Irregular Language, part 4

Hamannian Origins of Existentialism

‘In the early stages of its evolution, […] existentialism might be described as a theoretical stance which: a) moved philosophical discourse away from Kantian formalism and emphasized the belief that the content of thought must reside in particular experiences and decisions; b) followed Kierkegaard in defining philosophy as a passionate and deeply engaged activity, in which the integrity and the authenticity of the human being are decisively implicated; c) sought to overcome the antinomies (reason/ experience; theory/ praxis; transcendence/ immanence; pure reason/ practical reason) which determine the classical metaphysical tradition by incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence.’

-Thornhill, ‘Karl Jaspers’ [here]

In After Enlightenment Betz notes that Hamann did not understand ‘passions’ in terms of ‘the various vices or sins (like lust or pride) of a fallen world by which man is enslaved’; instead, he thought of passions in terms of ‘profound feelings, like fear, grief, love, and joy’. Hamann was already developing a Kierkegaardian and existentialist emphasis on suffering interiority unrelated to the dogmatic moral demands of organized Christianity. In a letter to Kant which was described by Josef Nadler as a ‘historical moment’ in the intellectual life of the eighteenth century, Hamann wrote of having exposed Kant ‘to the danger of coming so close to a man [Hamann] invested by the sickness of his passions with a power to think and to feel that a healthy person does not possess’: for Hamann passions related to a proto-existentialist complex fusing pathology, suffering and emotional-cognitive ‘power’.

Hamann also saw that the ‘sickness of his passions’ influenced his linguistic expression, as when he wrote in his Cloverleaf of Hellenistic Letters that ‘Every manner of thought that begins to be somewhat fashionable, every unnoticeable transition in one’s passions, affects the expression of one’s concepts’. Here the rôle played by passions recalls Hamann’s stammerer’s insight that (as Betz puts it) ‘there is no such thing as purely spontaneous language’: prior to communication, language is filtered through an experiential matrix of unnoticeable psychic transitions, reminiscent of the ‘fleeting, spiritual, arbitrary, and incidental determinations and circumstances’ of Aesthetica in nuce. When quoting the following lines from that text and noting that, for Hamann, within ‘the senses and the passions […], and not in a misguided form of pagan asceticism, lies the wellspring of human creativity’, Betz is referring to a level of passionate spiritual life through which language passes on its way to expression:

‘A philosopher like Saul sets up monastic laws (1 Sam. 14: 24) - - Passion alone gives to abstractions and hypotheses hands, feet, wings; - to images and signs, spirit, life, and tongue - - Where can you find more rapid inferences? Whence is the rolling thunder of eloquence engendered, and its companion – monosyllabic lightning.’

Betz helpfully observes that Hamann footnoted these arguments with a reference to these lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream :

‘Brief as lightning in the collied night,

That (in a spleen) unfolds heav’n and earth

And ere a man has power to say: Behold!

The jaws of darkness do devour it up’

Carl Gustav Carus, 'Mondnacht im Schilf' (c. 1834)



In the next line Shakespeare wrote of ‘quick bright things’; Hamann’s style obviously itself reproduces the ‘collied night’ of passionate spiritual life which he thought enabled such flashes of language. Betz compares Nietzsche’s vital style to Hamann’s: they shared ‘a style that is meant not to inform, but to effect something, to bring about some form of awakening, to help people – for both of them always “the few” – to see something new’. As Betz also notes, Hamann’s style generative of ‘monosyllabic lightning’ – jolting language flashes unfolded by the ‘spleen’ of fleeting spirito-experiential determinations – itself reflected his intrinsically irregular mode of production. The suggestion of producing a complete edition of his writings ‘struck Hamann as vain and fundamentally incongruous with the pseudonymous, occasional, and self-denying nature of everything he wrote’, Betz observes; yet Hamann’s writing was occasional also in that it responded to specific occasions in his life, and so was experiential and proto-existentialist even as it was self-denying. As he wrote to Johann George Scheffner:

‘It has truly been an Herculean labour for me to go through what I wrote between [17]59 and [17]83, since everything refers to the actual situation of my life, to moments, to mistaken, cockeyed, withered impressions that I am no longer able to renew.’  

Hamann’s foregrounding of contingent ‘moments’ also characterized his proto-existentialist conception of reason as something which, in Betz’s words, ‘is never pure, as Kant alleges is possible, but always situated within a given tradition to which it reponds’. Betz provides a quotation from Hamann’s Metacritique of the Purism of Reason, in which he refers to an ‘occasion’ when Hume recognized the influence of Berkeley’s thinking on his own:

‘It seems to me, first of all, that the new scepticism owes the old idealism infinitely more than this fortuitous and particular occasion would give us to understand in passing, and that, without Berkeley, Hume would hardly have become the great philosopher that the Critique [of Pure Reason], from a position of similar indebtedness, alleges him to be.’  

Betz convincingly suggests that Hamann’s very emphasis on the contingent moment in these lines, underlines the importance for him of existential life as a determinant of philosophical activity – even as he downplays the status of Hume’s ‘fortuitous’ recognition. As Betz puts it, Hamann’s ‘“fortuitous,” “particular,” “occasional,” [sic] “in passing,” are all meant to highlight the contrast between his understanding of the life of the intellect (as a function of the historical contingencies of our Sitz im Leben)’, and ‘Kant’s understanding of intellectual activity (as something conducted in the ether of pure, necessary, universal concepts)’. Betz notes that Hamann’s invocation of Francis Bacon, in Aesthetica in nuce, signals Hamann’s ‘stand with the British empiricist tradition against the Cartesianism and Stoicism of the modern Continental tradition, for which nature, the senses and passions, rather than being sources of knowledge and creativity, are always already deceptive and problematic’.

Hamann’s use of the image of Pilate washing his hands of Christ, in the same text, directs us, for Betz, to ‘the Christological basis of Hamann’s critique of the abstract rationalism of the age – the fact that in Christ the divine is at one with the human, the spiritual is at one with the sensible and material’. Betz adds that, ‘as von Balthasar points out, Hamann’s entire aesthetics is centred upon the fleshliness of God in Christ and the wonder that it is precisely through the flesh that the spirit is saved’. This emphasis on the value of existence beyond abstract cognition clearly situates Hamann as a Christian existentialist; as Betz records, the first study of Hamann in English was Walter Lowrie’s Johann Georg Hamann: An Existentialist, which was published by the Princeton Theological Seminary Press in 1950. Noting that Kierkegaard drew on Hamann’s thought, Betz calls Hamann ‘arguably the original source of the “existential turn” in the history of German philosophy’. Betz cites the remarks in Hamann’s Doubts and Ideas that ‘our existence is older than our reason’ , and that ‘the ground of religion lies in our whole existence and outside the sphere of our cognitive powers, all of which taken together constitute the most arbitrary and abstract mode of our existence’.    

Despite his self-alignment with Baconian empiricism, however, Hamann was – in Betz’s words, following Bayer’s analysis – ‘no strict empiricist’. As Hamann wrote to Jacobi,

‘Is knowledge possible apart from rational principles? – just as little as sensus sine intellectu. Composite beings are not capable of simple sensation[s], and still less simple [i.e., immediate, intuitive] knowledge. In human nature, sensibility can as little be separated from reason, as reason can be separated from sensibility.’

Hamann’s sense of the inseparability of the empirical and the rational, of experience and reason, was grounded in what Betz describes as his ‘spiritual understanding of language as involving a mysterious coincidentia oppositorum of the sensible and the intelligible’. Betz quotes from Hegel’s 1828 review of the first edition of his writings: ‘Hamann places himself in the middle of the problem of reason and proposes its solution; and he conceives it in terms of language.’ For Hegel, ‘in Hamann the concrete Idea ferments and turns itself against the divisions of reflection’. Betz continues,

‘In other words, whereas Kant’s philosophy divided the phenomenal from the noumenal, the sensible from the intelligible, and subsequent to “this unnatural and unholy divorce” (in Hamann’s phrase) could offer only a tenuous connection by means of synthetic judgments a priori, Hamann repeatedly points out that the actual living unity of these elements, which reason subsequently sunders, is already given in language.’    

In this connection Betz also quotes from Katie Terezakis’ The Immanent Word :

‘The strength of Hamann’s linguistic “metacritique” of Kant lies in his reckoning with the unreservedly immanent character of language, as the genetically prior, shared root of sensibility and understanding, and thus as the ideal and real boundary of subjective consciousness.’

Terezakis’ underlining of Hamann’s understanding of language as the boundary of subjective consciousness, helps us to understand that we should not overemphasize the subjectivism of Hamann’s oeuvre – a radical subjectivism to which Betz draws attention when he writes of Hamann’s ‘collection of writings that to this day are not only sui generis but doubtless some of the oddest and most fantastic in all of western literature’. For Hamann, as Beiser noted in some observations in The Fate of Reason which are quoted by Betz, subjective creative freedom is in a sense bounded by being itself an imitation of nature:

‘If we were to sum up Aesthetica in nuce, then we would have to single out two doctrines: that art ought to imitate nature and reveal the word of God; and that art ought to express the innermost personality of the artist. What is central to Hamann’s aesthetics, however, is precisely the combination or intersection of these doctrines. It is a seemingly paradoxical fusion of an extreme subjectivism, which insists that the artist express his innermost desires and feelings, and an extreme objectivism, which demands that the artist strictly imitate nature and surrender to its effects upon him.’

As Betz writes, ‘the resolution of this apparent paradox between subjective freedom and objective imitation is to be found in Hamann’s understanding of the human being as the imago Dei’. Because he believed that human poetic freedom is a reflection of God’s creative freedom, for Hamann (in Betz’s words) ‘the maximum of human freedom and creativity, rather than being an instance of pure subjectivism, is simultaneously the maximum of God’s self-revelation’. For Hamann, Betz continues, ‘human poesis’ is ‘always already a participation in the expressive language of creation’.         

Such ideas contributed to Hamann’s early existentialist thinking of language as a dialogical religious phenomenon. As we have seen, in some beautiful lines inThe Knight of the Rose-Cross, Hamann conveyed his view that the original natural creation constituted – just as language constitutes still – a communication between the human and the divine:

‘Every phenomenon of nature was a word – the sign, symbol, and pledge of a new, secret, inexpressible, but at the same time all the more intimate union, communication, and communion of divine energies and ideas. In the beginning everything that the man [Adam] heard, saw with his eyes, looked upon, and touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word.’

For Hamann in The Knight of the Rose-Cross, the ‘communicatio of the divine and human idiomatum is a fundamental law and the master key of all our knowledge and the entire visible economy’; for him, therefore, language is not only the boundary of subjective consciousness but also the medium of intersubjectivity. As Betz observes, ‘for Hamann the origin of language is not to be conceived in monological but in dialogical terms (anticipating the thought of Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner)’. Hamannian communicative intersubjectivity derives this existentialist or religiously dialogical quality from its relation to his theology of human freedom as response, imitation and surrender – a theology which, Betz notes, anticipates Bayer’s contemporary Lutheran ‘theology of human freedom as Verantwortung’, developed ‘largely along Hamannian lines’ in Bayer’s Freiheit als Antwort [Freedom in Response]. For Hamann, Betz underlines, ‘human freedom is properly understood not as an absolute freedom, i.e., as an autonomous self-positing, but rather as the freedom of a creature to respond, having previously been addressed by another’. Unable to claim the absolute freedom of personal fluency, Hamann theorized a revelational intersubjectivity which twinned language’s creative capacity with human incapacity: for Hamann, without surrender there can be no ‘participation in the expressive language of creation’.      

Next post: Thornhill on Hamann and Jaspers

Irregular Language, part 3

Reason and Rough Language

In After Enlightenment, Betz notes how Heidegger’s according of a central importance to language within his thinking was influenced by his reception of Hamann. Just as for Hamann language is ‘the mother  of reason and its revelations, its A and W’, for Heidegger language famously came to be the ‘house of being’. In ‘Die Sprache’, Heidegger quoted from a letter of Hamann’s to Herder:

‘If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single phrase three times. Reason is language, Lógox. This is the marrowbone on which I gnaw, and will gnaw myself to death on it. For me there remains a darkness over this deep: I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.’

For the stammerer language is distant and occluded, shrouded in ‘darkness’. For Hamann it is as if the need to understand his dysfluency has become a project which is ‘extreme, and existentially driven’ (to adopt Thornhill’s words on Weber’s sociology), and which involves a risk which verges on the autodestructive, or at least on a petition of an ‘apocalyptic angel’. Heidegger’s reading pointed towards this: ‘This view of language plunges into the depth of an abyss. Does this consist merely in that reason rests upon language, or is even language itself the abyss?’ One could then even argue that if our linguistic capacity is riven, abyssal or aporetic, for Hamann – as Betz puts it in a deconstructionist extension of the stammerer’s view – ‘not only is language the “mother” of reason […] it is also why reason cannot presume to attain any firm conceptual footing or totalizing grasp’. In the course of his analysis Betz ultimately separates Hamann from Derrida, however, and in a way that emphasizes Hamann’s conception of language as a playful and free response to the Logos, the living word. This conception seems to draw on a lighter, more relaxed stammerer’s self-image, when communication is experienced as faltering or errant rather than as falling into an abyss:         

 

‘Either, following Derrida, language is essentially, for all its non-finite supplementarity, a purely immanent construct that reveals nothing outside it; or, following Hamann, language is essentially a prophetic revelation of transcendence, of the divine in and through the human, including all the contingency and indeterminacy, creativity and eccentricity of human language that this implies.’

Central to Betz’s presentation of Hamann’s thought is an emphasis on Hamann’s critique of what Betz calls ‘the injustice of reason’, especially as manifested in attacks on linguistic ‘irrationality’ qua irregularity. Betz sees Hamann’s writing, for example the 1780 Two Mites Concerning the Latest German Literature with its orthographical concerns, to be animated by his response to ‘the contest of the age: a contest between a Christian worldview (which allows for and even celebrates a mysterious depth to human language, to human nature, to the world)’, and ‘a fanatical, puritanical rationalism that would seek to eliminate everything that does not conform to its immanent counsels’, such as ‘the “irrational ” arbitrariness of language’. Hamann’s defence of linguistic ‘excess’ can be read as stemming from his own experience of the extravagances – the repetitions, the delays, the extended silences, the ums, ahs and other fillers – which dysfluency entails.  

‘What he was against was the injustice of reason, i.e., reason “overstepping its limits”: whether this take the form of “rational” incursions into the sacred matrix of language in order to “clean it up” (as in the orthographical elimination of the terminal h) or impose upon it some kind of “rational” standard; or a Stoic denial of any positive rôle to the passions (as though human beings would have been better without them); or, in the matter of religion, “rational” eliminations of the supposedly “mythological,” “superfluous,” “irrational,” or at least “incredible” doctrines and contents of the faith […]. In short, as Hamann saw it, reason’s attempt to “fix the indeterminate and to cut out any excess,” as carried out here with regard to language, was symptomatic of the violence it commits whenever it transgresses its limits.’

As Betz notes, in his New Apology of the Letter h Hamann argued for the preservation of the silent terminal ‘h’ (for instance in words like Rath or Muth), in order to defend ‘the contingent and arbitrary aspects of language or religion’. A similar stammerer’s defence of linguistic arbitrariness lies behind his critique in Aesthetica in nuce of the reliance on rational philological methods in Michaelis’ scriptural criticism; for Hamann, Betz writes, ‘historical criticism alone can never hope to determine the meaning of the biblical text' - 'which depends, as Hamann puts it, “upon such fleeting, spiritual, arbitrary, and incidental determinations and circumstances that one cannot draw down the key to their understanding without ascending to heaven”’. The arbitrariness of the Bible’s linguistic determinations suggest to Hamann the way in which the Bible is animated by a spiritual impurity or transcendental disturbance. In Hamann’s view philological absolutism would void the Bible of what Betz calls ‘a mysterious image of the Spirit of the invisible God’, just as, for Hamann, ‘the silent letter h, which is an offense to reason, is symbolic not only of life and soul and the invisible creative human spirit, but ultimately of the creative breath of God’ too. Citing the Aesthetica in nuce, Betz writes that ‘the Spirit offends “good taste” and what counts as “good style”’.

‘As he put it as early as 1758, whoever “is called to be a preacher in the desert must clothe himself in camel’s hair and live from locusts and wild honey.” And, true to form, this is exactly what Hamann did: living on the meagre income of a civil servant, he imitated the rough exterior of John the Baptist through what is by all accounts a course [sic], rebarbative style (stylus atrox), in order to deflect attention away from himself to Christ.’

Attending to the vehemence of Hamann’s writing, Betz describes his ‘typically passionate, energetic, and declamatory style’. Betz argues that ‘Hamann’s style is more than anything a self-conscious imitation of the sublime, oracular style both he and [Robert] Lowth attributed to the sacred poetry of the Hebrews’. Betz notes that Lowth was a point of reference for Hamann in Aesthetica in nuce, and goes on to quote the following lines from Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, in connection with Hamann’s rough language. Here once again we find an emphasis on those qualities of disturbance, interruption and intermittency which define dysfluency and spiritual life alike; on the mysterious ‘fleeting, spiritual, arbitrary, and incidental determinations and circumstances’:

‘Thus if the actual origin of poetry be inquired after, it must of necessity be referred to religion; and since it appears to be an art derived from nature alone, peculiar to no age or nation, and only at an advanced period of society conformed to rule and method, it must be wholly attributed to the more violent affections of the heart, the nature of which is to express themselves in an animated and lofty tone, with a vehemence of expression far removed from vulgar use. It is also no less observable, that these affections break and interrupt the enunciation by their impetuosity; they burst forth in sentences pointed, earnest, rapid, and tremulous […] Is it not probable, that the first effort of rude and unpolished verse would display itself in the praise of the Creator, and flow almost involuntarily from the enraptured mind?’ 

To be continued.

Reading with Vision, part 3

Here's the third section from my essay on the poetry of Vernon Watkins.

Beyond Knowledge in the Vermilion Chambers

The Infant Joy is beautiful, but its anatomy

Horrible ghast & deadly! nought shalt thou find in it

But dark despair & everlasting brooding melancholy!

Looking back on his work in the preface to The Firewall, Iain Sinclair identified the forms of spiritual life, the spirit-lives, to which he has most aspired: ‘they were the double lives I wanted most, film and poetry.’ His description of the ‘film’ side of the equation in terms of ‘unanchored imagery’, suggests his understanding of spiritual activity as work with images – visions – without referents; work with views that are not necessarily interpretable in connection with a material grounding. ‘Cinema and its bastard off-spring, television, is the addiction, always: unanchored imagery, analgesic colours.’ Sinclair’s poem ‘Friendly Fire’ (included in The Firewall) indeed speaks of ‘light beyond interpretation’. In Watkins this contrast, between light or visions and all our wordy intellection, is particularly prominent in ‘Sea-Music for My Sister Travelling’.

Come down, I say,

Deluge of light, and drown the words’ inflection,

Rush through the luminous, coiled, vermilion chambers,

Shatter the labyrinths white,

And ruin all the mind remembers;

Come down, great Resurrection [78]

Watkins values the inside of the shell: the involution, the spiritual calm ‘too far away/ For thought to find the track’ [181]. But its flooding by light does not correspond to cognitive wipe-out. When shattering light, ‘unconscious glory’, disintegrates language it prepares for expansive renewal through the release of new potentialities.

What thought a thoughtless moment will express;

The unconscious glory brings its undertone.

Or how can thought be magnified, unless

The unknown god begets upon the known? [421]

In ‘The Replica’, a waterfall shows how the fragmentation of language can return us to the ‘thoughtless moment’ with its rhythm of a ‘perpetual music’, and its capacity to enrich insight beyond secular rationality.

The dissipation of unnumbered drops

Vanishing in a dark that finds itself

In a perpetual music, and gives light

In fading always from the measuring mind:

Such is the waterfall [263]

‘Prime Colours’ memorably imagines the operation of the secular interpretative ‘measuring mind’ belonging to ‘cramped, figured scribes, distorted by possession’:

One man may count, with imitative hooves,

The huge, high landscape that another loves,

Empound the apocalypse, till truth is pent

To satisfy the turnstiles of a tent.

But the following stanza foresees the subversion of such positivistic, accumulative research by dissipation, a humble dust-shedding – shedding of over-materialistic, empirical fragments – which releases new spiritual creation within the supernatural realm of the sky.

Vast libraries vault their dead, but I can trust

White dust to resurrect the moving dust,

White dust of donkeys shedding dusty loads

Where swallows’ wings paint Zechariah’s words. [6]

If it is indeed possible to trace a twentieth-century visionary poetic lineage – say (to list only a few markers) from David Jones or David Gascoyne, through Celan and Watkins, Raine/Temenos and on to Sinclair – then one notable instance of the contrary measuring mind, as noticed by Sinclair in his Lights Out for the Territory, would be the very Cambridge, literary-critical secular reason which fostered my own doctoral research on him. Observing the questioning Cambridge response to his publicizing of the visionary at the 1991 Shamanism of Intent event in Uppingham – ‘the younger, immodestly articulate element seethed with discontent’, and felt that ‘the whole approach to the numinous was suspect’ – Sinclair saw that the young academics were charging shamanism, particularly in its Sixties inflection, with ‘woolly thinking’. In Sinclair’s view, some sort of positivistic measuring mind was still demanding ‘genuine and visible scholarship’ from a ‘”shamanic” text’. In my slightly later experience of it, the covertly antimaterialist Cambridge philosophy of Simon Jarvis in fact instead encouraged my own inchoate suspicion of positivist method, and also directed me to the potency of language’s sacred capacities – amongst many other things, not least The Fall and its transcendental capacities. But there was nonetheless obviously a Cambridge resistance being made to the absolutism of London visionary proclamation: in supervisions I was a truculent student, a troubled post-cockney too full of Blakean moralisms. The academic resistance in Cambridge more generally was, I would now suggest, essentially to Sinclair’s claim to an accessible visionary experience – to what he himself calls (in Lights Out) his ‘rhetoric, the hyperbole’ – and also to his personal investment in the visionary as a repository of truth and value. Faith, against the facts. Prynne’s relation to shamanism, by contrast, Sinclair argued, offers a ‘measured risk’: the visionary poetic of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, supported by a bibliography, has not – to quote Blake, in Milton – ‘cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration’.

The whole point is to understand and move on…not hold seminars or open fucking web pages. [Smith]

In ‘The Room of Pity’, Watkins wrote of how ‘God’s heart beat seconds where there was no clock’ [13]; our experience of the sacred cannot be grasped by a perception which would divide it up and classify it into so many ‘rotten rags of Memory’. In a way bibliographies, websites and sacred texts themselves – when read as classificatory accumulations of spiritual knowledges – are only so many cognitive clocks. Supports of our fake human claim to omniscience, they become measuring tools for the faithless, weapons in the academic battle for mundane status. A ninth-century Indian mystic cited by Buber, Bayezid Bistami, prayed: ‘My God, it is not asceticism that I need, not knowledge of the Koran by heart, and not science; but give me a share in your mysteries.’ In 1848 Kierkegaard similarly expressed his dislike of the unnecessarily quasi-clerical character of mass Bible-reading – ‘a scholarly and legalistic type of religiousness, sheer diversion. A sort of “learning” in that direction has gradually found its way down to the commonest class and no human being reads the Bible humanly any more.’ The crux of the problem was ‘always this sham that one must have the learning in shape before one can begin living – which means one never gets around to the latter’. Kierkegaard, Diogenes Allen wrote, ‘claims academia has forgotten what it is to be an actual existing human being searching for truth’.

The ‘truths revealed by Scripture’, Allen goes on to argue, ‘must be considered by the mind of a person, and in particular the mind of a person who recognizes his or her incomprehensible nature, his or her insufficiency, his or her plight’. Buber called his anthology ‘[a presentation of] personal confessio’. Smith advised Middles, writing his book, to ‘just do the bits that are natural, that are of real interest to you, not the best bits, just the bits that mean something to you’. It is indeed difficult to imagine a visionary less scholarly or legalistic – or more committed to the personalized performance of lyric scriptures – than Smith. The Fall can be situated, in a way, in the Existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard and Allen – the band’s name is, after all, lifted from the Camus novel La Chute, published in English in 1957 as The Fall. Kierkegaard’s attack on the professionalizing ‘sham that one must have the learning in shape before one can begin living – which means one never gets around to the latter’, was echoed by Smith’s comments at a music and politics summit at the offices of New Manchester Review, in 1977. ‘People, especially working-class kids, are inhibited from trying to play because of the expertise of music-college groups like the Pink Floyd. But punk rock has shown that they can do it.’ Something like a Protestant nurturing of personal spiritualities, spiritual expressivities – Blakean ‘infinite talents’ – is a core goal of the ‘working class intellectualism’ propounded by The Fall.     

As is rapidly becoming the case in the United Kingdom, the US is composed of fine unique people with infinite talents ruled and bullied by indecisive publicity seeking political incompetents who are allied with the hopeless and un-intelligent media, bullshit academics, and a Martian-like led civil service. [Smith, Cleveland travelogue]

Deep Conflict is the Forge

What is then to be done? A one-time academic reader, all I can suggest is that we learn – somehow – to read visionary language with more generous vision. But this virtue involves struggle, just as did the creation of that language. For Weil, ‘that action is good which we are able to accomplish while keeping our attention and intention totally directed towards pure and impossible goodness, without veiling from ourselves by any falsehood either the attraction or the impossibility of pure goodness.’ This is one point where Weil’s ethics converges with her aesthetics, since she concurs with Buber that whilst ‘the ecstatic cannot say the unsayable’, the visionary nonetheless ‘speaks, he must speak, because the Word burns in him’. ‘The beautiful poem’, Weil goes on to write, ‘is the one which is composed while the attention is kept directed towards inexpressible inspiration, in so far as it is inexpressible.’ It was just this sort of stressed direction of attention which Watkins, in ‘The Death Bell’, saw lying behind visionary understanding or perception:

Deep conflict is the forge

From which their faiths emerge

Who give to humankind

Mind that is more than mind. [213]

In a 1949 letter to Michael Hamburger, Watkins contrasted the conflicted soul to the secular poet, whose work derives from a rationalist contemplative attitude.

What I look for first in a poet is intensity, and you have this. A poem must, for me, contain intensity in a unique form, impossible to paraphrase without loss. It is found in Hölderlin constantly. But large tracts of contemporary verse derive from a speculation situation allied to lucidity of thought; and there is everything there except the soul.

  

Watkins’s conception of the deep spiritual conflict from which visionary understanding can emerge is analogous to Buber’s conception of the burning ‘Word’.

For the Word burns in him. Ecstasy is dead, stabbed in the back by Time, which will not be mocked; but, dying, it has flung the Word into him, and the Word burns in him. And he speaks, speaks, he cannot be silent, the flame in the Word drives him, he knows that he cannot say it, yet he tries over and over again until his soul is exhausted to death and the Word leaves him. This is the exaltatio of the one who has returned into the commotion and cannot resign himself to it; this is his insurrection, the insurrection of a speaker: related to the insurrection of the poet, slighter in possession, mightier in existence, than his. This is the bending of the bow for the saying of the unsayable, an impossible task, a labour in the dark.   

The burning Word, through or conveying which the post-ecstatic seeks to pass towards expression of mystical experience, finds a further instance in Hildegard von Bingen’s comparison of visionary words to ‘a vibrating flame’ (quoted in Buber’s collection).

For in this vision I am not taught to write as the philosophers write. And the words in this vision are not like the words that sound from the mouths of human beings, but like a vibrating flame and like a cloud moving in pure air.

In ‘Yeats’ Tower’, Watkins wrote likewise of ‘this fire which never formed a school’ – in the hearing of which a ‘seed’ of salvific visionary perception is nurtured.

Surely the seed that stirs beneath this touch

Hears in its ear the wand within the wind,

The miraculous fire from which all years have waned.

This, if it moves, must heal the martyr’s wound:

O under grass, O under grass, the secret. [13]

In ‘Demands of the Muse’ Watkins lets the Muse articulate the conviction that it is precisely uncategorizable visionary passion, our struggling, self-conflicted fire which never formed a school, which lends poetic language its meaning:

Yet, though a school invoke me, it is he [the poet]

I choose, for opposition gives those words

Their strength; and there is none more near to him

In thought. It is by conflict that he knows me

And serves me in my way and not another.

Burning words are humble and submissive words in that the poet’s integrity is shaped by necessary difficulty: ‘The bit is tempered to restrain his words/ And make laborious all that’s dear to him./ So he remains himself and not another.’ [282] Yet burning words, Watkins feels, can be precise words too. ‘Dawn fires kindle perfection like a sword.’

To have held through hail, stormwinds, and black frost in darkness

Through the long months, gives meaning to the bud when it opens.

Song loses nothing of moments that are past.

So my labour is still: it is still determination

To resolve itself slowly in the weathers of knowledge. [392]

Weil shared Watkins’s sense that visionary understanding is indirect, even unending, and involves laborious struggle, yet can be supported by linguistic precision achieved through a slow resolution. ‘Intelligence can never penetrate the mystery, but it, and it alone, can judge of the suitability of the words which express it. For this task it needs to be keener, more discerning, more precise, more exact and more exacting than for any other.’ 

Final part to be posted next week.