June 25, 2021
With today’s newsletter, Expanding Eyes, well, expands by locating itself upon Substack, a platform home to newsletters and creative work by authors such as Heather Cox Richardson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (whose newsletter I warmly recommend) and the legendary Patti Smith. Do I deserve to be in such illustrious company? Becoming more visible to a wider audience is perhaps a way of finding out. But I would like to use this transitional moment both to welcome new readers and to thank those who have been reading the newsletter all along, together with those who have been listening to its companion podcast (also called Expanding Eyes), and those who have bought and, bless you, even read my book The Productions of Time: A Study of the Human Imagination. The podcast tracking statistics tell me I have been listened to in Finland and Germany, which fills me with wonder. To my combined audience, my warm gratitude. I hope to continue to be useful to you. This newsletter will continue to appear every Friday. More information about the podcast and book appears on https://michaeldolzani.com
Substack asks for a catchphrase characterizing one’s newsletter for those browsing the platform. Mine is “Imagination as the home of human life.” This may seem vague or sentimental, but it does articulate one of the central assumptions of everything I write. The imagination is not merely subjective, not merely a rabbit-hole retreat, an internal fallout shelter from the nuclear wars of life. That perspective has to be turned inside out, passed through a Vortex, as William Blake would have said. The imagination may begin as a hidden center, but it expands into the circumference of reality. There is nothing outside of the imagination. It is the medium in which we live and move and have our being. It is not a kind of fantasy activity helpless against the hard limits of an external reality. If that were true, the arts would be what Freud called them, a harmless narcosis. It is this kind of no-nonsense argument that is used to dismiss the humanities so that we can get on to the STEM subjects that deal with the supposed “real world” out there.
But the “objective reality” posited by science is a mental construct, not a set of unchanging “hard facts.” Our understanding of reality has been repeatedly revolutionized over the past century by mental leaps. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics are acts of imagination, of re-imagining the “real world” in ways that flagrantly violate both the supposed evidence of the senses and “common sense.” We no longer live in the same universe that my grandparents did. One notices that the more hard-line scientists, the proponents of hard facts and hard truths, tend to be those in evolutionary biology or related fields. I fear the bitter conflict with fundamentalism has produced a naturalist perspective as reductive as the supernaturalist perspective that it opposes. The nuclear theorists and cosmologists are more aware of what a wild, strange universe we inhabit, and perhaps more willing to admit that we don’t have the slightest idea what “reality” fundamentally is, or what its limits are.
What is true of the world of nature is even more true of the world humanity has made for itself. Economic and political systems are also mental constructs imposed upon a society. Unfortunately, humanity has a bad tendency to fall into a kind of passivity about power structures such as the social class system, thinking of them as inevitable facts. But most social injustice is anything but inevitable. Some suffering is part of the human condition, but by far the greatest part of it is the result of economic and political decisions—of mental acts leading to the creation of institutions and structures of power. Well, that’s human nature, some say, and you can’t change the selfishness of human nature. But what is imagined can be re-imagined. An essentially selfish or power-addicted human nature is another mental construct, what Marxists would call ideology. It is not a fact but a choice, and other choices are possible. Unselfishness and empathy are all around us, and to call them unreal or naïve is a lie.
It is in the interest of those who seek to gain or maintain power and privilege to deny the power of imagination to change human life. But we can change our lives, both individually and socially. Such change depends upon an expansion of experience and understanding, and the study of literature and the other arts is a discipline leading towards such an expansion. I am darkly aware that billions of people live on the edge of bare survival, deprived of the luxury of such study. But that only means that those of us who are lucky and privileged have a responsibility to use our education to re-imagine the world, and then to imagine alliances and connections by means of which we may work together to recreate this miserable “reality” into a better place, a true home for human life—all human life, not just that of the privileged.
Those interested in such a line of thinking might have a look at The Productions of Time. The goals of this newsletter are the goals of my teaching. The Roman poet Horace said that poetry should both instruct and delight. On the one hand, I hope the newsletter may make the complex argument of Productions more accessible and down to earth, not to mention dividing it into smaller portions for those whose lives contain no increments of leisure longer than, say, twenty minutes. I promise to do this without turning it into intellectual fast food. On the other hand, I hope to delight by several means. One is through appreciations of various works of literature, mythology, depth psychology, and popular culture as the mood seizes me. At other times, I will reverse Freud, who wrote a book called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I would like to mount short archeological expeditions excavating the depths of ordinary experience, The Imagination of Everyday Life, if you will. And on occasion I may cross the borderline into creative nonfiction, into the realm of the intellectual-yet-personal essay exemplified by two of my favorite writers, Montaigne (who invented the form) and Loren Eiseley. I do requests, so you are invited to send me suggestions as well as feedback.
Once again, thank you one and all. It’s funny how a far-flung group of strangers can also be, sometimes, a Homo gestalt of differing, often conflicting, yet kindred spirits. What hope I have for the future of the human race resides in the previous statement.
Postscript to the June 11, 2021 newsletter.
Readers wanting to explore the Northrop Frye/Tolkien relationship might be interested in "Frye and J.R.R. Tolkien" in Northrop Frye and Others. Vol. 3. Interpenetrating Visions, by Robert D. Denham. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2015. 57-71.
Correction
Sigh, another error. In the previous newsletter, the “100th” anniversary of Dante’s Divine Comedy is of course a typo for “700th.” Extra years in Purgatory on the level that punishes the sin of insufficiently careful proofreading.