December 20, 2024
In the aftermath of the election, people are asking what can be done. In the sense that they mean, my answer is, almost nothing. The war was decisively lost, and the winners have long made clear their plan for revenge and total destruction. There is nothing to stop them. Some people are counting on legal and logistical obstacles to impede the progress of the destruction, or to reduce its magnitude, but I think this is naïve. When some of the Trump administration’s proposals are illegal, there will be a host of right-wing lawyers declaring otherwise, and, when all else fails, everything will be kicked upstairs to a hopelessly corrupt Supreme Court which has already proclaimed the doctrine of Trumpian Infallibility. If all else fails, Trump will simply break the law and dare anyone to stop him, and of course no one will. No political activism will be able to gain traction, first because the Democrats have no inspiring vision that could unite educated professionals, the factions of identity politics, and an oppressed working class into a common cause. Instead, these are all at one another’s throats. Second, because the people have spoken. This was no hostile takeover but the will of half of the American people, the half that have chosen to give in to their dark side. A good many people are talking about detaching from what is going to happen as a kind of mental self-preservation, and I think that resolution is, right now, not fatalism but prudence. We have all been, anyway, far too doom-scrollingly involved for a long time now.
To paraphrase a famous statement on the eve of World War II, the lights are going out all over the world, and they will not be lit again in our lifetime. The wisdom of this moment is that expressed in one moment of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” It sounds like a counsel of despair, yet it is not. Hear me out.
A student of mine discovered and wrote an essay on a painting called The Eve of the Deluge, which is here in our Cleveland Museum of Art. It is by John Linnell, an early 19th century British painter and supporter of William Blake, and is inspired by Milton’s description of the Flood in Paradise Lost. Noah and his family are standing in the foreground, staring at the greatest of all storms gathering in the mid-distance. Dark clouds burgeon around the margins, while in the center is a flaring, lurid light, the weird light that presages violent storms, the light of nightmare. Soon that light will be swallowed within the clouds, like Noah within the great fish, the Leviathan who metaphorically is the sea of chaos and death. Anyone who has watched a huge storm growing and approaching slowly and ominously like an assembling army will shiver at the uncanny mood. My thanks to my student, Bryanna Feagler, for giving me the gift of this painting.
When causes or ideal institutions fail, a curious mythological motif may appear, that of the underground sleeper. This may seem a peculiar notion, a leader who is, like Monty Python’s parrot, not dead but sleeping, yet it is actually so common as to appear in Stith Thompson’s famous Motif-Index of Folk-Literature as the “king asleep in mountain” motif. The idea that a leader is not really dead but lying under a mountain, destined to return in his people’s hour of need, has been attached to any number of legendary kings, most notably King Arthur, who is said to reside in the enchanted island of Avalon. In a curious phrase from an early Latin poem, Milton speaks of Arthur “waging his wars under the earth,” as if Arthur were not asleep but rather living an alternate life in some kind of Otherworld. In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, it is Merlin who is revived in the 20th century to foil the plots of a bevy of nefarious characters. The Celtic version is that of Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Finn McCool, who lies amidst his warrior band, the Fianna. Other candidates include Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa, whose revival is treated with intense irony in John Crowley’s great fantasy Little, Big. In the Old Testament, the “once and future king,” as Malory calls King Arthur, is the promised Messiah, who will come someday to unite Israel into a kingdom of universal peace.
The leader who rides to the rescue in the darkest hour, appears in Christianity as the true Messiah, Christ, but especially the triumphant Christ of the Second Coming, who arrives, together with his warrior band, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to defeat the demonic powers. But there is a complication at this point, a paradox of directions that points towards two different types of mythology. For in his second coming, Christ descends from on high, like the cavalry in the old Westerns riding over the hill. In traditional Christianity, the emphasis is on what, in his Nativity Ode, Milton calls “Our great redemption from above,” and indeed the whole first half of that magnificent Christmas poem is a catalogue of images symbolizing the descent down the axis mundi of a redemptive power, beginning with “meek-eyed Peace” and including the angelic choir. In this kind of traditional Christianity, grace descends, as the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost in the form of the two upper elements, wind and fire. Like the Buddhist Boddhisattva, Christ chose to descend from his eternal eminence out of compassion for those who remain trapped in the illusions of sin.
Yet, just as there are two versions of the Creation and Fall in Genesis, which have been redacted or fused together yet which have very different emphases, the New Testament allows two possible ways of imagining the Christian story. The second way begins, not in heaven with a princely Son of God nobly volunteering for a mission in the provinces, as we see in the third book of Paradise Lost, but with a poor carpenter and his pregnant wife forced to make a journey from small-town Nazareth to big-city Bethlehem, the wife giving birth in a stable because there were no rooms in the inns. The child born that night gave signs, as he grew up, that there was something unusual about him, but only for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. When he returned as an adult to preach in his native Nazareth, the people he had grown up amidst ran him out of town, as people in small towns will do. His followers were not a warrior elite but a ragtag band of poor people and disreputables—prostitutes, tax collectors. He died the agonizing and shameful death of a criminal, and that may have been that: the earliest gospel, Mark, ends with the discovery of an empty tomb, but no Resurrection, leaving the possibility that the body may simply have been stolen.
However, as institutional Christianity emphasized the Second Coming of a triumphant, supernatural Christ from on high, a marginalized but persistent alternative interpretation of the story found its central symbol in the Resurrection. As the Christ of institutional orthodoxy was a supernatural being who con-descended, in a significant pun, who lowered himself to become human, like Odysseus disguising himself as a beggar, the revolutionary Christ is human, all too human, and proves it by dying—but in the moment of death reverses direction and explodes upward, like a plant exploding out of a seed, driven by “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” in Dylan Thomas’s phrase. The human is the dead and shrivelled husk—anyone who has seen a body just after death knows that they are looking at a husk of someone they knew. Frye, in a notebook in which he was struggling with the mystery of these two mythologies and their two directions, spoke vigorously of the second one: “The real God, from Blake on, is not the descendit de coelis God of imposing order & recreation but the Promethean God tearing loose from death & hell with smoke & grime all over his face, the mad treading-the-winepress Messiah of Isaiah” (111). The reference is to Isaiah 63, in which the Lord tramples his enemies like grapes. Americans know the imagery through its paraphrase in Julia Ward Howe’s lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword His truth is marching on
The “Battle Hymn”’s God is marching in support of the Union cause in the Civil War, as he will later march, courtesy of John Steinbeck, in solidarity with the exploited Okies. This God sides with the downtrodden. Nor is he an ideological imposition. The Middle Ages lay stress upon the top-down Chain of Being and the divine right of kings, neither of which is in the Bible. The following is in the Bible: it is the hymn known as the Magnificat that bursts from Mary’s lips when she is told she will bear the Messiah:
My soul doth magnify the Lord. | He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. (Luke 1: 46, 52-53)
This myth is revolutionary, a grass roots uprising that turns away from the yearning for a Big Daddy to come down from on high and rescue us, to lie down, as Yeats said of himself in old age, “where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” But the compassionate acceptance of our mere humanity may somehow awaken us from our ordinary awareness, which is a kind of sleep. And we may find that we are the sleeping giants, that within our frail humanity is a power that may awaken and change both us and the earth.
Christmas is celebrated at the solstice, when light is buried in the tomb of winter darkness. It is supposed to be “the most wonderful time of the year,” when we sing “Joy to the world,” and it is. But that joy is the joy of a reversal, in Aristotle’s terms a comic peripeteia and catharsis that is only found by going through its opposite. What we begin with is what the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti began with when she gave us a new, modern carol, set to music by Gustav Holst, “In the Bleak Mid-Winter.” This is its first stanza:
In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago.
The song immediately loses its nerve and reassures us anxiously that in his Second Coming “Heaven and earth shall flee away / When He comes to reign.” But with the fourth verse, with one quietly significant word, it regains the courage of its human vision: “Angels and archangels / May have gathered here.” May have. But all we actually see, the verse goes on to say, is the child’s mother, and all the gifts the child gets are “A breastful of milk / And a manger of hay.” Elsewhere, Herod is slaughtering children to keep his grip on power. And the singer himself is so poor that the only gift he has to give is his heart.
It is in this spirit that this newsletter is dedicated to celebrating three people whose deaths occurred in the bleak mid-winter. Northrop Frye died on January 23, 1991. And on December 14, 2024, both on the same day, two people died who, without exception, did more than anyone else to sustain both Frye himself and his vision, though in very different ways: Jane Widdicombe, his secretary and guardian angel, and Robert D. Denham, his bibliographer, editor, and greatest interpreter. Both these people dedicated themselves to Frye, heart and soul, and both were among the most wonderful human beings I have ever met. When people ask, what can be done, now, in perhaps the bleakest mid-winter since the lights went out in Europe on the eve of World War II, these people are my answer, though of course that will take some explaining.
Jane Widdicombe came from England as a young woman, where she had been secretary in a coal company in Nottinghamshire. By pure chance, she ended up as secretary to a great visionary genius, from 1968 until his death 22 years later. Jane had no higher education, and never spoke of the content of Frye’s work, although she must have picked up something from typing draft after draft of it in the days of manual typewriters. She did help protect Frye from the consequences of his fame, screening outsiders who wanted contact with him, but it is wrong to think of her as just a watchdog. Jane’s warmth and down-to-earth manner, her ability to talk to anyone, were invaluable in compensating for Frye’s notorious shyness. I remember her telling me about having an enjoyable conversation with Alice Munro at the Governor General Awards ceremony. I can well imagine: two people who came from small-town working class backgrounds in fact had much in common. So for that matter did Frye, son of a failed hardware salesman. People throughout the community of Frye scholars valued Jane for herself and not just as an adjunct to Frye. Her gift for people made good things happen. I owe my career to the combined efforts of Jane and Bob Denham. She recommended me to Frye as reseach assistant when his previous assistant suddenly got the offer of a tenure-track job. But that is only one example. Jane was traveling with the Fryes when Helen Frye went into crisis, was hospitalized, and died in Australia. She got them back home again, and brought Frye to live with her and her husband Deryck for several weeks so he did not have to be alone. Words with Power is dedicated to Jane. It was originally dedicated to Helen after her death, but then Frye remarried, and it would not have been appropriate either to leave the dedication or replace it with a dedication to his second wife. So it was dedicated to Jane, but I do not think that is demeaning. She was his pillar of strength in the last years, especially as his second wife began declining from Alzheimer’s just as Helen had.
What did Jane do? She helped make Frye’s work possible, and what did Frye’s work do? Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, was written while the lights were out. Its theme, as the above notebook quotation makes clear, is the “Promethean God” who lies sleeping within the depths of our flawed humanity. The task of the poet is to awaken that God through the working of the imagination. Blake’s personification of the imagination is Los, a blacksmith, a shaper of forms in the fire of the energies lying below in his den, the “caves of Urthona.” But the poet is only exemplary. Any creative act is a wake-up call, and that includes any acts that work in the direction of furthering the imagination’s vision of a world recreated in the light of what Frye called primary concerns. Frye drew the title of his first book on the Bible from an aphorism in an engraving by Blake called “The Laocoön”: “The Bible is the Great Code of Art.” Blake also says there that “The whole business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common,” and “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.”
It is too easy to say that Blake is just speaking figuratively here. I think these sayings look forward to someone like William Morris, who likewise believed that creativity was an inherent, universal aspect of human identity and not a special talent possessed by an elite, and whose crafts movement worked towards democratizing the arts. But there is, beyond that, the distinction between creative and non-creative work, defining creativity as that which works to make a better world, a world that is more secure, more compassionate, and more just. We speak of the surgeon’s “art,” and rightly so. Likewise, if you hang around working people, you know there is an “art” to much of what they do. When I had an electrician at the house this week, I was struck by how his job entailed an art of interpreting according to signs with remarkable similarities to textual interpretation. He looked at the breaker box and “read” it to me at a glance: this breaker is too large in amperage, this one is substandard, and so on. He devised creative solutions, knowing how to pry loose a 220-volt receptacle that had been improperly anchored without damaging the wall, and kept up a running conversation with me about guitars and the fossils in this glacial area. Another of my mentors (I have many), Ted Chamberlin, has written about how Indigenous hunters read tracks as if they were a kind of writing. There is an art to being a secretary, and, by this light, Jane was a gifted artist who worked in the medium of people. Should she have had to be a support system to a male? No, but if you had asked her, Jane would made clear that this was her choice and her vocation, not some “woman’s duty.”
When I was still a graduate student at the University of Toronto, a man knocked on the door of my study carrel in Robarts Library. This was strange, and I was a bit apprehensive, wondering whether he was not someone with issues, like the man who had once walked into Frye’s office and announced that he had cracked the Great Code. When he said that he was Robert Denham, I was amazed: I had been using the first version, published in 1973, of his bibliography of Frye’s work, for years in order to find and make copies of the hundreds of articles, reviews, and fugitive pieces that were as yet uncollected. What we now can call Frye studies would not exist without Robert Denham. Frye’s books are all more or less in print, but that represents only about half of his prodigious output. Bob made Frye studies possible first of all by making it possible to study Frye. His bibliography of Frye’s own work, in a much expanded edition of 1987, plus his copies of many fugitive pieces, was the foundation on which the Collected Works of Northrop Frye project was able to build. The Collected Works now makes available all of Frye’s own work, but Bob’s bibliography had also contained annotated entries on all secondary sources. Bob’s last major work, in 2021, The Reception of Northrop Frye, an enormous volume of 718 pages, brings that project up to the present moment. It represents a staggering amount of work and sheer mastery of detail. Yet it is more than just a reference work. Its introduction, written when Bob was in his early 80’s, energetically debates the fashionable critics who have been dismissing Frye as obsolete since the advent of the theory wars in the 70’s, the attitude characterized by one critic who said, “Today he’s just another dead white male, along with Blake and Shakespeare.” The Reception of Northrop Frye rebuts this kind of assertion by its sheer size. The number of people interested in Frye’s work, based on how often they cite it and write about it, in fact continues to expand. The idea that no one is interested in Frye’s work anymore is held by critics who are themselves out of touch. Denis Donoghue said in 1992 that he “doesn’t hear Frye’s name mentioned any more,” a decade after The Great Code reached number 2 on the Canadian bestseller list, topped only by Jane Fonda’s Workout Book.
All this bibliographical and editorial work would be legacy enough, but Bob is also, without exception, Frye’s greatest interpreter. When he was young, he focused his dissertation on Anatomy of Criticism, but his interest in his later years was in Frye’s visionary side, about which he wrote the most important treatment so far, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (2004). Bob’s sheer energy always mystified me. He got more done than anyone I know, and I have always felt lazy and undisciplined in comparison. He maintained his productivity into late old age, publishing three volumes of Northrop Frye and Others in 2015, 2017, and 2018, with individual chapters evaluating Frye’s intellectual encounters with writers ranging from Aristotle to Tolkien.
These later works are especially valuable in their use of the whole range of Frye’s work. It is still a regrettable tendency to think of Frye only in terms of Anatomy of Criticism, even though by far the greatest part of his work was written after it. Bob’s later work also makes use of Frye’s notebooks. The reason that fellow American knocked on my carrel door in Toronto all those years ago was to invite me to collaborate with him. Bob had secured from Frye the right to edit any unpublished work after Frye’s death, and originally we thought that meant a volume of selected letters. But after Frye’s death, it was discovered that he had left something like 77 notebooks, over 4000 pages of handwritten notes, and that these notebooks were not drafts or even for the most part notes towards his published work. They disclosed that behind all Frye’s published work was a plan for what he would have called an “encyclopedic” masterwork in 8 volumes that he referred to as the Ogdoad, a work of total definitive vision. He never wrote that work, but most of his published work began as attempts to write one or other volume of it that then turned into something else. The notebooks contain a vast amount of original thinking related to but not present in the published work, and they are a lot more daringly speculative. Bob and I spent 15 years of our lives editing those notebooks into 8 volumes, now subsumed into the Collected Works. They are endlessly fascinating, and I have been influenced by them as much, in some ways, as by the published work. The Productions of Time was more or less shamelessly an attempt to write my version of the Ogdoad (talk about hubris!).
What Jane and Bob shared was a human warmth that drew people to them. Both of them tried to nurture other people’s lives and projects as well as further Frye’s legacy. Their voices, gone from the earth now, will remain in my mind: Jane’s northern English and Bob’s North Carolina accent. They share something else as well. Each had a wonderful spouse and a lifelong marriage. Rachel Denham was a talented artist whose death was devastating to Bob. Deryck Widdicombe was a lifelong companion, but, in later years, a generous caretaker after Jane broke her back in a fall and never fully recovered.
What can we do? We can try to wake up, and try to help the world to wake up. The genuine act is a mental act, and is often invisible to a world that looks only at external appearances, much of which consists of what are only pseudo-acts, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. We are in for a lot of sound and fury, and by recommending detachment I do not mean indifference but a refusal to be drawn into the general hysteria. We may ignore a lot of the twirling that is going to go on, but at the same time become aware of the genuine acts, the acts which really change the world, to which we are often oblivious. One thing we may do is to fall in love. We dismiss romantic love as silly, as an illusion. Plenty of what passes for love is only neurosis, but true romantic love is a creative act, as the poets have always known. Falling in love renews the world, returns it to the original state of Creation before the Fall. This is the power of Eros, which is a form of the imagination. Some theologians condemn Eros as selfish because it is based on desire, but not all desire is selfish. Rather, at its best, Eros is personal: we fall in love with one special, unique person, whose individuality is exactly what we are in love with. The Contrary of Eros is what the Christian tradition calls agape, or spiritual love. It is the equal opposite of Eros, a transpersonal or universal love.
Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons are based on an agape vision of all humanity, nature, and God interconnected and interdependent, forming one universal identity. Agape is selfless and self-sacrificing: its model is the sacrifice of Christ. Eros and agape are modes of perception, modes of being. To live within them is to inhabit a different world from that of the mad dogs in their hydrophobic frenzy.
W.H. Auden’s elegy on the death of Yeats is a tricky poem. It says, “For poetry makes nothing happen,” just as I have been saying there is nothing to be done. It was written in 1939, when the lights were going out, a time so much like this one:
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
But then Auden counsels the poet:
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
The desert and the prison, the curse of human unsuccess: they are still there, and no versified handwaving will make them go away. But within the prison of our days, humanity is still free. This is not magical thinking. It is real magic.
After Anatomy of Criticism, Frye began keeping what we have called the Third Book notebooks, meaning the third major book after Fearful Symmetry and the Anatomy. Where the Anatomy was concerned with the forms of literature in themselves, the Third Book was to be about the relationship between literature and society. But Frye was never able to write the Third Book, although much of the material was quarried for the second half of Words with Power. The reason was that he could not figure out how to deal with the contrast between traditional and revolutionary mythologies. He knew that it was not a matter of either-or. Much as he was influenced by Blake, he was not willing to junk 1800 years of Christianity, along with the art, music, and literature inspired by it, as simply a mistake or ideological corruption.
The revolutionary myth became the model of modern mythology with the Romantics. Whether it was elaborated in Biblical terms, as in Blake, or Classical terms, as in Shelley, the heavens are not the locus of a transcendent power that descends and redeems. In a pattern resembling and perhaps drawn from some Gnostic and Hermetic myths, the Fall was a fall of God as well as man, the two being one, and the Creation was the coming into being of the fallen world. This may seem startling, but its revisionism copes with what is otherwise the intractable problem of Christian theology: the responsibility of an all-good and all-powerful God for evil. Instead, God himself fell, to become the dead or sleeping deity down below. Ascending into his place is a usurper, a tyrant on the throne who proclaims himself the true God, who actually thinks he is the true God, but who is in fact both senile and mad, like King Lear. In Blake, this is Urizen, whose name puns on “reason” and “horizon”; in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, it is Jupiter, who nails the fire-bringing rebel Prometheus to a rock for defying him. These fraudulent deities have as their predecessor a Gnostic figure called Ialdabaoth, who rules our fallen world, and whom most people mistakenly worship as the true God. Every authoritarian tyrant, including the one assuming the presidency, is an avatar of Ialdabaoth. Call it weird if you will, but this myth explains the world we live in a lot better than traditional mythology, which depends on a blind faith that somehow or other God is really all-loving and has a plan by which it will all work out for the best, so we should stop questioning because, as Alexander Pope put it, “Whatever is, is right.” We may put this up against Blake’s poem on Jesus, “The Everlasting Gospel,” in which the speaker says to a conventional Christian about Jesus: “Thine is the friend of All Mankind / Mine speaks in parables to the blind.” Jesus spoke in parables to force people to think actively. The kingdom he spoke of was like a grain of mustard seed. It is in the ground, under our feet, invisible, though it may grow into a great tree—the world tree or axis mundi—and the birds rest in its branches. But the real ground from which the tree grows is the human mind. The seed is the Word, which exfoliates both upward and downward, into branches in one direction and roots in another, becoming the text we read externally as the cosmos and internally as what Jung called the Self, an identity far greater than the ordinary ego.
In the revolutionary myth, when the dead God resurrects or the sleeping God awakes, the usurping tyrant is swept off his throne and the world is liberated. Considered as a total narrative, this myth is both a divine and a human comedy, with a fall into evils and afflictions but in the end a happy ending. But if it is a kind of cosmic drama, who is the audience? God used to be the spectator looking down, but in the revolutionary myth he is part of the cast: indeed, he is the tragic hero who falls. Radical critical theories indeed deny that there is any position of detachment in textual interpretation. Such a pretense of standing outside a text, judging it from a superior position, is only a power play. Likewise, in this perspective any deity who, like Milton’s God the Father in Paradise Lost, claims to watch the drama with all its human and angelic suffering dispassionately while disclaiming all responsibility, is a pious fraud. The reason that Gödel’s theory in mathematics has become a meme, as they say, is that it postulates a parallel uncertainty in mathematics. Attempts such as that of Russell and Whitehead to prove that the entire system of mathematics is logically coherent are doomed to fail, because any “proof” depends on accepting certain assumptions as true that lie outside the system itself. There is no certainty. What we call reality is a labyrinth, and there is, as Sartre said, no exit. We make a home amidst uncertainty, accepting certain things as true and others false, while knowing that these are pragmatic assumptions—they are what “work” for us, as the pragmatism of William James puts it. Millions of people, however, have a desperate need for certainty, and that is why we live in an atmosphere of panic and paranoid conspiracy theories, which are desperate attempts to find a certainty, no matter what, all of them depending in the end on authoritarian assertions that declare certainty by fiat.
In contrast, traditional mythology is based on the revelation of something outside the system, beyond time and space and the relentless process of life and death, life always ending in death. Considered as a person, this transcendent mystery is God; considered in terms of time, it is Eternity; considered in terms of space, it is heaven. Is there an Eternity, a condition that endures? Would it not just be frozen, like Keats’s Grecian urn? Are not all mandalas, symbols of the cosmos under the aspect of Eternity, just Grecian urns? And yet Keats ends by calling the urn “Friend to man.” What can he have meant? We are posing here the question of immortality. A sophisticated philosophical view is that we do not survive as individuals. Rather, we return to some source whence we came, or are blended into some kind of cosmic process. But I think this only satisfies philosophers, for whom abstractions are more meaningful than they are for me. When Lear says that Cordelia will never, never, never, never, never exist again, he means Cordelia the unique and irreplaceable individual. We love individuals, not essences or processes, and it is no real comfort to be told the the person we loved is part of the cosmic All. So what? Man is in love, and loves what vanishes, said Yeats.
And what kind of God sits above and contemplates the unspeakable suffering of this world, and the deaths of all his creatures, and is unmoved? In Star Maker (1937), one of the great mythmaking works of science fiction, Olaf Stapledon—significantly, a philosopher—fashioned a God in the light of Nietzsche’s statement that only as a work of art can the nightmare of life be justified. His Star Maker is a coldly detached, contemplative artist who watches dispassionately the rise and fall not just of the human race but of successive eons of the evolution of myriad forms of alien life, all of which eventually fail and disappear. He does not even have the grace to weep, as the Nazis were said to do at symphonies. Such a God is a horror. He is what Gloucester meant in King Lear when he said that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they use us for their sport. We are their reality TV.
I can cope with the problem in only one way. There is such a thing as a “saving detachment.” Without losing compassion, a doctor or analyst must maintain a professional detachment—in order to help, in order to have perspective. In the case of analysis, if the analyst loses balance and becomes personally involved, what depth psychology calls “transference” happens. The analyst is sucked in, and, because neurotic emotion is contagious, becomes part of the problem—becomes one of the gods who fall. We need someone sometimes who is not too close, who does not suffer with us but reflects our suffering back to us so that we can see ourselves. Moreover, we must learn to detach from ourselves. I do not know much about the mindfulness movement, but it appears to teach a technique of splitting into two selves, one involved and suffering and the other a thoughtful observer. At times we are aware of the latter as a kind of self behind the self. Sometimes we need someone to operate on us, physically or psychologically, who will first say, “This will hurt some.” We also have to learn how to say this to ourselves as we put ourselves through an ordeal of death to an old, outworn or inadequate self, and the birth of a new self. This second self, which Jung called the Self, abides. It endures, an anchor, a rock. Rocks are hard, cold, immoveable—but the rage of the chaotic, murderous sea breaks against them. Yet, because we are up against a boundary concept, the image is paradoxical. In the famous hymn, the Rock of Ages is “cleft for me,” and out of it comes water and blood.
The ruins of time build mansions in Eternity, said Blake. The fashionable modern stance is to perhaps grant some kind of “survival after death,” but nothing personal—that is just wish fulfilment. But immortality has always been personal immortality, and for good reason. Each person is unique, irreplaceable, a new and different contribution to the universe. James Merrill’s wonderful verse epic The Changing Light at Sandover is based on conversations Merrill and his partner David Jackson had over decades with friends of theirs on the other side, including W. H. Auden. After the deaths of Bob and Jane, those who knew and loved them have been making remarks about a reunion on the other side, themselves together with Norrie in a kind of commoner’s Valhalla. How many of us take the idea of personal survival literally? Are we merely speaking with wistful humor, not really believing? There are a few pages in the notebooks where Frye grapples with the death of his wife of over 50 years, and at one point flatly says she is a saint in heaven. This astonished a friend and fellow Frye scholar. After all, Frye was disappointed in Wallace Stevens when he learned that Stevens on his deathbed accepted last rites from a priest. I do not know how we can fully distinguish between our emotional desperation and intuitions from a perspective outside the framework. But to me, one of the most moving themes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is reunion, first with Beatrice, but eventually, led by Beatrice, with the company of the Heavenly Rose. Perhaps there is an 8th stage of grieving, beyond acceptance. If so, it would reverse the process of the first 7, and, in the final words of Words with Power, “restore everything we have never lost.”
References
Denham, Robert D. Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. University of Virginia Press, 2004.
Denham, Robert D. Northrop Frye and Others: Twelve Writers Who Shaped His Thinking. University of Ottawa Press, 2015.
Denham, Robert D. Northrop Frye and Others, Volume II: The Order of Words. University of Ottawa Press, 2017.
Denham, Robert D. Northrop Frye and Others, Volume III: Interpenetrating Visions. University of Ottawa Press, 2018.
Denham, Robert D. The Reception of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2021.
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Volume 13 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 2003.