When I was, well, inspired to write about the theme of inspiration, I realized that it raises a question. This newsletter’s usual purpose is to domesticate the imagination, so to speak: to show it as the home of human life. But inspiration is the breaking in of some power from beyond. Home is what is familiar, safe, enclosed, but at the price of insulating us, of limiting our horizons, of shutting out what is new or strange as possibly threatening. It sounds glamorous to be inspired, but, given the choice, we may prefer our snug, routine life and choose not to be. Of course, inspiration does not always ask permission.
Poets do seek inspiration, though. Classical poets begged it from a Muse, who in fact possesses the poet. The convention is that it is actually the Muse speaking the poem: the poet is merely the figurative musical instrument through which she blows, much as Apollo possessed and spoke through the priestess at the oracle at Delphi. Likewise, the Old Testament prophets heard the voice of God and delivered his message to his people. Their prophecies begin, “Thus saith the Lord.” In other words, this is not my message—these are the words of the deity himself. The inspired poet, oracle, or prophet is thus a go-between, an emissary of what is beyond, a messenger. In the Biblical tradition, that is what angels are: the word “angel” means messenger. Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic of angels. A remarkable amount of the poem is narrated by messenger angels to Adam. Raphael comes down to the garden of Eden to recount the past: the Creation and the fall of the rebel angels, which takes several books. At the end of the poem, Michael recounts the future, packing the whole rest of the Bible into books 11 and 12. In the Christian tradition, the best-known angelic messenger is Gabriel, who announces to Mary that she will bear the Messiah. The angels of recent popular culture are friendly and comforting, often guardian angels. Despite an amount of kitsch, there is Biblical precedent for such a view. Raphael, whom Milton calls “the affable Archangel,” shows up to lend Tobias a helping hand in the Book of Tobit.
However, not all angels are comforting. Angels with trumpets can be bad news. There are 7 angels blowing 7 trumpets in the Book of Revelation, each of them signifying a judgment. Paul speaks of an angel whose “last trump” shall raise the dead (I Corinthians 15:51-52). In popular tradition, it is Gabriel who blows his horn at the Last Judgment, but that is not actually Biblical. Whichever angels blow them, trumpets are annunciatory: they are a shattering blast that breaks the air as the angel breaks through the ceiling at the end of the first play of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991), the message being that of the play’s title, Millenium Approaches.
Strangely enough, the most famous angels in modern literature are not those of a Christian writer. They appear in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the product of one of the most extraordinary accounts of inspiration in literary history. In 1912, after a writer’s block lasting two years, Rilke was living alone at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. One January morning, he was walking in a violent wind, and from the wind he heard a voice that said, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” This became the first line of the first Elegy, which poured out of him and was finished by the end of that day, 95 lines in the original German. However, that momentum did not continue. By 1915, only four of the eventual ten Elegies were completed, and Rilke’s inspiration dried up again until 1922, when he was staying at the Château de Muzot, again in solitude. There, he was caught up in what he called “a hurricane of the spirit” (Mitchell, 252: note the image of wind). Between February 2 and February 5, he wrote the 26 poems of Part 1 of the companion work of the Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus. By February 9, according to the account of my favorite of his translators, Stephen Mitchell, he wrote a new Elegy to replace the Fifth, an essay, four short poems, and 38 more Sonnets, some of which became Part 2 of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Some poets speak of taking 50, even 100 drafts to finish a poem, but these were hardly revised at all.
Yet it is too simple to regard Rilke’s angels as symbols of poetic inspiration. They represent a higher reality so transcendent and a power so great that they are “absolutely other,” as Rudolf Otto defined the numinous power he called “the holy.” The Christian God came down to earth out of love and even became human himself and suffered what we suffer, including death. But there is no question in the Elegies of closing the distance between the angelic realm and the human. In the famous opening of the First Elegy, Rilke laments:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. (Stephen Mitchell translation)
That is one way of defining the purpose of the Elegies and Sonnets: to wrestle with the question of how we are to create, how we are to live in permanent exile from the powers above. There is a transcendent realm, but its inhabitants are as unaware of us as we are of the ants beneath our feet.
Erich Heller has a chapter on Rilke and Nietzsche in his book The Disinherited Mind. Nietzsche notoriously said that God is dead, but Rilke’s attitude is not atheism. It reminds me rather of the scene in Goethe’s Faust in which Faust, aspiring to be a mighty Magus, conjures up a vision of the Macrocosm, a mystical vision of the transcendent cosmos, in which “heavenly forces rising and descending / Pass golden ewers in exchange unending” (ll. 449-50). Faust’s ego is puffed up by his ability to conjure the vision:
Am I a god? I feel such light in me! Within these tracings pure and whole There lies creative Nature open to my soul. (ll. 439-41)
But he admits it is “Yet but a show, alas!” (l.454). He wants the real thing, so he
conjures up the Erdgeist, the Spirit of the Earth. However, in the presence of the sublime power of the Erdgeist he quails with demoralized fear, saying, “I cannot bear you! Woe!” (l. 485, Walter Arndt translation). The Spirit mocks him: “What horrors base / Now seize you superman!” (ll. 489-90). When Faust, bluffing, tries to claim, “how close I feel to thee!” (l. 511), the Spirit rejects him—“Close to the wraith you comprehend, / Not me!” (ll. 511-12) and vanishes. Faust continues to hunger, though, for a knowledge beyond human limits, and therefore turns to the demonic to acquire it.
Nietzsche argued that human limits need to be surpassed. The man who does so is the Overman, translated Superman in earlier translations. In Also Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s mouthpiece is the sage and prophet Zarathustra, who comes off his mountain of solitude to preach a new gospel, not of faith in a divine power but of human self-transcendence. In his last book, Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche speaks of Zarathustra as having been the product of a seizure of inspiration:
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.— If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system,, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces….One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice….Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity….That is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years in order to find anyone who could say to me, “It is mine as well.” (300-01, Walter Kaufmann translation).
The rhapsodic, quasi-scriptural style of Zarathustra is not an aesthetic choice: this is language that arrives from a deep level of the unconscious. Jung was fascinated by Zarathustra, devoting a seminar to it intermittently over the years 1934-1939, which has been published in two enormous volumes. He had personal reasons for his fascination, having had his own experience of “inspiration,” of being gripped by unconscious forces that personified themselves as archetypal figures like Zarathustra and spoke in the same archaic style. Jung not only wrote down his dialogues with these figures but illustrated them with his considerable artistic talent. They were published some years ago as the Red Book.
Jung was no believer in the gospel of a self-transcending Overman. In fact, Nietzsche for him was a negative role model, a warning. The numinous energy of an archetype like Zarathustra, the Wise Old Man, has a dangerous fascination for the ordinary ego, which is drawn to identify with it. Identification with an unconscious archetype results in what Jung calls “inflation,” of a sort that Jung was determined not to fall into himself. Nietzsche identified himself with Zarathustra, and the result was a megalomania of a sort that is highly contagious. Jung’s preoccupation with Zarathustra was not merely personal. He watched with horror as the growing psychological epidemic of fascism and Nazism, the fascist worship of the “strong man” and the Nazi belief in a master race of supermen, partly inspired by a distorted reading of Nietzsche himself, spread over Germany and much of the world. There is such a thing as demonic inspiration, and we watch the same inflation and mass psychosis spreading again over the world today.
From Nietzsche it is a short step to Thomas Mann’s late novel Dr. Faustus (1947). Mann parallels the demonic possession of Nazi Germany with the career of his Faust figure, the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Leverkühn’s life and tragic end are narrated by his friend and opposite, a well-intentioned humanist named Serenus Zeitblom, who discovers a manuscript recording a dialogue between Adrian and a demonic figure, in which Adrian makes a deal: 24 years of inspiration in exchange for his soul. Mann is not C.S. Lewis: Adrian’s devil is clearly a figure out of the unconscious rather than supernatural. The dialogue is modeled on Ivan Karamazov’s dialogue with the devil in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but Adrian is also modeled on Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, he suffers from chronic ill-health, including terrible migraine attacks, and alternates between long periods of creative dryness and inactivity and periods of inspiration in which he works non-stop at great speed. His final lapse into permanent insanity is attributed, as Nietzsche’s was according to one theory, to syphilis contracted in his youth from a prostitute.
Adrian not only wants inspiration, he wants a certain kind of inspiration, a Nietzschean kind that aspires beyond the limits of the “human, all-too-human.” What Adrian despises—like a good number of artists and theorists of the Modernist period—is “subjectivity” in art, which means emotionality and expressivism. The objective, impersonal art of a composer like Bach had given way to Romanticism, with its emphasis on “the true voice of feeling.” Counterpoint and polyphony, expressions of a higher order, gave way to harmony—to big, lush chords drenched in emotionality, mood music. Music was decadent, wallowing in sentimentality and the egotism of “personal expression.” This decadent tendency went about as far as it could go in Wagner, and the question was whether Western music had exhausted its possibilities. The kind of inspiration granted to Adrian for 24 years was not just a general creativity but a new kind of composition that would spurn Romantic subjectivism in favor of an objective musical order. Mann’s model for the new method of composition was the 12-tone serial composition of Arnold Schoenberg, which did not endear him to Schoenberg, who no doubt did not appreciate having his theories associated with the devil. We don’t have to delve into the technicalities of music theory: the point is that Adrian wants an art that leaves all that is warm and human behind. He has contempt for it, or at least one part of him does. That includes love. It is written into the diabolic contract that Adrian is not allowed to love—every time he tries to reach outside his solitude, something tragic happens to destroy the relationship.
We should not dismiss this as a kind of eccentric extremism. Serial composition sounds like dissonant noise to an untrained ear, but it is not intended to evoke feeling, but rather to embody a complex order. Emotional gratification is not its goal. The other arts have seen parallel developments, the movement away from representation into abstraction in the visual arts being one of them. The emphasis is on the purely formal elements of painting or sculpture. The work is not a vehicle for some kind of human feeling or value: it aspires to be pure form. The polarity is expressed in the title of a famous theoretical work, Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907). Keats called his Grecian urn a “cold pastoral” because, although it portrayed warmly emotional scenes, the scenes were frozen in the stone of the urn. Modern abstraction rejects the scenes as superfluous—the form of the urn is what matters. In poetry, T.S. Eliot called for an impersonal art to replace Romantic confessionalism and effusion.
There is a social class element to the modern revolution in the arts, evident, for example, in something like Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1951), which is radically revisionist of the Orpheus myth. Cocteau’s Orpheus is suffering from a mid-life crisis. He has achieved the middle-class ideal of the happy ending: he is a popular success with his poetry—women come up to him on the street wanting his autograph—and has a loving, “nice” wife who is pregnant and knitting baby socks. But Orpheus is miserable, restless, angry—he keeps saying that they are asleep and need to wake up. His bourgeois life is an illusion. Sure enough, all the desires he has repressed in order to have his secure little domestic circle return in the form of Death, a dark femme fatale figure contrasting with his blond wife, who comes through a mirror from a hidden world from which also emanate radio broadcasts that seem to make no rational sense but which come to obsess Orpheus because he is convinced they are the kind of poetic inspiration he needs. Orpheus follows Death through the mirror into a dreamlike Otherworld, but Death solves the problem exactly in the fashion of so many 19th-century novels in which a dark heroine dies or sacrifices herself so that the hero can marry the approved-of light heroine. By contriving that none of the events ever happened, which eliminates her existence, the split in Orpheus’s psyche is somehow healed. When he returns, he is no longer restless but a good and loving husband. One wonders whether Cocteau really believed in such a happy ending, but at least he saved his hero from the path of a kind of nihilism.
By this point it is becoming evident that inspiration is a more far-reaching notion than it might seem. It implies that there is a hidden reality behind the ordinary one, “inspiration” being either a revelation of that hidden reality or a communication from it, or both. That, however, is the kind of belief that drives conspiracy theories. It is the condition that Thomas Pynchon calls “paranoia,” and it is the theme of all of his wildly satiric yet intellectually complex novels. Many of Pynchon’s characters are questers seeking to uncover the truth behind one or other conspiracy theories, the first thing they need to know being whether any conspiracy or hidden system actually exists. The protagonist of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is named Oedipa, so she is a guesser of riddles. She becomes obsessed with finding the truth about a supposed secret organization called the Tristero. One wonders why, since she is not an intellectual or political type. The answer is given early on, when she likens herself to Rapunzel, imprisoned in the life of a middle-class housewife in the American early 60’s. In other words, she feels exactly like Cocteau’s Orpheus: her conventional, conformist life is unreal and empty, so she is predisposed to seek a hidden truth behind it. At the end of the novel, still searching for the truth not just of her own life but of America, she thinks:
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth…. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia. (150-51)
She craves an epiphany, an illumination showing her what is behind the surface of life, but she never quite gets it. No Pynchon character ever does. Is it just as well? After all, her namesake, Sophocles’ Oedipus, with the help of the seer Tiresias, did find out the truth, that his life was a conspiracy, that he was a puppet of a hostile god, that in the heart of darkness there was horror. Neo, in the Matrix films, also finds out that normal reality is an illusion, and that there is something behind appearances, a something that does not mean well. But that kind of revelation would provide certainty, and certainty is what paranoid thinking never quite achieves. We doubt, we have a feeling of unreality—but then we doubt our doubt. That vacillation, that balancing act, is perhaps the definition of sanity, for those who no longer doubt are psychotic.
Most people don’t walk around doubting reality, do they? Isn’t this kind of paranoia confined to a few neurotics who overthink things? Such common sense “realism” may be easy enough to sustain in periods of relative social stability and security. However, it is likely that paranoia is latent in the human condition, emerging at times when social controls are loosened. The original paranoid conspiracy theorists were the Gnostics, who thought that our world is an illusion created and sustained by an evil pseudo-deity and his Archons. They acquired this knowledge through techniques that led to gnosis, a direct inspiration which had a higher authority than faith or the teachings of the Church. The Church suppressed Gnosticism for exactly that reason, but there has been a great revival of interest in it in our time.
Later, the disintegration of social stability after the death of Elizabeth had a good deal to do with the dark, paranoid texture of Jacobean drama, of which the greatest example is of course Hamlet, and it is no accident that Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 contains a hilarious parody of a Jacobean revenge play. A good number of artists and intellectuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries were interested in occultism and esoteric philosophies, including Balzac, who was supposed to be a realist, and also Yeats, who hung out with the likes of Madame Blavatsky and the Order of the Golden Dawn. When I was editing Northrop Frye’s unpublished notebooks, especially those from the late 1940’s when he first wrote on Yeats, I was puzzled by a phrase that kept recurring in a way that made clear that Frye disapproved of it, the “deification of the void” (see Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye). It seems to have been his private code phrase for the paranoia that imagines some dark, inscrutable power behind the scenes—not only imagines it, but is attracted to it, drawn by its very inhuman otherness, maybe even aspires to its inhuman condition. I get that feeling when I read about those who call themselves transhumanists, who dream of a humanity that surpasses itself by means of technology that will liberate it from the body, from the human condition. Even so benign a spirit as the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke seems pulled in that direction. In his central work, Childhood’s End, humanity, or part of it, evolves into a collective Overmind, a name echoing Nietzsche’s Overman. That mind simply leaves the remnants of ordinary humanity behind, evolving towards a condition that is as sublime as that of Rilke’s angels, and as coldly unknowable. What is the attraction of this deification of the void? Tolkien shows where this transhumanism ends: it ends in Sauron. As a character in Blake’s Prophecies says, trying to become more than human, we have become less.
Of roughly the same generation as Thomas Pynchon, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had neither Pynchon’s intellectual sophistication nor his artistic control, but his science fiction novels gradually achieved an enormous popularity because they so powerfully dramatized the experience of paranoia, the feeling that one is no longer sure what is real. At the end of his life, Dick published a trilogy of novels, the so-called VALIS trilogy, the first two of which were based on Dick’s experience of inspiration in March, 1974, when he was struck by a pink beam of light and an entire esoteric religious system was revealed to him, a system strongly influenced by Dick’s interest in Gnosticism. In addition to fictionalizing his revelations, Dick wrote an enormous manuscript, some 8000 pages, meditating on them, which he called the Exegesis, portions of which have been published. The final novel of the trilogy, however, seems to renounce all such inspiration as pathological. Dick’s best work, like that of H.P. Lovecraft, another visionary paranoid, has been collected by the Library of America, which means it has become canonical despite its artistic limitations, and deservedly so. For both these writers look forward to the condition of our present moment, in which 20% of the American population supposedly believe that Taylor Swift is a deep state operative working with the Pentagon to elect Joe Biden. Millions believe that Democrats are Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and millions more believe that Covid vaccines tamper with our genetics or fill us with magnets or…something. Any drug that the system wants us to take must be part of a plot to control us or experiment with us or…something. All of this sounds as if it is lifted from a Philip K. Dick novel. In fact, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch does deal with a plot to control the population by reality-altering drugs. What “inspires” people with such notions? For it is a matter of inspiration, of ideas that seize people and take them over, not of facts and logic. Well, the Internet. But the Internet is just an amplifier. A good part of the population is basically unconscious, and therefore highly suggestible. Hence the power of irrational notions to “inspire.” It is not a new phenomenon: a famous book about it, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, dates from 1841.
By this point, it may seem as if “inspiration” were simply a euphemism for “psychotic episode.” Is there any such thing as positive inspiration, or is it simply a pathological phenomenon? The paranoid ego sits beleaguered, fearful of hostile forces “out there,” without realizing that the palace coup has already occurred, and consciousness is possessed, already in the grip of those forces. However, this is what Northrop Frye would refer to as a demonic parody of true inspiration. To gain an understanding of the latter, we may begin with Theseus’s famous speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream about the imagination. Theseus is a rational skeptic. His attack on the imagination singles out three types of people who are “inspired,” but who in his opinion are really just delusional: the lunatic, or religious visionary; the lover; and the poet. As for the lunatics, the world’s major religions were founded by inspiration. God spoke to Abraham, then later to Moses, first from the burning bush, then from the burning mountain of Sinai or Horeb on which Moses received the Law. The elements of inspiration are air and fire, which are weightless and intangible, and descend from above. The very word “inspire” refers to air: it is a breathing in of spirit and life. Since the Romantic era, however, spirituality has shifted from transcendent to immanent, from the worship of a supernatural power, a power above nature, to a sense of a spirit within, of which external deities are but projections. The Inner Light movement of left-wing Protestantism in the 17th century was a harbinger of this shift, and the pivotal figure was Milton, which is why he was the central precursor for all Romantic theorizing about the imagination. Milton was a divided figure, and his attempt to justify the ways of God was troubled by his partial clinging to the old external God, who, as Blake and Shelley complained, comes off as the usual authoritarian tyrant in book 3 of Paradise Lost, spouting the usual paranoid theory of predestination, in which an inscrutable God “out there” decrees that some people are saved and others damned, and don’t question. But Milton’s real God was the Inner Light he movingly prays to in the several invocations throughout the poem. At Pentecost, inspiration fell on the apostles in the form of a great wind and tongues of fire, and they were suddenly given the gift of inspired speech, and thus able to inspire others. In the old days, inspiration was sought by an ascent journey. The top of a temple or sacred mountain, where earth touched the heavens, was the location whence divine communication might descend. Milton is a harbinger of the modern descent quest, the quest into what traditionally was an underworld but in modern understanding is the depths of the psyche, which is why the descent myths of Orpheus and Prometheus continue to be revised in our time. It is also why Jung, with his myth of a descent into the unconscious, is a central figure for the modern theory of imagination, despite all the attempts to dismiss him as a quack.
Mind you, to be inspired you may have to be a little bit crazy, in the sense of looking eccentric and neurotic to those shielding themselves behind the walls of conventionality. Blake, who spoke of having visions, was dismissed as mad until Frye made that dismissal no longer possible by publishing Fearful Symmetry, in which he remarks dryly, “Wordsworth called him that, though Wordsworth had a suspicion that if the madman had bitten Scott or Southey he might have improved their undoubtedly sane poetry” (12). Some of the hostility to Blake in his own time came from the attitude of the Age of Reason in the 18th century, a conservative backlash against the fanatical religious wars that consumed most of the 17th century and included a civil war in England. Enlightenment thinkers refined Christianity into a rational form called Deism, and condemned with horror anything that smacked of what was called “enthusiasm” in religion. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake is amused by the uptight attitude, and quite willing to concede that inspired figures come off as a bit crazy if you invite them home to dinner:
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood…
Isaiah answer’d. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; by my senses discover’d the infinite in everything… |
I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung, & lay so long on his left side? He answer’d. the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite. this the North American tribes practise…. (plate 12, Erdman/Bloom edition)
Condemnation of any unconventional behavior or thinking as “crazy” is still going strong in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).
True inspiration works in the opposite direction from paranoia and its demonic seizures. Instead of “The truth is out there,” the imagination puts reality through what Blake called a Vortex and brings it inside, reversing center and circumference. Instead of an alienated ego looking out on an external world, beyond whose boundaries lies a transcendent world of inhuman powers, consciousness becomes a circumference that contains what was previously objective. In Jungian terms, this means the shift from the ego to the larger identity called the Self. That is the condition that Rilke’s angels have achieved. Rilke once spoke of “a whole inner world as if an angel, comprehending all space, were blind and looking into himself.” Blind, not out of disability, but because there is no need to look outward: there is no “there” there, for reality has been internalized. He speaks of a mode of experience in which “there is neither a this-world nor an other-world, but only the great unity, in which the ‘angels,’ those beings who surpass us, are at home” (quoted in Mitchell, 225). The angels are not cold, inhuman powers. They ignore us only because we live in illusion and are thus illusory ourselves.
But we too are capable of imagination’s internalization. In fact, Rilke repeatedly speaks of it as our task in life. In an eloquent letter, he says:
Everywhere transience if plunging into the depths of Being….It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show this at work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our inner nature… (quoted in Mitchell, 222)
Rilke uses the image of the mirror for this internalizing. Although mirrors often symbolize alienation, the doubling of the self, as in the myth of Narcissus, the angels are mirrors in a positive sense. They hold the world inside themselves, as a mirror does. When imaginative inspiration expands consciousness from an ego center towards a wider circumference, the result is ecstasis, in the root sense of being taken beyond oneself but also in the common meaning of ecstatic joy, the sense of limitations disappearing, of self and other dissolving into one in an ecstasy that is orgasmic. Bernini’s famous sculpture of St. Theresa being given the stigmata by an angel captures this moment of ecstatic inspiration. For those who are not poets, love may provide the experience of internalization. In the romantic Courtly Love tradition that emerged from the Middle Ages, the emphasis was often on what is in fact an ironic parody of true romantic love, in which the poet sets up as an idol a Cruel Mistress, an aloof figure as inaccessible as Rilke’s angels, and despairs beautifully about her from afar. Dante attempts to rehabilitate the tradition. Beatrice dies and becomes ultimately inaccessible, yet she thereby becomes Dante’s guide to the upper reaches of bliss in the Paradiso. At the beginning of that final canticle, Dante calls for inspiration, saying that he needs to be “transhumanized” because his poem is about to go beyond the ordinary human limits. The final cantos of the Paradiso are one continuously unfolding inspiration, but it moves in the opposite direction of contemporary transhumanism, as the light of inspiration folds all of the blessed into the single circumference of the Heavenly Rose, and then folds that unified identity into God. Canto 28 is famous for Dante’s own version of the reversal of perspective from center to circumference, the latter being the mind of God.
Rilke admired Hölderlin, who has a poem begging for inspiration very much in Rilke’s spirit. It begins, “A single summer grant me, great powers, and / a single autumn for fully ripened song.” It ends thus:
But once what I am bent on, what is holy, my poetry, is accomplished: Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world! I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not accompany me down there. Once I lived like the gods, and more is not needed. (Walter Kaufmann translation in Existentialism, Religion and Death, 209)
Rilke’s Orpheus is the poet who accomplishes the task of internalization. But he is not a Superman: in the terms of the theory of comedy discussed in previous newsletters, the Superman is an alazon, an inflated power figure whose pretensions are eventually unmasked as illusion. The real hero of comedy is the eiron, who seems less than he really is. When Blake spoke of seeing the world in a grain of sand and knowing eternity in an hour, he was saying that the grain of sand and the common hour are eirons, so to speak. It is the role of art to teach us that all things seem less than they really are when seen rightly. It is the role of love to teach us the same thing about other people. When that happens, the demons of paranoia are exorcized, and run screaming into the Void that has been their destination all along.
References
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, 1947. Also Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Goethe, Faust. Translated by Walter Arndt. Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edition, 1976, 2001.
Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays New American Library, 1976.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1967.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Harper Perennial, 1965.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Vintage, 1982.
One of your best. You managed to get through it without mentioning Trump which is a good sign. A conspiracy theory is usefully defined as an explanation of something that polite society cannot abide. Calling someone a conspiracy theorist is a grave term of abuse and a way of shutting down debate. Esquire magazine posted a list of 23 conspiracies in 1996 that included "The Military-Industrial Complex." The declaration by Eisenhower in his final speech is still struggling to come out of the smokescreen. Whether Oedipa truly cares about the existence of Trystero or is more concerned with the implications of its existence gets to the crux of the matter. I remember as a student reading Etienne Gilson spending hours knocking my head against the distinction between essence and existence to no avail. Those interested in figuring out who is behind the postal service miss the point. Eventually, you get nothing but flyers in the mail.