April 12, 2021
The main purpose of this issue of the Newsletter is to announce that the second episode of the podcast is now available on most of the common podcast sites. The exception for the time being is Apple, where, after two days of technical difficulties, Expanding Eyes has finally been submitted but will probably take a day or two to appear. Apologies for the inconvenience to those for whom Apple is their usual location for podcasts.
Current episodes of Expanding Eyes are examining Dante’s Divine Comedy, but intermittently making connections with The Productions of Time, whose subtitle is A Study of the Human Imagination. I attached that subtitle with a smidgeon of mischievous defiance, knowing that it would begin catalyzing, before the book was even opened, a kind of resistance, possibly a dismissal, by a certain kind of critical attitude which is likely to roll its eyes at the phrase at the phrase “human imagination.” Neither of those two words has been in favor in the realm of literary theory for a half century now.
However, the imagination is not a Neverland that we escape to within the covers of a certain kind of book. It is the element in which we live, and move, and have our being, and studying literature is a way of becoming aware of the ways in which our lives, not just socially but on the most personal, even intimate, levels have been constructed by the imagination.
I am prompted to these thoughts by a conversation with my brother yesterday, in which he told me that a man he works with is a COVID denier even though he had a fairly severe case of COVID! The reason The Productions of Time lays such stress on the need to break what Blake called the “mind forg’d manacles” is that economic and political problems are symptoms that cannot effectively be addressed without treating the underlying cause, which is inward and psychological. To some people, this is a “mystification,” deflecting attention from the real villain, which is “late capitalism,” suggesting that the solution is therapy rather than real social change. However, we are presently living in a country in which perhaps a third of the population is gripped by a mass delusion whose manifestations are so bizarre that attempts to explain the politics of Trump followers in terms of logical, realistic motivations like capitalist greed, racism, fascistic worship of power, and the like seem plausible, even inevitable—and yet past a point helplessly inadequate.
All those evils are part of the picture, and certainly need to be combatted. But they have catalyzed something beyond themselves: they have awakened a monster in a scenario out of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, QAnon is very much a narrative out of a Lovecraftian horror story: there is a secret group of Satanists who are also sexual perverts (“unspeakable practices” is how Lovecraft would put it), and this group is on the verge of taking over the world. When the imagination itself becomes pathological, it turns demonic. The pictures of a mob dressed in shaman’s costumes and other motley, stalking and prancing in the stately halls of law and order, taking selfies while perched on desks like gargoyles, have a terrifying impact. Those who deny, repress, or misuse the imagination, who go over to the dark side, will be taken over by it and transformed. Their metamorphosis resembles something out of a nightmare, out of a bad drug trip, out of a psychotic episode—out of the imagery of Dante’s Inferno. The poets have always known about such things.
PS—Comments so far by sympathetic readers prompt me to reassure you that, if you find the Overture on mandala symbolism intimidating, please don’t be put off by it. Feel free to skip it and start with the Introduction. The mandala is a map of the forthcoming territory, and I thought it might be useful to provide the map before the journey, but the Introduction starts with basic questions and is more reader-friendly. The mandala will, I hope, make more sense and be useful later. It’s really not difficult: if you have listened to the first episode of the podcast, you know that Dante builds his poem on the vertical axis:paradise and heaven are upward, hell is downward, higher and lower states of being. It’s as simple as that. This is an ancient image in many mythologies.