the conventions and genres of a cultural tradition. [120] So The Two Brothers comes out on top after all: the dreamer is the spirit and the dreamee is the soul-body with its dromena.80 Notice how in creative people the spirit and soul keep fighting each other, the creative impulse making something out of what may often be neurosis or worse. [121] The spirit only can struggle with the Word, and it only can make itself transparent enough to become the medium of kerygma. [122! The soul constantly yowls about being stuck with the body; the spirit is equally stuck with the soul, but it doesn't yowl. [123] The soul-body gets its sense of security from the group only; the spirit is something else. The dialectic of the struggle of and with faith results from the spirit's efforts to enlarge the perspective of the soulbody. [124] But where is the link I need with the reconciliation vs. interpenetration business? The spirit being attached to the soul, it can't be independent of space as long as the soul is alive. Does it just junk the soul or does it go on caring for it? St. Thomas links the spirit both with death

636

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

(change of state) and with omnipresence, but of course he's primarily talking about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is one, but it exists individually in each man, until the body returns to dust and the spirit to the God who gave it. One thing is sure: the body dissolves into nothing and there are no reliable accounts of souls returning. [125] The decentralizing tendency of culture is not the territoriality of the ego: it's a replica of the soul's settling down in a particular place. The centralizing tendencies it also has have a very different centre from the political ones. [126] Schelling says (perhaps an overstatement) that every mythology has a supreme god who is known to be the successor of a previous god.81 That's what has always bothered me about the "sovereignty" metaphors applied to God: they mean he's a supreme God, therefore belongs to a historical ideology, history being a category superior to Him. The only supreme God is a servant-God. Christ is certainly Kyrios [Lord], but within us he's a servant: he ought to be master but he practically never is. Link here with my diagram of Milton's faculties of reason, will and appetite before the fall and after.82 Once again, mastery here means spiritual authority only. [127] The main vehicle of the spirit within the soul-body is intuition: Blake's imagination is too general. It's a quality that works outside time: I've spent nearly eighty years trying to articulate intuitions that occupied about five minutes of my entire life. I don't mean intuition in my practical life, or anything connected with it: that kind of intuition is as often wrong as right. With me (I'm not an intuitive type), more often. [128] I've said that we develop criticism as an analogical construct to the fact that we never make a definitive response to the impact of great art: we're always scatterbrained or seeing Lear with a mediocre Cordelia, etc. On a bigger scale, man uses mythology as an analogical construct to the fact that he never directly hears the voice of God, or misinterprets it when he does. Man may have been made in the image of God, but no man ever was the image of God except Christ, and maybe Adam before he looked away. [129] (I may have this elsewhere). The doctrine of the uniformity of God,

Notes 53

637

that he is always good, just, merciful, etc., sounds like devotion to God: actually it's devotion to finite human categories of what man is determined his ideals of God should be. Niels Bohr is said to have advised Einstein to stop telling God what to do:83 the advice would be relevant to a lot of people besides Einstein. That's why, of course, there's so much about a whimsical, irritable, unpredictable, tricky and downright mean God in the O.T. [130] Re the top note [par. 126]: Milton also says, or ascribes to God, the remark that God will eventually outgrow being the supreme being, with the sceptre and crown and the rest of the rubbish discarded, and become (quoting Paul) "all in all."84 As a supreme being, he's not only a shit and a stinker, but there's a brooding suspicion I never understood before that he in fact has no right to be in that supreme position. [131] Schelling finds the essence of mythology in what he calls "theogony," a progressive evolution of revelation reaching perhaps a climax in the gospels but not through yet.85 I'm uneasy with this: it puts historical categories still on top. No, it's right.86 [132] The omnipresence of spirit and its independence of simple location: angels are spirits, and the number that can stand on the point of a pin is either none or an infinite number, depending on whether they occupy space or not. I think I can risk speculating on the fact that the spiritual body consists of energy rather than matter, but I hate to think of some form of Whitman's "body electric."87 Not that anyone knows what electricity is. [133! If the Spirit leads all souls into its unity, it's a psychopomp, a Hermes. Maybe this is something of what the alchemists meant by Mercurius. Thoth is the third name, but he's closer to the Word. [134] "The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common." Coleridge, and apparently Schelling.88 [135] The great error is to call the external and imaginative worlds objective and subjective. The external world as such is simply the world that is there: it was here a long time before we were; it could get along

638

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

quite well without us; its thereness, in short, does not depend in any way on our hereness. The other world, with its elements of beauty, symmetry, emotional appeal, and the like, is partly a creation of man and partly a human reaction to the external world: the perception of beauty is part of reality, Arnold said.89 But it isn't subjective: it's constructed mainly out of myth, but myth isn't subjective. The dream is subjective, and, as Freud showed, there are striking analogies between myth and dream; but they aren't the same thing by any means. Jung went farther than Freud, and posited a collective unconscious that comes closer to explaining the origin of myth. But he's still a psychologist concerned with the individual alone (in fact, with "individuation"), and consequently he's tied up in the paradox of an "unconscious" that we're supposed to know about. You have to advance into a collective consciousness. But there are two forms of this: one is ideological; the other is the spiritual aspect of primary concern. The former is always applied and is useful for maintaining somebody's ascendancy; the other isn't. Plato's art as wakened dream.90 [136] I think my primary and antithetical societies (I'm still reluctant to call them that) have a strong resemblance to Bergson's "two sources" of morality and religion.91 [137] Naturally the purely external world is an element in our perception of the imaginative world. That's where we get the two aspects of beauty as relating to human art and to pretty girls. But when the external world is incorporated into our comprehensive vision of the imaginative world it turns into a divine creation. And divine creation, even if it's by God, still has man for its ultimate audience. Further, divine creation introduces the notion of purpose as such, and makes teleological judgments unavoidable. Kant realized this clearly, which is why he stopped at "purposiveness without purpose" as the characteristic of Urteilskraft [Judgment].92 [138] What I'm getting at is that the imaginative world can't be subjective because the self-contained individual doesn't exist as such: the individual is a social and historically conditioned product—also ideologically conditioned. Hence private judgment, acting according to one's inner conscience, and the like, are horeseshit. Luther didn't say: "Here I stand, because my conscience tells me to." He said: "Here I stand, until I am convinced otherwise by arguments drawn from the Word of God." As

Notes 53

639

for the two forms of collective consciousness, above [par. 135], one is ideological, and is therefore, even when it's half right, also half wrong, and the half that's wrong becomes more and more expendable as time goes on. The ideological world keeps splitting into antitheses. But the spiritual body-world is penetrated by a collective consciousness that forms a tradition, which produces the genres and conventions of literature, and what corresponds to them in other disciplines. Of course the poet will join the ideological conflicts of his time, but to the extent that he does so he will date. [139] When "the creation" is incorporated into the imaginative cosmos, the emotional reaction to it may be of two kinds. Some of it looks beautiful; some of it looks awful, i.e., sublime. The opposite of beauty is ugliness, which is whatever violates primary concern; the opposite of sublimity is alienation, the sense of being a scapegoat. [140] Kant's Critique of Judgment stresses freedom and play, but, even more important, the whole argument turns on the contrast between mechanistic and ideological explanations, one assembling parts into a whole, the other deducing the parts from the (purpose of the) whole. He thinks there may be a reconciliation here but that the human mind may not be able to formulate it. In other words, perhaps, all explanation must be mechanistic. Teleological judgments are intuitive and not rational: they belong to the imaginative world, and they move toward projecting our own teleological feelings when we're creating on God, or whatever we postulate as "behind" nature. Nature, Exodus suggests, is the arse of God [Exodus 33:23]. [141] In the imaginative world everything is teleological: the creator knows what he wants to do, but is proverbially unable to explain how he does it, and he tends to move away from the quantitative or measurable instead of toward them. Like the black cook: "Ah takes two gullups of molasses." Blake insisted so hard on the creative side of the imagination that he's often misleading: he says anyone who isn't a poet or painter or musician can't be a Christian. Those who know Blake well can handle this kind of statement, but he shouldn't have made it. [142] Juliana of Norwich says he's in us and we in him (fn [footnote], to WP perhaps).93

640

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[143] I think my opening is right and my hunch about ending with interpenetration is right, but I wonder if the argument of ONE really does go into language; maybe it goes into history, and the reconciliation vs. interpenetration bit goes into a discussion of the double vision of language. I hate this kind of speculation. [144] Anyway, the point about progress is coming clearer: people who say they believe in progress usually mean technological development, and that's always spear-headed by weapons of destruction. That's why a belief in progress is so foul: we sacrifice ourselves to our future, and then it turns out that there isn't any future: we're just sacrificing ourselves, period. If anything is Moloch-worship that is.94 On the other hand, it's quite true that we always judge the past by the norms of the present: we can't take the stinker God of the Old Testament when our own norms are so much better behaved. What history does move toward, as my remark about the abstraction of Hegel's freedom implies,95 is a growing sense of the primary nature of primary concerns, and along with that the discovery that man is an animal in nature, and as soon as he thinks outside that context he's in all the unhappy-consciousness crap, loaded down with anxieties and aggressions. Of course the ambiguity of the two natures, the "real" one and the inner paradise, remains: we always say we love nature, not the ferocious predators who animate nature. But if we can't exactly love sharks we can be curious about them, study their habits, and leave them alone to make their own way in nature, and that's a kind of love. Anyway, history moves toward the progressively clearer discovery of the utterly obvious: we want to eat, fuck, own, and wiggle.96 [145! The final argument turns on a defence of my own views of a unity in criticism and a consensus among critics. All criticism of me of the Kermode type, based on the fallacy of a system where things have to fit, is the exact opposite of what I'm talking about:97 a system of that kind would be a hierarchy, and we've outgrown hierarchies even if we keep on sticking ourselves with them for centuries more. Physically, history moves towards the resurrection of the body; spiritually, it moves toward Joachim of Floris's ideal of an age of the Spirit.98 [146] It's the essence of a critic, as of a word, to differentiate himself from all other critics. Consensus comes, not from prepositional agreement (an aspect of "reconciliation") but from a common cultural context.

Notes 53

641

[147] Actually food, like breathing, while it's a primary concern, isn't one on quite the level of the others. Sex can expand into unity with nature, property into creativity, and freedom of movement into freedom of thought, but eating and drinking, along with breathing, have to remain on a more or less allegorical level. [148] A critic realizes he agrees with other critics, as a rule, when he renounces his ego. I can't of course say quite that, but I have to keep it in mind, because it's true. Second-raters who can't think but just think they think have to adopt some pre-fabricated position, feminist or Marxist or whatever, to disgorge whenever they're asked about anything. Of course they could do it with Frye criticism too, and some have, but there's something about me that discourages automatic patter. [149! If it was Vico who began the philosophy of history, it was Hegel who saw that a philosophy of history had to include a history of philosophy. Philosophy begins in an assertion of territoriality; it grows and diversifies through criticism, dispute, "refutation," and so on; but its real being is in a tradition of consensus. Every poem is "unique," in the softheaded phrase, and "archetype spotting" is a facile and futile procedure; but the traditions and conventions of poetry make a shape and a meaning. They move toward a future (emergence of primary concerns), and they expand into a wider present. [150] Criticism also has a tradition that gives a consensus to all the disagreement, including, not impossibly, all the blather and stock response. Because, as I've said from the beginning, even the bullshit documents a history of taste. [151] The bullshitters, of course, are always chasing donkeys' carrots (or bull's [bulls'! tails), looking for a final reconciliation of all disagreements in the bosom of Marx, S. Thomas, the Great Mother, or what not. The correct form of this is the "God exists in us and we in him" formula of Blake, Juliana of Norwich, and many others. This was the vision of historical Interpenetration I got from Spengler, without for many years knowing what it was I got. [152! The "subject" is the psychological subject, which can't think, can't create, can't do anything except complain about its "body" (persona

642

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

problems), until it hitches on to something traditional. Hegel calls it the unhappy consciousness." So it attaches itself to Christianity, Marxism, feminism, or whatever, and starts blathering the cliches of what it (so far) only believes it believes. Out of that eventually the true individual emerges with a "unique" addition to make to it. What this is has two aspects: it's an element in a tradition or convention, and it's all that unique shit. [153] I've been called a mystic as well as a myth critic, because some people think that's an even more contemptuous term. If myth is really mythos, story or plot, then mysticism is being initiated in the mysteries. The mysteries historically were rebirth experiences, and as such they belong to what Jesus tells Nicodemus is central to spiritual life [John 3:38]. The connection with shutting-the eyes and above all the yacking mouth (turn off the fucking chatter) takes one from the world of convention and tradition that's always sure it's going somewhere into the inner world of before birth and after death and thrownness and vision in between. Jesus entered synagogues, even preached in them, but he also talked of going into a closet and shutting the door [Matthew 6:61. This is the world of the individual experience that isn't just subjective and egocentric. It's also the nothing-world out of which nothingness grows into creation. [154] The few occasions in history when there seems to be a revolutionary movement towards something sensible occur when people are utterly fed up with what they've got. Revolts against Communism are easily explained on such a basis now: the enthusiasm for the New Learning of humanism in the sixteenth century indicated that intellectuals were utterly fed up with scholasticism. Always malignant clunkheads then crash down and pound it to rubble again, just as the Catholic and to a lesser extent the Protestant authorities in Europe extinguished all enthusiasm for genuine learning. [155] Marxism owed its immense popularity in Western democracies during the thirties to its being a primary or naive social vision, filling people with the great hope of pulling them down to a collective level where they wouldn't have to think any more. Those who couldn't buy that bought Thomism; those who simply hated the whole operation of thought went fascist. The United States never got sold on Marxism apart from the intellectuals, because they had their mattress to sleep on, the American way of life, with all its anti-intellectual cosiness.

Notes 53

643

[156] Ritual turns the wheel of the primitive society: observing times and signs may be the basis for individualized life. [157] I'm moving toward Blake's empire-versus-art dialectic: Marxism, Thomism, feminism, and all religions in their "fundamentalist" aspect are imperialisms. They want their power to extend throughout the whole world, and the conception of reconciliation or total agreement in propositions rationalizes some such impulse. The fallacy as always is that they use the wrong language. Culture decentralizes, and the more it does so the more readily it can communicate over vast distances of time and place and culture. Creative culture individualizes, being related to the spiritual body, where alone the world as "global village" resides. The mob-man assimilates to what's around him; the individual is equally an outgrowth of his society, but he recreates. The work of art is a symbol of that recreation, and the totality of art is the new creation. [158] The metaphorical structure of Acts 2 says that the Holy Spirit came down from outside into the apostles, creating the metaphor of the Holy Spirit being within man as an ultimately external power, salvation thus being a drama among the persons of the Trinity in which man is hardly included at all. This seems to me to ignore Paul's conception of man as himself being a spiritual body, so that the Holy Spirit and the spirit of man unite and the soul dissolves with the body. It's a question of metaphors, of course, and either-or situations are always deadlocked. [159] There's no such thing as a pure subject; there are only culturally conditioned subjects, and they speak two languages: the language of their contemporary ideology and the language of the tradition of their art. Perhaps the real difference between rhetoric and kerygma begins to open up here, though I see a lot of difficulties. Blake's statements are too extreme for those who don't know him to understand what he's saying: but perhaps I can say that every work of art is a possible medium for kerygma. [160] Movements that consider themselves revolutionary, like feminism and Marxism, go in for a kind of conscientious dishonesty in their pseudo-arguments. Here's a feminist saying that most of the poets I refer to are male.100 That's exactly the doubletalk I used to get from Communists: (a) it isn't true that nearly all great poets, for whatever reasons, happen to be men (b) of course it's true, but you must be a mean old

644

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

chauvinist to assume that it's true. Nothing can be done about this except to wait for it to stop. The instinct to lie deliberately to support an ideological cause is in Christianity, of course, God knows how deeply. If there's anything in that book about a censored gospel of Mark and Clement101 it's pretty deep, and one suspects it even in the gospels. Orwell's principle of who controls the past controls the present102 is involved here. It's a more or less degenerate offshoot of the fact that myth inevitably lies about history. [161] Well, I suppose all rhetoric lies about everything. That's because it seeks reconciliation and so tries to eliminate everything that doesn't fit the kind of thing people who don't know what they're saying say I do. I wish I could get over resenting the pin-pricks of fools: things won't get clear until I do. [162! History redeems: there's a process within history that isn't at all what Marxism calls the historical process, but relates to the cultural tradition. People denounced or martyred as horrible heretics in the hysteria of their times later become objects of great cultural interest. The twenty-first century will find The Satanic Verses103 a document of great interest to scholars and critics, but the Ayatollah will be of no interest to anybody except as one more nightmare of bigotry that history has produced in such profusion. One would hope that eventually the stupid human race would get the point. God doesn't create post-mortem hells even for people devoting their lives to cruelty and tyranny, but if he did the Ayatollah would certainly be howling in one of them forever. Anyway, this historical redemption of culture is something Schelling meant by theogony, except that he couldn't get beyond the purely mythological stage into literature.104 Geoffrey Hartman says Derrida has proved that there are no incarnational texts,105 Hartman and Derrida both being Jews: actually, there can be no text that isn't incarnational, that doesn't represent the descent of kerygma into flesh. Except that, while all writers and artists are prophets of a sort, most of them are opaque prophets, not vehicles of kerygma except by accident. [163] That note I got from Eliade on p. 10 [par. 82] is immensely suggestive. Egyptian pyramids are constructions (monuments) containing the body of the Pharaoh, and consequently providing a new body for his dead soul. The O.T. temple has the presence of God in the Holy of Holies;

Notes 53

645

Greek temples had statues; modern undertaker-cults have lifelike corpses in coffins; the Egyptians also had those mummy-coverings with idealized portraits on them. I put an unkind note on the p. 10 paragraph [par. 82!, "St. Paul's would be holier if it had the balls of Paul/' referring to the practice of putting a saint's "relics" in a cathedral, and, in fact, not even consecrating a church unless it had something of the kind. Life reanimating something dead with an allegedly new life. Crusades mentality: go fight for the empty tomb where the dead body of Christ once was. About as central a parody as one could find. [164] The colossal masterpiece associated with the name of Luke contains a gospel and the "Acts" of the apostles. The gospel begins with the Incarnation, the Word coming down and the Spirit, presumably, having accomplished his mission, going up. The words up and down could not make it clearer that this is the language of metaphor. Acts begins with the Ascension, followed by Pentecost: in other words the Word goes up and the Spirit comes down.106 What the Spirit comes down with is the gift of tongues, the creative descent of which the building of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is a parody, Babel being the effort of the natural man to create a unified social enterprise that leads to the confusion of tongues. If we listen to the speech around us, we learn what the natural man's language is like: it is mostly "babble," a word marking its descent from the Babel story. [165] Well: the gospel, being a gospel, is written in the language of myth and metaphor; Acts shows us myth absorbing history. The miserable and futile enterprise of the twentieth century, of making history swallow up myth and metaphor, is now at an end, and we have to reverse the movement. Traditions of convention and genre; Schelling's theogony, the historical process itself, are all examples not of history but of myth's struggles to tame history, and put it in some sort of shape. [166] The same thing must be true of the Old Testament: the sage of Kings represents the end of a progression from "pure" myth in Creation and Flood stories to narratives in which some of the details are "historical," i.e., credible. The demand for all the details in history to be credible leaves out the spiritual perspective: something very important here I haven't quite got yet. Anyway, nothing in the Bible is half as incredible as Golden-Age reconstructions, like Arnold's "sweetness and light" view

646

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

of "Hellenism."107 These are of course lost-paradise myths, constructed out of the fact that a society's culture is always attractive, whatever the society was. Anyway, history has no shape except what it derives from myth. [167] Question: is it possible that what millions of people have believed for thousands of years could still be an illusion? Answer: What else could it be? [168] The Old Testament begins with pure myth, creation and flood stories and the like; then it gradually begins to absorb history, the historical element becoming progressively more visible as it goes on. In the N.T. we start with the Gospels which are presented mythically, then we have Acts, which shows myth organizing history again.108 Derrida's remark that myth or narrative is insane109 is quite consistent with what I'm saying. Rhetoric lies about history; kerygma overrides it. [169! I wish I could find a book on the Tienanmin [Tienanmen] Square business and get the phrases shouted by the students and the Party statement afterward. It would be a perfect illustration of the contrast between the authentic voice of human concern and the ideology-bumbling of liars. (The last phrase echoes an early phrase of mine, "between the truth that makes free and the bumbling of the father of lies"). [170] Myths that start at the time or historical end are always pathological: evolution is not a myth, but the gradualist reconstructions of it are. That's why the mythology of this Hegelian century of total history is all pathological. One after another of these historicized myths blow up: efforts to show that phenomenon A must precede phenomenon B because the writer thinks it's more "primitive" disintegrate; but the farce goes on. [171] When history totally dominates myth we have these shadowconstructs. When myth totally dominates history we have a society where nothing happens, because everything that we'd call a historical event is a ritual, a re-enactment of a repeating mythical situation. In ancient Egypt, we're told (Frankfort, 48), a Pharaoh would record a victory over enemies giving the names of all the enemies killed or captured. Ostensibly a conscientious historical record, except that it's copied verbatim from another two centuries older.110

Notes 53

647

[172] The basis of myth is the repeating cycle of knowledge, with nothing new under the sun; the basis of history is the unique experience, which means there isn't any shape to history except what myth gives it. Nor is there any experience to myth except what it gets from history. If I could figure that one out I'd be a lot further ahead. [173] The psychosis of heresy is the main theme of the rest of Lecture One. [174! (Insertion into WP as well as here.) The authors of John's Gospel weren't impressed by the previous history of the word logos: the reason why it's translated verbum, word, is that it's a totally new context for what had been a rational principle; in short, kerygma. The word logos doesn't and never did mean word in Greek.111 [175] Orwell's doublethink is not correctly defined by him as the holding of two contradictory opinions simultaneously. The real demonic parody of the double vision is the feeling that those who utter what everyone acknowledges to be the truth should be treated as criminals. This in turn reflects the inner doublethink of the natural man: of course the God of the Old Testament is a shit, but you're an infidel, etc., if you say so. [176! Derrida on the book between two covers as a solid object enclosing an authority is,112 as Derrida must know, complete bullshit: nobody believes that a book is an object: it's a focus of verbal energy. What he should be attacking is the dogmatic formulation that eliminates its own opposite: that's the symbol or metaphor that can kill a man, and has killed thousands. It's always self-enclosed and opaque; no kerygma ever gets through it. [177] All explanations as such are mechanical, as I've said: if we explain that a snowflake is beautiful because God made it that way, we've turned God into a mechanical engineer. [178] Matter is energy congealed to the point at which we can live with it on a physical level: the spiritual world is an environment of released energy. [179] In the efforts to combine the two aspects of the world—at least, I never encountered a philosopher or theologian who claimed they were

648

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

two different worlds—the notion of a creator incorporates the external environment into the personal one. The immanent creator is what Greek philosophy meant by the logos: that's even clearer in the Stoic logoi spermatikoi [generative reason], with their concept of fire as the symbol of spiritual energy. [180] {Barker Fairley's Goethe, pp. 38 and 42, on Sturm und Drang and Herder for parallels to the English age of sensibility.}113 [181] "The Critique of Judgment has two main divisions: it treats first of the philosophy of taste, the beautiful and the sublime in nature; and secondly, of the teleology of nature's working. {St. Augustine hints that he had written a book, De Pulchro et Apto, in which these two topics were combined.} A beautiful object has no purpose external to itself and the observer, but a useful object serves further ends. Both, however, may be brought under the higher category of things that are reckoned 'purposive' by the judgment." Translator's Introduction to the Critique of Judgment.™* [182] From the Miller-Findlay summary of the Phenomenology: 108. The whole of Reality is a universal present in all its so-called parts. 77. Apparent knowledge in all its varied forms is the path taken by the natural consciousness till it reaches true knowledge. Along this path Soul becomes purified into Spirit. 177. Only in a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness do we have a true, accomplished case of self-consciousness, where the object of consciousness is also its subject. . . We have now risen to the level of Spirit, the I which is a We, and the We which is an I. 678. Religion does not[, however,] completely unify the actual world with the self of which it is conscious, but seems to have only a partial connection with that world, to be clothed by worldly forms as an outer garment. It does not yet see those worldly forms, in all their independent actuality, as simply Spirit itself. 763. [But] The single exemplification of the absolute essence must die in time in order to become something in which all men can share. If Christ does not go, the Holy Ghost cannot come to the worshipping community. (So Hegel saw the Acts i and 2 pattern too.) 764. The passing of Christ's life into the remote past merely pictures its translation to the plane of universal meanings.

Notes 53

649

801. Time is the Notion itself when presented to consciousness as an empty intuition, and Spirit appears to itself in time till it achieves full notional grasp and thereby abolishes time. Time is the destiny and the necessity of the as yet not perfected Spirit, i.e. until it has overcome the externality of objective Substance."5 [183] Spengler: I never did buy his "decline" thesis, which I realized from the beginning was Teutonic horseshit, closely related to the Nazi hatred for all forms of human culture. (Well, not just Nazi: Stalin had just as much of it.) No, as I've said, what struck me was, first, the sense of the interpenetration of historical phenomena, a conception of history in which every phenomenon symbolizes every other phenomenon. [184] Along with that came the conception of a culture in which works of culture show a progressively aging process. You have pure tradition in primitive societies, where conventions just repeat over and over, and you have a culture in which tradition accrues a self-consciousness in regard to itself, so that it must be where it is: i.e., Beethoven could only have come between Mozart and Wagner.116 This growth of self-awareness in tradition is recapitulated in the life of the poet or artist, which gives biography a genuine function in criticism. [185] So this time-dimension within each cultural product is the nonmythical element in it, the mythical being the purely conventional and primitive. But how to characterize it? [186] The great achievement of the Critique of Judgment was its insight into the inseparable connection between the teleological and the aesthetic. I seem to be stumbling into an area in which the traditional and the interpenetrative are combined, though I may be past any great achievement. Still, I can say something. [187] Everything is everywhere at once, but it also has to be where it is. The biographical sequence I just noted is recapitulated in the sequence of every word and syllable within the individual text. This is a most frightful tyranny to the bateau ivre deconstructions of Derrida-ism, but is the necessary complement to them. [188! Every word of the Bible echoes every other word; every image

650

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

echoes every other image. Yet, ideally, every word belongs just there, in its own historical context, and nowhere else. [189] The closing passages of Hegel's Phenomenology include my distinction in GC between the panoramic and the participating apocalypse.117 Perhaps TWO is about the panoramic one, the recognition of a spiritual picture as one form of two distinguishable worlds. Then THREE could deal with the integration of the two in kerygma. [190] Contemporary human standards have to be some sort of criterion, otherwise we're back to some quixotic reshaping of the past. The late Ayatollah of Iran, by urging the murder of Rushdie, turned the whole of the Koran into Satanic verses.118 The spiritual dimension of primary concern doesn't just include love (and the tolerance which is love at a distance), but eventually vanishes into love. [191] Conversion is imperialism, reconciliation at the price of subjection. If a Jew tells me he can't accept Jesus as the Messiah, there isn't, in these days, any question of conversion on either side, merely a realization that we both see the same things from different points of view: in short, interpenetration. [192] Everywhere I go I meet this silly inside-outside metaphor. What one does is set up a framework: as long as you're talking about literature, everything else is "inside" literature, not outside pushing it around. [193! Perhaps the end of 3 should turn on the fact that what transcends history is the spiritual substance. The Catholics, with their mania for institutionalizing everything, institutionalize that: I think of it in connection with such things as the transmutation of the elements of prayer by the Holy Spirit. [194! Prophecy in the Bible is connected with the sense of the historical occasion, though prophecy confronts history rather than absorbing it. The 20th c. is the grisliest on record because it's a pan-historical century: nothing except the "historical" Jesus means anything, and he has to give way to the Newman-Hegel-Marx constructs I mentioned."9 [195] In a society completely dominated by myth, like Old-Kingdom

Notes 53

651

Egypt, nothing ever really happens. A Pharaoh will set up a stele recording his victories over his enemies, with their names carefully detailed: it sounds like a conscientious historical record, except when archaeologists discover that it's copied verbatim from another two centuries earlier. Everything historical is a repetition of a ritual or mythical situation.120 [196] Two levels of history: aggressive and cultural. The aggressive is imperialist and seeks the reconciliation of the pax Romana: agreement on the linguistically aggressive dogma. Cultural history interpenetrates: variety and unity, but no uniformity. [197] Joachim of Floris reveals the suppressed feeling that the contentious age of Christianity, refining militant dogmas, going on crusades, torturing heretics and the like, is still immature.121 The rise of science siphons off one poison, the literal-as-descriptive nonsense. [198! Logos from Heraclitus to Philo doesn't mean word: it means a human consciousness cognate with some principle of divine origin immanent in nature. The John logos returns to the Hebrew DBR [dabhar].122 [199] Two: go from what you have to Keats' Grecian Urn (Wedgwood, likely).123 In Blake the double vision is the traditional spiritual-physical duality. Or rather an impersonal-objective vs. a personally-involving world, except that Blake is so unwilling to grant any kind of status to the former. Connected by puns on law. Personal world imports a creator God from observation of nature, but distinguishing the two purifies religion. [200] Three: Spengler's "decline" applies to the empires who conclude the cultural process: as they decline they move towards a confrontation, or historical judgment. [201] The Islamic revelation was a counter-apocalypse, which arose as a part of the Christian failure to separate the two worlds. They failed because science hadn't developed far enough. [202] Two: dialectic of the two worlds goes from the beautiful-true to the spiritual-physical. The dialectic of One goes from "I believe that that really happened (in the past)," the red herring of discursive language, to

652

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

"I see that that's the way it has to be." Study of poetry of course is training for us. All three form a larger dialectic running through language, space and time. Blake's distrust of memory is linked to the red herring of the past. [203] Orwell's doublethink is the soul-body civil war where the consciousness hypnotizes itself into thinking it believes what the repressed consciousness knows to be nonsense. Fear of external authority creates internal repression. All genuine imagination is double think as Orwell defines it: he gets it wrong. [204] Three red herrings: (1) it really means (2) it's really there (3) it really happened. From metaphor to spiritu'al reality. [205! Imperial monuments follow the law of Ozymandias: they crumble.124 Genuine culture is tribal and original—I mean regional. A lot of it crumbles too, of course. [206] Literature is the art of inscribing verbal patterns within a mythological cosmos. It starts as rhetoric, or the figuring of speech: as rhetoric passes into ideology it becomes kerygmatic or spiritual language. [207] Myth is the abstract form of narrative; later, in historical writing, it becomes the containing form of narrative ("decline and fall" stage). Then 'its [it's] Weltgeschichte and moves on to its confrontation in Heilsgeschichte. [208] Esse est percipi; but we know the world keeps on existing whether we see it or not: hence, for Berkeley, we trust that God keeps on watching it, the world being a perceived idea in God's mind.125 It's a good thing that, as the Psalmist says, God neither slumbers nor sleeps [121:4]. [209] Lewis Hyde: we instinctively speak of cultural abilities as "gifts," whether of the spirit or not.126 [210] Law, besides the option of obeying it or not, may be just or unjust, reasonable or arbitrary. [211] Feminists who refuse to accept that "man" means "men and women" have a very limited sense of metaphor.127

Notes 53

653

[212] If the Sabbath was made for man, the Church was too. [213] The ideologue identifies truth with whatever promotes his cause: the trouble with that is the mortality of causes. Truth, like the classic in literature, is whatever won't go away, and keeps returning to confront us. I don't know what "the truth" is in most matters, only that it's likely to be connected with whatever returns until we deal with it. (Logical positivism went under because it was the exact opposite of "the truth": only statements that make no sense at first have any continuing validity.) [214] Interpenetration of belief is unity with variety, like metaphor: reconciliation, conversion, agreement, are all forms of imperialistic compulsion. [215] Truth is in the repeating pattern which forms the structure of knowledge. Unique experience has its own kind of validity, but it has no pattern. In proportion as criticism becomes a structure of knowledge, all the paradoxes about the existence of a text and the like begin to fade away into a general consensus. As long as you pretend to have only experience and its uniqueness, anything goes. So truth is myth.128 [216] Symmetry is the characteristic of the aesthetic teleological world: occultism is symmetrical. Note the symmetry theme in Eco's sendup of conspiracy theories of history:129 belief in such conspiracies is fostered by establishments that go paranoid, and of course there are conspiracies, and have been since Jacobins and Jacobites, halfway between history and myth. [217] Look up: Foe's Domain of Arnheim in connection with the Critique of Judgment/ 30 Forster's "only connect,"131 where it's Eros who connects. [218] If you assume that the made world is the real form of the presented one, you start projecting a divine creation myth behind nature. Maybe there is a divine creation, but you don't reach it this way. [219] Three should stress the immense importance of the imaginative way of life: that Marxist cornball who said literature wasn't all that important is defending something that's gone west. [220] No, the real theme of Three is the contrast between the apocalyptic

654

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

and the millennial, the pan-historical vision focused on a future versus the vision of the expanded present, the world of physical concerns taking on a spiritual dimension. Hegel really tried to reach the apocalyptic conclusion in spite of his pan-historical perspective: Marx isolated the millennial element in it, the pure donkey's carrot of just you wait. The great strength of the New Testament was in the fact that its future was thought to be just around the corner: hence the abysmal fatuity of Paul whenever he gets on such subjects as what do we do right now with our women. As centuries passed, the future kept retreating, and now after two thousand years we ought to be getting the point that there's never anything in the future except more future. [221] Similarly, the real theme of Two is the contrast between the kerygmatic and the rhetorical, which I confused in GC. Unless it's actually what goes in to the end of One. [222] Three: myths that become purely ideological freeze into pseudohistory and become events that "really happened." Think of all the time and energy that could have gone into the development of science wasted on trying to prove the historicity of the Fall or the Flood. Similarly with the Gospels, natch. Realizing that all spiritual truths have a literally imaginative basis could have saved all that. [223! Neoteny: play is the basis of cultural development, and play in animals is a rehearsal for mature serious work. In humans, if we stuck with nature, we'd grow into apes, like that man in Huxley's novel;132 if we transfer our lives from nature to spirit, from the symbolic mother to the symbolic father, play becomes a rehearsal for spiritual life. [224] At the moment, it looks as though the contrast of interpenetration and reconciliation belongs at the end of ONE. Anyway, what I've just written certainly belongs in ONE: "I have been looking at the contrast between spiritual and natural man from two points of view. First is the contrast between spiritual and natural language. The natural man believes that words can reach truth and coherent meaning by describing something in the world outside the words. The assumption here is that words have an extraordinary power of accuracy in transcribing nonverbal phenomena into verbal structures. We have largely given up this assumption now, though the natural man continues to play games with

Notes 53

655

all the paradoxes resulting from doing so. The natural man, even when operating in linguistics or critical theory, will do anything before he will come to the point. I suggested also that literal language was really metaphorical and figured language, and such language functioned in two contexts, one ideological and the other based on the spiritual forms of primary concern. The first produces rhetoric, or attempts to unite societies verbally into certain programs of action; the second, which is based on the more disinterested language of the poetic imagination, reaches the kerygma or whatever for us is the voice of revelation, and which is rhetoric in reverse."133 [225] The only features in human life that are genuinely human are creation and criticism. They intertwine of course: the thing is right now that all education is education in criticism, and that criticism and education are synonymous. 12261 Burke and his continuous contract of dead, living and unborn:134 the much deeper wisdom in the Mosaic law of the jubilee year breaks the continuity every so often and throws away some of the burden of the past. The sense of jubilee affected British liberals at the time of the fall of the Bastille, and Burke overlooks the genuineness of that, although I agree that the later stages, the Terror and what not, indicate a greatly overrated historical event. [227] But the sense of jubilee should not be discounted as still imprisoned in a cycle. The transcendence of resurrection has its counterparts in the speech of God in Job, the Buddhist tankas and mandalas of the wheel of life, the Kabbalistic tree with its demonic reflection. These are all visions of creation, presented in the present, stretching from the sons of God to leviathan, from the ascension of Christ to the leviathan of hell he left behind. [228! The predatory balance of nature is amoral: morality has no meaning apart from the human world. What is immoral is the inept interference with the balance of nature by humans that causes things like lampreys and zebra mussels in the Great Lakes—pathological developments encouraged by human bungling. [229] We look at the predatory aspect of nature and can do one of two

656

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

things: invoke it as justification for our own exploiting of nature, or realize that it's something to detach ourselves from and outgrow as far as possible—there are always limits to the possibility, as we're natural organisms ourselves. If we think it justifies our own behavior, we overlook the fact that our consciousness make[s] us capable of malice and sadism, not simply ferocity: that is, as the Houyhnhnm master of Gulliver said, we have not reason but only a power of increasing our vice.135 [230] The argument of TWO is: first, the two worlds are the world that's there and the world we make out of it. This is the world of work, purpose and function and use. The next step is the vision of the world in terms of play, relaxation and freedom: Blake's threefold or Beulah vision, Beulah being the vision of nature as an earthly paradise inspired by largely sexual love. Here is where the categories of beauty, purposiveness without purpose (i.e., a sense of function outgrown), sublimity and the like go. The final step is Blake's fourfold or fully spiritual vision, but I don't know if I can tackle that before THREE. [231! THREE ought to include at or near the beginning the impulse to predictability. This is first of all applied to the future: prediction is important to science and prophecy has it as one of its functions. Then we extend it to God, who must always be what we want him to be, just[,l wise, merciful, etc. This sounds like devotion, but is actually telling God what to do in human terms. Bohr and Einstein.136 Hence the illegitimate pun on law, where the natural law is predictable and the moral law never can be: the vision of all nature as a field for exploitation is for the Gentiles; Israel, has rigidly exclusive dietary and other laws imposed on it. The rationale of all this we have to leave for Talmudic scholarship. Well, predictable. This enters history in the pan-historical fantasies of the twentieth century, notably in Marx's historical process, Spengler['s] cultural aging, Newman's development of church doctrine, etc. [232] Evolution as a biological theory is not what I mean by a myth: to call it one we'd have to redefine myth to a point at which it would be too broad to mean anything. But when we turn evolution into a story or narrative and assimilate it to an ideology it becomes mythical. Examples are the onward-and-upward progressivism, the proceed-by-insensiblestages conservatism, the catastrophic revolutionary myth, the falling away from a lost paradise one. All these lead up to saying: what must happen now is, etc.

Notes 53

657

[233! Predictable history is the one great hope of primary societies. God being interested in the individual, he's a trickster, a lying spirit, a genius of the unpredictable. The relation of humanity to nature, a conscious withdrawal that is not a separation but the dawn of a critical faculty, followed by a reintegration, reappears in the relation of the individual to society. Both turn on criticism, detachment without removal. [234] Ezekiel's valley of dry bones [Ezekiel 37] does mean resurrection, whatever the historical scholars say. That doesn't mean it prophesies Christianity, which would be an even more future event than the return from Babylon.137 But what burst out of Ezekiel without his conscious knowledge was the vision of an expanded present, a spiritual world existing here and now, where past and future are gathered, in Eliot's phrase [Burnt Norton, 1. 67!. [235] The full spiritual vision of the Resurrection cannot be conveyed in words unless there's some sense of the miraculous: hence the miracles in the Gospels, and the impossibility in nature of realizing Isaiah's peaceable kingdom [65:17-25!. It's a world in which the dead from the past are redeemed and the future has lost its remoteness, apocalyptic but not millennial. God is all in all there, not a sovereign whom everyone wants to dethrone. Yoga, Zen, Tao, are Oriental ways of reaching this world: Resurrection is the Biblical one. Without that, as Paul says, we may as well give up the whole Christian enterprise [i Corinthians 15:13-14]. And we should not think of resurrection as a survival after death, but as an awakening from death, which includes ordinary life. Whether this takes one life or many, or whether some such notion as Purgatory makes sense of it I don't know. [236! Empires start out with naked aggression and move towards a form of law that allows of certain degrees of equity but still enforces the imperial will. The great huddle of laws dumped on Israel indicates that only tribal societies, like Israel and Greece, contain the keys to the spiritual kingdom. At the same time empires are more comfortable to live in, for some people anyway, and perhaps they have something to contribute as well. [237] My point, which I've strayed from, is that law moves toward reconciliation and agreement, being founded on discursive language: imaginative language moves toward interpenetration of wholes and parts.

658

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[238] Hobbes' version of the social contract, in which individuals find life uncomfortable and surrender all their interests to a leader, will hardly do: such individuals could not have existed except as members of earlier societies.138 But the process of which Hobbes' fantasy is a demonic parody does exist: spiritual individuals do find that interpenetration within a spiritual kingdom or true commonwealth completes their spiritual reality. [239] Burke's continuity of dead, living and unborn does correspond to the facts of human life:139 historical continuity is the first datum of existence. Hence no poet can express himself as an individual: he has to attach himself to the continuity of a tradition, and his "Muse" acts like an angel, an Other who is also himself. Education, similarly, moves from the student studying under a master to a common vision of the subject being studied, the symposium-world that unites them on equal terms. [240] The point is that such continuity shouldn't be threatened by what Blake calls a "horrible fear of the future" [Four Zoas, Erdman, 354,1. 16], with its desire to make everything utterly predictable. That's the real Hobbesian contract: the future is the devil, the great accuser. Shadow of our own death.140 [241] Or, of course, the past, which can also act as the accuser. The miraculous element in the Gospels can't be assimilated to history or it becomes accusation: once we could have and see miracles, but now, you poor jerks, etc. There never were any miracles, but there can be miracles: miracles represent present potentials, not past actuals. That's why Jesus says his followers will perform greater miracles than he does [John 14:12]. [242] Criticism is the primary act of human awareness: it expresses detachment without separation. First, the natural sciences criticize the natural environment, then the social sciences criticize the human environment, treating man himself as an object. Then imagination moves from actualities to possibilities, involving primary concern, and the criticism of that leads to spiritual vision. [243] Meditation through art: science fiction visualized travelling to distant galaxies through space warps before man had actually even got on the moon.

Notes 53

659

[244] Kant's philosophy of criticism: first the conscious subject contemplates the objective world, and finds it a mirror of its own categories, leaving out the whole world of existence in itself. Second, the realization that the real consciousness is a conscious will leads to a discrimination between a human and a natural world, God being located definitively in the human one. Third, the higher contemplative view of the world in terms of beauty and purpose, the latter, which normally relates to the world of work, being subsumed into the aesthetic vision in which visible or obvious purpose no longer is needed. [245! I said fifty years ago that the doctrine that man is by nature good does not lead to a very good-natured view of man.141 Communism apparently failed because it assumed that man could become naturally cooperative, whereas man is naturally aggressive and competitive, and becomes cooperative only when he becomes also a fully matured individual. Hence all the retrograde steps, as a Marxist would consider them, "back" to competition and the deified open market and all the rest of it. But East Europe wants these things because they lead to the emancipation of the individual and his primary concerns, and only after that can we talk about producing for service instead of for profit. [246] When man becomes critical of the competitive and aggressive aspect of nature, instead of regarding it as a means of justifying his own shittiness, he begins to recreate nature. Nature isn't by itself much more than what man makes of it: that's why there has to be this third factor of a spiritual kingdom, where alone the providence of God can operate. [247! The spiritual power can work miracles, moving mountains and the like, which is why, as I've said, the miraculous element is presented as part of the life of the Messiah in the world. [248] One very important point you don't seem to have registered yet: as soon as we move from the practical-reason or work-world to the world of play and freedom, the crucial acts take place, the creative act and the critical act. But the critical act should be succeeded by a renewed work carried out in the light of the teleological standards thus acquired. Here, I think, is where the gospel miracles go: they're symbols of hope, no use to us as historical events, and the moral "go thou and do likewise" [Luke 10:37] surely applies to healing and feeding as well as to the parables. We can't perhaps cure a lifetime disease by a touch of the hand, but how do

660

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

we know what we could do if creative and critical faculties were both liberated? Indian yogis work "miracles"—not that that's the direction the argument points in. [249] And of course the criterion of the critical judgment is primary concern. I don't include health in my four concerns, but it could come under property (Job's boils are an attack on his property in the Aristotelian sense) or freedom of movement (note how often those cured by Jesus are sick of the palsy). Also, the critical act that succeeds the primary or half-conscious work is based on the creative or imaginative sense of language, not the discursive. [250] Conclusion of ONE: spiritual language is interpenetrative, going much farther than any damn "dialogue." Discursive language, being militant, aims at agreement or reconciliation. [251! Conclusion of TWO: In the kingdom of the spirit we find the creating God all right, and not as something projected from a human capacity into nature. Nature evolves or creates itself; man creates a human world out of it; this eventually leads to a recreation of nature, and so to the God who is the reality behind both. In this process—no, that's ONE again. [252] In this process (conclusion of ONE) rhetoric or persuasive language gives way to imaginative language, where, as Blake says, everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.142 Beyond that rhetoric goes into reverse as kerygma. [253! Insert into TWO: Hegel's Phenomenology turns on a gigantic metaphor of a mirror, which is where we get the words speculation and reflection. The mirror is the central image of an identity of subject and object which nevertheless preserve their difference. Once they're identified, we break out of the prison of Narcissus, as I call it in WP.143 [254] THREE: the main argument turns on the contrast between historical cyclical movement, where everything that's happened in the past will happen again, and where we await a future, and the sudden opening up and expanding of the present moment. The New Testament is the only document of present-expansion I know: it comes at a time when Virgil and Ovid were winding up the Classical cycle, and it contains some

Notes 53

661

cyclical crap itself. According to Blake, the continuity of the Church in history with its millennial donkey's carrot is symbolized by Jesus' weeping at having to raise the stinking Lazarus [Milton, pi. 24,11. 26-33]. [255] So things like Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones does centrally mean resurrection, even though Ezekiel and the modern scholars agree that it doesn't. [256] Re the prison of Narcissus: Humanity breaks away from the nature he was born from, sees there a mirror of his own consciousness, and builds the arts and sciences out of the reflection. But he's still Nature contemplating Nature. Once again, the end of Job illustrates what's happening. Elihu demonstrates how wonderful the creation is, seeing himself reflected in it; God presents the natural order to Job in a recreated form in which Job is a participant.144 Chapter 42 is the future millennial donkey's carrot of restoration closing in again, but Job doesn't need that now. Elihu's rhetoric has reversed itself into God's kerygma. [257! The difference between primitive and mature societies is a difference in tendency or emphasis, not of category, and, as in China recently,145 can change overnight. Because of spiritual gravitation (i.e., movement away from the spirit), it practically always changes the wrong way. [258] Hence one function of criticism is to help transform secondary concerns of a primitive society into the spiritual-primary concerns of a mature one. [259] Islam: Islamic people are very confused about the Rushdie business,146 and of course we get journalists exuding the inevitable bromides about how it can't possibly be really religious: it must be all economic or social. It ain't: there's a special viciousness in religion that's found nowhere else.147 [260! I seem to be working out a Bergsonian pattern: what's below consciousness, traditionally called the body, may suddenly fuse with what's above consciousness, or spirit. These are the moments of inspiration, insight, intuition, enlightenment, whatever: no matter what they're called or what their context is, they invariably by-pass ordinary consciousness.

662

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[261] "The medium by which spirits understand each other is not the surrounding air, but the freedom which they possess in common." Coleridge, who apparently got it from Schelling. I think it's in the B.L. [Biogmphia Literaria}.1^ [262] I have a limited faith in a historical process myself: I cannot believe that the Canadian nation will blunder and bungle its way out of history into oblivion, raising with its name only ridicule or at best a sympathetic smile from the rest of the free world.149 1 do not remember any other time in history when a nation disintegrated merely through a lack of will to survive, nor do I think ours will. [263] Literary history differs from "ordinary" history in having a quality of mimesis, recreating the same conventions and genres that have come down from the earliest times. It preserves the pattern of ritual repetition in which it began, and in "primitive" societies the view that history includes a repetition of mythical events lingers for a long time. My ancient Egypt example goes here:150 note that it's totalitarian, and so primitive. [264] Vice's ricorso, Spengler's organic culture, Yeats's double gyre, Wells' s onward and upward from primeval slime to cocksure cockney, the Marxist historical process, Tolstoy's chaos view: all these are metahistorical constructs. Find that sentence in Foucault about the past lost paradise versus whatever the future one is.151 Nietzsche's identical recurrence, derived partly from Virgil and echoed by Shelley. God, what a lot of horseshit. The panhistorical fantasies of Hegel, Marx, and Newman. The horizontal vision alone is never enough, and the statement "I believe only in history" is as asinine a pronouncement as any conscious mind can get past its teeth. Only the vertical vision, even if it's some impossible apocalyptic dream of the end of history as we know it, gives any dignity or integrity to human life. [265! The vertical vision comes down from above, as in the Incarnation. What's above? Something we intuit through myth: that's the genuine form of the mythical distortions of history. The vertical vision also comes up from below, as in the Resurrection. What's below? Something the body intuits whenever it knows more than just the fact that the con-

Notes 53

663

sciousness or soul is wrong about everything, and that what it should be making contact with is the spirit. [266! "The great dream of an end to History is the Utopia of causal systems of thought, just as the dream of the world's beginnings was the utopia of classifying systems of thought." Foucault, The Order of Things, 263-152

[267] The "body" is preoccupied with primary concerns on the physical level, and is also the part of the psyche that we should now call the unconscious. It "knows" nothing except that the soul or mind or consciousness that keeps bullying it is all wrong about everything. Above the soul is the spirit, and when the "body" makes contact with that, man possesses for an instant a spiritual body, in which he moves into a world of life and light and understanding that seemed miraculous to him before, as well as totally unreal. This world is usually called "timeless," which is a beggary of language: there ought to be some such word as "timeful" to express a present moment that includes immense vistas of past and future.153 1 myself have spent the greater part of seventy-eight years in writing out the implications of insights that occupied at most only a few seconds of all that time.154 [268] W.P. revisions, some of them to be included in these essays: 6. First Oedipal phase: child wants to kill father and possess mother, but really resents both. Second phase: child becomes father and the mother is possessed by being rejuvenated into a bride. So in the Gospels the Son of the Father replaces the Father and his mother becomes the bride of the church whom he crowns.155 4. Kerygma is rhetoric coming the other way, as in the Book of Job the speech of Elihu is immediately followed by that of God, who often echoes him but in another context. Even a verbal Tower of Babel will end in a confusion of tongues.156 Int. [Introduction]. The individualizing tendencies so over-stressed in criticism today, where a text is differently possessed by everyone who reads it, form a half-truth. A consensus emerges from a social subconscious. It follows the rhythm of the Eucharist symbolism, to be examined later: the sacred object is torn to pieces and disappears into the bellies of his worshippers, but recreates them all into a single body again by his

664

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

invisible presence. A critic, like a word, achieves his primary identity by differentiating himself: he achieves a further identity by becoming integrated into a tradition.157 Int. [Introduction]. I have not tried to set up a system into which things must fit: I am proceeding on the assumption that meaning is derived from context, and that every work of literature has an external as well as an internal context. The new critics and the like have done their best, or worst, with the internal context; I'm looking at another dimension of meaning.158

Notes 54.1

On 14-16 May 1990 Frye gave three lectures on the double vision of language, nature, and time at Emmanuel College. Before the lectures were published as a book Frye added a fourth chapter because, as he says, he "felt that the argument implied by them was still incomplete" (DV, xvii, or NFR, 166-7). These are his typed notes—at least some of them—for that chapter. They appear in the files as two separate units: paragraphs 1-15 and paragraphs 16-79. ^rye completed the first fourteen entries, added the fifteenth entry with a different typewriter, and then began the next paragraph on a new page. The two units have been merged because they appear to have been written at the same time and because they both relate directly to the last chapter of The Double Vision. These notes are in the NFF, 1991, box 28, file 4.

[i] Inferno in history is the Tower of Babel, a society of mutually unintelligible egos with a human personality on top, assumed to be divine or next to it. The figure on top has two aspects, the tyrannos and the basileus. The first is the Emperor figure in Rome, deified after death. Future history was always fascinated by the Jesus-Augustus contrast, and Augustus, though accepted as a type of legitimate temporal authority, was actually an Antichrist type, as became clear when the relatively able Augustus was succeeded by all those creeps down to Nero and Domitian, whose deification was described by Seneca as the apotheosis of pumpkins.1 [2] The basileus Antichrist is the chief of a hereditary aristocracy, which enters the gospels in the line-of-David stuff, but is actually the demonic parody of the worship of the true Father or author of our being.2

666

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[3] Purgatorio in history is the wrestling of Jacob or Israel with the angel or God. The swallowing of the sky-bugger. This develops into monotheism out of henotheism: our God, reflecting our qualities.3 [4] Paradiso in history is of course Jacob's ladder, the ascent to a spiritual world. [5] Actually tyrannos and basileus, while they may be in conflict, as in Macbeth or Marvell's poem on Cromwell,4 are aspects of the same thing. The tyrannos reflects the natural religion of nature, of storm-gods and other figures of brute power; the basileus the next or political stage, where the gods become an aristocracy. Note the natural imagery in Marvell about Cromwell.5 [61 Tower of Babel in hell-world: an instant of stability followed by chaos. Augustus is followed by Tiberius and the rest; the Pharaoh of Joseph by the Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. But Augustus was accepted by the mystique of temporal rule in the Christian period because no successful republican experiment was known in history. [7] For Virgil, Julius and Augustus were the essential point of clarification to which all history is leading; for Ovid, they were the sole means of transcending the world of endless metamorphosis as expounded by Pythagoras.6 [81 First, the origin of Christianity is entirely Hebraic and not in the least Hellenic. Second, the development of the so-called natural religion outside the Bible. This begins in the gods who represent aspects of a still unconquered nature: animals as figures of a numinous existence, local deities of rivers and mountains and stones. Then political and social gods, as tribal organization becomes national: gods of war, wisdom, justice. Gods here evolve into an aristocracy. The myth of the universal flood marks the culmination of this phase of human subjection to nature.7 [9] Perhaps always a sky-god of universality waiting for human organization to catch up with him: the sky as the symbol of an upper world as a totality and unity. The sun appears now as the focus of the sky, hence along with imperial social organization there comes the world-ruler who

Notes 54.1

667

is an incarnation or adopted son of a supreme god or becomes deified after death. Persian, later Stoic versions in the Roman Empire. Augustus as a type of Antichrist.8 [10] Tyrannos (emperor) and basileus (aristocracy evolving out of despotic family). Genealogies of Jesus confusing in view of the stones to Abraham remark [Matthew 3:9]: they contradict the Virgin Birth, which is there to block the divine birth by human birth crap.9 However, I shouldn't get on to the New Testament until I've dealt with the third main section, how to approach the old O.T. sky-bugger. [11] Jehovah seems to have all the characteristics of a false god: he's only true through the act of criticism I call resonance.10 [12] Difference between resonance and allegorical or hyponoia approaches, even Paul. Kerygma transcends the merely literal, or imaginative, basis. What are the transcending categories? I thought of the historical reality of a Jesus as one of them, but there are problems: Shakespeare's historical plays have this kernel. [13] Anyway, the main sequence is: (i) Hebraic source of Xy [Christianity] exclusive one (2) the development of natural religion to imperial monotheism and emperor as deity (3) similarity of false or objective gods to Jehovah (4) process of transforming the old bugger into Jesus' Father (5) the risen Christ as one with the Spirit in man, leading us into a world beyond the natural world of time and place. [14! Don't forget that there are always three grades, not two: demonic parody; the redeemable type, the apocalyptic reality. The vision of Jehovah is above all redeemable, not demonic. I suppose for Christians Jesus' Father is what redeems him, but there must be some principle within his capers too. [15] I shouldn't get too fixated on this abusive line: after all there are things like the 23rd Psalm. One point important to get: a God who has transcended personality is undoubtedly a higher, nobler, loftier etc. ideal than a personal God. Hindu ideals, and still more Buddhist ones, are undoubtedly more impressive. The Christian personal God is less noble, but more concrete, intense, and revolutionary.11

668

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[16] Man first of all creates "gods" or personal forces out of nature, searching for a personal otherness that complements his own need for personality in creation. He quickly realizes that, e.g., animals are not gods, but symbolize or embody these quasi-personal forces.12 [17] Political gods and gods relating to human society are at least as old as these nature-gods. Probably the god of war is the oldest and most powerful of these.13 [18! The sequence I've traced so often goes here: first the spirits of immediate nature, sacred stones, trees, rivers, etc., and the nymphs and fauns and satyrs that personalize them. Such deities correspond to a tribal organization. Then comes the nation, and the gods become an aristocracy, often sitting on mountains like Olympus, and treating human beings much as an aristocracy treats inferiors, sometimes with a rough justice, but always with a jealousy about preserving their own privileges.14 [19] Empires, where the emperor starts to think of himself as ruler of the world, complete this series with a monotheism that absorbs local cults as aspects of itself. The Christ-Augustus symmetry that so fascinated the Renaissance. The patriarchal family as the supreme God as a Father comes into this somewhere. [20] The real "gods" are not forces within nature, but forces within the human transformation of nature. That is, the true gods are the gods of words, numbers, tones and colors that produce the arts. [21] Human tendency to project their own inventions: the wheel becomes a wheel of fate or fortune; the book becomes the list of sins of the Recording Angel; the trial becomes the Last Judgment. We're struggling out of similar superstitions about computers now. The Word and the Number represent elements of vast human usefulness, but to preserve their divinity we must think of their real uses, not of their abuses and the readiness with which they become devils or means of manipulation. [22] The Jehovah of the Old Testament recapitulates all the stages above in reverse. Jehovah is not a theologian's God; he an intensely humanized

Notes 54.1

669

figure as violent and unpredictable as King Lear. He does silly and vicious things; as a human being we wouldn't let him into our front parlors.151 mentioned this in WP, and said that it makes it impossible for us to conceive of a uniform God, a God uniformly just, wise or what not.16 The uniformity has to be there somewhere, but it's not what gets revealed in the Bible. Jesus, on the other hand, seems to me a wholly acceptable divine-human presence, except for some "hard sayings" I don't pretend to understand. [23] The main problem in this paper17 is: why does our conception of God have to go through the Jahwist rather than through Plato or Aristotle? Evidently taking the natural god metaphorically is the first step in understanding the spiritual God. God knows the Greek deities were silly enough. Something here about that Psalm where God says to human power-figures "Ye are gods" [Psalm 82:6!. Jesus quotes this, evidently feeling that that phrase was valid rather than ironic [John 10:34-8]. The general sense seems to be: all men want power; no man should have any without checks and balances; every man who attains power eventually loses it. Power is the inner nature that betrays man. Spiritual power has no strength in the natural world. [24] The best human behavior we can imagine is surely where our conception of God ought to start. A decent human reaction would be the least we could expect from God.18 So why is the Old Testament Jehovah such an old shit, and why does he go in for capers like the sacrifice of Isaac? Presumably to demonstrate his Otherness: he's something totally alien to us that nevertheless we have to identify with. [25] Similarly with the "incredible" elements in the Gospels, raising the dead and the like. I find the raising of Lazarus particularly baffling: why does Jesus weep? and wouldn't Lazarus have to die a second time anyway? The miraculous provisions of food are metaphors of the fact that Jesus is the inexhaustible source of spiritual food. [26] John, writing a spiritual gospel, presents parables as events: the synoptics try harder to separate fact and fiction, though there's plenty of incredible fact in them as well. I can see glints here and there: diseases are normally produced by our psychic complex, i.e., we get the diseases

670

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

that are an essential part of our nature; hence all healing of disease is the casting out of devils. Disease is the nemesis of nature; it's a product of [the] hell-world we live in and eventually it kills us. Healing puts disease in a purgatorial context, as something we suffer from but can escape from too on our way to the spiritual kingdom. [27] There is one element in the "God of the gaps" notion19 that's genuine. The conception of divine creation is something that gradually retreats as evolution and allied conceptions fill in our vision of nature. The sense of artistic variety in nature is something that no Darwinian explanations quite satisfy. [28] The straight answer to all my problems is Blake's typological one; but I want a new formulation for it that won't just rehash that stuff, and will also take in different kinds of data, such as the creation bit just above, that Blake and his pre-Darwin cosmology doesn't take in. What I mean by retreating is that the progress that pushes against the retreat may be infinite. [29] Also, I mustn't forget that metaphorical language is the new literal, which means it's the basis of the real polysemous construct: there can be other meanings piled up to the anagogic on top of it. One of Dante's earliest commentators, his son Pietro, said that there were four literal senses, one of which was metaphorical.20 [30] The true gods are the Muses, except that there are six of them: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, mathematics and music. There is a seventh God who combines all these and creates us, rather than being the means of our own creation. It is this God who deserves a day of a week set aside for him, who is entitled to first-fruits and to the study of his myths and rituals that recreate us as we recreate the world through our arts. That's what Blake meant by saying you're not a Christian if you're not an artist,21 though I certainly wish he'd said it in a more cautious way. The six gods are both servants and masters, as every practitioner of them knows. They are servants of humanity, but masters of their priests: ego dominus tuus, as the god of poetry said to Dante.22 (He was the god of love too, of course: they're all forms of Eros, the reverse of the Agape that belongs to the seventh.)23

Notes 54.1

671

[31] The love of God for man comes first; next, "like unto it," is the love of man for his neighbour that the arts express [Matthew 22:37-9]. [32] The Old Testament speaks of a body derived from the dust and a soul breathed in by God; also of a separation at death between the body that disintegrates into dust again and the soul (or is it spirit?) that returns to God. Of course the doctrine that the soul is immortal by nature is not Biblical. The body is a metaphor for consciousness—shit, I mean will: the skipping puts me off24—the persistence in survival that gives the living organism its identity. The soul is a metaphor for consciousness. [33] In pagan and Hellenic (Hellenistic) circles soul and body are thought of as in an antagonistic relation: Plotinus, Porphyry tells us, was ashamed of being in the body.25 So in the Middle Ages ascetic practices grew up on the axiom that humiliating the flesh was good for the soul—a view never recommended by Jesus nor in any degree associated with him. Paul's doctrine of a spiritual body transcending the soul-body mortal unit was set on one side. [34] The historical Jesus is a concealed though essential element in the Gospels: if the Gospels['1 writers had simply made up the Jesus story they would still be superb works of literature, but of course they would not be gospels. The myth is what they literally are, though: they don't present Jesus historically.26 Historically, Jesus is a man until the Resurrection, when he becomes an element in everyone, implying that no one can be "saved" (meaning the indefinite persistence of something like an ego in something like a time and place) outside or before Jesus. Presented as a myth in the eternal present, this doctrine takes on a more charitable appearance. The Word and Spirit in man then coincide into something that has its being in God (as God has his being in it) to such an extent that the question of belief in "a" God doesn't arise. [35] Jesus is a role-model, or more accurately the role-model, for Christians, and might even be a fairly plausible model of what a divine or Messianic being might be as a human being for non-Christians.27 But how on earth could the Jehovah of the Old Testament be a role-model for anybody? Emily Dickinson said: "When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him."28 That's because she was honest enough to object to the

672

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

capers of the old bugger in the sky. Jesus' Father remains hidden, if manifest in his Son, the Golden-age Saturn separated from the gobbling monster. Jesus has swallowed the Father and he's transformed into a being of light.29 But why do we have to swallow that? It's like Jonah swallowing the whale of death and hell. [36] Dante's Purgatorio portrays the integration of soul and body, though on a hierarchical basis, the body being subdued by the soul. Blake said that the body is the soul as seen in this world: similarly the spirit's body is simply its emanation, not a thing to be subordinated. The Paradiso portrays the education of the spirit. The Inferno, of course, is thirteenthcentury Italy seen from a spiritual point of view: the people in it are not being punished for what they have done: they are acting out what they are, again to the spiritual eye. The view of eternity as endless time is what's "heretical" in Dante's vision, though of course orthodox according to the magisterium. Man cannot pursue his hatreds and cruelties beyond death: death is the mercy of God, like the Creation. I was born in 1912 but will live forever: that sounds silly. The Buddhist complement, that I am an unborn spirit incarnated in 1912 who will soon return to that unborn world, is badly needed here. [37] The denial of reincarnation in Christianity, and its insistence on the once-for-all pattern of both the Incarnation and human life, does not imply exclusiveness: rather it democratizes, so to speak, the vertical relation of natural and spiritual. Purgatory in Catholic doctrine is a concession to reincarnation. But it's hard to see how reincarnation, with its total loss of memory at each return, can lead to spiritual regeneration. [38] The age of gods culminates in the poetry of the gods—Virgil and Ovid. They are the real counterpart to Christ, not Augustus. Augustus is Antichrist, whatever he may have been as a person, because the demonic parody of recreating humanity is manipulating people with power. In that process all ends turn into the means adopted for them, and so get perverted. Carlyle said that what Napoleon did will ultimately become what he did justly: people like Napoleon never really do anything, certainly not justly. They're thunderstorms in the hell-world. [39] Hence the immense profundity of Virgil's role in Dante, and perhaps of Ovid's in Shakespeare. Their vision falls just short of the beatific

Notes 54.1

673

vision, because it focusses on Caesar. In the Inferno the name of God is never mentioned, but I think the whole Old Testament is really a vision of how God looks from the human hell. I certainly have to get Dante into my noddle: when he emerges on the other side of the earth on Easter morning he's an infant again, participating in the Incarnation; when Virgil leaves him and Beatrice appears he becomes an infant for the second time. His vision of human creativity is complete, but he's left out Beatrice. I used to find the entrance of Beatrice rather contemptible, a selling out to the masochism of piety, but maybe it'll bear more thinking about. [40] Of the six Olympian gods [par. 30], painting and music are still unborn and undeveloped. I've spoken of the cave-centered unborn nature of painting many times: the two-dimensional vision of reality. Music popular mythology postpones to the next world, because we don't really know what it does or says. The great transforming arts for us at present are words and numbers, literature and mathematics, the languages of the verbal and scientific arts. Architecture and sculpture are, perhaps, the incarnational arts, the centre of architecture being the house for the god. Whatever, the six arts are the spiritual forms of primary concern, the six-winged seraphim of Isaiah's vision [Isaiah 6:2]. [41! The six arts produced give us culture; the six arts applied give us civilization. Architecture: wonder why there always has to be a prick and a cunt: I wondered this when sitting in the Skydome with the CN tower beside me. Islam had a mosque and a minaret; Christianity a basilica and a bell-tower; even the New York fair had a trylon and a perisphere. Something points to the sky and something contains on earth. Wright wanted to put up a building a mile high and Fuller wanted to build geodesic domes. These are Eros symbols, and just as kerygma is verbal imagination coming the other way, so Agape is Eros coming the other way. After all, God creates us by the power of Eros. I'm just circling: I haven't caught my mouse yet. [42] But I'm moving in the direction of true and false gods: the true gods have to do with creation, like Athene's weaving and Apollo's music; the false gods belong to history, ideology, war politics, exploitation, and the like. [43] When I talked to the doctors at Mt. Sinai I found myself improvising

674

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

a thesis I didn't understand at the time.30 I said the sympathies and antipathies in nature that underlay Galenic medicine don't exist as that, but similar forces may exist in the mind. I thought of mother after a postparturitional disease following Vera's birth:31 she had what sounded (ironic for a woman who never touched a drop of alcohol in her life) just like delirium tremens. She said that reading Scott's novels, dropped on her by my grandfather, brought her round. Scott in those days was the acme of serious secular reading. What I felt was that the plots of formulaic fiction conventions could act as a sort of counter-delirium. Similarly the O.T. God may be a counter delirium to a nation trampled on by foreigners. I know how vague this sounds, but there's something that may emerge. [44] The nine Muses were concerned with the arts of mousike, music and poetry. The Pythagorean-Platonic tradition added mathematics, but the arts of techne were subordinated, despite their extraordinary achievement in Greek culture, and were still more so in the Hebraic tradition. The air, the realm of spirit, is invisible but carries sounds. [45] I spoke earlier of the prick-and-cunt pairs in architecture [par. 41], to which I should have added the menhirs and stone circles of Neolithic times. I suppose in another area this pairing becomes the one-and-zero binary form that's the basis of number. Erik Erikson: leave children alone to play and the boys will build towers and the girls paddocks.32 [46] I'm much closer to my real subject when I think of the hero-poetreader progression in literature. The Iliad is all about stupid gut-cutting thugs, with only Hector a half-decent person, and look what happens to him. Yet the Iliad is a superb poem, and the cornerstone of our literature. Some other principle is involved here: the principle of irony, of saying the opposite of what is meant, comes into both Homer and the Old Testament. Corresponding to the hero-poet-reader progression in the Bible we have the Jehovah-Jesus-Spirit one. Each turns its predecessor inside out. [47] Going back to the arts for a moment: painting is the most objectified of the arts, because of its presentation of a separated world in two dimensions. That's why I call it unborn: the sculptured-architectural world is closer to the individual-group alternation.

Notes 54.1

675

[48] The Father creates, the Son redeems, the Spirit recreates. Man falls and creates hell in opposition to the Father; with the Son he enters a purgatorial system (because anything of that shape belongs to the everlasting gospel); as spiritual man he enters the beatific vision. [49] It may be only a Christian prejudice, but I think if I were a Jew I'd be strongly tempted to accept Christ as at least a plausible working model of what a Messiah would be like. Which means that on the basis of imaginative literalism there's no real difference. [50] Augustine spoke of the anima naturaliter Christiana, following Paul, who spoke of those who do by nature the things contained in the law.33 What bothers me about this is the word nature: those outside the Biblical orbit do by their essential humanity the things that bring about redemption. [51] Curious about the computer mystics: they talk of an "alien intelligence," meaning that they're searching for a personal Other, a machine God. It's the Babel story over again. What they leave out is the fact that human beings are not just conscious but conscious wills: they keep a continuum of identity going from infancy to old age. Machines have no will to do what they do: they have to be plugged in or turned on, so they're not really alive. In the Old Testament it's the continuous will of God that's invariably stressed: "I will be what I will be" [Exodus 3:14]. His consciousness is not obviously better than ours, in spite of being so often said to be so. [52] The O.T. God of wrath and judgment corresponds to the hell-vision; the God of the Exodus and deliverance to the purgatorial vision; the God of restoration to the beatific vision. I seem to be circling around the Boehme principle: God minus Jesus equals Satan. [53] A lot of what I'm saying seems to lead toward the view that the arts should express or illustrate spiritual values. Many artists (e.g. Canadian painters of the Lawren Harris-Emily Carr period) would endorse this, but for academic critics it's a boob notion, perhaps less contemptible than trying to get Margaret Lawrence [Laurencel or Alice Munro out of school libraries, but not much more enlightened. The point is that expressing or

676

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

illustrating means allegory. I think the arts should be spiritual values, not express verbal platitudes only vaguely connected with them. [54] But of course they would express or illustrate something, which leads to the principle that the only critical criterion worth a damn is the apocalyptic one. The only real forms of life are heaven and hell, and bad art is simply art that expresses a delight in living in hell, endorsing hatreds and the like. I think it would be found that art that does this is invariably ephemeral and trashy. Again, of course I'm overlooking the vast amount of bad art that's well meaning. I'd better get going on something else. 155] Abraham and, centuries later, Mohammed, found themselves in a world of idolatry and went through an individual revolution in which that world turned inside out. There was only one place [in] which the revolution could locate itself and that was in their own minds, almost entirely in what would be called now their subconscious. Not until Paul is it explicit that the mind has to be a full partner with the spirit. Hence God speaks directly to Abraham, and reflects a good deal of the hellworld that Abraham has just emerged from. With Jesus things are different: he retires to pray, obviously isn't praying to himself even though the gospel writers are convinced he's God, and already in Paul (I Corinthians) there's a distinction between the Father from whom and the Christ through whom. There's no "progress" from Abraham to Christ; there's only a separation which is both progress and regress. By that time the hell-world had retreated from nature to the natural order, and the incarnation of God for most people was Augustus. [56] Trinity of Antichrists: the Father who's the power of nature, Job's Satan; the Son who's the temporal ruler of the world, from the Pharaohs of Egypt to Hitler and Stalin; the Spirit who is what Coleridge called the criminal patience of humanity.34 That last could be sharpened a bit. [57] Judaism went through its Father or anti-idolatry stage with Abraham, and its Messianic stage against the Pharaoh with Moses. Its spiritual stage is symbolized by Elijah. I suspect the Islamic religion never really escaped from the Abraham stage: there were some efforts to identify Mohammed with the Logos, but I don't think they got anywhere, and politically they came to terms with the Commander of the Faithful, or

Notes 54.1

677

Caliph. Of course in Judaism Logos and Spirit stages never achieved divinity. [58] The Creator, the Lawgiver, the Prophet: Christianity has the Father, the Logos, the Spirit. Law and Logos are quite explicitly related as type and spiritual antitype. All this is pretty elementary, at least for some readers. [59] Now the great hurdle: how do you get to the comfort of reasonable religion from the old bugger's capers?35 [60] There's no impropriety here, of course: a feminist who thought women should be ordained would be implying that Paul was a silly old bugger on this point, which he was. But the intense humanity of Jehovah, the fact that he's far more like King Lear than a theologian's God, is a real puzzle. Apart from the fact that he throws a lot of light on the reality of titanic figures like Lear, who show us what our subconscious is capable of throwing up. [61] That is, I don't disagree with Blake's Nobodaddy conception, but I want a more positive approach to the humanity of the Old Testament God, even though it's so profoundly unpleasant a humanity. At least in most cases, like Agag,36 not in all. [62] I've often expounded my pagan sequence of gods: first the elements in nature that seem numinous, the spirits of the rivers and trees and stones that become the nymphs and fauns and satyrs of the most primitive layer of Greek religion. Animals too, as in Egypt and in the transformations of Zeus when he makes love. Ovid read all this mythology as "metamorphosis" or the transformations of the world of becoming.37 [63] Then there are the political gods, of war first, of "wisdom" (i.e., cunning), and the aristocracy on Olympus or what not, climaxed in the supreme god whose will is being accomplished in the Iliad. It would be inaccurate to make this a sequence, but there is a correlation between tribal society and local gods, national society and aristocratic political gods, empire and pagan monotheism. In both Virgil and Ovid the Emperor is what holds it all together. Eventually, with Christianity, it becomes more obvious that the true gods are human creative powers, the

678

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

chief of which corresponding to the Word of the orthodox faith, is Eros, the "ego dominus tuus" of Dante's Vita Nuova.38 Such true gods develop out of the Muses or angels of earlier traditions, only why they're traditionally gods of mousike rather than techne I dunno. [64! I keep having a vision of a guide or preacher or some professional haranguer standing in front of a war cemetery in Flanders with a million crosses behind him and explaining how human aggressiveness has such essential survival value. [65! I have much of this already: Hebraic and Hellenic traditions are both tribal, based on the sense that a real community (i.e. a spiritual one) has to be a small group, small enough for the individual to emerge.39 Hence the amount of work society as a whole does to support a small aristocracy with all the privileges of social life. Only a small privileged group can possess the third great revolutionary virtue of fraternity, which is why all revolutionary movements to promote liberty and equality founder on the shoals of producing yet another exploiting dominant group. The difficulties of the "king" metaphor about God who's entitled to the best of everything are linked with this. [66] The Jehovah of the Old Testament is an intensely humanized being, as violent and unpredictable as King Lear. We read in Plato and Plutarch about the "hyponoia" efforts to make the gods behave themselves and be proper role-models. The central image of man trying to make his divine creature into a decent God is Jacob, (Israel) wrestling with the angel.40 [67] Aristocracy also is linked to ancestor-worship, of course, the particular line of one's birth being its essence. Behind this is the effort to keep a line of continuity with our ancestors as temporal authors of our being, nature-gods in a true sense that they're the authors of our own being. Hence the Virgin Birth as the stopping of this, pushing aside Joseph and making the author of Christ's being God himself, was essential for the myth of the spiritual Father. The genealogies in Matthew and Luke tracing the line of David are rationalized crap, but I suppose they're there to establish the humanity as well as the divinity of Christ. The flagrant contradiction between these genealogies and the Virgin Birth shows the paradox in the contrast between the mythical and the humanized historical element in the Christ story.41

Notes 54.1

679

[68] The spiritual community is small: this survives in the traditional sense that only a few get saved, on the analogy that only a few of nature's sperms and germs become fertile. History turns on saving remnants. [69] China: the axis of harmony between heaven and earth, so central in Taoism, is also prominently featured in the Lord's Prayer.42 [70! Machines are infinitely more efficient than the human mind at automatic repetition, because consciousness is also seeking mutation, variety, differentiation. I suppose the word "seeking" suggests Lamarckian versions of evolution. [71! "After the first death, there is no other," says Dylan Thomas,43 expressing an agreement between those who believe in an after-life and those who don't. Similarly, the most common, almost the universal, expressed hope for after death is the metaphor drawn from death of peace, repose, sleep, being free of consciousness and will.44 [72] As I've said so often, living things are animated by a continuous will, and the continuity of the will accounts for the sense of identity between infancy and old age of the "same" person. Human beings have conscious wills, but human beings in bondage, slaves and the more brutally exploited, get little chance to do anything except survive. Among the leisured and privileged glimpses of genuine consciousness may emerge, even to the point of glimpses of what consciousness could be. [73! But as consciousness is will-driven in everyone, there's a constant pull back to simple survival. Thus reason becomes rationalizing one's acts instead of a vision of order. [74! Schopenhauer is unanswerable on the point that life in continuous will entails far more suffering than happiness. Man creates hell and seems determined to keep living in it. What he calls representation is the beginning of the spiritual life, but only the beginning. [75] Representation implies picture-making, still central in Wittgenstein, and painting, being always a representation even when it doesn't represent anything (it represents intransitively), is, once again, a vision of an

680

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

unborn world. When it's born, it becomes three-dimensional but not objective. [76] Further on the line-of-David genealogies: even if there were no Virgin Birth doctrine they wouldn't count for much, because the Jewish descent from Abraham doesn't count either, God [having] been able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham (whether there's a reference to Deucalion and Pyrrha there has always teased me.)45 [77] The true gods, it becomes obvious when we cross the great divide from gods to God, are human creative powers: this was glimpsed by the Greeks in their invention of Muses and the association of Apollo with music, Athene with weaving, etc. Then Eros becomes the greatest of gods, and says to Dante ego dominus tuus—I've got this already [pars. 30, 63]. False gods are those assumed to have an objective existence, so the Jupiter and Venus of Christian poetry are truer as gods than the Jupiter and Venus of cults and temples. [78] I don't assume that the same principle works with the Christian God, though many would say it was obvious. But poets and novelists and dramatists, when deeply serious and responsible possessors of vision, are still prophetic: neither they nor their readers may know what Messiah it is that they're prophesying, and when they suggest one (Nietzsche) they get it grotesquely wrong. But they're prophets in one sense: they know that they're far bigger, or are attached to something far bigger, than any ideology, and can't function in Stalin's Russia or any other such pseudo-community. [79] Wonder if the Catholic search for a philosophical infra-structure, the analogia entis, doesn't accompany a neo-imperialism, as Stoicism reinforced the pax Romana.

Notes 54.2

What follows are four clusters of typed notes for Words with Power that Frye wrote sometime after The Great Code was published (1982). The four units, each quite brief, are separated by the symbol §. The first section (pars, i5) begins with eight points of connection between the two Bible books that Frye wants to keep in mind. The second (pars. 6-29) contains an early outline for Words with Power, followed by another outline for the first half of the book as Frye conceived it at the time. The third (pars. 30-45) includes a series of reflections on the "Frazer-Graves cycle, along with early notes on the four "cycles" or "archetypal narratives," which eventually modulated into the "four variations" in the last half of Words with Power. The final section is no more than a list of topics that Frye has proposed for chapters 5 and 6 of Words with Power. The unit is atypical, as Frye does not speculate on or develop the topics, but it does indicate the way he began to gather material and organize his thoughts for what became his chapters on the mountain (here called "the ladder chapter") and the garden. As the entries in this last section are brief, they have not been numbered. The original typescripts are in the NFF, 1991, box 28, file 4.

[i] What are the important points about GC to be carried over into the next book, either in summary at the beginning or in the argument itself? (a) the "syllepsis" business, where the written book invokes a presence outside it which gradually becomes totally identified with the book itself as "Word of God."

682

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

(b) the psychological, even the political, question, why belief, in ordinary human affairs, is normally identical with the pathology of belief. (c) the association of Christ with total individuality, with the consequent principle that no hierarchical organization can be ultimately catholic. (d) the emphasis on the structural side of metaphor, in opposition to the analytical people like Derrida. Two things are involved in metaphor: the difference between A and B, which leads to "deconstruction," and what is being constructed by the assertion that A and B are identical. (e) the binary nature of the imagery and its dialectical separation of life from death. (f) the conception of creation as the first epiphany of the Word, i.e., the presentation to consciousness of a world which contains things rather than nothing. (g) the difference between type and antitype as also the difference between myth as imaginative construct and myth possessed or recovered by man as something now in the existential area. [2] I've been reading a book about computers, full of very muddled arguments about whether a machine can be said to think or have intelligence. The difference between a mechanism and an organism is not one of intelligence but of will. An automobile can run faster than a human being can, but in itself it has no will to do so: it will sit rusting in a garage indefinitely without the slightest sign of impatience. There's no reason why man should not develop machines that can reproduce every activity of the human brain on a vastly higher level of speed and efficiency. But nobody has yet come up with a computer that wanted to do these things on its own: as will, so far, every machine is an expression of the will of its makers. In the Clarke-Kubrick movie 2001, the computer Hal suddenly develops an autonomous will, a power of using its intelligence for its own ends. That makes Hal a nightmare, of course, but it also makes him a fellow-creature: he's now a he and not an it, and the depiction of his gradual destruction had a genuine pathos.1 [3] The great Old Testament fallacy is that man is a mechanism of God, a

Notes 54.2

683

fallacy that became a truth with the Incarnation, when man acquired a potential individuality that made the ego a mechanism of what is called the selfish gene.2 [4] Hermes: the stars in the old construct were thought to be images of the presence of God. After Newton they became images of mechanism, which left the organism on earth the supreme thing we know about in the universe. Science still thinks of nature as a machine without a ghost. God can, Blake said, only operate within a conscious organism: maybe the universe is one, but we can't see whether it is or not.3 [5] The movement from type to antitype is also the movement from Pygmalion's statue to the living girl, dramatized in a different context in the Winter's Tale, where it is requisite you do awake your faith.4 Wish I knew what Ariel's songs meant: the dogs do bark sounds like the noise going on when the inner gates of the mind are opened.5 Whenever a statue comes to life, anyway, there's some variant of the imaginativeexistential movement going on.

§ PART ONE: THE LADDER OF MEANING. CHAPTER ONE: THE FIRST LEVEL. [6] Section One: a personal introduction, explaining my reasons for writing the book and what I've tried to do. Repeats the general position of the Anatomy, but in a new context.6 I said there that criticism would become a social science:7 this was generally repudiated or even ridiculed, but it was the only thing that could happen, so it happened. The critical picture changed to focus on a linguistic model. The Bible assumes a logocentric universe, so what to do with it? [7] Section Two: centrifugal and centripetal directions in reading, with diagram. Introducing the conceptions of hieratic and demotic meaning. The tension between them: Mallarme and the verbe vs. parole and langage. [8] Section Three: the conception of "levels" of meaning, preserved in Hegel's metaphor of Aufhebung.8 Two forms of literal meaning: the

684

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

traditional one, set out in Dante, won't work. All four levels in Dante are wrong because the basis is wrong. [9] Section Four: the repudiation of history as history in the Bible, and its containment in myth. The Bible is literally poetic. CHAPTER TWO: THE SECOND LEVEL. [10] Section Five: the heavy stress on verbal figuration in the Bible, and the consequent fact that its thinking is metaphorical and not doctrinal or prepositional. The two kinds of metaphor. [11] Section Six: Aristotle and the universalizing of history by myth. The way in which the Bible preserves its historical integrity by abandoning the wrong kind. Typology: the two Testaments. The relation not allegorical but a theory of historical process. [12] Section Seven: the other half of Aristotle's argument: the universalizing of concept and doctrine by metaphor, often pictorial or diagrammatic. The two primary operations in criticism, pre-critical absorption in narrative (mythos) and critical study of dianoia as an objective pattern. No involvement as yet: hypothetical basis of art.9 [13] Section Eight: The Everlasting Gospel. The expansion of myth into a mythological universe. Up and down movements of incarnation and resurrection. CHAPTER THREE: THE THIRD LEVEL. [14] Section Nine: Functional and non-functional belief, former an axiom of behavior, latter an element of subjective thought. Latter turns out to be anxiety, including the anxiety of influence (differentiation of hieratic meaning).10 [15] Section Ten: the informing of action or praxis by myth: ritual and myth in primitive societies, where ritual is the epiphany of myth. Social and individual basis for belief. Dream and psychological dramas: Freud, Jung, transactional scripts.11

Notes 54.2

685

[16] Section Eleven: the informing of life through the arts: shifting of basis of authority from the author to the vision he presents. [17] Section Twelve: active and passive belief; being taken over by myth in contrast to taking over the mythological universe, not as objective but as the autonomous Word.12 CHAPTER FOUR: THE FOURTH LEVEL. [18! Section Thirteen: Creation myths: beginning vs. birth; diachronic vs. synchronic mythology; mother and father myths; natura naturans vs. natura naturata. The birth of consciousness out of nothingness vs. the thrown-ness of Dasein.13 [19] Section Fourteen: Culbute myths. The burning bush: obliteration of theodicy in the redemption of Israel. Revolutionary mentality: sacred text, dialectical habit of thought, beginning in history, focus on exodus or social liberation.14 [20] Section Fifteen: the metaphor of kingship; Caesar as the opposing principle. The visual monument vs. the aural informing word. The individual as the epiphany of social unity. The enthroned king as married to the bride from the strange land. Human symbolism in the Bible. [21] Section Sixteen: Resurrection and apocalypse myths. These burst out of time, but time persists, so a sacramental wheel develops instead. The spiritual body as what's ultimately repressed. PART ONE: THE LADDER OF MEANING.^ CHAPTER ONE: THE FIRST LEVEL. [22] Section One: Personal Introduction, as now. [23! Section Two: centrifugal and centripetal directions in reading, with diagram. Gives rise to the illusion that centrifugal correspondence is the basis of meaning. It isn't, and the total verbal structure has to be seen as a temple with an inner hieratic court, a middle oratorical court, and an outer prose-descriptive court. Prestige of latter, but still derivative.

686

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[24] Section Three: the role of metaphor in the Bible, and the obvious fact that the Bible is literally poetic. Metaphor as counter-logical. [25] Section Four: the treatment of historical fact in the Bible, and the equally obvious fact that that treatment is mythical. CHAPTER TWO: THE SECOND LEVEL. [26] Section Five: the conception of "levels" of meaning, preserved in Hegel's Aufhebung. The Dante scheme as founded on the wrong kind of literalism. The rejection of corresponding history re-establishes the Bible as a historical entity, with the example of Gibbon. [27] Section Six: Typology and the two Testaments. Not allegory but a theory of history. The Individual-Social dialectic, resolving in the metaphor of kingship.16 [28] Section Seven: Aristotle's universalizing of history by myth, leading to the implication that metaphorical (often pictorial or diagrammatic) thinking universalizes concept and doctrine. The two primary operations of criticism, where mythos becomes dianoia. [29] Section Eight: Renewed readings of the mythos clarify the dianoia and spread it into an objective pattern. Still largely hypothetical, but the key to knowledge. Perhaps some introduction of the Genesis and Exodus patterns.17

§ [30] I'm right when I say that the two great structural principles of literature are the cycle and the dialectical polarization of opposites; but there are two forms of each. There's the closed cycle and the open cycle, the latter a spiral in which the end is the beginning renewed and transformed by the quest itself. And there's also the ultimate polarization into heaven and hell, the worlds beyond the cycle; there's also the coincidentia oppositorum, the struggle of opposites inside the cycle, the basis of all the brother-struggle patterns in Finnegans Wake. In Blake I suppose the Orc-Urizen struggle of Devil and Angel is inside the cycle, because in its totality it forms a cycle: the Los-Satan one is the outside polarization.

Notes 54.2

687

[31] In Frazer there are two main forms—well, three, perhaps. In the first a God-Man is killed, torn to pieces, eaten and drunk, and revives within the body of his community, creating one body out of them. In the second a substitute victim, animal or other human, dies instead and prolongs the life of the God-Man or whatever. In the third the victim, criminal or captive, has to be a temporary king, so that the disappearance or Saturday phase is an inversion of ordinary social order.18 [32] What Frazer unaccountably leaves entirely out of his scheme is the female principle, who represents the earth itself, which is potentially still fruitful all through the winter. This is what Graves adds; I've always known that, but haven't had the stages clear. The four phases in Graves are: first, virgin-mother with infant son (not very clear, but in his "ark" passage in the Juan poem).19 Second, the agon or sea-dragon fight, which seems to be oddly simultaneous with what's the real second phase of the white-goddess cycle, that of lover and bride. Third, the white goddess turns into an elusive siren or enchanting witch, beckoning and smiling, often with marine overtones like the mermaid, or, of course, Aphrodite the foam-born. Here the lover becomes the forsaken, abandoned, or tantalized lover: this is the phase at which the Eros poems start. Fourth, the white goddess becomes hag or crone, the sinister witch of so many witch-hunts, and her ex-lover becomes the victim. Then she renews her virginity (which in sky-father symbolism is of course the greatest of impossibilities, hence the yeow-my-cunt aspect of romantic fiction), and looks round for a new lover.20 [33] Sometimes this four-phase calendar could be set out vertically instead of horizontally, keeping in mind the fact that you go around and up the other side. But Endymion is clearer on a vertical basis, and so in a way is the end of Graves' Juan poem. So is a lot of water-symbolism, in The Waste Land and elsewhere. [34] The Frazer-Graves cycle is pretty clear to me now; but the top cycle, where we go from the paradisal garden which is the female body through to a place of seed, isn't; and there are no books about it. Elements: the son-mother start of the quest; the Bridegroom-Bride phase of which the prototype is the marriage at Cana; the father-daughter phase of the Logos and his Wisdom (note that the Holy Spirit descends at the moment of the Ascension); the redemption of mother (i.e. Eve, the natural

688

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

mother, from hell) and bride; and the coronation of the mother by the son as the renewed phase. Also, in Yeats, where the Virgin conceives through the ear [The Mother of God, 11.1-2]: that makes the Virgin's body a cave of nymphs, with one entrance for the gods and the other (an exit, naturally) for Jesus quasi homo. [35] There's a total cycle, with a polarization process going on within it which builds up contrasting worlds above and below it. This is an open cycle or helix, where whatever goes up is renewed and transformed (metamorphosis upward), with the resurrection principle incorporated into it. Whatever goes down is enclosed in a mechanism (metamorphosis downward). [36] Then there are the two sub-cycles of the upper and lower worlds respectively. The upper cycle, which is also helical, is that of the Eliot Quartets, or Yeats' Byzantium, the Heraclitean up-and-down process which never reaches hell—in other words it's a purgatorial world, the downward movement being into ascesis only.21 The lower cycle is the real closed-up ouroboros, the cycle of forza and froda, as I call it.22 [37] The four archetypal narratives are all right, but explain more clearly how they get displaced. For example, satire is always a Hermes descent movement, always the Lucian kataplous into a lower world of giants or gnomes, however many variants of it there may be. As I've said elsewhere, the grotesque is always partly the grott-esque, something emerging from a grotto.23 [38] The Eliot Quartets maybe have the answer to my problem about a lower oracular world below hell: "descend lower" [Burnt Norton, 1. 117]. Interesting if Eliot has the feature that blows up the Christian demonizing of the lower world.24 [39] Obvious point, but the lack of it should stop mucking up Three: a loyal married couple are symbolically in the same state as two virgins. Chaucer's Franklin's Tale is the definitive example. [40] Then, of course, as I've said, there are two polarizations, the apocalyptic one outside the cycle and the struggle of contraries inside it. The latter is Blake's Mental Traveller and Orc-Urizen cycles, the Shem-Shaun

Notes 54.2

689

conflicts in Joyce, and the curious red-versus-white struggle under the moon that comes into both Yeats' Blood on the Moon and Chaucer's Knight's Tale.25 [41] This last, by the way, may conceivably be involved in a fairy-Athens polarization in MND [A Midsummer Night's Dream], which comes mainly from the Knight's Tale. [42] There's something all wrong about the pre- and post-Romantic constructs as I have them. In medieval times the sky was the image of the unfallen order, O.K., but there was also a malignant aspect to the heavens: in a pagan setting, at least, the sky is just as much an image of mechanism and alienation in Troilus and Criseyde as it is in Shelley. [43! Also, the inverted tree image in the Preludium to Europe,26 which goes so well with the Romantic set-up, or set-down, is, of course, in Marvell, in Higden's Polychronicon27 (even in the Middle Ages they preserved the anthropos-anatrope pun),28 and so back—I suppose to Cratylus; I haven't checked. [44] The "burden of the past" lasts, I think, only for a relatively brief time.29 That's why the "primitive" is a quality of literature that keeps recurring every so often: it's part of a process in which the burden of the last growth of vogues and fashions and conventions is shucked off and a new lot starts. [45] In Finnegans Wake the cyclical and polarizing principles (the latter being of the type that's within the cycle, naturally), are associated with Vico and Bruno respectively. Interesting as an example of the deliberateness with which writers use these structural principles.30

§ [46! Tempest masque.31 City as well as garden at top of tower or mountain. Shelley in Epipsychidion. Return to virgin mother means reintegration of nature. Demonic parody the cyclical goddess: white goddess vs. black bride. Una in Faerie Queene I.

690

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Demonic parody (descending spiral in ladder cluster): the female-dominated cycle. Conflict of Eros poetry of the white-goddess type with, e.g., Milton. The vortex of white goddess passing into black bride (little girl lost; Perdita). (The general idea is that the ladder's focus is the bride, and synecdochally her cunt. So consummation with the bride also means the reintegration of nature with man on the second level. The garden image modulates to the city one in Revelation.) (end of ladder section). Four phases of space: real presence; home and up (degree); partially and wholly alienated space. Diagram. In spite of the levels of time, this is a spatializing metaphor. Plenitude: the ladder cosmos fills up the world: no nothingness in it, because time is subordinated to space. Natura naturata prevails over natura naturans. Circularity of arguments over what is unnatural to man. Jonson's vs. Milton's masque: maybe here or further up. Garden section: Macrocosmic and microcosmic accounts of creation: latter tends to metaphorical identification of garden with woman's body. Development of this in the Song of Songs. Synecdoche-metaphor identifying cunt and whole of garden-woman's body-nature. Gardens of Adonis: what they originally were and how they're transformed in Spenser and Comus. Well: natura-naturans and Eros. (Note how god-awfully refined Eros poetry is, and how unwillingly it finally disgorges the metaphorical cunt-mistress metaphor in Elizabethan poetry.) Examples you have (Campion, Fulke Greville, Fidessa, Robert Chester; also the end of Greene's play.)32 Brief retake perhaps of the Mutabilitie Cantoes. Ver perpetuum; locus amoenus; Golden Age (Tempest masque)

Notebook 46

The first twenty-eight entries in this holograph notebook contain material for Words with Power. These notes appear to have been written toward the beginning ofFrye's work on that book, probably in the mid-1980s. Entries 2964, separated from the earlier ones by a partially blank page, are notes for The Double Vision. In entry 56 Frye comments on a December 1989 CBC radio program, referring to it as "recent"; thus, paragraphs 29-64, which have been separated from the first unit by the symbol §, were most likely written during 1989 and 1990. The notebook is in the NFF, 1993, box i.

[i] Wider mythology behind the Bible: A Mesopotamian myth says first man created of earth and the blood of a slain god. In Scandinavia this is Ymir. In many flood stories it's giants or titans who get drowned: trace of this in Gen 6:1-4. [2] The bird-man flying out of the labyrinth: Daedalus & Way land.1 In the Christ-complex: SE.2 [3] Sky-god: the visual focus is the sun; audible focus, the sky-god speaking, is the thunder. The thunder god is usually the [Wonan?]fighter: hammer or double axe. Some myths go sky-god > death god > thunder god (e.g. Tiwes > Woden > Thor & Ouranos > Kronos > Zeus) but Jehovah seems to go the other way. [4] Middle death-god corresponds to the Deluge, the plagues of Egypt & Boehme's shell of wrath. Rainbow & the cycle; 10 cdts. [commandments] succeeding the 10 plagues, Sunday following Saturday, establish the third Father.

692

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[5] Earth-goddess losing some symbol of fertility: hair (Rape of the Lock & that Menander play)3 or apples. Usually golden hair or apple. (A lot of this kind of stuff is in the AC, don't forget). [6] Creation & deluge are apoc. & dem. [apocalyptic & demonic] forms of the world. They correspond to the manic-depressive movement of poetry from O [circumference] to centre. [7] Jehovah seems to go through the cycle of immanence, burning-bush & ark in wilderness, before he becomes a sky-god. [8] TWO-THREE: The "middle" earth separating heaven & hell: the perfect world vs. the chaos mirror. [9] Manna is displaced honey dew (i.e., honey believed to come down with the dew): last 2 lines of Kubla Khan.4 Velikowski says something about it.5 [10] In the Last Judgement God splits into an advocate and an accuser. The latter z's Antichrist, the accusing devil. In Manicheanism, & therefore in the Xn [Christian] doctrine of hell, there z's a divine demonic being. [11] Aristocrats get everything in this life: consequently they're fatalists & accept a shadow Hades-world. Cults of immortality are proletariat. [12] Speculative notion of a sequence of [?] emerges as a penumbra around the Bible but isn't there. [13] The Gardens of Adonis are cunts: identification of female body & garden. [14] Caedmon story: his formulaic units are probably all heathen, but the narrative sequence in the Bible was what started him off.6 [15] Apocalyptic is an attempt to primitivize, if that's a word, the legalprophetic perspective, which, despite leviathan & such, was getting pretty impoverished through its horror of idolatry. Xy [Christianity] completed the primitive apoc. revn. [apocalyptic revolution]. [16] Idolatry: tearing people away from feeling a part of the natural cycle

Notebook 46

693

is what's really distinctive & revy. [revolutionary] about the Bible. Cutting out world cycles, reincarnation, & such, is part of this. In the mind of God things happen once. [17] A dying god is not a god of death. I must think about the latter. He'd be a psychopomp like Hermes & Woden, & like Woden he'd be a chooser of the slain: this comes into the Ignatius martyrdom complex.7 [18] A military aristocracy turns the supreme god into a war god. Mars was once a life-giving fertility god—our centre. [19] Don't forget the point (Cornell)8 that Mary represents the original & the Bride-Church the fallen form of the creature. [20] If ELEVEN deals with "The Return of the Giants" or Titans, sons of the earth-mother, one has to consider the Queen Bee cult of Graves9 & such. But this aspect of it seems to be bound up with unending cycles. Only the symbolic male can be redeemed into creative freedom. [21] One-eyed Odin & the setting sun as losing the "eye" of heaven. Blindness & the dying-god king: Hoder in the North, etc.10 [22! The burning bush must be the end of a long development reversing the fertility cycle back through various stages back to the original skygod. Maybe the Hebrews are unique in reversing the current of mythological entropy. [23! Three goddesses of the "triple will";11 three gods of the sky-trinity. Creator-God, Death-God, & Sustainer-God. Jehovah, Lucifer, Christ > Holy Spirit. The Creator God is perverted into a war god by a military aristocracy: the Lord is a man of war. (For holocausts offered to such gods, see Tacitus' Annals on the Cimbri.)12 Cain, Abel, Seth. The former becomes wanderer & the third moves into the place of the second. Shem, Ham, Japhet. Japhet becomes peripheral & Ham goes underneath. Both trinities have past-present-future connexions: cf. Yeats' SB [Sailing to Byzantium].13 [24] White Goddess: poet fishing in his subconscious where he gets tantalizing glimpses of vision, bitter disappointments, & a few moments he's grateful for, is bound to think in terms of a female Muse.

694

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[25] Tobit's Sara is in the lower world: Raphael follows the Grateful Dead pattern & the dog is an underworld symbol. Hence the double fish theme.14 [26] Eternal recurrence: in the mind of God everything happens once only. That's the Biblical view: no reincarnation is necessary, just as no fall is necessary in yoga. [27] I must look at Koestler's Yogi & the Commissar, because these represent the two poles of religio: the pure Self withdrawn from society, the pure social religio denying a vertical dimension.15 [28] Three languages: faith (Father) hope (Son) love (Spirit). The three lecture pattern: Alexanders, Clevelands, Trinity, Western, Virginias, Western 2.16 Dante? History-experience-unique vs. Myth-insight-repetitive.

§ [29] "The lying spirit." Micaiah's vision of the trickster god [i Kings 22:22-3; 2 Chronicles 18:21-2], corresponding to what Zeus does in the Iliad. [30] Berkeley, Siris: all spiritual language is metaphorical.17 [31] The view of the divine backside: allegory of the material world, but the story is presented to us in its full mythical absurdity.18 [32] Laws: tokens of virginity: cutting off a woman's hand if she grabs two fighting men by the balls [Deuteronomy 25:11-12]. Spiritual sense of course, but the "higher" sense expands from the "lower" one; it doesn't run away from it. [33] Sartor Resartus paradox: whatever reveals also conceals. The manifested is something manifested that cannot be manifested.19 [34] Is the miraculous provision of food in the gospels a historical fact or

Notebook 46

695

not? Did it really happen or not? All either-or questions are inapplicable to the Bible. I don't know if it was a "real" event or not: I know only that it comes to me as a verbal event, a myth, because a myth [is] more true than a fact. The reaction "well, I'll believe it if it's also a fact" won't work. Only the myth is given us, and a myth may be totally non-factual. Only what may not have happened at all is a fit subject for belief. [35] So far, the Tertullian (Browne) principle that the absurd is the believable holds.20 Note that it's a counter-absurdity, set over against the absurdities of "thrown-ness" & life without discernible meaning.21 [36] Literature is the training ground of faith because it begins by saying "this is not so." The next step is "let's suppose it is so." At the third step, "let us make it a model of experience," splits off the poetic from the kerygmatic: that's where we part company with Don Quixote & his tragicomedy of trying to live by a literary model. Emma Bovary, Lord Jim, Captain Ahab. [37] Centralizing & homogenizing versus interpenetration may be Two or even Three: probably it's the germ of Utopia: nowhere becoming everywhere. [38] Literature begins in lying (Oscar Wilde): it proceeds from "you're just making all this up" to "you're (just) making this."22 [39] God only appears as a god, the god who rides a cherub in the sky. [40] Myth is counter-historical, metaphor counter-logical: kerygma combines them. History & logic are both mad: the rational is mad, & the reasonable is the illogical but sane suspending of logic. Assuming that a historical process is a reality leads to a Moloch-worship of the future. [41! Faust & Don Juan pursued wisdom & love because they didn't possess them. You can pursue only what you already possess: otherwise it's pure illusion you're chasing. Blake's Spectre around me poem.23 [42] Historical fallacies: the Crusade in Christianity; the jihad in Islam; Zionism in Judaism. Even Christian missionaries were tainted by the

696

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

crusading fallacy; the crusade is expanding empire, in Blake's terms, not decentralizing (interpenetrating) art. (Note that decentralizing is one step on the way to interpenetration). [43] The Quixote entry on the previous page [par. 36] overlooks the fact that trying to use poetic structures as life-models is also the error of "fundamentalism." The problem is still to distinguish the kerygmatic, which is founded on the poetic but transcends it, from the ideologizing of the Bible (and myth generally), applying the imagination to human passions. [44] Perhaps the first lecture could make this point, and the second one carry it into the Kant-critique world, distinguishing the subjective-objective world from the aesthetic or constructed one. Here we have material provided by an erotic view of nature—the pretty girl in a bikini side of beauty—and the form which transfigures the contemplated object into the artefact.24 [45! Love is the only virtue there is, but like everything else connected with creativity and imagination, there is something decentralized about it. We love those closest to us, Jesus' "neighbors," people we're specifically connected with in charity. For those at a distance we feel rather tolerance or good will, the feeling announced at the Incarnation [Luke 2:14]. [46] The move from confrontation to absorption, from the world of Tantalus to the world of the Last Supper, is a central theme: I should connect it with the swallowed-stinker hunch I picked up from Milton.25 [47] Nothing can speak on the other side of the imagination except the authentic voice of God. I don't know if that makes sense, and probably I can't say it, but there it is. Jesus was a prophet, of course, but that in itself wouldn't have made him divine: the divinity came from his living his life within a mythical or ritual pattern. So I wonder if my kerygma conception, which is within the orbit of words, is the ultimate one: one feels closer to an incarnate divinity with a lifestyle pattern, like St. Francis. Very commonplace stuff so far, but maybe it'll get somewhere. [48] In 1990 the United Church of Canada reaches the normal age of

Notebook 46

697

superannuation. This means that relatively few people now were brought up, as I was, within the pre-Union Methodist Church.26 [49] The individual grows out of the community: an infallible communion, whether Christian or Moslem or the Holy Communist Church of China, keeps human beings in an embryonic state. The metaphors of flock and sheepfold are very dangerous. What is the continuous function of the church? What chance has one to develop an individual religious consciousness if the communal body isn't there?27 [50] There has to be revolt, against the preposterous anxieties and legalism of the communion. I pass a small building labelled Foursquare Gospel or something and think how pleasant it would be to drop in on a group of people engaged in a genuinely communal spiritual enterprise. But of course I know that there'd be nothing inside but hysteria and glazed eyes and are-you-saved-brother and I'd have to run screaming out again. Methodism provided an absurd denatured world of soft drinks and playing cards without suits and walking dances: fortunately something in mother refused to believe all the gunk she'd got from her father,28 though she thought she believed it, or ought to believe it. [51] The combination of the Methodist emphasis on experience rather than doctrine and reading the Biblical myths & metaphors at first hand brought me as close as one can normally come to that "Biblical theology" so many clergymen maintain they have. [52] One is interested in church at the beginning & end of life. I was annoyed with Stevens, a great Protestant poet, for collapsing into the Catholic "fold" at the last minute, but that was his deathbed, a re-entry into the embryonic state.29 Besides, he was an affected old fool (Louise Bogan).30 [53] Once born, one has the responsibility of acquiring some sense of the Word, and of carrying on a dialogue with the church. Embryonic revolts within the embryonic state take the form of complaining that God isn't doing his proper job. The implication is that we might do it better, and the God of the Gospels in that case would say "all right, try." (This picks up my remark about charity in the sermon).31 The embryo believes that

698

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

he believes: the once-born fights his belief as Jacob the angel. To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, after the first birth, there is no other.32 [54] The church is a sentinel: the preacher, proclaiming the Word, ought to be dramatizing his own struggle, not simply enclosing the "fold." [55] Tillich on the miserable reality of the concrete churches: when I went to church in Montreal with Lorna33 that jackass disrupted the whole feeling of the service by braying about homosexuals. Before the service, I met a woman I'd never seen before who pecked out of me in two minutes the fact that I had no earned doctorate. Malice, like other pacts with the devil, certainly gives one preternatural perceptions, up to a point. [56] A recent radio programme on me had that Marxist goof from Linacre College reciting his speech about my lack of historical sense.34 By "history" he meant of course the old Marxist "historical process" that betrayed millions of people who tried to believe it. I have different, and better, historical categories. It's natural that Marxism should find a rest home in the humanities now that it's on the skids everywhere else. [57! The difference between poetic & ideological thinking is the subject of one (Word & Spirit); the difference between the cosmos and the "universe" is the subject of two (Creator & Spirit). It remains to get a grasp of three, the Creator-Word one, which I think may turn on the distinction of atonement as reconciliation and atonement as interpenetration. The spiritual as real, in short.35 [58] The church's motto is "Stand fast in the faith in which you were frozen at birth," which is not what St. Paul says.36 [59! The one & the many: devils and the devil; angels and the mal'ak Yahweh, whom Paul identifies with Christ, though surely "it's" the Holy Spirit.3? [60] I'm dodging, I'm nudging, oh how am I fudging conclusions with [lies?]. It's all very well to say infinite & eternal are the real here & now, but how long do they last? how does one relate them to our conception of

Notebook 46

699

the future? Because there does have to be a place for a future that isn't just a donkey's carrot. [61] Idolatry is the "literalizing" or objectifying of metaphor. . [62] Swift's axiom that we have only enough religion to hate38 springs from the polemic[al] nature of dogmatic language. Where there are such attitudes, there are no churches, only sects. 163] Discoveries of the extent to which psychopaths & criminals are socially & parentally conditioned to be what they are have, it is said, made moral standards too relativistic, in fact have eroded such standards. But knowledge of conditioning has also opened new avenues of freedom in showing how some (perhaps everyone: I'd say the great majority) can escape from these prisons. [64] Idolatry projects emotions into natural images: metaphor uses such images as—well—objective correlatives.39

Notebook 47

This small notebook was written when Frye was working on Words with Power and The Double Vision. Material in paragraphs 16,18, and 20, which relate to Frye's lecture "Literary and Mechanical Models," is evidence that part of the notebook was written before June 1989. The reference to Frye's Canadian Embassy lecture in paragraph 27 probably means that some entries were written after September 1989. The notebook begins in medias res and skips back and forth between Words with Power and Double Vision material. The different sections of the notebook have been separated by the symbol §. The notebook is in theNFF, 1993, box i.

[i]1 L 1 A A

FS AC Ess GC EssWP

A Shak. A Rscm.

V h 1 T

GC WP Ess. Ess.

1 Can. Lit. T Crit. Path

§ [2] Similarly, what most historians would consider crackpot or paranoid history may be useful to a romance writer (Tolkien's appendices form a comprehensive pseudo-history) or a satirist (e.g. Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo).2 [3] The remark about Vico may be an overstatement, but surely his main interest is in ideological & more particularly legal adaptations of myth.3

Notebook 47

701

[4] If I am asked where criticism itself belongs in this survey, I should say that criticism is the theory of words, and distinguishes, without dividing, the various ways of arranging them. The interests I have bracketed as linguistic & semiotic tend to cluster around the ideological & conceptual modes4 [5] I am speaking of continuous forms: short-run descriptive statements have naturally predominated since the beginning of speech.5 [6] Faith which accepts, on whatever level of consciousness, the schoolboy's definition of "belie vin' what you know ain't so" turns hysterical; faith which has passed through the imaginative stage, again on whatever level of consciousness, becomes a gay a scienza.6 (More likely text.) [7] (Add Rz's [Richard II's] mirror & Hamlet {as in Lacan article}7 to double-Narcissus section in Seven). [8] My methods are sometimes said to be deficient in rigor: I hope they will be found to be also deficient in rigor mortis. Intro.8 [9] Distinction between prophetic & oratorical rhetoric: cf. Yeats' "stare" and "glance."9 (Watch it, though; Mussolini stared). [10] Hypnotic force in figurative language, used in rhetoric for "lower" purposes.10 [11] Bultmann etc. can't get past soma psychikon11 language, and so cling to the pre-Rc. [pre-Romantic] notion of poetic language as a specialpurpose rhetoric. [12] Dante (I have this) is predicting the "salvation" of poetic language, not of himself. Venice.12 [13] Continuous descriptive forms before Locke could be based only on subjective memory (e.g. Marco Polo's Travels); therefore "logocentric." [14] 1800 period saw (a) beginning of continuous descriptive language (b) recognition of imaginative language. I'm sure there's a link here. [15] Primary concerns a quincunx: breathing in the middle surrounded

7O2

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

by (a) food & drink (b) sex (c) property (money, possessions, shelter, clothing) (d) freedom of movement ("wanderer" of 23rd Psalm & some Res. [Romantics] {Wordsworth} vs. prisoner or exile who can go anywhere but home). [16] The Ruskin-Morris protest against industrial ugliness was abundantly justified on ecological grounds, and reflects also a dinosaur stage of the industrial revolution. C.P. Snow was an ass.13 Microcomputers are a lot cleaner, but it will be some time before we get an immaculate conception of technology. The dynamo regenerated as well as the virgin.14 [17] The success of a book that takes no risks is not worth achieving.15 [18] Computers can think; they have intelligence and consciousness. What they don't have (so far) is will: they have to be plugged in or turned on like other machines.16 Perhaps electricity is will on the mechanical level; this sounds like the "galvanism" theories of the early 19th c., even of the anima mundi speculations before that. [19] Color is the halfway point in the electromagnetic spectrum where ordinary human sense experience crosses it. Goethe's Farbenlehre was, perhaps, wrong only in G's belief that he was attacking a Newtonian theory. Similarly with Butler and his anti-Darwin stance. [20] "Luddite" view of humanities: some of the most seminal inventions—the alphabet, the printing press, the book—are largely humanist: humanists weren't stung so much on "teaching machines" in the 505, with their idiot Skinner programs.17 [21] All critics stop here (at the ideological stage} who are not primarily concerned with literature but with the relation of literature to a more central interest, whether historical, radical, feminist, or the like. To deal with literature itself in terms of its own mythical & metaphorical language we have to take one more step. (Of course the same principle applies if the central interest is religion. Kerygma poses special problems, but religion as a social institution is still soma psychikon). Kerygma is a form of language, or rather a function of language.

Notebook 47

703

§ [22] Pelham & his Shelley thesis.18 Oxford & the collators: Feuillard's preface.19 Frazer's pen.20 (St. George & dead dragon.) "Making a contribution to knowledge" vs. se//-education. Concordances; the OED. (Salter?21 Snarls of resentment: meant more slips.) "Looking to see whether it's been done" mostly a fallacy. 9849 essays on Stevens' color imagery: 7297 in Japanese. Therefore good subject. "Go into M.E.: not O.E.: that's been done.["] Not a word of genuine csm. [criticism]. "Inspirational." General principle: subjects constantly approaching exhaustion. Panic. Physics in 1950 as analogy. Anything "exhausted" should be done by machinery. Marking essays. Second stage: AC: software programming & computer modelling unknown in 1949. Talked about "science": don't care about hard & soft metaphors: soft as marshmallow. By scientific I meant progressive. Protests about a locked-in-system. Opposite of pedantry is labyrinthine aimlessness. Humanists owe prestige to control of technological seminal inventions: alphabet, printing press, book.

§ [23] One: Csm. [Criticism] as theory of words. Two: What the primary concerns are. Three: (Nothing occurs to me here). Four: A fair amount of tinkering: what kerygmatic actually is, and why the poetic is its basis, need greater explicitness. Perhaps the Malekula riddle belongs.22 Five: A paragraph on the freedom concern. Reversal of consciousness and will roles.

704

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

Six: Nothing special except to note the physical basis of sexual concern, which is there anyway. Seven: Overview of food & drink concerns into spiritual forms. Eight: Overview of the property concern, ending with machinery (and perhaps creation, as more directly related to this concern).

§ [24] First Hunch:23 The Dialogue of Word and Spirit. The Dialogue of Father and Son. • The Dialogue of Father and Spirit. [25] Word & Spirit: my Methodist background with its emphasis on experience. What countered and contained that was not a structure of doctrine, but the story of the Bible.24 [26] Doctrine means that the Bible is rhetoric, facing its audience and acting kinetically on them. Actually it's poetic, in turning its back on the reader, & the "rhetoric" (kerygma) comes from the other side.25 [27] In other words the WP thesis goes into One. Something political, along the lines of my Heritage of Culture paper,26 would go into Two, & something educational, a Platonic dialogue transcending the metaphysical, goes in Three. [28] (Use the one-starred notebook for these lectures, and return to footnotes for this one).27

§ [29] Microcosmic axis: the hierarchy of "spirits" (vegetative, cordial, animal), should replace that cheap parenthesis I have now. This is Five (maybe Four, if so it should simply be deleted): for Eight it's Kundalini. Six may have the brain-sperm cycle in Onians28 and Seven of course would simply be attached to the eat & shit cycle.29

Notebook 47

705

§ Second Lecture: the Double Vision of Nature.30 [30] Blake's double vision suggests a subjective illusion opposed to an objective existence. If so, Blake would be talking nonsense.31 [31] Universe constructed by the imagination is a world in which emotional & intellectual factors in perception are inseparable. [32] Nietzsche's Frohliche Wissenschaft [joyful knowledge] (scienza), not Weisheit [wisdom]. [33] Blake moves in direction of humanizing the world, & of presenting Hegel's spirit as an image.32

Notebook 48

This brief Words with Power notebook is in the NFF, 1993, box i.

[i] The Bible is late: it took many centuries to adjust to the cyclical rhythm of the seasons and exhaust the mythological possibilities of recurrence before there could be an effective break with it. [2] Remember the importance of the Kingu myth: (cf. Ymir, Tiamat, etc.): not the dragon only but a God-Man had to be killed for creation.1 The Mithraic bull and the Christian lamb adapt this but my point about God condemning himself to death as Word goes a long way. [3] The culmination of Eros, I think, is the union of the red king & the white queen to produce the golden immortal child. [4] Trend toward parallel & multiple universes. Hoyle's October book is too late;2 Philip Jose Farmer3 is a bust. I didn't mean late: that's the title. I meant pedantic. Now I'm trying Zelazny, who seems a modulation of Eddison.4 As Mike says, travel in time is the wrong metaphor, like crossing the Atlantic on a motorcycle.51 think travel in space may be the wrong metaphor too. [5] In the GC the apocalyptic symbols are of two kinds: the provided ones and the achieved ones. The achieved are the images of human work in transforming animal, vegetable & mineral worlds. The provided ones are symbolized by the paradisal: angelic & divine orders are projected, though symbolically they're provided too—provisional, let's say. Man is

Notebook 48

707

in the middle, with the two forms meeting in him. This is the whole riddle of religion: eliminating the provided is arrogant humanism: it makes a divinity out of the psychotic creeps who pollute the earth. Eliminating the achieved is irresponsible fatalism.6 [61 This suggests a modification of my notion that redeemed man is woman.7 The achieved symbolizes the union of man with his male creative principle: the provided symbolizes the Bride who appears when that union is made. Red king & black queen turned white. There's a golden child, but he comes later. [7] It seems to be established that when children are left to play by themselves, the boys build tower-structures and the girls enclosurestructures.8 I'm following Blake again: as long as the created or provided order is thought of as made, it's the fallen Urizen or Nobodaddy. When it's thought of as the response to creativity, it becomes a female emanation. [81 The two movements up & down are the theme of Two, which leads into Prometheus. My intention here is to line up with Toffler's "third wave" notion: we're caught in an unresolved antithesis between laissezfaire and socialism, and are still fighting the tired old left-and-right-wing battles even though that war ended long ago.9 The thing is, not to learn a lot of economics, but to learn how to put that in my terms. [9] The Great Whore is actually the mistress of a "beast," rather than a human Antichrist. Cf. Pasiphae and the horrible climax of Apuleius.10 [10] The mirror, with its overtones of reflection and speculation, is the central image of preserving identity while preserving the distinction of subject & object. I suppose a thoroughgoing narcist would be put off by the fact that his right arm was his mirror-image's left arm.11 [11] Wisdom "playing" before God: perhaps as central an image of human wisdom as we can get would be a little girl with a skipping rope.12 [12! Life is a question of context. My life (as in Job) is my property, what is proper to me. If I get a haircut (and sometimes I do), or cut my

708

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

fingernails or shit, these excretions I think of as dead, although plenty of cellular & bacterial activity go on in them. Death is what I separate from. A stone is not dead, because it has never died: death is a process, not a condition. [13] Sacrifice is something I haven't worked out. It's founded on the Red Sea archetype: through death to renewed life. The superstitious view of it is that of Caiaphas: it is expedient that one man die for (the good of) the people [John 18:14]. [14] One thing you do in sacrifice is identify the victim with the death principle in what's being sacrificed to. The victim's death renews the life of the god, or whatever. Scapegoat imagery: you transfer the death or failure of the enterprise to the victim. If so, "God is dead" is the silliest remark any Christian can make: when Christ "emptied himself" [Philippians 2:7, RSV] God became immortal. Up to that time he presumably wasn't. [15] The distinction between the achieved & the provided is immensely important: it explains, for example, how we can have achieved beauty (Bach, Raphael, Keats) and provided beauty (a landscape, a flower, a pretty girl in a bikini). One is not derived from the other, as in naive imitation theories. The vision of provided beauty is the vision of potentially regenerated nature.13 [16] I've just said that it's only a naive "copying" theory of imitation that derives achieved from provided beauty. The argument from design, which derives provided from achieved beauty, and makes God or Nature an artist (see how clever he or she is) is a projection. [17] People robotize themselves to adjust to society & save trouble for themselves. Automatic conditioned reflex makes up I suppose 97% of any normal life: if someone said 100%, how could you refute him? The comic humor shows how strong the impulse is. Here's a science fiction story with a man & a female robot: it's assumed that no man could ever love a robot. I imagine I could: no robot could be more completely programmed & conditioned than some people I've known & been quite fond of. The robot is simply the idea of the slave realized.

Notebook 48

709

[18] Hence statistical trends can achieve so high a form of predictability: the mass tendency approximates the mechanical, whereas each individual is a variant. [19] Adonis Revived. Red. Beauty as response to Law, Eros Regained. Green. Love as response to Wisdom, Prometheus Unbound. Orange. Power as response to Prophecy, Hermes Unsealed. Blue. Wisdom as response to Gospel.14

Notebook nh

This notebook, the content of which is quite miscellaneous, is difficult to date with any certainty. Most of the entries following paragraph 22 have parallel passages in Words with Power, and the references to the various chapters of that book in the entries toward the end suggest that by the time of those entries, at least, Frye had settled on an eight-chapter book. The mention of books that were published in 1982 sets the earliest limit on the date. The eight-chapter format for Words with Power suggests a date from the mid-igSos. Frye appears to have written in the notebook on three different occasions. The entries, in any case, form three more or less distinct units: the first seven paragraphs, written in pencil (the rest of the notebook is in ink); paragraphs 8-22, where Frye keeps returning to the issues raised by the books he lists in paragraph 8; and the Words with Power material. These different units are separated from each other by the symbol §. The fact that paragraph 6 relates to one of the opening diagrams appears to mean that the diagrams were concurrent with the initial entries. The two diagrams at the beginning are on the verso of the notebook's flyleaf. The four gods in the first diagram appear throughout Frye's notebooks: he often refers to them in the notebooks as the "spectres of the dead" and in Words with Power as "informing presences" (277). Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus eventually came to represent the deities that preside over, respectively, lower wisdom, higher love, lower love, and higher wisdom. But their symbolism changed for Frye over the years. As he says in Notebook 44, "the HEAP scheme keeps reforming and dissolving" (par. 122). Notebook 6, the separate sections of which are entitled "Eros," "Adonis," "Hermes," and "Prometheus," is Frye's first notebook exposition of the symbolism of these four gods. In the second diagram, the alchemical and Knight's Tale structures are the comic and tragic variations of the Eros cycle. The mysterium conjunctionis in alchemy is mirrored in literature in the fusion of two bodies, as in Shakespeare's The

Notebook nh

711

Phoenix and the Turtle (Frye's favourite example). In the Knight's Tale structure, Eros is realized only in death. See Words with Power, 207-8, and The Secular Scripture, 154. The notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 23. Logos

Adonis

Eros

Nomos

Nous

Hermes

Prometheus

Thanatos

Knight's Tale Structure Alchemical Structure

Prophet (oracle)

Priest (parable)

King (commandment)

action

wisdom

lower king (law)

lower priest (counsel of prudence)

Lower Prophet (sacrifice)

institutional Christ

spiritual Christ

712

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[i] Obvious link: the hero with divine father & human mother with skyfather & earth-mother. [2! We can attend to only one thing at a time: therefore time is sequential, a horizontal line: therefore life in time cuts reality in two, half above & half below it. [3] L: Joseph & Daniel represent the ability to come to terms with a nonJewish ruler as long as he doesn't claim divine honours.1 [4] N.L.: There is a sense in which ritual becomes work again: the sacramental sense (cf. the etymology of "liturgy"). But that takes us outside the scope of these lectures.2 Noon in Beowulf means nones, 3 p.m. [5] L: Part One: The Monologue of the Book. Part Two: Dialogue of Book & Reader. Part Three: Dialectic of Book & Society.3 [6] L: Messiah as King, Prophet & Priest. As king, he incarnates the Father & sets us the polarization of commandment and law. As priest he incarnates himself as Logos, & sets up the polarization of parable & counsel of prudence. As prophet he incarnates the Spirit, & sets up the polarization of epiphany (pericope) and sacrifice. [7] L: The Nortons raised the question: the Eliade dilemma, or the profaning of the sacred, is the result of a growing sense that we have to produce our own mythology [SeS, 57!. But this isn't a complete answer: there must be something other, uncreated, given. That's what L is about, partly.

§ [8] i. Robert Anton Wilson: Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, 77. 2. Itzhak Bentov: Stalking the Wild Pendulum, 77 3. Rudy Rucker: Infinity and the Mind, 82 4. Ken Wilber, ed.: The Holographic Paradigm, 82 5. Stanislav Grof: Realms of Human Unconscious, 76.4

Notebook nh

713

[9] For years I have been collecting and reading pop-science & semioccult books, merely because I find them interesting. I now wonder if I couldn't collect enough ideas from them for an essay on neo-natural theology. Some are very serious books I haven't the mathematics (or the science) to follow: some are kook-books with hair-raising insights or suggestions. [10] Wilson: epigraph: it's an ill wind that blows nobody's mind.5 McLuhan's point is that multiple models are the great 2oth c. discovery. Like Ulysses.6 (I'd say it was really the rediscovery of the variation form (ideally 32 or 33).[)] He makes a lot of 23:7 24 & 33 are closed cycles, because you say twelve o'clock or north time. 23 and 32 have the open spark gap I mentioned in FS.8 Maybe this is the 7-8 relation too. And my 15 (16)—And the climacteric 63 (641 Ching, chess, etc.). Blake-Jung's 3 & 4. (No: 7 > 8 won't work: it would have to be 8-9 diagrammatically, although 7 > 8 has a lot of tradition going for it. As I've known since Blake, 7 is an event number in. time, which includes space by turning 8.[)] Note the close paranoia links: if you get fixated on 23, you develop a "that's for me" feeling about every 23 you see. He'd be nowhere without Jung's "synchronicity."9 At present only the real nut books, Wilson's & Bentov's, are interesting to me.10 I get nothing out of Marilyn's [Marilyn] Ferguson's goo-goo books on the Aquarian conspiracy11 or Fritjof Capra's two books on the Tao of Physics.12 Commonplace mind. David Bohm I did get something from.13 [11] A lot of modern writers want spirituality rather than religion. They are usually more attracted by Oriental cults (mainly kundalini and zazen)14 but in of course a very cleaned-up version. This makes me impatient, and one of my motives in writing is to show that everything is in this tradition too. But of course the psychological use of religion is more Oriental. [12] One of the first philosophical books that deeply impressed me was Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. That gave me the key conception of interpenetration, which has been central to me ever since.15 That was followed by [Peter] Fisher's introducing to me the Lankavatara Sutra, where it was said to be in the Avatamsaka Sutra.16 I find these

714

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

sutras a lot of blithering crap, but I suppose they made sense as vade mecums of practical meditation. [13] My Christian position is that of Blake reinforced by Emily Dickinson. At what point did Xy [Christianity 1 throw away Paul's spiritual-natural antithesis and pick up his dismal shit about a soul-body combination that separates at death, leaving us with a discarnate soul until God gives the order for the resurrection of the body? This evil notion was concocted to keep man under the priest-king hierarchy. I suspect the Filioque clause17 was added to subordinate the Spirit to the Son and reduce the former to continuing the priest-king authority in time. Not that the Eastern Churches did any better with it. Even if you do this, as Joachim of Floris realized, you turn history revolutionary and go through a "reformation." [14] In Wilber (4) there's a quotation (or "quote," as the illiterate bastard would say) attributed to a Tibetan monk: "once you realize the approximate nature of all concepts, then you can really love them, because you love them without attachment" (223). Capra.18 [15] Power, wisdom, love. Power is concealed in nature, and when it appears in human life it's unimaginably evil. It has to go through wisdom, which is the soul-in-body setup all right, and is dramatized by the death & burial of Christ. This is a spiritual "repetition" (that word again) of the original embryo-birth process. Once it rises into the spiritual state of love, it's safe to release power. Nietzsche wasn't Antichrist, but he was a circus barker for his show. [16] What I'm trying to work out is not "the truth" but what makes sense to me at the moment. What is much closer to "the truth" is the social tolerance that allows me to function. This tolerance is mostly indifference, but indifference is infinitely better than perverted concern. It assumes that the Reformation, like Communism in 1917, is a genuine revolution, but that the real revolution has still to come. That's the Second Coming that will convert the Jews, and the coming of the Messiah that will convert the Christians. [17] Wilber (4, 205): Bohm: "Thought is already implicitly beyond any limit that it sets up: that's the way it's built."191 suppose that's why every

Notebook nh

715

conception I set up as a goal to be reached turns out to be the principle I have to start with. [18] Imaginative, metaphorical, poetic speech is about the limit with words. The kerygmatic, whether the Vico-Joyce thunderclap or the Blakean "Awake, ye dead, and come to Judgment!,"20 is presented as verbal, but it's really announcing a world beyond speech. This world is first of all an alternation between experiencing as a unit & understanding without words, a larger entity: then it goes beyond that duality. [19] When man gets to the point of saying "God made the world" it means that man sees a structure of order in nature. He's not saying "I make the world by observing it." But he is beginning to interpose a manmade world between a nature-made world and God. This man-made world is made ultimately out of human quarks—words & numbers. These become metaphors for God. [20] Asymptotic metaphors for God: personal, loving, etc., are useful. On this level any statement like "all is one" is bad metaphor—the "is" creates duality where there isn't any: Samson between the pillars, or Christ between the thieves. [21] I must never forget that I'm a literary critic. Socrates' daimon, tutelary deities, angel guardians, may well be ourselves in a future stage of development. Henry James' Sense of the Past, one Ralph Pendrell imprisoned in the Regency & the other cruising freely in the future, yet still affected by his behavior. Or we could read "higher" for "future" above. Prospero recreating his enemies in a submarine purgatory. [22] Lyall Watson says that in the Earth-Mother-centered religions the male principle fertilizing the garden is the serpent.21

§ [23] I wonder whether I should abandon my Bible-Utopia ideas in favor of doing the obvious thing: tracing the archetypal narrative sequence through agon, pathos, sparagmos-disappearance, and anagnorisis. Of course anagnorisis is still incomplete without the rebuilding of Jerusalem-Atlantis. (Note that Blake's "And was Jerusalem builded here?"

716

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

totally destroys the vulgar Anglo-Israelite reading of that poem.) Misinterpreting Pentecost as the founding of the Church, & assuming the Church to be the New Jerusalem, is a heresy, but it's reasonable to correlate the Church with the O.T. archetype of the ruined & rebuilt temple. Rebuilding the Temple is putting the body of Christ together again, making one body out of a society. But it must be a spiritual body.22 [24] Yoga is the voluntary suppression of the involuntary actions of the mind. We're all born with a natural yoga: we're freed by objective energy and our consciousness freezes it into matter. Matter is mater, the mother. Materialism, dogmatism, the authority of elders and impotent kings, all assist the freezing process. A higher discipline that would freeze the mind could liberate the spirit. [25] Werther: the young men who committed suicide after reading it were not reacting just to Goethe's book but to the Barbara Allen [Allan] archetype, the Cybele of Catullus.23 [26] A purely individualized myth is an obsession, sometimes a psychosis. A purely socialized myth is an ideology, which sooner or later also becomes obsessive or psychotic. A myth that has either the direct current of transcendence or the alternating current of imagination rises clear of this grisly antithesis. I suppose the Hitlers & Stalins are the people in whom the antithetical obsessions coincide. [27] There are many books on comparative mythology, but mythology cut away from the mythology that inherits, disseminates, and ramifies it becomes a sterile and readily exhausted subject. Literary criticism cut off from its roots in mythology becomes also a sterile & quickly exhausted glass bead game.24 [28] Genesis 6:1-4 is the demonic parody of the Xn [Christian] doctrine that's such a stumbling block to non-Xns: that God begot a son on a mortal woman.25 [29] Reception of Blake: accustomed to it as I am, I am still not clear why mythological criticism evokes so powerful a resistance. [30] Re top of page [par. 26]: all teachers have neurotic students: creativ-

Notebook nh

717

ity often co-exists with neurosis, but the neurotic qua neurotic has nothing but obsession. To assimilate the obsession to a group obsession, to become a fanatical or bigoted member of some brainwashing group, regularizes the private obsession, but the path of pure schizophrenia is far more heroic. [31] More broadly, criticism is language that expresses the awareness of language. So far as this means conscious awareness, its approach to literature includes a certain amount of reduction of poetry to expository prose—in itself a somewhat pedantic and ungrateful task. The aim of such reduction, however, is not simply to translate poetic language into an inferior & inadequate language, but to establish the relations of poetry with its wider verbal context. A different kind of activity is suggested at that point. The awareness of language may begin with the awareness of ordinary consciousness, but it soon becomes clear that language is a means of intensifying consciousness, lifting us into a new dimension of being altogether. This is true of all four of the modes we have been surveying, but it is poetic language in particular that is a means of meditation, of using consciousness in a more highly organized & focussed way than ordinary life does.26 [32] There are many techniques of attaining this more highly structured awareness: there are the yoga & zazen & Sufi schools of the east, & various Western psychologies of psychosynthesis, individuation, peak experiences, cosmic consciousness, & what not. I have been somewhat puzzled by the extent to which all this activity overlooks the fact that all intensified language becomes metaphorical language, & that literature is the obvious guide to whatever passes beyond language, just as Dante's obvious guide to states of being beyond life in 13th c. Italy was Virgil.27 [33] The Barthian conception of God as "wholly other" is not antithetical: if God is wholly other he cannot be the other half of the third totality (Fn. [Footnote] to 4, near end). [34] Poetry is not merely what poets produce: it is the fusion of what poets produce with what (critical) readers see in it. The latter is in a constant metamorphosis, and steadily gains in authority & power. "Homer" means (a) the Homeric poems (b) Homeric criticism, including Chapman's preface (c) reconstructions of Homeric patterns by later po-

718

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

ets from Virgil to Kazantsakis [Kazantzakis] (d) the absorption of Homer into the Western cultural tradition. As for why the original structures are so powerfully haunting, that takes us deep into the mysteries of existence, like paintings deep in paleolithic caves. Criticism restricted to "historicity" cannot get beyond the entrance to such a cave; certain forms of depth psychology may come closer to it, but most of the question is far beyond us at present. [35] Note "spiritual" as a parody of the material, or material without content: the "spiritual consolation" offered by parsons, its "spiritual food" that you can't eat; the "spiritual riches" like those of the "Musical Banks" in Erewhon you can't spend.28 [36] Every psychiatrist knows the neurotic whose request is not to remove his neurosis, but to make it more comfortable to live with. However opposed at first, innovators in ideology become immensely influential; it's innovators in mythology who are lunatics or criminals. [37] We are at a period of history when we recognize the all-pervasiveness of ideology but are disillusioned with all existing forms of it. The "conversion" to religion or Marxism so common up to a half-century ago now seems utterly futile; yet withdrawal from all ideologies merely confirms the power of the one there. The next step is detachment without withdrawal, the study of the mythology of concern. [38! Seven: a third form of deliverance from the double is the complementary relation of man & nature-as-woman, the rising of boy and girl from kindling of the need-fire; incest in PU [Prometheus Unbound], perhaps the jeune Parque.29 [39] Kundalini symbolizes the power that comes out of nature, viciously evil if it goes up the left side: if it goes up the right side it goes through wisdom (lower), and thence through love (lower) into the chakras of higher wisdom & love.30 [40] Eight: "as for Nietzsche, he may have believed or tried to believe that the perpetually dying Dionysus, whom Heraclitus identified with Hades, was" etc.31

Notebook nh

719

[41] Isaiah 25:6 and Luke 14:15 ff.: banquet a Messianic vision. Seven, I suppose.32 [42] Cold War & concern: U.S.S.R.: food shortages, sexual prudery, abolition of property, rigid restrictions on freedom of movement. U.S.A.: excessive food, including junk food, indiscriminate copulation, reduced by fear of disease to rutting in rubber; anarchic grabbing of money & power, restless, incessant nomadic movement. More tolerant but still hard on creation.33 [43! Lewis Hyde, The Gift. Creative people belong primarily in the economy of gift, even though they have to involve themselves in the market economy & sell their books & pictures to stay alive. He deals with Pound & Whitman, not with the Biblical dimension, in which everything man has is a free gift from God, & has to be treated like other gifts, kept rolling & moving through society. The O.T. manna, food that spoiled when hoarded, is the type of the parable of the talents, which has in English changed a word meaning money into a word meaning creative gift-34 [44] Re above (S.U. [Soviet Union] vs. U.S.) [par. 42!. Excess is overemphasis on physical, deficiency is physical impoverished by ideology. Neither is the spiritual, which transforms (transubstantiates) the physical without abolishing it. Ideology is the discarnate soul. [45] End of Seven: the rising god contains his own female: Second Adam includes the body of his bride, i John 3:9 and Rev. 14, about redeemed.35 [46] 2/33: quote fn. [footnote] in Eliade, Forge & Crucible, p. 68.36

Notes 55.1

These notes come from three typed sheets filed together in the NFF, 1991, box 28, file 3. The separation of the three units is marked by the symbol §. At least one entry (par, 6, where Frye refers to his age) dates from 1990, but because of the way it is separated from the other paragraphs and because of its wider margin, it appears to have been typed later than the material that precedes it. The reference to "Liberal, the Bible book" in the second unit seems to be a reference to The Great Code rather than to Words with Power, in which case Tragicomedy would refer to Words with Power. Because of the reference to the Harcourt anthology (par. 9) this second unit may well date from the early 19705.

[i] For a long time I've been preoccupied by the theme of the reality of the spiritual world, including its substantial reality. The glimmer of another series of lectures rises in my mind. Four, perhaps: the New Testament; Dante's Paradise; Hegel's Phenomenology; Blake's Jerusalem (this last a revision of my Harvard lecture, with perhaps some material from the out-of-print Milton one).1 [2! Dante first. The Sun cantoes in the Paradise seem to suggest a complementary relationship between the Aristotelian-Thomist more or less orthodox tradition and a mystical neo-Platonic one running through the pseudo-Dionysius, and always suspected of heresy. Dante apparently didn't know Eckhart, but he has Joachim of Floris in. As in all repressive regimes, most of the really first-class people were dissidents accused or suspected of heresy: Abelard, Scotus Erigena, Sigier of Brabant, William of Occam, Eckhart, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Joachim. Dante himself had his De Monarchia put on the Index.2

Notes 55.1

721

[3] I've always felt that for all the Trinitarian symbolism there were really four planes in the Commedia: the hell, purgatory and heaven of the three cantiche, and an intermediate world that stretches from the beginning of the sphere of fire at the colloquy with Arnaut Daniel in Pg. [Purgatorio] 26 and ends with the vision of Rahab at the limit of earth's shadow in the sphere of Venus at Pa. [Paradise] 9. This may not work out or be important if it does.3 [4] Paradiso starts off in the moon with that extraordinary passage about the variations in the density of spots in the moon. I don't know what's going on here, and the experiment proposed clearly doesn't work, but it seems to carry on from the opening tercet of the Paradiso that emphasizes the variations in the spiritual world—more here, less there. Of course a medieval poet would be obsessed with the idea of hierarchy, and so we get a lot of stuff about how the low men and women on the totem pole don't mind being that. But maybe what is inequality in the natural vision is variety in the spiritual vision.4 15] This man Anderson quotes Dante's son Pietro as saying that there are not only four levels of meaning, but four kinds of literal meaning, of which one is the "metaphoric."5 So the elements of imaginative literalism are all there. [61 We must be free or die, says Wordsworth. We must love one another or die, says Auden.6 We must grow older or die, says Northrop Frye at the age of seventy-eight.7

§ [7] The Four Books, as I think of them now, are still in front of me, still to be written, and I have been assuming for some time that one or at the very most two would be all I should ever live to write. Possibly that is still true. But I have a reasonable expectation of finishing Liberal, the Bible book; and Tragicomedy, the book on the literary universe, is so closely interwoven in scheme and general design with it that it may also get finished. That would be a fair life's work in itself, even with retirement; but perhaps trying to get numbers three and four clearer in my mind would also help with the first two, as it's happened so often that the ideas I put on the most distant horizons turn out to be the next ones I want.

722

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

[8] Well, then, Anticlimax, the third, still seems to me to be a book on conceptual myth, the displacement of story into diagram. It's really a mandala book in which the mandala becomes the form itself instead of a framework for images. The lecture I gave at Harvard on Sartor Resartus gives a notion of the kind of thing I'd want to do;8 and Plato would still be its presiding tutelary deity. [9] Rencontre, the fourth, has vacillated most in my mind between a number of different conceptions. The most recent was a historical book, suggested by my work on the Harcourt anthology9 and the consolidation of an old ambition to write a history of English literature. It may still have historical characteristics; but even more than that it's always been a discontinuous book connected mainly with the Blake-and-later period. [10] I wonder now if I shouldn't set myself a psychological goal, one involving myself as a person. I'm trying to get out from under what I call the body of this death; and to escape from that will require a long and arduous discipline, which so far as I can see I shall have to do without a teacher. Consequently I don't know how far I shall get; but suggestions have been cropping up in two of my most recent articles that the study of literature is one of the paths to self-transformation. That would suggest the possibility of a book on that subject in which Blake himself would obviously have to be a central figure. Rimbaud certainly; de Nerval and Rilke probably, Yeats almost certainly, would bulk very large in a study of the poetic imagination as doing the kind of things that the drug people say drugs do.

§ [11] Whether I have any more books to write or not, I still want to consider the points of silence in religion: the silence of before being, expressed by the word creation; the silence of after being, expressed by the word apocalypse; the incarnating of those silences in human birth and death. [12] The Bible begins with the statement: "In the beginning {or really, "in beginning," or "to begin with"} God created the heavens and the earth." Nothing could be clearer, whether we take the statement as factual or as mythical. And yet the word creation, as applied to God,

Notes 55.1

723

seems to me among the most difficult and mysterious words in the language. [13] The Hebrew word bam, "created," is never used to mean something that man also does. Yet "created" has been throughout the centuries understood to mean "made," which makes creation a metaphor derived from man's power of making things. [14! Except: as a metaphor, and as thereby validating human creativity, the notion of God as a maker is vulgar. It leads to the puerilities of the divine watchmaker of Paley, and of the "if the world exists, somebody must have made it" argument. [15] It is less vulgar, however, than adding the unconscious gloss: "God made the world for us." That leads to theodicy and the judgment "the cosmos is unjust," a judgment about as relevant as a dog's judgment on a picture: "inedible." [16] Traditional Christianity says there's to be a Last Judgment of man by God, which will of course be just. Theodicy is a dishonest judgment of God by man, which says of course he must be proved "innocent" in spite of overwhelming evidence that he's "guilty." Guilty of what? Of not ordering the world according to human hopes and desires. [17] Creation ex nihilo identifies creation with epiphany or manifestation. It makes creation a phenomenon with nothing for its inner substance, which sounds more Buddhist than Biblical. "Out of matter" is not even grammatical, if I'm right in thinking that matter is energy cooled down to the point at which we can live with it. [18] So far I've been dodging this point by saying that creation is the revelation of the cosmos to human consciousness, and didn't exist, at least as creation, before human consciousness did. But the flowers were just as lovely millions of years before Adam as they are now. The Berkeleian in us shrinks from the notion of beautiful flowers in a world with nobody to admire them: "wasting" their sweetness, as Gray says.10 [19] Hence the importance, for me, of the Sabbath vision, of a total consciousness aware of the world's beauty apart from man. But the

724

Late Notebooks, 1982-1990

speculation of God admiring what he made brings us around in a circle again. For Kant beauty is purposiveness without purpose; for Stevens, you can't trust a world with a concealed creator in it. The flowers burst into beauty: it was their idea. Genesis 2 says that God "planted" a garden; but the pleasant trees were already available, so it was the idea of the garden that was divine. I'm getting nowhere with this.

Coda

The date of this passage, which was typed in the centre of a single sheet of paper, is unknown. It is located in the NFF, 1999, box 28, file 3. Some of the other papers in this file date from the mid-1970s. Denying that he has any special technical knowledge while at the same time claiming something greater than that, Frye here links himself with the paradoxes of Socrates' apology. Frye wrote very little without the double vision in mind, and one can sense in the coda both the impishness of the Socratic ironist, jolting us with the unexpected, and the truth contained in the literal meaning of the word "genius," reminding us of what finally motivated this architect of the spiritual world.

STATEMENT FOR THE DAY OF MY DEATH: The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction 1 GC, xi. 2 NF also took his notebooks on his travels: part of NB 50 was written on a trip to Russia, as we learn from par. 731. 3 NB 44, par. 448. Cf. ibid., par. 270: "I've never known an instant of real quiet in my mind." 4 NB 44, par. 270. See also par. 326, and NB 50, par. 52. 5 NB 3, par. 184. This notebook was written in the mid-i940s. 6 NB 50, par. 52. 7 See NB 44, par. 396; NB 50, pars. 17, 771; and Notes 52, par. 279. 8 NB 27, par. 486. 9 NB 44, par. 613. 10 NB 44, par. 223. 11 NB 27, par. 197. 12 NB 44, par. 472. 13 NB 50, par. 33. 14 NB 44, par. 326. 15 NB 44, par. 591. 16 See, e.g., the sequence of entries devoted to Bronte's Shirley in NB 44, pars. 182 ff. 17 NB 50, par. 529. 18 NB 38, par. 36. 19 Ibid. 20 NB 27, par. 112. 21 See NB 50, par. 553. 22 It is not clear whether NF always typed his first draft from a holograph manuscript. The notebooks do contain drafts for a small portion of his

728

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

Notes to pages xxiv-xxxiii

books and essays. But if such drafts were typical, only those that were written in the notebooks have survived. My guess is that NF most often used his notebooks to compose his first typed versions. Par. 158. For the high school, Edmonton, and Fearful Symmetry epiphanies, see the holograph notes in the NFF, 1991, box 50, file i, where NF describes the experience at the Edmonton YMCA as "one of the great nights of my life"; Ayre, 44,69, and NFC, 47-8; for the Blake intuition, see NFC, 47-8; for the Seattle and St. Clair illuminations, see NB 6, par. 72; NB nf, par. 266; NB 12, pars. 72,132,192,195,258; NB 19, pars. 207, 398; NB 23, par. 25; NB 24, pars. 238, 245,257; NB 50, pars. 716, 749; Notes 52, par. 324; Notes 53, par. 43; Notes 55.3, par. 3. There was perhaps a seventh epiphany that occurred when NF was walking to Victoria College on Bathurst Street in 1944. See the NFF, 1993, box 36, file nh, par. 2, where NF speaks of pondering the ogdoad, and the NFF, 1991, box 50, file i, par. 2, where he says that the "vast abstraction had finally become transparent" by 1944. Still another epiphany may have occurred in Yugoslavia only four months before NF's death. In NB 50, par. 808, he speaks of "that loud flash I got at Zagreb: the ideal of spontaneity, where the moment of composition and the moment of performance are the same." NFC, 48. Notes 53, par. 267. NB 44, pars. 248 and 108. SM, 117. AC, 29. NB 44, par. 122. Notes 52, par. 10. Poem 1260. See WP, 134, MM, 105, NB 44, par. 362, and NB 50, pars. 48 and 469. All four gods make their way into the essays NF wrote as an undergraduate. See the index entries in SE. "I've had a quadripartite scheme of Eros Regained, Adonis Revived, Prometheus Unbound and Hermes Unsealed swirling around in my noodle for a long time" (NB 44, par. 208). Par. 122. See, for example, NB 50, par. 183, Notes 52, par. 694, and NB 44, par. 70. NB 44, par. 99. WP, 277. NB 50, par. 444, Notes 52, par. 35, and NB 50, par. 378. NB 44, par. 265. On Kermode, see NB 44, par. 673; on Eagleton, NB 44, par. 183, and NB 46, par. 56; on Sparshott, Notes 52, pars. 691 and 693. NB 44, pars. 170-8.

Notes to pages xxxiii-xl

729

42 For the additional entries having to do with Helen in NB 44, see pars, 188, 198,203, 214-15,223,236,248, 254, 265, 349, 403, 433, 443, 468, and 747. In NB 50, see pars. 442, 576, and 605. 43 See NB 44, pars. 203, 223, and 236. 44 NB 44, par. 215. 45 NB 44, pars. 254,265, and 747. 46 NF can even joke about death. After laying out two options for his writing projects after WP, he remarks, "In either case the die is cast, or the cast has died, whichever comes first. I've had more time and better health than most people, so less excuse" (NB 44, par. 680). 47 NB 44, par. 717. 48 The quoted passages come, respectively, from NB 27, par. 232, NB 44, pars. 372 and 456, NB 50, par. 241, and NB 27, par. 240. 49 NB 44, par. 290. 50 See n. 11, above. 51 NB 3, par. 78. 52 NB 50, par. 479. 53 Notes 52, par. 358. 54 NB 44, par. 400. 55 Notes 52, par. 184. 56 NB nh, par. 9. 57 NB 44, par. 410. 58 "The Religious Base of Northrop Frye's Criticism," Christianity and Literature, 41 (Spring 1992): 241-54; "Interpenetration as a Key Concept in Frye's Critical Vision," in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 140-63. 59 Notes 53, par. 43. 60 Notes 55.1, par. i. 61 NB 50, par. 799. 62 NB 27, pars. 399-400. 63 Notes 53, par. 153. 64 NB 27, par. 32. 65 NB 27, par. 408. 66 NB 50, par. 165. 67 Notes 52, par. 209. 68 NB 44, par. 273. 69 Notes 53, par. 260. 70 NB nh, par. 31. 71 NB 50, par. 175. 72 NB 27, par. 498. 73 See NB 27, pars. 11,127, 385, 392, 398, 405; NB 44, pars. 170,174,214, 396,

730

74 75 76 77

Notes to page xl

426; NB 50, pars. 49, 55,89,155, 267, 484, 545,733,739; Notes 52, pars. 56, 60, 920; and Notes 53, par. 3. See MM, 98-101. NB 27, par. 70. Notes 52, par. 715. A number of NF's readers have written about various aspects of the religious dimension of his thought. Less than a decade after AC was published Grant T. Webster noted that that book "uses criticism heuristically to prepare men to think religiously about literary works by positing the infinite Man and Word as a relevant context." NF, says Webster, "wants to lead us from the imaginative structures of literature to critical faith and mythic doctrinet;] he wants us to see the world of literature anew in a religious way" ("The Missionary Criticism of Northrop Frye," Southern Review [Australia], 2, no. 2 [1966]: 167,168). A.C. Hamilton's observation that NF is a visionary prophet and that his criticism is "intensely religious" (Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990], 214, 215) is elaborated in his essay "The Legacy of Frye's Criticism in Culture, Religion, and Society," in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 3-14. Among other contributions to the general topic of NF and religion are the following essays: Margaret Burgess, "The Resistance to Religion: Anxieties Surrounding the Spiritual Dimensions of Frye's Thought; or, Investigations into the Fear of Enlightenment," in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, 59-75; Craig Stewart Walker, "Religious Experience in the Work of Frye," in the The Legacy of Northrop Frye, 40-58; Charles F. Altieri, "Northrop Frye and the Problem of Spiritual Authority," PMLA, 87 (1972): 964-75; J0rgen I. Jensen, "Cultural Theology: Northrop Frye between Totality and Decentralisation," in A Literary Miscellany Presented to Eric Jacobsen, ed. Graham D. Caie and Holger Norgaard (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1988), 406-17; Jan Ulrik Dyrkj0b, "Northrop Frye's Visionary Protestantism," in Ritratto di Northrop Frye (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 145-57; David Cook, "'Double Vision': The Political Philosophy of Northrop Frye," Ultimate Reality and Meaning, 15 (September 1992): 185-94; Jan Gorak, "Northrop Frye and the Visionary Canon," in The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991), 120-52; Tibor Fabiny, "Northrop Frye and the Rediscovery of Typology," in The Lion and the Lamb: Figuration and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1991), 4-9, and "The Literal Sense and the 'Sensus Plenior,'" in Literary Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics, ed. Tibor Fabiny (Proceedings of the International Conference on "Reading Scripture—Literary Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics": Pannonhalma, Hungary, 1992), 156-68; David Gay, "'Waiting to Be Recog-

Notes to pages xli-5

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

731

nized': Reading as Process in Northrop Frye's The Double Vision," Christianity and Literature, 44 (Spring 1995): 327-43; Imre Salusinszky, "Frye and Eliot," Christianity and Literature, 41 (Spring 1992): 299-312; and Christopher Wise, "Jameson/Frye/Medieval Hermeneutics," Christianity and Literature, 41 (Spring 1992): 313-33. NF's religious views can also be traced in the scores of reviews of his last three books, GC, WP, and DV—reviews that are recorded in Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), and in the bibliographical supplements that have appeared in the Northrop Frye Newsletter. See especially the reviews of GC (more than 160 altogether) and the proceedings of symposia devoted to GC in the University of Toronto Quarterly, 52 (Winter 1982-83), and the Dalhousie Review, 63 (Autumn 1983). See NB 50, pars. 405 and 745. NFF, 1991, box 50, file i. See NB 44, pars. 590, 609, 637-45, 650,656, 674, 679, and 680. NB 44, par. 680. NB 50, par. 822. NB 44, par. 668, and NB 50, par. 822. For NF's speculations about the anagogic book, see NB 44, pars. 325, 326,667, 668, and NB 50, par. 568. "Quintessence and dust" alludes to Hamlet, 2.2.320; "Quiet Consummation" is from Cymbeline, 4.2.280. NB 44, par. 326. NB 50, par. 568. NB 44, pars. 668 and 326. Notebook 27

1 See MM, 91,103, or NFR, 355; WP, 218, 258, MIS, 34-5, or NFR, 364; and Notes 52, par. 36. 2 See WP, 61. 3 See WP, 71-2. 4 See WP, 6-7. 5 One of the original eight trigrams in the / Ching, or The Book of Changes. Its attributes are the receptive, female, and passive; its symbol is the earth; its family relation is the mother. Annotated copies of two eds. of the / Ching are in the NFL. 6 One of the original eight trigrams in The Book of Changes. Its attributes are the creative, male, and active; its symbol is heaven; its family relation is the father. 7 See WP, 291-2, and MM, 39. 8 Here NF outlines six of the seven phases of revelation developed fully in his GC.

732

Notes to pages 5-6

9 In WP, NF associates each of these gods with the one of the four metaphorical "variations" surveyed in the second part of the book: Hermes with the ladder or mountain; Eros with the garden; Adonis with the cave; and Prometheus with the furnace. NF originally planned to organize an entire book, or at least a large part of one, around what the four gods or higher presences symbolized for him. For an early version of the plan, see NB 6. By "concentering vision" NF means "the feminine principle that expands into the whole of what is loved" (WP, 199). The phrase comes from The Four Zoas, Erdman, 369,1. 30. 10 In GC, NF distinguished between two forms of apocalypse: the panoramic, "the vision of staggering marvels placed in a near future and just before the end of time. As a panorama, we look at it passively, which means that it is objective to us"; and the participating, "a vision that passes through the legalized vision of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out into a second life" (136,137). 11 The reference is to Yeats's Solomon and the Witch. See WP, 217. On the Taoist balance, see DV, 84, or NFR, 234. 12 See NF's "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 1-23; rpt. in StS, 200-17, and rev. and expanded in the "The Romantic Myth," SR, 3-49. In MM, NF says, "I have spoken elsewhere of the curious 'drunken boat' construct in nineteenth-century thought, where the world of experience seems to float precariously on something immensely powerful that both supports it and threatens it. Examples are the world as will in Schopenhauer, the world of unconscious impulse in Freud, the world of the excluded proletariat in Marx, the world of evolutionary development in Darwin and the social applications of Darwinism. In some of these constructs the lower world contains only monsters of the deep; in others there is a submarine Atlantis to be reached" (56). The "drunken-boat people," then, is NF's shorthand for all the the Romantic revolutionaries who thought of civilization as "an ark or bateau ivre carrying the cargo of human values and tossing on a stormy or threatening sea" (SR, 32). "The Drunken Boat" comes from Rimbaud's poem of that title. The Atlantis myth for NF represents a "point of identity where human creation and imaginative power start, often symbolized as under the earth or sea" (WP, 248). 13 "Whoever leaves an antithesis without resolving it lacks the ground of truth" (Spirit within Structure: Essays in Honor of George Johnston, ed. E.J. Furcha [Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick, 1983], 112). 14 On the Marxist and capitalist borrowings, see DV, 5, or NFR, 168-9. 15 See WP, 81. 16 See WP, 208. 17 "The Formalists . . . are followers of St. John. They believe that Tn the

Notes to pages 6-8

733

beginning was the Word.' But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow" (Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960], 183). "In the beginning was the deed" ["Im Amfang war die That"] are the words of Faust in Goethe's Faust (pt. i, 1.1237). See GC, 18, WP, 34, and MM, 240. 18 This is apparently a reference to The Four Zoas, Erdman, 393,11. 36-9: "four Wonders of the Almighty / Incomprehensible, pervading all amidst & round about / Fourfold each in the other reflected they are names Life's in Eternity / Four Starry Universes going forward from Eternity to Eternity." On the phrase "concentering vision, see n. 9, above. See WP, 199-200. 19 See WP, 129-30. 20 "And even angels, whose home is heaven, and who are winged too, yet had a ladder to go to heaven by steps" (Meditation 2, Devotions on Emergent Occasions, in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin [New York: Modern Library, 1952], 417). An annotated copy of Donne's Devotions is in the NFL. See WP, 155. In Notes 52, par. 784, NF corrects the reference here, noting that the figure comes from one of Donne's devotions, not from a sermon. 21 In Galatians 2:20, Paul says, "Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." See WP, 89. With the Mobius strip everything is surface and edge: there is no top or bottom, and the edges don't separate one thing from another. The paradox is that the strip is a one-sided object in three-dimensional space. NF, however, seems to conceive of the paradox in terms of parts and wholes. In Notes 52 he speaks of the "Moebius strip, where the part-and-whole relationship reverses itself" (par. 524; cf. also par. 50). 22 See n. 10, above. 23 Bishop Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra (1680-89), or Sacred Theory of the Earth. An annotated copy of a 1965 ed. is in the NFL. 24 Edward Casaubon, the funereal pedant of George Eliot's Middlemarch, tries to discover the key to all mythology. The person who seems to be a likely model for Casaubon is Jacob Bryant, the eighteenth-century author of A New System: or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology. See Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 25 The AV: "The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted." 26 The allusions are to T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men ("Here we go round the prickly pear" [1. 70]), and to chap. 3 of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ("A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale"), where Dodo defines a caucus-race as one in which the runners begin and end wherever and whenever they like and in which everybody wins. 27 See WP, 56. 28 See WP, 72. 29 "Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World," a paper

734

30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39

40

Notes to pages 8-10

presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 27 December 1983; pub. in PMLA, 99 (October 1984): 990-5, and rpt. in MM, 18-27. The passage NF refers to: "But in the full critical operation there must always be a catharsis of belief, which belongs to secondary concern and secondary mythology" (MM, 26). The Clashing Rocks that the Argonauts had to pass on their way through the Hellespont. Gerard Manley Hopkins in a letter to Robert Bridges, 18 October 1882: "I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession" (Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], 254). Goethe, Faust, pt. i, 1. 485. A reference to the paradisal archetype in R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858). See SeS, 168-9. Poems by W.B. Yeats, pub. in 1928 and 1933, respectively. See WP, 302. See Turner's The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969) and "Metaphors of Anti-Structure in Religious Culture," in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 272-99. The reference is to the distinction Nature makes in Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 7, between those over whom change rules and those who rule over change. See WP, 304. See Adams's Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 276-8. An annotated copy is in the NFL. That is, the direction that would explore the connections between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. NF had been reading about these connections in The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes, ed. Ken Wilber (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1982), which is devoted to the work of, among others, the subatomic physicist David Bohm and the neuroscientist Karl Pribram. The phrase was popularized by Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 2nd ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1985). An annotated copy of Wilber's book is in the NFL. "The chief motives for creation, or rather motivations, are eros and logos, creation by desire & creation by the Word" (NB lib, par. 78). NB lib dates from 1980; "old note," then, means one written about five years before the present notebook. Huxley refers to "an everlasting truth of psychology and metaphysics—the fact that, in relation to God, the soul is always feminine and passive" (The Perennial Philosophy, 4th ed. [New York: Harper, 1945], 22). An annotated copy of the 4th ed. (London: Fontana/Collins, 1958) is in the NFL.

Notes to pages 10-13

735

41 On Parsifal, see NF's "The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal," MM, 340-55. 42 NF apparently means that in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit the word Begriff comes to mean not simply "concept" but reason itself or the mode of thinking of systematic philosophy. Hegel speaks of Begriff as "conscious of itself" and as "uniting its differences." See J.B. Baillie, introduction to Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), 33-6. Baillie translates Begriff as "Notion." 43 By "thematic stasis" NF means the simultaneous vision of myth or narrative—what he often refers to as dianoia. See WP, 70. 44 The reference is to the contest between Elijah and the priests of Baal in i Kings 18:17-40. See par. 78, below. 45 See WP, 151,167-8. 46 The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 1:33. NF cites the ed. pub. by Dent (London, 1906), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. See WP, 173, and MM, 247. 47 Micromegas (1752) is a satirical tale which reveals Voltaire's amusement at the disorder in the "order" of nature. 48 Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake" (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1962). An annotated copy is in the NFL. On Bruno and Joyce, see NF's "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake," an essay written about the time of the present notebook, pub. in Vico and Joyce, ed. Donald Philip Verene (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987), 3-19; rpt. in MM, 356-74. 49 In 1982 NF had written an introduction to Dispersal and Concentration, the collected papers of Harold Innis. The project to publish the papers was aborted, but NF's introduction was pub. as "Harold Innis: The Strategy of Culture" in EAC, 154-67. 50 "Therefore am I still / A lover . . . of all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear—both what they half create, / And what perceive" (Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 11. 102-7). 51 Wilhelm Reich, Character-Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1963). On "character armor," see esp. pp. 44,145-9, 314-27. An annotated copy of Colin Wilson's The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (London: Granada, 1981) is in the NFL. 52 The woman who, at Saul's request, calls up Samuel out of the earth (i Samuel 28). See WP, 231. 53 The sorcerers in canto 20 of Dante's Inferno. See WP, 235. 54 See WP, 238-9. 55 See WP, 12-13. 56 "What Otto did was to get descriptively at man's natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; his real creature

736

57 58

59

60

61 62

63 64 65 66

67

68 69 70

Notes to pages 13-17

feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being" (The Denial of Death [New York: Free Press, 1973], 49). Becker is referring to Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950). An annotated copy of Becker's book is in the NFL. See par. 36, above. "We can say that the essence of normality is the refusal of reality. What we call neurosis enters precisely at this point: Some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques that they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality" (The Denial of Death, 178). Here Becker is following Otto Rank's Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (New York: Knopf, 1945). According to Heidegger, the condition of our being "thrown" into the world means that our sense of place and destiny is concealed from us. See Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), passim. See also WP, 21-2. "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" (Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry [New York: Modern Library, n.d.], 111). An annotated copy is in the NFL. See WP, 115. To Tirzah (ca. 1801), one of Blake's Songs of Experience. On nature as the symbolic mother, see WP, 191-2,221. See, e.g., Purgatorio, canto 6,1. 95. Cf. NB 2, par. 73. i Kings 18:17-40. See GC, 115. The story gets retold in WP, 106-7. See WP, 219-20. The allusion here is to Martin Buber's Ich und Du (1923; trans, as / and Thou [Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1937]), which discloses the difference between a person-and-thing relationship and a person-and-person one, the latter including a relation between a person and God. An annotated copy of the 2nd ed. of the book (New York: Scribner's, 1958) is in the NFL. See WP, 118, 135, 271. Zolf is a Canadian author, public-affairs producer, and political pundit. He does not remember the specific radio or television program NF refers to, but he feels certain NF is recalling a remark he made on the air: "I did say approximately what Frye records me as saying" (Larry Zolf to Robert D. Denham, 15 February 1993). Joyce refers to "Professor Levi-Brullo" in Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1958), 151,1.11. NF takes the phrase from Levy-Bruhl. NF calls one of the "specific thematic forms" of the lyric participation mystique (AC, 295-6). An 1868 hymn by Fanny Crosby (lyrics) and William Howard Doane (music).

Notes to pages 17-20

737

71 See par. 27, above. NF's ellipsis. 72 "I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations" (Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann [New York: Random House, 1969], 343). 73 Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Atlantis/Europe: The Secret of the West (Blauvelt, N.Y.: Rudolf Steiner, 1971). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 74 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). 75 See Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychological Experience," first pub. in 1937 and rpt. in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). An annotated copy of Ecrits is in the NFL. On the stade du miroir, see also NF's "Lacan et la parole dans sa plenitude," Ornicar? revue du Champ freudien, 33 (April-June 1985): 11-14; rpt. as "Lacan and the Full Word," in Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogues on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, ed. Patrick Holm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 187-9. See WP, 271. 76 "The stars be hid that led me to this pain." On Wyatt's sonnet, see MM, 35. 77 "The individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with a ladder to this standpoint" of transfigured essence (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J.N. Findlay [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 14). An annotated copy is in the NFL. See WP, 165. 78 See par. 49, above. 79 Lacan's view that the unconscious is structured like language appears throughout his work; he first argued the view in Rome Discourse (1953), trans. Anthony Wilden as The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (New York: Delta, 1968). An annotated copy of The Language of the Self (New York: Dell, 1975) is in the NFL. 80 Gestalt therapy sometimes relies on a technique in which one enacts a confrontation between the opposing "top dog" and "underdog" aspects of one's personality. See MM, 171. 81 The conflict between inclination and duty, as in Kant's Foundation to a Metaphysic of Morals (1785). 82 NF's reference is to the Enlarged Nicene Creed: "I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and the Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets." 83 On Susanna and Tobit, see WP, 213 and 233, respectively.

738

Notes to pages 20-4

84 See S0ren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Walter Lowrie, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944). 85 Kaufmann's quotation from Hegel's Philosophy of History is actually from p. 275: "God is only God insofar as he knows himself; his knowing himself is, furthermore, a self-consciousness in man and man's knowledge of God that goes on to man's knowing himself in God" (Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965]). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 86 For Blake, Beulah has two entrances—a northern nadir and a southern zenith. See FS, 232. 87 See WP, 166. 88 That is, what Jacques Derrida calls sows rature (under erasure), the practice of questioning the ordinary use of such terms as "self" or "being" and so indicating the instability of textual meaning; the strategy is to cross through the word with an X, thus retaining the "trace" of a word in a sentence. "Logocentric" is the term Derrida uses to describe the metaphysical position that speech is primary because present at once between speaker and listener. He wants to deconstruct logocentric systems and habits of thought, because he believes that the centre or presence on which such systems and habits are said to rest does not exist. 89 The reference is to NF's oft-repeated example of metaphor in Genesis 49:14, 21-22: "Issachar is a strong ass . . . Naphtali is a hind let loose . . . Joseph is a fruitful bough." 90 The four images eventually modulated into the mountain, garden, cave, and furnace—the "variations on a theme" that NF explores in the last half of WP. See n. 9, above. 91 See WP, 235. 92 Hebrews 11:1, a verse that had fascinated NF for years and that had generated numerous commentaries, beginning with his interpretation of Blake's "All Religions Are One" in FS, 28. For his other efforts to come to terms with the meaning of the passage, see WP, 128-9; MM, 98-101, or NFR, 349-52; DV, 19, or NFR, 181; "Substance and Evidence," RW, 268-75; and NFC, 186-7. 93 See WP, 4-5. 94 The reference is to a statement in NF's "Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World": "The orthodox doctrine says that they [the gospel writers] were inspired to give a definitive transcription of what Jesus said. The critical principle involved is that the text is not the absence of a former presence but the place of the resurrection of the presence" (MM, 26). 95 On the one hand, the solitary quest for nirvana (the wisdom that would release one from suffering) and, on the other, the quest for the welfare of others (the combination of wisdom and compassion in the ideal of the Bodhisattva).

Notes to pages 24-6

739

96 Cf. this passage in NF's "Lacan and the Full Word": "I take Lacan's stade du miroir to mean that one cannot become a genuine 'subject' in our subject-object world of ordinary experience until one has become an object to oneself. There must be a split within the subject, and the sense of the subject as bound up with something alien is thereby formed" (Criticism and Lacan, 188-9). 97 Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univer'sity Press, 1984). 98 Pope Pius IX, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (1792-1878), also known as Pio Nono. He began as a reformer, but after the revolutions of 1848 he became increasingly conservative and condemned the modernist movement in theology. 99 In its "Letter to the Archbishops and Bishops of Italy" (1941) the Roman Catholic Biblical Commission issued a statement on the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture. NF may be referring to the Commission's "Letter to Cardinal Suhard" (1948), which gave new directives on the sources of the Pentateuch and the literary form of Genesis 1-11. 100 See WP, 77. 101 S0ren Kierkegaard, Attack upon "Christendom," trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944). See WP, 278-9. 102 Ecriture is the name Jacques Derrida gives to any sign system based upon differences, the study of which ("grammatology") reveals the play of terms as they are juxtaposed to other terms; ecriture disrupts what has traditionally been seen as the priority of speech and its assumptions of "presence" and fixed authority. See Derrida's Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 154-8, and Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. 103 See WP, 156-8,188-91, and NB 44, nn. 8-9. 104 In the Kabbala, the universal man whose limbs contained all heaven and earth. 105 Archetypal giant. The phrase comes from Milton's De Idea Platonica quemadmodum Aristotles Intellexit [On the Platonic Idea as Understood by Aristotle]: "Sive in remota forte terrarum plaga / Incedit ingens hominis archetypus gigas, / Ft diis tremendus erigit clesum caput, / Atlante maior portitore siderum" ["Or perhaps the human archetype is a huge giant, a tremendous figure in some remote region of the earth who lifts his head higher than the star-bearer Atlas, to terrify the gods"] (Hughes, 57,11. 214). See also par. 254, below. 106 See, e.g., Milton, pi. 4,1. 5, and Jerusalem, pi. 63,1. 20. 107 The cave of Demogorgon, apparently, in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. 108 See, e.g., Erwin Schrodinger, Science and Humanism: Physics in Our Time

740

Notes to pages 26-8

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), and Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); and David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Ark, 1980). See also DV, 84 and 88 (final note), or NFR, 234. An annotated copy of Bohm's book is in the NFL. 109 See n. 102, above. no See WP, 211-14. 111 William R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, originally pub. in 1899 (New York: Scribner's) and subsequently issued in numerous eds. The annotated copy in the NFL is the yth ed. (New York: Living Age Books, 1956). 112 "For the furnace itself shall come up at the last according to Abraham's vision" (Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, ed. W.H. Bond [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954], 89). NF quotes, or rather misquotes, the line in WP, 297. 113 NF expands on some of the themes in this entry in "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake," in Vico and Joyce, 3-19, and MM, 356-74. See also WP, 160-1. 114 See To Hermes, in The Homeric Hymns and The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, trans. Daryl Hine (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 32-46. This is the longer of the two Homeric hymns to Hermes. 115 "The Social Authority of the Writer," presented at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 24 April 1984. A slightly different form pub. as "The Authority of Learning," in The Empire Club of Canada: Addresses, 1983-1984 (Toronto: Empire Club Foundation, 1984), 196-206. This paper later modulated into what NF calls his "Chicago paper" (par. 325, below)—"The Expanding World of Metaphor"—an address he gave at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago, 8 December 1984, and pub. in MM, 108-23. 116 The reference is to Vico's belief that in matters of truth we can be more certain about human constructs than we can about the natural world. See Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), esp. sec. 3, par. 331. An annotated copy is in the NFL. In WP, NF translates verum factum as "what is true for us is what we have made" (82). See also MM, 122. 117 On Mallarme's Igitur, see NF's "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," MM, 39, and WP, 291-2. The John the Baptist-Salome myth lies behind Mallarme's Herodiade, which the poet began in 1864 and worked on throughout his life. 118 The metaphor is from i Corinthians 14:8. 119 Biological nature or nature as a fertile, reproductive power; as distinct from natura naturata: physical nature or nature as a cosmic structure or system. In WP, NF says, "I am aware that this distinction has other dimensions of meaning; but the simplified contrast is my concern here" (318). NF doubt-

Notes to pages 28-31

741

less first encountered the distinction between natura naturata and natura natumns as an undergraduate in Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy. It is a distinction he frequently called on in his later writing. See, e.g., GC, 67-71; MM, 46, 55,242,279,297-9; and WP, 190,240-3. 120 See n. 115, above. 121 See WP, 189-91. "Zakar" = za-'chahr, Hebrew for "male," as in Genesis 1:27 and 5:2. The letters in parentheses are NF's transliteration of the Hebrew. 122 NF associated one of the Four Zoas with each of the dialogues of Word and Spirit: Eros and Urizen, Adonis and Ore, Hermes and Tharmas, and Prometheus and Los. The four pairs came to be associated respectively with the four central images in the last half of WP: mountain, garden, cave, and furnace. 123 Here NF begins to think about the furnace archetype, first referred to in par. 147, as the containing archetype for the last of his four "variations on a theme" in WP. 124 The Works and Days, in Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 101 (1. 694). 125 Shelley could have encountered the name Demogorgon in Spenser and Milton as well. But a more likely source is Peacock's Rhododaphne, which Shelley had reviewed. In a note to the poem Peacock had written: "The dreaded name of Demogorgon' is familiar to every reader, in Milton's enumeration of the Powers of Chaos.... He was the Genius of the Earth, and the Sovereign Power of the Terrestrial Demons. He dwelt originally with Eternity and Chaos, t i l l . . . he organised the chaotic elements, and surrounded the earth with the heavens . . . it was held impious to pronounce his name" (qtd. in David Perkins, ed. English Romantic Writers [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967], 1000). 126 In Greek, klimax means "ladder." 127 Jonathan Swift, The Lady's Dressing Room. The line, "Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia shits," also appears in Cassinus and Peter (Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983]), 448-52, 463-6). The pseudo-idealist in the first poem is in fact Strephon; in the second, Cassinus. See WP, 263-4. 128 The phrase is the title of a chapter in John Middleton Murry's Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), 432-8. NF's likely source is Norman O. Brown, who borrows the expression for a chapter title of his own in Life against Death: A Psychoanalytical Interpretation of History (New York: Vintage, 1959), 179-201, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 129 See WP, 263-4. 130 What NF refers to here as the first half of the book turned out to be the second half.

742

Notes to pages 31-4

131 See WP, 89. 132 See WP, 192. 133 See n. 88, above. Ezekiel 3 records the episode of Ezekiel's eating the prophetic scroll. 134 aletheia = truth, in Greek. NF is calling on Heidegger's use of the word as "unconcealment" in "The Origin of a Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 17-78. NF translates the word as "unforgetting" in WP, xxiv. 135 "The Reactor [Satan] hath hid himself through envy. I behold him. / But you cannot behold him until he be reveald in his System" (William Blake, Jerusalem, pi. 43,11. 9-10). 136 The divine presence in the Jerusalem Temple and, as in medieval mystical texts, the divine presence hypostatized in feminine form. Also Shekhinah. 137 "While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave" (John Milton, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 1. 68). The "Birds of Calm" are the halcyons; according to Ovid, they sit on their nests for seven peaceful days in winter (Metamorphoses, 11.745-6). 138 The references here are to the diminutive and gigantic inhabitants of Lilliput and Brobdingnag in bks. i and 2 of Gulliver's Travels; to the "dried tubers" and to the boat that responds to the third command of the thunder in The Waste Land (11. 7, 419-23); to the name of one of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream; and to Jesus' parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31-2. 139 Chapelizod is an environ of Dublin, located on the Liffey River and adjacent to Phoenix Park. In Finnegans Wake HCE, also called Porter, keeps a tavern in Chapelizod. 140 See "Deliverance of Mankind from Destruction," a I4th-i2th-century B.C. text from the walls of the tomb of Seti I, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 10-11. An annotated copy of the first ed. (1950) is in the NFL. 141 See WP, 123. 142 The quotation comes, not from Law, but from The Cloud of Unknowing: "For he [man] may make sorrow earnestly that knoweth and feeleth not only what he is, but that he is" (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945], 37). 143 "while Erigena put greek tags in his excellent verses . . . omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt, or whatever" (Canto 83, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), 548. The Latin tag: "every thing that exists is light." See also Canto 87, p. 607. "That great acorn of light bulging outward" comes from Canto 106, p. 799. 144 Harry Redner, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Reflections on the Passage of Faust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). See n. 17, above.

Notes to pages 34-8

743

145 See n. 119, above. 146 "The Godhead gave all things up to God. The Godhead is poor, naked and empty as though it were not; it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. It is God who has the treasure and the bride in him, the Godhead is as void as though it were not" (Meister Eckhart, qtd. in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 25). 147 "Commentary on the Book of Wisdom," in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 150. 148 Jnana = knowledge or cognition. In the Bhagavadgita and other texts jnanayoga refers to the path of knowledge, as distinct from the path of action (karmayoga) and the path of devotion (bhaktiyoga). For the more technical senses of the word among the various schools of Hindu philosophy, see Bimal Krishna Matilal, "Jnana," in Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 8:94-5. 149 "The upper air is one in which the relation of divine and human becomes reciprocal. . . . The demonic parody of this spiritual air in the Bible is the hebel, the vapor or 'vanity' in the Book of Ecclesiastes which is the normal characteristic of life without any vision of or desire for renewal" (WP, 127). 150 For the Hymn of the Soul, also called the Hymn of the Pearl (the pearl is a metaphor for the original soul), see The Acts of Thomas, in Edgar Hennecke, The New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), 2:498-504. 151 The speech of Ulysses in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.75-137. 152 C.G. Jung, "The Anima and the Animus," in Two Essays in Analytical Psychology (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956), 211-23. 153 The Cumaean Sibyl guided Aeneas through Hades in the Aeneid. On "the way down," see T.S. Eliot's The Dry Salvages, pt. 3,11. 6-7. 154 "Deep calls to deep" (Psalm 42:7). 155 Nobodaddy is Blake's name for the false God of this world, similar to fate, necessity, and the "immanent Will." See FS, 63. 156 See NF's tables of apocalyptic and demonic imagery in GC, 166-7. 157 This thesis runs throughout Boehme's Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, trans. John Rolleston Earle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 158 See "Harold Innis: The Strategy of Culture" in EAC, 154-67. 159 In an interview with John Ayre NF remarked, "I wouldn't call Marxism a pseudoreligion. I would call it a quite genuine religion" (WGS, 97). 160 The Future of an Illusion, trans. W.D. Robson-Scott (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), a copy of which is in the NFL. 161 "Nachts," Die Fackel, nos. 376-7 (June 1913): 8. Kraus (1874-1936) was a scathing Viennese critic of the failures of his culture. 162 Cf. Eliot's East Coker, pt. 3,11. 23-5: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait

744

Notes to pages 38-9

without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love / For love would be love of the wrong thing." 163 On the word "nothing" in King Lear, see FT, 107-8, NFS, 109-10, and "Nature and Nothing," in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gerald W. Chapman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 44-5. 164 See par. 62, above. 165 Memoire from Derniers vers (1872) in Arthur Rimbaud, CEuvres Completes, ed. Rolland de Reneville (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 122-5. The lines NF apparently has in mind come from st. 5: "Mon canot, toujours fixe; et sa chaine tiree / Au fond de cet ceil d'eau sans bords,—a quelle boue?" ["My boat still stationary, and its chain caught / In the bottom of this rimless eye of water—in what mud?"], trans. Wallace Fowlie. 166 Alchimie du verbe is the title of Rimbaud's second delirium (the story of one of his journeys into madness) in Une Saison en enfer. 167 "The Cisterne full / Of divers stones, some bright, and round / Others illshap'd, and dull. / The first (pray marke,) as quick and light / Danc'd through the floud, / But, th'last more heavy then [sic] the night / Nail'd to the Center stood" (Henry Vaughan, Regeneration, in English SeventeenthCentury Verse, ed. Louis Martz [New York: Norton, 1969], 336-7). 168 From Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre (1871): "Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles, / Je ne me sentis plus guide par les haleurs: / Des PeauxRouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles, / Les ayant cloues nus aux poteaux de couleurs" ["As I descended black, impassive Rivers, / I sensed that haulers were no longer guiding me: / Screaming Redskins took them for their targets, / Nailed nude to colored stakes: barbaric trees"] (CEuvres Completes, 100; trans. Stephen Stepanchev). 169 Toward the end of Eureka Poe has the voices of memory say, "There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed, one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. It was not and is not in the power of this Being, any more than it is in your own, to extend, by actual increase, the joy of His Existence; but, just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same), so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes His Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self with almost Infinite Self-Diffusion" (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. E.C. Stedman and G.E. Woodberry [Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1985], 9:136-7). 170 The title of the first section of the first ed. of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857). 171 For Venus Anadyomene and Mes petites amoureuses, see (Euvres Completes, 55,74-5. Of the Lettres du voyant, the one NF is referring to was written to

Notes to pages 39-42

745

Paul Demeny on 15 May 1871 (CEuvres Completes, 269-74). Rimbaud also uses almost identical phrasing in a letter written to Georges Izambard on 13 May 1871 (CEuvres Completes, 267-8). 172 From Rimbaud's Lettre du voyant: "Le Poete se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonne deregglement de tons les sens ["The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses"] (CEuvres Completes, 270; cf. also p. 268). 173 The phrase comes from the first sentence of Apres le Deluge at the beginning of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations (CEuvres Completes, 175). 174 The phrase—"he has not been found," i.e., the accused person has not been arrested—is repeated throughout pp. 81-7 of De Quincey's "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays, ed. John E. Jordan (London: Dent, 1912). 175 The passage NF has in mind here is one from "The English Mail-Coach" that concludes, "... that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden" (Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Essays [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 212). See MM, 57. 176 That is, the dance of those who wound ropes around the Trojan horse, described in bk 2. of the Aeneid. On the "Troy dance," see Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 249-50. Levy, an annotated copy of whose book is in the NFL, notes that the name of Troy became associated with labyrinthine dancing grounds. 177 See WP, 290-4. 178 i Corinthians 2:10. See WP, 186. 179 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). 180 "The Hunter Gracchus," in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nathan Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1971), 226-30. 181 "Abolie, et son aile affreuse les larmes / Du bassin, aboli, qui mire les alarmes" ["Abolished, and her frightful wing in the tears / Of the basin, abolished, that mirrors forth our fears"] (CEuvres Completes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry [Paris: Gallimard, 1945], 41; trans. Weinfield). 182 At the end of 1. 80 of Un Coup de Des Mallarme wrote "N'ABOLIRA" (not "n'abolira pas"), which was printed in thirty-point bold capitals at the bottom of the page. 183 Un Coup de Des is the fourth section of Mallarme's Igitur. Cantic/ue de Saint Jean is the third part of his Herodiade. See CEuvres Completes, 423-77, 41-9. See WP, 268. 184 See WP, 291-2. 185 See n. 116, above. 186 Edgar Allan Poe's burlesque entitled A Predicament (1838), the second part

746

Notes to pages 42-4

of How to Write a Blackwood Article (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 4:198-224). See WP, 268. 187 NF does, however, glance at Yeats's play in WP, 268. 188 "Je sens comme aux vertebres . . . Et ma tete surgie / Solitaire vigie / Dans les vols triomphaux / De cette faux" ["I feel in my sinews . . . And in solitary vigil / After flights triumphal / My head rise / From this scythe"] (Mallarme, CEuvres Completes, 49; trans. Weinfield). The "scythe" in Poe's Zenobia story is the hand of the cathedral clock that severs the head of the narrator. The Scythe of Time was the title given to A Predicament when it was pub. in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). 189 Mallarme's so-called Sonnet en x: "Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx" (CEuvres Completes, 68-9). See WP, 291. 190 The reference is to the woman with bad "nerves" in pt. 2 of The Waste Land, 11. 111-38. 191 Jean-Pierre Richard, L'univers imaginaire de Mallarme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961). 192 The images referred to here are from the incantation of the nurse at the beginning of Mallarme's Herodiade (CEuvres Completes, 40-3). 193 The "mysterious combination of Homecoming (to freedom) and OutwardBound . . . involves a mysterious close-of-cycle fusion of death and life, of old man and infant (as in the symbolism of the New Year). See our later comment [p. 162] on the 'noye pensif,' the Old Man of the Sea (Shakespeare's 'father' who lies 'full fathom five' in The Tempest, Keats' Glaucon in 'Endymion,' who is the spectral father of the poet; Mallarme's vieillard in the 'Coup de Des/ who carries the ombre juvenile in him)." (Robert Greer Cohn, The Poetry of Rimbaud [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, !973l/ !58). Cohn means to refer to Glaucus, who is rejuvenated by Endymion in bk. 3 of John Keats's Endymion. 194 The references here are to Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre, Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle," Alfred de Vigny's La Bouteille a la mer, the priestess Baqbuq (Bacbuc), who ushers Panurge into the presence of the holy bottle in bk. 5 of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the empty flask from which Igitur drinks the drop of pure nothingness in the epilogue (pt. 5) of Mallarme's Igitur. 195 For the references to Apuleius' The Golden Ass and Dante's Vita Nuova, see Aurelia, in Gerard de Nerval, Selected Writings, trans. Geoffrey Wagner (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 115. The reference to Peregrinus, Lucian's satirical expose of a Cynic-Christian fanatic, is at the beginning of Sylvie, in Selected Writings, 51. The theme of this entry is expanded in WP, 286-7. 196 Joseph's three dreams (Matthew 1:20-1,2:19-20, 2:22) and the dream of the wise men (Matthew 2:12).

Notes to pages 44-7

747

197 Supplement, meaning both "substitute" and "addition," is a term used by Jacques Derrida to denote the unstable relationship existing between speech and writing and to critique the binary oppositions in structuralist thought. A supplement is whatever substitutes or compensates for the loss of a "metaphysics of presence." 198 The line ("'Scape being drunk for want of wine") is actually spoken by Sebastian in The Tempest, 2.1.146. 199 See WP, 302. 200 See n. 102, above. 201 See n. 105, above. 202 "All thought emits a throw of the dice"—the final line of Mallarme's Un Coup de Des (CEuvres Completes, 477). 203 "Time is a child moving counters in a game; the royal power is a child's" (Fragment 24, in Heraclitus, ed. Philip Wheelwright [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959], 29). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 204 See par. 93, above. 205 "With cruelties of choice and chance," "Chance being at one with Choice at last" (Solomon and the Witch, 11. 24,15). In phase 15 of Yeats's phases of the moon, "Choice and Chance become interchangeable without losing their identity" (A Vision, 136). 206 "There is exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and of gold for wares" (Fragment 28, in Heraclitus, ed. Wheelwright, 37). 207 See WP, 171. 208 See Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," in Fundamentals of Language, rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 90-6. 209 Nahum Stiskin, The Looking-Glass God (New York: Weatherhill, 1972). An annotated copy is in the NFL. On the yin and yang definitions, see esp. pp. 19-26. 210 Letter 268 (to T.W. Higginson) in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:412. 211 GC, 159. 212 That is, the erecting of a statue in the desecrated Temple by Antiochus Ephipanes and Caligula's reputed desire to erect his own statue in the same place. See GC, 94,159. 213 Shakespeare's Mystery Play: A Study of "The Tempest" (London: Cecil Palmer, 1921); rev. as The Timeless Theme (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1936). 214 See n. 206, above. 215 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution (London: Dent, 1915). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 216 In Reminiscences Wassily Kandinsky refers to "the great period of the

748

217 218

219 220 221

222

Notes to pages 47-52 spiritual, the revelation of the spirit. Father—Son—Spirit," and he speaks of "the 'third' revelation" as "the revelation of the spirit" (Complete Writings on Art: 1901-1921 [Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982], 1:377, 379). Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 18701930 (New York: Scribner's, 1931). "Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness" (Annotations to Swedenborg's The Wisdom of Angels, concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (Erdman, 603). Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam's Axel was translated by H.P.R. Fineberg in 1925. The hypersensitive, decadent hero of Georges Charles Huysmans's A rebours (1884). NF apparently means the mosaic in the apse of the great western wall of the Basilica at Torcello, the cathedral described by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice. The Virgin stands above the twelve apostles with the Christ Child in her arms. The most famous of the small stone figurines of the female body uncovered by archaeologists in central Europe; the anatomically exaggerated sculpture, in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, dates from 25,000-20,000 B.C.

223 Herod the Great (74-4 B.C.), the most famous Idumean (Edomite); his crowning architectural achievement was his plan to rebuild the Jewish Temple, on which work was begun in 20 B.C. 224 In March 1985 the Vatican condemned the teachings of the Brazilian Franciscan priest, Leonardo Leonard Boff, an exponent of liberation theology, saying that his views endangered Church doctrine and threatening sanctions against him unless he altered his teachings. 225 An apocryphon is a secret book, the secretness symbolized by its seals. 226 See par. 266, above. 227 See WP, 69. 228 Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 229 Albrecht Diirer's engraving, Melancholia I (1514). Diirer said that Melancholia was a figure "from whose eyes Saturn looks out." On the "melancholy link," see Yates, Giordano Bruno, 63,146, and Erwin Panofsky et al., Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964). 230 That is, the translation by George Sandys: Ovid's Metamorphosis: Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford: Lichfield, 1632). 231 Ft. i of Chapman's The Shadow of Night. See The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York: Modern Language Association, 1941), 20-30. 232 The references here are to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), John Milton's // Penseroso (ca. 1631), John Keats's Ode to Melancholy (1819)

Notes to pages 52-5

749

and Hyperion (1818-19), and Paul Verlaine's Les Poetes maudits (1884), a collection of essays on six poets Verlaine thought to be insufficiently appreciated and understood. Poete maudit became a catch-phrase for the doomed or damned poet, such as Poe and Baudelaire—brilliant, morbid, and self-destructive. 233 "Now as all that die in warre are not termed Souldiers, so neither can I properly terme all those that suffer in matters of Religion Martyrs.... The leaven . . . and ferment of all, not onely Civill, but Religious actions, is wisdome; without which, to commit our selves to the flames is Homicide, and (I feare) but to passe through one fire into another" (Browne, Works, 1:37-8). Cf. a later passage in Religio Medici: "nor must a few differences more remarkable in the eyes of man than perhaps in the judgement of God, excommunicate from heaven one another, much lesse those Christians who are in a manner all Martyrs, maintaining their faith in the noble way of persecution, and serving God in the fire, whereas we honour him but in the Sunshine" (Browne, Works, 1:66-7). 234 "The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language," a paper presented to the Society for Mediterranean Studies, University of Toronto, 4 October 1984; rpt. in MM, 3-27; see pp. 5-6. 235 The Morris essay, "The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris," appeared in Studies in Romanticism, 21 (Fall 1982): 303-18. NF did write the Butler essay, "Some Reflections on Life and Habit," which was presented as the F.E.L. Priestly Memorial Lecture on 17 February 1988, pub. as a pamphlet by the University of Lethbridge, and printed in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, i, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 1-9; both essays rpt. in MM, 322-39,141-54. 236 "[A people] which say, Stand by thyself, come not near me; for I am holier than thou. These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burneth all the day." 237 Watson's prototypes are the seed, the soil, the flower, and the fruit. See his Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), 310-11, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 238 "I remember," the motto of Quebec. 239 GC, 166-7. 240 Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake": A Structural Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 241 Literally, "the golden germ or embryo," the Hiranyagarbha is a new-birth or purification rite by which the Brahman becomes a cosmic soul. It is first described in the Atharva-Veda Parishishta. The ceremony is explained in Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (New York: Harper, 1958), 56. Hiranyagarbha is also the sun-god. For the creation myth, see the Rigveda, 10.121, "To Prajapati," in Hindu Scriptures, ed. Nicol Macnichol (London: Everyman's Library, 1938), 32-3. 242 "P" refers to the creation account in Genesis i, written by the priests of

75°

Notes to pages 55-8

Israel, "}" to the account in Genesis 2, written by the Jahwist writers. See NB 44, nn. 8-9. 243 Biblical Language and Structure in "Paradise Lost," Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1984, 93-108. Willard McCarty had beens NF's research assistant and a teaching assistant for Religion 32OY, "The Mythological Framework of Western Culture." 244 "Urizen has no body, and is described as 'a shadow of horror/ and 'abominable void/ a 'soul-shudd'ring vacuum'" (Janet Warner, Blake and the Language of Art [Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984], 29). 245 NF is referring to his remarks on Derrida and Joyce in "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake," Vico and Joyce, 7, or MM, 360-1. On supplement, see n. 197, above. 246 "Just when he [Christian] was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind" (John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress [New York: Rinehart, 1949], 65-6). 247 SR, 33-4. 248 See n. 88, above. 249 In the Mesopotamian poem Enuma Elish, Kingu is the god from whose blood human beings are formed. See WP, 256. 250 See GC, 146-7,188, and WP, 273. 251 For Kingu, see n. 249, above. Ymir is the giant in the Prose Edda whose body is used to create the earth. See FS, 125-6. Purusha, in Brahmanism, refers to the soul or spiritual essence. See WP, 256-7. 252 See WP, 273-4. 253 See Vico and Joyce, 7, or MM, 360. On supplement, see n. 197, above. 254 The phrase "lapsed soul" comes from Blake's Introduction to Songs of Experience, 1. 6. See WP, 270. 255 "Such was that happy garden-state, / While man walked there without a mate" (The Garden, 11. 57-8). See WP, 198-9. 256 In the Hindu Vedic mythology of the Rig Veda, Indra is the warrior god of the clear sky and the greatest of the deities; Vritra ("Restrainer") is a serpent-demon; Tvastr is the artisan of the gods. For the Vedic hymn NF refers to, see The Rig Veda, trans. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty (London: Penguin, 1981), 141-3. 257 The line is not from a creed but from the Te Deum Laudamus as it appeared in the 1549 ed. of the prayer book of Edward VI: "Whan thou tookest upon thee to delyuer manne, thou dyddest not abhorre the virgins wombe" (The First and Second Prayer-Books of Edward VI [London: Dent, n.d], 23). 258 For the "Washington paper," see n. 115, above. The "Chicago paper" was "The Expanding World of Metaphor," presented at the annual meeting of

Notes to pages 58-60

751

the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, Chicago, 111., 8 December 1984; pub. in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 53 (December 1985): 585-98, and rpt. in MM, 108-23. 259 See Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: Viking, 1994). 260 "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," originally presented at the meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, Kingston, Ont., 26 October 1984; pub. in Symbols in Life and Art, ed. James A. Leith (N.p.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), 3-16, and rpt. in MM, 28-43. 261 For Robert Graves the White Goddess, the earliest European deity, took many guises and was worshipped under numerous names; she was the goddess of birth, death, and love who presided over a cult-ritual. See Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, enlarged ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 262 See par. 305, above. 263 The theory of metaphor which Ezra Pound used in his Cantos. In the 19205 he developed the idea that Chinese written characters are ideogrammatic (pictorial) and that poets write with a pictorial meaning in mind. 264 For one version of this diagram, and NF's commentary on it, see GC, 57-8. 265 The central characters in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Way of All Flesh, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. 266 The reference is to the opening lines of Rousseau's Confessions (1764-70). 267 The Carlyle reference is apparently to one of the undergraduate lectures NF gave when he was at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry in 1974-75. NF did lecture on Carlyle while he was at Harvard. The diagram itself is almost certainly the one in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file i. One Blake diagram is in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 11. The "subject-object" diagram seems not to have survived among the Frye papers. 268 "But hell is the being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires which shortly weary the man for all life is holy" ("Annotations to Lavater," Erdman, 590). Blake makes the "meer" nature and hell equation in his "Annotations to Swedenborg," Erdman, 605. The I-A-B diagram has apparently not survived. 269 Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ, trans. Peter Erb (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). See esp. chap. 2 of "The Fourth Treatise on True Resignation." See WP, 289. 270 On Ezekiel's vision of the holy waters. 271 "Man is the ark of God the mercy seat is above upon the ark cherubims guard it on either side & in the midst is the holy law. man is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth & of the water if thou seekest by human policy to guide this ark. remember Uzzah" (Blake, "Annotations to Lavater," Erdman, 596). Uzzah was struck down by God because he touched the ark; see 2 Samuel 6.

752

Notes to pages 60-2

272 The Mental Traveller, 1. 4. See WP, 221. 273 William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up, 1. 7. Wordsworth repeats the line in the epigraph to Ode: Intimations of Immortality. NF seems to be alluding here to Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence. See n. 320, below. 274 Shankara (or Samkara) (788-820), a Hindu metaphysician and religious leader, wrote commentaries on ten Upanishads. NF's source for Shankara's derivation was doubtless S. Radhakrishnan's introduction to The Principal Upani$ads (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), 3. An annotated copy of this book is in the NFL. 275 "Prayer is the Study of Art / Praise is the Practise of Art / Fasting &c. all relate to Art / The outward Ceremony is Antichrist / Without Unceasing Practise nothing can be done / Practise is Art / If you leave off you are Lost" (Blake, "The Laocoon" drawing and engraving, Erdman, 274). 276 "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of Noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days" (Lycidas, 11. 70-2). 277 The Delany novel NF refers to is Neveryona, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities (New York: Bantam, 1983). The sentence from Kristeva, which comes from her Desire in Language, is this: "the modality of novelistic enunciation is inferential; it is a process in which the subject of the novelistic utterance affirms a sequence, as conclusion to the inference, based on other sequences (referential—hence narrative, or textual—hence citational), which are the premises of the inference and, as such, considered to be true." 278 See Victor C. Hayes, Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation (Arimindale, New South Wales: Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 1995), 121-3. 279 Jean Danielou, "The Dove and Darkness in Ancient Byzantine Mysticism," in Man and Transformation: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 270-96. 280 Gregory uses the image of flight in his The Life of Moses, where he says that the human being's "very stability becomes as a wing in his flight towards heaven; his heart becomes winged because of his stability in good." Or again: "The soul moves in the opposite direction [from heavy bodies], light and swiftly moving upwards once it is released from sensuous and earthly attachments, soaring from the world below up towards the heavens" (From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory ofNyssa's Mystical Writings, trans, and ed. Herbert Musurillo [Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1979], 150,144). In a note to "The Dove and Darkness" Danielou (see previous note) cites a number of passages of flight in Gregory. 281 Freud describes the "oceanic feeling" in the opening section of Civilization

Notes to pages 62-4

753

and Its Discontents, vol. 21 of Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 195375). 282 Joachim of Fiore's doctrine of the three ages—of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—is developed in his Liber Figurarum and Expositio in Apocalypsim. See Delno C. West and Sandra Zindars-Swartz, Joachim ofFiore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 10-29. See DV, 58, or NFR, 213. 283 In WP (74), NF refers to this passage and cites its source as Barthes's Writing Degree Zero. The passage, however, is from Barthes's S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 15-16. 284 The Blake clause comes from "Annotations to Wordsworth's Poems," Erdman, 666. See also Milton, pi. 14,1. 29 and pi. 41,1. 4. Ut Pictora poesis ("as is painting so is poetry") is Horace's famous tag from Ars Poetica, 1. 361. 285 "But many things are not seen in their true nature and as they really are, unless they are seen as beautiful" ("Porro Unum Est Necessarium," in Culture and Anarchy, ed. R.H. Super [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965], 184). Cf. Arnold's earlier remark, "To get rid of one's ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal that Hellenism holds out before human nature" (167). See WP, 226. 286 About two years later NF did write the essay on Butler, "Some Reflections on Life and Habit." See n. 235, above. 287 "All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings.... A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes. The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an internal or an external, but must see everything as both external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object—external and internal—being unified as much as everything else" (Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh [New York: Modern Library, n.d.], 305). 288 "I supposed that he [Ernest] had only hit upon some new 'Lo, here!' when to my relief, he told me that he had concluded that no system which should go perfectly on all fours was possible, inasmuch as no one could get behind Bishop Berkeley, and therefore no incontrovertible first premise could ever be laid" (The Way of All Flesh, 330). 289 NF incorporated these points in his essay, not on Butler, but on Finnegans Wake. See Vico and Joyce, 12, or MM, 3, 66.

754

Notes to pages 64-71

290 The year Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity. 291 "Verse," from the Latin versus, is literally "a turning." See EAC, 130. 292 See Marx's Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 25-6. 293 See DV, 5, or NFR, 169. 294 Benjamin Whorf expressed these discoveries in a number of articles, including "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (1939). His essays are collected in Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J.B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of MIT, 1956). 295 "Moral law can only define the lawbreaker: it cannot distinguish what is above the law from what is below it, the prophet from the criminal, Jesus from Barabbas" (RE, 86). 296 GC, 131. 297 See WP, xvii. 298 The seven phases of revelation in chap. 5 of GC: creation, revolution, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. 299 For the passages from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dent, 1910) that most closely correspond to NF's paraphrase of Burke, see pp. 44,131, and 178. 300 See EAC, 60. 301 In 1985 the Church of England became embroiled in a controversy because Bishop David Jenkins of Durham suggested that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection might be myths. In June 1986 the Church of England issued a document reaffirming its belief in both dogmas. See WP, 193. 302 A conference at Smith College, Northhampton, Mass., held in October 1985. NF's paper, "Framework and Assumption," was pub. in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, i, no. i (1988): 2-10, and rpt. in MM, 79-92. 303 NF means to cite Genesis 2:1, "Igitur perfecti sunt coeli et terra et omnis ornatus eorum" ["Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them"]. The suggestion that the title of Mallarme's Igitur comes from Genesis 2 was made by Rolland de Reneville, in L'Experience Poetic\ue (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 90. In WP, NF says that the suggestion "has been discredited for lack of evidence" but that "it is a most penetrating comment nonetheless" (292). 304 "Those who dare appropriate to themselves Universal Attributes / Are the Blasphemous Selfhoods & must be broken asunder / A Vegetated Christ & a Virgin Eve, are the Hermaphroditic / Blasphemy ..." (Jerusalem, pi. 90,11. 32-5). 305 bebelous mythous - godless myths. In WP, NF cites the source as Titus 3:9, and he translates the phrase as "silly myths." But the correct source is

Notes to pages 71-6

755

the phrase bebelous kai graodeis mythous (godless and silly myths, RSV) in i Timothy 4:7, which the AV translates as "profane and old wives' fables." 306 NF presented a paper with that title at the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto, on 3 December 1985; pub. in Shenandoah, 39, no. 3 (1989): 47-64, and rpt. in MM, 93-107. 307 In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. 308 Etude published no articles on Scriabine (more commonly Scriabin) in 1925. NF is doubtless referring to Ellen Von Tidebohl, "Musical Voyage Down the Volga," Etude, 44 (December 1926): 905-6. 309 Robert G. Oliver, a 1942 graduate of Emmanuel College, where he was later appointed as an adjunct instructor in theology. After the federation of the Toronto School of Theology in 1969 he served on the staff of Principal Douglas Jay, organizing ecumenical programs of continuing education. He and NF regularly encountered each other at the high table in Burwash during the years that Oliver was at both Emmanuel and the Toronto School of Theology. 310 The contrast between Hebraism (Puritan morality and the work ethic) and Hellenism (aesthetic and intellectual cultivation) is found in chaps. 4 and 5 of Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869). 311 Wallace Stevens, Description without Place, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1967), 341 (pt. 3). See WP, 120. 312 Maurice Nicoll, The New Man: An Interpretation of Some Parables and Miracles of Christ (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967). Nicoll believes that the parables have an outer literal meaning and an inner psychological one; the latter is what NF refers to as a moral platitude. Nicoll was a pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. 313 A distinction examined most fully in WTC. 314 NF gave two lectures at Stratford in the 19803, "Something Rich and Strange" (1982) and "The Stage Is All the World" (1985). The remark may have appeared in one of those lectures, but it is not in the typescripts or published versions. NF probably had in mind these words from the introduction to NFS, which was written about the time he was writing this notebook: "Shakespeare was a poet who wrote plays, all right; but it's more accurate and less misleading to say that he was a dramatist who used mainly verse" (5). 315 NF's complaint is found in his review of Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun (BG, 117-18). NF's reviews of a number of Layton's books are included in BG. 316 The phrase "supreme fiction" comes from Wallace Stevens's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1947). See WP, 82.

756

Notes to pages 76-80

317 Bishop Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (1736), a defence of revealed religion against the deists. An annotated copy of the book is in the NFL. See WP, 97. 318 NF is imposing on the story of Eve in Genesis 3 the report of Francesca to Dante about the fate that befell her and Paolo after they were discovered by her husband (Inferno, canto 5,1.138). 319 See AC, 6-7, where NF points to a variety of critical "determinisms," each of which attaches to criticism some external framework. 320 The reference is to Harold Bloom's notion that strong poets seek to overcome their predecessors by misreading them and so establish themselves in the literary tradition—an idea developed in a series of books, including The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976). 321 See Gertrude Rachel Levy's two books, The Gate of Horn, and The Sword from the Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1953). 322 The phrase comes from D.H. Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978), 85. See WP, 193. 323 The eight steps of Patanjali's yoga begin with right actions, move through meditation, and culminate in insight. Patanjali, who flourished in the late 2nd century B.C., was the author of the Yoga-Sutra. In NB 3, NF gives an account of his effort to follow Patanjali's eightfold path, devoting a number of pages of the notebook to codifying a spiritual program for himself. He was unable to get beyond the fourth stage—pranayama—but he outlines in some detail what he proposes to do in the first three stages— yama, niyama, and asana, or the ethical and moral practices and the bodily positions. 324 "Some fast asleepe, others broad-eyed / And taking in the Ray" (Henry Vaughan, Regeneration, 11. 67-8). See WP, 206, and MM, 50,219-20. 325 See WP, 80. Annotated copies of five of Castaneda's books are in the NFL. 326 Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Incjuiry into Values (New York: Morrow, 1974). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 327 See "The Bride from the Strange Land," an address NF gave at the Holy Blossom Temple, Toronto, in May 1985; pub. in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett, ed. H.B. de Groot and A. Legatt (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 1-11; rpt. in EAC, 50-61, and NFR, 104-16. 328 See NF's "The Bride from the Strange Land," ibid., and WP, 213-14. 329 See WP, 212. 330 The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) derives partially from Hannah's song of triumph when her many years of barrenness end with the birth of Samuel (i Samuel 2:1-10). See GC, 183, and WP, 214-15,245.

Notes to pages 80-6

757

331 "Could Hope inspect her Basis / Her Craft were done— / Has a fictitious Charter / Or it has none—" (Poem 1283,11.1-4). See WP, 130. 332 NF explores this topic in "Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form/' SM, 275-94333 Stevens is reported by Rev. Arthur Manley to have been baptized into the Catholic Church several days before his death. His daughter Holly denied her father's conversion to Catholicism, and NF told Eleanor Cook that he didn't believe the story either (Eleanor Cook to Robert D. Denham, 6 August 1993). See Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, An Oral Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), 295-6, 310. 334 "He dyed a Papist," the only extant reference to Shakespeare's religion, was recorded by Richard Davies, who added the sentence to a set of notes on Shakespeare's life by William Fulman. 335 "Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine" ("Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord"), the first words of the canticle that Simeon uttered when Jesus was presented at the Temple. Luke 2:29 (Vulgate). 336 The phrase "full word" is Jacques Lacan's. See his "Le seminaire sur 'La lettre voice/" in Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 11-61, and "The Empty Word and the Full Word," in The Language of Self, 9-27. See also NF's "Lacan and the Full Word," in Criticism and Lacan, 187-9. 337 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 2,1. 2. 338 "Coleridge," in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 10:116-73. 339 Herod as depicted in Auden's For the Time Being, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 301-4. 340 The reference is to Theseus' speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.1820: "Such tricks hath strong imagination, / That if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy." 341 See WP, 190. 342 Christ's miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. 343 See Ezekiel 37; the reference is to NF's view of metaphor as Incarnational. See also GC, 129. 344 "To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour" (Auguries of Innocence, 11.1-4). 345 Mystical Muslim sects. Idris was the founder of the Sanusi order, and the last of the dynasty, Sayyid Idris, ruled Libya from 1943 to 1969. 346 See AC, 7-8,15-17,19. 347 The opposition is found in Blake's Book ofAhania. See also Jerusalem, pi. 86, 1.27. 348 See Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 79-80.

758

Notes to pages 86-93

349 The Gospels do not report the hearing of thunder at the baptism of Christ. NF apparently has in mind the account of the voice from heaven in John 12:29, a voice that was said to have thundered by some who heard it. 350 See n. 327, above. 351 The concluding lines of Yeats's Among School Children (1927): "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?" 352 "I have no more made my book than my book has made me; a book consubstantial with its author, concerned only with me, a vital part of my life; not having an outside and alien concern like all other books" (Montaigne, "Of Giving the Lie," in Essays, bk. 2, trans. Charles Cotton). See WP, 81-2. Annotated copies of one French ed. and two English eds. of Montaigne's essays are in the NFL. 353 Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Diihring) (1878). 354 Sesquicentennial sermon, "To Come to Light," delivered on 5 October 1986 at the Metropolitan United Church, Toronto, and pub. in NUS, 27-37, and NFR, 360-6. The sermon was part of the commemoration of Victoria University's first 150 years. See also NB 44, n. 195. 355 In Mahayana Buddhism, the complete conversion of the mind. 356 "Je demande 1'arrestation des coquins et des laches" (French Revolution, in Works, ed. H.D. Traill [London: Chapman and Hall, 1897-1901], 3:308 [bk. 7, chap. 5]). 357 "He has no hope who never had a fear" (William Cowper, Truth, 1. 298). 358 A remark made, apparently, to Jay Macpherson, one of NF's colleagues at Victoria College. NF is punning on Horace's non omnis moriar (I shall not wholly die) and Moriarty, the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. 359 For Hopkins, "overthought" is the obvious or paraphrasable meaning of a text and "underthought" its metaphorical meaning; the latter, as Hopkins says in a letter to A.W.M. Baillie (14 January 1883), is "often only half realised by the poet himself" (Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott [London: Oxford University Press, 1938], 105). 360 "The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the housedog" (T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England [London: Faber, 1933], 151). See WP, 59, and MM, 21. 361 For an expansion of the themes in this entry, see WP, 253-7. 362 The references here are to Isaiah 63:1-6 and Revelation 14:18-20. 363 See WP, 262-4.

Notes to pages 93-100

759

364 "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Revelation 3:16). 365 See NF's "Crime and Sin in the Bible," MM, 255-69, or NFR, 133-46, and GC, 130. 366 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 54-5 (sec. 10). See WP, 227, MM, 279, and DV, 32-3, or NFR, 191. 367 This is the first entry on page 150; there are 160 pages in the notebook. 368 "And all the waters shall be joined with the waters: that which is above the heavens is the masculine, and the water which is beneath the earth is the feminine" (i Enoch 54:8-9). 369 See WP, 256. Enuma Elish (so called after its opening line, "When on high") is the Babylonian creation epic. 370 Here NF is referring to the Priestly creation account in Genesis 1:1-2:3. See WP, 156-8, and NB 44, n. 8. 371 On the account of the creation by the Jahwist writer, see WP, 188-92, and NB 44, n. 9. 372 See Prospero's question to Ariel in The Tempest: "Hast thou forgot / The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy / Was grown into a hoop?" (1.2.57-9). The three godesses are Iris, Ceres, and Juno (4.1). Tiamat is the female, cosmic, chaotic body of water, personified as a dragon, slain by Marduk in the Enuma Elish. 373 GC, 125. 374 Culture and Anarchy, chap. 3. 375 The Order of Illuminati, which was founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, parallels some aspects of the Freemasons. Various conspiracy theories about an international Jewish cabal have been perpetuated by the recent Illuminati industry, spearheaded by the books of Robert Anton Wilson. See, e.g., Wilson's The Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 376 See WP, 207-8. 377 See n. 322, above. 378 See WP, 213-14, and EAC, 54. 379 The good angel figure in Ibsen's Peer Gynt. 380 See T.S. Eliot's La Figlia die Piange. 381 See WP, 202-3. The "table of metaphors" refers to NF's charts of apocalyptic and demonic imagery in GC, 166-7. 382 See WP, 160. 383 See WP, 250, and MM, 193-4. 384 See WP, 304. 385 That is, human action (moral law) and observed action in nature (natural law).

760

Notes to pages 100-6

386 See n. 354, above. 387 NF associates each of his "presiding deities," as he calls them in WP, with one of Blake's mythological gods: Hermes/Tharmas, Eros/Urizen, Adonis/Ore, and Prometheus/Los. Notebook 44 1 A variation on the motto of the Benedictines, ora et labora, "worship and work." 2 Throughout this notebook NF's references to the numbers "One" through "Eight" are to chaps, of one or another version of WP. 3 See NB 27, n. 359. 4 NF eventually came to regard the fourth primary concern as freedom of movement, and shelter became a subcategory of property. See WP, 42, and DV, 6, or NFR, 169-70. 5 This definition appears at a number of places in Tillich's work. See, e.g., Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), 1-4,62, and Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63), 1:211-15. 6 Cf. par. 103, below. 7 See DV, 3-5,10-12, or NFR, 167-9,173~58 The so-called "P" source of the Pentateuch, a consolidation of Jewish law and history by the priests of Jerusalem about 500 B.C. after the Babylonian exile. The P account of creation is given in Genesis 1:1-2:3. 9 The so-called "J" source of the Pentateuch, a history of the Hebrews from the creation to the last years of King David's reign, set down by scribes between 950 and 850 B.C. The Jahwist account of creation is given in Genesis 2:4-26. The "J" writer uses JHWH or Jahweh, rather than Elohim, when referring to God. 10 For the development of the ideas in pars. 13-18, see WP, 156-8,188-93. 11 See WP, 189. 12 See NB 27, n. 119. 13 Psalm 74:13-14; Isaiah 27:1; Ezekiel 29:4-5. 14 See NB 27, n. 368. 15 See NB 27, n. 108. On the implicate or enfolded order, as opposed to the explicate or unfolded order, see chaps. 6-7 of Wholeness and the Implicate Order. 16 This is apparently an abbreviation for "Hermes Unsealed." See pars. 57 and 208, below. 17 See NB 27, n. 291. 18 See NB 27, n. 38. 19 For Bohm, see par. 19, above. NF's knowledge of Karl Pribram's neurological research doubtless derived from Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate

Notes to pages 106-8

20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27

28

29

761

Order. Pribram, says Bohm, "has given evidence backing up his suggestion that memories are generally recorded all over the brain in such a way that information concerning a given object or quality is not stored in a particular cell or localized part of the brain but rather that all the information is enfolded over the whole" (198). See Pribram, Languages of the Brain (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), and "Problems concerning the Structure of Consciousness," in Consciousness and the Brain, ed. G.G. Globus (New York: Plenum, 1976). In a letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, Keats distinguished the selfless poetical character from the "wordsworthian or egotistical sublime." F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) was—and remains—a controversial literary critic because of the stringency of his moral judgments and the vehement attacks on his opponents; the firmness of his evaluations can be found in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Revaluation (1936), and The Great Tradition (1948), among many other places. "Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World." In this essay NF speaks of current critical theory as having "relapsed into a confused and claustrophobic battle of methodologies, where, as in Fortinbras's campaign in Hamlet, the ground fought over is hardly big enough to hold the contending armies" (MM, 19). "How can I conceive, with a man I have not known? How can I break what I have promised with a firm mind?" (Verse 2 of the fourteenth-century carol, "Angelus ad Virginem," in New Oxford Book of Carols [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 17). The parenthetical remarks are, of course, NF's. "Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father": Jesus' words to Mary Magdalene (John 20:17). See WP, 72-4. See WP, 69-70. In his published work, as well as in his notebooks, NF often commented on Theseus' lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact" (5.1.7-8). He develops the point of this par. in "The Expanding World of Metaphor," MM, 113-14. On Donne's two poems and on the connection between Theseus' lines and "identity with," see also WP, 78-9. NF's transliteration of afjiddev, "from some point" (Odyssey, 1.10). The context in Homer is the poet's invocation to the Muse that he be given some portion of the story of Odysseus—a portion that begins, in effect, in medias res. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a book that caused a great deal of controversy after its 1982 publication in London by Jonathan Cape and in New York by Delacorte Press. The paperback title is Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell, 1983).

762

Notes to pages 108-11

An annotated copy of the 1983 ed. (London: Transworld) is in the NFL. 30 On the hypothesis that Jesus was married and had children, see Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell, 1983), 316-59. 31 See Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 344-7. 32 The general framework of NF's levels derives from the medieval levels of meaning, as outlined in Dante's Epistola X (the letter to Can Grande della Scala, ca. 1318) and in // Convivio (1304-8). NF adapts the Dantean scheme in the Second Essay of AC. See WP, 3-4. 33 NF is referring to the way he expressed this relation in El: "Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. And the imagination won't stop until it's swallowed everything" (80). "Swallow" is NF's word: Milton does not use the word in his poetry in this context, but for NF's account of swallowing as a metaphor for internalizing, seeRE, 116-7. 34 The mischievous companion of Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52). "Never was born," she remarks, "never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin'. I 'spect I growed." 35 "And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Revelation 22:17). 36 On the organism as a symbol of culture, see Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, rev. ed. (New York: Knopf, 1928), 1:104-11. An annotated copy of the 1932 ed. is in the NFL. 37 In Egyptian religion, Ptah was the god of Memphis and of artisans. Enki was a Sumerian water-god and god of wisdom. 38 The allusions here are to William Blake's AH Religions Are One (1788) and Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy. 39 Holy Blood, Holy Grail; see par. 37, above. 40 Herrenmoral, or master morality, as distinct from Sklavenmoral, or slave morality (sec. 260 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955], 202-6). See WP, 278. On the "deified Caesar," see Blake's annotations to Thornton's The Lord's Prayer (Erdman, 669). 41 See Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), chap. i. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 42 By "antithetical" Yeats meant generally "subjective," as opposed to "primary" or "objective." In his theory of the interpenetration of opposite forces the antithetical "cone" expresses, says Yeats, "our inner world of desire and imagination" (A Vision, rev. ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1956], 73). See WP, 164. 43 Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, ed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). 44 See WP, 180.

Notes to pages 112-14

7^3

45 The reference is to Robert Graves's To Juan at the Winter Solstice (1945): "Water to water, ark again to ark, / From woman back to woman: / So each new victim treads unfalteringly / The never altered circuit of his fate" (11. 13-16). NF's remark about the ark symbolism refers to his account in GC, 177 (where he quotes Graves), of the cyclical movements in Biblical history. 46 The four gods mentioned in pars. 55-7—Prometheus, Eros, Adonis, and Hermes—appear throughout NF's notebooks as "informing presences," as he calls them in WP, 277, where they represent, respectively, the deities that preside over lower wisdom, higher love, lower love, and higher wisdom. But their symbolism continued to evolve for NF, as it does even in the present notebook. In par. 122, below, NF remarks that "the HEAP [Hermes, Eros, Adonis, Prometheus] scheme keeps reforming and dissolving." NB 6, the separate sections of which are entitled "Eros," "Adonis," "Hermes," and "Prometheus," is NF's first notebook exposition of the symbolism of these four gods. 47 "Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, The Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth." 48 See NB 27, n. 303. 49 The narrator of James's ghost story believes that the apparitions of Quint, the ex-valet of the country house where the story occurs, and of Miss Jessel, the predecessor of the governess who narrates the story, have come back to haunt the two children in the story, Miles and Flora. For NF's later commentary on the story, see EAC, 119-20. 50 Theodor Storm, Der Schimmelreiter (1888; English trans. The White Horseman, 1962, and The White Horse Rider, 1966). The story is presented through a series of narrators—Hauke Haien, an old schoolmaster, a reeve of the dike, and the story-teller in a book that cannot be found but is remembered by the principal narrator. 51 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Play as the Clue to Ontological Explanation," in Truth and Method, trans, edited by Garrett Barden and John Gumming from the 2nd ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 91-119. NF may also have in mind Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), where Gadamer, as he does in Truth and Method, draws on Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 52 In "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake" NF quotes Joyce's letter to Harriet Weaver in which Joyce said that Bruno's philosophy was "a kind of dualism—every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realize itself and opposition brings union" (Vico and Joyce, 5, or MM, 358). "The solemn and the gay are interchangeable aspects of the same things," NF

764

53 54

55

56

57 58 59 60

61 62 63

Notes to pages 114-16

says in the same essay, "and this may well be the essence, for Joyce, of Bruno's theory of polarity" (Vico and Joyce, 16, or MM, 371). NF also considers the influence of Vice's cyclic conception of history on Joyce (Vico and Joyce, 4-6,18, or MM, 357-9, 373). The references are to William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job (1825). In Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), Vladimir and Estragon await the mysterious Godot, who continually sends word that he will arrive but never does. In James's story John Marcher is preoccupied with the idea that some momentous experience awaits him, but the experience never comes. For NF's brief commentary on the story, see EAC, 124. NF perhaps has in mind Benjamin's early essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities (1922-23), which is a critique of what he sees as the mythic compulsions that entrap the novel's characters, as well as an implicit critique of the vitalist cults in the romantic youth movement; however, as this essay was not translated into English until after NF's death, it seems more likely that he is referring simply to Benjamin's general commitment to the tenets of materialistic criticism. On Vico's theory of repetition (ricorsi), see The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Vico treats the "course" and "recourse" of nations and other human institutions in bks. 4-5. Not long after he wrote this entry, NF did read a great deal of James for his lecture, "Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult," EAC, 109-29. See pars. 71-2,111-14,119-20, below. Cf. NF's remarks here on The Sense of the Past and The Jolly Corner with those in EAC, 109-10. NF expands upon this note in "Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult" (EAC, 120). The Blake picture is The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for Possession of a Child (1795), a large colour print now in the Tate Gallery. The next sentence is, "But we are covered with a stole of glory similar to that which covered Adam and Eve before they sinned" (The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985], 2:457). NF comments on the passage in WP, 197-8. After about 1912, Alfred Adler argued that the "will to power" better explained human behaviour than Freud's theory of sexual drives. On the pre-fall appetites of Adam and Eve, see Milton's Paradise Lost, bk. 5; on the post-fall passions, bk. 11. See also RE, chap. 3. NF's view that Romanticism reversed the human understanding of the structure of the cosmos is found in a number of places, including "The Drunken Boat" (see NB 27, n. 12). On the Romantic revolution in WP, see 239-51. On the culbute or social overturn associated with a miraculous birth, see GC, 183, and WP, 215,245; and on the culbute in romance, see SeS, 139.

Notes to pages 116-18

765

64 For the dialectical progression of revelation through what NF sees as its seven phases, see GC, 106-38. 65 F.H. Anderson was professor of philosophy and ethics at University College of the University of Toronto. NF is doubtless referring to one of the ethics courses he took during each of his final two years at Victoria College. The reference to Ellis, including the footnote, is to p. 36 of The Dance of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923). 66 Song of Songs 4:12: "A garden enclosed [hortus condusus] is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed [fons signatus]." 67 Song of Songs 4:16: "Awake, O north wind; and come, then south; blow upon my garden, that the spice thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits." 68 On thefemme couverte ("protected woman") and other themes in this par., see WP, 202, 206-12, and "The Bride from the Strange Land," EAC, 50-61, or NFR, 104-16. 69 See DV, 84, or NFR, 234. 70 The passage from Confucius NF apparently has in mind is from chap. 19 of Yochi, Liki: "The rituals regulate the people's feelings; music establishes harmony in the sounds of the country; the government orders their conduct and the punishments prevent crimes. When rituals, music, punishments and governments are all in order, then the principles of political order are complete" (The Wisdom of Confucius, trans. Lin Yutang [New York: Random House, 1943], 177). For Plato's view that the overseers of the state must be alert to the dangers of music, see the Republic, bk. 4, 424b. 71 NF is referring to NFS, an edited version of his lectures on Shakespeare, taped over a period of years and conflated into separate chaps. 72 "The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance": Prospero's words to Ariel in The Tempest, 5.1.27-8. 73 NF did squeeze the points in this and the preceding entry into his book of lectures on Shakespeare. On Edgar, see NFS, 118; on the final scene of The Winter's Tale, NFS, 167-9; °n the commentators who see King Lear as atheistic, NFS, 111; and on the "rarer action" in The Tempest, NFS, 182. The manuscript for the book must not yet have been in the hands of the printers. 74 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Anchor, 1961), 295. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 75 This notation apparently refers to the points about metaphor and myth, structure and narrative, static and dynamic forces, space and time that NF intends to make in chaps, i and 2. Esslin's sequence is the reverse of what NF had outlined in par. 2, but it does follow the order of myth and then metaphor that emerged in pt. i of WP. 76 On the relation of the Song of Songs to the J creation account, see WP, 196. 77 Here NF is still working with the categories of the seven phases of revela-

766

78

79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

87

Notes to pages 119-22

tion that he had developed in GC, 106-38: creation, exodus (revolution), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. He did not abandon these phases in WP, but the second half of the later book was organized on a fourfold pattern deriving from the primary concerns: making, loving, sustaining, and escaping restraint. Chaps. 3 and 4 of the book NF is working on as he writes this section of the notebook actually seem to contain eight phases: structures of accommodation (creation, law, prophecy, and revelation) and structures of response (exodus, wisdom, gospel, and enlightenment). (See par. 2, above.) The first four of these NF associates with the J creation myth, and the second four with the P creation myth. The information in this entry derives from Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 94-5, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. The work by Raphael Loewe that Pope cites is "Apologetic Motifs in the Targum to the Song of Songs," in Biblical Motifs: Origins and Transformations, ed. Alexander Altmann [Philip W. Lown Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, Studies and Texts, 3] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 159-96. On the "food concern," see WP, 252-7; on the building metaphor, WP, 151-6. Practically all of the poems of St. John of the Cross turn upon images of erotic love. That is, subject to NF just as the Gauleiters were agents of the Nazis For an expanded view of the themes in this entry, see MM, 327-8. These pairs of topics are treated in that order in WP, chaps. 2 and 3. The passage NF refers to is in the Polemical Introduction, though not its opening sentence: "Whenever schematization appears in the following pages, no importance is attached to the schematic form itself, which may be only the result of my lack of ingenuity. Much of it, I expect, and in fact hope, may be mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better shape" (AC, 29). See par. 8, above. A Festschrift was being planned for Jerome Buckley, professor of English at Harvard; NF, as it turned out, did not contribute to the volume, NineteenthCentury Lives: Essays Presented to Jerome Hamilton Buckley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). "4k" was a course in "NineteenthCentury Thought" that NF taught for many years. Letters between Samuel Butler and Miss E.M.A. Savage, 1871-1885, ed. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). In 1873 Butler wrote to Savage, "I am reading Middlemarch and have got through two-thirds. I call it bad, and not interesting: there is no sweetness in the whole book, and though it is stuffed full of epigrams one feels that they are lugged in to show the writer off. The book seems to me to be a long-winded

Notes to pages 123-6

767

piece of studied brag, clever enough I dare say, but to me at any rate singularly unattractive" (40). 88 Not long after this notebook entry NF did write an essay on Butler, "Some Reflections on Life and Habit." See NB 27, n. 235. 89 From the first par. of chap. \ of What Maisie Knew (1897). 90 For NF's treatment of the stories in this par. and pars. 113-14, see "Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult," EAC, 109-29. 91 NF served as principal of Victoria College from 1959 to 1967. 92 A 1980 play about Mozart by Peter Schaffer; it was made into a Saul Zaentz film in 1984, starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Barridge. 93 The "nut" in James's story is Theobald, an ineffectual painter. Early in the story Mrs. Coventry, a friend of the narrator's, refers to "that terrible little tale of Balzac's," an allusion to Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, a story about a half-mad artist, Frenhofer, who, like Theobald, is unable to complete his painting. 94 For the development of the point about Pynchon, see "Culture as Interpenetration," DG, 17-18, and DV, 25-6, or NFR, 185-6. 95 Jean F. Blackall, Jamesian Ambiguity and "The Sacred Fount" (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 90-5,110-15. 96 That is, vain despots such as the one depicted in Shelley's Ozymandias (1818), who had inscribed on his statue "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, / Look on my Works, ye mighty, and despair!" (11. 10-11). 97 The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson, 1953), 5:68 (par. 109). An annotated copy of vol. 5 of Berkeley's Works is in the NFL. 98 Ibid., 5:77 (par. 137). 99 In the / Ching K'un is the second hexagram, symbolizing earth (and therefore mother). None of the / Ching hexagrams symbolizes air, but here NF associates air as a sublunary form and a maternal receptacle with the primary symbolism of K'un. 100 The Works of George Berkeley, 5:78 (par. 141). 101 Ibid., 5:88, (par. 170). 102 See NB 27, n. 210. 103 For Blake's understanding of the Female Will see, e.g., Jerusalem, pi. 34, 11. 26-31; pi. 56,1. 43; pi. 86,1. 61. 104 The Works of George Berkeley, 5:89 (par. 171). 105 As NF says in "Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult," "In The Ring and the Book Browning took a dramatic situation and worked it out through the points of view of all the major characters (and others) in turn. James's corresponding experiment in reversed drama was The Awkward Age, and he is apparently trying to repeat the device in The Ivory Tower" (EAC, 115).

768

Notes to pages 126-30

106 A project announced several times in NF's notebooks but one he never completed. 107 See Blake's Jerusalem, pi. 98,11.11-12, and Milton, pi. 4,1. 5, and pi. 5,1. 6. 108 The ritual is described in Sir James Frazer, The Scapegoat (vol. 9 of The Golden Bough), 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1913), 293-300. 109 Siris is the diminutive of the Greek seira, meaning a cord or chain. The subtitle of Siris is "A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries, Etc." no The Works of George Berkeley, 5:82-110 (pars. 152-230). 111 Ibid., 5:102,116,122,120. NF's references are to the paragraph numbers. 112 The reference is to the judgment by Michael Dolzani, NF's research associate, about the talk, "Repetitions of Jacob's Dream," NF presented at the National Gallery in Ottawa on 13 October 1984; pub. in EAC, 37-49, and NFR, 91-103. 113 The works referred to in this par.:'John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671); Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder (1892), Rosmersholm (1886), When We Dead Awaken (1899); Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka (1848); August Strindberg, Keys of Heaven (1890-2). 114 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd ed. (London: Barie and Jenkins, 1973). The Penguin ed. (1978) is in the NFL. 115 "Anti-Semitism is a fiction of escape which tells you nothing about death but projects it onto others.... In this sense anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth" (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967], 39). 116 The symbols come from Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1903), Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm (1886), and Giinter Grass, The Tin Drum (1961). 117 The theme of climbing and then falling off towers and mountains in Ibsen's plays receives brief mention in WP, 230. 118 Cf. NB 48, par. 11. The reference is to the feminine personification of wisdom in Proverbs 8; NF accepts the alternate wording of "little child" in verse 30. Both the AV and the RSV make wisdom the source of delight ("rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth" [8.31]); NF takes the image of playing from the Vulgate (ludens in orbe terrarum). The Hebrew word can also be translated as "making sport" or "laughing." See GC, 125. 119 On the puer aeternus ("eternal youth"), see C.G. Jung, "The Psychology of the Child Archetype," in The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 151-81. The essay is also in Jung and C. Kerenyi's Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. On the Hiranyagarbha (Sanskrit for "golden egg") myth, see NB 27, n. 241. 120 NF quotes the passage from Laforgue in WP, 73, and, as his note to the passage indicates, he encountered it in the introduction to Laforgue's Moral

Notes to pages 131-3

769

Tales, trans. William Jay Smith (1956), xi. This is the New Directions ed., pub. in New York in 1985, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL (1956 is the original copyright date of Smith's translations of two of Laforgue's tales). The passage from Samuel Butler NF refers to is from chap. 69 of The Way of All Flesh: "A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes. The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object—external and internal—being unified as much as everything else" ([New York: Modern Library, n.d.], 305). In MM, NF remarks that in The Way of All Flesh Butler "draws the inference that eventually we shall have to abolish the distinction of subject and object, internal and external, and live and work within a purely metaphorical universe" (366). 121 See Henry James, The Awkward Age (New York: Harper, 1899), 22-8 (chap. i). 122 See, e.g., the preface to The American, where James describes first glimpsing the theme of his story, which he then drops for a time "into the deep well of unconscious cerebration" like a "buried treasure" before it is resurrected into the novel. James says that the "germination is a process almost always untraceable" (London: John Lehmann, 1949), 8-9,10. 123 There are two copies of the Penguin paperback ed. (1966,1985), both annotated, in the NFL. The description of London society NF quotes is on the back cover of both copies. 124 See WP, 126. 125 The reference to Heraclitus' "double spiral" is to his aphorism (Fragment 66), "Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals: they live in each other's death and die in each other's life," which NF quotes in WP, 166, from Philip Wheelwright's Heraclitus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), 68. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 126 "Let the shoemaker stick to his last." According to Pliny the Elder, Apelles corrected a shoe in one of his paintings when a shoemaker pointed out its flaw, but when the shoemaker criticized the painting of a leg, Apelles remarked, "ne supra crepidam sutor" (Natural History, trans. H. Rackham [London: Heinemann, 1952], 9:324 [bk. 35, sec. 36]). 127 In the Odyssey, bk. 19,11. 562-7, Penelope says that there are two gates for dreams, "one gateway / of honest horn, and one of ivory. / Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams / of glimmering illusion, fantasies, / but those that come through solid polished horn / may be borne out, if mortals only know them" (trans. Robert Fitzgerald). See also Virgil's Aeneid, bk. 6,11. 893-900. In The Gate of Horn, a book NF had long been interested in,

77°

Notes to pages 134-7

Gertrude Rachel Levy sees the gate of horn as the line of demarcation between light and darkness, life and death, the divine and the human. See WP, 298. 128 On the cruel mistress, see WP, 198-9, and MM, 47-9. 129 See par. 22, above. The distinction between "identity with" and "identity as" is treated in GC, 87, and WP, 77-8. 130 For the story of the fall of the rebel angels, see i Enoch 6-10, in Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R.H. Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 2:191-4, and WP, 274-5. 131 NF is referring to Paul Ricoeur's "Anatomy of Criticism and the Order of Paradigms," in Centre and Labyrinth, 1-13. NF has in mind the following passage: "Even within the state of suspension wherein fiction holds the poem, there subsists an oblique reference to the real world, either as a form of borrowing or as a subsequent resymbolization of it. Therefore I see Frye's second phase as the nexus or turning-point between suspended reference and recreated reference, what I would call, in a vocabulary close to Hans-Georg Gadamer's, reference to the world of the text" (8). NF thinks Ricoeur has not taken account of what he says about the symbol as sign in AC, 73-82. 132 Lacan's view that the unconscious is structured like language appears throughout his work; he first argued the view in Rome Discourse (1953), trans. Anthony Wilden as The Language of the Self, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 133 "Esse est percipi," or "existence is percipi or percipere," is the fundamental tenet of Berkeley's subjective idealism. The phrase appears throughout Berkeley's writings. See, e.g., The Works of George Berkeley, 1:5, 53. 134 Rimbaud, according to his sister Isabelle, converted to Catholicism on his deathbed; other witnesses dispute the claim. John Christopher Brennan (1870-1932), the Australian poet, abandoned his Irish Catholic upbringing, but during the last desperate years of his life, he returned to the Roman Catholic Church. On Stevens, see NB 27, n. 333. 135 See NB 27, n. 320. 136 Richard Sibbes, Bowels Opened, or, A Discovery of the neere and deere love, union and communion betwixt Christ and the Church (London: George Edwards, 1639). Sermons on Song of Songs 4-6. 137 Helen, NF's wife, was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. 138 "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me" (Matthew 26:39). 139 The reference is to Jacob's wrestling with the angel at Peniel "until the breaking of the day" (Genesis 32:24). 140 A popular song by Leslie Edgar (1927). 141 "Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to

Notes to pages 137-41

771

yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you" (Matthew 17:20). 142 Some time passed between entries 169 and 170. On 23 June 1986, NF and Helen left for a month-long lecture tour of Australia, at the conclusion of which they flew to Cairns for a week's holiday before returning to Toronto. On 24 July, Helen Frye collapsed after getting off the plane. She was taken to the Cairns Base Hospital, and then released. The next day, after collapsing again, she was admitted to intensive care, her condition having been diagnosed as a pulmonary embolism. She died on 4 August. 143 The phrase comes from Ned Pratt's poem about the death of his mother, The Iron Door (An Ode), in E.J. Pratt, Collected Poems, ed. Northrop Frye, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), 25-33. 144 In a "Memoir" NF read at a memorial service for Helen in September 1986 he said, "She died at 3.10 p.m. on August 4 (the medical attendants said 3.30, but I happen to know when she actually left me)." The unpublished typescript of the "Memoir" is in the NFF, 1988, box 31, file 10, and 1991, box 50, file 3. 145 See NB 27, n. 92. 146 Jane Widdicombe, NF's long-time secretary, who had accompanied the Fryes on the trip to Australia. 147 NF is likely remembering James's account of the experience he and others had when using nitrous oxide, an experience that produced, James says, a "tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical experience"; but "as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases" (The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy [New York: Longmans, Green, 1923], 284). 148 From a hymn by John B. Dykes (1823-76), with lyrics by Richard Baxter (1615-91), st. 3,1. i. 149 "We may come to think that nothing exists but a stream of souls, that all knowledge is biography, and with Plotinus that every soul is unique" (W.B. Yeats, "Introduction to The Resurrection,'" in Explorations [London: Macmillan, 1962], 397, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL). 150 See n. 40, above. 151 Matthewson Helstone, the rector of Briarfield in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, was a high Tory; Hiram Yorke was a Birmingham merchant whose radical views brought him into frequent conflict with Helstone. 152 The allusions in this par. are all in Bronte's Shirley. The citations in parentheses below are to the volume, chapter, and page of the World's Classics ed. of the novel, ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Andre Chenier, a poet who offended Robespierre, was guillotined on 25 July 1794 (1.5.68). Coriolanus: the

772

Notes to pages 141-4

passage qtd. in the novel is from 4.7.37-45 (1.6.92-3). Psalm 23: the allusion is to vs. 2 (3.4.476). Hamlet: the allusion is to 1.5.40 (3.4.476). "I am not mad": the allusion is to Acts 26:25 (3.5.517). It seems unlikely that Bronte is alluding to Racine's Berenice in the passage NF cites, "I am not mad, most noble Berenice!" In Acts Paul says, "I am not mad, most noble Festus." When Paul was examined by Festus, Bernice, the daughter of Herod Agrippa I and the sister of Agrippa II, was present; see Acts 25:13,23 and 26:30. 153 The attack, by Elizabeth Rigby, appeared in The Quarterly Review, December 1848,162-76. 154 Chap. 10, entitled "Mrs. Pryor," of vol. 2. 155 See Shirley, vol. 3, chap. 4. The Genesis myth is about the giants of the earth begetting children to the daughters of men. See WP, 283-4. 156 Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. 157 The resolute businessman in Shirley, described by Bronte as "taciturn, phlegmatic and joyless." 158 "M'amour, m'amour / what do I love and / where are you? / That I lost my center / fighting the world. / The dreams clash / and are shattered . . . / and that I tried to make a paradiso / terrestre." Notes for Canto 117 et seq., The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 822. NF quotes, or rather misquotes, the first three lines of the fragment in WP, 200. See also MM, 102,285. 159 "(Mon Moi, c'est Galathee aveuglant Pygmalion! / Impossible de modifier cette situation)," Dimanches, 11. 4-5, from Derniers vers, in Poesies Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 2:188. Cp. the quite similar couplet that concludes the fifth of the Dimanches poems in Des Fleurs de bonne volonte (ibid., 130). See also William Jay Smith's introduction to Laforgue's Moral Tales: "When Kate [a character in Laforgue's 'Hamlet, or the Consequences of Filial Piety'] recites his [Hamlet's] lines, it is too much for him. This is a case of 'Galatea blinding Pygmalion,' as Laforgue wrote elsewhere" (xv). Smith remarks that "no single book was as important to Laforgue as Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious" (xv). See WP, 87. 160 See NB 27, n. 246. 161 In Sanskrit prana means breath or breath of life. Breath and wind are often identified in Vedic writings, as they frequently are in other religious traditions. See GC, 11,19. 162 Both of Huxley's books are in the NFL: Island (New York: Bantam, 1963); The Genius and the Goddess (New York: Bantam, 1963). The former is annotated. 163 See DV, 81, or NFR, 232. 164 On the metaphor of the journey or "way," see WP, 90-4, and "The Journey as Metaphor," MM, 212-26. 165 A thesis advanced in "The Romantic Myth," SR, 3-49. 166 "The way up and the way down are one and the same" (Heraclitus, Frag-

Notes to pages 144-7

773

ment 108, in Heraclitus, ed. Philip Wheelwright, 90). T.S. Eliot quotes from the Greek fragment from Diels's ed. of Heraclitus as the second epigraph to Burnt Norton. Cf. Eliot's line from the The Dry Salvages: "And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back" (pt. 3,1. 6). See MM, 223-4. 167 A parody of the opening lines of Shelley's Queen Mob (1813): "How wonderful is Death, / Death and his brother Sleep!" 168 Hamlet's response to Gertrude's remark, "Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity" (Hamlet, 1.2.72-4). 169 That is, the introduction to WP. See esp. pp. xi-xvi. 170 "And those who have loved now love the more"—the last half of a couplet from the Vigil of Venus (Pervigilium Veneris), "Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet." NF chose not to use the line as an epigraph for WP; the epigraph he did use was suggested by A.C. Hamilton, who had read the book in manuscript. 171 See Walter J. Ong, "Systematic Theology and the Self: The Scotist Cosmos," in Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 106-12, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 172 NF is referring to the seven phases of revelation, developed in chap. 5 of GC: creation, revolution, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. 173 Because the Greek klimax means "ladder." 174 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 175 The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen papyrus codices found in 1945, is an important series of texts for understanding Gnosticism. An annotated copy of James M. Robinson's ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981) is in the NFL. 176 The sound made by the frogs in Aristophanes' The Frogs. 177 The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. NF summarizes Jaynes's argument in WP, 50-1, and MM, 73-4. 178 See n. 27, above. 179 Jaynes argues that human brains from about the tenth to the second centuries B.C. were bicameral: the hallucinatory area in the right temporal lobe of the brain worked intuitively, sending auditory commands to the brain's left hemisphere, where the message was spoken or enacted. That is, the brain was split in a way similar to the functioning of schizophrenia. Consciousness, according to Jaynes, arose about 1000 B.C., only after the rightleft brain synthesis. See WP, 50-1. 180 See NFS, 64, and MM, 31, both of which make reference to E.H. Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

774

Notes to pages 148-50

181 C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). The book was written in 1912, translated into English in 1916 by Jung's disciple Beatrice M. Hinkle, and rpt. in 1991, when it was issued as Supplementary Volume B in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Jung later revised the work, which appeared in English as Symbols of Transformation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), vol. 5 in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. NF read the Hinkle translation in the 19305. Annotated copies of both vols. are in the NFL. 182 See par. 170, above. 183 NF is referring to a whole series of ideas about memory developed by Samuel Butler in Life and Habit (1877) and Unconscious Memory (1880); "miserable comforters" is an allusion to Job 16:2. 184 Catherine Runcie, a friend and former colleague of NF's, who had left Victoria College to teach in Australia; she had assisted with the arrangements for the Fryes' trip to Australia. 185 In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February-3 May 1919, Keats wrote, "Call the world if you Please The vale of Soul-making' Then you will find out the use of the world." See WP, 300. 186 Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, 404-32. See WP, 50-1. 187 Hans Kiing, Eternal Life? Life after Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), 139. An annotated copy is in the NFL. See WP, 305-6. 188 "Ah, ha, boy! say'st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny [honest fellow]?" Hamlet's query to the ghost in Hamlet, 1.2.150. 189 For Jaynes the "analog T" is "the metaphor we have of ourselves" that allows us to experience things vicariously through our imaginations, The Origin of Consciousness, 62-3. 190 See Michel Foucault's "What Is Enlightenment?" trans. Catherine Porter, in A Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32-50, and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), chaps. 3-4. 191 "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange." See NB 27, n. 260. 192 See MM, 28, and WP, 109, where NF notes that a symbol was originally "a token or counter, like the stub of a theater ticket which was not the performance, but will still take us to where the performance is." 193 In chap. 2 of Joyce's Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says to his schoolmaster Mr. Deasy, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (New York: Random House, 1922), 35. 194 The reference is to Bishop Butler's view in The Analogy of Religion (1736) that ritual acts are analogies of the spiritual life. See WP, 97. 195 NF is referring to the sermon he delivered at a Thanksgiving service at

Notes to pages 150-3

775

Metropolitan United Church, Toronto, 5 October 1986. Excerpts from the sermon appeared as "The Dedicated Mind" in Vic Report, 15 (Winter 198687): 12-13, and the entire sermon, dedicated to the memory of Helen Kemp Frye, was pub. as "To Come to Light" in NUS, 27-37, and NFR, 360-6. 196 In Job 29, Job reflects on what his life was like before he lost everything. 197 See par. 186, above. 198 See n. 191, above. 199 "The Bride from the Strange Land." See NB 27, n. 327. 200 The five are: Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ruth, and Lamentations. 201 See NB 27, n. 136. 202 Qoheleth is a transliteration of the Hebrew title of the Book of Ecclesiastes, a form of the verb "to assemble" and traditionally rendered "preacher." 203 On the Magnificat, see NB 27, n. 330. On the culbute, see par. 76, above, and WP, 245. 204 On supplement, see NB 27, n. 197. For NF a "construal text" is one that leads to a particular or "directed" interpretation or commentary. See pars. 241 and 281, below, and NB 50, pars. 33 and 505. 205 See n. 191, above. 206 See par. 222, above. 207 The clause ("and the Son") added to the Nicene Creed by the Latin Church in the late sixth century, reflecting the doctrine that the Holy Spirit descends from the Father and the Son (ex Patre Filioque), a position maintained by the Latin Church as against Eastern Christendom, which held that the Spirit proceeded from the Father only. The addition is traditionally seen as having brought about the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom. See also NB 27, n. 82. 208 Blake's sky-god, Urizen. See WP, 244. 209 That is, chap. 2 of WP. The point was actually incorporated into chap. 3, "Identity and Metaphor." 210 See par. 140, above. 211 The distinction is in Summa Theologica, question 79. 212 See WP, 193. Eckhart makes the point in two sermons, Sermon 5 and Sermon 23, in Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Translation, 91-4, 325-30. In WP, 318, NF cites the Colledge and McGinn translation of The Essential Sermons, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 213 NF's reference to the "Parsifal book" is uncertain. In The Disinherited Mind Heller refers to the intransitive understanding of praise by Rilke and Nietzsche. See par. 348, below. 214 See pars. 222 and 230, above. 215 "A contrast or opposition between the religious and the secular, the sacred

776

216

217

218

219

220

221 222 223 224 225 226

227

Notes to pages 153-5 and the profane, does not work any more, if it ever did. Everything in religion has a secular aspect, and everything in secular life has religious implications, however ignored or undefined they may be" ("To Come to Light," NUS, 34, or NFR, 363). See the opening stanza of Blake's Auguries of Innocence, recorded in his notebook (the "Rossetti manuscript"). Interpenetration is one of the keys ideas in the Avatamsaka Sutra—an idea NF learned about from a comment in D.T. Suzuki's The Lankavatara Sutra (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932), xxxvi, more than fifty years earlier. Recently, NF had been reading Thomas deary's translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, The Flower Ornament Scripture (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," a paper NF presented at the University of New Mexico, 16 February 1983; pub. in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 15-29, and rpt. in MM, 44-59. Frau Olga Froebe-Kapteyn (1881-1962), who provided for the meetings of the Eranos Roundtables at her estate on Lake Maggiore. See the editor's Foreword to the various volumes of the Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Bollingen Series 30 (New York: Pantheon). Annotated copies of vols. i, 2, 4, and 5 of the Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks are in the NFL. Martin Buber, "Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism," in Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 168-85. "The Dove and Darkness in Ancient Byzantine Mysticism," in Man and Transformation: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 270-96. See par. 229, above. See WP, xii-xiii. See MM, 115. See WP, 28. On this etymology, see "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," MM, 28, and WP, 109. For Carlyle's distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic symbols, see "Symbols," chap. 3, bk. 3 of Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 165-71. NF expands on Carlyle's views in MM, 31. "The idea of a journey puts us in mind of the word way, whose meaning can be seen in the ideogram of the Chinese equivalent, tao. This is made up of a sign for a head with hair on it plus that for 'to go,' which is itself composed of two signs standing for 'to step with the left foot/ and 'to stop.' The explanation of the ideogram is that 'it is the way not only for the

Notes to pages 156-61

777

feet to walk in but also for the thoughts to move in.' In this it resembles the Latin word sentis, 'a path/ which is closely related to the verb sentire, meaning 'to feel/ 'to sense/ 'to scent'" (Francis Huxley, The Way of the Sacred [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974], 133-4). Two eds. of Huxley's book, both annotated, are in the NFL. 228 Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: MIT Press and John Wiley and Sons, 1961). On entropy, see pp. 11, 56-7, 62, 64. 229 "For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them" (Areopagitica, Hughes, 720). 230 On supplement, see NB 27, n. 197. 231 On Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura as symbolizing the triumph of love over death, see WP, 207. 232 See WP, 94. 233 The distinction between Redequelle (discourse source) and Semeiaquelle (sign source) is regularly found in the literature on the Gospel of John. See, e.g., Rudolph Bultmann's The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971). 234 The passages in John's Gospel NF refers to are, respectively, 1:26, 3:5, 4:626, 2:19-21, 2:1-10, 6:31-5, 48-51,11:1-46,17:1-5. 235 For the sign of Jonah, see Matthew 12:39-41 and Luke 11:29-32; John 3:14 refers to the account of the brass serpent of Moses in Numbers 21:9. 236 Ernst Hanchen, A Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. Robert W. Funk (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). 237 Samyama is the concentration through meditative discipline on a specific object in order to gain power over the object. 238 On the elephant, see chap. 3, sutra 23 of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, trans. Rama Prasada (New Delhi: Oriental Reprint, 1982), 224. In his commentary on the sutra, Vyasa says, "By samyama with reference to the strength of an elephant he comes to possess the strength of an elephant" (ibid.). For the secrets of breathing, see chap. 2, sutras 49-51, pp. 171-4. An annotated copy of The Yoga-Sutras ofPatanjali, 4th ed. (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1947), is in the NFL. 239 See WP, 104. 240 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930). 241 See Jacob Boehme's Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings and The Way to Christ, trans. John Joseph Stoudt (New York: Harper, 1947), 61-4, 78-89. See WP, 289. 242 On the Boehme-Schelling connection, see Nicolas Berdyaev's introduction to Boehme's Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, xxvii-xxviii. 243 See, e.g., i Corinthians 13:12.

778

Notes to pages 161-5

244 On the Hindu expression "the drunken monkey," see Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works (Almora: Advaita Ashrama, 1926), 1:174. The drunken monkey is also associated with the Buddhhist view that in order to advance to samadhi one must, through concentration, rid the mind of the distracting thoughts that continually jump from branch to branch in the consciousness. The Cloud of Unknowing is a fourteenth-century mystical prose work, written in Middle English by an unknown priest. 245 Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, 405-6. 246 See esp. chap. 2 of GC. 247 The reference is to Genesis 1:2: "And the earth was without form [tohu], and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep [tehom]." In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, Tiamat, the monster goddess, is slain by Marduk. The words tohu and tehom are said by scholars to be etymologically derived from the name Tiamat. See GC, 146. 248 The extensive "refutations" of P.M. Cornford's theories appeared in the ist ed. of Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge's Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) but were omitted from the 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 249 See WP, 122. 250 Theodor H. Caster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East (New York: Schuman, 1950). Caster's note on p. 396 is not about the Egyptian ladder. In a note on p. 400 he does refer to a study by H.P. Blok of "Egyptian conceptions concerning the ladder which leads to heaven." An annotated copy of the revised ed. of Thespis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961) is in the NFL. 251 In later entries (pars. 308, 527, and 585) NF seems uncertain about Irenaeus as the source of recapitulatio and about whether it is the Latin translation of the Greek apocatastasis. Recapitulation ("summing up" or "restoring") is a central theme in Irenaeus. He takes the idea from St. Paul (Ephesians 1:10, "to gather together in one"), but attaches his own meaning to it: the new beginning that brings about communion between God and man. See Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. Joseph P. Smith (New York: Newman Press, n.d.), 51, 67, 71,108. 252 The title of the final poem in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1967). 253 See WP, 56. 254 Susanne Langer's aesthetic, as developed in Feeling and Form (1953), rests on the theory that the major arts occupy "virtual" fields; they present the semblance of space, time, power, dream, memory, and so on. An annotated copy of Langer's book is in the NFL. For NF's review of Feeling and Form, see NFCL, 111-16. 255 See Pensees politiques et sociales [de] Napoleon, ed. Adrien Dansette (Paris: Flarnmarion, 1969), 296-7.

Notes to pages 165-70

779

256 For Jacobsen's two pars, on Otto, see The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 3; for his treatment of the wedding song and underworld descent, see chap. 2, "Fourth Millennium Metaphors." An annotated copy of Jacobsen's book is in the NFL. 257 See pars. 8 and 103, above. 258 See The Treasures of Darkness, 209-19; Jacobsen sees two literary traditions in the Gilgamesh epic, a tradition of the warrior and wall-builder, which he calls the "Hero line," and a tradition of fertility in the netherworld, which he calls the "Heros line." 259 The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 286. Lenclos (ca. 1620-1705) was one of the most renowned intellects of her time—and one of its most celebrated courtesans. 260 Notes 52, par. 15. 261 See WP, 56. 262 See WP, 87. 263 "All men by nature desire to know," the opening line of Aristotle's Metaphysics, 9803 (trans. Ross). 264 Stephan V. Beyer, The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. For the vow, see p. 405; for the dissolving of the subject-object world, PP- 453-4265 See WP, 36. 266 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 267 Cullen Murphy, "'Who Do Men Say that I Am?'" Atlantic Monthly, 258 (December 1986): 36-46. 268 NF is referring to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. See par. 37, above. 269 NB 27, par. 264: "Paine, Rights of Man: 'He {Burke} is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination . . . he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him.'" 270 The reference is to the soliloquy of Philip the Bastard, Robert Faulconbridge's half-brother, at the end of act 2 of Shakespeare's King John. 271 See pars. 280, above, and 527 and 585, below. 272 A reference to Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, pt. i, sees. 14-16, which conclude with Browne's postulate that "Nature is the Art of God" (The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 26); on "horse & design absurdities," see NB 27, par. 54. 273 Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings. See also "The Sixth Treatise on the Supersensual Life," The Way to Christ, 179-80, and WP, 289. 274 Because, according to Derrida, we can no longer think of Western metaphysics as being grounded in some central principle or idea outside of

780

275 276 277 278 279 280

281

282 283 284 285 286

287

288 289

Notes to pages 170-3 language, "a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside of a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely" (Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, 280). See WP, 105. NFS, 101-2; FS, 373-4. The allusion is to the concluding line of William Butler Yeats's Among School Children. See NB 27, n. 351. See NB 27, n. 17. See WP, 71-2. The reference is to a passage in one of Rilke's Briefe aus Muzot: "The 'Angel' of the Elegies has nothing to do with the Angel of the Christian heaven (rather with the angelic figure of Islam)" (Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender [New York: Norton, 1963], 87). See MM, 38. NF is referring to the oft-quoted passage in Mallarme's letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867, where he says, "I struggled with that creature of ancient and evil plumage [vieux et mechant plumage]—God—whom I fortunately defeated and threw to earth" (Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws, trans. Bradford Cook [New York: New Directions, 1982], 87). See WP, 239, and MM, 39. The "remarks on Shirley" ended up going into the last chap, instead of the first. See WP, 283-4. See par. 318, above. See WP, 34. See WP, 16, 97. In the medieval theory of four levels of interpretation, the allegorical meaning was what was to be believed (quid credas) and the moral meaning was what was to be done (quid agas). Mervyn Nicholson wrote to NF that "it would be wonderful to have your most daring thoughts and speculations" (3 January 1987). He repeats the hope in an undated letter of 1989. NF is apparently referring to the first letter. Both letters are in the NFF, 1991, box 9, file i. Nicholson wrote a dissertation under NF's supervision: "A Rock that Sparkles: Eikasia and Dianoia Imagery with Particular Reference to Keats and Stevens" (1979). Anatole France's Le Jardin d'Epicure (1894), trans, by A. Allinson in 1908 as The Garden of Epicurus, is similar to what NF would call an anatomy, an erudite excursion over a wide range of topics. See Dmitry Merezkovsky, Atlantis/Europe: The Secret of the West (Blauvelt, N.Y.: Rudolf Steiner, 1971). An annotated copy is in the NFL. Twilight was the title NF conceived for the final book (or books) in an eight-

Notes to pages 173-4

290 291

292

293

294 295 296

781

part project, the broad outlines of which he formulated as a young boy. Throughout the notebooks he uses a series of names and "hieratic forms" to refer to eight books he planned to write: Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight. His first dream—at about age nine—was to write eight concerti. After reading Scott, he had another wish—also at age nine—to write a sequence of historical novels, and when he had made his way through Dickens and Thackeray, the wish became "a sequence of eight definitive novels." When he was fourteen, each of these novels acquired the one-word descriptive name given above, and these names, along with their hieratic forms (e.g., A, _1_), remained with NF over the years: they appear hundreds of times in the notebooks as a shorthand way of referring to his writing projects. The emphases of the books changed over the years—often radically, but he saw them as "eight masterpieces in the same genre." He conceived of Twilight, as he suggests here, as his Tempest, his "valedictory," "the work of my old age." For the most complete accounts of the ogdoad project, see the holograph manuscript in the NFF, 1991, box 50, file i, and Notes 54.3, in the NFF, 1991, box 28, file 4. See also the diagram on pp. xlii-xliii of the present volumes, as well as the excellent exposition of the ogdoad by Michael Dolzani, "The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Note books," in Rereading Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 19-38. On the "transcendental signified," see n. 274, above; on verum factum, see NB 27, n. 116. In Yoga, the unawakened Kundalini is the sleeping spiritual force (lit. "serpent power"), imaged as a serpent coiled up asleep at the base of the spine; awakened, it rises to eventual spiritual vision. Morris Eaves, a friend of NF's, is professor of English at the University of Rochester and editor of the Blake Newsletter. The conversation took place when Eaves visited NF in Toronto in 1987 (Morris Eaves to Robert D. Denham, 30 March 1996). According to the documentary theory of the Pentateuch advanced by Julius Wellhausen and others in the nineteenth century, an editor put together four chief sources in creating the form of the first five books of the Bible we now have: the J (Jahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomic), and P (Priestly) sources. The reference here is to the legend of Ezra and the restoration of the Holy Scriptures in 2 Esdras 14. The title of a book by Robert Alter (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), chap. i. An annotated copy is in the NFL.

782

Notes to pages 174-7

297 A fragmentary Akkadian story which, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, is about a lost opportunity to gain immortality. NF read the myth in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 101-3. 298 Apparently a reference to Milton's gloss on Paul's use of the word "beginning." See Milton's Christian Doctrine, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Maurice Kelley (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 6:302-3. 299 "Before the Unconditional could manifest Itself under the conditions of existence, it was necessary that man should first have reached the ultimate frontier of consciousness, the secular limit of memory beyond which there remained but one thing for him to know, his Original Sin, but of this it was impossible for him to become conscious because it is itself what conditions his will to knowledge" (W.H. Auden, "The Meditation of Simeon," For the Time Being, in Collected Poems, 298). 300 See WP, 126. 301 The Romanticism chap, eventually became chap. 7 of WP. On the double heroine, see WP, 269. 302 See WP, xvi. 303 See WP, 156. Sepher Yetzirah (The Book of Formations), a brief, anonymous work of mystical cosmology, aims to account for the mystery of creation, which is seen as issuing from thirty-two "wondrous ways of wisdom," comprising three categories: writing, number, and speech. NF quotes from the fourth section of the work, in Origins: Creation Texts from the Ancient Mediterranean, trans. Charles Doria and Harris Lenowitz (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1976), 58, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 304 See WP, 44. 305 Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965). 306 Kingdom of Absence was the title of Dennis Lee's first book of poetry (Toronto: Anansi, 1967). 307 The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1957), 136See WP, 270-1. 308 Literally, "the ascension of Kore" (Persephone), a reference to the restoration from Tartarus of Persephone: Zeus commanded that Hades return Persephone to Demeter for a portion of every year. 309 Speaking to the leader of the chorus, Apollo says, "The woman you call the mother of the child / is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, / the newsown seed that grows and swells inside her. / The man is the source of life—the one who mounts" (Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 11. 666-9, trans. Robert Fagles). 310 "Neither Rilke nor Nietzsche praises the praiseworthy. They praise. They do not believe the believable. They believe. And it is their praising and

Notes to pages 178-82

783

believing itself that becomes praiseworthy and believable in the act of worship. Theirs is a religio intransitiva" (Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974], 171). See WP, 131. 311 That is, that Helen had died. Jane = Jane Widdicombe, NF's long-time secretary. 312 One of the characters in Bulwer-Lytton's mystical allegory is Ayesha, the sensuous mistress of a man named Margrave. In She (1885) Rider Haggard extended the myth of Ayesha, the ageless woman or She~who-must-beobeyed, and that was followed by his Ayesha, or the Return of She in 1905. Annotated copies of both Haggard books and Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story are in the NFL. 313 James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (New York: Knopf, 1926). 314 NF gave the Thomas More Lecture in the Humanities, "Natural and Revealed Communities," at the College of Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., on 22 April 1987; pub. in MM, 289-306. 315 See NF's comments on Lafferty's dystopia (1968) in MM, 302. 316 Plato uses the analogy of the divided line in bk. 6 of The Republic, 509d ff., separating the visible world into eikasia and pistis and the intelligible world into dianoia and noesis. 317 Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). For Barfield's exposition of Coleridge on interpenetration, see esp. chap. 3, "Two Forces of One Power." 318 See par. 338, above. 319 The reference is to st. 7 of Fletcher's Christ's Triumph over Death. See WP, 145320 Paradise Regained, bk. 4,11. 221-364. In WP, NF refers to these lines as the "obscurantist passage . . . where Jesus is tempted by Satan to become a Greek philosopher but refuses to have anything to do with any culture outside the Old Testament" (146-7). 321 "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," where NF probed the meanings of symbolon and symbolos. The material in (a) through (e) did not, as it turned out, serve as an outline for the chap, on "Spirit and Symbol" in WP. 322 See pars. 338 and 356, above. 323 The "confiscated gods," a phrase NF takes from the last stanza of Emily Dickinson's Because that you are going (Poem 1260), are Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus. 324 See GC, 140, and WP, 192.

325 See pars. 235 and 348, above. 326 See par. 324. 327 "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," MM, 37-8.

784

Notes to pages 182-5

328 The references are to Valery's longest poem La Jeune Parque (1917), and to his short prose work La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste (1896). 329 "—The very thirst that made you huge / Can raise to the power of Being the strange / All-probing force of Nothingness!" (Paul Valery, Poems, vol. i of The Collected Works of Paul Valery, trans. David Paul [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971], 205). 330 "I was tracking a snake there that had just stung me" (La Jeune Parque, \. 37, in Poems, 71). 331 Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things, with Other Writings (London: Dent, 1912), 14. See also par. 310, above, and WP, 289. NF's ordinary practice in the notebooks was to write Urgrund (ground of being) for Boehme's Ungrund (abyss). Neither word, however, can be translated simply, and Urgrund is often understood as the abyss of the medieval mystics. 332 Wu-ivei, a concept from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (37,11.1-2), means literally "non-doing," that is, nonmotivated, nonintentional action. R.B. Blakney's translation: "The Way is always still, at rest, / And yet does everything that's done" (The Way of Life [New York: Mentor, 1983], 90). 333 In his celebrated pamphlet What is the Third Estate? Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748-1836), French priest and revolutionary, began his answer by saying, "Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To be something." 334 See par. 324, above. 335 See WP, 124. 336 See GC, 124, and WP, 127. 337 See n. 285, above. 338 See NB 27, n. 246. 339 When Arthur beheads Orgoglio, the giant's body, says Spenser, "Was vanisht quite, and of that monstrous mas / Was nothing left, but like an emptie bladder was" (The Faerie Queene, 1.8.24). 340 In his own copy of Poe's The Domain of Arnheim NF wrote in the margin below the last par. "transformation of the elements" and "landscape gardening a symbol of reintegration with nature, like Zen pictures" (Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Talcs and Poems [New York: Modern Library, 1938], 615). 341 See WP, 74-5. 342 Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 267. Jung was actually visiting a tribe in Uganda, where he had travelled after leaving Kenya. An annotated copy of the 1965 ed. (New York: Vintage) is in the NFL. 343 See WP, 125-6. 344 "I have written the Poem [Milton] from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render'd Non Existent, & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a

Notes to pages 185-9

785

long Life, all produc'd without Labour or Study" (William Blake to Thomas Butts, 25 April 1803, The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970], 67). 345 An allusion to the first line of Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress (1681): "Had we but world enough, and time." 346 "The Journey as Metaphor," originally presented as a lecture at the Applewood Centre, Toronto, 8 October 1985; pub. in MM, 212-26; and "Repetitions of Jacob's Dream," originally presented as a talk at the National Gallery, Ottawa, 13 October 1983; pub. in EAC, 37-49, and NFR, 91-103. 347 On sous rature, see NB 27, n. 88. 348 See WP, 55. 349 See WP, 41. 350 Notes 52, par. 979. 351 The reference is to Schiller's concept of the Spieltrieb (play-drive), a synthesis of the two fundamental human drives, the Stofftrieb (sensuous drive) and the Formtrieb (formal drive). See esp. the fourteenth and fifteenth letters of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans, and ed. E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). On Huizinga, see par. 394, below. 352 See WP, 5-6. 353 See pars. 324 and 375. 354 That is, around NF's essay on More, "Natural and Revealed Communities," MM, 289-306. 355 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. See n. 51, above. 356 "Inscape" and "instress" are terms invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins to refer, respectively, to the inner nature of an object that reveals the unity of creation and to the divine energy that creates this essential nature. 357 After Aquinas's vision (or mental breakdown) on 6 December 1273, he determined to abandon the scholarly life, and when his secretary urged him to complete his Summa, he responded, "I cannot, because all I have written now seems like straw." Aquinas died on 7 March 1274. (Anthony Kenny, Aquinas [New York: Hill and Wang, 1980], 26). 358 NF's collection of essays and addresses on education, OE (1988). 359 The nine papers NF refers to: (i) "The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal," presented at the Toronto Wagner Society, 27 October 1982; pub. in Carleton Germanic Papers, 12 (1984): 37-49; rpt. in MM, 340-55; (2) "The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris," Studies in Romanticism, 21 (Fall 1982): 303-18; rpt. in MM, 322-39; (3) "The Responsibilities of the Critic," presented at Johns Hopkins University, 20 February 1976; pub. in MLN, 91 (October 1976): 797-813; rpt. in MM, 124-40; (4) "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake," presented at the University of California,

786

360

361

362 363 364 365 366 367

Notes to pages 189-90 Berkeley, February 1985; pub. in Vico and Joyce, ed. Donald Philip Verene (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987), 3-19; rpt. in MM, 356-74; (5) "Castiglione's // Cortegiano," presented at Aula Atti Accademici, Venice, 23 May 1979, and at the University of Urbino, 29 May 1979; pub. in Quaderni d'italianistica, \, no. i (1980): 1-14; rpt. in MM, 307-21; (6) "Natural and Revealed Communities," the Thomas More Lecture in the Humanities, presented at Holy Cross College, 22 April 1987; pub. in MM, 289-306; (7) "Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason," presented as the second of the 1982 Wiegand Lectures at the University of Toronto; pub. in Descant, 14 (Spring 1983): 7-21; rpt. in MM, 168-82; (8) "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," presented at the meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, Kingston, Ont., 26 October 1984; pub. in MM, 28-43; (9) "Framework and Assumption," presented at Smith College, 24 October 1985; pub. in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, i, no. i (1988): 2-10; rpt. in MM, 79-92. (i) "Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984," presented at McMaster University, 7 September 1984; pub. in OE, 168-82; (2) "Approaching the Lyric," presented at the Conference on Lyric Poetry and the New New Criticism, University of Toronto, 14 October 1982; pub. in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 5-17; rpt. in EAC, 130-6. (i) "The Mythical Approach to Creation," presented at the meeting of the Learned Societies, Montreal, 4 June 1985; pub. in MM, 238-54, and NFR, 117-32; (2) "The Expanding World of Metaphor," presented at the meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, 8 December 1984; pub. in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 53 (December 1985): 585-98; rpt. in MM, 108-123; (3) "The Dialectic of Belief and Vision," presented at the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto, 3 December 1985; pub. in Shenandoah, 39, no. 3 (1989): 47-64; rpt. in MM, 93-107, and NFR, 344-59; (4) "The Journey as Metaphor," presented at the Applewood Centre, Toronto, 8 October 1985; pub. in MM, 212-26; (5) "Repetitions of Jacob's Dream," presented at the National Gallery, Ottawa, 13 October 1983; pub. in EAC, 37-49, and NFR, 91-103. "The Bride from the Strange Land." See NB 27, n. 235. See n. 86, above. M.R. James. See, e.g., his Collected Ghost Stories (1931). This article was never written. NF lectured at Smith College on 24 October 1985; for his talk, "Framework and Assumption," see NB 27, n. 302. One of the sections in chap. 2, bk. 5 of Crowley's Little, Big (New York: Bantam, 1981) is entitled "Sylvie & Bruno Concluded," and bk. 5 itself is entitled "The Art of Memory." NF is associating Crowley's Bruno and Carroll's Bruno with the work of Frances Yates, the author of The Art of Memory (1966) and Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic

Notes to pages 190-4

787

Tradition (1964). Annotated copies of the books by Crowley, Carroll, and Yates are in the NFL. 368 An annotated copy of Waite's book is in the NFL. 369 An annotated copy of Duffy's book (St. Alban's, England: Panther, 1974) is in the NFL. 370 See Paul Ricoeur, "Freedom in the Light of Hope," in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 15582. On faith and hope, see WP, 128-9. 371 See WP, 66. 372 NF makes the point in WP, 34. 373 See WP, 89,240. 374 Joyce's pun on "kaleidoscope" in Finnegans Wake; it is the answer given in the book of riddles (143,1. 28; bk. i, chap. 6) to the question, what would the dreamer see if he could envision the entire story of HCE? 375 John Henry Cardinal Newman is referring to a proposition set forth in a sermon by Dr. Edward Hawkins: "that the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it" (Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura [New York: Norton, 1968], 20). See GC, 85, and WP, 99. 376 See MM, 302-4. 377 See par. 404; "128" refers to the page number of the notebook. 378 See WP, 75-6. 379 G.W.F. Hegel, "Preface: On Scientific Cognition," in Phenomenology of Spirit, 10 (par. 13). 380 See NB 27, n. 366, and WP, 227,182. 381 NF employs the idea of resonance at the beginning of chap. 3 of WP (64-5). 382 The concrete universal, one of Hegel's key concepts, is the category that results from the synthesis of two oppositions (e.g., becoming as emerging from the opposition of being and nonbeing). 383 See NB 27, n. 352. 384 See MM, 28-9. 385 NF could have in mind any number of passages from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. He is possibly thinking about the concluding pars, of sec. BB ("Spirit") and the beginning of sec. CC ("Religion"), pp. 407-12. 386 The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 62-6 (The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 9). 387 See WP, 277-8. The allusion is to Byron's The Vision of Judgment, 1. 689: "The former [history] is the devil's scripture." 388 "Now I pray you," the words of Arnaut Daniel, who requests that Dante remember his pain (Purgatorio, canto 26,1.145). Eliot's 1920 Poems were originally entitled Ara Vos Prec. 389 "Tenor" and "vehicle" are terms used by LA. Richards to describe metaphor, tenor being the subject that the vehicle illustrates. 390 See n. 316, above.

788

Notes to pages 194-6

391 The Bibles of authority, renewal, revolt, and redemption. See pars. 355-6, above. 392 See WP, 310-13, and GC, 195-8. 393 "Notre heritage n'est precede d'aucun testament" ["Our heritage was left to us by no testament"]. Qtd. from Rene Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946) in Arendt's Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1961), 3. NF reviewed the English translation of Char's book, Hypnos Waking (1956), in the Hudson Review, 10 (Spring 1956): 237-42; rpt. as "Poetry of the Tout Ensemble" in NFCL, 237-42. An annotated copy of Hypnos Waking is in the NFL. 394 See n. 33, above. 395 Chuan Tsu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, trans. Herbert A. Giles (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1926), 32. 396 See Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977), 229-38. 397 On the Hebrews passage, see NB 27, n. 92. On "substance" in Hebrews, see Hebrews 11:1 and NB 27, n. 92. On the Hegelian "Substance as Subject," see Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, 10 (sees. 17-18). 398 See n. 366, above. 399 See n. 360, above. 400 Mir can mean peace, world, universe, or village community in Russian, and the complications are that it is impossible to suggest all meanings with one word in translation. See WP, 84. 401 Hegel puns with the three meanings of aufheben (to lift up, to preserve, to cancel) in describing the mechanics of his dialectic. Once a certain philosophical position (thesis) has found its antithesis, the new synthesis that results lifts up the old position to a new level while at the same time preserving it as part of the new synthesis. See GC, 222-3. 402 The term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to designate the ways that different "voices" in a literary text disrupt the authority of a single voice (monologism). See his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 403 See NB 27, n. 352. 404 "Blake's Bible," presented to the St. James Piccadilly Blake Society, London, 2 June 1987; pub. in MM, 270-86. 405 One of the satiric verses from Blake's Notebook: "The Hebrew Nation did not write it, / Avarice & Chastity did shite it" (Erdman, 516). 406 See NB 27, n. 12. 407 See n. 158, above. 408 2 Clement 14:2: "The male is Christ, the female is the Church."

Notes to pages 197-8

789

409 On the male-female symbolism in Blake, see MM, 282-5. "Mead I" is a reference to vol. i of G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis (London: Watkins, 1964). The verse from the Second Epistle of Clement that NF refers to, and which is quoted by Mead (105, n. 5), is from 12:2: "For the Lord Himself being asked by some one when his Kingdom should come, said: When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female." Mead also records a similar passage from the Gospel According to the Egyptians, which Clement of Alexandria quotes several times (ibid.). An annotated copy of Mead is in the NFL. 410 See n. 170, above. 411 The references are all to events that transpired in 1987: the conference in Rome, Ritratto di Northrop Frye (May); NF's receipt of the Governor General's Award for NFS (May); his receipt of an honorary degree from Oxford (June); and the two sessions devoted to his work at the 1987 meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco (December). 412 NF hopes to finish the book within the year: Helen Frye was within twoand-a-half months of her seventy-sixth birthday when she died. 413 NF had named Jay Macpherson his literary executor but later relieved her of those duties. 414 NF presented the paper on Butler in February 1988, which means that the present entry was probably written in late 1987 or early 1988—in any case between 14 July 1987, when NF had turned seventy-five, and February 1988. 415 For the provenance of these papers, see the notes to par. 397, above; ten of the papers NF mentions were pub. in MM; the paper on Ruth appeared in EAC. 416 NF did not write the essay on American Gothic fiction, but he did complete one on "Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult" (EAC, 109-27). 417 An English translation of the sonnet is in Gerard de Nerval's Selected Writings, 217. See WP, 220. 418 NF visited Japan in April and May of 1977. 419 See, e.g., Tennyson's The Sea-Fairies; for The Lotus-Eaters, see 11. 46-52. For Tennyson's The Hesperides, see WP, 220. 420 "The lady I was following stretched her slender figure in a movement that made the folds of her dress of shot taffeta shimmer, and gracefully she slid her bare arm about the long stem of a hollyhock. Then, in a clear shaft of light, she began to grow in such a way that gradually the whole garden blended with her own form, and the flowerbeds and trees became the patterns and flounces of her clothes, while her face and arms imprinted their contours on the rosy clouds in the sky. I lost her thus as she became transfigured, for she seemed to vanish in her own immensity" (Nerval, Selected Writings, 131).

79°

Notes to pages 198-202

421 On Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia and George Macdonald's Phantasies, see WP, 286-7. 422 The phrase is Blake's: see The Four Zoas, Erdman, 337,1.13, and Milton, pi. 15,11. 39 and 46. 423 See WP, 247-8. The passage NF has in mind is "Land, land, land, nothing remains / Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech" (Ballad of the LongLegged Bait, 11. 259-60). 424 A student residence that provided undergraduates in the late 19605 with an alternative to the University of Toronto system of instruction. It became a centre of counter-culture activities and was eventually closed—in May 1975—for mortgage arrears. 425 Ferdinand's remark to Bosolo, who had strangled Ferdinand's sister in John Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi, 4.2.254. 426 A reference to Paul Tillich's "The Protestant Principle and the Proletarian Situation," chap. 11 of The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 161-81. Protestantism as a principle also appears throughout vols. 2 and 3 of Tillich's Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63). 427 "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange": from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest, 1.2.399-401. 428 "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). 429 Carl Jung, "Septem Sermones ad Mortuos," in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 378-90. 430 The Mahabharata, i: The Book of the Beginning, trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Van Buitenen says that "there is little doubt that the story was in part designed as a riddle" (xvi). 431 The reference is to Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy: Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). The plot begins with a stone in a snowball thrown by Percy "Boy" Staunton at his friend Dunstable (later Dunstan) Ramsay; after Boy's death sixty years later the same stone is found in his mouth. 432 "I wonder what it would really be like to get one's mind completely clear of the swirl of mental currents. It would be like walking across the Red Sea to the Promised Land, with walls of water standing up on each side" (NB 3, par. 184). 433 NF is recalling two passages from Mallarme's "Variations sur un sujet": "Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusiers, manque la supreme: penser etant ecrire sans accessoires, nu chuchotement mais tacite encore 1'immortelle parole, la diversite, sur terre, des idiomes empeche personne de proferer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-

Notes to pages 202-4

791

meme materiellement la verite." "L'ceuvre pure implique la disparition elocutoire du poete, que cede 1'initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inegalite mobilises" ["Languages are imperfect in that although there are many, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is to write without accessories, or whispering, but since the immortal word is still tacit, the diversity of tongues on the earth keeps everyone from uttering the word which would be otherwise in one unique rendering, truth itself in its substance." "The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference."] (CEuvres Completes, 363-4, 366; trans. Mary Ann Caws). 434 See NB 27, par. 233. 435 A reference, perhaps, to \ Corinthians 1:23. 436 "For me it seems a pity that in English we have no name to distinguish the Providence which rules from the Providence which provides" ("How Kierkegaard Got into English," an afterword by Walter Lowrie to his translation of Kierkegaard's Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946], 193). The passage is marked in the annotated copy of the book in the NFL. 437 Memoirs of a Book-Molesting Childhood and Other Essays (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23. 438 NF's maternal grandfather, Eratus Seth Howard, was a Methodist preacher. Ayre reports that he "instilled his family with unshakeable and often numbing convictions of Tory and Methodist rectitude and superiority" (14). 439 The quotation is from Devotions on Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17: "Now, this bell tolling softly for another says to me: Thou must die." See WP, 126. 440 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1988), 112. NF quotes the first sentence in WP, xxiii. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 441 A book consisting chiefly of papers presented at a program of the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 1975. "Concepts . . . Chain of Being is the subtitle (New York: Peter Lang, 1987; rev. ed., 1988). 442 Above "fire explained" NF wrote "(aither)," Greek for 'ether.' 443 See WP, 168. 444 NF is referring to his marriage to Elizabeth Eedy Brown on 27 July 1988. 445 For Donne, see par. 464; for Montaigne, par. 428. In Paradiso, canto 33,11. 85-7, Dante describes how the Eternal Light "contains within its depths / all things bound in a single book by love / of which creation is the scattered leaves" (trans. Musa). 446 The Barbelo-Gnostics were an early Gnostic group: Barbelo was the First

792

Notes to pages 204-7

Thought of the Perfect Spirit, which appeared in many forms. Among the Ophite sect laldabaoth was the name of the demiurge. 447 See WP, 144-7. 448 See WP, 293. 449 See WP, 115. 450 See WP, 83. 451 According to Samuel Johnson, "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy' did not last" (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson [London: Dent, 1901], 2:204); the Russian Formalist was Viktor Shklovsky. See his "A Parodying Novel: Sterne's Tristram Shandy," in Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 66-89. Shklovsky published this essay in 1929; an earlier version (1921) appears in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). See MM, 80-1. 452 NB 50, par. 726. 453 The reference is to st. 7 of Fletcher's Christ's Triumph over Death: "But he that conquer'd hell, to fetch again / His virgin widow by a serpent slain, / Another Orpheus was than dreaming poets feign." NF quotes the stanza in WP, 145. 454 The reference is to the Paradiso, canto 33,11. 94-6: "Un punto solo m'e maggior letargo / che vinticinque secoli a la 'mpresa / che fe Nettuno ammirar 1'ombra d'Argo" ["One instant brings me more forgetfulness / than five and twenty centuries brought the quest / that stunned Neptune when he saw Argo's keel" (trans. Musa)]. See WP, 178. 455 As conveyed through awareness of time by Prince Myshkin, recounting what he heard from one of his professor's patients awaiting execution. See WP, 178. 456 Pt. 3 of Mallarme's Herodiade, the Cantique de Saint-Jean is about the decollation of John the Baptist. About the poem NF says in WP: "the image of the severed head is linked with the position of the sun in the zenith, suggesting the paradoxical timeless moment that never quite exists" (268). 457 The reference is to "Zeno of Elea's vision of a motionless universe" in Valery's Cimetiere marin, as NF describes it in WP, 184. 458 On Ovid, see WP, 73,145. 459 See Tolstoy's War and Peace, bk. 13, chap. 4, bk. 14, chap. 3, and bk. 15, chap. 5. 460 The Venetian nobleman in Candide (1759) who shocks Candide by his dismissal of the received opinions about music and literature, among other things. 461 For the trickster-god passage, see WP, 106-7. 462 In Thespis Theodore Caster observes that the activities of seasonal ceremo-

Notes to pages 207-10

793

nies in the primitive community fall into two groups, the rites of kenosis, or emptying, and the rites of plenosis, or filling (4). 463 See par. 61, above. 464 The ascension of Persephone. See WP, 253. 465 On Kundry, see NF's "The World as Music and Idea in Wagner's Parsifal," MM, 340-4. 466 The Player Queen (1907-10) is a play by Yeats. It contains his poem The Mask, an early embodiment of his complex theory of the social self and its defences. 467 On The Tempest, see the introduction to The Tempest, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Penguin, 1970), 14-24; NFS, 171-86; and NP, 150-2. On technology and introversion, see "The Quality of Life in the Seventies," R W, 34962. On television and unrest, see "Violence and Television," RW, 363-73. 468 See WP, 83. 469 See WP, 149. 470 William Anderson, Dante the Maker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 365-7. The annotated copy in the NFL is the 1983 ed. (London: Hutchinson). 471 See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1936). The original German ed. appeared in 1917. 472 According to Lacan, "the name of the father" (his significance or power) represents the constraints against childhood desire. For NF's adaptation of this and other Lacanian notions, see "Lacan and the Full Word," in Criticism and Lacan, 187-9. On the "trickster" passage, see WP, 106-7. 473 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pt. 4, chap. 2. 474 See NB 27, n. 66. 475 In "The Critic as Artist," Gilbert remarks: "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music . . . creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears" (The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [New York: Harper and Row, 1989], 1011). See also NB 27, n. 72. 476 "Or [think] of the poets Rilke and Valery, waiting patiently for years in silence until what they had to say was ready to be said" (£/ [the Massey Lectures], 96). 477 NF is apparently referring to the contrast between the virgin queen of Christianity and the maternal vision of love in Shelley. On the latter, see SR, 112-14. 478 The passage about the trickster god was retained in chap. 4 of WP, "Spirit and Symbol" (106-7). 479 See NB 27, n. 285.

794

Notes to pages 2io-i 3

See WP, 226. See NB 27, par. 189. See WP, 164 (chap. 5), 230 (chap. 7). On Lucy, see Wordsworth's A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal; on the ascension of Kore, see WP, 253; "Blake's black girl" is a reference to Lyca in Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Found (Songs of Experience), "not yet" referring to the fact that, as NF says in WP, she is "waiting to enter her rightful kingdom" (270). 484 See WP, 247, and DV, 13, or NFR, 175. NF takes the phrase "selfish gene" from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). An annotated copy of a later ed. (London: Granada, 1978) is in the NFL. 485 "You may drive out nature with a fork, yet still she will return" (Horace, Epistles, 1.7.96). See WP, 240. 486 This idea is developed in WP, 240-2. 480 481 482 483

487 See WP, 257. 488 See WP, 279. 489 See WP, 90-6. 490 See WP, 252-7, 262-4. 491 Almost certainly a reference to Theodore Roethke's Journey to the Interior, which NF deleted from WP. See, however, the commentary on the poem in "The Journey as Metaphor," MM, 223. 492 This theme is examined at the end of chap. 7 of WP (271). 493 See WP, 294-8. 494 See WP, 279-81. 495 See WP, 269-71. 496 Inferno, canto 34. See WP, 260. 497 See WP, 278. 498 Chap. 5 did retain one remark about socialist realism as displacement (149)499 See WP, xvi. 500 This is a reference to pt. 3, p. 12 of a draft of WP. 501 See WP, 72. 502 In the myth of Er, the spindle that turns on the knees of Necessity (Republic, bk. 10,6i7c ff.). 503 See NB 27, par. 427. 504 WP, 256-7. 505 See WP, 273. 506 "Rather than the metaphor of logos, Strindberg used the metaphor of mythos, illuminating the context through the narrative, structural analogy of a mythic resonance, and in so doing revealed the kind of commitment he made as a playwright. In choosing mythos over logos he was favoring the

Notes to pages 213-17

795

intuitive and even irrational over the systematically philosophical" (Harry G. Carlson, Strindberg and the Poetry of Myth [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982], 96). In the notes to WP, NF does not quote or refer to Carlson's book, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 507 See WP, 258. 508 See par. 504, above. 509 At the end of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Gynt returns to Norway to discover that the button-moulder is waiting to melt him into nothingness. 510 Catastasis = plausible but false solution; apocatastasis = restitution of all things. See par. 589, below. 511 Recapitulatio is the Latin translation of the Greek anakephalaiosis. On Irenaeus' recapitulatio, see pars. 280 and 308, above, and par. 585, below. Kierkegaard's treatment of the idea is in Repetition. 512 See WP,265. 513 "The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written" (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination [New York: Knopf, 1951], 142). See WP, 84514 In a letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867, Mallarme speaks of there being only one book to create, "the Great Work, as our ancestors the alchemists used to say"—a book that would embody the structure of the universe (Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, ed. and trans. Rosemary Todd [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 76). See WP, 292. 515 On the theme of the double, see WP, 266-71. On the time-travel and parallel-world themes in James, see EAC, no. 516 See WP, 271. Seraphita is one of the novels in Balzac's Comedie humaine. 517 "Borges and I," in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 246-7—a parable by Borges about himself and his alter-ego, the writer. 518 Paul Verlaine, Art Poetique (1882), 1. 21. See WP, 59. NF had apparently attributed the remark to Valery in one of his drafts. 519 See WP, 284-6, 301-2. 520 See WP, 84. 521 See WP, 284. 522 On educational repetition and Yeats's Byzantium poems, see WP, 302-5. 523 The belief that the activity of God can be seen in things that science cannot explain, such as the details of evolutionary mechanisms. 524 See n. 502, above. 525 Cf. par. 528, above. For the Russian word mir, see n. 400, above. For the themes of this par., see WP, 84. 526 NB 50, par. 744. 527 Eleanor Cook, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens

796

Notes to pages 217-23

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 49, n. 37. The author's presentation copy is in the NFL. Cook was NF's colleague at Victoria College. Colie's book is Parodoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). On Wallace Stevens's The Snow Man, see WP, 291. 528 Robert M. Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). 529 Norma Arnett, a student at Victoria College, class of 1949. After she graduated, she began writing NF, averaging a letter a day for almost ten years. In a letter to William Fennell, dated 14 May 1980, NF refers to Arnett's letters, as well as the writing she submitted to him, as "psychotic blither." NF finally had to ask that the letters be stopped. She continued to write at intervals, but NF instructed his secretary to return them unopened. 530 "We cannot undo the past. English literature will ever have been Protestant" (John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, in A Newman Reader, ed. Francis X. Connolly [New York: Image Books, 1964], 300). 531 On supplement, see NB 27, n. 197. 532 John 11:50. See WP, 61. 533 See WP, xvii-xviii. 534 See NB 27, n. 320. 535 See WP, 46-7. 536 Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, st. 46. On the Mutabilitie Cantos, see WP, 181-4. 537 Wisdom of Solomon 18:14-19. See GC, 174. 538 See DV, 74-5, or NFR, 226-7. 539 See WP, xxii. 540 "What dreadful rubbish." 541 Above the end of "allegories" NF wrote "zation." 542 See WP, xx-xxi. 543 See WP, 125. 544 See WP, 267. 545 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 84. See WP, xxiii. 546 See WP, 277. 547 See WP, 57-8, 61. The "Edward III passage" is from Shakespeare's Henry V, 1.2.162-5. 548 See par. 548, above. 549 See WP, 61-2. 550 See WP, 83, 309-10. "3/31" is a reference to pt. 3, p. 31 of a draft of WP. 551 A reference, apparently, to "The Koine of Myth," MM, 3-17. 552 See n. 530, above. 553 See n. 516, above. 554 See WP, 286-7. 555 A reference to NB 45. The Joachim of Floris reference is in par. 97.

Notes to pages 223-6

797

556 Lucian, "To One Who Said, 'You're a Prometheus in Words/" in Lucian, trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 6:417-27, which is about the combining of dialogue and comedy to form a new genre. 557 This point, which NF mentions in NB 27, par. 310, and in pars. 191, 376, and 509, above, did not get included in WP. 558 See WP, 191-2. 559 Ewig-Weibliche = the eternal feminine, from the penultimate line of Goethe's Faust, pt. 2. 560 See n. 530, above. 561 The passage NF remembers actually does come from The White Peacock: '"Just look!' he [the gamekeeper] said, 'the dirty devil's run her muck over that angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement'" (The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 149). 562 See WP, 300-1. 563 See WP, 297-313. 564 NF did include his remarks about the catastasis device in his glance at the detective story in chap. 7. See WP, 264-5. 565 See pars. 280, 308, and 527, above. 566 See WP, 265. 567 See WP, 311. 568 See WP, 302. 569 See WP, 303. 570 For the Argonaut allusion, see Paradiso, canto 2,11. 16-18; for the letargo passage, see n. 454, above. 571 See WP, 304-5. 572 Statius, author of the Thebaid and the unfinished Achilleid, overtakes Dante and Virgil in canto 21 of the Purgatorio. See WP, 302-3. 573 "A man cannot say, T will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is, as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness" (Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967], 30). 574 "The arts might be more clearly understood if they were thought of as forming a circle, stretching from music through literature, painting and sculpture to architecture, with mathematics, the missing art, occupying the vacant place between architecture and music" (AC, 364). 575 Vanni Fucci (canto 24) readily reveals his name. Perhaps NF means Filippo Argenti (canto 8), Bocca degli Abati (canto 32), or Guido da Montefeltro (canto 27). 576 In The Tibetan Book of the Dead the bardo is the "in-between state," connecting the death of an individual with the rebirth that follows. 577 NF placed the pars, on beauty at the end of chap. 6 of WP (226-8).

798

Notes to pages 226-9

578 Sergei Hackel, The Poet and the Revolution: Aleksandr Blok's "The Twelve" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 579 From the Greek kosmos, "order." 580 See DV, 84, or NFR, 234. 581 See WP, 163. 582 "'Reason' in language!—oh what a deceptive old witch it has been! I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar" (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici [New York: Russell and Russell, 1964], 22). NF seems to have picked up the Nietzschean point from Foucault's The Order of Things: see NB 50, par. 635. 583 See n. 127, above. 584 See WP, 227. 585 See WP, 298. 586 W.B. Yeats, Byzantium, 1. 28. Cf. Statius' explanation of the generation of the body in the Purgatorio, canto 25,11. 34-108. 587 See WP, 154. 588 See WP, 121. 589 See WP, 116. 590 See WP, 246. 591 See par. 37, above. 592 On the letargo point, see n. 454, above. NF retained the letargo passage from the Paradiso in WP, 178. The demonic-letargo point apparently had to do with the inability to forget. 593 "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena" (John von Neumann, qtd. by James Gleick in Chaos: Making a New Science [New York: Penguin, 1987], 273). An annotated copy of Chaos is in the NFL. 594 See WP, 119-22. 595 See WP, 127. See also par. 131, above. 596 See WP, 119-21. 597 "Jesus Christ was the first who clearly pointed out to men who is the apologist and teacher of all feigned virtues, and the detractor and persecutor of all true ones; the adversary of every sort of greatness that is intrinsic and truly proper to man; the derider of every high sentiment, unless he believes it to be false, and of every sweet affection, if he believes it to be private; the slave of the strong, the tyrant of the weak, the enemy of the unfortunate, to which Jesus Christ Himself gave a name, which it has kept in all civilized languages up to the present day: the World" (Giacomo Leopardi, "Selected Reflections, 84," in Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. and

Notes to pages 230-1

799

trans. Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs [New York: New American Library, 1966], 169). 598 See WP, 120-1. 599 Bk. 3, chap. 13 of De Monarchia, in A Translation of the Latin Works of Dante Alighieri (New York: Greenwood, 1969), 223-4. 600 NF did add Dante to the list. See WP, 44. 601 "Socrates was forcing them [Agathon and Aristophanes] to admit that the same man might be capable of writing both comedy and tragedy—that the tragic poet might be a comedian as well" (Symposium, 223d [trans. Jowett]). 602 Thoth, the inventor of writing, is told by the Egyptian king, Thamas, that writing engenders forgetfulness rather than memory (Phaedrus, 2746-275^. See WP, 295. 603 Frederick W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 132-3. 604 A reference to the speech of Lysias that Phaedrus brings with him at the beginning of the Phaedrus (228a-e). Later in the dialogue Socrates distinguishes between reminders, such as Lycias' speech, and the kind of genuine memory that does not depend on "external marks" (2753). 605 In the context of the quotation from Proverbs, NF may have in mind Joel 2:28: "And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions." 606 On "the personal" as the excluded initiative of "the impersonal," see WP, 12-13. 607 Revelation 14:4: "These [the 144,000 who were redeemed] are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins." 608 "Whoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin because he is born of God" (i John 3:9). On the Revelation and John passages, see WP, 127, 275. 609 A pun on Joshua 9:21: "but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation." 610 See WP, 270-1, where Thomas's A Winter's Tale gets mentioned. 611 "Just as the Eucharist in Christianity is founded on the metaphorical basis of food and drink, so baptism becomes the physical image of spiritual cleanliness, the separating of the true individual from the excreta of original sin" (WP, 263). 612 Euthymiae Raptus, or The Teares of Peace, in The Poems of George Chapman, 171-200; the poem is about the value of learning and its abuses. NF does not quote the poem in WP. 613 ma'alah = step (Hebrew). 614 "The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If

8oo

615 616 617 618 619 620 621

622 623 624

625

626

627

628

629

Notes to pages 231-4 we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them." These words, attributed to Chief Seattle, were actually written by Fred Perry, as a fictionalized version of what Chief Seattle might have said, for a film script. See WP, 307. In Keats's letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817: "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream—he awoke and found it truth." See WP, 307. See WP, 308. See WP, 312. See WP, 208. "Natural and Revealed Communities." The topics in pars. 638-45 relate to this article. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), 1:1-37 (bk. i, chaps. 1-4). R.A. Lafferty's Past Master (1968). See MM, 302. This article, which appeared in New Society, rather than New Statesman, was a reprinting, with slight editorial changes, of the last half of "The Universities and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract," in Higher Education and Response, ed. W.R. Niblett (London: Tavistock, 1969), 35-59. It appeared as "The Educational Contract" in New Society, 14 (20 November 1969): 811-14. "The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century," in Literary Views: Critical and Historical Essays, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 145-58; rpt. in StS, 241-56. NF is referring to the essays by Krieger and Wimsatt in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). See Krieger's "Northrop Frye and Contemporary Criticism," esp. pp. 3-4, and W.K. Wimsatt's "Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth," pp. 75-107"Toynbee and Spengler," Canadian Forum, 27 (August 1947): 111-13; r pt- in NFCL, 76-83; "Turning New Leaves," Canadian Forum, 29 (September 1949): 138-9; rpt. as "The Rhythm of Growth and Decay" in NFCL, 141-6; "Oswald Spengler,"in Architects of Modern Thought (Toronto: CBC, 1955); rpt. in RW, 315-25; "The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler," Dsedalus, 103 (Winter 1974): 1-13; rpt. as "Spengler Revisited" in SM, 179-98. It is not clear what writings NF has in mind here. He often referred to the "butterslide" view of history, the view that civilization has been going downhill ever since the Middle Ages. "Yeats and the Language of Symbolism," University of Toronto Quarterly, 17 (October 1947): 1-17; rpt. in FI, 218-37; "The Rising of the Moon: A Study of 'A Vision/" in An Honoured Guest: Essays on W.B. Yeats, ed. Denis

Notes to pages 235-7

801

Donoghue and J.R. Mulryne (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 8-33; rpt. in SM, 245-74; "The Top of the Tower: A Study of the Imagery of Yeats," Southern Review, 5 (Summer 1969): 850-71; rpt. in StS, 255-77. 630 The reference is to Rene Magritte's realistic painting of a pipe which he entitled Ceci n'est pas une pipe. See WP, 63. 631 The books referred to in this entry: Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962); James Harrington, The Commonwealth ofOceana (1656), ed. S.B. Liljegran (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979); Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932); Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); Sacvan Berkovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975); Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages (1613). NF uses "the whirligig of time" as the title of pt. i, chap, i of DV; it means for him the rhythmic cycle of history. 632 Richard Hakluyt (15527-1616) left unpublished a number of papers that came into the hands of Samuel Purchas (i575?-i626). Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625) is in part based on the manuscripts left by Hakluyt at his death. 633 Spingarn speaks of Henry Reynolds's Mythomystes (1632) as a "perverse work," the opening pages of which "make one regret that its author has gone off on a tangent" (Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J.E. Spingarn [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957], i:xxi). 634 Eratus Howard Frye, born 29 March 1899, was killed by artillery fire near Amiens, 18 August 1918. 635 For the footnote in Robert Greer Cohn's The Poetry of Rimbaud that NF refers to, see NB 27, n. 193. 636 See NB 27, par. 240. 637 NF probably had in mind a passage from Constantine's "Oration to the Saints": "This generation [of the Son] was accompanied by no diminution of the Father's bowels" (Minge, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 20 [trans, by Jaroslav Pelikan in Pelikan to Robert D. Denham, 12 December 1996]). Another candidate for the reference is from Origen's fragmentary commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the Son is described as the "bodily outflow" of the Father. Origen's diroppoux (Lat. aporrhea) means "emanation" or "effluence"; while this term is related to dTroppvcnq, "excrement," the patristic use of the term, according to Robert L. Wilken, derives from Wisdom of Solomon 7:25 in the Septuagint, where the pure "emanation" of God seerns to come from the mouth rather than the anus (Wilken to Robert D. Denham, 7 January 1997). The Latin text is in Origenis Opera Omnis

802

638 639

640

641

642 643 644 645

646

647 648

Notes to pages 237-9 (Berlin, 1835), 5:299-300; the translation "bodily outflow" is from Johannes Quasten, Patrology (Baltimore, Md.: Newman Press, 1953), 2:78. "A story about a man to whom nothing has ever happened" (WP, 290). NF borrows the title here from Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations (ca. 1670), a work of luminous religious sensibility that centres on his philosophy of "felicity." Traherne did not entitle his book, but he numbered the paragraphs of his meditations from one to one hundred. After he had completed the first "century," he began the numbering sequence all over again, calling this and the subsequent sections of his book "Centuries." A long typescript (193 single-spaced pages) of forty-seven sections, most of which relate to NF's reading for a book on romance. Many of these notes, which were written in the early 19705, served as material for NF's Norton lectures at Harvard, pub. as SeS. The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 28, files 5 and 6. In the myth from the New Hebrides that NF has in mind, "the newly-dead man is believed to arrive before the entrance to a cave on the seashore, where he encounters the dreaded Guardian Ghost. In front of the cavemouth is a design called 'The Path,' traced upon the sand by Lev-hev-hev. At his approach she obliterates half the design, which the dead man must complete or be devoured" (Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn, 156). On the Malekula riddle, see also DV, 44, or NFR, 201. Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972) sets forth a pseudo-history of racial oppression. See n. 593, above. See n. 57, above. NF was asked to give the plenary address, which was also the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture at the University of Minnesota, at the 1990 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Minneapolis. His talk, "Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility," was pub. in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 24 (Winter 1990-91): 157-72; rpt. in EAC, 94-108. NF did include a very similar sentence in WP: "So while my critical approach has been said to be deficient in rigor, this does not matter so much to me as long as it is also deficient in rigor mortis" (xx). NF believed that criticism of his work of the Frank Kermode variety was "based on the fallacy of a system where things have to fit" (Notes 53, par. 145). See Frank Kermode, "Northrop Frye and the Bible," in Ritratto di Northrop Frye, ed. Agostino Lombardo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 105-20. NF and his second wife Elizabeth owned a condominium in Simcoe, Ont. The reference is to Lester Furnival in Charles Williams's All Hallow's Eve (1948). She was killed when a plane crashed on her, and the novel opens with her wandering in London as the bombing in World War II has just come to a halt.

Notes to pages 239-42

803

649 References to the trickster god appear in pars. 486, 497, 503, 510, 561, and 597, above, and par. 692, below. 650 See WP, 42. 651 The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies, ed. Glenn Robert Negley and John Max Patrick (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1962). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 652 Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (Boston: Beacon, 1955). 653 These hieratic codes represent the first four volumes of NF's ogdoad: Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, and Rencontre. 654 The second four books of the ogdoad: Mirage, Twilight, Paradox, and Ignoramus. Above _L in this list NF put the symbol H. And then he wrote another sequence of codes, apparently correcting those that appear in the entry: V (Mirage), r- (Paradox), _L (Ignoramus), and f (Twilight). The symbol L in NF's notebooks and diaries ordinarily appears as J; and the symbol h, as H. 655 Ad majorem Dei gloriam, "to the greater glory of God": the motto of the Jesuits. 656 See WP, 26-7. 657 See WP, 42. 658 See WP, 175-6. 659 See WP, 185-6. 660 See WP, 186. 661 See the prefatory note to pt. 2 of WP, 139-40. 662 See chap. 3 of RE, 60-88. 663 See n. 641, above. 664 See WP, 263-4,29O665 See n. 484, above. 666 See Genesis 4 and WP, 274. 667 NF apparently means to refer to Matthew 18:22: "I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven," which would be the New Testament forgiveness antitype of the Old Testament revenge type in the account of Lamech (Genesis 4:23-4). NF cites no passage in connection with the reference to Lamech in WP, 274. 668 See WP, 278. 669 See WP, 221. 670 The "variations" are the four archetypes NF examines in chaps. 5-8 of WP. 671 NF has slightly misquoted the phrase from Jerusalem, pi. 92,11.16-18: "hidings of Cruelty in Deceit / Appear only in the Outward Spheres of Visionary Space and Time. / In the shadows of Possibility by Mutual Forgiveness forevermore ..." 672 In his autobiography (The Education of Henry Adams), Adams contrasts the

804

Notes to pages 243-4

power of the Virgin, "the ideal of human perfection," representing the thirteenth-century synthesis, with the dynamo, the symbol of the multiplicity of twentieth-century power and energy. 673 See WP, 243. 674 An invitation from Principal Douglas Jay for NF to deliver three lectures at Emmanuel College in May 1990. These lectures became the first three chaps, of DV. 675 The lecture on More, which NF gave, not at Boston College, but at the College of Holy Cross, was "Natural and Revealed Communities." He presented a revised version of the lecture at McGill University, 17 October 1989. A page of holograph notes, which NF used to adapt the Newman lecture from the one at Holy Cross, are in the NFF, 1991, box 38, file 6. 676 NF gave this talk on 23 November 1989; pub. in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, 3, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 23-32, and rpt. in EAC, 21-34. 677 See n. 57, above. 678 An address NF presented at the annual meeting of the Northeast Modern Language Association, Toronto, 6 April 1990; the address, entitled "The Double Vision," was related to the "Double Vision" lectures he gave the following month at Emmanuel College; NF spoke only from notes. 679 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian, 1955)680 The lectures NF is planning here are for the Emmanuel College series. 681 NF is referring to his talk at Mt. Sinai Hospital; see par. 699, above. 682 The references here are to the lecture, "Literature as Therapy," mentioned in the previous par. For the story about Scott's novels serving as a therapeutic agent for his mother's illness, see EAC, 33. For "the Lear lecture," see "King Lear," NFS, 101-21. 683 Etienne Gilson founded the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1929; Jacques Maritain later taught at Toronto. 684 The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) was Newman's first book, originally commissioned as part of a history of Church councils. The Via Media was the term used by Newman and other Tractarians to designate the "middle way" between the polity of Rome and the values of the Reformation. See chap. 3 of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). 685 NF is still referring to the Emmanuel College lectures. See par. 698, above. 686 Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism (New York: Scribner's, 1947); Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978; orig. pub. 1953); Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953); Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1953). NF was at Princeton as class of 1932 visiting lecturer in 1954.

Notes to pages 245-50

805

687 That is, the third of the Emmanuel College lectures. 688 Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 619. 689 In MC (the Whidden Lectures for 1967) NF defines "stupid realism" as "a kind of sentimental idealism, an attempt to present a conventionally attractive or impressive appearance as an actual or attainable reality" (61). "Stupid realism," he adds, "depends for its effect on evoking the ghost of a dead tradition" (63). 690 That is, the witty, erotic, and often obscene tales popular among the Greeks and Romans; they can be found in the Milesiae Fabulae, among other places. 691 That is, into the halls of Los's palace in Golgonooza, the city of art and manufacture in Blake's mythology. 692 See "A Summary of the Options Conference," University of Toronto Bulletin, 31 (24 October 1977), 6-7; "Summation," Symposium on Television Violence/ Colloque sur la violence a la television (Ottawa: Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, 1976), 206-15; rpt. in RWas "Violence and Television," 363-73. 693 "Approaching the Lyric." See n. 360, above. 694 The "toast" is one NF gave at a dinner at Massey College, University of Toronto, in connection with a Ben Jonson conference, 27 October 1972. According to the convener of the conference, NF spoke for about ten minutes from notes he had made on a card (William Blissett to Robert D. Denham, 23 September 1997). 695 These are doubtless the "Commissioning—Benedictions" NF gave at various baccalaureate services; pub. in NFR, 338, 343, 371, and 372. 696 See, e.g., the preface to SM, vii, and to StS, viii. 697 In The Man Who Died (1928). 698 See n. 29, above. 699 See DV, 39, or NFR, 197. 700 William Paley (1743-1805), who found proof of the existence of God in the design of nature. 701 See par. 735, below. 702 The words of Sir Thomas Browne—a direct quotation—are from Religio Medici, pt. i, sec. 16. 703 The reference is to the Jewish mystic Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-72), who at age seventeen withdrew to a hut by the Nile to mediate on the Zohar of Moses de Leon; he later founded a school of mystics. 704 John Scotus Erigena's De Divisione Naturae or Periphyseon (ca. 865) tried to fuse Christian and Neoplatonic doctrines. At least three English translations would have been available to NF. Scotus wrote a line-by-line commentary on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, used Boethius' Opuscula to develop theological arguments based on grammar, and translated Dionysius the Areopagite (the Pseudo-Dionysius).

806

Notes to pages 250-2

705 See Mallarme's Preface to Un Coup de Des. 706 In 1987 the literary columns that de Man wrote as a young man for the collaborationist Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper, came to light. In one of the columns de Man used anti-Semitic language. 707 NF takes the phrase from Julien Benda's book of that title (1927). Benda described the attitude of some intellectuals between the world wars as a trahison, meaning that they had betrayed the causes of justice and truth because it would have been inconvenient to defend them. 708 "The virginity of Mary and her giving birth eluded the ruler of this age, likewise also the death of the Lord—three mysteries of a cry which were done in the stillness of God" (Ephesians 19:1, trans. William R. Schoedel in Ignatius of Antioch [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985], 87). 709 "There is one God who revealed himself through Jesus Christ his Son, who is his Word which proceeded from silence, who in every way pleased him who sent him" (Magnesians 8:2b, Ignatius of Antioch, 118). 710 See Ignatius of Antioch, 120, n. 12. 711 "For I do not want you to please people but to please God, as you do please him; for I shall never have such an opportunity to attain God, nor can you, if you remain silent, be credited with a better deed; for if you remain silent and let me be, I shall be a word of God, but if you love my flesh, I shall again be a (mere) voice" (Romans 2:1, Ignatius of Antioch, 170). 712 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1883), 3:300. An annotated copy of the 1966 ed. (New York: Dover) is in the NFL. 713 "On Heredity," in The World as Will and Idea, 3:318-35. 714 On these medieval thinkers, see DV, 66, or NFR, 219. 715 See WP, 106-7. 716 Trans. David Rosenberg (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). For a dustjacket blurb for the book, NF wrote: "The Book of] clearly highlights one of the major problems in Western culture: the fact that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is not a theological god at all but an intensely human character as violent and unpredictable as King Lear." 717 "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent": the words of Balaam in Numbers 23:19. 718 Charles Heller, a synagogue choir director in Toronto, had given NF a copy of the thirteenth-century Jewish liturgical hymn known as the "Hymn of Glory" (trans. Simeon Singer in The Authorised Daily Prayer Book). NF remarked to Heller "that he was very impressed by the sophistication of the poem, insofar as it suggested that God was unknowable. . . . He told me that this was a more sophisticated concept than would be found in the writings of medieval Christian divines, and he was going to give it mention in his next book" (Charles Heller to Robert D. Denham, 12 April 1996).

Notes to pages 253-7

719 720 721 722 723 724

807

NF did quote the last stanza of the hymn in WP: "In images they told of thee, but not according to thine essence: they but likened thee in accordance with thy works" (108). See DV, So, or NFR, 231. NF retained the passage, at least in the published version. See DV, 35, or NFR, 193. See Milton's Christian Doctrine, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 6:586. In canto 10 of the Paradiso, the metaphor of the sun. The phrase comes from Blake's annotation to Swedenborg's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, pt. 3, sec. 237 (Erdman, 605). Helen Frye died in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. Notebook 50

1 See RE, chap. 3. 2 See NB 27, n. 321. 3 Finnegans Wake, 6,11. 9-10; The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 445 (Canto 74,1.10). 4 See WP, 166, and MM, 249-50. 5 NF associates Blake's Urizen, Tharmas, Ore, and Urthona with the Greek "gods" that serve as "informing presences" for each of the last four chaps, of WP. Sometimes in the notebooks the sequence corresponding to the HEAP cycle is, respectively, Tharmas, Urizen, Ore, and Los (Urthona's Spectre). 6 See, e.g., "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," MM, 44-59. 7 See WP, 260. For the reference to the tree and water of life, see Revelation 22. 8 See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. See NB 44, n. 51. 9 See Buckminster Fuller, The Critical Path (New York: St. Martin's, 1981), 15-17, 29-32. 10 See // Penseroso, 11. 85-92, where Milton contemplates the constellation Ursa Major. 11 For the Watcher legend—the story of the fall of the rebel angels—see NB 44, n. 130. 12 See WP, 195. The Enkidu episode is in tablet i, sec. 4, of Gilgamesh. 13 The reference is to William Morris's The Wood beyond the World, where the heroine's magical powers disappear on her wedding day. See WP, 195. 14 See WP, 195. 15 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), x. Becker is a great admirer of Norman O. Brown's work, and Brown does say that "Eros is fundamentally a desire for union (being one) with objects in the

808

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30

Notes to pages 257-60

world" (Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History [New York: Vintage, 1959], 44). Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death, 134. Brown quotes the translation of the twenty-eighth poem of the Tao Te Ching in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China (1956). One of the original eight trigrams in the / Ching, or The Book of Changes. Its attributes are the receptive, female, and passive; its symbol is the earth; its family relation is the mother. See NB 27, par. 6. See WP, 200. The allusion is to A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.17. "May I recall a phrase of H. Poincare's which I quoted in Le Potomak without saying from where I had taken it: 'Poets have the advantage of us. A chance rhyme, and a whole system, hitherto obscure, stands revealed'" (Cocteau's World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau, ed. Margaret Crosland [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972], 367). The word "metaphysics" derives from ta meta ta physikd (the [works] after the physics), a reference to the arrangement of Aristotle's writings. That is, such writing is negated while at the same time it passes into a new form. For NF, as for Hegel, aufheben suggested several meanings at once: to cancel, to preserve, and to lift up. See NB 44, n. 285. The ideas in this par. developed into chap, i of WP. The phrase is Hegel's. See his Phenomenology of Spirit, 126-38. See also DV, 13, or NFR, 176. That is, on the boundary between the conceptual and rhetorical levels or modes of language—two of the four modes that NF proposes in chap, i of WP. The allusions here are to Blake's "To see a World in a Grain of Sand" (Auguries of Innocence, 1. i) and to Wallace Stevens's poem A Primitive Like an Orb. In this and the following eight pars. NF outlines the ideas, including the principle of the "excluded initiative," that were to becomes the basis of chap, i of WP. See WP, 11. NF perhaps has in mind a passage in bk. i, chap. 18 of Musil's Man without Qualities about a mentally deranged man who is subjected to various official discourses in the criminal proceedings after he has killed a prostitute: "Such expressions he had picked up eagerly in mental hospitals and prisons, with scraps of French and Latin that he stuck in at the most unsuitable places in his speeches, since he had found out that it was the possession of these languages that gave those in power the right 'to arrive at findings' where his fate was concerned" (trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser [London: Panther, 1968], 79). The idea is reiterated in bk. 2, chap. 59: "Moosbrugger

Notes to pages 260-5

8

°9

was wrathfully aware that they all talked just as it suited them and that it was this talking that gave them the power to treat him in any way they liked. He had the feeling, which simple people tend to have, that the educated ought to have their tongues cut out" (279). 31 Rhetoric, 13543. See GC, 27, and WP, 15, 32 See WP, 100. 33 See WP, 68-71. 34 See WP, 118. 35 "Concern and Myth" ended up being chap. 2 of WP. 36 Sam is the archetypal yeoman—strong-willed and devoted to duty—in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. 37 "The Journey as Metaphor." 38 Quartet in C Major, the third of the "Razumovsky" quartets (op. 59). 39 John 14:6. See WP, 94-5. 40 This book was most likely Roger Cook, The Tree of Life (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1974). See pp. 26-7. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 41 See "Charms and Riddles," SM, 123-47. 42 See WP, 191, 207-8. 43 "Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form," SM, 275-94. 44 As NF says in SeS, the Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) "maintained that the entire range of dramatic possibilities could be reduced to thirty-six basic situations" (38). In his own theory of narrative phases, developed in the Third Essay of AC, NF arrives at twenty-four basic possibilities—six phases for each of the four mythoi. 45 Revelation 22:17; Franqois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955), 39. 46 See pt. C, chap. AA ("Reason") of Hegel's Phenonemology of Spirit. 47 See WP, 8-9; "a camera dawdling down a lane" is NF's twist on Stendhal's remark that "a novel is a mirror walking along a highway" (The Red and the Black, chap. 39 (or, in some eds., pt. 2, chap. 19). 48 See WP, 8-10. For the Anatole France reference, which has to do with the impossibility of translating abstractions back into their concrete roots, see WP, 73. 49 At this point it is clear that NF has arrived at the sequence that the first two chaps, of WP eventually took. 50 For this par. and the five that follow, see WP, 13-17. 51 Axis mundi refers, for NF, to the vertical, as opposed to the linear, dimension of the cosmos. 52 The five phases are the descriptive, dialectical, rhetorical, poetic, and lower kerygmatic. The last is not a part of NF's treatment of the modes of language in chap, i of WP, though the kerygmatic, which combines the rhetorical and poetic modes, does enter the discussion in chap. 4.

8io

Notes to pages 266-71

53 NF's plans for the shape of pt. 2 of the book changed considerably, the last half of the book (there was no pt. 3) being organized around the myths and metaphors of the four primary concerns and their "informing presences" (Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus). 54 See WP, 146-7, and NB 44, n. 320. 55 Dickinson, Poem 1260. See WP, 134, and NB 44, 323. 56 See WP, 16. 57 "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," MM, 28-43. 58 "Approaching the Lyric," EAC, 130-6. 59 See WP, 65-6. The quoted phrase is from Thomas Nashe's song "Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss," Summer's Last Will and Testament, 1.17. 60 Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 143-61. 61 Cf. NB 44, par. 270. 62 Karl Earth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (New York: Harper, 1957), 200-10. 63 That is, the definition of faith in Hebrews 11. 64 See NB 44, n. 285. 65 The dedication of the The Witch of Atlas—"To Mary"—was a response to Mary Shelley's objection that there was "no human interest" in the poem. See Mary Shelley's remarks on the poem in her preface to the first collected ed. of Shelley's poetry, in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), x. See also WP, 25. 66 See n. 58, above. 67 See WP, 24-5. 68 The sequence NF finally adopted was Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus. 69 Fragment 29 in Heraclitus, ed. Wheelwright, 37. 70 See NB 44, n. 357. 71 See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. 72 In The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) the process of death and rebirth is set forth as three in-between states, each of which is associated with a flash of light. The bardo itself (or in-between state) connects the death of individuals with their following rebirth. For NF's earlier (late 19405) speculations on the bardo state, see NB 3, pars. 15, 61,136. 73 "Alles Vergangliches ist nur ein Gleichnis" ["All in transition is but reflection"] (Faust, pt. 2,11.12104-5, trans. Arndt). 74 The allusion is to Faust's "Im Anfang war die That" ["In the beginning was the deed or act"]. See NB 27, n. 17. 75 "And when every stone [of the house of God] is laid artfully together, it

Notes to pages 271-7

76

77 78

79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

811

cannot be united into a continuity, but it can be contiguous in this world" (Areopagitica, Hughes, 774). See WP, 74. Shem the Penman, the artist-poet in Finnegans Wake, is frequently identified by Joyce as Jewish. See, e.g., 171,1.1, where Joyce refers to him as "that greekenhearted yude." See GC, 167-8. The "excluded initiative" is the category NF uses in his analysis of the modes of language in WP to refer to the necessary but unexamined assumption in each of the four modes. See WP, 7-24. See n. 72, above. The order NF finally settled on was 3, i, 2, 4. In the Hindu Rig Veda, Hiranyagarbha (Sanskrit for "golden egg") is the source and animating principle of all creation. NF refers to the Hiranyagarbha image in seven pars, in this notebook, and often in other notebooks, but there are no references to it in WP. In T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets the sequence of elements is earth (Burnt Norton), air (East Coker), water (The Dry Salvages), and fire (Little Gidding). Substraction is the mathematical relation that produces numbers, such as 0 or -2, that do not relate to objects in the world. A national newspaper that Lenin founded and began editing in 1900. See NB 44, n. 159. See WP, 186. James is said to have awakened one day with this jingle ringing in his head: "Hogamus, higamus, / Men are polygamous. / Higamus, hogamus, / Women monogamous." See n. 12, above. See WP, 195. See NB 27, n. 322, and WP, 193. For Blake's Little Girl Lost, see NB 44, n. 483. On the Faustian descent and Mallarme's Igitur, see WP, 290-2. NF quotes the first of these two stanzas in WP, 108. His source is The Authorised Daily Prayer Book, trans. Simeon Singer. See NB 44, n. 718. See WP, 295-7, 3OJSee WP, 46-8. See WP, 202-3. See WP, 210-12, and NF's "The Bride from the Strange Land," EAC, 50-61, or NFR, 104-16. Watt and Les Gommes are experimental novels by Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet respectively, both published in 1953. The Williams reference is to William Carlos Williams's Paterson, "—Say it, no ideas but in things" (bk. i, pt. i, 1.14). See WP, 87-8.

8iz

Notes to pages 277-80

99 See WP, 88, where NF uses the adjective "hallucinatory" to describe the Joycean visions. 100 See WP, 185. 101 See WP, 124-6. 102 Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme, trans. Malcolm Cowley and Justin R. Lawler (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 296-7. (NF's double quotation marks within the Valery passage have been changed to single.) 103 See WP, 127-8. 104 See WP, 211-12, 215-16. 105 See par. 122, below. 106 Here and in the following three entries NF is using "dialogues" to refer to what he eventually called "variations on a theme"—the four archetypes in chaps. 5-8 of WP. At this point in his plans for the book, he sees the four archetypes as the ladder (mountain), garden, seed, and furnace. 107 See WP, 180-7. 108 The themes listed here are treated throughout chap. 6 of WP, except for Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, which NF glances at in chap. 8 (283-4). Portions of NF's "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," MM, 44-59, are woven into chap. 6. 109 On Noah's ark and John the Baptist, see WP, 242,268; NF included Mallarme's Igitur in "Dialogue Four" (chap. 8). no See WP, 296-7. 111 Jacques Lacan, "The Empty Word and the Full Word," in The Language of Self, 9. See NF's "Lacan and the Full Word," in Criticism and Lacan, 187-9. 112 In Welsh legend, the head of Bran, the king of Britain, was buried at London as a magical defence against invasion. 113 See WP, 82. The reference to verumfactum in GC is on p. 196. 114 See WP, 107-8. 115 See WP, 155. 116 See WP, 285. 117 "Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day." 118 NF worked this point into chap. 2 (WP, 34). 119 See n. 112, above. 120 The AV translates the Hebrew for "in thy belly" as "within thee." 121 Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the heart as the seat of intelligence, see pp. 40, 56,80, 82,171, 225; on the brain as the source of sperm, see p. 115. 122 The last phrase is D.H. Lawrence's. See NB 27, n. 322. 123 epiclesis - invocation; in the Christian eucharistic prayer, it is a special invocation to the Holy Spirit. The epiclecti is the sacred moment in the Mass when the host is changed, through the efficacy of the Holy Spirit, into the body and blood of Christ. In a letter to Constantine Curran, July 1904,

Notes to pages 280-6

813

Joyce wrote, "I am writing a series of epiclecti—ten—for a paper" (Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann [New York: Viking, 1975], 22). 124 The "epiclesis" ("to call upon") is the invocation of the Holy Spirit following the prayer of consecration in the Eucharist of the Eastern church. 125 The ellipsis is NF's. In speaking of the way that New Testament redactors sought to reduce passages of poetry to "a plain prose sense," NF wrote: "This kind of sense implies a direct appeal to credulity, to the infantilism which is so exasperating a feature of popular religious and other ideologies" (WP, 104). 126 Doubtless a reference to pars. 270 and/or 370 in Notes 52. 127 Soma psychikon (the mortal or natural body, which NF translates as "soulbody") and soma pneumatikon (the spiritual body). See WP, 122,124-5. 128 By this point in the notebook it is clear that NF has fairly well settled on the final shape of the last half of WP. Although he is still thinking of seed, rather than cave, as the dominant metaphor in the third of his four controlling images, the outline in the four pars, that follow is close to what finally emerged in WP. 129 Above this clause NF inserted in parentheses "mountain-tower-ladderspiral." 130 See WP, 296-7, 301-2. 131 A series of books by Jane Roberts about paranormal experiences, the multidimensional nature of the human personality, and its connection with all aspects of the universe as it ranges in time and space. An annotated copy of Roberts's The "Unknown" Reality: A Seth Book is in the NFL. 132 The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Atheneum, 1984). NF is quoted in the first section of Merrill's poem. 133 See WP, 72 ff. 134 See WP, 296. 135 Eliot's account of the London air raid is in pt. 2 of Little Gidding. See WP, 301-2. 136 See WP, 300-1. 137 See WP, 195. 138 See SeS, 106-117,146. 139 On Sailing to Byzantium, see WP, 302; on The Garden, see WP, 198-9. 140 The page references are to Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn. 141 See NB 44, n. 187. 142 See WP, 164. For those less familiar than NF with the manner of Kekule's discovery, here is Kekule's own account of what happened after he fell asleep: "The atoms gamboled before my eyes. Smaller groups . . . kept modestly in the background. My mind's eyes, trained by repeated visions of a similar kind, now distinguished larger formations of various shapes. Long rows, in many ways more densely joined; everything in movement, winding and turning like snakes. And look, what was that? One snake

814

Notes to pages 286-9

grabbed its own tail, and mockingly the shape whirled before my eyes. As if struck by lightning I awoke; this time I spent the rest of the night to work out the consequences" (qtd. by R. Anschiitz in "August Kekule," in Great Chemists [New York: Interscience Publishers, 1961], 700). 143 "Sex in the head" is D.H. Lawrence's phrase. See NB 27, n. 322. On the androgynous Christ, see WP, 127. 144 NF means to cite Leviticus 16:29. 145 See WP, 197-8. 146 See WP, 196-7. 147 P.M. Cornford writes of mummers' plays in various districts of Thrace and northern Greece in which phallic rites and a sacred marriage are interrupted by a "mimic death and resurrection." In one play, according to the summary of A.J.B. Wace provided by Cornford, a husband is killed after an argument, lamented by his bride, and then resurrected. The Origin of Attic Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 17-19. 148 Jerusalem, pi. 69,1. 44. See WP, 216-17. 149 / saw a chapel all of gold, from Blake's Notebook (Erdman, 467). 150 "Apropos of much. I think that much of the confusion of modern philosophy, perhaps the whole realism versus idealism quarrel, comes from our renouncing the ancient hierarchy of being from man up to One" (The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade [New York: Octagon, 1980], 728). See WP, 162. 151 "Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World," MM, 18-27. 152 "We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket" (Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 February 1818, in John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959], 263). 153 On the "Zen golden flower" remark, see WP, 70. 154 The image appears throughout Blake's The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, and other poems. 155 The cipher found at the South Pole by Arthur Gordon Pym in the story that takes its title from his name. 156 According to Josephus, Seth's descendants preserved on pillars of clay and stone his knowledge of the coming destruction of the earth by flood and fire; the stone pillar, says Josephus "exists to this day in the land of Sirius [the Nile]" (Antiquity of the Jews, 1.2.3). 157 See WP, 249-51. 158 The reference is to Novalis's unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). 159 See n. 72, above. 160 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, \. 117. 161 Ordinarily spelled samyama (the concentration through meditative disci-

Notes to pages 289-91

815

pline on a specific object in order to gain power over the object). For the sutra NF refers to, see NB 44, n. 238. 162 NF is referring to the final two lines of Idylls of the King. See WP, 58. 163 See NB 44, n. 166. 164 See par. 154, above, and WP, 164. 165 "Thou art that" (Tat tvam asi), the Absolute is of the essence with yourself, is one of the chief precepts of the Hindu Vedanta. For example, the phrase is part of a refrain that is repeated with variations in the Chandogya Upanishad: "an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is Reality. That is Atman. THOU ART THAT," in The Upanishads, trans. Juan Mascaro (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965), 117. 166 Edgar Allan Poe, The Colloquy ofMonos and Una (1841), one of Poe's many efforts to overcome the separation between conscious existence and spiritual reality. The line "Methinks it is no journey" is from the last stanza of an eighteenth-century ballad, Tom o Bedlam, qtd. by NF in WP, 96, and NFS, 118. 167 See n. 84, above. 168 The ancient Welsh Triads, a sententious and historical commentary arranged epigrammatically in threes. NF is referring to Graves's note in The White Goddess about the "glass castles" of Irish, Manx, and Welsh legend (p. 109). 169 NF means to refer not to Paul Fort, the French poet associated with the symbolist movement, but to Charles Fort (1874-1932), who wrote four books about extraordinary phenomena inexplicable by conventional means. See The Books of Charles Fort (New York: Holt, 1941), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 170 Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, trans, Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 171 See WP, 181. The passage NF remembers from Graves is this: "What ails Christianity today is that it is not a religion squarely based on a single myth; it is a complex of juridical decisions made under political pressure in an ancient law-suit about religious rights between adherents of the Mother-goddess who was once supreme in the West, and those of the usurping Father-god" (The White Goddess, 476). 172 See The White Goddess, 464 ff., and WP, 189. 173 I have been unable to locate the source of this quotation (Ed.). 174 See WP, 221. 175 "The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular" (Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 55. See MM, 122.

816

Notes to pages 291-4

176 "We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own" (Heraclitus, Fragment 2). T.S. Eliot quotes the Greek fragment as an epigraph for Burnt Norton. 177 See WP, 207-8. 178 The reference is to Hopkins's That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection. 179 See pars. 166 and 168, above. The exclamation point is apparently intended to call attention to the juxtaposition of "below" and "above." 180 See, among other places Blake uses the phrase, The Four Zoas, Erdman, 307, l. 3 i. 181 NF must have meant to refer to The Triumph of Life, Shelley's unfinished poem in which the tyrannical Chariot of Life tramples on youth and drags others in chains. 182 See n. 166, above. 183 A reference to a correction NF makes in his use of the term in WP, 70: epoptae = seers. 184 For the "tree of repressive morality," see WP, 194; the Noachic flood, 253; Atlantis, 247; Mallarme's Igitur, 291-2; Blake's The Mental Traveller, 245; Joyce's Finnegans Wake, 266; Yeats's A Vision, 254-5, and Dialogue of Self and Soul, 180. 185 NF eventually decided to conclude WP with Job, fitting his GC account of the Job story into the argument of chap. 8 (see pp. 310-13). For Yeats's Byzantium, see WP, 302; Eliot's Little Gidding, 301. Hopkins's poem was not included in chap. 8. 186 SeeNB27,n. 112. 187 According to the Stoics, the world developed through a series of phases, repeating itself identically from one phase to the next in an eternal cycle, each phase ending in a conflagration (ekpyrosis). 188 The Works of George Berkeley, 5:89. NF's reference is to the par. number. 189 "There arose a tree. Oh, pure transience"—the opening line of the first sonnet in Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. C.F. Maclntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 3. 190 Orpheus turned out to make only a cameo appearance in chap. 7 of WP (195). 191 See WP, 202-3. 192 See WP, 109-10. 193 See WP, 208. 194 A reference, apparently, to one of the spatial or temporal paradoxes in Four Quartets. 195 On Hopkins's distinction between "underthought" and "overthought," see WP, 57, and MM, 2.1-2, 34, 325-6. For the source in Hopkins, see NB 27, n. 359.

Notes to pages 294-8

817

196 See WP, 129. 197 See WP, 242-51. 198 In Faust, pt. 2,11. 5569 ff., Faust, in the guise of Plutus (the god of wealth), carries a magical treasure chest on stage. Proteus, the old man of the sea who represents the power and change of nature, appears in pt. 2,11. 8225 ff. 199 NF uses the word "titanic" for the creative aspect of the pattern of ascent and descent along the axis mundi, as opposed to the "demonic" or destructive aspect. See WP, 276. 200 See n. 116, above. 201 See WP, 256-7. 202 NF included the Oedipus-Christ contrast in chap. 7 of WP (258). 203 Above "is" NF wrote "belongs to." 204 NF included neither point in the introduction to WP, but a version of the first point is in WP, 189-90, and in a note in DV, 87, or NFR, 398, n. 17. 205 "P" seems to refer to the preface (see par. 204), which eventually became the introduction. 206 "P rev." refers, apparently, to a revision NF planned to make to the preface (later introduction). Graves's subtitle is "A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth." For NF's remark on Graves in the introduction, see WP, xiii. 207 See WP, xvi and 56. 208 Charles H. Long, Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York: Braziller, 1963), 19-20. An annotated copy of the Collier paperback ed. of Alpha is in the NFL. 209 Alpha, p. 43. 210 Erich Neumann quotes the Timaeus as containing, not the word "ouroboros," but the passage about "the universe as a sphere revolving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to bear itself company, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance" (The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R.F.C. Hull [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954], 10). 211 See WP, 167. For the English translations of Foucault's books, see NB 44, n. 190. 212 "Commentary on Exodus," in Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, 69. 213 NF's commentary on Bronte's Shirley did eventually become a part of chap. 8. 214 The wrecked Titanic was discovered on the ocean floor on i September 1985. Various schemes to recover the ship were promptly proposed. 215 See WP, 250. 216 A reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's so-called "picture theory of meaning," developed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). 217 See NB 44, n. 193. 218 In September 1969 NF had attended the congress of the Federation Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes in Islamabad.

8i8

Notes to pages 298-303

219 Following "people" in the preceding sentence, NF had omitted "are/' which he inserted above the line. 220 "Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come" (John 1:4). See WP, 105. 221 See WP, 210-11. 222 Letter to Fanny Keats, 2-4 July 1818. 223 See WP, 211-15. 224 See WP, 198-9, and MM, 49-50. 225 NF is referring to sec. 2 of chap. 6. The white-goddess theme turned out to be in sec. 3. 226 See WP, 320. 227 See WP, 212. 228 See n. 166, above. 229 See WP, 219. 230 See WP, 219-20. The Valery poem is Ebauche d'un serpent. 231 On Penelope's web in Sir John Davies's Orchestra, see WP, 176-7, and SeS, 153232 On Lacan's stade du miroir, see NB 27, par. 92 and nn. 75 and 96. 233 Letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867, in Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, 74-5. 234 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Mystery of Continuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986). 235 Mr. Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, and Fraulein von Kulp (11. 23-8). 236 T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 32-3. An annotated copy is in the NFL. The epigraph for Gerontion is from Measure for Measure, 3.1.32-4. 237 On the Tudor mystique, see WP, 259; on the royal Psalms, 196-7. 238 Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper, 1971), 169-78. 239 See WP, 197. 240 In the Vedas, Prajapati, "lord of creatures," is the title used to refer to Hiranyagarbha and other divinities. On Hiranyagarbha, see also NB 27, n. 241. 241 The Principal Upanisads, ed. and trans. Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 60-2. 242 See WP, 256-7. 243 Paradiso, canto 9, where Rahab appears in the circle of Venus. 244 See WP, 214-15. 245 NF's commentary on Bronte's Shirley became a part of chap. 8 of WP, 283-4246 Nicholas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 105,113. An annotated copy is in the NFL.

Notes to pages 303-7

819

247 Stephane Mallarme, "Variations on a Subject," in Selected Poetry and Prose, 75248 Ibid. Mary Ann Caws's translation, which is the one NF quotes, begins, "Since the immortal word is still tacit. . ." 249 This last phrase, a later addition, refers to the place in the notebook where NF had in fact referred to the male virgins in Revelation—on p. 4 of the holograph notebook (par. 9, above). 250 See NB 44, n. 310. 251 NF retained his outline of the "Romantic reversal" in the "cave" chap. (WP, 239-51). 252 For the Oedipus parody and the white-goddess cycle (and its various extensions), see WP, 218-28. For the Eivig-Weibliche or eternal feminine, see NB 44, n. 559. 253 For NF's treatment of the "divine cannibal feast," see WP, 256-7. 254 Genesis 4:1-5. See WP, 253. 255 See WP, 256-7. 256 The expression comes from the title of a novel about the French Revolution by Anatole France (1912). 257 See WP, 257. 258 See WP, 260. 259 See WP, 250. 260 See n. 161, above. 261 See WP, 266. 262 See NB 27, n. 336. 263 In WP, NF treats Nietzschean recurrence as part of the cave archetype (255)264 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Zarathustra's Prologue," in Thus Spoke Zamthustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 9-25. 265 See WP, 308-9. 266 The reference is to the battle between good and evil within each human being in the Bhagavadgita, this battlefield serving as a backdrop for the teachings of Krishna: Krishna instructs Arjuna in the virtues of renunciation, forgiveness, love, sympathy, modesty, gentleness, and non-violence. 267 See WP, 114. 268 See WP, 117. 269 Cf. NB 27, pars. 427 and 493, and NB 44, par. 517. 270 The reference is to Valery's long dramatic monologue, La Jeune Parque (1917). See WP, 220. 271 See WP, 289. 272 Letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867, Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, 76. See WP, 292. 273 To the Finland Station (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 370-1. 274 See WP, 296.

820

Notes to pages 307-12

275 See NB 27, n. 112. 276 NF did write a prefatory note to pt. 2 that treats some of the topics listed here. See WP, 139-43. 277 See n. 81, above. 278 See WP, 292. 279 See NB 44, n. 187. 280 See NB 44, n. 185. 281 The phrase is from the proem to Blake's Milton, 1. 8. 282 See WP, 203. 283 Except for the principle of displacement, the points outlined in this par. made their way, not into the prefatory note to pt. 2 of WP, but into the introduction. See pp. xii-xiii, xvii. On displacement, see WP, 141-2. 284 See WP, 141. 285 See WP, 260. 286 See WP, 264. 287 See NB 44, n. 310. 288 See NB 27, n. 316. 289 "Circumference thou Bride of Awe / Possessing thou shalt be / Possessed by every hallowed Knight / That dares to covet thee" (Poem 1620; ca. 1884). See also NB 27, par. 260. 290 Mallarme flirted with the idea of entitling one of his volumes of lyrics The Glorious Lie. See his letter to Henry Cazalis, 28? April 1866, Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, 60. 291 go'el = redeemer, as in Job 19:25. See WP, 130, 310. 292 Probably a reference to NB 44, par. 422. 293 The opening words of Rousseau's Social Contract. 294 See WP, 62. 295 Jonathan Swift, The Lady's Dressing Room, in Complete Poems, 448-52. See WP, 263-4. 296 See WP, 255. 297 See SeS, 140-5. NF delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in April 1975. 298 NF has in mind the view about dreams in "The English Mail-Coach," where De Quincey proposes that dreams in which we fail to act reveal our consciousness of original sin. See Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 212. See also MM, 57. 299 A 1943 novel by Graham Greene. 300 In the published version of the Norton lectures NF does not actually refer to Ishtar; but for the earth-mother archetype, see SeS, 118-19. 301 See WP, 264. 302 See WP, 256.

Notes to pages 313-16

821

See NB 44, n. 250. See NB 44, n. 291. See WP, 141-2. Especially When the October Wind, \. 9. See WP, 165. The references are to The Canonization, 1. 32, and The Ecstasy, 1. 72. "I saw how it contained within its depths / all things bound in a single book by love / of which creation is the scattered leaves" (Paradiso, canto 33,11. 85-7, trans. Musa). 309 Judges 11:39. See WP, 2.2.2. 310 See WP, 225. 311 See WP, 191. 312 Tertullian's principle: "Credibile est, quia ineptum est; certum est, quia impossible" ["It is believable because it is absurd; it is certain because it is impossible"] (De came Christi, chap. 5). See MM, 97-8, or NFR, 348. As NB 46, par. 35, suggests, NF probably encountered the epigram in Sir Thomas Browne, who quotes the last half of it in Religio Medici. See Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), 70 (pt. i, sec. 9). 313 "Themes that rule, while they create, the moral will—this is Donne! He was an orthodox Christian, only because he could have been an Infidel more easily, & therefore willed to be a Christian: & he was a Protestant, because it enabled him to lash about to the Right & the Left—and without a motive to say better things for the Papists than they could say for themselves" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 2:220 [title 12 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge]). 314 For this entry, see WP, 129. 315 See WP, 132. 316 See WP, 164-5. 317 "October" is a later addition, indicating that NF found the phrase "tower of words" in Thomas's Especially When the October Wind, 1. 9. 318 NF means to cite Exodus 13:2 or 22:29. 319 See WP, 239-46. 320 On the twin complex, see WP, 266-71; on Frazer, 264. 321 See WP, 270-1, and MM, 49-50. 322 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Major Works, 81. 323 See WP, 45-6. 324 See WP, 164-5. 325 NF put the point at the end of chap. 3. See WP, 95-6. 326 See WP, 232-3. 327 "Je suis une bete, un negre" ("Bad Blood," sec. 2 of A Season in Hell), Wallace Fowlie translates negre as "savage"; Paul Schmidt, whose anno-

303 304 305 306 307 308

822

328 329 330 331

332 333

334 335 336

337 338 339

340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352

353

Notes to pages 316-21 tated translation is in the NFL, as "nigger." "The wretched of the earth" is the title of a book by the African revolutionary Franz Fanon (New York: Grove, 1961). See WP, 142. "Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason," MM, 177. The Garden of Forking Paths, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. See WP, 142. The words of the Roman speaker in Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine, lamenting the replacement of the Romans by Christ, "the pale Galilean" (1. 68). They occur also in Psalm 82:6 and John 10:34. See NB 27, n. 310. Tom o'Bedlam is an eighteenth-century ballad that NF quotes in WP, 96, and NFS, 118. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855). Edgar's mad song in King Lear is in 3.4.171-3. See WP, 183-4. See WP, 175, where NF quotes from Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum (1588), a poem on the nature of humankind and the immortality of the soul. The quotation does come toward the end of chap. 5. See WP, 239-40. See WP, 264. "3/19" refers to a section of NF's draft. Genesis 2:24: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." See WP, 78,207-8, 224. Holderlin: Selected Verse, trans. Michael Hamburger (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961), xxi-xxii. An annotated copy is in the NFL, See WP, 141,145. See NB 27, n. 284. That is, the unconscious memory that comes from practice, an idea NF derived from Samuel Butler. See WP, 304-5, and MM, 143-4. See WP, 163-4. That is, Jubal, the sixth lineal descendant of Cain, who invented the harp and the organ (Genesis 4:21). See WP, 295. See WP, 146. See WP, 250-1. See WP, 243-5. Andrew Marvell, On a Drop of Dew. See WP, 264. See WP, 263-4. A phrase, perhaps, that NF used in one of his drafts. In WP it is changed to "a purity and refinement of a type that cannot co-exist with human life" (264). In WP, NF links the paradox of the zenith with Mallarme's Cantique de Saint-Jean (268). On Valery's Zeno, see WP, 184.

Notes to pages 322-6 354 355 356 357 358

359 360 361

362 363 364

365 366 367 368 369

370 371 372 373

374 375 376 377 378 379

823

For the golden riches in the hell of Milton's Paradise Lost, see bk. i, 11. 670 ff. See WP, 119-20, and MM, 26. See NB 27, n. 283. On the Christian reversal of the Oedipus story, see WP, 218. For Rabelais's oracle of the divine bottle, see Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 5, chaps. 44-8. Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (first performed in 1896) is a parody of the Classical and naturalist traditions of the theatre; it is a demonic parody in that the vulgar and cowardly Ubu engages in a savage reign of terror. See WP, 218. See WP, 273-7. NF does not treat Poe in relation to the technological imagination (WP, 294 ff.). For Moby Dick, see WP, 284-5, and for Narcissus, 271. The phrase is from bk. i, 1.134 of the Keynes ed. of Blake. Erdman does not include the passage in his ed. of Blake, as he explains on p. 820. See WP, 249. "Jupiter" derives from "Diou-pater." A reference to such work as Karl Pribram's studies in memory and brain function and David Bohm's work in subatomic physics. See Ken Wilber, ed., The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes. NF doubtless also means to refer to those whom he calls elsewhere "the Tao of Physics people," such as Fritjof Capra. See WP, 234. That is, the form of the downward journey. NF takes the word from Lucian's Cataplus: The Downward Journey, or the Tyrant. See WP, 245. See WP, 272-3. Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton (New York: Modern Library, 1963), 62. Audisne haec, amphiarae, sub terram abdite? ("Do you not hear these things, Amphiaras, hidden beneath the Earth?") See WP, 247-50. The "sea of time and space" is Blake's phrase: The Four Zoas, Erdman, 337,1.13, and Milton, pi. 15,11. 39 and 46. See NB 44, par. 440, where NF refers to the Dylan Thomas poem, and WP, 247-8. For the reference to Apuleis, see Gerard de Nerval, CEuvres, ed. Albert Beguin and Jean Richter (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 1:359; for the reference to Isis, 1:401. On Nerval's Aurelia, see WP, 286-7. See pars. 356 and 378, below, and WP, 268. See WP, 250. See WP, 245. For the themes in this and the following entry, see WP, 233. See SeS, 147-8. See WP, 257.

824

Notes to pages 326-33

See WP, 234. See WP, 233. See WP, 267-8. NF is referring to such ideas as "the mirror stage" and "the alienated self" in the work of Jacques Lacan, and to Rank's Beyond Psychology (1941). See WP, 268. 384 See Notes 52, par. 995, and NB 44, pars. 544 and 582. See also pars. 12 and 14, above.

380 381 382 383

385 See WP, 209. 386 Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, 489 (vol. 3, chap. 4). The expression NF refers to appears toward the end of a composition written by Shirley as an exercise; her essay is about the encounter of an angel and a woman, which Shirley sees as "the bridal-hour of genius and humanity." On Genesis 6:1-4, see WP, 274; on Shirley, 283-4. 387 NB 44, par. 255: "There are twelve signs in the zodiac, but it would be equally easy to see nine or eleven or fourteen and a half. Only fractions seem so vulgar." 388 See WP, 209. 389 NF quotes the apocryphal passage in WP, 204, citing the source in WP, 318, as The Gnostic Scriptures, ed. and trans. Bentley Layton (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987), 384. The passage is from the Gospel of Thomas 22. See also NB 44, n. 409, and NB 50, n. 652. 390 See NB 44, n. 212. 391 See WP, 246. 392 See par. 364, above. 393 The chariot that bears Asia and Panthea in act 2, sc. 5, of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1819). In act 3, sc. i, Demogorgon, arriving in the Car of the Hour, dethrones Jupiter. See WP, 249. 394 See WP, 249. 395 Philip Gosse, Omphalos (1857). 396 "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake," Vico and Joyce, 3-19, or MM, 356-74397 NF treats these themes at the conclusion of chap. 7 of WP (266-71), 398 See WP, 208. 399 For Shakespeare and Thomas, see WP, 270-1. 400 See par. 362. 401 On Raphael, see WP, 233. 402 See WP, 310-11. 403 The reference, apparently, is to the post-Pentecost apostles, or the disciples. 404 Emerson's advocacy of Swedenborg is taken up in the penultimate par. of The American Scholar. On Swedenborg's visions of hell, see WP, 286; on nausea in Swift, 263-4.

Notes to pages 333-7

825

405 On Albion, see WP, 301. 406 Jane Widdicombe, NF's secretary. 407 NF actually placed his treatment of the Mutabilitie Cantos and the Transfiguration toward the end of chap. 5 (WP, 181-4). 408 On the difference between unity and uniformity, as applied to visions of God in the Bible, see WP, 107-8. 409 See NB 44, n. 190. 410 Frederick Barbarrosa (Frederick I), the twelfth-century German king who regarded himself as the heir of the Roman emperors and tried to restore the splendour and authority of Rome. 411 In the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, the god Kingu takes the wrong side in the struggle between Marduk and Tiamat and so is killed as a traitor. See WP, 256-7. 412 See WP, 189-96. 413 See WP, 256. 414 See WP, 262-4. 415 See "Auguries of Experience," EAC, 3-4. 416 Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). 417 See WP, 10-11. 418 See WP, 85-6. The allusion here is to The Tempest, 4.1, the "rabble" of spirits being the goddesses, summoned by Ariel at Prospero's instruction, and their attendant nymphs. 419 See WP, 308. 420 Jay Macpherson, NF's colleague at Victoria College, who had visitied Graves in Mallorca before coming to study at the University of Toronto. 421 The refrain in the litany of the ugliest man in pt. 4 of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 312-13. 422 A thirteenth-century English romance, derived from the Charlemagne legends of the twelfth-century chanson de geste Amis et Amiles; the story is about the lifelong devotion of two knights, the brothers Amis and Amiloun. 423 See WP, 266-71. 424 See FT, 81. 425 E.T.A. Hoffmann, Don Juan, in Tales of Hoffmann (New York: Grove Press, 1946). Kierkegaard's treatment of Don Juan, who symbolizes the "aesthetic" stage of life, is in Either/Or (1843). 426 Ottavio is Donna Anna's bridegroom. 427 Thomas Mann's tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43). 428 See "Castiglione's // Cortegiano," MM, 307-21. 429 NF had lectured on More at the College of Holy Cross in 1987, on Castiglione at the Aula Atti Accademici (Venice) in 1979, and on Butler at the University of Lethbridge in 1986. These three lectures, along with a paper on Morris not presented as a lecture, were pub. in MM.

826

Notes to pages 337-45

430 431 432 433

See par. 24, above. NF did not include the quotation in WP. See "The Journey as Metaphor/' MM, 212-26. "Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason," MM, 168-82. Theodore Roethke, Journey to the Interior. See MM, 223, and EAC, 177. NF's commentary on the poem was included in his "Journey as Metaphor" paper. NF did follow the outline here for the material he included in the prefatory note (WP, 139-43). See WP, 180-1. In Chaucer's House of Fame, the eagle refers to the natural place of words, as they ascend in the order of nature, their "kindly stead." NF did include baptism in chap. 7, though at the beginning, not the end, of his account of the image of excretion. See WP, 263. Both sacraments did, in fact, end up in chap. 7. See WP, 269. See WP, 264-5. E.T.A. Hoffman's novella Signor Formica, about the painter Salvator Rosa. See WP, 268-9. Adelbert von Chamisso's story Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814). Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Harper, 1979), 5 (First Walk). See WP, 111. For NF's treatment of this aspect of the kerygmatic, see WP, 111-19. Kerygma as a category is abandoned in the last four chaps, of WP, appearing only in a passing reference on the penultimate page of the book. NF quotes the passage, which is not from the Brobdingnagian king but from Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master, in WP, 279. See WP, 128. See WP, 119-20. See WP, 111. See WP, 113-14. Heraclitus, Fragment 108. See NB 44, n. 166. For "wisdom" NF had written and then crossed through "illusion." Tennyson's description of nature in In Memoriam, sec. 56,1.15. This material made its way into chap. 7, rather than chap. 6. See WP, 240. This last phrase is a later addition. NF did not introduce Bronte's Shirley until chap. 8 (WP, 283-4). Matilda is the friend and attendant to Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy. "Fern Hill" was a later addition. In WP, 217, NF uses the Dylan Thomas poem as an illustration of the the climb backward toward the innocence of youth. Canto 19,1. 32. See WP, 300.

434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444

445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454

455 456

457

Notes to pages 345-9

827

458 Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, st. 46. See WP, 183. 459 NF uses a version of this last sentence in another context in WP, 217. 460 The allusion here is to pt. 4,11. 5-9, of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men (1925): "Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow." See WP, 89. 461 NF is remembering Martin Buber's remarks about "the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form" in / and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner's, 1958), 25. 462 See WP, 214. 463 The second of the six states that Yeats envisions between birth and death. "In the Dreaming Back [state], the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them" (William Butler Yeats, A Vision, rev. ed. [N.p.: Macmillan, 1956], 226). 464 In The Tempest, 5.1.171 ff., Prospero takes Alonso to a cave where Miranda and Ferdinand are playing chess. 465 See par. 362, above. The remark begins, "When you make the two one and make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside ..." (WP, 204). 466 See WP, 127,275. 467 The Pearl-poet did take the Revelation account literally. See Pearl, 11. 865 ff., where the poet takes pains to insist that the account of the male virgins in Revelation is true. 468 See WP, 274. 469 Cyrus = Cyrus Hamlin, English and Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, until 1982-83, when he left Toronto to take up a position in German and comparative literature at Yale. Hamlin makes the point about the practically identical sounds in German of Mutter and Mythe in the interpretive notes to his ed. of Faust (New York: Norton, 1976), 328. 470 See WP, 291-3. 471 See NB 44, n. 402. 472 See GC, 140. 473 See WP, 183. 474 See WP, 217. 475 See NB 44, n. 429. 476 Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper, 1982), and John Michell, The Earth Spirit: Its Ways, Shrines and Mysteries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 21-2. Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. 477 "Brot ist der Erde Frucht, doch ists vom Lichte geseegnet, / Und vom donnernden Gott kommet die Freude des Weins" ["Bread is the fruit of the

8z8

478 479 480 481 482 483 484

485 486 487

488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497

498 499

Notes to pages 350-3 earth, though blessed by the light / And from the thundering God comes the joy of wine" (st. 8,11.13-14, trans. Scott D. Denham). An Die Madonna (1803). See WP, 205. "Ein Ratsel ist Reinentsprungenes" (Der Rhein, 1. 46). See NB 44, n. 185. "Shut-upness" is the term Kierkegaard uses for the opposite of freedom. See The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), no, 117. See also WP, 231. kdthodos = a descent, a way down. Anados (literally, ascension) is the hero of George Macdonald's Phantastes. See WP, 287. See WP, 246. See WP, 289-91. The remark about ascesis in Eliot refers to that stage of the journey in pt. 4 of Burnt Norton, symbolized by death, the nadir of the descent. See TSE, 83-4. See WP, 193. See NB 44, n. 190. "Confiscated gods" is Emily Dickinson's phrase. See NB 44, n. 323, WP, 134, and MM, 105. That is, the "giants" referred to in Genesis 6:4 by the Jahwist (J) writer. See WP, 274. See NB 27, n. 284. Paradise Lost, bk. i, 1. 514. See WP, 249. NF decided on a different principle for organizing pt. 2 of chap. 8 (the four aspects of Prometheus, WP, 294), but he does glance at Yeats's Byzantium and the Sabbath vision of Paradiso, canto 33 (WP, 302-3). See n. 435, above. See WP, 282, 294-5. NF corrected "Thersites" by writing "Teiresias" above it. The reference is to the Odyssey, bk. n, 11. 95 ff., where Teiresias appears (he is not actually summoned) to Odysseus in Hades. Frederic Spiegelberg, introduction to Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy of Man by Gopi Krishna, rev. ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1971), 8. An annotated copy is in the NFL. For the commentary on Gopi Krishna's autobiography, written by James Hillman, see pp. 38-45, 68-73, 94-102,131-3, 153-8,176-80, 202-5, 235~9/ and 250-2. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. "She" = Kundalini, lit. "she who is coiled," or the "serpent power," envisioned as a serpent encircling a phallus in the energy centre at the base of the spine. When awakened, the Kundalini-Shakti (as this feminine principle is called) travels up the spine to the crown centre in order to be united with her masculine counterpart Shiva, as described by NF in par. 497. See also NB 44, n. 291.

Notes to pages 353-8

829

500 Hillman does refer to the collective unconscious (Kundalini, 251), but not to "a collective mind." Perhaps what NF remembered was Hillman's account of the "collective voice" (71-2). 501 The references here are to Dante's conception of the heavens as a tree (Paradiso, canto 18,1. 29: the fifth tier of the tree); a sentence in NF's draft that apparently cited one or both of the saetta (arrow) passages in canto 17; the images of Marsyas and Glaucus in canto i (see WP, 146); the following passage from canto 19: "I heard its [the eagle's] voice use words like / and Mine I when in conception it was We and Ours" (11.11-12, trans. Musa); the sphere of Jupiter's or Jove's justice in cantos 18-20—; and Dante's examination of the definition of faith given in Hebrews 11:1 (canto 25,11. 58-78). 502 See WP, 28. 503 See WP, 122. 504 For the F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lecture, "Some Reflections on Life and Habit," see NB 27, n. 235. 505 See WP, 144-5. 506 See n. 241, above. 507 See MM, 144-5. 508 Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1988), 5-6. An annotated copy of the Bantam Books ed. (1977) is in the NFL. 509 This is perhaps a reference to the motto from the Pervigilium Veneris that NF mentions twice in NB 44 (pars. 200 and 432). WP is dedicated to Jane Widdicombe: the dedication page contains only her name. 510 A reference apparently to Acts 1:2. 511 Boehme's mysterious doctrine of the Ungrund (translated in the Earle trans, that NF used as "Unground"), according to Berdyaev, is "nothingness, the unfathomable eye of eternity and at the same time a will, a will with-out bottom, abysmal, indeterminate.... At the same time the Unground is 'freedom'" (Nicholas Berdyaev, "Unground and Freedom," in Boehme's Six Theosophic Points, xix). In one of his marginal notations to Berdyaev's essay, NF wrote: "I used to call this Unground mysticism the deification of the void, which apparently is just what it is. I also thought of it as antiBlakean, but I'm not so sure." This annotation appears at the bottom of p. xxiii of NF's copy of Six Theosophic Points in the NFL. See WP, 289. 512 See GC, 123. Sunyata (shunyata), the central concept of Buddhism, means emptiness or void; the Hebrew hebel is translated as "vanity" in the AV. 513 See par. 479, above. 514 See, e.g., the chart on p. 80 of Stalking the Wild Pendulum. 515 See n. 504, above. "Felp" was the nickname of F.E.L. Priestley. 516 See MM, 141-54. 517 The argument turned out not to be central to chap. 8, but NF does glance at unconscious memory in WP, 304-5.

830

518 519 520 521 522

523 524 525 526 527 528 529

Notes to pages 358-66

See WP, 60-1. "The Journey as Metaphor," MM, 212-26. NF chose to delete the reference to this myth in the published form of WP. The reference is to one of the manuscripts NF received that was reviewed by his research associate, Michael Dolzani. In Matter and Memory (1896) Henri Bergson develops his theory of consciousness, arguing that the brain is not a place for thought but a motor organ that receives stimuli from the environment. Memory retains all of the past, but the brain screens out everything that is not useful for the present occasion. See WP, 312. See NB 44, n. 190. "Revealed Religion," in Phenomenology of Spirit, 453-78. See WP, no. See NB 44, n. 401. See WP, 115-16. Kierkegaard distinguishes between recollection and repetition in the opening pars, of Repetition.

530 See WP, 116. 531 See WP, 197. 532 See WP, 115-16. 533 NF had written "afterword" at the end of the previous sentence; thus, his explanation for the slip, which he corrected. 534 See WP, 115-16. 535 The passage NF had in mind was written by Kierkegaard in 1846: "I wanted particularly to represent the various stages of life [aesthetic, ethical, religious], if possible in one work, and that is how I consider all my pseudonymous writings. With that in mind it was important to keep an unvarying balance so that, for instance, the Religious should not appear at a later time when I had become so much older that my style would have lost some of the lofty, imaginative expansiveness proper to the Esthetic. The idea is not that the Religious should have this exuberance, but that the writer should be capable of producing it and making it clear that if the Religious lacked this style the reason certainly was not that the writer lacked the necessary youthfulness" (The Diary of S0ren Kierkegaard, trans. Gerda M. Anderson, ed. Peter P. Rohde [New York: Philosophical Library, 1960], 60). An annotated copy of this ed. of the Diary is in the NFL. 536 The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), 298. An annotated copy of the Modern Library ed. (1902) is in the NFL. See WP, 112. 537 See Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, passim.

Notes to pages 366-70

831

538 "listen:there's a hell / of a good universe next door;let's go" (e.e. cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind, 11.14-15). See WP, 112. 539 Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 205. 540 "And not until now, in my thirty-fifth year, may I have learned . . . to die to the world to the extent that I might truly find my life and my salvation in a belief centering on forgiveness of s i n . . . . A certain exhausted decrepitude is required to feel a real need for Christianity. If it is forced upon one earlier it makes for madness. There is in the child and the youth something that is such a natural, integral part of their natures that it could be said God willed them to be so: the child and the youth are esentially in the category of the 'psyche,' neither more nor less. Christianity is spirit. To conceive of a child as being strictly in the category of 'spirit' is a cruelty compared to killing it, and this Christianity never intended" (The Diary of S0ren Kierkegaard, 155-6). 541 See lectures 4-7 in The Varieties of Religious Experience. 542 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Three Metamorphoses," in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 25-8. 543 Master morality, as distinct from Sklavenrnoral, or slave morality. See sec. 260 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), 202-6. 544 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 46-8, 65-7. 545 Fu, or Return, is the twenty-fourth hexagram of the I Ching, meaning that it is good to have a goal in mind and that self-discipline requires one to turn back before one has gone too far. The entry, then, is a self-directed injunction to return to the essential purpose of the notebook. The entry appears at the bottom of a page; thus, "like" points to what follows—the top of the next page, where NF does return to his notes for WP. 546 See WP, xviii, xx. 547 See NB 44, par. 135 and n. 120. 548 See n. 535, above. If NF did find the passage in Kierkegaard's diary, he chose not to include it in WP. 549 See WP, 113-15. 550 See WP, 118. 551 That is, the two views of creation and fall in the J and P narratives in Genesis, respectively, and the four gods that serve as informing presences of the last four chaps, of WP: Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus. 552 See WP, 182-6. The phrase "Sabaoths sight" comes from the last line of Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos. 553 The twins theme was transferred to chap. 7 (WP, 266-71); the Ovidian metamorphosis and the voyeurism in the Faunus-Diana episode in Spenser were retained in chap. 5 (WP, 182-3).

832

Notes to pages 370-2

554 On the locus amoenus, see WP, 180. NF did not include the reference to Baudelaire, and Foe's Domain ofArnheim, a work that NF refers to repeatedly in his notebooks, was excluded as well. 555 See MM, 316-21. 556 See WP, 231-8. 557 See WP, 256-7. 558 See WP, 282-3. Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony (1933), which NF cites in WP, 283, is a classic study of the pathology of Romanticism and its development into late nineteenth-century Decadence. 559 See WP, 278-9. 560 See NB 44, n. 513. 561 See WP, 300. 562 Finnegans Wake, 353, 1. 22. 563 A reference that NF apparently transferred to WP, xii-xiii. 564 A commissioning and benediction that NF gave at the Victoria University Baccalaureate Service, 10 April 1988. The commissioning in full: "The knowledge that has been entrusted to you is the food of the spirit. It must be shared with others; if hoarded for yourselves it will spoil. With the knowledge you have, you will often feel as though you had to feed thousands with only five loaves and two fish, but still what you have must be shared. The knowledge you can have is inexhaustible, and what is inexhaustible is benevolent. The knowledge you cannot have is of the riddles of birth and death, of our future destiny and the purposes of God. Here there is no knowledge, but illusions that restrict freedom and limit hope. Accept the mystery behind knowledge: it is not darkness but shadow" (NFR, 565 See WP, 257. 566 "Classisch ist das Gesunde, Romantisch das Kranke," declared Goethe in Maximen und Reflexionen, no. 1031, in Samtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Miinchner Ausgabe, ed. Karl Richter (Miinchen: Carl Hanser, 1985-), 17:893; the well known maxim also appears in a slightly different form in Gesprache mit Eckermann, 2 April 1829, Miinchner Ausgabe, 19:300. 567 That is, symbolized by the calm serenity of the marble Greek statue, which, for the eighteenth-century archaeologist and art historian J.J. Winckelmann, epitomized beauty. 568 The last sentence here is a direct quotation of 1. 21 of Wallace Stevens's The Poems of Our Climate. 569 The benediction is included with the commissioning in NFR, 371. 570 Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.

Notes to pages 372-6

833

571 In addition to writing sophisticated detective stories, Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh was also a producer of Shakespearean repertory theatre. 572 NFS, 55-7. 573 The Maori, a man named Rangi, uses the word tapu only twice in Marsh's Light Thickens (62,205). 574 NF travelled to New Zealand during the summer of 1978. 575 Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (New York: Viking, 1957). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 576 See WP, xix-xx. 577 "Report on the 'Adventures' Reading Series," a critique of a literature textbook series. The sixteen-page typescript, dated 9 March 1965, is in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 3. Forthcoming in Northrop Frye's Writings on Education, CW, 7. 578 The aetiological conception of Ovid's Fasti, a poetical calendar that connects dates with mythological and historical events and records various festivals and rituals, was derived from Callimachus' Aitia (Causes), ca. A.D. 270, in which the author, transported in a dream, questions the Muses about myth, history, and ritual. 579 See WP, 200. 580 See WP, 180. NF put the material on Ovid in chap. 6. 581 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.2-4: "di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) / adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!" ("Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world's very beginning even unto the present time") (Loeb, trans. Miller). 582 The reference is to a talk NF gave at the 1987 convention of the Modern Language Association, on the occasion of two sessions devoted to his work. The talk was pub. as "Auguries of Experience," in Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye's Criticism, ed. Robert D. Denham and Thomas Willard (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 1-7. The suggestion about productive scholars is on p. 3. See also WP, xviii. 583 See NB 44, n. 333. 584 See WP, 288. 585 Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 586 See WP, 273-5. Nephilim = Hebrew word of uncertain meaning but translated as "giants" in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 (AV). 587 NF is referring to his having quoted in El, 51, the first six lines of Robert Graves's To Juan at the Winter Solstice, a poem that begins, "There is one story and one story only." 588 The reference is to the eighth of Rilke's Duino Elegies.

834

Notes to pages 376-83

589 NF borrows the "sense of an ending" from the title of the book by Frank Kermode cited in NB 44, n. 115. 590 One of the original eight trigrams in the / Ching, or The Book of Changes. Its attributes are the receptive, female, and passive; its symbol is the earth; its family relation is the mother. See NB 27, par. 6. 591 See WP, 146,195,278. 592 C.F. Maclntyre, the translator and editor of the ed. of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus NF is reading. 593 On the metaphor in Poe's Eureka, see WP, 150-1. 594 See WP, 172. 595 See NB 44, n. 523. 596 See "Nature and Nothing/' in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gerald W. Chapman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 35-58. 597 "From the worm that feels spring's madness / To the angel near God's throne" (trans. Louis Untermeyer). 598 Beethoven used Schiller's Ode to Joy in his Choral Symphony (no. 9 in D minor). See WP, 177. 599 See WP, 302-6. 600 NF underscores the point several times in the introduction. See WP, xv-xxi. 601 Mark 4:3-20; Luke 8:5-15. See GC, 129. 602 Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911), 272-98. See WP, 289. 603 Yeats's The Unicorn from the Stars was a reworking of an early play, Where There Is Nothing, at the end of which Paul Ruttledge says to Brother Colman, "Remember always where there is nothing there is God" (The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach [New York: Macmillan, 1966], 1164). On the nothing/Nothing pun, see WP, 289, where NF does quote Heidegger, in addition to Bergson and Yeats. 604 In his parable of the line (Republic, 509d-5iie), Plato uses pistis to refer to the quality of perceptual thought in the visible world, and eikasia to refer to the mode of belief (opinion), also in the visible world, both of which stand over against the two powers of the intelligible world, dianoia (reasoning or scientific thought) and ndesis (knowledge or dialectical thought). NF gives his own twist to the terms, translating eikasia as "negative illusion"; pistis, as he remarks in par. 665, is "the world of objective 'reality' we're supposed to believe 'in.'" 605 On Voltaire's Micromegas, see NB 27, n. 47. On Pynchon, see NB 44, n. 94. 606 See n. 60, above. 607 NF did keep the Ruth material in chap. 6. See WP, 210-15. 608 berith (or berit) = Hebrew for "covenant"; diatheke = Greek for "will" or "testament." 609 A reference to the position taken by some critics, such as Stanley Fish in Is

Notes to pages 383-9

835

There a Text in This Class? that texts do not contain meaning; meaning, rather, is constructed by the reader. 610 "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." See WP, 291. 611 See WP, 247. 612 The book NF wants to check is William R. Mueller, The Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction (New York: Association Press, 1959). 613 For Kant's formula, see NB 27, n. 366. On Pynchon's representation of paranoia, see NB 44, n. 94. 614 See NB 44, n. 582. 615 See WP, 237. 616 See pars. 453 and 470, above, and WP, 274. 617 The last line of Orwell's 1984 reveals the number of years that will be required to translate all of the literature of the past into Newspeak, after which translation the original texts are to be destroyed. 618 The subtitle of Bernard de Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714). 619 "Of Civil Liberty," in David Hume's Political Essays, ed. Charles W. Hendel (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 105. 620 The point being, apparently, that Henry III makes his way into Dante's Inferno as one of the "violent against neighbours" (canto 12,11.118-21), whereas Edward I does not. 621 On Spenser's four hymns, see WP, 147. Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 is the obvious "poor soul" sonnet; which other sonnets NF includes in the group is not clear. 622 The material on Rabelais remained in chap. 7. See WP, 254, 260. 623 See WP, 273-4. 624 Viola Sachs, La Contre-bible de Melville: Moby Dick dechiffre (Paris: Mouton, 1975)625 See WP, 246, 279. 626 See WP, 266-71. 627 The Red and the Black (1830), chap. i. 628 That is, natura naturata, as opposed to natura naturans. 629 These themes are hardly what turned out to be the "general argument" of chaps. 7 and 8: they are treated in WP, 241-7. 630 Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871, Arthur Rimbaud, in Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 100. This is one of two famous letters in which Rimbaud says that, in his effort to become a visionary, he is seeking to attain the unknown by "le dereglement de tous les sens." See NB 27, nn. 171-2. 631 On Nietzsche, see WP, 278, 308. 632 In very small letters NF later added to the end of this entry "unzeitgemasse," doubtless an allusion to Nietzsche's Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen

836

633

634 635 636 637 638 639 640 641

642 643 644 645 646 647 648 649 650

651 652

653 654 655

Notes to pages 389-94 (1873-76), trans, by R.J. Hollingdale as Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For Stevens and Valery, see WP, 182,184; NF does not consider Mallarme's Cantique de Saint-Jean in the section on mutability in chap. 5, but see WP, 268. See WP, xviii-xx. See par. 610, above. See WP, 130-1. See Mallarme's Preface to Un Coup de Des. See WP, 289, and n. 603, above. The reference is to the final line of Wallace Stevens's The Snow Man: "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." See WP, 291. See WP, 232. See WP, 263-4, where NF contrasts, not The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, but The Ladies' Dressing-Room with Marvell's On a Drop of Dew. The Unicorn and the Stars, in Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 222. Albert Thibaudet, La Poesie de Stephane Mallarme (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 40. The quotation is from William Anderson. See NB 44, n. 470. A reference, apparently, to the four fathers or father-figures in Shakespeare's Pericles: Simonides, Cleon, Antiochus, and Pericles himself. kenosis = emptying; cf. Paul's wording for the Incarnation in Philippians 2:7: "He emptied himself." See WP, 270. See MM, 223. See n. 166, above. M.K. Joseph, The Time ofAchamoth (Auckland: Collins, 1977). See Notes 52, par. 982. See WP, xvi-xvii. The passage referred to is from the Gospel of Thomas 114: "Simon Peter said to them, 'Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.' Jesus said, 'See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.'" The editor's note to which NF refers indicates that "it was a philosophical cliche that the material constituent of an entity was 'female,' while its form (or ideal form) was 'male'" (The Gnostic Scriptures, 399). See WP, 302. See WP, 180. The Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella, a Latin ency-

Notes to pages 394-8

837

clopedist (fl. 5th cent.); in this work, also called Satyricon, the seven liberal arts are represented as courtiers of Mercury and Philology. 656 See WP, 271. 657 Harold Bloom, Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959). In examining Shelley's relation to nature and to imagination, Bloom draws on Martin Buber's distinction between "I-Thou" and "I-It" relationships. 658 See WP, xvi, and I.A. Richards's chap, on "Poetry and Beliefs" in Science and Poetry (1926; rev. ed., 1935). 659 NF's graduate course was English 605OY, "Principles of Literary Symbolism," which he taught until 1984-85. 660 See WP, 259. 661 NF's translation into Buber's terms of the Sanskrit "Thou Art That." See n. 165, above. 662 See WP, 166. 663 "Hologram model" is a reference to the work of Karl Pribram, David Bohm, Ken Wilber, and others, who postulate that both the brain and the universe function like the unity-in-diversity experience that has been recorded by many of the world's mystics. See pars. 80 and 343, above. The sources for NF's understanding of the model were principally David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science, ed. Ken Wilber. Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. 664 NF included a reference to the passage (Prometheus Unbound, 1.1.192-4) only in a note. See WP, 319. 665 Words that Yeats uses to symbolize the "primary" and "antithetical" types of subjectivity: "the stare, which sees nothing but expresses an inner consciousness, and the glance, a subject looking at a reality set over against it" (SM, 255). Yeats uses both words more than a dozen times in his poetry; they appear together only in Among School Children. 666 John N. Bleibtreu, The Parable of the Beast (New York: Collier, 1973), chaps. 3 and 4. An annotated copy is in the NFL. In WP, NF cites Bleibtrau on the strict regulation of eating together in human societies (319). 667 See WP, 262-4. 668 A reference to the penultimate pi. of Blake's Jerusalem, depicting JehovahAlbion embracing the prodigal Jerusalem. 669 The resurrection of Lazarus was "to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark" (Samuel Beckett, Murphy [New York: Grove, 1957], 180). 670 See WP, 106-7. 671 See WP, 264-5.

838

Notes to pages 399-404

672 Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (Toronto: Bantam, 1983). An annotated copy is in the NFL. For the "parallel-worlds problem," or what Rucker calls "duoverses," see chap. i. 673 See WP, 262-4. 674 The "Seattle intuition" was an epiphany that NF had in Seattle during the summer of 1951. He describes it in NB 53, par. 43, as "an illumination about the passing from the oracular into the witty." See the introduction to the present volumes (xxiv-xxv). 675 See WP, 285-8. 676 Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), 1:488. 677 See WP, 64-6. 678 See WP, 148-9. 679 See WP, 148-9. 680 The Gogol story is apparently Dead Souls (1842). 681 "But the only obvious common characteristic of The Road to Xanadu and Finnegans Wake is that we may say of each: one book like this is enough" ("The Frontiers of Criticism," in On Poetry and Poets [New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957], 119). See WP, 149. 682 "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts: Some Patterns in the Imagery of Canadian Poetry," in The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, ed. David Staines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 22-45. 683 See WP, xxi-xxii. 684 Caroline Spurgeon was a Shakespearean scholar who attempted to characterize Shakespeare's personality by studying his imagery. Her most important work was Shakespeare's Imagery (1935). 685 NF gave a series of lectures in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev in September and October of 1988. 686 In A Defence of Poetry Shelley speaks of "that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world" (Shelley's Criticial Prose, 19). See SR, 122. 687 Ramon Lull, Blanquerna: A Thirteenth-Century Romance, trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Jarrolds, [1926]), 415. NF concluded his Emmanuel College essay on Lull, written more than fifty years earlier, with these lines from Lull's The Book of the Lover and the Beloved (SE, 233). 688 S0ren Kierkegaard, "The Dread of the Good," in The Concept of Dread, 10537 (chap. 4, pt. 2). See WP, 281. 689 Romans 8:15. Abba is Aramaic for "father." On the quotation from . Foucault, see NB 44, n. 582. 690 NF did not include an endnote for his reference to the John Prologue in WP, 104. 691 Both poets wrote poems entitled Journey to the Interior. See MM, 223. 692 All four papers were later pub. in MM.

Notes to pages 404-10

839

693 Although Fulke Greville does not address the issue of prose forms in his Life of Sir Philip Sidney, he does, as NF says in NB 44, par. 638, see Sidney's Arcadia as a model state, referring to it in the "Dedication" to Sidney's Life as an "excellent intended pattern" (Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986], 134). 694 That is, on the one hand, the views about self-determination and individual responsibility in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), and, on the other, the argument for socialism in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). 695 Song 6, in The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, IX Duke of Acjuitaine, ed. Gerald A. Bond (New York: Garland, 1982), 27. For Mallarme, see Un Coup de Des (1885). 696 interrex = the mock-king. See WP, 262.

697 See WP, 247-9. 698 See WP, 308. 699 See WP, 264-5. 700 The reference is to the epiphany NF had on New Year's Day sometime during the 19505. See the introduction to the present volumes (xxiv-xxv). 701 See WP, 63-4. 702 See pars. 408, 677, and 743, above; for Roethke and the Canadian poets, see MM, 223. 703 The phrase appears throughout Night the Eighth of The Four Zoas. 704 The reference is to Edmund Burke's conviction that people who uphold bad principles turn into bad men. See NB 27, par. 382. 705 The scandal, which hit Toronto newspapers in July 1989, led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Newfoundland, Alphonsus L. Penney, who stepped down as a result of charges that the Roman Catholic hierarchy ignored or failed to deal effectively with allegations of sexual abuse of altar boys and orphaned youths by priests. 706 NF was born on Bastille Day in 1912. 707 N.W. DeWitt was professor of Latin at Victoria College in NF's student days. 708 NF's distinction is between two terms used to refer to the New Testament "covenant": diatheke, "will or testament," and syntheke, "binding or putting together." See CP, 158. 709 A reference to the instructions given by the father to the three sons in Swift's A Tale of a Tub: each of the sons, representing, respectively, Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Calvinism, is given a coat with instructions not to alter it. 710 NFS, 60. 711 Notes 52, par. 57. 712 That is, NF's "moonlighting" works. Francis Sparshott, NF's colleague at Victoria College, used the word in his review of GC in Philosophy and Literature, 6 (October 1982): 180.

840

Notes to pages 410-13

713 This remark may well have been triggered by the reference to Francis Sparshott in par. 772, as Sparshott's review of GC (see previous n.) was a rather severe attack on the book. 714 The references are to Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) and George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1903). 715 R. Bruce Elder, Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (Waterloo, Ont: Wilfred Laurier University Press in collaboration with the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, 1989). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 716 Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950 (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1981). 717 The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 718 John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, 11. 81 ff. 719 See WP, 201,223-4. 720 See WP, 260-2. 721 NF's use of the word "niggers" here derives from Paul Schmidt's translation of Rimbaud's un negre. See par. 302, above, and n. 327. 722 See WP, 223-8. 723 See WP, 182. 724 methexis - participation. The allusion is to a passage in bk. i, chap. 6 of Aristotle's Metaphysics: "the Pythagoreans say that things exist by 'imitation' [mimesis] of numbers, and Plato says they exist by participation [methexis], changing the name. But what the participation or the imitation of the Forms could be they left open to question" (987^ 10-12). 725 See WP, 223-4. 726 See WP, 184. 727 "Lead, Kindly Light" is a hymn written by John Henry Cardinal Newman. NF's remarks about the hymn here are quite similar to those he makes in NFC, 49. 728 The word mnesteron does not appear in Davies's Orchestra. NF is referring to the fact that the poem is sung to Penelope by Antinous, her chief suitor, and, apparently, that the cosmic dance celebrated in the poem recalls the "dance" of Penelope's fingers as she weaves and unweaves her web. See WP, 176-7. 729 That is, Kant's phrase "purposiveness without purpose." See WP, 227. 730 Blake's poem is in a letter of 14 September 1800 from Mrs. Blake to Anna Flaxman. Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 40. 731 "For the woman in her conception and generation is but the imitation of

Notes to pages 414-17

841

the earth, and not the earth of the woman" (The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989], 190). 732 Philo, trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 1:457-9, 461. 733 The last twelve lines of Yeats's The Cat and the Moon draw directly on the following passage from Plutarch's Isis and Osiris: "But the pupils in the eye of the cat appear to grow large and round at the time of the full moon, and to become thin and narrow at the time of the wanings of that heavenly body. By the human features of the cat is indicated the intelligence and the reason that guides [sic] the change of the moon" (Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, 16 vols. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 5:151 (sec. 376). An annotated copy of vol. 5, the only vol. of the Moralia NF owned, is in the NFL. 734 Erik Erikson, "Configurations in Play—Clinical Studies," Studies in Play (New York: Norton, 1975), 139-214. 735 This is not a reference to Bach's Goldberg Variations in one of Borges's stories. NF is referring rather to Borges's practice of repeating the original theme at the end of his stories, as in Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, which does contain a play. 736 Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 737 A reference, apparently, to an epiphany NF experienced on his trip to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in September 1990. 738 See Stephane Mallarme, Brise marine, L'Action restreinte, and Le Mystere dans les lettres, in CEuvres completes, 38, 370, 387. 739 Ars est celare artum, "art lies in the concealment of art": an axiom of those artists who try to disguise the means by which they produce their effects, as well as a precept of those who feel art should reproduce nature. 740 Philip Marchand, "Vintage Frye," Toronto Star, 25 November 1990: Gi2. 741 "It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife" (Heraclitus, Fragment 26). 742 The books NF refers to: Geoffrey Chew, Lectures on Modelling the Bootstrap (Bombay: Tata Institute, 1970); David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Ken Wilber, ed., The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes; and Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum. 743 See n. 738, above. 744 "Nature that hateth emptiness / Allows of penetration less" (Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, 11. 41-2). 745 "Nature abhors a vacuum."

842

Notes to pages 417-23

746 Quiet Consummation was the title of a novel NF planned to write in the 19405. He did in fact write several chapters: see NB i, NB 2, and the fifteenpage typescript in the NFF, 1991, box 34, file 2. "Quiet consummation" comes from the song in Cymbeline (4.2.280). 747 Henry James's The Next Time (1895) is the story of a writer whose work is admired by a small coterie but who is frustrated by his failure to reach a large audience. 748 See NB 44, par. 667. 749 "If there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision" (land Thou, 52). 750 The clause is from "A Collect for Peace," in The Book of Common Prayer. Notes 52 1 NF has in mind Fish's Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 2 See NB 27, n. 12. 3 For Poe's vision of the expanding and contracting cosmology, see the concluding pars, of Eureka in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 9:136-8. On Eureka, see NB 27, n. 169, WP, 150-1, and MM, 42, 58,126. 4 NF examines these themes in SeS ("the romance book"), 102,110-17,14°-7On the prison of Narcissus, see WP, 271, and DV, 27, or NFR, 186. 5 The Lankavatara Sutra is a Mahayana Buddhist text stressing inner enlightenment and the erasing of all dualities. Peter Fisher, one of NF's students, gave him D.T. Suzuki's translation of the sutra in the late 19405. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 6 SeeNB44, n. 118. 7 In the final sentence of his Defence of Poetry (1821; pub. 1840) Shelley announces that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." 8 See NB 27, n. 10. 9 That is, the chap, devoted to the Hermes cycle. NF associated each of the four gods or "informing presences," as he was to call them in WP (277), with a colour: red for Adonis; green for Eros; orange for Prometheus; and blue for Hermes. 10 For NF's graduate course, see NB 50, n. 659. The poem is Robert Graves's To Juan at the Winter Solstice. 11 That is, making something subjective and finding something objective. See par. 449, below, and MM, no. 12 See NB 27, n. 205. 13 The Igitur pattern is the via negativa. See WP, 291-2, and MM, 39. 14 See NB 44, n. 641. 15 See NB. 44, n. 642.

Notes to pages 423-6

843

16 An idea that NF sees illustrated, as we learn from WP (306), in Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral. 17 Jay Macpherson, "Narcissus," in The Spirit of Solitude: Conventions and Continuities in Late Romance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 75-96. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 18 Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early iqth Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967). On Narcissus, see WP, 271, and MM, 243. 19 NF's "hunch" has to do with Kant's thesis about "purposiveness without purpose" in the Critique of Judgment. See WP, 227, and MM, 179. On the Domain ofArnheim hunch, see par. 55, below, and NB 44, par. 378. 20 Sailing to Byzantium (1927) and Byzantium (1932). See WP, 302. 21 "For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" (Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man, 11.13-15). On "something called nothing," see WP, 288-91. 22 The reference is to Pericles' daughter in Shakespeare's Pericles Prince of Tyre and in T.S. Eliot's Marina (1930). See SeS, 52,152,181. 23 Chosisme ("thingness") was the label attached to the flat, objective descriptions in the early fictions of Alain Robbe-Grillet. See WP, 87-8. 24 See par. 13, above, and NB 27, n. 176. 25 Stevens makes no explicit references to Easter in his Adagia. NF probably has in mind Stevens's comment on Easter in "Honors and Acts": "On Easter the great ghost of what we call the next world invades and vivifies this present world, so that Easter seems like a day of two lights, one the sunlight of the bare and physical end of winter, the other the double light" (Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse [New York: Knopf, 1957], 239). The essay was omitted from the 1989 ed. of Opus Posthumous. An annotated copy of the 1957 ed. is in the NFL. 26 See GC, 231. 27 For Jacques Derrida's early formulation of the relation among writing, speech, and thought, see Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 28 See WP, 34, and MM, 240. 29 See WP, 166. 30 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), i. See also "The Origin of a Work of Art," in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Regnery, 1949), 21-6. Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. See WP, 10. A number of Heidegger's readers have pointed to the similarity between Heidegger's question and Leibnitz's "Pourquoi il y a plutot chose que rien?" See, e.g., George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (New York: Viking, 1978), 34-5. 31 See WP, 72.

844

Notes to pages 426-31

32 See MM, 111. 33 "Objective correlative" is T.S. Eliot's term for the object or image in a poetic work that represents its essential emotion. See T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 124-5; Selected Letters ofStephane Mallarme, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 39 (undated letter to Henri Cazalis). 34 See nn. 11 and 23, above. 35 NF's plan to organize the last part of WP on the two sets of dialogues of Word and Spirit was eventually changed to another pattern based on four axis mundi archetypes. On the two overmastering desires of Oedipus, see MM, 91,103, or NFR, 355; MIS, 34-5, or NFR, 364; and WP, 218,258, where NF softens his description of them. 36 See NB 50, n. 165. 37 The reference is to Arthur Koestler's'argument against considering wholes and parts in any absolute sense (The Ghost in the Machine [New York: Macmillan, 1976], 45-58). By saying "it goes only one way," NF means that Koestler's dialectic of substructures ("holons") is a top-down hierarchical system. 38 See WP, 209,183-4. 39 See WP, 271. 40 Cf. par. 12, above. 41 "Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies" (Science and the Modern World [New York: New American Library, 1948], viii). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 42 From the first line of e.e. cummings's pity this busy monster, manunkind. Both the Oedipus story and cummings's phrase illustrate what NF calls "that continuous psychosis which is the substance of human history" (MM, 117). 43 On the Mobius strip paradox, see NB 27, par. 27. 44 NB 27, par. 20. 45 See WP, 81. 46 NB 27, par. 97. 47 See WP, 281. 48 See WP, 42-3, and MM, 21-2, 58, 89 49 "It [cosmogony] belongs to a department of literature remarkable for its persistence and astonishing in its variety; cosmogony is one of the most ancient literary forms" (Paul Valery, "On Poe's Eureka," trans. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler, in Leonardo Poe Mallarme, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of Paul Valery, 170.) In the preface to Eureka Poe says, "I present the composition as an Art-Product alone,—let us say as a Romance; or, if it not be urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem" (The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 9:4). See FS, vii-viii, WP, 150-1, and MM, 58,126. 50 De Quincey does not use the image of the network per se in "The English

Notes to pages 431-7

51 52

53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

845

Mail-Coach," although he often speaks of the links, associations, and connections among the events he describes, historical events, the delivery of mail, and the "dream fugue" in sec. 3 of the essay. NF's reference to Ben Jonson's Staple of News is to the network of the news office in that play and to the connections among its various newsmongers and gossips. See n. 76, below. NF presented the Wiegand Lecture, "Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason," at the University of Toronto, 29 September 1982. An idea expressed in various ways in Stevens's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, in Collected Poems, 380-408, and in Adagia and "Two or Three Ideas," in Opus Posthumous, 184-202, 257-80. See WP, 82. This verse contains the phrase "word of his power," one of the several sources of the title of NF's WP. Saint Stephen and Herod, a Middle English poem preserved in a fifteenthcentury manuscript. In the poem a roasted cock arises from King Herod's dish to announce the birth of Christ. Angered, Herod has Stephen stoned to death. RW, 252, DV, 19, or NFR, 181, and NFC, 186-7. See esp. Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969) and "Anatomy of Criticism or the Order of Paradigms," in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, 11-12. An annotated copy of The Symbolism of Evil is in the NFL. See WP, 54-62. See NB 27, n. 17. Par. 25, above. On the focusing symbol, see WP, 70. See NB 44, n. 194. See esp. CP. See NB 44, n. 484. See WP, 42-3. See WP, 43-6. See par. 52, above. See NB 27, n. 119. See NB 27, n. 13. NF means to refer to Lawrence's Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921). See NB 44, n. 317. See NB 44, n. 484. See NB 27, n. 12. See par. 54, above. One of the central themes of Mallarme's Igitur, esp. pt. 4, Un Coup de Des. In FS, NF used the phrase "Druid analogy" to mean the myths and rituals of natural religion in their most primitive form. Such myths and rituals were

846

76

77

78 79 80

81

82 83

84 85 86 87 88

Notes to pages 438-41

analogies of genuine religion, that is, confused or shadow forms. Over the years, however, the meaning of the phrase greatly expanded to include anything that was not perfect or genuine. In his notebooks from the 19605, for example, NF refers to his own schematic diagrams as "Druid analogies," meaning that they should not be taken as substitutes for the vision they represented: they were but imperfect analogies. Donald F. McKenzie, "Staple of News and the Late Plays," in A Celebration of Ben Jonson, ed. William Blissett, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 83-128. De Quincey uses the phrase "galvanic cycle" in "The English Mail-Coach" to describe the relationship between the horse and his master in the old mail-coach system of travelling (pt. i, par. 13). The systole and diastole movement that NF finds in Eureka is in De Quincey as well, and NF is remembering this passage: "What! shall it be within the benefit of clergy to delay the king's message on the high-road?—to interrupt the great respirations, ebb and flood, systole and diastole, of the national intercourse?—to endanger the safety of tidings running day and night between all nations and languages?" (The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, enlarged ed. 14 vols. [Edinburgh: Black, 1890], 13:280). In SR, NF refers to De Quincey's image as "part of a big spider-web of central intelligence, a new kind of personality which is at once human and mechanical" (93). See par. 54, above. See WP, 218-28. See WP, 241-2. The ideas in this par. are developed in "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," MM, 44-59. Pars. 10-14, 54, 74, 80, 85, 92. The point about the network imagery in De Quincey, which NF refers to many times in the late notebooks, was not included in WP. On the systole-diastole imagery in Foe's Eureka, which also appears throughout the notebooks, see the brief mention in WP, 150-1, and NB 27, n. 169. The reference is to the association of Danae and the Virgin in Francis Thompson's Maria Assumpta (11. 33-4) and in Pound's Canto 4 (11.100-26). See WP, 206-7, and MM, 52-3. See NB 44, n. 484. For the development of the ideas on reading in this and the following four pars., see WP, 67-76. "Charms and Riddles," SM, 124. The History of Herodotus, trans. George Rawlinson (New York: Tudor, 1939), 495See WP, 87-8. "Overdetermined" is a holograph addition. The Protevangelium of James was a second-century infancy gospel that developed into the History of Joseph the Carpenter.

Notes to pages 441-5

847

89 The eclogue prophesying the birth of a child; because of the similarity of its language to that of Isaiah, it was seen by the Church, after the time of Constantine the Great, as a prophecy of Christ. 90 "Point of contact" (Anknupfungspunkt) was Emil Brunner's idea that it is impossible to communicate the Gospel unless there is a point of contact with what the hearer already understands. See Brunner's Der Mensch im Widerspruch (1937; Eng. trans. Man in Revolt, 1947), and "Die Frage nach dem 'Ankniipfungspunkt' als Problem der Theologie," Zwischen den Zeiten, 10 (1932): 505-32. 91 SeS, 37-50. 92 "I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.... All fiction is metaphor." (The Left Hand of Darkness [New York: Ace, 1976], [xiv-xvi]). 93 John 20:17. See WP, 201. 94 That is, the first cycle of the "triple goddess" mythology that Robert Graves reconstructs from Classical sources. See The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 61-73. See also WP, 219-20, and MM, 5,5995 For the development of the ideas in this par., see WP, 201-4. 96 GC, 18. 97 For Jacques Derrida "trace" means that there is no unequivocal and determinate sense in which linguistic signs are either present or absent: every sign contains a "trace" of other signs that differ from it. 98 temenos = sacred space. 99 See WP, 183-4. 100 Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 435; Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1956), 247. Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. 101 The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 89. 102 On the ascension of Kore, see WP, 203,253. 103 Marie-Louise von Franz, Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1972). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 104 John Weir Perry, Lord of the Four Quarters: Myths of the Royal Father (Toronto: Collier, 1970). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 105 The White Goddess, 70. 106 Enki was the Sumerian god of wisdom and of water. NF is referring to "The Deluge," a fragmentary text in which the command is given, apparently by Anu and Enlil, gods of skyh and atmosphere, for a flood "to destroy the seed of mankind" (Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 42-4). 107 See the "Deliverance of Mankind from Destruction" (in Ancient Near

848

Notes to pages 445-52

Eastern Texts, 10-11), an Egyptian myth about the rebelliousness of humanity, their slaying at the hands of the goddess Hathor, undertaken initially at the behest of Re, and their subsequent protection by Re through the use of a potion of beer and red ochre. 108 The one unnamed deity who attempts to save humanity from destruction is thought to be Enki, who "took counsel with himself" as to what to do about the situation when the decree for the impending flood was first announced. 109 This story is recorded in Hesiod's Theogony, 521 ff. no See WP, 182-3. 111 In the margin of this par., adjacent to the second sentence, NF wrote "causality & typology." 112 Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. On the symbolism of the lance and chalice, see chap. 6 (pp. 62-76). On Weston, see MM, 344113 The first such diagram being the U-shaped narrative sequences of the Bible that NF charted in GC, 171. 114 Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), and T Zero (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), both trans. William Weaver. Annotated copies of both are in the NFL. 115 Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Bantam, 1971), 3-17. In this story, Carlos Argentine Daneri explains to the narrator that the Aleph in his cellar "is one of the points in space that contains all other points . . . the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!" (10, 12). 116 See WP, 266-71. 117 See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), passim. Heidegger formulates the distinction throughout Being and Time, but see esp. pp. 172-82. Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. 118 C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). An annotated copy is in the NFL.

119 The White Goddess, 157. 120 Perdita is the abandoned daughter of Leontes and Hermione in The Winter's Tale; Imogen, the faithful husband of Posthumus in Cymbeline. On the dying and reborn central character, see chap. 4 of NP; on the Proserpine echo, see NFS, 164, and MD, 32; on the notion of allegory in Cymbeline, see NP, 69-70.

Notes to pages 452-8

849

121 GC, 222. 122 The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Avon, 1978). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 123 See NB 27, n. 136. 124 The two Yeats poems are Solomon and the Witch and Solomon to Sheba. 125 Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (London: Cassell, 1963). 126 NF meant to type "Lyca," the name of the child in Blake's Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Found, rather than "Lucy." See WP, 270. 127 See NB 44, n. 78. 128 See Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus," in Ecrits: A Selection, 281-91. 129 A theme NF associates esp. with Yeats's Solomon and the Witch and A Vision, as well as with Mallarme's Igitur. See NB 27, n. 205. 130 The priestess Baqbuq (or Bacbuc, as in most eds.) ushers Panurge into the presence of the holy bottle in bk. 5 of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. See WP, 254. For the Biblical references, bak-book appears in Jeremiah 19:1, 10 (where it is translated as "earthen bottle" in the AV), and i Kings 14:3 (where it is translated as "cruse"). 131 M.A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979), 378-9. 132 See WP, 299. 133 The ideas in this par. are developed in chap. 6 of WP. 134 Jerusalem, pi. 94; see also Milton, pi. 24. A culbute (lit. a "somersault") is most often used by NF to mean a social overturn or reversal. See NB 44, n. 63. 135 See WP, 299. 136 Lectures NF gave as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, April 1975; pub. as SeS. 137 See GC, 180-7. On the double and twin themes, see SeS, 140-5, and WP, 268-70. 138 See par. 50, above. 139 Luke 16:19-31, the parable of Lazarus and the unnamed rich man; the rich man has traditionally been called Dives from the Latin word for "rich" in the Vulgate. 140 NF had two copies of Gargantua and Pantagruel, both annotated: London: Dent, 1933; and Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955. 141 Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544): Italian monk, burlesque poet, and the preeminent macaronic writer; he wrote under the name of Merlinus Coccaius. Hypnerotomachia: the earliest of the Renaissance emblem books or collections of symbolic pictures, printed by Aldus in 1499. 142 According to J.M. Cohen, wine in Rabelais was symbolic of the exchange of ideas among learned men and also of "the uninhibited interchange of

850

Notes to pages 458-62

affection between man and man" (Translator's Introduction to The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955], 24). 143 This seems to be a reference to par. 721, suggesting that NF began the typed notes for WP with the section that begins with par. 694. Or perhaps he is speaking of only those notes, interspersed throughout the file, that were typed by Jane Widdicombe. Those notes include the material in this section and that in pars. 694-731, which appear to have been originally part of a single unit. 144 See, e.g., bk. 2, chap. 6. Gellius was a second-century Latin writer, the author of Nodes Atticae, a medley of history, literature, and language. 145 See pars. 11, 80, and 159, above. 146 See n. 74, above. 147 See NB 50, n. 358. 148 For Bishop Berkeley's speculation on fire as the "animal spirit," see Siris, pars. 152-230. 149 See NB 24, par. 59. As this notebook dates from the early 19705, NF is recalling a passage he wrote some fifteen years earlier. 150 Roger Sherman Loomis, The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1963); A.E. Waite, The Holy Grail: The Galahad Quest in the Arthurian Literature (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961). Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. 151 From Ritual to Romance. See par. 127, above. 152 The allusion is to Ariel's Song in The Tempest, 1.2.396-402. 153 See par. 160, above. 154 Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (New York: Citadel, 1995). NF seems to be referring to a passage on p. 75. Which of the numerous alchemical symbols for the conjunction of opposites NF has in mind is not clear. His ideas on alchemical conjunction derive from Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56; Eng. trans. 1963), and perhaps from Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (1917). For NF's notes on Silberer's book, which he read in the late 19405, see NB 7. Annotated copies of both Jung and Silberer are in the NFL. 155 For the development of the ideas in this par., see EAC, 17-19. 156 GC, 71-6. 157 That is, Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus. 158 New York: Macmillan, 1973, an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. NF had first read the book in 1985. See NB 27, par. 65. 159 "The causa-sui passion is an energetic fantasy that covers over the rumbling of man's fundamental creatureliness, or what we can now more pointedly call his hopeless lack of genuine centering on his own energies to assure the victory of his life" (Becker, 107).

Notes to pages 462-9

851

160 NB 50, pars. 178, 200, 315. 161 Sermon 183, in Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle, N.Y.: New City Press, 1990), 5:341 (par. 11). 162 On the mater-material connection, see Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 322, and The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (ibid.), 91, and Mysterium Coniunctionis, 18,21; on hyle (chaos or primary matter), see his Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 79- An annotated copy of Psychology and Alchemy is in the NFL. 163 CG, chap. 5. 164 NB 44, pars. 55, 80, 82, 87, 90, 95. 165 The Cambridge Platonists, a seventeenth-century group led by Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, and others, opposed the materialistic theories of Hobbes, basing their opposition on the views of Plato, the Neoplatonists, and Descartes. 166 See WP, 296. 167 "Cantus ubi, choreisque furit lyra mista beatis, / Festa Sionaeo bacchantur et Orgia" ["Where song and the sound of the lyre are mingled in ecstasy with blessed dances, and where the festal orgies rage under the heavenly thyrsus"] (Milton, Epitaphium Damonis, 11. 218-19; trans. Merritt Y. Hughes). 168 "The grandest Poetry is Immoral the Grandest characters Wicked" (Annotations to Boyd's Historical Notes, Erdman, 634). 169 An annotated copy of The Celestina: A Novel in Dialogue, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), is in the NFL. 170 "Red" and the colours that follow refer to the coloured file folders containing NF's notes for the various chaps, of WP. The folder for the introduction was pink. 171 The words to the right of the chap, titles ("creation" . . . "apse 2") are holograph additions. 172 For the development of the ideas in this and the following two pars., see MM, 70-3. 173 See par. 212, below. 174 See WP, 270-1. 175 See WP, 213-14. 176 GC, 128. 177 SR, 102-5. 178 Cf. par. 201, above. 179 Secretum meum is Petrarch's autobiographical work (1342-58); "fiend Apollo" is a phrase from Abraham Cowley's On the Death of Mr. Crashaw, 1. 22; for the Marsyas and Glaucus images, see the Paradiso, canto i, 11.19, 68. See WP, 145-7, and MM, 50-2.

852

Notes to pages 469-83

180 See n. 30, above. 181 The phrase used by Jacques Derrida to represent the fundamental set of principles upon which the Western intellectual enterprise ("logocentrism") has centred but which, according to Derrida, must be dismantled. 182 GC, 3-30. 183 Samuel Johnson, "Life of Addison," in Lives of the Poets, ed. G.B. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), 2:127. 184 "Harold Innis: The Strategy of Culture," EAC, 160. 185 One version of the book NF planned to write after AC, to be entitled The Critical Comedy, was to have had one hundred sections. See NB 19, pars. 332 and 359, NB 24, par. 211, and NB 12, pars. 19, 23, 270,292, 524, and 531. 186 GC, 166-7. 187 See Vico, The New Science, 79-80. 188 See WP, 192. 189 See NB 50, n. 734. 190 NF filed his notes and drafts of various chaps, of WP in coloured folders. See par. 200, above. 191 GC,50. 192 SR, chap. i. See NB 27, n. 12. 193 On the Coming of Spring (1628), Elegy 5. See WP, 240. 194 See MM, 63. 195 NF is beginning to move away from his conception of the Dialogue of Word and Spirit as an organizing principle for the last half of WP and to move toward the archetypes of the axis mundi. Here and in the next two pars, he introduces the images of the ladder (or mountain), garden, cave, and fire (furnace), which became the organizing archetypes of chaps. 5-8 of WP. 196 After Zeus threatened to withold the gift of fire from humankind, Prometheus stole fire from heaven, carried it in a fennel stalk, and gave it to mortals. 197 For an outline of the parallels between the sequences, see par. 466, below. 198 NF is referring to Boehme's Six Theosophic Points (orig. pub. in 1620). See NB 50, n. 511. 199 GC, 182-3.

200 The Ballad of the Long-legged Bait, sts. 41-4. 201 See NB 27, pars. 92, 96,103, no, 229, and NB 50, par. 401. 202 See NB 27, n. 88. 203 "Differential language" is a reference to the puns in Derrida's neologism differance, meaning to differ, to disperse, and to defer. See his essay "Differance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1-27. On Derrida's "scratching out," see par. 278, above.

Notes to pages 483-91

853

204 Above "gyres" is NF's holograph addition, "caves?" 205 See MM, 241-3. 206 NF gives an account of the "irritable passage" in several places, including CR: "St. Augustine mentions someone who, irritated by questions about what God was doing 'before' he made the world, said he was preparing a hell for those who asked such questions" (CR, 34, or NFR, 55-6). See also GC, 71 and DV, 42, or NFR, 199. The passage itself is in the Confessions, bk. 11, chap. 12. 207 GC, 119-20. 208 Apparently a reference to the word "esemplastic" in the subtitle of chap. 13 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Coleridge used the word to mean "moulding into unity," though his derivation of the word—the Greek form of the German Einbildungskraft—was based on a misunderstanding of the German. 209 According to Hesiod, there are two kinds of Eris (the personification of strife or competition), one bad and one good. See Works and Days, bk. 2 ff. 210 See pars. 253 and 197, and n. 167, above. 211 Doubtless a reference to Auden's depiction of the historical situation that forms the background for the Incarnation. See GC, 98, and MM, 166. 212 The final entry in this par. is a holograph addition. 213 The final entry in this par. is a holograph addition. 214 In Pound's imagist theory of poetry the juxtaposition of particulars was sufficient: they needed no copula or other connecting link. Pound's twoline poem In a Station of the Metro became the locus classicus of such theory. 215 The final entry in this par. is a holograph addition. 216 This and the next three entries are holograph additions. 217 Leibnitz had argued in his Theodicee (1710) that God's plan for the world, taken as a whole, was the best of all possible systems. In Candide (1759) Voltaire satirizes Pangloss's repeated claim that "this is the best of all possible worlds," there being much evidence to the contrary throughout the adventures of Candide. 218 See NFS, 164. 219 Pandosto, or The Triumph of Time, Robert Greene's prose romance (1588), was the source of The Winter's Tale. 220 See WP, 207. 221 In the "Dark Gallery" scene of Faust, pt. 2, Faust is told that he must descend to the realm of the Mothers (11. 6213 ff.). See WP, 290-1. 222 See WP, 221. 223 That is, since the epiphany or illumination NF had during the summer of 1951 in Seattle. See the introduction to the present volumes (xxiv-xxv). 224 See WP, 164. 225 See WP, 256-7.

854

Notes to pages 491-7

226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237

The White Goddess, 70. See WP, 208-10. Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn, pt. 2. See WP, 153. See WP, 196. City of God, bk. 15, chap. 26. See WP, 198-9, 206. See WP, 240-1. See WP, 160-2. See NB 44, n. 171. See WP, 158-62. On Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum, see NB 50, n. 336. At the beginning of Sir John Davies's Orchestra, Antinous invites Queen Penelope to dance, and what follows is a long series of dancing metaphors. The article NF refers to is R.J. Manning, "Rule and Order Strange: A Reading of Sir John Da vies' Orchestra," English Literary Renaissance, 15 (Spring 1985): 175-94. See WP, 176-7. See WP, 175-6. Childhood's End is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke (1953). In Chariots of the Gods and in other bestselling books Erich von Daniken speculates that alien astronauts were responsible for most ancient civilizations. See NB 50, n. 366. Elegy 5, In Adventus Veris (On the Coming of Spring) (1628). See n. 221, above. La Vie anterieure (A Former Life): a sonnet in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mat (1857). See Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Atlantis /Europe: The Secret of the West. An annotated copy is in the NFL. Thera is the ancient name for Santorini, a volcanic island of the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea, where prehistoric and Greek works have been excavated. See NB44, n. 118. See NB 50, n. 393. See NB 44, n. 622. That is, the yellow file folder in which NF kept his notes for the Prometheus archetype and material dealing with the theme of law. "Vision and Cosmos," a lecture NF presented at Bar-Han University on 24 May 1982; pub. in Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature, ed. David H. Hirsch and Nehama Aschkenasy (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), 5-17. The argument in this lecture is similar to that of "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," MM, 44-59. Baron Ludvig Holberg's satirical novel is The fourney of Niels Klim to the World Underground (1741). For Lucian's kataplous, see NB 50, n. 366.

238 239

240 241 242 243

244

245 246 247 248 249

250

Notes to pages 497-505

855

251 See n. 221, above. 252 See WP, 231-2, 235. 253 A reference to the three-part structure of De Quincey's "The English MailCoach," which begins with historical reminiscence, moves to a dramatic action, and then, as NF describes it elsewhere, "funnels into the dreamworld in a descending spiral" (MM, 57). For the whirling crisis in "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," see De Quincey's account in that essay of the murders committed by John Williams, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 13:74-124. 254 For "concentering vision," see NB 27, n. 9. 255 See n. 298, below. 256 NF underlined the first "he" in this sentence and in the margin wrote "Faust." 257 See WP, 63. 258 The Victoria talk was "Expanding the Boundaries of Literature," which NF presented to the Victoria University Alumni on 10 April 1984. Many of the entries in this section (pars. 384-417) are developed in that talk, which NF revised and published as "The Expanding World of Metaphor." Paul Bouissac was a colleague from the French department. 259 See WP, 67-8. 260 Cf. par. 309, above. 261 Cf. pars. 30, 299, and 306, above. 262 The last phrase is a holograph addition. 263 The final two words of this entry are a holograph addition. The reference is to Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 49-51 ("Aphorisms," bk. i, nos. 44-6). 264 "Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss . .. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 14-15). See par. 302, above. 265 What follows the question mark in this entry is a holograph addition. 266 See NB 27, n. 60. 267 Dylan Thomas, /// Were Tickled by the Rub of Love, final line. The idea of a "central man" who is all men appears throughout Stevens's poetry. See, e.g., Asides on the Oboe, 1.15. For NF's commentary on the metaphor, see "Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form," MM, 290-1. 268 Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). NF apparently had in mind quoting Burkert's thesis, that "myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance" (23). 269 All is True is the name given to Shakespeare's Henry VIII by Sir Henry

856

Notes to pages 506-15

Wotton in a letter describing the burning of the Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613. The truth of the events of the play is insisted on three times in the prologue. 270 "The darkness of that battle in the west, / Where all of high and holy dies away" (the final lines of Tennyson's To the Queen, the epilogue to Idylls of the King). See WP, 58. 271 See par. 52, above. 272 See NB 27, n. 72, and NB 44, n. 475. 273 "Man is a crazy Oedipus obsessed by two desires: to murder his father God and to rape his mother Nature" (NB 27, par. i). See WP, 218,258; MM, 91, 103, or NFR, 355; NUS, 34-5, or NFR, 364; and par. 36, above. 274 See n. 263, above. 275 See n. 219, above. 276 "The Social Authority of the Writer," a paper NF presented at the Library of Congress on 24 April 1984. This paper later modulated into what he calls his "Chicago paper" in NB 27, par. 325—"The Expanding World of Metaphor." 277 See par. 278, above. 278 See n. 276, above. 279 NF derives the idea of ecstatic metaphor from Heidegger. See Being and Time, 377, 387. NF also refers to ecstatic metaphor as existential metaphor. See WP, 82, and MM, 111. 280 The reference is to Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), as well as to works of other literary critics of the Bible. 281 See NF's "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," MM, 44-59. 282 Part I being, at this stage, the material outlined in pars. 426-9, and Part II, the material outlined in pars. 430-3. 283 For Valery's account of Poe's notion of a universe, see "On Poe's Eureka," passim. See par. 52, above, WP, 150-1, and MM, 58. 284 See NF's "Myth as the Matrix of Literature," Georgia Review, 38 (Fall 1984): 465-76. 285 W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (New York: Meridian, 1956), 124-39. 286 See n. 81, above. 287 See NB 44, n. 484. 288 See NB 44, n. 118. 289 The allusions are, first, to Revelation 22:17 and, then, to the eating of the scroll in Revelation 10:8-11. 290 See NB 27, n. 336. 291 "-city" is a holograph addition. 292 See NB 27, n. 143.

Notes to pages 515-22

857

293 This entry is a holograph addition. The chaps, from Isaiah and Ezekiel record the prophets' visions of the seraphim and cherubim, respectively. 294 "abnihilization of the etym" is from James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 353,1. 22. Joyce's spelling is "abnihilisation." The gas jet is the one in Bella Cohen's brothel in the Circe chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. 295 The Henry James novel is The Spoils ofPoynton (1896), identified in the following par. G.B. Shaw's Heartbreak House (1919) concludes with the death of Boss Mangan and Billy Dunn in an air raid. 296 See NB 50, n. 98, and n. 376, below. 297 The devotees of Ydgrun, the goddess who enforces conformity in Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872). 298 The Four Zoas, Erdman, 369,11. 29-30; "73" refers to the first of Blake's two manuscripts for the section entitled Vala/Night the Seventh. 299 The reference is to Jay Macpherson's poem A Garden Shut: "A garden shut, a fountain sealed, / And all the shadowed mountains yield: / Dear Reader sits among the rocks / And fiddles at my seven locks" (The Boatman and Other Poems [Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968], 78 (11.1-4]). By apocryphon NF means a secret book, the secretness symbolized by its seals. 300 See NB 27, n. 366, and WP, 227. 301 A reference, perhaps, to the concept of master narrative, the notion that the grand recit of a philosophy of history, such as the Marxist one, can explain all events in terms of its rational framework. For a critique of the master narrative, see Jean-Francpis Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 302 See WP, 299. 303 GC, 199-200. 304 That is, the earliest stage: Q (for Quelle, meaning "source") is a hypothetical source text believed to have been used by the authors of Matthew and Luke, along with the Gospel of Mark. The theory that Q and Mark were literary sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is called the Two Source Theory. 305 See NB 27, n. 17. 306 See par. 52, above. 307 GC,76-7. 308 See n. 181, above. 309 Images found respectively in works by Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Stevens. 310 See n. 23, above. 311 See NB 44, n. 194. 312 See WP, 210-11.

858

Notes to pages 525-33

313 Cf. an expanded version of this colour scheme in pars. 233-41. 314 "Architas made a woodden Doue to flie; by which proportion I see no reason that the veryest blocke in the worlde shoulde dispayre of any thing" (The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, rev. P.P. Wilson [Oxford: Blackwell, 1958], 2:220). 315 See par. 52, above. 316 See pars. 54, 92, and 373, above. 317 See WP, 271. 318 Solaris (1961), one of Stanislaw Lem's major science fiction novels, is about a sentient ocean.

319 The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 16 (Canto 4). See WP, 162. 320 See RE, chaps. 4-5. 321 That is, the obstacle that Weil found in the doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ. NF's "mention" of Weil's challenge is in GC, 100. 322 See n. 51, above. 323 See WP, 106-7. F°r an expansion of the current entry, see pars. 732-4, below. 324 A hymn by Rev. R. Lowry. NF quotes part of the chorus and part of the first stanza of "A Better Day Is Coming," which can be found in The New Canadian Hymnal: A Collection of Hymns and Music (Toronto: William Briggs, 1913), 85-6325 GC, 124. 326 Stanza 4 of Vaughan's Regeneration alludes to Genesis, and the verse at the end of the poem is from the Song of Songs. On Marvell and Vaughan, see WP, 198,206, and MM, 40-1, 49, 50,219-20, 283. 327 The reference is to the identification of the garden with the mistress's body in Loves Martyr. See MM, 49. 328 See SR, 32-3. 329 NF quotes the 1945 ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster), chap. 23. See WP, 150, and MM, 168-9. 330 Science and the Modern World, 8. This entry is a holograph addition. See MM, 169. 331 The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century mystical treatise, is based on the notion that God can be reached only by a love that breaks through the intellectual darkness of the cloud of unknowing. 332 On Donne's The Canonization and Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle, see WP, 207-8, and MM, 49-50. On Donne's The Extasie, see WP, 79,207-8, 224, and MM, 26,114. 333 See WP, 54, for an elaboration of the ideas in this entry. In FS, NF quotes the passage from Puttenham having to do with the etymology of the poet as maker (157). 334 NF is referring to Chester's Loves Martyr, Fulke Greville's sonnet Caelica, I overnight was finely used, and Campion's Cherry-Ripe. See MM, 48-9.

Notes to pages 533-45

859

335 The Erdgeist, or earth spirit, who is summoned by Faust in the first scene of Goethe's Faust, pt. i, represents the power of nature that Faust cannot bear. 336 See T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 11. 337 See Blake's The Clod and the Pebble. 338 See NB 27, n. 205. 339 See Blake's All Religions Are One. 340 See WP, 299. 341 i Kings 18. See n. 323, above, and WP, 106-7. 342 There are only two stories of levirate marriage recorded in the Old Testament: Boaz and Ruth (Ruth 4) and Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38). The "somebody else" NF cannot remember may be simply the account of the levirate law in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. 343 The last sentence of this entry is a holograph addition. On the levirate marriage, see WP, 211-12, and EAC, 51-2, or NFR, 105-6. 344 See n. 276, above. 345 See n. 276, above. 346 That is, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. 347 Sitz im Leben = situation in life, the phrase used esp. by Biblical scholars to point to the historical circumstances in which a story was told or a saying uttered. 348 See NB 27, n. 116, GC, 164, and WP, 82. 349 See WP, 242. 350 On Nerval's Aurelia, Rimbaud's Saison en enfer, and Mallarme's Igitur, see WP, 286-7,291-2. On Igitur, see also MM, 39-40. 351 La Flamme d'une chandelle (1961) and La Psychanalyse du feu (1938). NF wrote a preface for the English translation of the latter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 352 See NB 44, n. 51. 353 See MM, 91. 354 For "overthought" and "underthought," see NB 27, n. 359. In MM, NF observes that Henry V includes "some element of insight into the human situation that escapes from the limits of ideology" (119). 355 See n. i, above. 356 NF is referring to Derrida's notion, argued in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, that writing is prior to speech. 357 On Shelley's poem, see WP, 25. 358 See NB 44, n. 158. 359 See WP, 218,258, and MM, 91,103. 360 See NB 44, n. 55. 361 See MM, 91,120. 362 See NB 27, n. 320.

86o 363 364 365 366

Notes to pages 545-51

See n. 354, above. On the physicist Erwin Schrodinger, see MM, 122, and NB 27, n. 108. See MM, 122. See Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul JordanSmith (New York: Tudor, 1955), 120. Hercules de Saxonia, a professor of medicine at Venice, was the author of a posthumous treatise on melancholy (1620). 367 "The Bride from the Strange Land," EAC, 50-61, or NFR, 104-16. 368 On the themes of this and the following two pars., see WP, 211-13. 369 See NB 27, n. 330. 370 See NB 44, n. 78. 371 The last line of the folksong NF refers to is, "I love my love and love is no more." See WP, 67. 372 In Browning's poem, My Last Duchess, the duke, who takes great pride in his art collection, is an utter villain. 373 In the margin beside this phrase, NF wrote "a what?" What he meant to write is uncertain. 374 The last sentence is a holograph addition. 375 See NB 50, n. 98. 376 William Carlos Williams, "—Say it, no ideas but in things" (Paterson, bk. i, pt. i, 1. 14); Wallace Stevens, Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself. See WP, 87-8. 377 Heraclitus, ed. Wheelwright, 37 (Fragment 29); Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 165-86. See WP, 85. 378 See NB 44, n. 323. The ideas in this entry and the three that follow are developed in WP, 87-8. 379 See NB 44, n. 159. 380 It seems likely that NF is thinking about Blake's line, "They became what they beheld" (Jerusalem, pi. 36,1. 9). See WP, 87. 381 See NB 44, par. 135 and n. 120. 382 The reference is to Laforgue's couplet about Galatea. See NB 44, n. 159. 383 For Boehme's doctrine of the Ungrund, the irrational abyss that precedes being, see NB 50, n. 511, and NB 44, n. 331. 384 SeeNB27, n. 112. 385 This entry is a holograph addition. 386 "I see a better state to me belongs" (Sonnet 92,1. 7). 387 For the development of the material in this par., see WP, 219-21. 388 This entry is a holograph addition. 389 See WP, 131. 390 See NB 50, n. 350. 391 See Andrew Marvell's A Dialogue between the Soul and Body. 392 Mallarme, Cantique de Saint-Jean; Valery, La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste.

Notes to pages 551-7

861

393 See WP, 263-4. 394 For this and the previous entry, see WP, 243-50. 395 See WP, 247-60. For the "symposium writer's" account of the Atlantis myth, see Plato's Critias, H3c-i2ic, and Timaeus, 24e-25d. 396 This entry is a holograph addition. Cf. NB 50, par. 355. 397 NF included a brief passage on The Tempest toward the end of chap. 2 of WP (85-6). 398 Aucassin and Nicolette and Other Medieval Romances and Legends, trans. Eugene Mason (London: Dent, 1910), 6. 399 See WP, 40, and MM, 54. 400 GC, 132-3. 401 "Criticism and Environment," pub. in Adjoining Cultures as Reflected in Literature and Language, ed. John X. Evans and Peter Horwath (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1983), 9-21; rpt. in EAC, 139-53. The point about a counter-environment is on p. 152. 402 See NB 27, n. 352. 403 "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, and which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written" (John 21:25). 404 In Euripides' The Bacchae, Pentheus, made mad by Dionysus and caught spying on the women's Bacchic rites, is torn limb from limb by his mother Agave, who thinks he is a lion. 405 See Elie Halevy, "Bentham's Philosophy of Law," in The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. 406 That is, the engraved title page of the first ed. of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), which represents the body of the king as composed of hundreds of individuals. 407 Francis Sparshott, NF's colleague, reviewed GC in Philosophy and Literature, 6 (October 1982): 180-9, calling it "an appallingly bad book." 408 "Cracking the Great Code, or History Is Bunk," Dalhousie Review, 63 (Autumn 1983): 400-7. 409 A.S.P. Woodhouse (1895-1964), a member of the English department at University College, University of Toronto, 1929-64, and head of the department for two decades, was a Miltonist who for many years maintained the hope of putting his extensive knowledge of Milton into a book. Although the book was never written, that fact hardly "crippled [Woodhouse] for life": he was a devoted teacher and careful reader of student papers, and he had an important influence on English studies, especially in Canada, where he helped to direct the careers of many university teachers of English. 410 One of Blake's Proverbs of Hell, pi. 7 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 411 This entry, a holograph addition, refers to the reviewer just mentioned (par. 691).

862

Notes to pages 559-69

412 "Panopticism," pt. 3, chap. 3 of Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 195-228. The account of the Benthamite Panopticon is on pp. 200-10. 413 Annotated copies of the last two are in the NFL. 414 See The Southern Version of Cursor Mundi, ed. Sarah M. Horall (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1978), 1:42. 415 "Festa Sionaeo bacchantur & Orgia Thyrso" (Epitaphium Damonis, in Milton's "Lycidas": The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 18. Helen Waddell translates the last line of the poem as "The madness and ecstasy of Heaven" (ibid., 26). 416 See pars. 54, 92, and 373, above. 417 That is, the chap, on the seven phases of revelation. 418 NF is referring to the second of two Old English metrical dialogues between Solomon and Saturn, recorded in the tenth century, in which Solomon represents Christian wisdom and Saturn eastern and northern wisdom. Diderot's Rameau's Nephew is a satiric dialogue featuring the cynical bohemian nephew of the French composer ("Lui") and Diderot himself ("Moi"). See WP, 40. 419 Summa Theologica, pt. i, question 52, arts. 2 and 3. 420 Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (New York: Vintage, 1959); Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949). Annotated copies of both books are in the NFL. 421 Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 422 See WP, 288-91. 423 See n. 418, above. 424 The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright, 1966), 221. 425 Ibid. 426 The Broken Tower (1933), the last poem Hart Crane wrote. 427 J.C (Jack) Woodbury, one of NF's former students; he attended the University of Toronto from 1951 to 1954. 428 See Crane's letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, in Philip Horton, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Norton, 1937), 333-4. 429 That is, Spengler's theory of Arabian culture. See chaps. 7-8 of vol. 2 of The Decline of the West (1928). 430 The reference is to a line in A.E. Housman's Reveille, in A Shropshire Lad: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover" (1. 21). 431 Pars. 733-4 are an expansion of par. 526. 432 See n. 324, above. 433 The Bar-Ilan lecture was "Vision and Cosmos"; see n. 249, above. "Trans-

Notes to pages 571-7

863

figuration stanza" is apparently a reference to the last section of Eliot's Four Quartets (st. 4 of Little Gidding). 434 See NB 50, n. 350. 435 Robert Chester, Loves Martyr. See MM, 49. 436 Bartholomew Griffin, Fidessa, More Chaste than Kind (1596); Thomas Campion, There is a garden in her face, Poem 7, in The Third and Fourth Book of Airs (1617). See MM, 48-9, and WP, 199. 437 See WP, 181-4, 304, and MM, 24,160-1. 438 See WP, 147, and MM, 52. 439 The reference is to Theseus' "triple goddess" of the imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.7. See MM, 16,113, and WP, 78. 440 On Marvell's On a Drop of Dew, see NB 50, n. 350. On Vaughan's Regeneration, see MM, 50,219-20, and WP, 206. This entry is a holograph addition. 441 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Starlight Night. 442 On beauty, see WP, 227. 443 Solomon and the Witch. 444 Introduction, Songs of Experience, \. 6. 445 The ideas in this entry are developed in various places throughout chap. 6, pt. 2 of WP, 201-18. 446 Something seems to have been omitted in this sentence. If "starting-point renewed" modifies "theme," then NF may have intended to write "descent." In MM he wrote: "The genuine quest-cycle is of the type in which the conclusion is the starting point renewed and transformed by the quest itself. In a way Virgil's Aeneid is a quest of this type" (214). See also MM, 251, and WP, 180,235, 293-4. 447 See Arthur Edward Waite, The Holy Grail: The Galahad Quest in the Arthurian Literature, 17-18. 448 See MM, 213, 324. 449 By "Person" NF means God, or perhaps the Holy Spirit. 450 The reference is to Milton's second Gunpowder Plot poem, Siccine tentasti, where the image of blowing the cowls of the unreformed to the sky is picked up by Milton in the Limbo of Fools section of bk. 3 of Paradise Lost, 11. 476-97451 Here some material—at least one page—is missing from the files. 452 The references here are to Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre, Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle," Alfred de Vigny's La Bouteille a la mer, the priestess Baqbuq (Bacbuc) who ushers Panurge into the presence of the holy bottle in bk. 5 of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the empty flask from which Igitur drinks the drop of pure nothingness in the epilogue (pt. 5) of Mallarme's Igitur. 453 In the opening lines of Beowulf, Scyld Schefing is said to have arrived in Denmark as a child in a treasure ship.

864

Notes to pages 577-82

454 Arthur Rimbaud, First Communions, in Complete Works, 79-83. 455 A reference to the custom alleged to have existed in medieval Europe giving the lord of the land the right to sleep the first night with the bride of any of his vassals. 456 The quotation is from Meditation 17 in Donne's Devotions on Emergent Occasions, in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, 440. NF refers to the passage in WP, 126. 457 Ibid., 441. 458 The reference is to NB 27, par. 26. See also NB 27, n. 20. 459 See NB 27, n. 193. 460 NF means to refer to Glaucus, who is rejuvenated by Endymion in bk. 3 of John Keats's Endymion. 461 "le vieillard . . . son ombre puerile" (CEuvres completes, 464). 462 The reference to Thomas's poem is a holograph addition. 463 The "elsewhere" NF refers to is NB 27, par. 167. See also NB 27, n, 127. 464 D.H. Lawrence, Sex, Literature and Censorship (New York: Twayne, 1953), 60. 465 See NB 27, n. 128. 466 A play by John L. Balderston, based upon Henry James's The Sense of the Past. A film, adapted from Balderston's play and starring Leslie Howard, was produced in 1933. NF saw the film not long after its release. See SE, 379-80. 467 See n. 276, above. 468 See WP, xi-xii. 469 See WP, 82. 470 See WP, 24, 36. 471 See WP, 78. 472 See WP, 5-6. 473 See WP, 26. 474 See WP, 56,72. 475 See WP, 31-2. 476 See WP, 42. 477 See WP, 42-3. 478 The Tasso entry is a holograph addition. The reference is to the persecution mania and other crises suffered by Tasso. See WP, 39-40. 479 See WP, 85. 480 At the end of the above list, NF has cancelled the following: "(Perhaps somewhere above) Bible as concentering vision (old), though it only starts there." 481 See par. 73, above. 482 See n. 69, above. 483 On Eureka, see WP, 150-1.

Notes to pages 582-6

865

484 See WP, 206-7. 485 See n. 276, above. 486 Genesis P and J refer to the Priestly and Jahwist creation stories in chaps, i and 2, respectively. This entry is a holograph addition. 487 See WP, 151-4. 488 The History of Herodotus, trans. George Rawlinson (London: Dent, 1942), 1:53 (bk. i, chap. 98). 489 See WP, 152-3, and MM, 11,248. 490 See WP, 160,201. 491 See WP, 155. 492 The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 445 (Canto 74,1.10); Finnegans Wake, 6,11. 9-10. For Herodotus, see n. 488, above. For Elpenor, the mariner who fell to his death from Circe's roof and who was the first shade Odysseus met in Hades, see the Odyssey, bk. 10,11. 593-604, and bk. 11,11. 53-88 in the Fitzgerald trans. The ideas in the present par. are developed in WP, 160-2. 493 Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, oil on wood, 1563; William Blake, Jacob's Ladder, watercolour, ca. 1800. See WP, 154. 494 Europe, pi. 10,11.13-15. 495 See WP, 153. 496 See NB 27, n. 151. 497 See WP, 298. 498 See NB 27, n. 20. 499 See WP, 198-9, 206. 500 Holograph addition: NF underlined "bed," wrote "fucks on the field" below the entry, and joined them with a line. 501 See WP, 210-12. 502 See WP, 192. 503 That is, Odysseus' descent to Hades in the Odyssey, bk. 11. 504 See NB 27, n. 303. 505 See NB 27, n. 205. 506 In the Norse legend Hamlet (Amlodhi) was identified with a legendary mill that ground out rock and sand from the ocean bottom and thus created a whirlpool or maelstrom ("grinding stream"). See Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time (Boston: Gambit, 1969). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 507 "In dreams, perhaps, under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness of the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the treason of our aboriginal fall" (Thomas De Quincey, "The Vision of Sudden Death," in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 13:304)508 SeeNB27, n. 114.

866

Notes to pages 587-94

509 510 511 512

See NB 44, par. 343. This entry is a holograph addition. Genesis 15:17. See WP, 297. In Burnt Njdll, one of the Icelander's sagas, Njall is burned to death by a reluctant "enemy" whose honour demands vengeance. This last phrase is a holograph addition. Prometheus ("forethought") and Epimetheus ("afterthought") were brothers. See WP, 297. "Dancing stones" is an allusion to Henry Vaughan's Regeneration, 11. 53-8. See NB 44, par. 74, and WP, 198. See WP, 156-8,189-90. See WP, 190. See Paradise Lost, bk. 8,11. 345-6, where God tells Adam that the fish will not be included among the creatures presented for naming because "they cannot change / Their Element to draw the thinner Air." See WP, 190. See WP, 190-1. See NB 27, n. 322. See WP, 274-5. See WP, 69. See WP, 142. See NB 27, n. 46. See WP, 207,194. See WP, 282-3. See WP, 172. See WP, 160-3. Introduction, Songs of Experience, 1. 6. See WP, 270. See WP, 68. See WP, 68. See WP, 64. See WP, 68-9. See WP, 71-2. See WP, 72. See WP, 72-3. See WP, 73. NF apparently has in mind the following passage from Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: "Omitting all other, there are three most mysticall unions; Two natures in one person; three persons in one nature; one soule in two bodies. For though indeed they bee really divided, yet are they so united, as they seeme but one, and make rather a duality then [sic] two distinct souls. There are wonders in true affection, it is a body of /Enigmaes, mysteries and riddles, wherein two so become one, as they both become two" (The Major Works, 143 [pt. 2, sees. 5-6]).

513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520

521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540

Notes to pages 594-9

867

541 That is, the principle of Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt that "language was a third order of reality, coming between subject and object" (MM, 115). 542 See WP, 118. 543 See WP, 72. 544 See NB 27, n. 23. Burnet lost his position in the court of William III because of his allegorical readings of Scripture. See MM, 116. 545 For "major man," see n. 267, above. Stevens's Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors contains the phrase "the single man" (1.15). 546 NF is reminding himself of Erwin Schrodinger's remark that "consciousness is a singluar of which the plural is unknown" (What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947], 90). NF quotes the passage in MM, 122. 547 See par. 644, above. 548 See WP, 82. 549 See WP, 47-8, and MM, 85. 550 See MM, 89. 551 SeeNB 44, par. 81. 552 See MM, 94-6, and WP, 68-70. 553 Pars. 915-22 are a fairly complete abstract of pp. 94-100 of "The Dialectic of Belief and Vision," MM, 93-107, or pp. 345-51 of NFR, 344-59. 554 See MM, 96, and WP, 69-70. 555 See NB 50, n. 312. 556 See MM, 98. 557 See MM, 98. 558 See MM, 98-9. 559 elpizomenon hypostasis = "the substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1). 560 See WP, 57-8. 561 See WP,6i. 562 See WP, 58. 563 See WP, 19-20. 564 See WP, 31-2. 565 "The Nature of Satire," University of Toronto Quarterly, 14 (October 1944): 75-89. NF is referring to his belief that the relation of writers to the ideologies they expound is the real "anxiety of influence," as opposed to the Freudian version of such anxiety advanced by Harold Bloom. See WP, 48, and MM, 85,119. 566 The material in the two previous entries, as well as in those that follow, indicates that "this paper" refers to "The Expanding World of Metaphor," MM, 108-23, though some of the same points are made in "Framework and Assumption," MM, 79-92. 567 See MM, 120-1. 568 See MM, 121.

868

Notes to pages 600-4

569 See NB 44, n. 158. 570 See WP, 227. 571 What NF includes under "(4)"—entries 944-61—is in effect an outline for "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange/' MM, 28-43. 572 Poem 1052,1. 8. 573 See NB 27, n. 202. 574 Poetic Process (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 166-7. 575 See NB 44, n. 226. 576 Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. 577 See NB 27, n. 360. 578 See MM, 35. 579 See WP, 12-13. 580 See MM, 37. 581 The reference is to the similar symbolic journeys in Huysmans's A rebours and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Axel. See NB 27, par. 272, NB 44, par. 371, and MM, 37-8. For "peak experiences," see NB 27, n. 259. 582 See NB 44, n. 280. 583 "Le Livre, instrument spirituel," CEuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor and Jean Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 378. 584 Letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867, Propos sur la poesie, ed. Henri Mondor (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1946), 77. See WP, 81. 585 See WP, 292. 586 Ernst Cassirer's theory of symbolism was developed in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-29; Eng. trans., 1953-57). See also chap. 2 of his Essay on Man (1944). For NF's views on Cassirer's project, see "Myth as Information," in NFCL, 67-75. 587 William Caxton, How to Die (1490), a usage recorded in the OED. See MM, 40. 588 See NB 27, n. 206. 589 See, e.g., Romans 12:5 and Galatians 2:20. 590 Eureka, in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 9:137. See NB 27, n. 169. 591 What NF includes under "(5)"—entries 962-74—is an outline of "Framework and Assumption," MM, 79-92. 592 See NB 44, n. 451. 593 "I now frequently encounter objections to my alleged passion for ticketing and labeling things, where reference to an excessive toilet training in my infancy is clearly being suppressed with some reluctance" (MM, 81). For the "interdiscursivity" passage cited, see also MM, 81. 594 A reference to Herbert Read's The True Voice of Feeling, which, as NF says in MM, was a "refinement of the Carlyle view that all writing was the personal rhetoric of the author" (83).

Notes to pages 604-9

869

595 See MM, 84. 596 See WP, 47, and MM, 85. 597 Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) supplied Shakespeare with the names of the devils mentioned by Edgar in King Lear, 4.1. 598 The reference is to Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 599 See MM, 87. 600 See MM, 88-90. 601 See MM, 91. 602 GC,6i. 603 See WP, 219. 604 See WP, 176-7. 605 See NB 50, n. 65. 606 Geoffrey Ashe, Camelot and the Vision of Albion (London: Heinemann, 1971), 135. An annotated copy of the Panther Books ed. (St. Albans, 1971) is in the NFL. 607 On James's story, see WP, 290. 608 "You can't use a machine to travel in time any more than you can cross the Pacific on a motorbike. But the mind can travel, if it can find a host to receive it" (M.K. Joseph, The Time ofAchamoth, 24). Mike Joseph and NF had been friends from the time of their student years at Oxford in the 19305. 609 Farmer's series is known as the "Riverworld" series; it contains To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), The Dark Design (1977), and The Magic Labyrinth (1980). 610 Annotated copies of three of Roger Zelazny's Amber series are in the NFL: Nine Princes of Amber (1970), The Guns of Avalon (1972), and Sign of the Unicorn (1975). NF is apparently referring to the first two in the series, which eventually expanded into ten novels. 611 E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvia trilogy—Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958)—annotated copies of which are in the NFL. 612 "Education of the People," in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers ofD.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking, 1936), 658-60. 613 See NB 48, par. 4. 614 Prince ofAnnwn: The First Branch of the Mabinogion (New York: Ballantine, 1974). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 615 Annotated copies of Frank Herbert's Dune (New York: Berkley, 1977) and Isaac Asimov's Foundation (London: Panther, 1969) are in the NFL. 616 Which poem NF is referring to is uncertain: there are numerous candidates.

870

Notes to pages 613-16 Notes 53

1 The Massey Lectures, a series of six talks NF presented on CBC Radio and pub. as £7(1963). 2 The present typescript is single-spaced. The double-spaced typescript refers to an early draft of the lectures, which has not been preserved. 3 The reference is to Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of "As If" (1924; orig. pub., 1911). See DV, 19, or NFR, 181. 4 See Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 126-38, and DV, 13, or NFR, 176. 5 logoi spermatikoi = generative reason. 6 "Berkeley, Wordsworth, Shelley are representative of the intuitive refusal seriously to accept the abstract materialism of science" (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 87). G.S. Brett was NF's philosophy professor when NF was a student at Victoria College. 7 WP,246. 8 A distinction NF had made in the first chap, of GC and the first chap, of WP. 9 "Kant's . . . CJ" is a holograph addition. 10 WP, 107. 11 See NB 44, n. 323, and WP, 134. 12 "In a certain sense everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatiotemporal standpoint mirrors the world" (Science and the Modern World, 93). NF refers to this passage in several of his notebooks and in an interview (NFC, 61), but the only place he quotes it is in DV, 41, or NFR, 198. Wallace Stevens quotes the same passage in "A Collect of Philosophy" (Opus Posthumous, 273), and NF, citing the reference in Stevens, does refer to Whitehead's "great passage" in "Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form" (SM, 292). Cf. the further gloss on the passage in Notes 52, par. 55. 13 D.T. Suzuki remarks that the Avatamsaka Sutra, "the consummation of Buddhist thought," represents "abstract truths so concretely, so symbolically . . . that one will finally come to the realisation of the truth that even in a particle of dust the whole universe is seen reflected—not this visible universe only, but the vast system of universes, by the highest minds only" (Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930], 95-6). 14 "Such Harmony of Colouring is destructive of Art One species of General Hue over all is the Cursed Thing calld Harmony it is like the Smile of a Fool" ("Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds," Erdman, 662). 15 In the margin beside the passage quoted in n. 12, above, NF wrote: "this doctrine of the universal mirror is a point for me, I think. The passage is almost identical to Plotinus, V, 8." See NF's ed. of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 114, in

Notes to pages 617-22

16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28 28 30

871

the NFL. The Plotinus reference could be to one of several statements in the Enneads, 5.8.4. Plotinus says, for example, "Every being [in the divine realm] is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light. And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and all is all and each all, and infinite the glory." Or again, "In our realm all is part rising from part and nothing can be more than partial; but There [in the divine realm] each being is an eternal product and is at once a whole and an individual manifesting as part but, to the keen vision There, known for the whole it is" (The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 2nd ed. [New York: Pantheon, n.d.], 425). Cf. NF's comment in NB 44, par. 554: "the great intuition I got from Spengler, and later from Vico, was the sense of every historical phenomenon being symbolic of every other phenomenon contemporary with it." StS, 21. The phrase is from a poem Blake composed while walking to see his sister in 1801; he reproduced the poem in a letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802 (Erdman, 721). The metaphor of the thistle being an "old man grey," mentioned in the present par., is also from this poem. See DV, 22-3, or NFR, 182-4. Soma psychikon and soma pneumatikon are Paul's phrases from i Corinthians 15:44, translated in the AV as "natural body" and "spiritual body." G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis. See Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), and Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 7. See n. 14, above. Here NF has a holograph insertion: "NOT, fuck it"; that is, "they are not to be reconciled." Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. On the principle of interpenetration, see n. 12, above; on prehension, see Science and the Modern World, 122. NF presented a lecture on "Poets and the Double Vision of Nature" at Carleton College, Northfield, Minn., in April 1990, three weeks before he gave his Emmanuel College lectures. That is, the news about the fall of Communism in 1989. John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989). See nn. 20 and 21, above. See Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, 45. "J'avais essaye de reunir les pierres de la Table sacree, et de representer a 1'entour les sept premiers Elo'im qui s'etaient partage le monde" (Gerard de Nerval, Aurelia, in CEuvres, 375).

872

Notes to pages 622-4

31 See DV, 31, or NFR, 190. 32 For an early treatment of the three gunas or fundamental qualities in Patanjali's Yoga-Sutra, see NB 3, pars. 7,17,27, 31, 83,159. 33 Schelling's so-called "last philosophy," partially translated with an accompanying commentary in Victor C. Hayes, Schelling's Philosophy of Myth and Revelation. 34 Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: The Romantic Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955), 151-61. 35 A reference to Niels Bohr's query to Einstein at the Solway conference in 1927: "Don't you think caution is needed in ascribing attributes to Providence in ordinary language?" This was in response to Einstein's gibe, "Do you really believe God resorts to dice-playing?" The episode is reported in Ruth Moore, Niels Bohr (New York: Knopf, 1966), 167. 36 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, pt. 2, trans. Harold Knight et al, (Edinburgh: Clark, 1960), 220. 37 See Notes 52, n. 162. 38 Bernard Silvestris of Tours (fl. 1136). See Megacosmus, bk. i of Silvestris's De mundi universitate, where Nature complains to Noys about the confusion of hyle (chaos or primary matter). 39 According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the after-death state or bardo progresses through three stages in which the deceased experiences various symbolic, apparitional, or hallucinatory visions. See W.Y. Evans-Wentz, introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 3rd. ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 28-35. 40 "'Beauty is truth, truth Beauty'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 11. 49-50). 41 See DV, 37, or NFR, 195. 42 Critique of Judgment, sec. 58. 43 The reference is to Helen Frye, who received her training in art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She had visited Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago in December 1938. 44 A direct quotation from "The Beauty of Life," in The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1910-15), 22:76. 45 This last phrase is a holograph addition. On work and play, see DV, 28-31, or NFR, 188-90. 46 Here NF cancelled the next sentence, "No society can do anything sensible for longer than it takes to break a New Year's resolution," a form of which appears in par. 39. 47 Faraday's biographer was never able to find any documentary corroboration of the story (L. Pearce Williams to Robert D. Denham, 25 November 1997). A similar story, however, is told of Robert Peel, who asked Faraday

Notes to pages 624-30

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

57

58

59 60

61

62

873

about the use of the first electrical dynamo. Faraday reportedly replied, "I know not, but I wager one day your government will tax it" (L. Pearce Williams, Michael Faraday: A Biography fLondon: Chapman and Hall, 1965], 196). The parenthetical clause is a holograph addition. The allusion is to 11. 44-5 of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn: "Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity." "They talk (but blasphemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is President of their General-Councils, when the truth is, the odd man is still the HolyGhost" (John Selden, Table-Talk, 1689 (London: Alex Murray and Son, 1868), 41. An annotated copy of the 2nd ed. (London: Tonson, 1696) is in the NFL. That is, does this point belong in the second lecture or in the first? The question is a holograph addition. The reference is to the Suffering Servant passages in Second Isaiah 49 ff. See NB 27, n. 116. NF cancelled this par., doubtless because he had made a similar point in par. 5, above. See DV, 33, or NFR, 192. "All speech concerning the s o u l . . . is metaphorical" (The Works of George Berkeley, 5:89 [par. 171]). Coles Notes are a Canadian version of Cliff's Notes, Monarch Notes, and the like in the U.S.—plot and thematic summaries of more or less canonical literary works. Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), vii, 161, and 183. Following the last sentence of par. 82, NF cancelled the following holograph sentence: "St. Paul's [Cathedral] would be holier if it contained the balls of Paul." See par. 163. See n. 21, above. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. Various illustrations of star maps are reproduced between pp. 134-5,142-3, 216-17, 300-1/ and 434-5. That is, Leibnitz's view that monads are the true unities and thus the only true substances, monads being extensionless mental entities, independent of other things ("windowless") but capable of perceptions and appetitive states. NF appears to have in mind the following passage in Milton's The Reason of Church Government: "And although some Christians be newborn babes comparatively to some that are stronger, yet in respect of ceremony, which is but a rudiment of the law, the weakest Christian hath thrown off the robes of his minority and is a perfect man, as to legal rites. What children's food there is in the Gospel we know to be no other than the 'sincerity of the

874

63

64 65 66 67

68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

80

81 82 83

Notes to pages 630-7

word that they may grow thereby'" (Hughes, 674); or NF may be paraphrasing Milton's remark about the "perpetual childhood of prescription" in Areopagitica (Hughes, 727). The allusion is to i Corinthians 16:22 ("anathema" in Greek means "a thing accursed"), as well as to the condemnation, in Catholicism, by a Church authority of those who are regarded as heretical or blasphemous. The allusion is to 1. 3 of Yeats's The Second Coming (1921). NF apparently has in mind Tertullian's phrase, "testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae" (Apologeticum, 17.6). See NB 27, n. 282. NF is referring to the Miller translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In the analysis of the text, which NF refers to as a "summary," J.N. Findlay writes, "Cf. Plotinus: Everything that is yonder is also here" (517). See par. 20, above. See DV, 32, or NFR, 191. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111-19 (sees. 178-96). Morris's point appears throughout his Signs of Change, Lectures on Socialism, and Lectures on Art and Industry, in vols. 22 and 23 of The Collected Works of William Morris. See MM, 91,103, WP, 218,258, NB 27, par. i, and Notes 52, par. 36. See Phenomenology of Spirit, 111-19. See DV, 13, or NFR, 176. This is the argument of Kant's Critique of Judgment. See WP, 227. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764; Eng. trans. 1960). "Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason." That is, before the presentation of the Emmanuel College lectures, 14-16 May. The reference is to chaps. 8-10 of Hyde's The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1983). See WP, 304, 320, and NB nh, par. 43. In a speech Winston Churchill gave at the Mansion House on 10 November 1942, he said, "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." On Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, see pars. 162 and 190, below. See also DV, 15, or NFR, 178. NF is apparently pointing to a link between reincarnation and the opening words of Rushdie's novel: "To be born again/ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" Cf. NB 50, par. 356: "Eventually the dreamer & the hero he dreams of consolidate in the figure of the double or doppelganger." Dromena - things to be done or specified actions. See Hayes, Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation, 94-105, NB 44, par. 684. See par. 54, above.

Notes to pages 637-44

875

84 Paradise Lost, bk. 3,11. 339-41. The Pauline phrase is from i Corinthians 15:28. 85 See Hayes, Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation, 111-14. 86 This last remark is a holograph addition. 87 See I Sing the Body Electric, one of Walt Whitman's Children of Adam poems (1855; pub. 1881). 88 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:244 (chap. 12). In the original, "freedom" is in italics. NF is doubtless quoting the passage from LA. Richards's Coleridge on Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 98. See DV, 18, or NFR, 180, where the passage is also quoted, and the note on p. 87, or NFR, 398, n. 8. See also par. 261, below. As NF suggests, Coleridge plagiarized the passage from Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlauterung des Idealismus (1809). See Engell and Bate's note, p. 243. 89 See NB 27, n. 285. 90 This last phrase, referring to Plato's remark in the Sophist, 266c, is a holograph addition. 91 See Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Doubleday, 1935). 92 See DV, 31-3, or NFR, 190-1. 93 Juliana of Norwich, The Revelations of Divine Love, trans. James Walsh (Wheathampstead: Anthony Clarke Books, 1973), 150-1. 94 See DV, 51-2, or NFR, 207. 95 A reference, apparently, to par. 37, above. 96 That is, the desires behind one version of NF's four primary concerns: food, sex, property, and freedom of movement. 97 See Frank Kermode, "Northrop Frye and the Bible," in Ritratto di Northrop Frye, ed. Agostino Lombardo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 105-20. 98 See DV, 58, or NFR, 213. 99 See n. 4, above. 100 A reference, perhaps, to Patricia Galloway, "Sexism and the Senior English Curriculum in Ontario Secondary Schools," Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1977,19-31. Galloway says that NF's male-normative view of the world is seen in, among other things, his almost exclusive reliance upon literature written by men. 101 Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 102 "If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past/ ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls

876

Notes to pages 644-51

the present controls the past'" (George Orwell, 1984 [New York: New American Library, 1983], 32 [chap. 3]). 103 Salman Rushdie's novel (1988), which was denounced by Muslim leaders because of its depiction of a character modelled on the Prophet Muhammad and his transcription of the Koran. See par. 190, below. 104 See Hayes, Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation, 111-14. 105 The reference, apparently, is to Hartman's remark in Easy Pieces about the early practice of the Yale critics in their struggle "to break with incarnationist and imagistic theories of expression," "even if the theory had to await Derrida" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 190. 106 See WP, 258. 107 Matthew Arnold's views on aesthetic and intellectual cultivation, which he calls Hellenism and which he contrasts with the Puritan morality and work ethic of Hebraism, are found in chaps. 4 and 5 of his Culture and Anarchy (1869). 108 Here NF has cancelled the following three sentences: "The great masterpiece of Luke-Acts starts with the Incarnation (Word coming down and Spirit presumably going up) and continues in Acts, with the Word going up (Ascension) and the Spirit coming down (Pentecost). What the Spirit comes down with is the gift of tongues, the antitype of Babel. Nothing new here." Cf. par. 164. 109 This seems to be a reference to Derrida's commentary on Blanchot's Le folie de jour in "Living On: Border Lines," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Seabury, 1979), 75-176. no The example is from Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 48. See DV, 50, or NFR, 206. in See WP, 105. 112 "Living On: Border Lines," in Deconstruction and Criticism, 83-5. 113 Chap. 5 of Fairley's A Study of Goethe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 37-48, is devoted to the difference between Goethe and his "Storm and Stress" contemporaries, whose creative abilities waned after their early enthusiasm. 114 Translator's Introduction to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, xviixviii. The sentence in braces is NF's paraphrase. An annotated copy of Bernard's translation is in the NFL. 115 These passages are quoted from J.N. Findlay's analysis in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 509, 505, 520, 578, 586, and 591. 116 See DV, 56, or NFR, 211. 117 GC, 136-7. 118 See DV, 15, or NFR, 178. 119 See DV, 56, or NFR, 211. 120 This par. has been cancelled, possibly because it repeats an idea in par. 171,

Notes to pages 651-9

877

or because it is a passage that NF did include, with minor changes, in DV, 50, or NFR, 206. 121 See par. 94, above. For Joachim, the contentiousness of Christianity belonged to the age of the Son, which he projected would last until 1260, when the age of the Spirit would produce a spiritualized Church. 122 See WP, 105. 123 See DV, 37, or NFR, 195. 124 The reference is to Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias, which depicts the crumbled statue of the once mighty king. See NB 44, n. 96. 125 SeeNB 44, n. 133. 126 Lewis Hyde, The Gift, xi-xiii. 127 See DV, 87, or NFR, 398, n. 17. 128 This last sentence is a holograph addition. 129 See Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), a novel in which three characters investigate the idea of a Templar conspiracy, along with other esoteric and occult lore, and eventually develop their own plan of the hidden history of the world. An annotated copy of the novel is in the NFL. 130 See Notes 52, par. 15. 131 "Only connect" is the epigraph to E.M. Forster's Howard's End (1910). 132 Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (1948). A copy of the Bantam Books ed. (New York, 1958) is in the NFL. 133 NF did not include this par. in the first chap, of DV or elsewhere in the book. 134 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dent, 1910), 93. See DV, 46, or NFR, 203. 135 "He [the Houyhnhnm master] seemed therefore confident, that instead of reason, we [the Yahoos] were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices" (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, pt. 4, chap. 5, par. 8). 136 See pars. 54 and 129, above. 137 See DV, 49, or NFR, 205. 138 See DV, 46, or NFR, 203. 139 See par. 226, above. 140 This last phrase, echoing Psalm 23:4, is a holograph addition. 141 In a paper he wrote on Augustine during his final year at Emmanuel College (1935-36) NF said, "To postulate the whole of the human soul as good, to admit no hierarchy over our impulses and desires, is to revert to the animal stage. The cry of the man who considers man constitutionally good is, back to nature! and, whatever he means, he is revolting against the social instinct of mankind, which is based on subordination of selfassertive elements" (SE, 206). He had earlier made the same point in a 1932

878

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

153 154 155 156

157 158

Notes to pages 660-7 essay he wrote on primitivism during his final year at Victoria College, "The Basis of Primitivism" (SE, 3-10). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 8, penultimate 1. (Erdman, 37). WP, 271. See also DV, 27, or NFR, 186. See DV, 49, or NFR, 205. A reference to the massacre of the protesters in Tienanmen Square on 3-4 June 1989. See pars. 162 and 190, above. Below "viciousness" is NF's holograph addition, "quality of evil [perverted?]." See n. 88, above. See DV, 46, or NFR, 203. The example given in pars. 171 and 195, above. See par. 266, below. NF quotes this passage—from the Vintage Books ed. (New York, 1973)—in DV, 48, or NFR, 204. See DV, 49, or NFR, 205. See DV, 55, or NFR, 210. "6" at the beginning of this entry refers to chap. 6 of WP. See WP, 218. "4" refers to chap. 4 of WP. NF did not make the revision suggested here, but he did include a version of the Job-Elihu point in the last par. of the book (p. 131). See WP, xviii-xix. See WP, xvi. Notes 54.1

1 See DV, 62-4, or NFR, 215-18. For the Senecan satire, a scathing skit on the deification of Claudius, see his Apocolocyntosis ("The Pumpkinification of Claudius"). 2 See DV, 64, or NFR, 218. 3 See DV, 74, or NFR, 226. 4 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650). 5 See DV, 64-5, or NFR, 218. 6 See DV, 63, or NFR, 217. 7 See DV, 60-1, or NFR, 214-15. 8 See DV, 60-1, or NFR, 214-15. 9 See DV, 70, or NFR, 222-3. 10 In Notes 54.7, par. 3, NF defines his "burgeoning theory" of resonance as "the verbal statement stretching into and collecting echoes from the whole mandala of literary experience." 11 See DV, 74-6, or NFR, 226-8.

Notes to pages 668-79 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

879

See DV, 59-60, or NFR, 213-14. See DV, 60, or NFR, 214. See DV, 59-60, or NFR, 214. See DV, 74-5, or NFR, 226-7. WP, 106-8. By "paper" NF means the last chap, of DV. See DV, 62, or NFR, 215. See NB 44, n. 523. NF's source here is William Anderson, Dante the Maker, 347. See DV, 69, or NFR, 222. 21 The Laocoon (Erdman, 274). 22 In Dante's La Vita Nuova, love appears to the poet and declares, "I am your master." Cf. John 13:13, where Jesus, speaking to his disciples, says, "Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am." See DV, 62, or NFR, 216. 23 See DV, 62, or NFR, 216. 24 NF's typewriter has been skipping a space here and there. 25 Porphyry's statement is at the beginning of his biography of his teacher Plotinus; the biography was prefaced to Porphyry's ed. of the Enneads. See DV, 73, or NFR, 225. 26 See DV, 71, or NFR, 223. 27 See DV, 73, or NFR, 225. 28 The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3:837. 29 See DV, 74-5, or NFR, 226-7. 30 See NB 44, n. 676. 31 Vera was NF's older sister. 32 See NB 50, n. 734. 33 See Notes 53, n. 65. 34 "I could weep for the criminal Patience of Humanity!" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Condones ad Populum: On the Present War," in Lectures, 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971], 59-60). See DV, 57, or NFR, 212. 35 See DV, 66-7, or NFR, 219-20. 36 God was displeased with Saul, repenting that he had made him king of Israel, because Saul refused to kill Agag, the Amalekite king (i Samuel 15). 37 See DV, 59-63, or NFR, 213-17. 38 See n. 22, above. 39 On the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions, see DV, 65-9, or NFR, 218-22 40 See DV, 79-80, or NFR, 230-1. On hyponoia, see DV, 77, or NFR, 229. 41 See DV, 69-70, or NFR, 222-3. 42 See DV, 84, or NFR, 234. 43 A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, \. 24. 44 See DV, 72, or NFR, 224.

88o

Notes to pages 680-6

45 See DV, 70, or NFR, 222. Both Matthew (3:8) and Luke (3:9) report John the Baptist as saying that "God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." In bk. \ of Ovid's Metamorphoses Deucalion and Pyrrha, after surviving the flood sent by Zeus, throw stones over their shoulders and shortly discover that the stones have been transformed into men and women, thus repopulating the earth. Notes 54.2 1 NF uses some of the ideas in this entry in "Literary and Mechanical Models" (EAC, 19), a paper he presented in 1989. These notes, however, were written several years earlier. 2 See NB 44, n. 484, WP, 247, and DV, 13, or NFR, 175. 3 Hermes is the "informing presence" (WP, 277) of the archetype of the mountain, which NF examines in chap. 5 of WP. 4 "It is requir'd / You do awake your faith": Paulina's words to Leontes, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, 5.3.94-5. 5 The allusion is to The Tempest, 1.2.382-5. 6 See WP, xii. 7 AC, 16. 8 SeeNB 44, n. 401. 9 In the left margin beside this entry NF added the following holograph note: "'concealed' or hieratic meaning: no difference when the N.T. is also shifted to the (human) future. Nature as secondary world (Husserl)." 10 In the left margin beside this and the following par. NF added the following holograph note: "What happened vs. the form of what happened, which you wouldn't have seen. Apt to get impatient with Browne's tee-heeing." Above par. 14, he added these words, with an arrow pointing to "non-functional": "ind. [individual] > social duality reflects hieratic-demotic deadlock." 11 Below this par. NF added the following holograph note: "Myth as the more serious story." 12 In the left margin of this entry NF made the handwritten addition, "language of thesis & of love (vision). Paul on permanence." Below the entry he added, "law & gospel." 13 For Heidegger's concept of "thrownness," see NB 27, n. 59. 14 In the left margin beside this entry is NF's holograph addition, "culbute in the next life (maybe 16)." On the culbute, see NB 44, n. 63. 15 As NF has now moved from sixteen to eight chaps., this outline for WP is later than the one above. 16 In the left margin beside this entry is NF's handwritten addition "identity with & as." 17 Below this entry NF added the handwritten word "Perhaps?"

Notes to pages 686-93

881

18 See WP, 256,264. 19 See NB 44, n. 45. 20 NF is drawing on Robert Graves's The White Goddess: An Essay in.Poetic Mythology. See WP, 219-20. 21 See WP, 302. 22 See SeS, chap. 3, where NF uses forza (violence) and froda (fraud) to organize his treatment of the heroes and heroines of romance. 23 SeS, 133. Kataplous = the downward journey; see WP, 232. 24 See WP, 290. 25 See WP, 221, 245. 26 Europe: A Prophecy, pi. i, 1. 8. 27 Ranulf Higden (d. 1364), Polychronicon, a general history of the creation to about 1342 and continued by others until 1377; an English translation was printed by Caxton in 1482. 28 Anatrope = inverted growth. 29 The allusion is to the argument of Walter Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971) that the poet, from the time of Dryden on, is anxious about having anything new to say because of the rich legacy of the past. 30 See NF's "Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake," Vico and Joyce, 3-19, or MM, 356-74. 31 Most of the images and themes in the following lists made their way into WP; many can be traced through the index. 32 See "The Survival of Eros in Poetry," MM, 48-9. Notebook 46 1 Wayland Smith, the skilful blacksmith of English folklore; his Norse cognate, Vblund, appears in the Elder Edda. 2 That is, the southeast quadrant of NF's cycle of images. 3 Perikeiromene (The Rape of the Ringlets), written by Menander in ca. 313 B.C. 4 "For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise" (11. 53-4). 5 See Immanuel Velikovsky, "Rivers of Milk and Honey," in Worlds in Collision (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), 149-50. 6 Such expressions as "Warden," "Keeper of the heaven-kingdom," and "might of the Measurer," derived from a "heathen" Germanic tradition, were still in evidence in Northumbria when Caedmon's work as a scop began. Most Anglo-Saxon scholars consider such expressions as formulaic, even though there is some debate over the issue. [I am indebted to Alvin Lee for this information. Ed.] 7 Woden, the chief god of the Teutonic peoples, took an interest in the world of both the living and the dead. Odin, the god of war in his northern incar-

882

8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15

16

Notes to pages 693-4

nation, summoned numerous dead heroes to his vast hall (Valhalla), where they feasted and engaged in warlike games. The glory of martyrdom is a theme running through the Epistles of Ignatius, (ca. A.D. 35-ca. 105), the second bishop of Antioch. See, e.g., his Romans 4-5. NF seems to be reminding himself about a point he had made many years before in a lecture on "Faces of the Bible" at Cornell University (MarchApril 1972). See Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 401-5. Hoder = the blind god of Teutonic mythology. The phrase used by Robert Graves in The White Goddess to describe the roles of the capricious and omnipotent threefold goddess of our mythological inheritance. See, e.g., Tacitus' account of the ravaging and burning of the German countryside during the rule of Tiberius (Annals of Imperial Rome, chap. 3). The Cimbri were a Teutonic tribe that for years warred with the Celts along the Danube and later with the Romans in Gaul and elsewhere. Marius defeated them in 101 B.C. and completely destroyed their army. The reference is to the last line of Yeats's poem, where the artificial form taken by the poet, once his soul is "out of nature," will sing "Of what is past, or passing, or to come." In the Book of Tobit, Sarah is a "lower world" figure because of the demon that has claimed her seven previous husbands on their wedding night. Raphael assists Tobit's son Tobias in exorcising the demon. The story of Tobit himself contains the widely circulated Grateful Dead folktale: the blind and poverty-stricken man who is ultimately rewarded for burying an executed compatriot. On the dog, which appears somewhat surprisingly, see Tobit 5:16,11:4. The organs of a fish are used both to banish the demons from Sarah and to restore Tobit's sight (8:2-3,11:11-14). For Koestler the yogi represents the belief that everything can be improved "by the individual effort from within." The commissar represents the belief that everything can be improved by a revolutionary change from without, by "a radical reorganization of the system of producing and distribution of goods" ("The Yogi and the Commissar," in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays [New York: Macmillan, 1945], 3-14; the quoted phrases come from pp. 4 and 3). The three-part lectures referred to here are, respectively, the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto (1966), pub. as FT; lectures presented to the Graduate School of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (1966), pub. as SR; the Larkin-Stuart Lectures at Trinity College, University of Toronto (1980), pub. as CR; the Tamblyn Lectures at the University of Western Ontario (1981), pub. as MD; the Page-Barbour

Notes to pages 694-8

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

883

Lectures at the University of Virginia (1961), published as WTC; and lee tures presented at the University of Western Ontario in March 1989 (unpub.). NF's lectures at Emmanuel College 15-17 May 1990, which were pub. as DV. and rpt. in NFR, 166-235, also followed the three-lecture pattern. The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), 2:426. See Yahweh's remark to Moses in Exodus 33:23: "And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen." One of the main themes of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, developed especially in "Natural Supernaturalism" (bk. 3, chap. 8). See NB 50, n. 312. See NB 27, n. 59. See Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" (1899). My Spectre around me night and day, one of the untitled songs from Blake's notebook (Erdman, 475-7). NF did more or less follow the pattern outlined here in his first two "double vision" lectures at Emmanuel College. On the erotic view of nature, see DV, 31, or NFR, 190. See NB 44, n. 33. Cf. the opening sentences of DV. The United Church of Canada was formed on 10 June 1925 by union of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational Churches of Canada. See DV, chap, i, pt. 2. NF's mother was Catharine Mary Maud Howard; her father, Eratus Seth Howard, was a Methodist minister who held pastorates in eighteen different Canadian towns. See NB 27, n. 333. In a letter to Morton D. Zabel (19 April 1944) Louise Bogan remarked that Wallace Stevens had stopped writing and "become an affected old fool" (What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970, ed, Ruth Limmer [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973], 236). "Faith, or the rejection of faith, often revolves around the question: 'Why would a good God permit so much evil and suffering?' Charity starts with the question: 'Why do we permit so much evil and suffering?' and that is a question on which all men and women of good will can act instead of arguing in circles." From "To Come To Light," a sermon NF preached at the Metropolitan United Church, Toronto, 5 October 1986, and pub. in NUS, 29-37, and NFR, 360-6; the quoted passage is from NUS, 34, or NFR, 363. "After the first death, there is no other" (Dylan Thomas, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, 1. 24). Lorna Brown, the daughter-in-law of NF's second wife, Elizabeth. The reference is to Terry Eagleton, who remarked on CBC's "Morningside"

884

35 36

37 38

39

Notes to pages 698-701

program on 21 December 1989 that NF "remorselessly divorced literature from history." NF is speculating here about a possible pattern for organizing his three Emmanuel College lectures. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and not be entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Galatians 5:1). Cf. i Corinthians 16:13; Philippians 1:27, 4:1; i Thessalonians 3:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:25. mal'ak = angel (Heb.); the Pauline reference is apparently to Galatians 4:14. "We have just enough Religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another" ("Thoughts on Various Subjects" [1711], in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis [Oxford: Blackwell, 1957], 1:241). See Notes 52, n. 33. Notebook 47

1 On the first page of this notebook is a sketch of NF's ogdoad project, with a variation on the second half of it. NF's symbolic code is followed by abbreviations of books published and collections of essays he planned to publish. "L" represents Liberal, identified here with FS; "~\" represents Tragicomedy, here identified with AC; "A" represents Anticlimax, here apparently identified with essays written during the time NF was writing GC, or, alternatively, his studies in Shakespeare; "k" represents Rencontre, here identified with essays written during the time NF was writing WP, or, alternatively, his studies of Romanticism; "V" represents Mirage, here identified with GC; "h" represents Paradox, here identified with WP; "_L" represents Ignoramus, or, alternatively, NF's essays on Canadian literature; "f" represents Twilight, here represented as a collection of essays, or, alternatively, CP. For a full analysis of the ogdoad project, see Michael Dolzani, "The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye's Notebooks," in Rereading Fn/e, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)/ 19-38. 2 Following "pseudo-history" NF wrote "or chronicle" and then cancelled it. On Reed's novel, see NB 44, n. 642. 3 This is doubtless a reference to the statement about Vico that NF makes in the introduction to WP: "But even Vico had a limited interest in the continuous social function of literature, and he paid little attention to the principle that makes it insistent" (xii). 4 See WP, 26-7. 5 See WP, 6. 6 See WP, 128. 7 A reference to a passage in NF's own article, "Lacan and the Full Word": "I

Notes to pages 701-3

885

take Lacan's stade du miroir to mean that one cannot become a genuine 'subject' in our subject-object world of ordinary experience until one has become an object to oneself. There must be a split within the subject, and the .sense of the subject as bound up with something alien is thereby formed. This conception threw a good deal of light, first, on my reading of Shakespeare. Richard II, for example, bedevilled by what has been called the king's two bodies, and finding his royal self not only alienated but lost, tries to add himself together in the abdication scene by calling for a mirror and gazing into it. Hamlet, too, seems to me a gigantic force of personality imprisoned within an alienated self, thrashing around within it in his soliloquies and gazing hard at all the other characters, including Ophelia and Yorick's skull, in an effort to de-objectify himself, so to speak, or return to the pre-mirror stage" (Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, 188-9). See WP, 271. 8 NF included a similar statement in the introduction to WP, xx. 9 Words symbolizing the "primary" and "antithetical" types of subjectivity; as NF says in SM: "the stare, which sees nothing but expresses an inner consciousness, and the glance, a subject looking at a reality set over against it" (255). 10 See WP, 18. 11 The natural or mortal body, as distinguished by Paul in i Corinthians 15:44 from the soma pneumatikon, or spiritual body. 12 "I have this" refers to NB 44, par. 587. NF did work the point into the concluding pages of the book (303). "Venice" is a reference to a talk called "On the Bible" that NF gave at a conference on "Venice and the Study of Foreign Language and Literature" in Venice, 17 April 1989, the concluding par. of which contains an expansion of the point about Dante; pub. in NFR, 158-65. 13 See EAC, 14. 14 NF expands on the ideas here, as well as in pars. 18 and 20, in a talk he gave on 6 June 1989, "Literary and Mechanical Models." See EAC, 9-20. The dynamo and virgin images are an allusion to The Education of Henry Adams, where Adams contrasts the power of the Virgin, "the ideal of human perfection," representing the thirteenth-century synthesis, with the dynamo, the symbol of twentieth-century power and energy. 15 See WP, xxii. 16 See EAC, 19. 17 See EAC, 14-15. 18 The entries in this par. are, again, notes for NF's talk "Literary and Mechanical Models," pub. in EAC, 9-20. 19 "I remember a preface to another established text in which the editor, in the tone of a triumphant St. George with a very dead dragon, thanked his wife

886

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes to pages 703-6

for holding his hand while he fought out his titanic battle with a room full of bulky folios" (EAC, 9). A reference, apparently, to a preface in one of Louis R. Feuillard's multivolume eds. of musical scores. A rumour that NF heard when he was at Oxford that Sir James Frazer had entered the technological age by switching to a fountain pen. See EAC, 15. This person, identified in "Literary and Mechanical Models" only as a Canadian scholar of early Tudor literature, was perhaps E. Gurney Salter, author of Tudor England through Venetian Eyes (1930). See NB 44, n. 641. What follows are notes for NF's "double vision" lectures at Emmanuel College. See DV, 3, or NFR, 167. See DV, 3, or NFR, 167. "Levels of Cultural Identity," an address NF gave at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., 14 September 1989; pub. in EAC, 168-82. NF is referring to NB 46, which has one red star pasted on the inside front cover. The present notebook has two stars. R.B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 108-10. This entry, on a separate page in the notebook, relates to chaps. 4-7 of WP. Here NF returns to his notes for the "double vision" lectures. See DV, 22, or NFR, 182-3. See DV, 35-6, or NFR, 193-5. Notebook 48

1 In the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, the god Kingu takes the wrong side in the struggle between Marduk and Tiamat and so is killed as a traitor, and it is from his blood that human beings are formed. The aged Ymir, father of all giants in Teutonic mythology, was killed by his sons, but his body was raised by one of the giants to form the earth and sea. See WP, 256-7. 2 Sir Fred Hoyle, October the First Is Too Late (London: Heinemann, 1966). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 3 See Notes 52, n. 609. 4 In Notes 52, par. 983, NF says he is reading Roger Zelazny's two-volume Amber series, a reference apparently to the first two volumes in the series, Nine Princes of Amber (1970) and The Guns ofAvalon (1972), annotated copies of which are in the NFL. At the time of NF's late notebooks there were at least five novels in the series, and five more were pub. between 1985 and 1991. NF also owned and annotated the third of the Amber novels, Sign of the Unicorn (1975). He had earlier read E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922), but here the reference is to Eddison's Zimiamvia trilogy—Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). Annotated copies of Eddison's books are in the NFL.

Notes to pages 706-13

887

5 See Notes 52, n. 608. 6 NF does not use the provided/achieved distinction in GC, but see GC, chap. 6, for his analysis of apocalyptic imagery. See DV, 31, or NFR, 190, for what amounts to the "achieved" (created by human beings) and "provided" (natural) categories. 7 See WP, 208. 8 The point has been argued by Eric Erikson. See NB 50, n. 734. 9 The reference is to Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. 10 Her passion having been aroused by Poseidon, Pasiphae mated with the white bull, from which union came the Minotaur. In Apuleius, the golden ass mates with a rich, passionate matron, whom the author twice compares to Pasiphae (The Golden Ass, trans. W. Arlington [London: Heinemann, 1928], 409-11 [bk. 10]). 11 See WP, 10, 75-6. 12 SeeNB44, n. 118. 13 See WP, 226-7, and DV, 31-3, or NFR, 190-1. 14 Cf. the somewhat different colour scheme that NF uses in connection with his four gods in Notes 52, pars. 233-41, 509. Notebook nh 1 The reference of "L" here and in the following entries is uncertain, though it may stand for Words with Power. Throughout his notebooks NF used "L" as a hieroglyph for "Liberal," the first of the eight-part writing project he had formulated early in his life. Early on, "L" stood for NF's Blake book, but in the 19705 it came to represent the Bible book. That seems to be what it represents here. 2 The reference "N.L." is uncertain. It may refer to the Norton Lectures, where NF does comment on the relation between ritual and work (SeS, 56). But "these lectures" are clearly different from the Norton Lectures, mentioned in par. 7. "N." in the notation "N.L." could represent a negative: that is, "N.L." may signify that "these lectures" are not to be a part of "L" (the Bible book); or it may be an abbreviation for "new lectures." The lectures are almost certainly unrelated to the outline in the next entry, as NF never presented a series of lectures on those three topics. 3 This is apparently an outline for an early version of WP. 4 The numbers following the titles of these books refer to the year of publication. Annotated copies of all five books are in the NFL. 5 "Tis an ill wind that blows no minds," from Malaclypse the Younger's Principia Discorda, as qtd. in the epigraph to Robert Anton Wilson, The Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, [ii]. An annotated copy of Wilson's book is in the NFL.

Notes to page 713 6 See The Cosmic Trigger, 15-16. 7 The reference is to Wilson's speculations about the mystical significance of the number 23. 8 "The final comprehension of the Bible's meaning is in the spark of illumination between its closing anode and its opening cathode, and if that gap were not there the Bible would not stimulate the imagination to the effort of comprehension which recreates instead of passively following the outline of a vision" (FS, 386). 9 Wilson draws on Jung's idea of synchronicity throughout The Cosmic Trigger. 10 In The Cosmic Trigger Wilson records thirty years of his own experiments with magic, extrasensory perception, and other deliberately induced changes to his nervous system. Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum is about the various levels of altered states of consciousness and an argument for a holistic view of the universe. 11 Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980$ (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 12 The two books by Fritjof Capra NF refers to are no doubt The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, and The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). There is an annotated copy of the latter in the NFL. 13 Wholeness and the Implicate Order. NF refers to Bohm's idea of the implicate order in DV, 84, or NFR, 234. 14 On Kundalini, see NB 44, n. 291. Zazen, literally, "sitting in absorption," is the practice of meditation in which the subject focuses on no object but dwells in a state of thought-free attention. 15 See Notes 53, n. 12. 16 Fisher was one of NF's students. After he graduated from college, he came to NF saying that he wanted to do an M.A. thesis on Blake, and, as NF reports this episode in his preface to Fisher's book on Blake, Fisher "nearly walked out again when he discovered that I had not read the Bhagavadgita in Sanskrit, which he took for granted that any serious student of Blake would have done as a matter of course." NF adds that he had earlier been misled in his reading of Oriental philosophy by bad translations, but that thereafter his and Fisher's "conversations took the form of a kind of symbolic shorthand in which terms from Blake and from Mahayana Buddhism were apt to be used interchangeably" (Fisher, The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961], v). These conversations were frequent: in the late 19405 and early 19505 NF and Fisher met every Monday to drink beer and talk about literature and philosophy and religion, and NF often records the essence of their conversa-

Notes to pages 714-18

17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24

25 26 27 28

889

tions in his diaries from those years. Fisher, whose life was cut short by a sailing accident when he was only forty, was, by NF's account, the most brilliant student he ever had. See NB 44, n. 207. The monk is quoted by Fritjof Capra in an interview in The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes, ed. Ken Wilber. NF is quoting from the 1982 ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala), but the page number is the same. "(4)" refers to the list of books in par. 8, above. Again, NF is quoting from an interview with David Bohm in Wilber's The Holographic Paradigm, p. 205 of the fourth book in par. 8, above. For Vico, see The New Science, 79-80; for Joyce, see Finnegans Wake, 6, 11. 9-10. The Blake reference is NF's paraphrase of Jerusalem, pi. 41,1.15, and Europe, pi. 13,1. 3. See WP, 160-1. Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), 67. An annotated copy is in the NFL. Here NF begins the WP entries. His "Bible-Utopia ideas," which derived from the law and wisdom phases of revelation in GC, were to form a section of the book as NF conceived it in the mid-1980s. See NB 27, pars. 189, 466, and 482. One of NF's plans following the publication of WP was to write a book on education and Utopias (see NB 50, pars. 745 ff.), but the entries that follow in the present notebook make clear that the material predates his intent to write a book on Utopias: these entries come from an earlier stage in the writing of WP. Barbara Allan, the Scottish ballad, is about the death of Sir John Grehme for his unrequited love of Barbara Allan. Catullus' Attis is the story of a young convert to the worship of Cybele who cannot escape from the passionate frenzy of the goddess. He castrates himself in a fit of devotion to her and then comes to lament his action (Poems, no. 63). See WP, xiii. The "glass bead game" is a reference to Hermann Hesse's novel of that title (Das Glasperlenspiel), in which Joseph Knecht is consumed with mastering the glass bead game, a synthesis of music, mathematics, logic, and philosophy. The reader is left with little explanation of how the game really works. See WP, 274. See WP, 27-8. See WP, 28. In one of the commercial systems of the Erewhonians "all mercantile transactions were accompanied with music, so that they were called Musical Banks. The currency in such banks had no direct commercial value in the outside world" (Samuel Butler, Erewhon, ed. Peter Mudford (London: Penguin, 1985), 137-8 (chap. 15). On spiritual food as a parody of the material world, see WP, 128.

890

Notes to pages 718-21

29 Valery's La Jeune Parque (1917). 30 On Kundalini, see NB 44, n. 291. In yoga the chakras are the centres of energy in the body. 31 See WP, 278. The sentence NF eventually wrote: "As for Nietzsche, he may have believed or tried to believe that the perpetually dying Dionysus was a life-affirming figure, and that the Christ of the Resurrection was a lifedenying one." The passage does in fact appear in chap. 8. 32 NF cites neither Biblical passage in WP, but he does treat the Messianic vision of the banquet in chap. 7. 33 See WP, 45, and DV, 6-8, or NFR, 170-1. 34 The reference is to chaps. 8-10 of Hyde's The Gift. See Notes 53, par. 115. In WP, 304, NF's remarks about possessions are indebted to Hyde. 35 See WP, 127. NF included this observation in chap. 4, rather than chap. 7. 36 NF did not quote the footnote or otherwise make reference to Eliade's book on alchemy in WP. Notes 55.1 1 NF gave the Witterbyner Lecture at Harvard on Blake's Jerusalem ("The Ear and Eye of William Blake") on 25 February 1974. He also lectured on Jerusalem at the International Lecture Series in Toronto on 26 November 1981, and at the University of Georgia on 6 April 1982. If NF prepared a manuscript for any of these lectures, it is not extant. There are, however, several sets of notes on Jerusalem in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file 7. The second set was used by NF for the Toronto lecture (which was recorded on tape) and is fairly close to a fully developed essay. The "Milton one" refers to "Notes for a Commentary on Milton," in The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Gollancz, 1957), 99-137. 2 See DV, 66, or NFR, 219. 3 NF also speculates on this division in NB 45, most of which is devoted to an analysis of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. 4 See NB 45, pars. 100-3. 5 See Notes 54.1, n. 20. 6 Wordsworth, It Is not To Be Thought of (1807), 1.11; Auden, September i, 1939, st. 8,1.11. This poem was not included in Auden's Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), though it does appear in his Collected Poetry (New York: Random House, 1945). In the earlier ed., however, Auden omitted the stanza that concludes with "We must love one another or die." The stanza containing this line is in the full version of the poem in Auden's Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1979), 86-90, and in A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, ed. Oscar Williams, rev. ed. (New

Notes to pages 721-3

7 8

9

10

891

York: Yardstick Press, 1941), 27-8, and in several other anthologies edited by Williams. On this entry, see the headnote. NF's seventy-eighth birthday was 14 July 1990. A reference, apparently, to one of the undergraduate lectures NF gave when he was at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry in 197475. He refers to his schematic representation of Sartor Resartus in NB 27, par. 335, and the diagram itself is almost certainly the one in the NFF, 1991, box 36, file i. Neither W.J. Bate nor Jerome Buckley has any recollection of a lecture NF gave on Carlyle when he was at Harvard. In 1972 NF wrote a five-part, i84~page introduction (pt. 5 exists only in outline) for a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich anthology of English literature, for which he was to be the general editor. The project fell through. "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air" (Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 11. 55-6).

This page intentionally left blank

Index

NOTE: Works by identifiable authors (including NF's works) are indexed under the author's name; anonymous works are indexed by title. For printed works published in the author's lifetime or shortly thereafter, the date of first publication in the original language has been given whenever it could be determined. Mythological and Biblical figures are generally indexed separately only when they are discussed without reference to a particular work (thus when Odysseus is discussed as part of the Odyssey, the discussion is indexed under "Homer: Odyssey," not under "Odysseus"). Discussions of Shakespearean characters are indexed under the title of the play in which they appear. Names appearing without comment in lists of topics or brief outlines for WP are generally not indexed, but the lists and outlines themselves are indexed in the entry for WP under the heading "general plan of." To facilitate searching and to save space, continuous page numbers have been used to indicate separate discussions of a subject on consecutive pages. Abel, 27, 95, 304, 352 Abelard, Peter (1079-1142), 252, 720 Abraham, 9, 23, 26-7, 86,158, 283, 341, 363, 449, 587-8, 676, 680 Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward) (b. 1912): Natural Supernaturalism (1970), 41 Acts of the Apostles, 51, 84,127,132, 146,151,164,213,256, 356, 462, 483, 583, 643, 645-6, 648 Adam, 25,127, 231, 293, 328, 336, 387-8, 443, 585; as androgynous, i 3°3/ 602 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), 186 Malraux, Andre (1901-76): The Voices of Silence (1951), 244-5 Mandala(s), 233, 564; Jung on, 524, 564, 574; NF's "mandala vision," xxv Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733): The Fable of the Bees (1714), 386 Mankind: alienated from nature, 477, 520; consciousness in, 679; as maker, 624; two worlds of, 415, 640, 547-8, 656, 662 Mann, Thomas (1875-1955): Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), 337 Manning, R.J.: "Rule and Order Strange: A Reading of Sir John Davies' Orchestra" (1985), 493 Manuel, Frank E. (b. 1910): The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959), 235 Mao Tse-Tung (or Zedong) (18931976), 264 Marcel, Gabriel (1889-1973): Being and Having (1935), 310 Marchand, Philip: review of WP in the Toronto Star, 415 Marcion (ca. A.D. loo-ca. 165), 253 Marie Antoinette (1755-93), 168 Maritain, Jacques (1882-1973), 244-5; Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), 243-4 Mark, Gospel according to, 19,119, 147,150,158,198, 312, 327, 379, 450,610,621; Secret Gospel according to, 644 Marriage, 204; levirate, 278, 522, 536, 546-7, 585 Mars, 693 Marsh, Dame (Edith) Ngaio (18951982): Light Thickens (1982), 372

Index Marsyas, 320 Martianus Capella (Martianus Minneus Felix Capella) (fl. A.D. 480), 250; The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 394 Martyrdom, 301, 305 Marvell, Andrew (1621-78), 689; A Dialogue between the Soul and Body (1681), 33, 551; The Garden (1681), 57, 96,285, 299, 493, 529, 584,603; An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's Return (1681), 666; On a Drop of Dew (1681), 321, 392, 398, 551, 571-2; To His Coy Mistress (1681), 100,298, 417, 550 Marx, Karl (1818-98), xxxvi, 5-6, 9, 65,116,125,145,168,205, 220, 224, 242,261,264, 307, 329, 388, 439, 451, 487, 495, 541, 614, 617, 630, 640,650, 656, 662; as an emancipating spirit, 632; as political analogue of Freud, 178; Communist Manifesto (1848), 330 Marxism, 6,12, 39, 76,153,190, 205, 219,244-5, 255, 406, 619,698; and Christianity, 589; on history, 162, 164,166,296-7, 358, 565, 617,644; and ideology, 37,107,121,131-2, 294, 544, 718; imperialism of, 643; and literature, 116,126,132,219, 465; popularity of, 642; and religion, 49 Mary, the Blessed Virgin, 15, 51, 94, 97,105,107,152,210,248,250, 274, 298, 323, 382, 394, 442-3, 450, 453, 464, 540,607, 688; and Gabriel, 406, 496; medieval paintings of, 561. See also Roman Catholicism/Catholics; Virgin Birth Mary Magdalene, St., 6,248,250, 328; reverses the Whore of Babylon, 492, 585

929 Mary of Bethany, 248,250 Masques, Jacobean, 46, 493, 560,690 Matthew, Gospel according to, 4,6, 28, 44, 72, 83,119,137,147,157-8, 171,232,242, 281, 301-2, 306, 328, 387, 429, 451, 457, 48i-3, 534, 547, 566, 587, 627, 633, 667, 671,678, 680. See also Sermon on the Mount Mead, G(eorge) R(obert) S(tow) (1863-1933): The Gnostic, John the Baptizer (1924), 404; Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906), 196, 618, 620 Meaning: four levels of, 259,263, 427, 437, 466, 508, 537, 670,683-4,686, 721; literal, 172, 596,606; theory of, H3, 355, 442, 544, 685 Melville, Herman (1819-91), 208; Benito Cereno (1855), 340; Clarel (1876), 197, 467; Israel Potter (1855), 197; Moby Dick (1851), 215-16, 280, 295, 323-4, 329, 385, 522 Memory, 38,260; Bergson on, 360; Blake on (see Blake, William); two kinds of, 360 Menander (342/1-291 B.C.): Perikeiromene, 692 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix (180947): Rondo capriccioso, 237 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich (1865-1941): Atlantis/Europe (1925), xxxv, xliv, 17,169,172, 495 Merrill, James (1926-95): The Changing Light at Sandover (1984), 283 Metaliterary writers, 361, 369 Metamorphosis, 206,295, 305-6, 389, 428,633; in the Bible, 492-3; in Spenser, 389, 444. See also Ovid Metaphor(s), 12,194; and analogy, 478, 602; apophatic, 487; asserts, 502, 511, 537, 540, 582, 593; centripetal, 488; classification of, 487-8; as counterironic, 15-16, 506; as

930 counterlogical, 4,7,14,164, 487, 504, 506, 580,686,695; denies an assertion, 502, 537, 540, 582; ecstatic, 16, 509, 537, 580-1, 593, 599; existential, 90, 547; frozen, 360; hierarchical, 618; and history, 12; hypothetical, 547; as identification, 16,107,426, 487, 512, 619; identifies person and object, 593; ironic, 487; juxtaposing, 488; as the language of religion, 379; in literature, 502; as a meditative technique, 592; and metonymy, 171, 541; as microcosm of language, 20, 58, 509, 537, 540, 580, 594; and myth, 592; participative, 488; questing, 488; rooted in the Bible, 359; royal, 17, 452, 488, 504, 506, 540; and syntax, 268; tentative, 487; theory of, 619; three phases of, 52-3, 63,66. See also Bible; Ideology Metaphysics, 261, 264 Methodism, xxiv, 697 Michael (archangel), 90,134 Michell, John: The Earth Spirit (1975), 349 Midrash, 175 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 60, 408; "Coleridge" (1840), 82 Milton, John (1608-72), 63, 66, 88, 94, 109,123,128,185,203,230,253, 317, 342, 375-6, 401, 486, 492, 528, 558, 690, 696; psychology in, 240-1; his Puritanism, 135; his use of mythology, 505; Areopagitica (1644), 156, 205, 271; Christian Doctrine, 175, 253; Comus (1637), 46, 50,190,274, 285, 318, 387, 459, 493; Elegia quinta (1645), 477, 486, 494; Epitaphium Damonis (1645), 464, 487, 560; Lycidas (1638), 61,254, 491, 507, 596; Nativity Ode (1645), 32, 469,

Index 473, 571; Paradise Lost (1667), 8, 19-20, 38, 41, 46,113,115,119,134, 141,182,194,255, 313, 316, 321, 324-6, 335, 352, 358, 374, 381, 425, 429, 505, 552, 575, 585-6, 590, 610, 636-7; Paradise Regained (1671), 34, 127,180,266, 347, 469, 565; // Penseroso (1645), 41, 52,257, 453, 571; The Reason of Church Government (1642), 629-30; Siccine tentasti (1645), 575 Mimesis, 263, 626, 708 Miracles, 137, 659-60; Jesus', 335, 521, 657 Mithraism, 11,262, 706 Mnemosyne, 260 Mohammed (ca. 57O-ca. 632), 676 Moloch, 273 Money, 99 Montaigne, Michel de (1533-92), 517; on "consubstantial form," 88,193, 195, 204, 555; Essais (1580-95), 88, 193,195, 204, 233, 410, 555 Montale, Eugenic (1896-1981), 66 More, Sir Thomas (1478-1535), xxxvi, xli, 233; Utopia (1511), 178,188,190, 192, 404. See also Utopia Morgan, C(onwy) Lloyd (1852-1936): Emergent Evolution (1923), 562 Morier, James Justinian (17807-1849): The Adventures of the Hajji Baba, of Ispahan (1824), 178 Mormon, Book of, 206 Morris, William (1834-96), xxxvi, xli, 17,120,178,190,205,210,234, 400, 702; "The Beauty of Life," 624; The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), 17, 348, 378, 544; News from Nowhere (1891), 234, 337; The Wood beyond the World (1894), 257 Moses, 9, 23,26-7, 30, 81,87,108,174, 286, 317, 341, 359, 455-7, 471, 5*9,

931

Index 547, 676; as symbol of law, 22, 146 Mountain metaphors, 279, 299, 303-4 Mount Rushmore, and Easter Island, 196 Mt. Sinai Hospital (Toronto), NF lectures at, 243 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (175691), 230, 235, 622,649 Mueller, William R. (b. 1916): The

Prophetic Voice in Modern Fiction d959), 383 Munro, Alice (b. 1931), 281, 385,675 Murphy, Cullen: "'Who Do Men Say that I Am'" (1986), 167 Murray, Gilbert (1866-1957), 177 Murray, Margaret Alice: The God of the Witches (1952), 111 Muses, 75, 260, 595,604, 674; as gods, 670, 673, 678, 680 Music, 15, 227, 310, 558; NF's love of, 298, 558; use of, 503; as verbal language, 84, 404 Musil, Robert (1880-1942): The Man without Qualities (1930-43), 260 Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945), 701 Mysterium tremendum, 209, 289, 600, 626. See also Otto, Rudolf Myth/mythology, 3, 58-9, 81,163-4, 169,269, 301; asserts and denies, 504-5, 537, 540, 580; autonomy of, 68; basis of, 64; Biblical, 120,181, 335/ 358/ 509, 570-1; and concern, 77,103,108, 269, 505, 596, 598, 605, 718; condensation and displacement in, 308; cosmology as (see Cosmology); as counter-environment, 243; as counterhistorical, 7, 164, 580, 695; cycles of, 64; and dreams, 155,623; and folk tale, 505, 588; grammar of, 295, 308; hierarchical, 309, 321; and history, 3, 59,

62,165-6, 221, 297, 310, 505, 538, 605,644, 646; history of, 605; of identity, 275; and ideology, 73,76, 84, 92-3,112-13,128,171, 265, 396, 429, 604, 629; kerygmatic (see Kerygma); as language of religion, 379; and literature, 111-12, 335, 543, 595, 652; meaning of, 513; as microcosm of narrative, 58; middle earth in, 124-5; more true than facts, 695; and mysticism, 642; Nazi (see Nazi mythology); origins of, 308; Orphic (see Orphic myth); pastoral, 218; pathological, 646; phoney, 66,135; and pseudohistory, 654; and science, 88,104, 545, 560, 580, 598, 654; social function of, 92,102, 519, 542, 588, 605; as source of literary authority, 605; as structure of concern, 429, 505, 545; as technique of meditation, 592; and time, 20,22, 443, 575; three ages of, 62-3; and truth, 59, 245; twentieth-century revival of, 605; two levels of, 363; as vision of hope, 600; as wish-fulfilment, 108. See also Aition Mythos and logos, 70,168, 171,176, 191, 266, 280-1

Nag Hammadi Library, 147. See also Thomas, St.: Gospel of Naomi, 69, 176, 298, 382 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769-1821), 165, 325, 408-10, 672 Narcissus, 45, 285, 327, 331, 387, 423, 430, 550, 577,701; prison of, 211, 300, 394, 421, 424, 428, 430, 525, 527, 542, 660-1 Narrative, 217, 590; speed of, 310 Nash, Ogden (1902-71), 368 Nashe, Thomas (1567-1601): Sum-

932 mer's Last Will and Testament (1592), 266; The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), 525 Nation, as response of the Spirit, 433, 449, 470, 513, 533, 538. See also Israel Nationalism, 434 Nativity. See Jesus Natural religion. See Religion Nature: alienation from, 477, 520; as female, 175, 325, 329, 450, 570; Freud on, 388; as God's book, 315, 426, 440; human exploitation of, 626, 655-6; Aldous Huxley on, 388; as a machine, 683; Marx on, 388; moral ambiguity of, 387-8, 576; natura naturans, 28, 44, 54, 66, 133-4,233, 435, 464, 477-9, 494, 523, 561, 571, 589, 690; natura naturata, 34, 44, 54, 83,104,133-4, 435, 492/ 555/ 558/ 589, 690; Nietzsche on, 388; redemption of, 329; regenerated, 325, 331, 431, 450, 516, 520, 556,659; Sade on, 175, 387-8; Schopenhauer on, 175, 388; as symbolic mother, 15, 331, 493; two orders (or levels) of, 344, 531, 555-6, 571; Wordsworth on, 56,175,228, 3878, 476, 486 Nazi mythology, 322, 552, 597 Nebuchadnezzar, 207,283, 400, 587 Needham, Joseph (1900-95): Science and Civilization in China (1956), 257 Negley, Glenn Robert (b. 1907), and J. Max Patrick (b. 1911): The Quest for Utopia (1962), 639 Nehemiah, 97; Book of, 546 Neoplatonism, 262, 347, 451, 496, 720. See also Plotinus Neptune (or Poseidon), 506, 593 Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar) (A.D. 37-68), 111, 400, 665

Index Nerval, Gerard de (Gerard Labrunie) (1808-55), 43~4/ 722; Aurelia (1855), 44,198,223, 325, 327, 331, 541, 622; Horus (1853), 197; Sylvie (1853), 44 Neumann, Erich (1905-60): The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), 296 Neurosis, 13-14,217, 716-18 New Criticism. See Criticism Newfoundland riddle song, 547-8 New Historicism. See Criticism Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801-90), 10, 25, 243,245, 398, 650, 662; on the Bible, 160,191-2; his conversion, 413; his "via media," 244; Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), 244; The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), 244; The Idea of a University (1873), 217, 222-3; The Pillar of Cloud (or "Lead, Kindly Light"), 412 Newspaper writing, 304 New Testament, 204,252, 331, 409, 516, 539, 629; central event of, 324; the church in, 629-30; dialogue of the Word; verse in, 159-60. See also Gospel(s) and the individual books Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 66, 461, 475-6, 487, 615, 683 New Zealand, NF visits, 372 Nicene Creed, 19,152,613 Nicholas of Autrecourt (ca. 1300-0. 1350), 252, 720 Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), 444 Nicholl, Maurice (1884-1953): The New Man (1950), 75 Nicholson, Mervyn (b. 1951), 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), 25, 39,178, 239,241,261,264, 340, 342, 361, 365-6, 369-70, 3§5/ 388, 399/ 470, 500, 508, 630; and Antichrist, 111,196, 212, 363, 367-8, 370, 380,

Index 508, 714; and Blake, 388; on Dionysus, 111,193,196, 212,242, 375, 377, 388, 508, 599, 718; and the "drunken boat people," 196; nihilism in, 336; on recurrence, 196, 292, 306, 313-14, 361, 363, 387-8, 451-2,662; as satirist, 368; on the "superman," 216, 342; as visionary, 389, 680; on women, 389; The Birth of Tragedy (1872), 193; The Gay Science (1882), xliv, 172,256, 343, 372, 596, 705; The Genealogy of Morals (1887), 193; Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-92), 306, 336, 366-8; Twilight of the Idols (1889), 227. See also Jesus Nihilism. See Nietzsche, Friedrich Nineteenth century. See History Noah, 23, 25-6, 32, 44,112, 535, 579, 585. See also Flood, myths of; Genesis, Book of Nobodaddy. See God No plays, 226 Notebooks. See Frye, Northrop: Notebooks Nothingness: in the Bible, 563; Heidegger on, 360; in Mallarme, 550; in Shakespeare, 183, 378; in Stevens, 216-17, 383, 392, 423-4; in Valery, 183 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772-1802), 190, 377; Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), 288 Novels, historical, 246; popular, 311. See also Scott, Sir Walter Numbers, Book of, 119,157, 252, 536 Numerology, 157-8, 457, 496,713 Nygren, Anders (b. 1890): Agape and Eros (1930), 559 "Oceanic feeling," 191, 355; Freud on, 62

933 Oceanus, 445 Ockham, William of (ca. 1285-ca. 1349), 252, 335,720 Odin, 693 Oedipal complex, 304, 306, 318, 323-4, 352, 506, 544, 549,631, 663; in the Gospels, 663 Oedipus, 3, 57,71,273,295, 334, 338, 427, 442, 462, 595, 599, 606; and Christ, 45,291, 322, 327; and the Sphinx, 238, 423 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph (170282), 62 Ogdoad scheme. See Frye, Northrop: projected works Old Testament, 213; apocalyptic vision in, 9; central event of, 324; historical narrative in, 645-6; irony in, 674; as law to Jews, 66, 342; as prophecy to Christians, 66, 342; separation of body and soul in, 671; as vision of God from hell, 673. See also the individual books Oliver, Robert G., 72-3 Omphale, 385 Ong, Walter J. (b. 1912): Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986), 145, 493 Onians, Richard Broxton (1899-1986): The Origins of European Thought (1951), 280, 705 Oracle, 438, 519; Delphic, 293, 440; unconscious, 440 Origen (ca. A.D. 185-0. 254), 89, 118-19, 250 Orpheus, 206,257, 293, 376 Orphic myth, 356 Orwell, George (Eric Blair) (1903-50): on Wells, 606; 1984 (1949), 386, 559, 568, 644, 647, 652 Otto, Rudolf (1869-1937): The Idea of The Holy (1917), 13,165, 209, 289 Ouroboros, 286, 292, 296, 357,445

934 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Nasso) (43 B.C.-A.D. 18), 460, 490, 523, 532, 660, 666,672; Fasti, 373; Metamorphoses, 53, 206, 317, 352, 373, 376, 444, 493, 497, 503/ 594, 630,633-4, 677. See also Sandys, George Oxford University, NF receives honorary degree from, 197 Ozymandias. See Ramses II; Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Ozymandias Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 176, 556; The Rights of Man (1791-2), 47,168 Painting: Baroque, 561; Canadian, 675; as embryonic art, 84, 98,100, 213, 285, 297, 404; literature like, 504, 507; most objectified of arts, 674; Renaissance, 561. See also Cave Drawings, prehistoric; Mary, the Blessed Virgin Pakistan, NF visits, 297-8 Paley, William (1743-1805): Natural Theology (1802), 723 Pandora, 345 Pantheism, 270 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) (1493-1541), 190 Paradise. See Eden Parody: in Blake, 292; cyclical, 292; demonic, 300, 308, 313, 453, 481, 535, 541, 549/ 597,667,689; in Joyce, 292; in Rabelais, 323; in Yeats, 292 Pascal, Blaise (1623-62): Pensees (1669), 372-3 Passover, 29, 56,118, 421, 520 Pasternak, Boris (1890-1960), 66 Patai, Raphael: The Hebrew Goddess (1978), 453; Hebrew Myths (see Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai)

Index Patanjali (2nd c. B.C.?), 78; Yoga-Sutra, xxxv, 159,289, 305, 622 Pater, Walter (1839-94): The Renaissance (1873), 14, 504 Patterson, Annabel (b. 1936): Censorship and Interpretation (1984), 375 Paul, St., 7, 24, 43, 46, 49, 84, 89,109, 131,159-61,182-3, 202, 282, 315, 342, 407, 418, 431,464, 482, 519, 585, 603, 675,698; on Jewish law, 83, 94, 629; on natural and spiritual bodies, 617-18, 671,701, 714; on women, 654 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849-1936), 200 Pearl, 348 Peleus, 390 Pelikan, Jaroslav (b. 1923): The Mystery of Continuity (1986), 300 Penelope, 206. See also Widow Pentecost, 645, 716 Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703): Diary, 37 Peripeteia, 331 Perry, John Weir (b. 1914): Lord of the Four Quartets (1970), 445 Persephone (or Proserpine), 176, 376, 393, 444, 452, 490, 507- See also Anabasis of Kore Perseus, 97 Pervigilium Veneris, 145,196 Peter, St., 24, 27, 328; First Epistle General of, 156, 414 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 130474), 591; and Laura, 377; Rime, 490; Secretum meum, 469, 533; Sonnetto in Vita, 18 Philippians, Epistle to the, 159,708 Philo Judaeus (ist c. A.D.), 164,412, 454, 614, 651 Physics, 443, 512 Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973), 602 Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur

Index Wallace (1873-1952): Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy (1927), 163 Pieta, 26, 332 Pilate, Pontius, 230 Pindar (ca. 522-ca. 440 B.C.), 91 Pirsig, Robert M. (b. 1928): Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), 79 Pius IX, Pope (Giovanni Ferretti) (1792-1878), 24 Planck, Max (1858-1947), 390 Plato (ca. 428-347 B.C.), xxxvi, 51, 96, 122,126,133,138,161,191, 228-9, 233, 264,268, 337, 362, 404, 412, 360, 490, 498-9, 500, 519, 529, 573, 610,621, 678, 722; his allegory of the cave, 208; as betrayer of Socrates, 554; not dualistic, 177; myth of Er in, 621; on Prometheus and Thoth, 320; Apology, 163; Cratylus, 454, 689; Critias, 552; Gorgias, 232; Laws, 554; Menexenus, 413; Phaedo, 163; Phaedrus, 230, 260, 583; Republic, 117,163,179, 212, 216,232, 264-6, 307, 381, 390, 456, 586; Sophist, 130, 632, 638; Symposium, 230, 313, 583, 591; Timaeus, 296, 300, 495, 532, 552, 620, 627 Platonism, 226; in social institutions, 220, 227 Play, 87, 95,127,269, 473, 529, 674, 707; as primary concern, 87-8, 103,114-15,120,255, 542-3, 606-7; and work, 98,120-1,132, 187, 256, 542-3, 556, 606,624, 659. See also Erikson, Erik H; Huizinga, Johan Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) (A.D. 23-79): Natural History, 133 Plotinus (A.D. 204-70), 287, 347, 413, 631, 671; Enneads, 616

935 Plutarch (ca. A.D. 46-ca.i2o), 678; On Isis and Osiris, 414, 621 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49), 165, 222, 317, 323, 377, 511; The Colloquy of Monos and Una (1841), 290; The Domain ofArnheim (1847), *65/184, 238-9, 370, 423, 466, 481, 494-5, 653; Eureka (1848), 39, 45,127, 377, 421-2, 430, 435, 438-9, 441, 482, 494, 515, 525, 582, 603; Ligeia (1838), 268; MS. Found in a Bottle (1833), 43, 577; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), 43, 288, 390, 535, 577; A Predicament (1838), 42; The Psyche Zenobia (1838), 42; The Purloined Letter (1844), 220; The Raven (1845), 43, 577; The Spectacles (1844), 165; William Wilson (1839), 331, 336, 387. See also Frye, Northrop: projected works Poetics, underthought in, 294 Poetry: Canadian, 400; centrifugal reference in, 564; centripetal reference in, 399, 564-5; concrete, 593; condensation and displacement in, 399; conventions in, 76, 641; function of, 377, 398, 594; homophones in, 592; and ideology, 164, 543-4, 595, 639; and love, 571; (see also Eros), metaphorical structure of, 377; orality of, 31-2, 417, 537, 593; as primitive, 167; and science, 394; themes of, 287-8; young women as inspiration of, 376-7 Poincare, Jules Henri (1854-1912), 258 Polarities, 33 Polo, Marco (1254-1323?), 701 Polyphemus, 45 Polysemy, 229, 468, 670 Polytheism, 228, 523, 548, 580,608; in Heidegger, 599. See also Gods

Index

936 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 82; The Rape of the Lock (1712-14), 190, 692 Pope, Marvin H. (b. 1916): Song of Songs: A New Translation (1977), 118-19, 454, 546-7

Popol Vuh, 290 Pornography, 76, 604 Porphyry (ca. 234^:3. 305): Life of Plotinus, 671 Potiphar, 414 Pound, Ezra (1885-1972), 69, 78, 93, 148, 492, 511, 527, 591, 595, 719; his hieroglyphic theory of metaphor, 58; The Cantos (1917-70), 33,142, 196, 237, 256, 544, 582-3, 588, 600; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), 59 Power, 261; as concern, 115 Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882-1964): The Iron Door (1927), 137 Praz, Mario (1896-1982): The Romantic Agony (1930), 370 Presocratic philosophy, 122, 598, 615 Pribram, Karl H. (b. 1919), 106 Priestley, F(rancis) E(thelbert) L(ouis) (1905-88), 355 Prince Charming, 97 Progress: belief in, 640; god of, 273 Prometheus, 26,60,70-1,133,193, 308, 320, 323; in Blake, 591; in Byron, 516; as Christ-figure, 194; and Dionysus, 195; and Epimetheus, 587; as forethought, 57,224, 345, 422, 530, 569, 587; in Hugo, 516; and law, 449; in Milton, 610; and Pandora, 345; and recovery of myth, 587; in Rousseau, 591; his secret, 390; in P.B. Shelley, 516, 591; steals fire, 480, 587; as trickster, 239,445. See also Frye, Northrop: Words with Power Property, as primary concern, 239, 241, 702, 704

Prophecy, 4, 41,68,96-7,286, 424, 431, 470, 474, 479, 514-15, 521, 534; as epiphany of the Word, 433,447, 449, 469, 522, 538; and fools, 562; and the Gospels, 97,421, 470, 534; and madness, 547; meanings of, 625; in the Old Testament, 617, 625

Prose Edda, 56 Protestantism, xxxvii-xxxviii, 6,136, 143,202, 244, 471, 622-3; conversion to, 632; and English literature, 199, 217, 222-3 Protoevangelium (or Book of James), 441 Provengal poets, 153 Proverbs, Book of, 118-19,230, 276, 279-80, 421 Providence, 433, 443 Psalms, Book of, 7,16-17,79/ 83,97, 104,118-19,123,130,141,159,240, 277, 300, 326, 370, 379, 476, 558, 582, 603, 605, 652,667, 669 Pseudo-Dionysius. See Dionysius the Areopagite Purchas, Samuel (1577-1626): Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), 236, 496; Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), 233, 236 Puttenham, George (ca. 1529-91): The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 532 Pygmalion, 507, 683 Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937), 124; Gravity's Rainbow (1973), 381, 385, 402 Pyramids, 130,213, 644-5 Pythagoras (6th c. B.C.), 634,666 Quakers, 200,289 Quest(s), 34,231, 316, 446, 558 Rabelais, Francois de (14947-1553), xxxiv, 15, 233, 291, 387, 392,460,

Index 464, 497, 541, 556,604, 620; and the Bible, 454,461; his pervasiveness in French literature, 459; Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-5), 262, 282, 323, 362, 457-61, 480, 494, 577 Rachel, 26-7, 481, 585 Racine, Jean (1639-99): Berenice (1679), 141 Radhakrishnan, Sir Sarvepalli (1888i975): The Principle Upanisads (1953), 302, 356 Raff, Joachim (1822-82): Am LoreleyFels, 237 Rahab (New Testament), 302 Rahab (Old Testament), 27, 345 Ramses (or Rameses) II, the Great (Ozymandias) (i3th c. B.C.), 124, 207 Rand, Ayn (1905-82): Atlas Shrugged (1957), 404 Rank, Otto (1884-1939), 13, 462; The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909), 327, 336, 562 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (14831520), 708 Read, Sir Herbert (1893-1968): The True Voice of Feeling (1953), 604 Reading, 203, 222, 501; and community, 203, 592-3; NF's, xxxiii-xxxiv, 365; as reflection of reader, 322; as revolt against narcissism, 184; origin of, 439-40; unifying factors in, 384 Reagan, Ronald (b. 1911), 50, 273, 398 Realism, 109, 245 Reason, 519, 631 Redner, Henry: In the Beginning Was the Deed (1982), 34 Reed, Ishmael (b. 1938): MumboJumbo (1972), 238, 423,700 Reformation, 103,121, 714; and the Eucharist, 192

937 Reich, Wilhelm (1897-1957), 12-13, Reincarnation, 19, 90,251, 356, 443, 559,607-8,635; in the Bible, 400, 563,694; in Buddhism, 572; in Dante, 292; denial of in Christianity, 672; in Virgil, 292, 400 Religion, 81, 467; as basis for society, 73, 324; in Baudelaire, 632-3; in Blake, 632-3, 714; as concern, 103, 121-2; in Dickinson, 632-3, 714; Eastern, xxxv; natural, 329, 350-1, 437, 666; NF's, xxxviii-xxxix, 714; in Rimbaud, 632; and science, 467; and spirituality, 713; in Yeats, 632. See also Church Revelation, Book of, 50,89,119,131, 134,176, 214,270, 312, 381, 383, 389, 412, 441, 456, 482-3, 511, 534, 585, 588, 590; harvest of world in, 93, 305; invitation to drink in, 262, 271, 433; male virgins in, 230, 257, 303, 348, 413,719; New Jerusalem in, 56, 233, 276; as undisplaced myth, 349, 359. See also Apocalypse Resurrection. See Jesus Revolutions, 68, 95-6,116, 388, 518-19, 642; apocalyptic, 692; in world today, 553. See also French Revolution; Glorious Revolution; Industrial Revolution; Russian Revolution Reynolds, Henry (fl. 1627-32), 236 Rhetoric, 303, 341, 643-4; and dialectic, 260, 265; and kinetic writing, 264; Parnassian, 216, 404 Richard, Jean-Pierre (b. 1922): L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarme (1961), 43 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (18931980): Science and Poetry (1926), 394 Richardson, Peter: review of GC in Dalhousie Review, 557

938 Ricoeur, Paul (b. 1913): "Anatomy of Criticism and the Order of Paradigms" (1983), 134; "Freedom in the Light of Hope" (1980), 191 Rig Veda, xxxv, 55, 57 Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875-1926), 177, 209, 286, 309, 377, 523,602-3,722; as anti-Christian, 552; and the caves of Altamira, 289; Briefe aus Muzot (1935-7), J71/ 602; Duino Elegies (1923), 376, 602; Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), 293, 602; Wendung (1927), 373-4 Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854-91), xxxiv, 39-40, 43, 80,135, 142,215, 366, 399, 470, 604,632, 722; as anti-Christian, 40, 552; on the self as other, 388; Apres le deluge (1886), 40; Le Bateau ivre (1871), 39, 577; Beth-Sai'da, la piscine (1873), 43; Illuminations (1886), 397; letters, 388; Lettres du voyant (1871), 39, 388; Matinee d'ivresse (1886), 397; Memoire (1872), 39; Mes petites amoureuses (1871), 39; Les Premieres communions, 577-8; Un Saison en enfer (1873), 39, 316, 320, 541; Venus Anadyomene, 39 Ritual, 105, 421, 590; and mythology, 91, 684; in primitive society, 643 Robbe-Grillet, Alain (b. 1922), 426, 440; Les Gommes (1953), 277, 548 Roberts, Jane: Seth books, 283 Robin Hood, legend of, 329 Rochdale College (Toronto), 199 Rodin, Auguste (1840-1917), 602 Roethke, Theodore (1908-63), 406; Journey to the Interior (1964), 338,

393, 404 Rojas, Fernando de (d. 1541): Celestina, 464 Roman Catholicism xvxvii-xxxviii,

Index 6, 24, 49,68,80, 91,143,148,160, 244,297, 398, 409, 413, 434, 458, 680; and authority, 460,633; its cult of the Virgin Mary, 442; its doctrine of Purgatory, 672; doctrines of, 105, 302,417; mania for institutionalization in, 650; papal infallibility in, 463,613,629; pederastic priests in, 407; and Protestantism, 202, 244, 471 Romance, 86, 311, 326, 481; and amnesia (see Twin(s)); Harlequin, 311; and ideology, 440; in Milton, 326; and polytheism, 608; in Shakespeare, 489, 507; in Stevenson, 326; in Tolkien, 700; in Twain, 326 Romance of the Rose. See Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun Roman Empire, 665 Romans, Epistle to the, 403,418, 629 Romantic Esauism, 108,228, 410 Romanticism, 79,87-8, 92,115, 241, 268, 294, 439, 476, 509, 529, 571, 591, 606; and nature, 477; and poetic language, 602; and prophecy, 369 Rome, NF attends conference in, 197 Roosevelt, Theodore (1858-1919), 196 Rosa, Salvator (1615-73), 211, 340 Rostand, Edmond (1868-1918): Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), 576 Rougemont, Denis de (1906-85): Love in the Western World (1939), 559 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78), 81, 99,116, 233, 325, 329-30, 439, 493, 500, 523, 591; on primary concern, 303; Confessions (1782), 59; Le Contract social (1762), 309; Emile (1762), 88, 337, 350, 388; Reveries d'un solitaire (1782), 100, 341, 516 Royalty, 300. See also Bridegroom metaphors

Index Rucker, Rudy (Rudy von Bitter) (b. 1946), xxxvi; Infinity and the Mind (1982), 398-9, 712 Rug-weaving, 366 Runcie, Catherine, 148 Rushdie, Salman (b. 1947), 661; The Satanic Verses (1988), 635, 644, 650 Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 120,178, 210, 234, 702 Russell, Betrand, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970): A History of Western Philosophy (1945), 530-1 Russia, 207, 397-8, 719; capitalism in, 573; Christianity in, 402; Communism in, 465; NF visits, 402 Russian Revolution, 565, 714 Ruth, 27, 69,116,176, 277, 298, 481, 483, 522, 536, 585; Book of, 20, 79, 97, 117-18,134, 162,176, 509, 546; as redeemed bride, 382, 569 Sabbath, 8, 192, 280, 314, 425, 518, 568, 629, 653; as Venus' day, 454 Sachs, Viola: La Contre-Bible de Melville (1975), 387 Sacrament(s), 73-4, 352; as sedation, 353; and symbol, 394. See also Eucharist Sacrifice(s): Aztec, 36,127, 589; in the Bible, 143, 302, 329, 708; and God, 305, 317; in Mithraism, 302; psychology of, 334, 513, 560; in Upanishads, 302 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Franc.ois, marquis de (1740-1814), 56, 66,175 Sagan, Carl (1934-96): The Dragons of Eden (1977), 195 Saint Stephen and Herod, 431 Sakuntala, 326 Salome, 299 Salter, Emma Gurney (b. 1895), 703 Samson, 116, 385

939 Samuel, 96,116, 353; First Book of, 27, 80,138,151, 267, 302, 363, 370, 396, 513, 585; Second Book of, 119. See also Witch of Endor Sandys, George (1578-1664): Ovid's Metamorphoses (1626), 52 San Francisco, NF attends conference in, 197, 373 Santa Claus, 237, 578 Sarah, 5, 26, 298, 550, 585 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-80), 188, 250-1, 365; Being and Nothingness (1943), 183 Sassonia, Ercole (Hercules Saxonia) (1551-1607), 545 Satan (or Lucifer), 34, 60, 90,123, 202, 212, 306-7, 318, 591, 676; language of, 630. See also Milton, John: Paradise Lost Satire, 15, 481, 688; expresses primary concern, 600; in Lawrence, 322, 551; Menippean, 460; in Swift, 551 Saturn, 672 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857-1913), 512 Savage, Eliza Mary Ann (1836-85), 122 Scarlatti, Domenico (1685-1757), 262 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1775-1856), xxxiv, 371, 633, 637, 662; on theogony, 637, 644-5; °n myth, 62,155, 161, 169, 308, 636, 637; Philosophy of Mythology (18567), 623; Philosophy of Revelation (1858), 623. See also Frye, Northrop: projected works Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805), 246; Ode to Joy (1786), 378; On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), 187, 257 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), xxxvi, 175, 261, 320, 336, 388, 439,

940 476, 487, 494-5, 533, 541, 551; The World as Will and Representation (1818), 249, 251, 679 Schrodinger, Erwin (1887-1961), xxxvi, 26, 545; Mind and Matter (1959), 291; What is Life? (1947), 595 Science, 394, 528, 560, 598, 683; authority of, 471; neither mythology nor ideology, 122; origins of, 256-7; and religion, 467 Science fiction, 436, 526, 607-8, 658; NF's interest in, 713; and robotics, 708 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), xli, 69-70,140,142, 243,247, 674; Balzac on, 246; and opera, 245-6; Anne of Geierstein (1829), 247; The Antiquary (1816), 246; The Betrothed (1825), 246; The Bride ofLammermoor (1819), 245; Count Robert of Paris (1831), 246; The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), 246; The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), 246; Guy Mannering (1815), 246; The Heart of Midlothian (1818), 246; Ivanhoe (1819), 246; Kenilworth (1821), 246; The Lady of the Lake (1810), 246; The Legend of Montrose (1819), 246; Old Mortality (1816), 246; Peveril of the Peak (1823), 246; Quentin Durward (1823), 246-7; Redgauntlet (1824), 246-7; Rob Roy (1817), 246-7; St. Ronan's Well (1823), 246; The Talisman (1825), 246; Waverley (1874), 247 Scotus Eriugena. See Erigena, Joannes Scotus Scotus, Johannes Duns. See Duns Scotus, Johannes Screech, M(ichael) A(ndrew): Rabelais (1979), 454, 46o

Index Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich (1872-1915), 72 Seattle, Chief (17867-1866), 231 Secrecy, 329, 334-5 Secular scripture, 459, 468. See also Frye, Northrop: The Secular Scripture Selden, John (1584-1654): Table Talk (1689), 625 Seneca, Lucius Anneaus, the Younger (ca. 5 B.C.-A.D. 65): Apocolocyntosis, 665 Sepher Yetzirah, 175-6,180 Septuagint, 293, 328, 588 Sermon on the Mount, 99, 229, 306, 369. See also Matthew, Gospel according to Servomechanisms, words as, 23, 339, 589 Seth, pillars of, 288 Sex, 96, 98-101,121, 248, 280, 379, 540; and ideology, 274; in the head, 590; as primary concern, 77, 87-8, 103,120, 239, 255, 542, 606, 640, 702, 704; shame about, 559. See also Food Shaeffer, Peter (b. 1926): Amadeus (1979), 124 Shah Idris sect, 84 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 32, 68, 70, 80,88, 91,109,128,130, 147,160, 201,216, 230, 342, 345-6, 377, 529, 554, 585; as dramatist, 604; his history plays, 560; lack of biographical information about, 401; role of Ovid in, 672; his romance plays, 489, 507; his use of Greene, 490, 507; his use of Harsnett, 604; his use of Holinshed, 506; and Virgil, 571; Antony and Cleopatra (1623), 466, 489-90, 529; Coriolanus (1623), 141-2,151, 385;

Index Cymbeline (1623), 246, 352, 452; Hamlet (1603), 12-13, 41/141, 144, 149,158,203, 346, 481, 489, 701; Henry IV, Part I (1598), 82; Henry IV, Part II (1600), 82, 336, 507; Henry V (1600), 82, 221, 505-6, 543, 545, 594, 598; Henry VIII (1623), 505; King John (1623), 168; King Lear (1608), 17, 98,117-18,170,183, 209, 244,252, 310, 317, 344, 391, 489-90, 492, 506, 548, 604, 636, 669, 677-8; Macbeth (1623), 331, 372, 489, 554, 666; Measure for Measure (1602), 72, 300; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 532; The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), 342; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600), 33, 40, 50,107,146, 190, 219, 314, 370, 410, 537, 547, 571, 594, 689; Pericles (1609), 98, 326, 393, 424; The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601), 276,282, 314, 331, 481, 532; Richard II (1597), 183, 701; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 50, 200; Sonnets (1609), 386, 550; The Taming of the Shrew (1623), 244; The Tempest (1623), 43-4, 46, 55, 81, 95,117-18, 166, 208, 274, 335, 346, 410, 415, 454, 489, 493, 496, 545, 552, 571, 578, 683, 689-90, 715; Troilus and Cressida (1609), 35, 99, 584, 689; Twelfth Night (1623), 215, 222, 336; The Winter's Tale (1623), 43, 52, 55, 72,117, 326, 345-6, 452, 490, 507, 550, 577, 683, 690 Shamanism, 269 Shankara (or Sarnkara) (788-820), 61 Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), 128; Back to Methuselah (1921), 562; Heartbreak House (1919), 516; Man and Superman (1905), 410 Shekinah, 32,151, 249, 251, 287, 414, 453, 517-18

941 Shelley, Mary (1897-1851), 268; Frankenstein (1818), 336, 606 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 34,43, 82,199,210, 231, 292, 314, 370, 448, 467, 495, 5i6, 529, 551, 580, 591-2,662,689; his interest in science, 615; A Defence of Poetry, 226, 402, 421; Epipsychidion (1821), 592,689; Julian and Maddalo (1824), 215; The Mask of Anarchy, 321; Ode to the West Wind (1820), 283; Ozymandias (1818), 217,652; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 30, 34, 41, 285, 325, 329-31, 336, 383, 390, 392, 395, 476, 482, 490, 494, 496-7, 575, 579, 586,718; Queen Mab (1813), 144; The Revolt of Islam (1818), 407; The Sensitive Plant (1820), 198; The Triumph of Life (1824), 292; The Witch of Atlas (1824), 268, 544, 606 Shelter, as primary concern, 77, 87-8, 98,101,103,120, 255, 542 Shklovsky, Viktor Borisovich (18931984), 206, 604 Sibbes, Richard (1577-1635): Bowels Opened (1632), 136 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 404; Arcadia (1590), 232; Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust, 386 Sieyes, Abbe (Emmanuel Joseph, comte de Sieyes) (1748-1836): What Is the Third Estate? (1789), 183, 374 Siger of Brabant (ca. i23O-ca. 1280), 252, 720 Simcoe (Ontario), NF visits, 239 Sin: against the Holy Spirit, 198, 385, 630; original, 3, 52, 66,198, 264, 379, 386, 402, 447, 631-2; and patriarchy, 631-2 Skelton, John (1460-1529), 317

942 Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic) (190490), 702 Sky-god, myths of, 691 Sleeping beauty theme, 313 Smart, Christopher (1722-71), 283; Jubilate Agno, 27,292, 307, 550 Smith, Adam (1723-90), 386 Smith, Morton (1915-91): Jesus the

Magician (1978), 335; The Secret Gospel (i973)/ 644 Smith, W(illiam) Robertson (1846-

94): The Religion of the Semites (1889), 511 Smith College (Northampton, Mass.), NF lectures at, 190 Snow, C(harles) P(ercy) (1905-80): The Two Cultures (1959), 702 Socialism, and capitalism, 65-6, 397, 553, 573, 599 Society, 73, 221,227, 324, 513. See also Church; Community; Israel, ancient; Nation Socrates (469-399 B.C.), 5, 31,163, 230, 264, 518, 553, 573, 588, 714. See also Plato Solomon, 546; as symbol of wisdom, 22, 26, 471; Temple of, 213-14, 527, 583 Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich (1853-1900), 169 Song of Songs, 136,144,162,291, 293, 301, 327, 438, 451, 463, 473, 529, 571; allegory in, 452; bride in, 79, 97, 298, 382, 393, 442, 492, 546-7; and the creation story, 112,116, 118,134,162, 591, 690; and Elizabethan literature, 560-1; primary concern in, 120; scholarship on, 452; sex in, 112,117,119, 257,274, 286-7, 300, 445, 455- See also Pope, Marvin H.

Index Sophocles (ca. 496-405 B.C.): Antigone, 285 Soul (or psyche), myths of the, 254 Soul-body, 634-5, 662; antagonism in, 671; intuition in, 636 South Africa, apartheid in, 91 Space, 65, 484, 575; four levels of, 493, 551,690. See also Time Sparagmos, 633-4 Sparshott, Francis (b. 1926), xxxii;

review of GC in Philosophy and Literature, 410, 556-7 Sparta, 96 Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), xl, 219, 250, 353, 386, 420, 430,436, 491, 517, 574, 581, 656, 662; NF's interest in, 401, 616,641,649; The Decline of the West (1918-22), no, 245, 565, 649, 651 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552-1599), 54, 492, 554; Epithalamion (1595), 286; The Faerie Queene (1590-6), 30,183, 189-90, 232, 358, 371, 404, 446, 496, 689; Four Hymns (1596), 386; A Hymn of Heavenly Love (1596), 452-3; Mutability Cantos (1599), 86, 92, 204, 219, 278, 290,295, 305, 317, 333, 345, 347, 349, 351, 370, 389, 392, 412, 424, 444, 486, 550, 560, 571, 690 Sphinx. See Oedipus Spiegelberg, Frederic (b. 1897): introduction to Gopi Krishna, 353 Spingarn, Joel Elias (1875-1939): Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (1908), 236 Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedictus) de (1632-77), 260-1 Spirit(s), 183-5,193; and consciousness, 661; elemental, 190, 318, 493, 532; in Goethe, 318; in Milton, 318; omnipresence of, 637; and soul,

Index 535, 635; substantiality of, 9-10; vision of the, 288; and will, 634. See also Word Spurgeon, Caroline Frances Eleanor (1869-1942): Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935), 401 Staines, David (b. 1946), 400 Stalin, Joseph (losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879-1953), 68, 82, 264, 649, 680, 716; as Antichrist, 676; his pact with Hitler, 627 Statius, Publius Papinius (ca. A.D. 45-96), 225 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (17831842), 386; Le Rouge et le noir (1831), 263, 387-8 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68): Tristram Shandy (1759-65), 206, 604 Sternfeld, Frederick William (b. 1914): Music in Shakespeare's Tragedies (1963), 230 Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955), 80, 262, 370,493,504,526,724; Louise Bogan on, 697; as Protestant poet, 696; purported deathbed conversion of, 80,135; on the Song of Songs, 291; Adagia, 425; Anecdote of the Jar (1923), 522; Description without a Place (1947), 74, 322, 342,602; Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour (1953), 392; The Necessary Angel (1952), 214, 216,221; Notes towards a Supreme Fiction (1947), 309, 431, 545; Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself (1964), 164, 548; Peter Quince at the Clavier (1923), 291; The Poems of Our Climate (1942), 371; Poetry Is a Destructive Force (1942), 136; A Primitive Like an Orb (1948), 259; The Snow Man (1923), 216, 383, 392, 424; Someone Puts a Pineapple Together (1947),

943 359; Sunday Morning (1923), 389, 424-5; Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors (1947), 595 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-94): Treasure Island (1883), 326, 552 Stilicho (fl. 395-408). See Claudian Still, Colin (b. 1888): Shakespeare's Mystery Play (1921), 46 Stiskin, Nahum (b. 1945): The Looking-Glass God (1972), 46 Stoicism, 164, 292, 570, 614, 630, 667, 680 Stonehenge, 130, 213 Storm, Theodor (1817-88): The White Horseman (1888), 113 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-96): Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), 109,142 Strindberg, August (1849-1912), 126, 128,130, 206, 213, 228; his fear of being poisoned, 401; Keys of Heaven (1892), 127, 228; Miss Julie (1889), 399 Sturm und Drang, 648 Subjectivity, impossibility of, 643 Sublime, 191, 476; and alienation, 639; and beautiful, 290, 626,639, 648 Sufi sect, 84, 458 Susannah, 298; Book of, 20,134,176, 291, 509 Suzuki, D(aisetz) T(eitaro) (18701966): Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra (1930), 616 Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1688-1772), 223, 333 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 82, 233, 333, 397; on apocalypse, 398; and Bolingbroke, 493; Norman O. Brown on, 578; Lawrence on, 578; Gulliver's Travels (1726), 282, 341, 481,656; The Lady's Dressing Room (1732), 30, 310, 321, 551, 578; The

944 Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1705), 392; A Tale of a Tub (1704), 408; "Thoughts on Various Subjects" (1711), 699 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (18371909): Hymn to Prosperpine (1866), 317 Symbol(s), 155, 362, 397, 600-3; and allegory, 82; and analogy, 153; apocalyptic, 706-7; Carlyle on, 155, 601; expanding, 293, 309; focusing, 433, 522; liquidity of, 308; and metaphor, 602; as monad, 152,175, 193, 259; phoney, 168; sexual, 129, 154,157/ 346, 450, 499/ 540; and synecdoche, 128-9; as unit of identity, 186, 600-1 Symbolisme, 58, 267,280, 286, 299, 392, 480, 563, 565, 602 Symmetry, and teleology, 653 Symposium form, 228, 305, 311-12, 404, 552. See also Plato Synecdoche. See Symbol(s) Syntax, 268 Tacitus, Gaius Cornelius (ca. A.D. 55120): Annals, 693 Talmud, 68 Tamar, 27,298, 481, 483, 522, 536, 585 Taoism: xxxv, 10,106,117, 227, 451, 678 Targum, 118-19 Tarot, 459, 564 Tasso, Torquato (1544-95), 561, 581, 604 Technology, 241-2,261, 441-2, 461-2, 615, 640, 675,679; and introversion, 100 Teleology, 626, 639, 563; and aesthetics, 649. Television, 50,100,208, 377, 596 Temple. See Herod; Jesus; Solomon

Index Tennyson, Alfred, Baron (1809-92), 186; Hesperides (1833), 198; Idylls of the King (1857-9), 289, 506, 598; The Lotos-Eaters (1833), 198 Tertullian (Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus) (ca. i6o-ca. 230): Apologeticum, 630; De came Christi, 313, 596, 695 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63), xli Theocritus (fl. 270 B.C.): Adoniazusae, 300 Theodicy, 249. See also Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: Theodicy Theology, neo-natural, xxviii, xxxvi, 713 Theseus. See Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream Thetis, 385, 390 Thibaudet, Albert (1874-1936): La Poesie de Stephane Mallarme (1926), 392 Thomas, D(onald) M(ichael) (b. 1935): The White Hotel (1981), 340 Thomas, Dylan (1914-53): Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait (1941), 198, 325, 482; Especially when the October Wind (1934), 313-14; Fern Hill (1945), 345; /// Were Tickled by the Rub of Love (1934), 504; In the White Giant's Thigh (1950), 30, 579-80; A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London (1945), 679, 698; A Winter's Tale (1950), 176, 231, 237,280, 331, 466, 481, 578 Thomas, St., 457, 635-6; Acts of, 35; Gospel of, 328, 350, 393-4 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas, St. Thomas Thompson, Francis (1859-1907): and Pound, 439, 511, 582; Assumpta Maria (1893), 439/ 582

Index Thoth, 320 Tiananmen Square massacre. See China Tiberius (Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus) (42 B.C.-A.D. 37), 666 Tibetan Book of the Dead, xxxv, 226, 270-1, 288, 331, 623 Tillich, Paul (1886-1965), 103,165, 199, 276, 543, 698 Time: consciousness of, 64-5, 484; and creation, 484, 512; as dance, 493, 575; dominates external cosmos, 633,663; four levels of, 493/ 55i; and progress, 330; and sex, 100; and space, 22, 63-4, 443, 486, 576; as symbolically male, 54. See also Myth/mythology Timon, 312 Tiresias, no Titanic, 296-7 Titans, 479 Tobit, 328; Book of, 20,134,299, 332, 370, 547, 694 Toffler, Alvin (b. 1928): The Third Wave (1980), 707 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892-1973), 34,231, 700; The Lord of the Rings (1954-5), 261, 574; The Return of the King (1955), 333 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828-1910), 169, 206, 365, 662; War and Peace (1863-9), 195,206, 209, 216, 222, 400, 407 Tom o' Bedlam, 39,290,292,299,317,393 Torah, 5, no, 166, 233, 250, 409, 504, 510, 560; contains all possible books, 555; as female, 518; as shadow, 345 Torcello (Italy), fresco in, 48 Toronto, architecture in, 414,673. See also Emmanuel College; Mt. Sinai Hospital; Rochdale College

945 Totemism, 527, 593 Tottel, Richard (ca. 1530-94): Tottel's Miscellany (1557), 18 Tower metaphors, 41, 430-1, 493. See also Babel, Tower of Toynbee, Arnold (1889-1975), 409, 436, 565, 588 Traherne, Thomas (1637-74), 342; Centuries of Meditations, xliv. See also Frye, Northrop: projected works Tragedy, 481 Translation, 218 Travel metaphors, 576,607-8. See also Journey metaphors Triads. See Welsh Triads Tribalism, 599, 657, 678 Trickster figures, 72-3. See also God Trinity, 172, 204, 376, 457, 467, 536, 558-9, 643, 675, 694; of Antichrists, 676; man as fourth person of, 420, 442-3,561,563 Trojan War, 251, 598, 621,634; in English literature, 574 Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 460 Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronstein) (1879-1940), 6, 589 Truth, 653; as correspondence, 69; oblique form of, 592; as unveiling, 31, 581. See also Beauty; Verum factum Turner, Victor (1920-83), 10 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 207, 361, 585; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), 326, 552; The Prince and the Pauper (1882), 207; Puddenhead Wilson (1894), 207 Twentieth century. See History Twin(s), 258, 430; and amnesia, 27, 86-7, 221, 311, 314, 421, 424, 456,

946 526, 587; in the Bible, 457; and Narcissus, 327, 424. See also Brothers; Doppelganger United Church of Canada, 696-7; on homosexuality, 407 United States of America, 66; antiintellectualism of, 642; capitalism in, 622; civilization of, 208,273, 3!5/ 397-8, 553, 719; McCarthyism in, 465, 468; as open society, 406-7; slavery in, 454 University of Western Ontario, NF lectures at, 694 Upanishads, 61, 289. See also Radhakrishnan, Sir Sarvepalli Urania, 75 Utopia(s), 85,121, 232-3, 245, 409, 446, 460, 573, 695; fiction as, 229; and the university, 243. See also Frye, Northrop: projected works; More, Sir Thomas Ut pictura poesis. See Literature Vaihinger, Hans (1852-1933): The Philosophy of "As If" (1911), 613-14, 626 Valery, Paul (1871-1945), 182-3, 215, 524, 555; on cosmology, 430, 435, 506, 511, 521; secularization in, 182; Cimetiere marin (1920), 206, 321, 389, 412; Ebauche d'un serpent (1921), 183, 300; La Jeune parque (1917), 182-3, 292, 307, 312, 412, 550,718; Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme (1972), 278; La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste (1896), 182,184, 321, 412, 551; "Au sujet d'Eureka" (1923), 430, 435, 506, 511, 521, 525 Vance, Eugene (b. 1934): From Topic to Tale (1987), 274 Vanni Fucci (fl. 1293), 226

Index Vaughan, Henry (1622-95): The Evening Watch (1650), 33; Regeneration (1650), 39, 79, 298, 493, 529, 572, 585, 588 Velikovsky, Immanuel (1895-1979): "Rivers of Milk and Honey" (1977), 692 Venus (or Aphrodite), 95, 428, 530, 558, 593, 680, 687; and Adonis, 299, 444 Venus of Willendorf, 48 Verbal expression: four bodies of, 258-9; major structures of, 108,260 Verdi, Giuseppi (1813-1901), 246 Verlaine, Paul (1844-96): Art poetique (1882), 215; Crimen Amoris (1884), 215; Les Poetes maudits (1884), 52, 215 Verum factum, 59-60, 279, 538, 540, 626. See also Vico, Giambattista Via negativa, 184 Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 11, 114,155,161, 219,261, 371, 386, 420, 430, 436, 491, 517, 581,614; on myth, 64, 308, 700; and philosophy of history, 641; on verum factum, 27-8, 42, 545, 595; The New Science (1725), 86,114,473, 583, 715 Victoria, Queen (1819-1901), 624 Victoria University (University of Toronto). See Emmanuel College Vigny, Alfred Victor, comte de (1797-1863): La Bouteille a la mer (1864), 43, 577 Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, comte Philippe-Auguste (1840-89): Axel (1885), 48,182, 602 Vinge, Louise: The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature (1967), 423 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (7019 B.C.), 344/ 400-1, 490, 494, 523,

Index 532, 574, 633, 660, 662, 666, 672, 677,717-18; Aeneid, 38, 41, 43, 75, 289, 292, 469, 476, 491, 497, 541, 571, 586, 598, 621, 634; Fourth Eclogue, 441 Virgin Birth, 69,71,118,158, 242, 328-9, 339, 351, 354, 357, 411, 496, 550, 667, 678, 680 Virginity, 75, 284, 303, 348 Vision, 73, 89, 268, 288, 597; and death, 618; fourfold, 253,656; Genesis-Exodus, 227; in the Gospels, 618 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) (1694-1778), 407, 591; Candide (1759), 207; Micromegas (1752), 11, 381 Von Neumann, John (1903-57), 229 Vulgarity, 341-2 Wagner, Richard (1813-83), 124,130, 186, 231, 250, 577,649; Parsifal (1882), 10, 34, 314, 446, 463; Ring des Niebelungen (1876), 10, 463 Waite, A(rthur) E(dward) (18571942), xxxvi; The Holy Grail (1933), xxxv, 460-1, 574; The Key to the Tarot (1920), xxxv, 461; Quest of the Golden Stairs (1927), xxxv, 190 Walton, Evangeline: Prince ofAnnwn (1974), 608 Warner, Janet (b. 1931): Blake and the Language of Art (1984), 55 Watson, Lyall, xxxvi; Lifetide (1979), 53/715 Weber, Max (1864-1920): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), 160

Webster, John (ca. 1580-0.1626): The Duchess ofMalfi (1623), 199 Weil, Simone (1909-43), 528 Wellek, Rene (1903-95): A History of

947 Modern Criticism: The Romantic Age (1955), 623 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (18661946), 606, 662 Welsh Triads, 290 Weston, Jessie L. (1850-1928): From Ritual to Romance (1920), 446, 460, 618, 628 Whalley, George (1915-83): Poetic Process (1953), 601 White goddess, 38, 53,75,197,290, 299-300, 304, 370, 389, 393, 445, 498, 536,687,690,693; and black bride, 29, 48,78, 420, 427, 454, 466, 581, 491-2, 498, 508, 510, 518, 530, 563, 582, 585,689. See also Cycle(s); Graves, Robert: The White Goddess White, Patrick (1912-90): Solid Mandala (1966), 235 Whitehead, A(lfred) N(orth) (18611947), xl; Science and the Modern World (1925), 429, 531, 615-16, 619,

713 Whitman, Walt (1819-92), 8, 719; / Sing the Body Electric (1855), 637 Whole and part, 87, 99, no, 116,139, 175,191, 398, 507,639; interchange of, 89,109,123,192, 217-18, 404, 418. See also Christ; Hermeneutic circle Whore of Babylon, 5,707 Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1897-1941), 66 Widdicome, Jane (b. 1943), 137-8, 178, 333 Widow(s), 206. See also Eurydice; Penelope Wiener, Norbert (1894-1964): Cybernetics (1948), 156 Wilber, Ken (b. 1949), xxxvi; The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes (1982), 416, 712,714 Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900): The Critic

Index

948 as Artist (1891), 17,209, 506, 695;

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), 336 William of Ockham. See Ockham, William of William of Poitiers. See Guilem IX Williams, Charles (1886-1945): All Hallows' Eve (1947), 239 Williams, William Carlos (18831963): Paterson (1946-58), 277, 516, 548 Wilson, Edmund (1895-1972): Axel's

Castle (1931), 47,602; To the Finland Station (1972), 307 Wilson, Robert Anton (b. 1932): The Cosmic Trigger (1977), xxxv, 712-13 Wimsatt, William K. (1907-75), 234 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717-68), 371 Winters, Yvor (1900-68), 374 Wisdom, 5, 20, 26-7,105, 314, 474, 528; and the fool, 4, 557, 562; as a girl skipping rope, 129,707; as response to law, no, 447, 470, 485, 513, 520, 533, 538; as response of the Spirit, 449, 471; as sister figure, 517 Wisdom, Book of, 220, 441 Wiseman, Adele (b. 1928): Memoirs of

a Book-Molesting Childhood and Other Essays (1987), 202 Witch of Endor, 13, 38, 341, 345, 352, 381, 480, 586; and Tiresias, 352-3. See also Samuel, First Book of Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951),

Woodhouse, A(rthur) S(utherland) P(igott) (1895-1964), 557 Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941), xxxiv; To the Lighthouse (1927), 347; The Waves (1931), 305, 320 Word, 14, 91,136,219-20, 314, 332, 364, 428, 447, 469, 520, 536, 539; ascent of, 332, 583; and Spirit, 8, 21-2, 214,278, 382-3, 414, 421, 427, 463, 483, 509, 534, 550, 583, 635, 671. See also Christ Wordsworth, Willam (1770-1850), 56, 175, 228, 342, 387-8, 476,486, 555, 615; The Excursion (1814), 352; Is it not to be thought o/(i8o3), 721; Lucy poems, 377; My heart leaps up (1807), 61; The Prelude (1850), 288, 541; Tintern Abbey (1798), 12 World War II, 398 Wright, Wilbur (1867-1912), and Orville Wright (1871-1948), 313 Writing, origin of, 84,105 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (15037-42), 287; My galley, charged with forget fulness, 17-18, 45, 602 Xenophon (ca. 435-354 B.C.): Cyropaedia, 232

Yates, Dame Frances (1899-1981), xxxv, 51-2, 563; Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 618, 621; The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), 52

679-80; Tractatus Logico-Philoso-

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), 41, 45, 48,78, 80, 92,126,148,212, 282,

phicus (1922), 297 Woden, 693 Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1170ca. 1220): Parzifal, 446 Women, 298; pedantry in, 258 Woodberry, J.C., 564

370, 395, 493/ 496, 517, 527, 530, 549, 577, 585, 591, 595, 601,632, 662,701,722; and Nazism, 336, 368; Among School Children (1927), 88,170, 396; Blood and the Moon (1928), 242, 306, 689; Byzantium

Index (1932), 9, 215-16, 225, 228, 283,292, 352, 394, 423, 509,688; The Cat and the Moon (1918), 414; A Dialogue of Self and Soul (1933), in, 292, 346, 497; The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935), 42; The King's Threshold (1904), 243; Leda and the Swan (1924), 496; The Letters of W.B. Yeats (1954), 287; The Mother of God (1932), 688; "The Philosophy of Shelley" (1900), 379; The Player Queen (1922), 207; Purgatory (1938), 238; The Resurrection (1931), 140; Sailing to Byzantium (1928), 9, 44, 215, 240, 285, 394, 423, 693; Solomon and the Witch (1921), 5, 453-4, 535, 573, 586, 610; Solomon to Sheba (1918), 453-4; The Statues (1939), 10, 495; The Tower (1928), 46, 256 583; The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), 392; Vacillation (1932), 370; A Vision (1937), 10, 46, 63, in, 292,

949 435; Where There Is Nothing (1902), 380; The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), 256, 583 Yin and yang, 127,609 Ymir, 691 Yugoslavia, NF visits, 415 Zechariah: and Elizabeth, 406; Book

of, 441 Zelazny, Roger (Rodzher Zheliazny) (b. 1937), 574; Amber novels, 608,

706 Zen Buddhism, 106,267,271, 451, 548, 603; golden flower in, 288, 590, 596; popularity of, 367, 596 Zephaniah, Book of, 284, 303 Zeus. See Jupiter Ziggurats, 492, 583 Zionism, 695 Zodiac, 158, 459, 472 Zolf, Larry, 16 Zoroaster, no