Scheitern, part 2

Thornhill shows the congruity of Jaspers' conception of foundering communicative reason as a decisive ‘hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, with the Weimar socialist theologian Paul Tillich’s theorization of revelation. For Tillich as for Jaspers, revelation involves ‘the shattering of reason’ (in Thornhill’s words); precisely as such however, revelation ‘is not the negation of reason’, because it is ‘the moment where reason experiences its highest degree of transcendent and unconditioned truthfulness’. Both Jaspers and Tillich conceive of revelation as being ‘not solely a fact of faith, but also a philosophical possibility of human reason’, which presents itself wherever reason founders, or ‘encounters the limits of its formal processes’. Thornhill also explains how Jaspers’ theory of the limit, or of a decisive hermeneutic operating in existential limit-situations, parallels Tillich’s conceptualization of kairos, and how both thinkers thus theorize a ‘decisive moment of responsible transcendence’.

Tillich used the concept of kairos to capture what he called ‘fulfilled time’; the moments in human life ‘in which eternity breaks in’ on the usual conditions of human history. In Thornhill’s words, kairos is thus ‘a moment of historical time in which human life reflects upon its possibilities at the limits of its historicality’; in a way recalling Jaspers’ theory of the limit, Thornhill notes, Tillich could therefore assert kairos as a ‘historical consciousness […] whose ethos is unconditioned responsibility for the present moment in time’. Thornhill stresses that – and whilst Heidegger simply ‘interprets the moment of human decision as the awareness of the immutability of the historical forms in which human life is placed’ – Tillich and Jaspers alike understand ‘true kairological decisiveness’ to be an ‘ethical position’. This is because they both sense that genuine ‘transcendent(al) self-knowledge’ articulates itself in ‘acts of active self-choice, self-disclosure and, in the strict sense, historical responsibility towards others’. Both Tillich and Jaspers assert, Thornhill clarifies, that ‘kairos provides the grounds for an innerworldly ‘metaphysic of responsibility’. Quoting Tillich, Thornhill emphasizes this point:      

   

‘It is only in the kairological specificity of historical responsibility, not in the compliance with “universal law”, that human life explains and enacts the possibilities of its transcendence. The decisive moment of responsible transcendence (kairos for Tillich; Grenze [limit] for Jaspers) does not effect here (as for Barth) an absolute crisis of the human realm. Rather, in quasi-Kantian, or even quasi-Weberian manner, both Tillich and Jaspers see the kairos of responsibility as an ethical intrusion into the existing conditions of human life, and as an unconditioned position of accountability towards these conditions.’

It is important to note, finally, that when (what Thornhill calls) Jaspers’ ‘ethical kairology’ enables him to posit an innerworldly metaphysic of responsibility, he is thereby nonetheless thinking towards a true non-secularity; for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, ‘the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’. Thornhill underlines this point by explicating the shared foundations of Jaspers’ and Karl Barth’s ‘eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’.

Jaspers and Barth, Thornhill sees, ‘share the conviction that revelation cannot be objectified in a particular set of worldly imperatives, and that revelation cannot be cemented in any system of legal or political obligation’. Both assert that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘No order within history itself, […] can arrogate the authority of transcendence to itself. Any attempt of this kind is merely an example of bad secularity, or bad metaphysics.’ Hence both thinkers claim that ‘the disclosure of transcendence occurs at all times at the limit of history, and that it cannot be incorporated into the fixed orders of everyday history’. Moreover both Barth and Jaspers indicate that ‘human life can only interpret itself adequately insofar as it interprets itself and its products under the index of their limits and their possible otherness’. Barth and Jaspers’ shared argument that ‘humanity interprets its own transcendence only as it brings into suspension the forms in which it exists, only as it knows itself external to the forms of its worldliness’, Thornhill stresses, is precisely why Barth (from a christological viewpoint) and Jaspers (from a hermeneutical viewpoint), ‘retain a far stronger attachment to the eschatological basis of Christianity than their opponents amongst liberal and conservative theologians’. Jaspers’ identification of a truthful hermeneutic of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, means that for him – as for Barth – transcendence is, in Thornhill’s words, ‘merely a decisive possibility at the limit of the temporal’; for both thinkers ‘true interpretation must take place at the limit of objective self-awareness’, and ‘all attempts interpretively to integrate transcendence into a historical synthesis inevitably fall into the trap of false objectification’. Jaspers and Barth’s shared conviction that, as Thornhill writes, ‘the interpretation of revelation is never final’ is therefore what brings both Jaspers and Barth to suggest ‘an either explicitly or implicitly eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’: both thinkers hold ‘the essentially eschatological belief that human history in its present condition cannot provide for final truthfulness, and that the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’.      

Thornhill thus pays considerable attention to the way in which Jaspers, like Barth, argues that ‘the interpretation of transcendence cannot be historically fixed as a reflex within any continuum of culture, politics or doctrine’. Yet, crucially, Thornhill also suggests that the type of non-secularity established within Barth’s thinking, is distinct from the true non-secularity established within Jaspers’. The truth of the non-secularity thought by Jaspers, Thornhill’s argument hints, hinges on his proposal of a self-hermeneutic of individual failure. Jaspers, Thornhill sees, charges Barth and the dialectical theologians with interpreting revelation as ‘the unique source of authority against human history’; precisely in their opposition to secular legitimacy, they ‘succeed only in recreating revelation at the limit of human history as a new source of objective authority’. Thornhill writes that when Barth in this way insisted on the objective authority of revelation, and so ultimately aligned himself with the Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch and Barth’s other reactionary adversaries, he became ‘complicit in the process which secularizes and materializes religious contents’.

Crucially, Thornhill stresses that, viewed from Jaspers’ perspective, Barth’s thinking of radical anti-secularity necessarily creates an ‘objectivizing system of belief’, precisely because it fails to recognize ‘the human relativity of all truly transcendental interpretation’. Thornhill maintains that when the Lutherans, viewed from Jaspers’ position, ‘crudely press revelation into service for the authority of the nation state’, and Barth poses revelation at the limit of history as a new source of objective authority, this is because – so Jaspers’ thinking intimates – they all obscure ‘the absolute relativity of revelation’. ‘In this respect, both eliminate the genuine transcendence of revelation, which is its uncertainty, and both falsely concretize transcendence as authority – as law.’ Thornhill’s work suggests that, in opposition to this juridical tendency of Weimar theology, Jaspers’ identification of a truthful interpretation of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, recreates the relativity of truly transcendental hermeneutics, and so establishes a true non-secularity – one which ‘relies on an interpretive component of humanity, secularity and liberality ’.  

Scheitern

In the last of this series of posts drawing heavily on Chris Thornhill's work on Karl Jaspers, I want to present a summary of Thornhill’s account of a central concept within Jaspers’ thought: that of foundering or failing (Scheitern). Probably the most fundamental context within which Thornhill addresses Jaspers’ concept of failure, is that of what Thornhill calls Jaspers’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘respective fusions of negative-anthropological and negative-metaphysical positions’. Influenced by Jaspers’ student Jeanne Hersch’s work on metaphysics and ontology in Jaspers, and discarding both Leonard Ehrlich’s description of his thinking as ‘negative theology’  and Sebastian Samay’s categorization of his thought as ‘negative ontology’ – though he does not contest Samay’s characterization – Thornhill suggests that we view Jaspers’ work as collapsing the universal metaphysics of Kantianism into a ‘negative-anthropological metaphysic’. Thornhill sees Jaspers as making ‘a clear Kierkegaardian addition to his basic Kantian position’. Kierkegaard’s theology, Thornhill notes, correlated a ‘negative anthropology’ – ‘in which the conditions for authentic human-being recede ceaselessly into the indeterminate, suffering interior of the historical person’ – with a ‘negative metaphysic’ which views the transcendent essence of humanity as a quality which can only be addressed as a ‘manifest absence’. Thornhill identifies a similar correlation within Jaspers’ thinking, resulting in a comparable negative-anthropological metaphysic.



              Jeanne Hersch                  

Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant asserted, Thornhill writes, that ‘the possibility of transcendence enters human interactions as a telos, which draws life progressively out of its material orientations’. However unlike Kant, Thornhill argues, Jaspers also asserts that humanity ‘only has truthful access to the possibility of its own transcendence insofar as it reflects upon the impossibility of this possibility: in its failure (Scheitern)’. Partly determinant as it is of Jaspers’ communicative, negative hermeneutic liberated from objectivist preconditions, his negative-anthropological metaphysic maintains, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘human life only constitutes itself through processes of transcendent (self-)interpretation which cannot be accomplished in the modes of action and existence which are open to it’. Referring to Hersch’s explication, Thornhill adds that for Jaspers, ‘The metaphysical moment of transcendence […] exists only in a relation of unattainability to human reflection, and as such it describes both the unity and the absolute end of all determinations of human-being’. Thornhill also shows how Jaspers’ negative-anthropological metaphysic moves on from Kant’s philosophy of religion, and his ‘theory of religious unknowingness’. For Jaspers takes the absence of positive human knowledge about God as (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the fundamental experiential basis of human existence itself’:

‘In his response to Kant’s scepticism, Jaspers thus replaces the formal uncertainty of God, which is at the core of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, with an experiential uncertainty, which interprets transcendence as an elusive possibility of human life, and which ceaselessly refers humanity to a pained experience of its own antinomies and limits. The lack of a positive knowledge of God is for Jaspers, therefore, not an index of the formal limits of reason, but an experience of the limits of existence.’      

For Jaspers, metaphysical transcendence – Thornhill summarizes – ‘is thus never present: it is self-interpretation against the limit of this absence’. Jaspers’ subjection of ‘the tradition of occidental metaphysics to a hermeneutical (anthropological) reconstruction’ in this way, enlists the aid of his theory of ciphers of transcendence. Thornhill’s account of Jaspers’ thinking here quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy :

‘Human speculation, he asserts, interprets its innermost (metaphysical) essence in what he calls the ciphers of transcendence. Ciphers are “being which brings transcendence to the present”, and which permits human-being to interpret fleetingly its primary transcendent origin. “Wherever I read the cipher”, Jaspers explains, “I am responsible, because it is only through this that I read my self-being […] I attempt to tear myself out of the constant falling; I take myself in hand; I experience the decision, which emanates from me”.’

Thornhill sees Jaspers’ philosophy to be ‘a fractured, antinomical ontology’, ‘whose triadic conception of human life’ – in terms of levels such as orientation, illumination and metaphysics – is ‘rendered internally fluid by the fluidity of being itself, and of the absolute in being’. ‘“With the insight into the fragmentary nature of being”, he explains, “the demand for an ontology ceases and transforms itself into an impulse to obtain being, which I can never acquire as knowledge, through self-being”.’ In other words, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Only insofar as we experience and recognize the inevitable crisis (Scheitern) of our attempts to interpret our transcendent origin do we actually begin to approach this origin.’ Jaspers thus ‘de-objectifies the truth-claims of metaphysics’, so as to replace them with the self-interpretations undertaken by shattered humans. Thornhill continues:

‘Orientation, illumination and metaphysics are thus ways in which being is present to human consciousness. But none of these, ontologically, is being. Being, rather, is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’

Thornhill distinguishes between such implosions in ‘objective logic’ – limit-situations such as ‘death, guilt, suffering and anxiety’ – and implosions in ‘subjective logic’. Crucially, in subjective logic, these implosions are ‘decisions’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. In other words, as Thornhill summarizes, ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ For Jaspers the ‘truthful hermeneutic of transcendence’, in Thornhill’s words, is ‘also a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis’. Thornhill quotes once more from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy : ‘“Failing [Scheitern]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’ Jaspers’ argument is grounded in his sense that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Transcendence discloses itself as a response to the existential questions which I ask about myself, but for which – ultimately – no answer can be found in the world.’

‘My knowledge of my own absolute crisis releases me from any conviction that I can obtain cognitive or objective certainty about the conditions of my life. For this reason, however, it also prepares me for the evanescent interpretation of my transcendence in ciphers. The meaningful interpretation of the cipher, therefore, is possible only for being, which is “shattered as existence” and which “finds its ground in the being of transcendence”.’

We have already explored – in earlier posts – Jaspers’ understanding of foundering in terms of the imperfect communication which can begin to explain transcendence to humanity. Whilst Kierkegaard saw ‘the temporal presence of God’s absence only in closed interiority’, Thornhill notes, Jaspers sees ‘the presence of God’s absence as disclosed in the absolute, and yet absolutely believing, relativity of interpersonal communication’. You could say that speech, for Jaspers, is at once necessarily decisive and necessarily dysfluent; just as, whilst for him philosophical belief (as Thornhill writes) ‘has its only hold in the ciphers of transcendence’, the interpretation of these ciphers is ‘only existentially binding because they do not stabilize transcendence as certainty, but merely refer humanity to its own possibilities’. Necessarily dysfluent communication exemplarily enacts and enables recognition of our existential and cognitive uncertainty: the ‘imperfectibility of all communication’, Jaspers asserts in Reason and Existenz, reflects the ultimate inadequacy of ‘every shape of truth in the world’. But whilst human communication for Jaspers is a reflection of the impossibility of truth, enacting our existential uncertainty, the committed quality of existential communication also implies the possible resolution of that uncertainty: Reason and Existenz states how, ‘The imperfection of communication and the weight of its failing become the openness of a profundity, which nothing can fulfil but transcendence’. Necessarily failing, existential communication thus nonetheless forms what Thornhill calls ‘an ongoing attempt to articulate truthfulness: it is the only practically possible expression of transcendence’.  

To be continued.

Suzanne Kirkbright's Life of Karl Jaspers

In his ‘World History of Philosophy’, Karl Jaspers underlined the potential of genuine thinking to create a dialogue with the transcendental capacities of the singular human who thinks. ‘If we hear true philosophy, we enter into communication with human Existenz of the philosophical personality. Philosophy is, in essence, always personal in form. The thoughts that are released and freely floating only gain blood and energy if an Existenz accepts them and, in that way, they again become a motive of an entire philosophy’. If communicated  to another striving human, Jaspers intimates, true philosophy can make a philosopher of the one who receives. This sort of fluidly reciprocal or intersubjective experience of philosophy of course itself demands a particularly sensitive biographical account of the genuine philosopher, Karl Jaspers, who theorized it. In this pair of posts I want to point to ways in which I think Kirkbright succeeds in the biographical task of relaying the intersubjectivity of philosophical activity, in her Karl Jaspers, A Biography: Navigations in Truth.

Kirkbright does not set out to offer an intensive exposition of Jaspers’ philosophical ideas, and I would recommend Chris Thornhill’s Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics in this connection. She in fact explicitly draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in any biographically based interpretation of a philosopher’s work, arguing in her introduction that ‘there is no single or prescribed approach to the stated aim of illuminating aspects of Jaspers’ published works of philosophy within the context of his life’. Yet she does sometimes consider the aesthetic quality of Jaspers’ presentation of his concepts, and this treatment of the shifting aesthetics of his philosophical writing can itself help us to understand the shifts in his thinking. For example, Kirkbright notes Ernst Mayer’s interesting assessment, in 1953, of the aesthetic terms of a general progress on Jaspers’ part from existential to religious concerns. Aesthetically, Jaspers moved from a practice of direct illumination, or a sort of visionary definition of everyday life, to the deployment of cipher-language, of symbols of transcendence. ‘In the later period of his work, his task had been one of creating a language of ciphers through intuitivism, whereas his earlier illumination of Existenz illustrated what Mayer called a way to explore reality in ever closer approximation of truth.’ Kirkbright directs us to Jaspers’ use of metaphors, which can ‘allude to possibilities of a cipher language’: these are keywords, such as Erhellung (Schelling’s ‘illumination’) and Lichtpunkte (Hegel’s ‘light points’), which become for Jaspers signs (signa) of Existenz, ‘replete with further meaning leading on from the direction of his thought trails’.

Jaspers’ poetic language of light – of light in space – introduces an architectural quality to his bringing of the reader to Existenz (Hannah Arendt said that his ‘deepest aim is to “create space” in which the humanitas of man can appear pure and luminous’).  The airy, ‘pictorial or spatial’ dimension of Jaspers’ thinking also reminds us –  Kirkbright insightfully notes – of Jaspers’ chronic, intermittently life-threatening lung illness, and so of the necessary vulnerability and potential evanescence of his project: ‘concepts become intangible, perhaps as fragile as the high-pitched tone of his voice that was distorted in later years by the worsening of the illness’.  

The experience of impermanence, of failure, of foundering is integral to Jaspers’ philosophical activity. This was a reclamation and assertion of life’s imperfection in the face of the judgementalism of the healthy and strong. Kirkbright records how, when Jaspers was about to leave school, his headmaster told him ‘Nothing can become of you anyway, because your illness is an organic fact of life!’ Jaspers’ incurable bronchiectasis was finally diagnosed when he was eighteen, at which point he was not expected to live much longer than his early thirties. At about the age of seventeen he had already turned to philosophical thinking in order to revivify himself against the depressing influence of educators such as his headmaster. ‘With the view across the pastureland and the windmill – already feeling my life’s possibilities threatened and fallen victim to a melancholy with the cares of the world – I read, to gain strength, Spinoza.’ Philosophy was aligned with claiming the confidence to fight on as well as with refuge and rest. Of course, as Kirkbright writes, the ‘quiet life of contemplation[…] was so advantageous to Jaspers’ health’. But she is also correct to point out that ‘an early, unconscious rebellion against the circumstances of his illness appeared to have heightened his awareness of a need to find the meaning of life’.

By drawing attention to Jaspers’ awareness of the insecurity of rational activity, Kirkbright illuminates key aspects of his intellectual relationships with other major twentieth-century thinkers. Our understanding of his focus on Max Weber as ‘the key representative of modern life in all its fragility’, is deepened by Kirkbright’s citation of a comment on his mentor’s health from a 1910 letter of Jaspers’ to his parents: ‘It is as though a mighty will is constantly wrestling to control a nervous system that is going to become agitated.’ Jaspers’ important argument with Georg Lukács’ Marxism – which is expounded brilliantly in Thornhill’s study – is contextualized by Kirkbright’s account of their encounter in 1946 at the International Rencontres in Geneva. Jaspers and Lukács had enjoyed cordial relations before the First World War, and Jaspers acted as psychiatrist to Lukács’ first wife. Yet at the 1946 conference Lukács’ socialist-realist position led him to label Jaspers a ‘broken man’ representing – in the words of Stephen Spender’s report – ‘the point of view of a bankrupt individualism’. Lukács, as Kirkbright notes, would go on in The Destruction of Reason to attack Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s adoption of Kierkegaard’s conception of Existenz, which he impugned as ‘Romantic and individualistic cat’s wail’. In Geneva Lukács seems to be linking Jaspers’ personal weakness, his supposedly broken thinking, to the failures of capitalist economics. Yet as Thornhill’s study suggests, Jaspers’ thinking of failure in fact itself intimates, through its imbrication with his interrogation of the limits of objective orders of life, a very potent critique of capitalist economism.

Kirkbright quotes a 1907 letter to Jaspers from his brother Enno, in which the latter – in Kirkbright’s words – ‘struck a nerve when he called Jaspers’ existence an artificial shell, an alibi to conceal from others the true nature of his experiences’. The charge was that Jaspers’ awareness of his disability inhibited his acceptance of his existential life. ‘Your body prevents you from doing a lot of things, but to conclude a lack of personal experiences from that does not seem justified to me.’ Kirkbright, however, usefully shows how Jaspers’ trip to Italy in 1902 had already demonstrated his capacity to claim ‘independence from his illness and his family in a way that motivated him to embark on a different way of living’. The journey was a ‘watershed’ for Jaspers, in that it launched his route towards existentialism through an increasing acceptance of sensual experience. ‘Italy was, for me, the start of winning the world – while before Italy, I lived almost wholly in an abstract sense without the world.’ Though his time in Rome remained solitary and overshadowed by his illness, his letters home – as Kirkbright notes – testify to a shift from youthful Schopenhauerian gloom (an immersion in Sehnsucht [longing] and Weltschmerz [pain of the world]), to ‘a new understanding of the effect of beauty on an individual’s senses’. Jaspers found Italian girls more attractive than girls back home in Oldenburg ‘by ten to one’.

Throughout this biography Kirkbright emphasizes how his wife, Gertrud (née Mayer), represented ‘the life and soul of Jaspers’ intellectual life’. In Kirkbright’s presentation Gertrud brought Jaspers to existentialism, in the sense that insofar as their friendship originally ‘released Jaspers from his solitary lifestyle’, Gertrud ‘made visible the beauty of life’s possibilities’. Jaspers understood this beauty of existence in terms of harmony. ‘From the very first hour there was between us an inconceivable harmony, something never expected to be possible.’ The philosophical activity which was stimulated by awareness of this harmony would of course go on to draw in disharmony: for example when it foregrounds speech which is necessarily insufficient, uncertain, foundering. In the same way, as Kirkbright writes, the Jaspers’ marriage ‘evolved into a paradigm of communication as a “loving contest” that was a focal point of his perception of his philosophical achievement’.

Kirkbright quotes from Jaspers’ eulogy to his wife, which was delivered at her funeral in 1974. ‘We have lived this life philosophizing. If there is any substance in what I have presented to the world as philosophy, then it is her I have to thank for it.’ Gertrud, Kirkbright records, had attended the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert’s lectures in Freiburg, where she made the acquaintance of Rickert’s pupil Emil Lask. ‘Her acquaintance with Lask, who followed Rickert as an unpaid lecturer to Heidelberg, was instrumental in Jaspers’ introduction to Heidelberg’s Philosophical Seminar.’ Whilst training in the Clinic of Psychiatry at Heidelberg, Jaspers was taught Kant by Lask – and rebelled. Just as Gertrud Mayer would decide to discontinue reading philosophy altogether after presenting a résumé at one of Wilhelm Windelband’s seminars, Jaspers – as Thornhill notes – ‘sets himself emphatically against the prevailing orthodoxies in the neo-Kantianism of early twentieth-century Germany. In his attempt to deploy Kant as the basis for an existential metaphysic of possible lived unity, he seeks to wrest Kant from his epistemological assimilation into the philosophy of value (Wertphilosophie), which was pioneered by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert.’

Another way in which Gertrud helped Jaspers to orientate himself intellectually, when he was still an unpaid voluntary assistant at the psychiatric clinic, uncertain whether to go on to work in the field of psychology or philosophy, was by encouraging him to socialize with the Webers. Kirkbright notes how, whenever Jaspers sought an appointment with Max Weber, he was encouraged by Gertrud’s friendship with Weber’s wife Marianne; and when he did find the courage to call upon Weber, he usually went along with Gertrud. Jaspers wrote to his parents, ‘I doubt whether I belong in that circle. The people are too clever.’ But, Kirkbright also records, the Jaspers did after all manage to mix with figures such as Georg Simmel at Weber’s Sunday afternoon gatherings, and from the end of 1914 onwards Jaspers regularly attended ‘cultural philosophical’ evenings with the likes of Ernst Bloch, Max Scheler and Lukács. ‘It may be assumed that Jaspers drew encouragement from his participation in the discussions, from which he appeared to have derived confirmation of the philosophical direction of his future work.’ Kirkbright writes of ‘the indispensability of Jaspers’ bond of trust with Weber’; indeed Weber ‘convinced Windelband to open the doors of Heidelberg’s philosophy faculty to Jaspers’.       

As Kirkbright notes, Martin Heidegger did not visit the Jaspers again after June 1933, due to Gertrud’s ‘deep mistrust’ of Heidegger’s activities as a Nazi party member. Gertrud was Jewish, and was also someone with whom Jaspers found it easier to be honest and open than in his friendship with Heidegger. Kirkbright quotes from Jaspers’ ‘Philosophical Autobiography’: ‘I had failed with regard to Heidegger, who himself had been seized by an intoxication. I had not told him that he had chosen the wrong road.’ Kirkbright records how already during the late 1920s, at the time of Jaspers and Heidegger’s discussions on Schelling, Jaspers had found that he ‘preferred to talk to Gertrud, whom he knew he could trust to contest his thinking, and to judge their conversations in the light of what they both believed in as the necessary questioning of the other’s position in a process of communication’. The importance for Jaspers of the potential for ‘open communication among free individuals’, is again underscored by Kirkbright when she documents how, after the Second World War, ‘Arendt understood that Jaspers’ belief in the power of communication was one reason why she had failed to broker a reunion between Heidegger and Jaspers, and that Heidegger’s complicity in the Nazis’ control of the university was not something Jaspers could forgive.’

Second part to be posted next week.

Reading with Vision, part 2

Here's the second part of my long essay on Vernon Watkins from 2007.

Downcast Lids

Henry Leroy Finch’s beautiful and clear-sighted study, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, underlines the convergence of Weil’s thought with the visionary hermeneutics which I am attempting to develop from Watkins’s poetry here. In Waiting on God Weil suggested that our attention – visionary understanding – could be radically passive, radically female: ‘our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it’. Likewise, Weil’s own ‘messages’, Finch writes, ‘are messages of grace, received by those who wait and not by those who grasp’. Finch notes how post-Marxist Weil – like Watkins in ‘Rebirth’ – valued sacred human understanding over progressivist will and effort:

Simone Weil is the opposite of a secularist, because for her a true human culture comes from beyond the merely human. Science, art, poetry, music, philosophy, to the extent that they come unannounced to human attention waiting in patience, she calls forms of the implicit love of God; they are sacred deliverances. This is not romanticism or sentiment because it is not egotism. True making, like true doing, is not ours.

The understanding of knowledges, such as Watkins’s lyric visionary knowledges, as ‘sacred deliverances’, opens up – Finch sees – an emphasis on the common ‘vulnerability and dependence of each of us on others, which is our initial situation in the world’. Finch takes from Weil a Blakean critique of ‘masculine authority’, or of ‘the discipline of the powerful God of authority’; the sort of hierarchical, utilitarian, jobsworth discipline which, often in pseudo-feminist garb, controls today’s academic study of literature. ‘Simone Weil’s God of grace is a God divorced from power and necessity, which are after all nothing to admire and worship.’ The supernatural influence of the divine in human affairs, for Weil, is ‘decisive but subtle’ and ‘entirely beyond human control’. ‘The human principle, like Plato’s Good, has an inexorability about it too, but it is a providential one beyond natural causality. Higher dimensions show themselves only at scarcely recognizable points. This is how love makes itself felt.’

Ah dumb Piétà, fixed beneath closed eyelids,

Strong vision pledged to seek the unchanging light

Of angels, true above a changing world! [166]

Watkins’s ‘The Age-Changers’ relates a scarcely recognizable, fragmentary descent of grace, for instance through cultural artefacts, to the necessary exhaustion of youthful enquiry’s bid for visionary perception. ‘Light through downcast lids/ Is rising, where one drop of light decides.’ Watkins senses that an awareness of the sacred, light, can be launched by the adoration undertaken by the more elderly, more blind. ‘Mute wonder through the sweet, blind eyes looks out,/ Starts the sun’s memories life forgot.’ [18] In ‘The Song of the Good Samaritan’, Watkins lays out ‘a choice/ Between those visions acclaimed by pride overthrown,/ And the downcast, intimate eyes, the source of the voice.’ [148] The idea is that only baffled eyes, at sea in love, can see through lower dimensions: ‘But that disguise,/ Look up now, softly: break it with your eyes.’ [10] Another early poem notes, ‘Youth is itself infirm/ Until those sightless eyes/ Rarify youth and breath’. [21] Then the memories of illumination can begin to emerge, themselves reminiscent of the ‘transfiguring after-clarity’ of David Jones’s The Anathemata. ‘Doom’s serial writing sprang upon the wall/ Blind with a rush of light.’ [6]

Spiritual Involution

The flash we saw in the distance now becomes for us a shell,

Spun from the loom of waters to its own

Stillness, and inward music: mark it, where it fell. [350]

The springing out of ‘higher dimensions’ is twinned, in Watkins as in Blake, with a hermeneutic pursuit of grace inwards. In Jerusalem Blake recommended ‘O search & see: turn your eyes inward: open O thou World/ Of Love & Harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely Gates.’ Where Blake projected the gates on to the city streets – ‘I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear/ In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets’ – Watkins identified them in coastal shells. Internal and external cities, still. ‘The Interval’:

It is that dark source which makes all things new

Scoops out, with changing lights, those fragile shells

Whose voice would perish, did I not pursue

Their inmost labyrinth still, to give the god his due. [277]

The continuation of the sacred voice is aided by the poet’s and the reader’s linguistic process of spiritual involution, a process which, Watkins emphasizes in ‘Swedenborg’s Skull’, leaves intact the ‘vessel of uninterrupted calm’ – just as the visionary’s grave-robbers ‘could not shake or destroy that interior psalm/ Intended for God alone, for his sole Creator.’ Hermeneutic involution becomes a developing, a complexification of the object’s calm.

So I see it today, the inscrutable mask of conception

Arrested in death. Hard, slender and grey, it transcends

The enquiring senses, even as a shell toiling inward,

Caught up from the waters of change by a traveller who bends

His piercing scrutiny, yields but a surface deception,

Still guarding the peace it defends. [247] 

When ‘the spiral dark’ is to be ‘kept, unseen’, ‘one is mute,/ Fearing far more the heresies of speech/ Than watchful waiting.’ [249, 252]

I have discerned a secret

Hid from the arc of day,

Locked in the heart of silence,

Stronger than death, and pure. [354]

The practice of hermeneutic involution distances the muted from politico-academic rhetoric.

Stop, then, and quail beneath their tyrannous eloquence,

All you, save one whose tongue is tense,

Transfigured by God with a message that has no words. [127]

Deeper than Language

‘The London writer is incapable of expressing his meaning, or escaping from it.’ Watkins’s poetic world too is dotted with those transfigured by their supernatural messages in no words. In ‘The Sinner’, ‘she had found Him, sleepless, redeeming time there,/ O deeper than language, in a circle where all was hushed’ [141]. Erinna similarly, in ‘Erinna and the Waters’, ‘sighed to recapture the music no sea could sing’ [249]. In Watkins the visionary’s expression relates to grace and fluidity, circularity: reciprocity. It relates to the senses, just as in Sinclair’s ‘A Few Hundred Yards from the Dwelling of Mr Prynne’, ‘I dip my left hand/ into Cambridge river’:

Now, if I speak, my words can belong to no book

For my fingers mingle the language of water and dove,

Ending, here at the source, the journey they took. [148]

 

Watkins’s sensual visionary words, which are no words because they ‘can belong to no book’, yet which follow a pilgrim’s ‘journey’ towards language, recall the new philosophy of language produced on the brink of modernism in pre-1914 central Europe. Bourgeois positivist rationalism was undercut then and there by a potent combination of what Paul Mendes-Flohr – in his editor’s introduction to the English translation of Martin Buber’s 1909 anthology of mystical writing, Ecstatic Confessions – calls ‘epistemological skepticism’ and ‘spiritual quest’. The mysticism of Expressionist poetry such as Trakl’s was matched by the mysticism of Fritz Mauthner’s pioneering critique of language. (Like so much of pre-Holocaust central European culture, Mauthner is perhaps now known, if at all, only through the canonical protocols of Benjamin reception: he is mentioned twice in Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Though Mauthner could be known to Wittgensteinians too). Happily, Mendes-Flohr cites some lines from Gustav Landauer’s précis, in his 1903 Skepsis und Mystik, of Mauthner’s thinking – Landauer had edited Mauthner’s three-volume Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [Contribution to a Critique of Language (1901-02)]. ‘Language, the intellect, cannot serve to bring the world closer to us, to transform the world in us. As a speechless part of nature, however, man transforms himself into everything, because he is contiguous with everything [“my fingers mingle the language of water and dove”]. Here begins mysticism.’

We can see how such ideas of the insufficiency of our language (which – with Watkins’s poetics – argue both that we are insufficient for language, and that language is insufficient for us), and of language’s supersession by vision inflect Buber’s introduction to Ecstatic Confessions, which holds that language ‘will never enter the realm of ecstasy, which is the realm of unity’.

The voice returned to itself round the sevenfold world

And perched on mystery. [233]

The effort has destroyed a part of the false sense of fullness within us. The divine emptiness, fuller than fullness, has come to inhabit us. [Weil]

In ‘The Death Bell’, Watkins found in Laocoön a personification of the supernatural expressive capacity of those of us who have been exhausted into uncomplaining silence by the insufficiency of our language. This capacity is one to project visionary ecstasy, ‘sublime unrest’ – as a human potentiality – if not to reach its realm through language.

He who, his strength being spent,

Still remained reticent,

Darts his sublime unrest

Into the marvelling breast

Because he did not speak.

Even thus far went the Greek. [212]

Watkins’s lyrics ask us to respect their own ‘reticent forces of rhyme’ [335].

Verse is a part of silence. I have known

Always that declamation is impure. [161]

Light Must Learn a Dying Trade

‘Fisherman’ finds in nature the sublime unrest of visionary fragments:

There are silver fish that flash before day, in the fragile moment of dawn.

I have seen them shiver before my eyes, then vanish before light shone.

These are redemptive fragments of spiritual insight, which interpretation can only gain by grace: ‘O little weights of the mind,/ O little floats to carry me up in a moment none can foretell’. As in ‘Fingernail Sunrise’, spirit-floats are liable to return to the dark; to the involution from which they emerged:

The flash we saw in the distance now becomes for us a shell,

Spun from the loom of waters to its own

Stillness, and inward music: mark it, where it fell. [350]

  

‘The Salmon’ hence traces visionary knowledge as ‘lost and living’. ‘A moment taken out of time, a flash along a weir,/ The light all men are chasing is lost and living here.’ [427] This poem holds a parable, which suggests that because light is in unpredictable motion, so must interpretation be similarly fugitive. As Sinclair puts it in ‘Walking up Walls’, ‘ATAQUE GRAVE. AS A MUGGER YOU ARE NEVER SAFE. It doesn’t matter who you are, who you think you are, the trick is: never, ever, stay still.’

And waiting for the salmon-flash, to steal immortal life,

An old man crouched beside the pool with net and sharpened knife

Till all his life had ebbed away. He slept and woke in tears,

Knowing he’d missed the little splash that might renew the years. [428]

The argument is that you can be still, but not when static, with sharpened knife. A reader’s harmless stillness enabling the reception of vision, that matches the reticence or silence from which the poet projects sublime unrest, is the grace surrounding a hermeneutic process – what ‘The Turning of the Stars’ calls ‘the love that guards this book’ [161]. In ‘Beckton Alp’ Sinclair wrote of a ‘breathing space’; of how ‘the point of a good view is that it should capture, and give relief from, the journey that led up to it. There are no good views in isolation. No empty frames. Unwalked, uncycled. Unearned. View is always an accident, a breathing space.’ Watkins’s ‘The Debt’ touches on this notion of rewarded process, or relieved struggle; here Watkins proposes a spiritual economy of exhaustion ‘where sacrifices race/ And leave a fuller mind.’

Vision bequeaths a sum

Increased by spending it.

Poor if I first become,

My gain is infinite.

But when did I divine

That what was fugitive,

Like water in a mine,

Alone could make it live? [413]

As ‘Logos’ has it, ‘light must learn a dying trade’ [427].

More next week.

Reading with Vision: On Vernon Watkins

I’ve decided to launch this blog by posting – in four parts – my exegesis of the work of the great Welsh visionary poet and vulnerable adult Vernon Watkins, which I completed back in July 2007. This writing reflected my struggles to come to terms with my unexpected removal from academic employment in 2004, and can now be seen as representing an early statement of my transcendental concerns, and regarding communication and truth (before my discovery of Jaspers and Badiou).

Reading with Vision is previously unpublished, but now downloadable in full here.

Reading with Vision

I think it would be better instead, by frequent note-taking, to let the thoughts emerge with the umbilical cord of the original mood intact and forget as far as possible any concern for their possible use (which I would never realize anyway by looking up my journals) but more as though unburdening myself in a letter to an intimate friend, so gaining on the one hand the possibility of self-knowledge at a later moment, and on the other fluency, the same articulateness in written expression which I have to some extent in speaking, knowledge of many little traits to which I have given no more than a passing glance, and finally, an advantage, […] in that there are ideas which one gets only once in one’s life. Such backstage practice is certainly necessary for anyone not so gifted that his development is in some way a public phenomenon.

-Kierkegaard

Because, you see, what intimation of immortality have we, save our spontaneous wishes? […] Suddenly, God moves afresh in me, a new motion. It is a new desire. So a plant unfolds leaf after leaf, and then buds, till it blossoms. So do we, under the unknown impulse of desires, which arrive in us from the unknown.

-D. H. Lawrence to Catherine Carswell

The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thought’s utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character, indicates, as do most historically surviving terminologies, something about the form, something to be taken all the more seriously in that it takes place not systematically but rather as a characteristic of an intention groping its way.

-Adorno  

Visionary Hermeneutics

Everyone provideth objects but few prepare senses whereby, and light wherein, to see them.

-Traherne

Those who have had occasion to move about in Forward Areas recall that it is possible, if disconcerting, to do so in bright full moonlight, provided that the moon is high in the sky.

-David Jones

In his 2002 lecture on Vernon Watkins, ‘Swansea’s Other Poet’, Rowan Williams referred to ‘the phenomenal difficulty of much of the important poetry’. Interpretation – distinct types of readerly attention – hence become unavoidable issues. For Kathleen Raine, Watkins’s poetry escapes what she calls ‘the range of ordinary attention’. Watkins, Raine suggested, falls through today’s literary critical net on account of his work’s abstraction, its metaphysical concerns and qualities. ‘Like white light or distilled water his invisibility to the common kind and degree of attention is an attribute of this poetic purity.’ The special moonlight of Watkins’s poetic means that a ‘transition of attention’ becomes necessary. A reading with rather than a theory-led reading over. Raine wrote of a ‘miraculous shift of focus’ when ‘the attention is caught up and, committing ourselves to the swift yet gentle current, we flow with the verse’. But we must ‘await the miracle’, just as Watkins himself awaits the poetic manifestation:     

I celebrate you, marvellous forms. But first I must cut the wood,

Exactly measure the strings, to make manifest what shall be.

All Earth being weighed by an ear of corn, all heaven by a drop of blood.

How shall I loosen this music to the listening, eavesdropping sea? [185]

Watkins’s writing encourages a sensitive hermeneutic extraction of visionary potential from out of the poetic artefact: ‘Steal, steal from rhyme:/ Take from the glass that shone/ The vintage that remains.’ [360] Such a mode of attention is not mere vision-theft, but a hermeneutic that dynamically – with ‘wit’ – perpetuates vision, or ‘tenacious secrets’ of spiritual knowledges.

So thunders break man; great undertakings fail

In a flash, and broken lie; then only wit

And a rope held, will harness what here was spilt:

Through rock facets tenacious secrets prevail. [379]

When caught up by this aspirational, striving form of attention, the light which shone through the words shines on: ‘I have a net whose cords/ Gather the fallen day’ [380]. Such a netting indeed recalls the reciprocal process of ‘visionary hermeneutics’ which Gerda Norvig, discussing Blake’s illustrational response to Bunyan in her Dark Figures in the Desired Country, argued to occupy a ‘cornerstone position in the structure of Blake’s larger artistic programme’. Blake saw something akin to his own hermeneutic mode being practiced by Bunyan himself, Norvig understood; ‘I hoped to show how Blake’s dynamic concept of the imagination […] allowed him to perceive a cognate vision operating in Bunyan’s Progress’. Seeing her own reading itself developing the visionary mirror-work, a serial harnessing of personal secrets, she found herself ‘explaining Blake’s focus on Bunyan’s fable as an expression of how consciousness transforms itself from within by vision, producing its own signifiers and images of transformation to mark the way’. Seizing the opportunity to perpetuate a path of vision in this way – and rather than reading Blake’s interpretative mode ‘through the veil of a basically monotheistic [Jungian] depth psychology’ – Norvig’s study consciously ‘tried to practice a form of visionary Blakean hermeneutic, and open my own criticism to the imaginative process of “striving with systems to deliver individuals [and their works] from systems”’.

Norvig invokes the famous anti-system Blake so as to advance the visionary hermeneutic with which she seeks to free herself from the standard, oppressively subsumptive – ‘read things through’ – methodologies of today’s academic literary criticism. In his book on The Fall, Mick Middles invoked the equally famous, personal system Blake when describing Blake’s re-birth of a visionary imagination – ‘religious awakening’ – so as to align it with that sought, in music, by Mark E. Smith, with The Fall. ‘What is particularly interesting here is that Blake deliberately side-stepped the aesthetic trappings of any distinctive organized faith, be it Catholic or Anglican, and pursued a religious awakening all of his own. His famous words, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” certainly resonate through the centuries. As Mark told Melody Maker: “He [Blake] was a real workhorse for his time. I thought he was great, especially what he did and how he managed to do it for that period of history.”’

Hideous Noise Group Write ‘St’ Pope Biog. Ohio, Sweden: A group has written a character portrayal of a Pope J.P. One – rumoured to become a ‘SAINT’ which will be presented at the ‘Riverside Studios’ near some river where ‘Rule Britannia’ was written. The Vatican commented “We have been waiting for a sign for 7 years”. “It’s nonsense” claimed their manager from a St John’s Wood face lift surgery. [Fall, programme for Hey! Luciani, 1986]

Williams suggests that ‘in assessing Watkins’s intellectual and imaginative legacy, it is perhaps proper to relate what matters most in his thematic and rhetorical repertoire to the pervasiveness of the Christian myth in his work’. For ‘both the myth or doctrine itself and the practice of poetry may be illuminated surprisingly by being drawn into conversation in this way’. Gwen Watkins stated that her husband’s ‘Christianity was the centre of his life, and he wrote only to praise and affirm that belief’. This poetic stance entailed the poet’s subjection to the status of medium of vision.

I would be flute to that sweet air:

How blasphemous it were

To print her music otherwise

Than in her own true skies. [429]

A visionary reciprocity is built up: the poet’s, or reader’s, response to vision emerges out of the vision herself, and is developmental. This is the case with The Fall too, as Smith pointed out: ‘I know what The Fall is and I don’t think there is much you can do to explain it, which is why a lot that is written about us is just crap. Because there’s nothing you can actually say about it really, without it being there […] It just goes on and on.’ Nelson Bentley’s poetic narrative ‘In Memory of Vernon Watkins’ stressed the developmental effect of Watkins’s own acts of visionary hermeneutics on those who respond: ‘You read your “Yeats in Dublin” with such vision/ The students looked like the angelic host.’ Less angelic, but similarly translated by vision, are the Fall students recounted by Smith. ‘The kind of people who read Sounds, generally speaking, were more your ordinary, everyday people who were also a bit odd. Like those guys from Wakefield jail…from all over. I knew that if The Fall could connect with them they would be there for life. It would mean something a bit more special, rather than some passing fancy for Parsons and Fucking Burchill.’ Middles ascribes the visionary ‘uniqueness’ of Fall-activity not just to Smith himself, but also to the translation of vision that occurs as ‘the maverick spirit fans out through those on the fringe of band membership, onwards and outwards, through the ungainly blend of Fall fans’. This is a description of the capacity of visionary work to instigate spiritual renovation, a sort of re-birthing translation like that posited by Watkins in ‘The Many-Peopled Night’. ‘So packed a score must be undone/ To make the morning sky.’ Here the hermeneutic lyric sound of an ‘athletic body’ translates, mediumizes, an obscure sacred language of nature and nocturnal sexuality; the Gower coast as Psykick Dance Hall.

Its fingered notes translate the word

The many-peopled night has known,

Low on the breathing waters heard

And locked in every stone. [430]

Iain Sinclair recalled his visit to Watkins’s home on the Gower coast in his 2001 novel Landor’s Tower. In a prose piece from 2006, ‘Coming to the Crossroads’, Sinclair speculatively pinpointed ‘the myth of the founding of the city’ of London: ‘a head, its eyes eternally open, watching the river’. This image of a perpetual vision of nature, breathing waters, then suggests the process of visionary reciprocity: two heads, two forms of perception, two spiritual intelligences. A reminiscence of Blake’s sketched heads of visionary heroes, or of the Brontës caught pacing around the Haworth parlour table. ‘The preacher, the man in black, has a board hung from his neck: a portrait. My face stolen from the tube and transmitted, a grinning skull. This story – our city – is all about heads. The man walks, a penitent, round and round the room, and my face, shifting, rolling, walks with him. […] His mad eyes shine.’ Sinclair goes on to see the reciprocity recapitulated in Swedenborg’s relation, as a ‘talkative skull’, to his ‘spirits’. ‘He saw what they saw; he saw through their eyes.’

Perhaps the brightest commentary on Sinclair’s practice, in my opinion, is Kathy Acker’s confessional essay, ‘Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer’ – a report on an extended discussion with Sinclair. Acker writes: ‘This is the usual announcement of the visionary. To dream is to see. To see is to make, to bring into being. I can write only by reading and listening, says the visionary, for one makes only when one is made. Thus the angels Blake saw.’ It was in surrender to the process of visionary reciprocity that he made the angels. In Jerusalem Blake wrote of ‘Time & Space/ Which vary, according as the Organs of Perception vary’. And the complementary knowledge that one makes, and sees only when one is made, when one is translated, is also available in Watkins’s poem ‘The Pulse and the Shade’, which mocks – oh so gently – at those harsh academic ‘inscriptions cut with files/ That have no meaning for translated eyes.’ Democratically, the accent is on the perceiver’s own personal perception, which though watery is spirit’s hermeneutic ground. ‘The Shade himself, since he must act as host,/ Rewrites those words that use him like a ghost.’ [432] Sinclair too suggests that enthralled translation, translation in thrall, can never fully grasp the word, though such visionary hermeneutics is the surest route to language that we have. ‘The episode that is and was Emanuel Swedenborg will never be concluded, not here, not until the word, whose ghost he is, has been spoken. Now and forever. The London writer is incapable of expressing his meaning, or escaping from it.’

Re-enact for Cherubim

In the poem ‘Rebirth’, Watkins identified understanding, hermeneutics – ‘perception’ – to be grounded in a ‘remaking’: a re-energizing of the remnants of the visionary imagination.

Just as the will to power

From youth exhausted spins

To earth, it sees a flower

Rooted in ruins.

From that remaking hour

Perception begins. [365]

For Watkins, as Leslie Norris noted, ‘true poetic knowledge […] is equivalent to the soul’s rebirth. This is what inspiration means.’ Norvig too, reading Blake, seeks ‘an appreciation of how the psychopoetics operating in his oeuvre teaches the language required to perceive, understand, honour, and indeed resurrect that which he figures as “the eternal body” of imagination lying dormant within reader and text, spectator and image’. In ‘A Vision of The Last Judgment’, Blake wrote:

The Nature of Visionary Fancy or Imagination is very little Known & the Eternal nature & permanence of its ever Existent Images is considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative & Generative Nature yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce but its Eternal Image & Individuality never dies. but renews by its seed. just so the Imaginative Image returns by the seed of Contemplative Thought.

Blake’s ‘eternal body’ is the ‘living truth’ to which Watkins refers in ‘I, Centurion’:

I, centurion out of time,

Re-enact for Cherubim

The living truth which makes them wise

Forever present to my eyes.

Yet of course the visionary human’s ‘will to power’ is easily ‘exhausted’, and truth for us is not eternal – not always immediate – like the angels’ truth. ‘Their wisdom is direct, but ours/ Emerges from a stress of powers.’ [264] There is the element of passivity, noticed within Acker’s crucial definition of visionary hermeneutics: ‘one makes only when one is made’. Raine, we remember, noted in connection with Watkins’s writing the receptive, attentive stance necessary for the moment of readerly visionary arrest. ‘Reading his work I no longer seek to apply the relatively crude instruments of Practical Criticism or Seven Types of Ambiguity, but await the miracle.’ Anyone’s genuinely visionary hermeneutic works in opposition to the violence within literary-critical rationality. Visionary hermeneutics works contrary to both the grasping seizure of language by the career-building academic ego, and the subsumptive processing of language through pre-set methodologies. A good illustration of both mistakes is my reading of Vahni Capildeo’s first book – an essay online in Jacket 26 [here]. Whereas, immersive-devotional, religious and responsive rather than secular and exploitative, a visionary hermeneut’s stormy ‘stress of powers’ has the goal of failure and exhaustion; because it has the goal of valuing, celebrating and releasing precisely the spiritual life within language which is to remain obscure. In Watkins’s ‘Buried Light’:

What are the light and wind to me?

The lamp I love is gone to ground.

[…]

Come, buried light, and honour time

With your dear gift, your constancy,

That the known world be made sublime

Through visions that closed eyelids see.

Come, breath, instruct this angry wind

To listen here where men have prayed,

That the bold landscape of the mind

Fly nobler from its wrist of shade. [260]

More next week.