‘Through Imagination spiritual truths are transformed into visible forms’

Milosz

“Let us pose a simplistic question: did [Emanuel] Swedenborg really travel through Heaven and Hell and did his conversations with spirits really take place? The most obvious answer is: no, not really. He only believed that he had access to the other world at any time, for instance when attending a party or walking in his garden. Everything happened only in his mind. This amounts to conceding that [Karl] Jaspers was right when he pronounced his verdict: schizophrenia. We should note that Romanticism had already treated Swedenborg in a way no different from the way positivistic psychiatry did later on, namely, a split into the material (that is, real) and the spiritual (that is, illusory) had been accepted, but with a plus sign, not a minus, added to the phantoms of our mind. If, however, William Blake‘s help is enlisted in reading Swedenborg, the picture changes radically. The question asked and the answer given would be rejected by Blake as absurd. Blake read Swedenborg exactly as he read Dante: these were for him works of the supreme human faculty, Imagination, thanks to which all men will one day be united in Divine Humanity. Through Imagination spiritual truths are transformed into visible forms. While opposing Swedenborg on certain crucial matters, Blake felt much closer to his system than to the system of Dante, whom he accused of atheism. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell is modeled upon Swedenborg, and he would have been amused by an inquiry into whether he had ‘really’ seen the devils and angels which he describes. The crux of the problem — and a serious challenge to the mind — is Blake’s respect both for the imagination of Dante, who was a poet, and the imagination of Swedenborg, whose works are written in quite pedestrian Latin prose. Dante was regarded by his contemporaries as a man who had visited the other world. Yet Jaspers would not have called him a schizophrenic, because the right of the poet to invent — that is, to lie — was recognized in Jasper’s lifetime as something obvious. It is not easy to grasp the consequences of the aesthetic theories which have emerged as the flotsam and jetsam of the scientific and technological revolution. The pressure of habit still forces us to exclaim: ‘Well, then, Swedenborg wrote fiction and he was aware it was no more than fiction!’ But, tempting as it is, the statement would be false. Neither Swedenborg nor Blake were aestheticians; they did not enclose the spiritual within the domain of art and poetry and oppose it to the material. At the risk of simplifying the issue by using a definition, let us say rather that they both were primarily concerned with the energy which reveals itself in a constant interaction of Imagination with the things perceived by our five senses.” — Czeslaw Milosz, in “Dostoyevsky and Swedenborg,” from Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision

Three of my poems published by Circumambulations

Update (May 2013): Circumambulations keeps one poetry page, and my poems have since been replaced by newer work from other authors.

The inaugural edition of Circumambulations includes three of my poems — “Winter Night at River View Farm near Avenue, Maryland,” “Idol,” and “Chapped Lips in Orlando” — along with poetry by Michael Campbell and Jason W. Johnson (the latter has previously published work with LiturgicalCredo). Visit the Circumambulations poetry page here.

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A thought about David Foster Wallace’s suicide

This reminds me of the time I found an older, solid, slightly worn hardcover collection of John Berryman’s poems (minus “The Dream Songs”), still sharp-looking in its dustcover, in a used bookstore in Asheville. I took it back to a small rented cabin in Black Mountain and started reading the biographical info on Berryman, and found out that he had jumped from a bridge. At the time, I was in a clinical depression, and upon reading that Berryman was a suicide, I felt cursed — even the writers I liked couldn’t make it. The way out wasn’t apparent at the time, but eventually, it was easy to see — recognize the work for what it is, and the person for who he was, and his last horrible decision for what it was.

Ramesh Ponnuru’s recommended books: a short, original interview

I contacted Ramesh Ponnuru, author and senior editor at National Review, via email for a quick e-interview. I asked him what books he would recommend to a layman who wanted to read about the history of ideas or intellectual history. I asked him because I had recalled that he had studied the history of ideas while in college.

Replying that “intellectual and cultural history” were his “alleged fields of concentration” in the history department at Princeton University, Ponnuru gave the following two lists.

First, Ponnuru’s Recommended Reading:

John Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest

Robert Nisbet, A History of the Idea of Progress

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

James Ceaser, Reconstructing America

Second, Related Books on Ponnuru’s To-Read List:

James Bowman, Honor: A History

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club

Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence

George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945

Have you read any of these books? Comment on this post with your reviews.

-Colin Foote Burch

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BustedHalo.com interviews Anne Rice about her Catholic faith; video of interview with Anne Rice

Bill McGarvey of BustedHalo.com conducted this interview with Anne Rice.

See more clips from the interview here.

Trull’s poem, first published in LiturgicalCredo, to appear in anthology

Rhett Iseman Trull’s poem “Counting Miracles at the State Asylum” will be included in an upcoming anthology entitled “The Poetry of Recovery,” which will feature several other established poets.

The poem was first published about a year ago in LiturgicalCredo.com, a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. LiturgicalCredo.com will be credited in the anthology.

Read ”Counting Miracles at the State Asylum” at http://www.liturgicalcredo.com/PoetryPage031507.html .