Lin (Septidi), 17 Thermidor, CCXXXIV

1. Jacques Arcadelt (1507-1568), Missa Noe Noe: Arcadelt is primarily remembered as one of the most significant early composers of madrigals, of which he produced more than 200. His Primo libro di madrigali (he issued five collections in all) was far and away the most popular and influential book of its kind in early modern Western Europe, going through 45 editions and 58 printings over the course of the latter part of the 16^th century and early decades of the 17^th. It was largely on account of Arcadelt that the madrigal became the common property of the continent. His special distinction, in all his compositions for voice, was as a great synthesizer of styles with a genius for combining the demanding techniques of French and Flemish polyphony (Josquin was a great influence on him) with the flowing melody and rhythms of Italian song. The former is audible in the austere absence of gratuitous chromatic ornament in his madrigals, and the latter in the sustained melodic development; and the ease with which the (as a rule) four voices of the pieces alternate between polyphonic and homophonic passages is one of the conspicuous marks of his compositions. He carried that genius over in numerous ways into the chansons, motets, and masses of his later years. He came by his eclectic leanings quite naturally. Born in the Netherlands, he had established himself in Florence by his early twenties, where he perfected his style before moving to Rome in 1538 to take up an appointment in the Papal Choir, soon thereafter becoming the magister puerorum of the Sistine Chapel. He knew Michelangelo while he was there and set two of the latter’s sonnets to music. In 1551 he moved to Paris to become the choirmaster for Charles de Guise, and in time became a member of the Chapelle Royale of Versailles under both Henri II and Charles IX. His sacred music includes 24 motets, a variety of other sacred settings, and three masses, and I have chosen one of the last of these. The Missa Noe Noe is a ‘parody mass’, which is not to say a lampoon, but rather a mass constructed from thematic materials already in existence, woven into new patterns and new plangencies. It is set for six voices and uses motifs from a motet by Jean Mouton to produce perhaps Arcadelt’s most brilliant fusion of northern polyphony and diatonic Italian harmony, all within the modal system. The structure is especially ingenious in generating, amid the counterpoint, rhythmic convergences of all six voices in rich chords, from which they then diverge again along their several lines of development. Throughout the piece, there is an antiphonal interplay between, on the one side, the altos and the tenor and, on the other, the bass and bass-baritone voices. The recording to get is, as far as I know, the only one available, but also an altogether admirable one: the 2023 Ricerar release with the Choeur de Chambre de Namur and the Capella Mediterranea under the direction of Leonardo García Alarcón.

2. Chen Yi (b. 1953), Symphony no. 2: When last I checked, Chen was still a professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, as is her husband, the great Zhou Long. When I first encountered her music, she was on the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, which I believe was her first appointment after her studies in composition at Columbia. But, before coming to the States, she had won the distinction of being the first female Master of Arts graduated by Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. Though she has also enjoyed considerable international fame as a violinist since her days in her native China, she has been a prolific and celebrated composer for just as long, and one whose remarkable and varied hybridizations of Western and Far Eastern musical traditions, from every period, succeed brilliantly where a lesser artist might have achieved only pastiche. And she has excelled in every form: solo works (especially, naturally, for violin), chamber music, song, choral music, and music for orchestra. Like her husband, she has crafted a world of sound entirely her own from all these forces. I find this work from 1993 to be especially affecting, largely because it puts her genius for discovering new sonorities and tonal textures on full display. It is in one movement, though with four distinct phases, as well as a very brief codetta that neither recapitulates nor resolves what has preceded it, but only invokes a gracious silence. It is a deeply somber work, an elegy in fact, dedicated to the memory of her late father, constructed as a single sustained largo that begins already from a state of profound sorrow and ends with a sense of haunting uncertainty. And it is engrossingly beautiful. The first phase or ‘movement’ is a unison line dominated by the low registers and chordal structures of certain traditional kinds of Chinese song. The second is jarring to some degree, interrupting the flow with percussion figures clearly shaped by classical Chinese opera. In the third, however, this slow but tumultuous transition subsides into a series of solo lines passing through vagrant development, among three instruments: a flute, a clarinet, and a cello. Finally, or almost finally, the more complex orchestral sonorities return, deepening, growing more intricate, interweaving melodic threads that never quite yield a stable pattern, but instead reach a climax in which the intensity of the sadness finds a kind of release. Then comes that codetta, in which the voices of the instruments melt away in ever softer and more diaphanous and dreamlike lines, at the end dying out, as I say, without resolution, as if about to pose a question but not knowing how to phrase it. I am aware of only one recording, but there may be others. In any event, it is a recording I can unreservedly recommend. It appears on a disc entitled The Music of Chen Yi, with the Women’s Philharmonic directed by JoAnn Falletta, which appeared in 1996 from the small New Albion Records label.

3. Frank Martin (1890-1974), Le Mystère de la Nativité: It seems uncontroversial to call Martin the greatest modern Swiss composer, in part because the field is not exactly crowded, but mostly because of his undeniable genius. I should note, however, that he lived the better part of his adult life in the Netherlands. But he was born and reared among the Alps, the youngest child (out of ten) of a Reformed pastor, and he knew from perhaps the age of nine that music was his vocation. Like Messiaen, his Christian faith informed everything he wrote; and it was through his music that his faith very quickly expanded beyond the particular limits of Reformed tradition. He excelled in every form—orchestral, choral, chamber, solo—and every work was in a sense a theological statement of his decidedly idiosyncratic spiritual vision. This was especially true of his sacred works, of course, which were in some instances constructed on an enormous scale and intended for theatrical presentation. Such is the case with this work from 1959, a staggeringly ambitious masterpiece that was written to be performed as a static spectacle on a stage designed in three tiers—heaven, earth, and hell—with a reserved section of the last of these for the limbus patrum. Martin’s mature idiom was emphatically modern, largely crafted in his own variant of the twelve-tone system, but generously so; he always drew on past ages of musical tradition and a great deal of his special genius lay in his ability to integrate past and present in inventive structures and unexpected accords. Nowhere is that more evident than in this slightly mad music drama. From the strangest of all the late mediaeval mystery plays, Arnoul Gréban’s 15th century Mystère de la Passion, Frank took the idea of presenting the drama as a cosmic tableau vivant, including an almost Job-like (or even Faust-like) heavenly prologue, all played out among the distinct powers of the three spheres. Here, as perhaps nowhere else in Frank’s œuvre, his uncanny ability to interweave and integrate radically different styles of musical development is on full display. The music of heaven is modal, serenely luminous, exquisitely plangent, and constructed on mediaeval and Renaissance models; the music of earth is monodically melodious, diatonic, at times folkish, and touchingly lyrical; and the music of hell is harshly dissonant in tone-color, full of jagged tritones, driven on by violent and convulsive rhythms. But the sounds are not simply set in contrast to one another; again and again, they are brought together in astonishing ways, often by way of diverse motifs sharing the same intervallic structures in a single tone row, producing vastly different effects from tier to tier, but also blending in sonorities and dissonances that, for all their strangeness, never dissolve into mere chaos. There have been a number of fine recordings, and the premiere recording by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under the baton of Ernest Ausermet (Martin’s favorite conductor) is justly famous; but the one I want to recommend here is from 2014 on the Musiques Suisses label, performed by the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester and the Mozart-Ensemble der Musikhochschule Luzern, conducted by Alois Koch.

4. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799), Violin Concerto in A major: What can one say about the Chevalier de Saint-Georges that is adequate to his legend? Especially given that his legend is entirely true? He was born on Guadeloupe, the ‘natural child’ of the plantation owner Georges Bologne de Saint-Georges and a slave woman named Nanon. He was acknowledged by his father and given the family name, though French law barred him from inheritance by virtue of having been born out of wedlock, and in time he became one of the most accomplished, dashing, and dauntless men of France during the twilight of the Bourbons and the dawn of the Republic. He was only seven when, early in 1753, he was sent to France to begin his formal education, where he excelled in all his studies—not only in violin and musical composition, but also in the aristocratic arts of horsemanship, dance, athletics, marksmanship, and fencing. He was only fifteen when he defeated the somewhat racist fencing master Alexandre Picard in a public match, and by seventeen he was regarded as invincible in the speed, nimbleness, and accuracy of his blade. John Adams met him in 1779 and reported that he could shoot a flipped coin from the air with a pistol. He was also a prolific and charming lover. It was his martial prowess, however, that won him an appointment to the King’s Guard, and it was his virtuosity on the violin that won him fame and the friendship of, among others, Marie Antoinette. He became the conductor of Le Concert des Amateurs in 1773 and briefly director of the Paris Opera in 1776, before the complaints of three lady sopranos who refused to sing under the baton of a black man, as well as the intrigues of a beautiful dancer whose advances he had rejected, forced him to abandon the position. He did for a while serve as conductor of Le Concert de la Loge Olympique, taking the position in 1781, and was praised for the precision he imposed upon the ensemble. It was during this period that he devoted himself to composing operas, symphonies, concerti, sonatas, solo and duo violin pieces, and so forth; after 1785, abruptly, he ceased composing. He fled to England during the revolution, returned to serve the Republic in a legion for ‘citizens of color’, spent a year in prison during the Terror, and then made shift as he might till his death in somewhat impecunious circumstances. What else? Oh, there was the time when half a dozen assassins in the employ of a cuckolded nobleman fell upon him, but he fought them off till the night guard arrived. More impressively, there was the episode of the five brigands who attacked him in England when he was on his way to a public performance, his violin in hand; he disabled all of them quite efficiently and then went on to his concert. Anyway, the stories are too numerous, and we should not let the flamboyance of his biography obscure the excellence of his music. This work is my favorite among his pieces, both for its lyricism and for the extraordinary virtuosity it requires of the soloist (he wrote it for himself, needless to say). It starts with an allegro moderato whose beautifully melodic orchestral prologue establishes four main themes that the violin then works variations upon in a cascade of double-stops, string crossings, and vertiginously ascending registers worthy of Paganini. There follows a largo with a composed cadenza that has one of the most affecting sustained melodic arcs of any concerto of that era. Finally comes a rondeau that brings the whole to a dancing, joyous, elegant, but also extremely intricate conclusion. There are a few fine recordings, but I think the most recent perhaps the best: the 2026 Aparté release from the Orchestre national de Cannes under the direction of Benjamin Levy with Romuald Grimbert-Barré as soloist.

5. Per Nørgård (1932-2025), Gilgamesh: An Opera in Six Days and Seven Nights: When Nørgård passed away last year, one of the titans of modern music vanished from our midst, though the event was barely noticed outside his native Denmark, and probably barely noticed there as well. Few other composers of his time produced as astonishing a body of work. He left behind orchestral music (including eight symphonies), chamber music (including ten string quartets), operas, ballets, choral music, settings for voice, solo music (including some truly exquisite pieces for guitar), and so forth, all of it marked by singular genius. His was, in one sense, what we tend to think of as a quintessentially Scandinavian musical voice, influenced by Sibelius, Nielsen, and Holmboe, often expressing itself in long lines of melodic development and rich sonority. But his was also an extremely personal idiom that, as it matured, became ever more distinctive. He created his own system of serial music based on the mathematical ‘infinity series’, which is to say continuous self-similar integer expansions, though he employed it with considerable flexibility. The technique involved starting from a basic interval that would progressively acquire, through repetition and variation, more and more complex harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic layerings, and the result in his greatest compositions was a music that seems to draw one into itself, as if one is being carried upward into a constantly mounting sea-swell. But I suppose that is all rather vague sounding. In any event, in the early 1970’s, he produced two operas, Gilgamesh and Siddhartha, that to my mind rank extremely high in the late 20^th century repertoire, and I have chosen the former, in part—though this does not matter here—because of its magnificently odd staging. Nørgård wrote the libretto himself, drawing from the epic, but also from other sources of Mesopotamian myth, as well at the last from his own spiritual imagination. Hence, it begins with the creation of the world rather than with King Gilgamesh in Uruk, and it ends in a manner I will not give away. The emphasis of the drama is on the depth of Gilgamesh’s friendship with Enkidu, his grief at the latter’s death, his longing for immortality, and his final resignation to the inevitable. But the spectacle of the opera’s performance, with its cast of gods and mortals and beasts and demons, is meant to be positively liturgical, or something of a sacred pageant. The action is not played out on a proscenium stage but rather in the central space of a rectangular auditorium, with the audience seated on either side lengthwise along the walls. All the vocalists and musicians, including the conductor, are in full costume, and no one on the ‘stage’ is without a role in the mystery play. In fact, the conductor represents the sun god Shamash, and he actually orbits the players continuously as the days and nights of the drama elapse. The music is beautiful and entrancing in ways too strange to describe. The infinity series provides its structure, but augmented by the overtone series that governs the melodies, with chromatic rows in constant pitched contrast to diatonic modes, and the rhythms expand and contract, with shifting stresses, according to the golden ratio and the Fibonnaci sequence. Here too description fails. The orchestration is ingenious, especially in its uncanny percussion effects, played by musicians who frequently move through the audience with tuned gongs, shakers, unusual metallic chimes, and even unconventional ‘air percussion’ instruments played by being blown through in rhythmic sequences. Why am I trying to describe this? The recording I recommend is the 1992 Da Capo release, featuring the Swedish Radio Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of Tamás Vető.

6. Marin Marais (1656-1728), Le Tableau de l’Operation de la Taille and Les Relevailles: Marais, apart from his wholly justified reputation as a composer of great elegance and cleverness in an age that prized the former inordinately and expected the latter as a matter of course, has a place in the history of European music as one of the earliest and most ingenious proponents of program music. He was also a virtuoso of the viol in all its variants who left behind an enormous repertoire written for that instrument in several compendious volumes. In his younger days, he was a student and occasional collaborator with Lully and he produced a small but admirable body of operas, mostly inspired by episodes from Ovid. The greater part of his oeuvre, however, consists in chamber pieces. We know of, but no longer possess, a few sacred pieces as well. He received a court appointment at Versailles in 1676 as a member of the larger ensemble there, but three years later was promoted to Ordinaire de la Chambre du Roy pour la Viole, in which capacity he served until 1725. Again, though, it is the program pieces that make him a distinctive figure among the Parisian composers of his time: Le Labyrinthe, La Rêveuse, Les Voix Humaines, Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris, Plainte, Les Follies d’Espagne (a theme and 32 variations requiring immense virtuosity from the violist), and so on. But the most famous of his programs is that of these two connected pieces from 1725: ‘The Bladder-Stone Operation Table’ and ‘Convalescence’. They provide, I must say, an entirely convincing musical portrait of an agonizing surgical procedure in the days before anesthesia, which Marais himself had undergone at the age of 64. The drama, so to speak, is played out between a viola da gamba, which represents the voice of the patient, and the basso continuo of a harpsichord. The former is especially effective in capturing a scream of pain and a subsequent whimper of exhausted misery. The program notes say it all: “The appearance of the apparatus—tremulousness at the sight of it—the resolution to mount it—the accomplishment of this—getting off again—somber reflections—the binding down of arms and legs with silken cords—making the incision—inserting the forceps—the stone is extracted—the voice dies away in a croak—the flow of blood—the cords removed—being carried to bed…”. The music begins with agitated tremolos and nervous dissonances, the tempo shifting abruptly and violently and the chords becoming more dissonant as blade and forceps do their work; then the tones becoming strained and strident as the patient screams at the écoulment du sang before growing hoarse and weak; and then finally the score descends into calmer intonations as the patient is released and borne to his sickbed on a languid and somniferous major chord. The companion piece then describes, with simple and flowing melodic lines, the gradual release from pain and the soothing restfulness of returning health. It really is a wonderful feat of wordless but expressive narrative and an ingenious use of minimal musical forces. The gold standard of performances is that of Jordi Savall on seven-string bass viol, accompanied by Ton Koopman, originally recorded in 1983 but remastered for the 2011 release on Alia Vox.

7. Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960), Symphony no. 4, “From the Outermost Skerries”: Having now invoked both Nordic orchestral music and musical programs, I might as well continue both themes here. This symphony is not really supplied with a program, admittedly, but neither is it absolute music; rather, it is something of a musical hybrid, part symphony, part tone-poem, evoking a seascape, but employing it really as a depiction of the tides and turbulences of erotic passion. Alfvén was, in his day, one of Sweden’s greatest conductors and violinists, as well as the nation’s most accomplished and obstinately late Romantic composer (he was also a very estimable painter). He remains best remembered for his orchestral music—five symphonies, several tone-poems and program works, his three ‘Swedish Rhapsodies’—though his chamber music, choral works, cantatas, and song settings are firmly ensconced in the national repertoire. This symphony from 1919 is his greatest work, it seems obvious to me. It is certainly the work composed on the most impressive scale and with the greatest unity of structure; but it also contains much of his most inspired and captivating musical invention. He was moved to attempt it on first hearing Nielsen’s Sinfonia Espansiva, and what he accomplished genuinely honored that particular tour de force. Alfvén was always one to luxuriate in gorgeous orchestral colors, using orchestration reminiscent of Richard Strauss’s, but here he was at once at his most opulent in chromatic richness and controlled in harmonic structure. The symphony is also a work for voice, or rather for two voices, though it has no words. A soprano and a tenor portray not the thoughts but the feelings of two lovers drawing together, ascending together to a pitch of ecstasy, and released together into a final calm. Their voices interweave throughout the piece, both with one another and with the instrumental lines, across a vast continuous arc of four movements full of shifting tone-colors. The music definitely reminds one of any number of Scandinavian aural portraits of vast mysterious landscapes, but the vividness and frequent radiance of its orchestration is clearly inspired by Debussy, and its enveloping chromaticism—not to mention its unrestrained eroticism—is altogether Wagnerian and reminds one irresistibly of Tristan und Isolde. The first movement is a thing of mists and waves, surging and tumultuous harmonic layers and vagrant thematic development, with the vocalists almost moaning with yearning. The second, which I suppose could be called a scherzo, is brighter, more ebullient, more excitedly grateful, the orchestration becoming all at once diaphanous, in constantly shifting chromatic layers, especially in the almost antiphonal oscillation between string and woodwind figures. Then comes Alfvén’s finest orchestral achievement, the immense and beautiful and ecstatic third movement, which clearly depicts the consummation of the lovers’ passion, with long melodic lines and flowing depths of harmony undergirding the tenor’s ardent sighs of transport and the soprano’s cry of… well, let’s try to be discreet here. Then the fourth movement arrives, not as any kind of resolution in the classical sense, but in a serene return to the seascape, now with the tempest having passed and the turbulence having subsided into luminous and languid chords descending toward silence. I apologize if any of this has proved too titillating, and I had better leave off here. For my money, the best recorded performance is the 1991 BIS release by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under the baton of… rather, let’s say, conducted by Neeme Järvi.

8. Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), Callirhoë: Ballet Symphonique: Chaminade was extremely popular and celebrated in her day, both as a composer and as a pianist; and the two sides of her fame were inseparable, since in concert she performed only her own music. In 1913 she became the first woman composer ever awarded the Légion d’Honneur. One of the more notable enthusiasts of her music was Queen Victoria, for which reason an organ work by Chaminade was played at the queen’s funeral in 1901. Her piano setting of her own Pas des écharpes (Scarves’ Dance), originally from the work I have chosen here, sold millions of copies. She already had quite a following in France and Britain when, in 1908, she made her first US tour; I will not say that it was quite the equivalent of the Beatles coming to America for the first time, but it was a conspicuous success and definitely something of a sensation. If her fame has dimmed considerably since her day, that is largely because she lived during a period of extraordinary transition in musical forms and idioms and she, even more than other figures who were comparably caught between the late Romantic and modern styles (like Gounod and Saint-Saëns), spoke eloquently to her own time, but well before her death had come to sound to critics somewhat charmingly antique. Then, too, she was a woman, which was never good for anyone’s reputation in the world of ‘serious music’. It is all unjust, given the structural sophistication, imperturbable elegance, but also deeply affecting expressiveness of her music. The only piece of hers that has enjoyed perennial popularity is her Flute Concertino in D major, but everything she composed deserves still to be listened to and admired. She had been a child prodigy, I should note. When she was only 10, no less a virtuoso than Félix le Couppy tried to persuade her father to enroll the child at the Conservatoire de Paris; her father would hear nothing of it, however, on purely social grounds, but he arranged for her to be tutored privately by the conservatory’s faculty. She was taught composition by both Benjamin Godard and Martin Pierre Marsick. In 1869, at age 12, she performed some of her own original music for Bizet, who was profoundly impressed. And, while she came principally to be known for her solo pieces, she enjoyed full command of the entire range of musical forms and forces. I have chosen her sole full ballet score, which premiered in 1888, because it demonstrates at a scale she would never have the opportunity to venture again just how sure that command was. It is quite unlike her salon pieces or even her more flamboyant orchestral works, marked as it is by lavish Romantic orchestration and constant dramatic shifts in tone and tempo. And yet it, like all her music, is unfailingly lyrical, elegant, and wistful. There are no Wagnerian surfeits, though there is a richness of controlled chromaticism that places it in the topography of late Romanticism, somewhere in the vicinity of Bayreuth. The score is built around not recurrent motifs, admittedly, but rather a profusion of melodic phrases. Since the original performances of the ballet, however, the music has survived chiefly in the form of one four-part orchestral suite and one six-part piano suite; but I recommend the entire 21-episode ballet itself. This has been available to us only for about a decade now, ever since it was reconstructed from the original scores by Martin Yates, who is also the conductor on the only complete recording there is, the 2016 Dutton/Epoch release, on which he leads the BBC Concert Orchestra.

*******

Two Notable Recordings:

1. Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), Symphony no. 5: During the final 30 years of his life, when Sibelius was no longer composing music but was quite comfortable living on the state pension that Finland had granted him, the most popular of his symphonies tended to be the second, which is of course a captivatingly tuneful and persuasive work. Since then, however, the fifth has won out as the most popular, and it is conveniently and epicentrically placed among his genuinely original and brilliant mature symphonies, which are the third through the seventh. Sibelius’s reputation has, of course, gone through a few curious oscillations; in the mid-20^th century, such was his immense popularity among concert-goers worldwide that it was perfectly plausible for Dana Andrews in Laura to tell Vincent Price that the program for the concert that the latter had lied about attending had been switched at the last minute to a night entirely of Sibelius. At the same time, the unapologetic grandeur and (dare we say it) beauty of Sibelius’s music was the target of the unremitting scorn and bile of Virgil Thomson—though I suspect in large part out of Thomson’s resentment at the relative obscurity of his own music. I happen to adore the great Finn (who, like many educated Finns of his time, never learned to speak Finnish very well); I might be more a partisan of the fourth and sixth symphonies, but I am as susceptible to the magnificence of the fifth as any other galoot. Sibelius composed it in 1915 for his 50^th birthday, which had been declared a national holiday, but the less indulgent and more austerely monumental version we now all know appeared in 1919, with its three movements all surprisingly in a major key. There are countless recordings of note, but one of which I am especially fond is the 1988 EMI release with Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In that performance, the third movement in particular, in its handling of the swelling theme that came inappropriately to be known as ‘Thor swinging his hammer’ (since Thor was not a Finnish god) and of the gigantic resolution in the last few bars is masterful in its rhythmic control and almost shocking abruptness, and since first hearing it I have come to find just about all other versions less compelling.

2. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Symphony no. 8: What can one say about Mahler that does justice to the sheer insane vastness and temperamental excesses of his most famous works? And what can one say about his eighth symphony—the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, as it came to be known to Mahler’s great displeasure—with regard to how far it takes that insanity and those excesses? There are few orchestral works or choral works (and Symphony 8 is both) that require such enormous forces, instrumental and vocal, or that employ them in a structure of such spacious design. Mahler had long been fond of combining the vocal and orchestral in his music, but before the appearance of the eighth in 1910 he had produced three purely instrumental symphonies in a row. Here, however, he both returned to his earlier fascination with the heterogeneous form for his large-scale works and established a new pattern for exploring that form, one that would also yield Das Lied von der Erde (a symphony in all but name, because Mahler feared that the mystic symphonic number 9 would precipitate his death, which indeed is precisely what happened when he foolishly cast off his superstition and composed a symphony with just that number). In any event, this gigantic work—built around two choral texts, one the ninth century Pentecost hymn Veni creator spiritus, the other the concluding scene of Goethe’s Faust part two, which says about as much as needs be said about Mahler’s eccentricity—has had many recordings, but none is as justly celebrated as the 1991 live performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, the Eton College Boys’ Choir, and the London Symphony Chorus, all under the baton of Klaus Tennstedt, originally released by EMI but also available now from an LPO 2019 release. Tennstedt manages to extract every last drop of mystic transport from the piece while somehow entirely preventing the stupendous forces at work in the music to escape his control at any point.

Brebis (Quintidi), 15 Thermidor, CCXXXIV

Public Orthodoxy has been running a series of essays called the Free Inquiry Project inspired by a remark of Jaroslav Pelikan: “Orthodoxy is truly orthodox only when it is eager to encourage free and responsible inquiry, even into orthodoxy itself.” One would not think this an especially scandalous sentiment, but in the current atmosphere of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in this country and around the world, it is one that can provoke scowls of consternation and howls of rage, particularly among recent converts. I contributed one of the essays in the series, under the title “On Living and Merely Surviving”.

Mûre (Nonidi), 9 Thermidor, CCXXXIV

201. Lady Nijō, A Tale Unasked: These lists have abounded in titles from Japan’s glorious Heian period, a literary culture dominated by women writers. This memoir, Towazugatari, is perhaps the last great work of the Heian in its twilight and Lady Nijō (1258-post 1307) the last major representative of that tradition—though both book and author were nearly lost to posterity during the Kamakura period, and it was only the chance discovery of an eighteenth century copy of the text in the first half of the twentieth century that saved it from oblivion. It is now recognized as a masterpiece of Japanese literature. We do not now know the writer’s true name; Nijō merely means something like ‘Second Avenue’, and Lady Nijō is a court sobriquet indicating that she was one of the more favored of the imperial concubines or wives (probably the former), residing in the neighborhood of the imperial compound in the Prime Ward. That was a ‘distinction’, however, that she possessed only from 1271 to 1283. She belonged to the Minamoto clan, the same noble family that would establish the Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates after her time, but her pedigree did not make her a free woman. She was given to Emperor Go-Fukakusa when she was only 14 years old and was then raped by the emperor and thereafter by various other members of the court. In her later years in the imperial household, she took lovers of her own, in defiance of her condition, and was ultimately expelled at the behest of the emperor’s chief consort Higashi-nijō. She took vows as a Buddhist nun and lived out the rest of her life, at least during the period covered in her book, in a rather peripatetic fashion, on a long pilgrimage from one holy site to another following an itinerary charted years before by the great poet Saigyō (1118-1190). A Tale Unasked is one of the most revealing documents from the Heian, especially as regards the forms of sexual coercion to which even women of the nobility were subjected at the time, but also as regards the religious life of those in orders, and the refuge afforded many women by the monastic habit. It is a work, as well, every bit the artistic equal of the other great books of the Heian. Its prose and its poems are of the most distinguished kind, suffused with all the virtues of the best classical Japanese literature, as well as by that literature’s guiding themes: the bitterness and evanescence—but also the delicate beauty—of life.

202. Kim Sowǒl, Azaleas: I have been attempting, with small success, to acquire some knowledge of Korean, of somewhat greater scope than the names of dishes on a menu. The effort has at least had the benign effect of sending me in the direction of one of the fathers of modern Korean verse and perhaps the greatest Korean lyric poet of the twentieth century. Kim Sowǒl was the pen-name of Kim Jeong-sik (1902-1934), and Azaleas (1925) was the sole collection of his poetry to be published during his lifetime. After his death, another volume of selected verse, including the best of the ever more infrequent poems of his last decade, was issued by a literary executor; but his actual floruit was even briefer than his dates might seem to indicate, as deep depression and alcoholism steadily eroded his poetic powers before leading him to his eventual suicide. His had not been a happy life. He was still an infant when his father suffered an irrevocable descent into psychosis. His grandfather became the only paternal presence in his life, and saw to it that he received a good education in classical Chinese and very fine schooling; but his father’s mental illness shattered his family. His ambitions were literary from an early period, though he made his livelihood chiefly as a newspaper editor, publishing his verse pseudonymously in small if distinguished journals. In 1923, he lived for a time in Japan, and this experience sent him back in the direction of native Korean traditions of poetry and folksong. He became, for want of a better term, an early ‘modernist’ in Korean letters, at once an explorer of novel poetic forms but also, in those forms, drawing on the cadences and imagery of the native arts of the rural and lower classes. Azaleas is recognized as a work of singular beauty in the Korean canon, one whose surface simplicity sometimes belies its subtlety and verbal innovations. The poems are full of melancholy; their lyricism is of a particularly musical kind; their principal themes are partings, loss, haunting memories, irrecoverable moments when happiness seemed almost attainable, and resignation. Many of them are love poems, but typically tell of a love that is now already past or that has no future. A Korean literary scholar described him once to me as a poet haunted by the ephemerality of both love and life, always seemingly destined to die young, whether by his own hand or not.

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Carthame (Octidi), 8 Thermidor, CCXXXIV

Over at Sesame and Lilies, our latest conversation—this one with Tom Holland the historian (not the superhero)—has arrived. It is, alas and alack, behind the paywall, but those of you who subscribe to that publication might wish to watch it. The audio link is below.

Sesame and Lilies

Episode Eight: Tom Holland

This month, our guest is the wise, witty, and mercurial Tom Holland, historian, novelist, podcaster, and raconteur. The conversation ranged not necessarily widely, but at least nimbly. We discussed his work, with a special emphasis on his book Dominion…

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16 days ago · 27 likes · 1 comment · Sesame and Lilies

Also, below is a link to a pleasant conversation I had with Burl Horniachek on his recently released anthology of Christian verse from non-English sources, up to 1800. A second volume will eventually follow. We talked about the book, about the global reach of Christian history, about the nature of verse translation, and about Alberta (Canada, that is).

Épeautre (Primidi), 1 Thermidor, CCXXXIV

Bluebottle: What time is it, Eccles?

Eccles: Err, just a minute. I, I’ve got it written down ’ere on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning.

Bluebottle: Ooooh, then why do you carry it around with you, Eccles?

Eccles: Well, umm, if a anybody asks me the ti-ime, I ca-can show it to dem.

Bluebottle: Wait a minute, Eccles, my good man...

Eccles: What is it, fellow?

Bluebottle: It’s writted on this bit of paper, what is eight o’clock, is writted.

Eccles: I know that, my good fellow. That’s right, um, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o’clock.

Bluebottle: Well then. Supposing when somebody asks you the time, it isn’t eight o’clock?

Eccles: Ah, den I don’t show it to dem.

Bluebottle: Ooohhh...

Eccles: [Smacks lips] Yeah.

Bluebottle: Well how do you know when it’s eight o’clock?

Eccles: I’ve got it written down on a piece of paper!

—The Goon Show, Series 7, Episode 18, ‘The Mysterious Punch-up-the-Conker’

I do not believe in what the philosopher of mind Keith Frankish (if I am not mistaken) has dubbed ‘illusionism’. I do not mean simply that I disagree with the position, though I most definitely do disagree on the matter with Frankish and the late Daniel Dennett and all the other philosophers who champion the view; I mean, rather, that there is no position there to disagree with. It does not exist, because it cannot, except as a mirage. Illusionism is an illusion of grammar, one that certain minds fabricate for themselves in much the way our minds fabricate a spatial image to fill in the blind spots in our fields of vision. In either case, the counterfeit is so subtle and seamless that it eludes direct notice, but a counterfeit it remains. Unlike the useful visual trick our optical neurology plays on us, however, illusionism is not a natural structural condition of how we perceive the world, but rather a very particular and eccentric theoretical construct, imposed upon our understanding of nature and forcibly held together by the pressures of a metaphysical ideology. It exploits a blind spot within our habits of thought and language in order to make a certain kind of logically impossible materialism seem plausible, hiding its one indispensable non-materialist premise in the invisible vanishing point of the personal perspective that none of us can escape, but that none of us can turn around to look at directly. Even so, no matter the ingenuity with which it is ‘performed’, illusionism is a pure phantasm. No one has ever really succeeded in being an illusionist in the philosophical sense; those who imagine they have are simply illusionists in the theatrical sense, so deft in their sleight of hand as to have deceived even themselves.

Perhaps I should explain, though, what illusionism is, or what it imagines itself to be. In simple terms, it is the denial that we possess phenomenal consciousness in the way we think we do. Our ordinary understanding of our experiences, which philosophy of mind translates into the extraordinary question of the ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’, tells us that we have access to private, qualitative states of subjective awareness: the ‘what it’s like’ of the personal experience of colors, tastes, tones, even internal titillation or aversion or frissons of excitement. Rather, we are intricate neural and cognitive systems engaged in filtering data and translating them into behaviors, operating at a level of such complexity that our brains, in order to monitor and facilitate that flow of information and orientation, must create for themselves the illusion of a rich inner world of phenomenal experience, which then serves as a user-illusion or interface that allows us to function with economy and efficiency. There are no real intrinsic qualia, says this theory, but only a system of mental states and propensities by which a brain ‘tracks’ its activities. That is not to deny that there are experiences, supposedly. At least, illusionists assure us that it is a caricature of illusionism to depict it as a denial of the mental states associated with our brain events; illusionists believe in pain and color perception and all the other affects of our interactions with the world, they tell us; they simply do not believe that these are irreducible and intrinsic states of inner, private experience whose phenomenal natures are really distinct from the mechanical processing of data. For Frankish and others of this persuasion, illusionism is a coherent and scientifically conceivable alternative to the Cartesian picture of the res cogitans in mysterious alliance with the res extensa of the body and of the material world. Needless to say, like so many Anglophone philosophers of mind, he seems to think that these are the only two real options that exist. Any understanding of mind and world from before the seventeenth century is simply terra incognita in his philosophy; and, even among modern schools of thought, the third option of Berkeleyan idealism does not merit serious attention for him.

Now, obviously, the riposte to this position that seems most plausible, and even inevitable, is to dismiss it out of hand as an absurd redoubling of the problem rather than a solution. In the case of phenomenal consciousness, one is immediately tempted to say, there can be no illusion here, because qualitative experience is a tautology, however it might be explained in functional terms. To suffer the illusion of phenomenal consciousness is really, truly, irreducibly to experience phenomenal consciousness; the illusion is already the reality it supposedly dissembles. Ah, no, says the illusionist, that is merely the crude folk-psychology of our ordinary way of thinking about our cognitive processes in terms of their algorithmic distillates—their interfaces or ‘screen icons’. This objection merely repeats the caricature of the illusionist argument, by again mistaking it for the denial of experience tout court, as if illusionists refused to believe that pain hurts or colors catch the eye. No, the claim is simply that pain or color is how the brain tracks certain functional neural states, under the useful representational fiction of this or that private quale. Now, you may say this does not actually answer the objection, but merely attempts to evade it by refusing to abstract the experience as experience from the event and to consider it in itself: a first-person, unified, continuous subjective immediacy that cannot simply be explained away in third-person terms of mechanical operation and interactivity. But Frankish would see that as a pardonable but somewhat primitive, pre-scientific, Cartesian fallacy.

Frankish is wrong. In fact, the ‘coarse caricature’ of illusionism is not a caricature at all, and can be regarded as such only through indulging in caricatures of both the ‘Hard Problem’ and subjective experience. More to the point, the illusionist position is not in fact an alternative to the Cartesian picture of reality, but is merely one particularly absurd terminus toward which an inflexible Cartesian paradigm can gravitate. The problem with Frankish or Dennett or others in this school is not that they have rejected a Cartesian psychology, but rather that they remain trapped within the inherent contradictions in that psychology, and especially within the contradictions of the mechanistic philosophy it presumes. I shall get to all of that presently, however.

In any event, the peculiar weakness of illusionism struck me even more forcibly than it normally does when I recently listened to the recording of a two-hour conversation between Frankish and Alex O’Connor. Frankish is a charming and intelligent man, and plainly perfectly earnest in his desire to make sense of the issues of mind and brain that preoccupy him; but it became increasingly clear, as he attempted both to dispel what he considers to be misunderstandings of his project and to propose a convincing account in their stead, that he, no doubt with the best will in the world, has failed to grasp not only the actually very solvent ‘folk-psychological’ objections to that project, but also how thoroughly his own reasoning about the matter consists in strategies for blinding himself to the problem he imagines he is addressing. More than ever before, I was convinced by his careful and persistent case for the illusionist view that he has chiefly succeeded in persuading himself that he believes in something he does not—because he cannot—believe, any more than he can believe in a square circle.

Then again, that may be just as bad as speaking of the illusion of intrinsic consciousness; surely if one believes that one believes, then one truly believes—by virtue, again, of the simple logic of tautology. There seems to me, though, to be a crucial difference between the two cases: to say that the illusion of consciousness would be the consciousness of illusion is merely to point out that intrinsic experience is uniquely ontologically irreducible in itself and hence definitely real, while to say that Frankish only believes that he believes in illusionism is to point out that his convictions in this matter fix upon no actual object, and that his own attempts to state what he believes are already, semantically and syntactically speaking, subversive of his purposes. More simply, in one case the illusionist is attempting to deny an undeniable reality; in the other case he is affirming the reality of something impossible. The ‘folk-psychological’ protest that consciousness of intrinsic qualitative states attests irrefutably to itself is simply correct. Illusionism, by contrast, is a nonexistent position, like the belief that the number 7 is in fact really both 0 and also a species of carp. Belief in belief is always possible, but simple belief is not. You can believe that you believe that you do not exist, but still I would insist that you cannot successfully believe that you do not exist. You can say it, and perhaps you can derange your faculties with sufficient force to make yourself think you believe it, but the mental state thus produced would still correctly be characterized as an illusion, or perhaps delusion, no matter what energy and ingenuity you might employ in its defense. There is no real object of credence there, not even one that can be represented in some chimerical composite form, like a mermaid; there is only a haze of verbal gestures and half-formed intuitions that simply cannot coalesce into a stable image. So it is, I submit, with illusionism. I do not mean this, though, as a mockery of Frankish’s views. He is a careful and reflective theorist, but his positions on these matters, as I say, are also products of several unreflective habits of language and thought: conventions of grammar, a tacit and very modern tendency toward mechanistic understandings of nature, a certain definition of science that has no actual connection to scientific rigor or to any scientific knowledge we possess, and (above all) that secret but devilishly tenacious Cartesianism in the model of reality he presumes.

I have written often enough and at sufficient length on those aspects of mental agency that I think resistant to physicalist reduction, and I do not want to rehearse my arguments just now. In very general terms, they include considerations not only of phenomenal or qualitative consciousness, but also of intrinsic intentionality, unity of awareness, and the inherently regressive structure of subjective acts of consciousness when conceived in physicalist terms (to which I shall return shortly). The principal issue informing most of those arguments might be described simply as the mystery of ‘first-personhood’. To the illusionist, that is no mystery at all, of course; it is merely the illusion of unified subjectivity and of private states to which we have introspective access. All of that is, again, just the ‘user-interface’ generated by the third-person system of data processing. Of course, oddly enough, that alleged effect is also somehow the prior condition of such privacy and introspection, or of the illusion of such privacy and introspection, which seems to make the whole interior spectacle a kind of organic causa sui, of the most unforgivingly paradoxical kind. At least, it seems hard not to see something of the ‘Münchhausen Trilemma’ as formulated by Hans Albert (who, being German, insisted on that spelling of the good baron’s name): just as Baron Munchausen lifted himself and his horse out of a mire by pulling upward on his own plaited tresses, so illusionism seems to lift itself out of dualism in one of three possible ways: by circular reasoning or by infinite regress or by sheer dogmatic assertion. If this seems too obvious and unsophisticated a diagnosis, all I can say is that this is a case in which subtlety and sophistication are scarcely called for. Or, rather, they are called for, but only for those who want to avoid the force of the accusation by refusing to confront it. This was, at least, my view of the matter long before listening to the conversation between Frankish and O’Connor, and it was even more my view afterward, having seen Frankish repeatedly veer away from the actual problem of first-personhood every time O’Connor tried to invite it to come to the front of the stage.

The most captivating and perhaps most irrelevant way in which Frankish did this was to portray the ‘what it’s like’ of phenomenal awareness in terms purely of affectivity, as if the notion of intrinsic qualia were one merely of our psychological investment in our grateful sense of the richness of private experience. This was easy for him to dismiss as a mere flood of intuitive agitations, the mystery of which could, to his mind, be conjured away by reducing that seeming richness to the elaborately acquired and developed functional capacities by which our cognitive survey of reality has progressively—both phylogenically and ontogenically—installed itself ever more securely in our neural apparatus. He even adduced the story of a woman blind from early childhood whose sight was surgically restored much later in life, only for her to discover that she lacked the capacity to translate visual data into a fully satisfactory and composed inner experience, which ultimately led her to elect to wear opaque glasses and live again as if blind. For Frankish, this seemed to suggest that phenomenal experience really is only a functional residue of a mechanical system rather than (as another person might have concluded from exactly the same story) something conceptually and practically distinct from the functions it accompanies. At least, he seemed to be drawing a causal conclusion regarding the relation of brain states to phenomenal experience from what was clearly only a correlation between them, and even then a correlation that still did not touch upon the first-personhood of that woman’s experiences of either blindness or sight. Whatever the case, though, Frankish’s argument was beside the point. The affective richness of awareness is neither here nor there, and is almost certainly variable from one organism or person to another. Renée Fleming’s perfect pitch gives her a qualitative consciousness of music vastly different from that of someone who is totally tone deaf, but she is no more subjectively conscious than he is; the first-personhood of her experience of all the correct notes, either in a complex chord or in a serial arpeggiation of that chord, and his very different experience of those same notes, either as a burst of dissonance or as a meaningless sequence of abruptly punctual noises, are equally subjective and equally conscious, even though her exhilaration in the richness of the music she experiences may affectively far exceed his indifference to the same measurable ensemble of sound waves. But the quantitative event and its variable reception as cognitive data do not in any way qualify the enigma of experience as such, which remains equally mysterious in either case.

To put the matter slightly differently: when Thomas Nagel asked ‘what it’s like to be a bat’, he was not posing a question regarding the rich inner emotional life of bats; he was drawing a simple and (one would think) obvious distinction between the quantitative registering of data and the qualitative experience of those data. That there is a very real difference between the measurable calculus of the former and the verifiable but largely ineffable event of the latter should not need any very elaborate demonstration. In a very real sense, in fact, that ineffability is itself that qualitative disjunction made startling manifest. To speak of qualia is to call attention not to a mood or emotive state, but to a phenomenological specification of what differentiates experience from the sort of information that can be communicated in objective quanta. But, when all is said and done, making a point of missing the point is what illusionism (or functionalism or ‘qualia quietism’) is all about. The way in which the illusionist evades the question is, almost infallibly, to confuse the issue in two oddly incompatible ways: at one and the same time to conflate qualia both with private, psychological, affective responses to data and with the physical sensations of perceptible qualities like color or scent. The former error is what Husserl and others would call psychologism, and I suppose we could call the latter error pathologism, but in either case the central problem has been altogether ignored. There is a ‘what it’s like’ in every conscious cognitive state, even when there is no conspicuous emotional state involved. The affect here must be distinguished from the affectivity, or even from the effect of the affect, in either the subjective or objective sense of the genitive—either the psychological effect produced by the affect or the neurophysiological effect that gives rise to the affect. There is an experience of ‘what it’s like’ in remembering an appointment, which is quite different I assume from anything that the occurs in the calendar function of a smartphone. There is a ‘what it’s like’ to noticing a pencil on a desk or even to one’s awareness of thinking something is true (to which I shall return below). And, frankly, the pretense that there is any obscurity or ambiguity or (for that matter) doubt about this distinction, and about the impossibility of reducing quantitative calculation and qualitative experience to one and the same phenomenon, does not rise to the level of a serious intellectual position. It is impossible to have a meaningful debate about a willful refusal to acknowledge the indubitable. As Searle somewhere remarked, if experiential consciousness of this kind is an illusion, then very well: it is that illusion that is the conscious experience in need of explanation.

To be fair, Frankish in this regard is merely treading a well-worn trail in Anglo-American philosophy of mind, one that has never been blazed in the more phenomenologically inclined continental tradition, for the very good reason that it does not really lead anywhere. It is common for analytic philosophers to approach mental agency as a collection of distinct functions and faculties, arranged together in an extrinsic aggregate of parts but otherwise separate from one another. If one begins in this fashion, one has already started from a mechanical fiction that more or less determines how the analysis is to proceed; but this ‘faculty psychology’, as Husserl might call it, corresponds to nothing that really exists. Mental agency may vary in the relative degree of awareness achieved, but no aspect of it exists apart from the totality of its action, which becomes a conscious action always and only within a movement of intentionality both proceeding from and appearing to a unified subjective apprehension. That agency can be conceptually articulated into distinct aspects, as part of a general phenomenology of its structure, but it certainly cannot be decomposed into separable functions, even if the physical apparatus of cognition and sensation can be. Therein lies the first mystery of the notorious mind-body problem. There are definitely a great many material parts and physical functions in our cognitive grasp of the world, all of which as material phenomena should, if mechanism or some analogous form of physicalism is true, be devoid of any kind of true unity or intrinsic intentionality. And yet, every time we pronounce or presume the designation ‘I’, we invoke an immediate experience of a unifying totality within the space of consciousness, prior even to any reflective differentiation of subject and object. That does not mean there are not plural functions at work behind the curtain or below the threshold or beyond the high vaulted ceiling of that space, but within that space itself there is something unifying and directing that array of forces. This is also why it is futile for Frankish to try to reduce phenomenal consciousness to what Ned Block denominated ‘access consciousness’ (the non-phenomenal general possession of information states, perhaps as physical brain states, available to our varied systems of cognitive processing). Even if a hard and fast division of this sort could be coherently maintained—and I do not believe it can in physicalist terms—access consciousness would still subsist as an act within the same structure of unity, intentionality, and even (or so I would argue) affect and introspective regress. Consciousness of any kind exists as just this order of first-personhood, which cannot result from any mere combination of mechanical forces, because it is the prior condition of any combined effect as that which appears. As Fichte most incisively argued, the immediacy of consciousness in a nonobjective awareness of itself is always already present as the irreducible ground of conscious acts, whether they are general acts of knowledge or specific acts of attentiveness and phenomenal awareness. As it happens, I agree with Frankish that a real distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness is indeed largely illusory, not because the latter can be reduced to the former, but because both turn out to be irreducible in exactly the same way, and therefore different from one another in this respect only by degrees.

Needless to say—and, to his credit, Frankish is aware of this—it would not make sense to try to explain the structure of consciousness away by reference to some supposed executive brain module or neurological panopticon where all these faculties converge before some kind of subject within the subject. That would be just an ineptly materialist version of what Dennett called the ‘Cartesian theatre’, which would require either the return of the ghost in the machine or an infinite regress into ever more centralized and ever more minuscule ‘homuncular’ modules. Rather, Frankish believes in an irreducibly plural set of cognitive events and operations that only—again, as an interface or user-illusion—appear to us as a unified subjective perspective. There are, supposedly, ‘plural drafts’ of consciousness that the brain is ceaselessly generating, filtering, synthesizing, and presenting to itself as a phenomenal, intentional, cognitive unity; but that unity is itself only a useful fiction that we narrate to ourselves.

The only problem with this is that it is utter nonsense. Once again, Baron Munchausen tugs manfully away at his braided hair, trying to bear himself and his mount aloft. The translation of plurality into a genuinely indissoluble unity of apprehension—not a composite or synoptic compilation, but an actual unity of the awareness of this event of cognition within this continuum of experience—is simply impossible in mechanical terms, as would be also the illusion of such unity as the ‘user-interface’ of a mechanical system. Here again the Cartesian theatre requires its proscenium and its audience, and the more widely diffused the various stage effects and performers throughout the brain, the more agonizingly mysterious that unity is rendered. And let us be clear: this unity is not merely some agreement of sensible data in a synchronous and symmetrical whole, which the brain need merely keep in proper alignment as a cognitive event. It is instead a positively transcendental capacity and orientation that subtends both the conjunctions and disjunctions of data within its always already detached survey of the world and the senses, in self-present immediacy. It attests to itself with irrefutable probity. You see a distant flash of lightning, followed some seconds later by the sound of thunder reaching your ears; the two data occur for your senses disjoined and qualitatively unalike, and yet your experience holds them together not as proximate but unrelated data, but as a continuous apprehension, a phenomenal totality presented to a unified cognitive perspective, an indivisible vanishing point that must always already be there before even any synthesis can be achieved. So it is with ‘plural drafts’ of consciousness: there may not be a substantial soul-substance of the Cartesian variety there, lodged incongruously in a mechanical body, but there is definitely a continuous ‘I’, if only in that instant—let’s be Buddhists about this for a moment—to whom and by whom and in whom there is a presentation, a Darstellung, that defies mechanical analysis. Frankish simply presumes this first-personhood while obstinately refusing to turn his eyes in its direction.

Not that I want to press the point, though I believe it to be a phenomenological and logical truth, partly because I have done so elsewhere, and partly because it is a long argument, but mostly because it is something of a distraction from what principally concerns me here, which is that aforementioned first-personhood and its inherently regressive structure—if, that is, one tries to explain it in mechanical terms rather than grant, as one ought, that it must necessarily be present prior even to introspection. In fact, every aspect of mental agency exhibits this regressive structure if reduced to a material model: every act of intentionality is prompted by a prior and more transcendental orientation toward a realm of values that makes finite intentional ends available to the mind; the unity of mental acts is always ever more individual as one traces them back to their causal foundations; awareness itself is like the infinitely receding images of two facing mirrors in its introspective depths. Frankish, like Dennett before him, resists the notion of introspective consciousness as robustly as he can, since that is the very issue that the ‘Hard Problem’ raises; and, as I have said, he tends to mount his defense by casting that issue in a purely psychological and affective light, as if the felt richness of experience is what makes it a challenge to physicalist reduction. But that is not at all where the enigma lies. The mystery is more basic than even introspection, since it is the mystery of an immediate self-awareness that must be in place in order for the introspective division into subject and object to be possible at all. As even Aristotle noted, long before questions of intentionality explicitly entered Western philosophy in the late Middle Ages and then in modern phenomenology (chiefly by way of Brentano), all conscious awareness is intrinsically self-awareness, not in a merely psychological sense, much less a purely affective sense, but in its very essence. To be conscious is to possess an awareness not only of the object of intention ‘out there’, or even of oneself as a biological organism with a full spectrum of proprioceptive faculties, but also of the act of awareness itself. To be conscious is to be conscious of being conscious; consciousness is always already its own intentional orientation and unified field as, once again, a transcendental condition of all experience. Understood incoherently as a mechanical or physical function, this structure would invoke the same infinite regress as a Cartesian theatre in the brain—or, rather, as Cartesian theatres, arranged like a miraculously interminable succession of matryoshka dolls, each attended by an ever more diminutive modular homunculus. Even for illusionism, the supposedly wholly material mechanism of cognition has been discreetly anthropomorphized, and the irreducible personal perspective of the ‘I’ has been inexplicably infused into the material substrate, even as its existence as a real event has been incoherently denied. What else can the materialist do, though? Consciousness, recognized as necessarily occurring within the intentionality and unity of mental agency, simply must rely upon an essential act logically prior to the physical apparatus of mere third-person data processing; otherwise, it simply can never occur at all. But, for the materialist, that act must remain hidden from view, even that of the illusionist.

This is one of the points in the performance at which the illusionist relies on an especially distracting bit of prestidigitation. Supposedly, once one removes all the cognitive apparatus—neurological, cerebral, what have you—and all the discrete processes of third-person filtration, synthesis, and systemic surveillance, all at once, abracadabra, presto, one finds that nothing remains that needs to be explained, and the entire spectacle of qualitative representation will simply vanish away in a scrim of smoke as nothing other than a stage effect. This truly is nonsensical. Or, rather, it is trivially true that, once the contents and media of perception and cognition have been subtracted, there is no concrete event of perception or cognition, and so nothing to be aware of. It is also true that drinking from an empty glass does not quench thirst, but that does not mean that there is no such thing as the taste and feel of water as distinct from the chemical transaction between water or air and one’s mouth and throat. In the event of knowing, there is in fact the experience itself, which is indeed something different from the flow of data, precisely because of this irreducible introspective regressiveness that is the structure of reflective awareness. And Frankish acknowledges this precisely by the way in which he denies it. Remove all the third-person elements of the event, and one finds indeed that the first-personhood of the experience is none of those things singly. Very well. But, by the same token, neither is it the combined effect of all those things taken together, for the simple reason that it must already have been in place for that combination of elements to have occurred at all, a prior condition always presumed even when left scrupulously unnamed. Frankish, in all his language, never actually gets behind or around to the other side of that subjective awareness that he thinks he is explaining away, but that he actually relies on as somehow always already present in the structure of perception and cognition he is describing. He goes to great lengths to decompose the stage effects of representation or knowledge, but never actually touches upon that silent witness who remains grammatically, if not semantically, obstinately present in all his constructions of the solution. Even if he were to succeed in accounting for what appears to consciousness—he does not, in fact, because his evasion of the phenomenal renders him incapable of an adequate phenomenology of the apparent—he still would not have addressed the appearing as such, as it necessarily arises within the mind’s reflective awareness of being aware. Instead, that first-person perspective is just simply there in his words, the hidden and immovable anchor holding the interactions of all those third-person physical quanta in place. Here the simpleminded village idealist’s cavil proves perfectly just: the illusion of consciousness is still the consciousness of an illusion. When Frankish claims that such critics have misunderstood him, it is he who is confused; they have understood him all too well. Yes, of course, take away the operations of the neural machinery and the data it processes and perhaps indeed nothing functional remains. But that is precisely the point, because something that is not simply functional, but instead more fundamental and necessary, nevertheless does remain; and, but for it, no truly mental function would be possible. Unless one can convincingly get behind not just the stage scenery, but also the spectating awareness of the witnessing ‘I’, so thoroughly that one need never invoke the first-person vantage at all by word or conceptual gesture, that anchor remains fixed and its chain remains unbreakable. Remove every object from before the face of the mirror, strip away layer upon layer of glass, but so long as the subtle silver tain remains there to gather in whatever light it can whenever one attempts to talk about systems that monitor themselves or about illusions conjured up and employed by some kind of perceiving and intending agency, however diminished and ghostly and suppressed that agency may now seem, absolutely nothing has been established except the impossibility of actually even conceiving of illusionism, let alone believing in it.

There is a reason why grammar refuses to give us a language that does not rely upon the anchor of the ‘I’. That anchor need not be conceived of in quite the essentialist form of the Cartesian ego, but it is present in every mental act that is aware of being aware of itself, and in every account we attempt of the nature of such acts. Frankish certainly relies upon it, and must do, because in all his arguments it is already there doing necessary work for him in almost silent, self-effacing coyness. This is the case also, with almost cruel consistency, when Frankish reprises Dennett’s circular attempt to dismiss subjectivity as no more than a narrative constructed by the brain, succeeding no better than Dennett did at conjuring away the unity and intentionality—the non-mechanical and logically prior vanishing points of perspective and purpose—of either the narrator or the auditor of the tale. The givenness of this first-personhood is the prior possibility not only of conscious agency, but of language; we can pretend to deny it or pretend that it is not qualitatively absolutely different from the third-personhood of composite or mechanical orders, but it is always there behind our backs, ready to catch us if we should fall. We may refuse to look back over our shoulder at it, or we may fail to notice it by virtue of its ubiquity and stubborn reliability, and so by virtue of how unthinkingly habituated to it we are; but any attempt to treat it as an illusion really will inevitably drag us back down into Munchausen’s mire.

This was especially evident at that point in the exchange between Frankish and O’Connor when the issue of philosophical zombies came up. In part, perhaps, the problem lies in the failure of David Chalmers or of Robert Kirk before him to make the notion resplendently clear. Certainly Frankish makes nothing of the distinction Chalmers draws between phenomenal and psychological knowledge, but it is debatable what Chalmers himself makes of it. Like Dennett, Frankish fends the issue off by saying that such zombies are typically conceived not only as being physiologically and structurally no different from us, but also as disposed to report themselves to be conscious, as both a cognitive and a phenomenal judgement. For Frankish, this means that such zombies would believe themselves to have phenomenal experiences just as we do. This would indeed be a wholly vacuous conceivability argument if that were an accurate portrayal of it, and would justify Dennett’s rather silly and offhand response that we have no way of knowing that we ourselves are not such zombies; but that is simply to avoid the actual question, and requires an equivocal use of the word ‘believe’, or at least one that has already been secretly transposed into a functionalist key before the debate is joined. So, just to set our zombies on the straight and narrow, the point they make for us even as they are lurching about in what seems like some sort of intentional way is that a purely functional system for processing data, whether instantiated robotically, cybernetically, or organically, could conceivably perform all the same actions as a conscious subject, and could report itself to be conscious as one of those functions, but need possess no interior experience whatsoever, having no prior unity of perspective, no intentional motivations, and no awareness of being aware. Whatever one thinks of this idea, it is definitely the case that such a system—Harold the zombie, Robbie the Robot, Claudia Dawkins—would believe nothing at all, no matter what it said, and so to use the word ‘believe’ here in this hazily ambiguous way, conflating the report of data with the experience of personal conviction about one’s own personal states of mind, simply sidesteps the issue, or simply writes the conclusion into the terms of the question. To believe something requires not only a unified center of awareness and a fixed horizon of intentionality, but also the bare phenomenality—or, if one likes, the Urphänomen—of the awareness of being aware of one’s sense of belief, as an affective experience of experiencing affect. That is to say, not belief in the sense of the propositional content of this or that conviction, but just that act of believing as such, or of having a conviction about something. The former one may or may not possess in some mental form even when one is not conscious of it; one may even possess it in one’s sleep or when one is not conscious at all, though I have considerable doubts on that score, and would in any event consider that a defective use of the term. But the experience of belief is something one knows even with regard to things that, in full possession of our cognitive states, one would not believe. In dreams and delusions, one often believes something to be the case that is not the case, and that one might not even be able to give coherent propositional form. Again, psychologism and pathologism must both be avoided here. To believe is to experience the affect of belief, even if it does not come trailing clouds of emotional excitement or neurological agitation. Belief is a quale of sorts, as is every inward state, or a kind of representation in the form of a state of attachment, and the analytic proclivity toward faculty psychology only obscures the issue; a report issuing from a program according to a protocol of interior monitoring is nothing like this, but is only the causal residue of a third-person correspondence between that program’s system and a world of data.

This should simply be obvious, and the very fact that it needs to be stated is the result of a rather ludicrous impasse created by an accident of intellectual history. The mechanical philosophy began merely as a methodological bracketing, for the purpose of ‘tracking’ discrete physical phenomena, and it was produced through the systematic subtraction of all the obvious marks of mental agency from the model of nature being employed: purpose, form, subjectivity, and so forth. To make room for that model, all the manifest phenomena of the mental were assigned to a separate sphere of God, spirits, and souls, discontinuous from and antithetical to the mechanical order. And this method bore plenteous fruit, in such abundance that the territorial ambitions of the sciences continued to grow, and scientific culture began to cultivate in itself an irredentist impatience with any impermeable partition between res extensae and res cogitantes. The humble method soon became an imperious metaphysics, even in disavowing the name, and began to see itself as the shape of reality, within whose configurations everything that really exists could be fully explained. Thus the mechanistic picture of nature was advanced ever more deeply into the precincts of the Cartesian ego, and within the scientific picture assumed by modern culture the siege has continued to be pressed ever more violently against the now drawn-in forces sheltering in the citadel of the self. Just as Hegel acutely saw the Kantian critical project as the completion rather than the overthrow of empiricism, an observant critic should see that illusionism—if it could be coherently conceived—would constitute not the rejection of Cartesianism, but only one of its inevitable termini. Frankish is a Cartesian sub contrario, granted, but he is one nonetheless, and he is consequently unable to think through the mysteries of mind according to any paradigm other than an opposition between our pictures of mental agency and our pictures of mindless nature. And illusionism is at once the most consistent and most quixotic form of mechanistic thinking, the inevitable and utterly absurd cul-de-sac at the end of the materialist leg of the Cartesian itinerary. Still, the citadel has not been taken: of necessity, the irreducibly non-mechanistic first-personhood of the subjective ‘I’ remains, even if reduced to the most tenuous of whispers. That ‘I’—the ‘I’ to whom the world appears, whether with qualitative richness or only in the form of conscious beliefs—remains imperturbably in place, as an ineradicable grammatical constant, always necessary but never avowed.

Frankish sees his view as the one most in keeping with the rigor and the findings of the sciences, though it is nothing of the kind. The machine, once its spectral occupant has been displaced or absorbed, is still only the machine, and there is no empirically or theoretically cogent reason to believe in a mechanistic metaphysics. The mechanical philosophy was only one in a series of methods, and scientific methods constantly alter as the paradigms around them shift, often as a result of the aporias, no less than the discoveries, made possible by those methods. But that does not matter. Neither mind nor nature is either a ghost or a machine, and until that model is truly transcended we shall continue to come up short against this or that ‘Hard Problem’ or find ourselves reaching this or that dead end. Illusionism is one of these dead ends, without question. It is simply a distraction from any meaningful philosophical proposals about the nature of mind. I could say that it is not a serious position, but that would be rather like saying that Anna Karenina’s death was not a tragedy. Within their own fantastic terms, the one is indeed serious, the other indeed tragic. But neither illusionism nor Anna has actually ever existed. The one crucial difference between them in this regard, however, is that Anna conceivably could.

Blé (Nonidi), 29 Messidor, CCXXXIV

My latest book of essays has appeared, or will have done in a few weeks time, from UNDP. The title—A Gathering of Leaves: Extravagances and Ephemera—might suggest that it is a collection of pieces from Leaves in the Wind, which in large part it is; but it also gathers articles that were published elsewhere, and all the materials taken from my Substack writings have been revised, reordered, rearranged, polished, burnished, buffed, primped, painted, purfled, and curled, to the point in many instances of constituting new works. In any event, I happen to think it my best essay collection to date and, mercenary soul that I am, I implore you buy several copies for all your near and dear, as well as for any amiable strangers you might encounter out on the boulevards.

Haricot (Tredi), 23 Messidor, CCXXXIV

…While we are on the topic of Richard Dawkins—sorry, the conversation began before you got here, but Dawkins is what we were talking about, especially in regard to his recent nuptials with the winsome Claudia—I should note that my unkinder remarks about him over the years have never been prompted by any special objections on my part to his atheism. In the abstract, atheism is wholly inoffensive to me. Certainly, I find nothing to complain of when I encounter someone hostile to religion on morally and intellectually respectable grounds. George Carlin mocking a creed that promises unending torment for unbelievers at the hands of an angry God but that simultaneously proclaims “He loves you” strikes me as not only amusing, but just; and it is hard not to share Carlin’s mystification at the idea of a God who is at once omnipotent and yet “always in need of money”. More to the point, the sheer immensity of cosmic suffering, and the suffering of the innocent in particular, more than justifies impatience with or indifference to faith of the invincibly glib variety. Randy Newman’s “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)” is, to my mind, a work of spectacular moral intelligence. And, after all, it should be obvious that a great many of those who believe they love God while also believing in the threat of an eternal hell actually despise and fear him and have only convinced themselves that their loathing and terror is actually love and reverence in order to overcome cognitive dissonance, make life tolerable, and avoid giving needless offense to an omniscient tyrant. It is comforting, oddly enough, that Ivan Karamazov’s ‘rebellion’ has never actually been answered in the terms of the Christianity that most believers adhere to, or for that matter in any immediately attractive religious terms at all. But all these honorable protests either against theism in general or against the specific claims of religions have their contexts, which render them intelligible but also define the limits of their pertinence. Fantastic or repellant images of the divine may inspire revulsion, but that revulsion does not touch either upon philosophical arguments regarding God or Spirit in relation to contingent realities or upon those dimensions of religious belief and experience that suffer from none of the incoherence of so much popular piety or institutional dogmas. If anything, a rigorous and principled atheism is a wonderful intellectual purgative; it can clear away a very great deal of nonsense and thereby bring more clearly into view what is most essentially at stake in asking the question of whether or not there is a God.

There are just two things that I find annoying in the atheism of Richard Dawkins: the philosophical ineptitude, which is more or less absolute, and the complacent bigotry, bred of imaginative obtuseness rather than intellectual scruple. The latter is the graver offense, of course; in his more unguarded moments, he has often spoken as if your gentle aunt Dorothy who keeps the flowers fresh on the altar, and who finds in the quiet church as she is doing so a space in which she can come into loving and contemplative contact with the mysteries of existence, is only an ignorant and probably dangerous simpleton who would be better off just having a coffee over the latest issue of Scientific American and recognizing that everything comes down to gene frequencies and selfishness in the end. Some men have no ear for music, and some no aptitude for spiritual wonder or metaphysical curiosity; the former, though, usually understand that they are missing out on something. Dawkins, by contrast, is one of those philistines whose defect of sensibility is so deeply seated that he cannot even grasp that he is not grasping something, just as he cannot see what the point of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is. That may be beyond remedy, like my tragic inability to grasp the beauty and Pythagorean harmonies of NASCAR or the soul-wringing lyricism of Lee Greenwood. We all have our blind spots.

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Cumin (Duodi), 22 Messidor, CCXXXIV

Just a quick note reminding all of you that today is Marcel Proust’s 155th birthday. I expect that most of you were already planning to observe it with all sorts of exquisitely tasteful festivities. Five years ago, when Leaves in the Wind was still quite new, I published a birthday greeting to the great man, which you can read here if you care to do so. I would write a new one now if I were not feeling a bit under the weather and if I were not resolved, despite my health, to totter off to the museum to look at a patch of yellow on a wall in a painting by Vermeer. Wish me well.

Oh, before I go, I have written about Proust at this site on a few other occasions—such as here and here.

Chamois (Quintidi), 15 Messidor, CCXXXIV

§1 I am become ChatGPT, destroyer of worlds: It seems that one of the signs of mischief that supposedly indicate that a text has been produced by AI is that it uses semicolons and dashes. This is depressing for reasons both general and personal. For one thing, this development means that two venerable and (I would argue) indispensable items in the punctuative repertoire of any decent writer have come to be regarded as too exotic and archaic for contemporary prose. This suggests a decline in standards, taste, and literacy that must have been underway long before Claudia ever caught the eye of Richard Dawkins with her flirtatious smiles and batting eyelashes. But it is also a development that cuts me to the quick, because it means that everything I write from here on out risks being mistaken for the confabulations of an LLM. I am peculiarly devoted to both forms of punctuation; my sense of discursive continuity is one that makes me fiercely resistant to hard and fast disjunctions between thoughts on a page, or between syntactically separable phrases, or even between discrete sentences or paragraphs. Some of you may recall a long essay I once wrote on English prose style, issued in two parts here and here, and published all as a piece in The Lamp. The only recommendations I made regarding punctuation in the list of rules for writers I provided there were these:

25) A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language’s miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality.

26) Second only to the semicolon in subtlety, fluent beauty, and whimsy is the dash. Cherish it. Use it with abandon.

Never have I committed words to a page with more conviction. The truth is that I am devoted not merely to the prose of the past—Byron’s dashes, Henry James’s semicolons, and so on—but to the natural flow and undulations of thought as it is embodied in language, or (alternatively) to the flow and undulations of language as it crafts the mysterious connections of thought. I find nothing more horrid in the realm of the written word than prose constructed entirely from short declarative sentences, mortared together into something like the textual equivalent of a drab brick ranch house. My preference, by many orders of magnitude, runs in the direction of those vast paragraphs of Krasznahorkai’s, in which semicolons often number in the dozens and periods are almost vanishingly rare.

So it goes. Sad as I find the withering away of a prose of sinuous deferrals and fluid transitions and agonized hesitations, I know that fashions change. What I find mystifying, though, is how LLMs have acquired the habit, in however denatured a form, of punctuating the texts they generate according to the conventions of past literary epochs. I mean, yes, part of it no doubt is simply the result of the sheer quantity of public domain texts ingested and digested by their autoregressive algorithms; but does that entirely explain their use of semicolons and dashes in constructing phrases in an otherwise wholly contemporary patois? After all, their systems function by the statistical sorting of periodic recurrences of syntactic units—or not even really syntactic units, but only purely juxtapositional frequencies at the level of linguistic ‘tokens’, which is to say letters and words—which means that one would expect them to eschew these subtler, sultrier, more seductive punctuations the more consistently they employ the vocabulary and phrases of our day. So it all must have something to do with a certain number of living writers out there who insist on faithfully tending the flame of the dash and laying flowers on the altar of the semicolon. And so it occurs to me that perhaps I, in my own small way, have contributed something to this depressing atmosphere of suspicion now enveloping every text that incorporates these more ambiguous markings in their textures. After all, I have spent a few decades now producing baroque prose rife with intentionally punctilious punctuations and obscenely mannered turns of phrase (like ‘punctilious punctuations’), so I have more than enough documentary evidence to prove, if I ever must, that I rather than Claudia Dawkins am the author of a given specimen of prose. But does that also mean, perhaps, that I have had some part in subjecting writers who will come after me to unjust calumnies?

I recently learned, for instance, as a result of a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for copyright infringement, that a dozen of my books had been plundered for that company’s proprietary LLM without my knowledge or consent. I know, moreover, that many of my occasional articles and posts and even comments on the articles and posts of others have been harvested for their crops of semicolons, dashes, shifts into the subjunctive, arcane idioms, and perverse neologisms because, on three occasions, readers have sent me AI-generated replies to questions they have posed to ChatGPT or some other such system regarding my work in which I have seen phrases of my own oddly but not unrecognizably altered. I do not want to exaggerate my own importance. I know I am at most a tiny flicker of literary energy in the great world-devouring dynamo of these data streams. Even so, I know also that I have some presence there, and that every dash or semicolon I have committed to the great cumulative reservoirs of prose on which they draw has achieved a virtual eternity and incalculable fecundity in their processing.

There is an old convention in detective fiction—supposedly, at any rate, though I can remember encountering it only twice—in which a detective investigating a series of murders discovers at the last that he himself is the murderer, and is suffering either from psychosis or some sort of supernatural influence. This latter was, for instance, the plot of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, which became the movie Angel Heart, which scarred the psyches of all who saw it with the indelible image of Mickey Rourke’s bared buttocks (it also had a vaguely unpleasant plotline involving Satan, human sacrifice, several brutal murders, and eternal damnation, but all of that seemed like the stuff of a Lassie movie by comparison to the Mickey Rourke matter… which I don’t want to talk about any more). Or, in a related vein, there is of course the plot of Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’, which supplied the premise for the film Total Recall, which scarred the psyches of all who saw it with the traumatic experience of watching Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to act (it also included a great deal of brutal and graphic violence of the Paul Verhoeven variety, but that was positively charming and cuddly by comparison to the Arnold Schwarzenegger element… which I don’t want to think about right now). Anyway, my point is simply that—quite contre cœur of course and, from any just perspective, blamelessly—I may be the villain of my own story, in some measure at least. When the veil is removed from my digital persecutor, and yours of course, I may find myself, like Mickey or Arnold, confronting my own leering face (but only my face…). Or, to put all of this on a higher cultural plane, I may yet find that I am like No. 6 in The Prisoner, and when at last No. 1 is unmasked I shall find myself leering back at me (and, apparently, looking like Patrick McGoohan… though I may be getting the analogy a bit confused here).

§2 Sanctum Sanctorum: Walter Benjamin’s most famous essay is probably ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’), a title whose drabness effectively conceals the brilliance of the text that follows. No one before him, as far as we know, fully appreciated the degree to which the material substrate of a work of art, and thus the material constraints of space and time, could no longer function as once they did to certify the ‘authenticity’ and therefore ‘cult value’ of an artifact; and no one better appreciated the degree to which the camera has become the disenchanted gaze that all of us now unthinkingly train upon that artifact. On these issues, the essay is an astonishing feat of insight. That said, I have always had one reservation regarding its argument—not as concerns its claims about the magnitude of the cultural changes it addresses, but as concerns the adequacy of its treatment of sacrality and cult. Benjamin was anything but naïve regarding bourgeois culture’s often purely acquisitive scale of values, but his essay perhaps fails to take full account of the ways in which mechanical reproduction has the power to exaggerate and amplify rather than dispel what he calls the “aura” of the artwork. He was undoubtedly correct regarding the changes brought about by photography in respect to the relative importance of a painting’s chemical constitution, or of the proprietary claims of its owner, or of the power of its ‘ritual’ context to consecrate it as authentic; but he was perhaps too quick to associate the numinous mystique of originality or authenticity with the local or physically immediate, and thereby to fail to do justice to the element of productive absence in a work of art.

That is to say, in a more elusive yet more essential sense, the ritual mystique of any object of veneration—its special mana or khvarenah or numinous surfeit or ‘aura’—is always in large part the effect of a deeper hiddenness, an unrepresentable mystery or sacrality supposedly inhering in the object, which the sensible form necessarily dissimulates precisely in symbolizing it. The ‘aura’ of the sacred is sustained not only by the outward form, but by the secret that can be represented only indirectly, as something forever deferred, hidden behind the veil of the holy of holies, in the most inaccessible penetralia of the temple. Idolatry, understood as the worship of an image or symbol as itself the divinity it represents, is a more or less nonexistent phenomenon in human culture. It is a sin that almost no one has ever committed. The visibility or tangibility of the cultic artifact—the idol or icon or symbol—has in almost all times and places served as the manifest image of something that can be revealed only as concealed, just as (according to both the scientific and the philosophical orthodoxies of early modernity) the whole phenomenal world both discloses and dissembles reality in itself. The ritual object’s authenticity has always lain in its exalted status as a ‘reproduction’ of something intrinsically unapproachable—something that must wear a mask in order to make itself available for adoration and pious dread.

In just this way, the artwork as a cultic object has always been an emanation of the mystery, but not the mystery itself. What makes it compelling as something genuinely sacred has always been the testament it provides to that mystery’s power to generate ‘copies’ or allegories or types or figures of its hidden truth. Reproduction can never therefore actually demystify the artifact, or dispel its aura of authenticity. In fact, the more lavishly the work is reproduced and the more freely its reproductions are distributed throughout culture, the more that numinous power of authenticity is confirmed. The ever greater diffusion of its simulacra and refractions and prismatic sheen is, if anything, a brighter and more blinding aura, a more resplendent cloud of glory.

The real difference between the older cult value of a work of art and the particular meaning that the work has acquired in the age of mechanical reproduction is not really as Benjamin’s essay describes it. The artwork as a sacred or ritual object at one time exhibited the otherwise invisible potency of the divine; now the work of art as mechanically reproduced in a secular cultural setting exhibits instead the unfathomable sacrality of money. The holiness that inheres in the original artifact, as a specific physical object, is not a special mystery residing in one of the world’s thin places, but the positively supernatural force of massed capital. We are no less enchanted by what we adore in a work of art than our ancestors were; we are simply often enchanted by a different god: Mammon rather than by Apollo or Amun Ra or Christ. The highest ritual of this devotion is the art auction. There, in that setting, the artifact, as the focus of this strange liturgy and of the religious ecstasy it cultivates, becomes all the more intensely sacred the more devoid it is of conspicuous beauty, intelligence, craft, and imagination. Conceptual art, of the kind so often awarded the Turner Prize, is an especially marketable or even fungible style of production, precisely because there is nothing intrinsically priceless about it, and so it is the ideal symbol of the sacrality of price as such. It is the sign of a spectral and genuinely occult property that simply cannot be represented except by way of the intrinsically worthless occasion of a miraculous feat of purchasing power. It is the utterly enigmatic and so adorable symbol of a god without aspect—a god of such sublimity that its glory can be proclaimed properly only by the self-effacing absurdity of willful banality. The wholly vapid and incompetent artifact is like the veil of Isis, faithfully and self-effacingly attesting to the true holiness with which it is ‘invested’: again, the absolute power of money. And, even where truly great art is concerned, the haze of photographic scintillations breaking from it into culture at large imbues the original with that same holiness; the Mona Lisa, as probably the most reproduced image of all, is no longer merely an object of great value, but is now an object beyond all price—which is really to say, an object whose price is well-nigh infinite.

All right, I admit I am waxing a little—a little—playfully apocalyptic in my rhetoric. Even so, I do honestly believe that the effect of photography and of other forms of mechanical reproduction on our understanding of the work of art—and here we enjoy the luxury of greater hindsight than Benjamin’s—has not been one of demystification or of the dissipation of the ‘aura’. If anything, the particularity of the original work, from which those reproductions flow, has been rendered all the more sacred in its very materiality. The object itself has acquired a deeper magic. The more plentiful and accurate its reproductions, the more it acquires the grandeur of an inconceivably holy quintessence, an inexhaustible source, ever more withdrawn into its own authenticity, ever more precious. Even the most perfect reproduction lacks that invisible nimbus of pure value for value’s sake. Now one goes to see the Virgin of the Rocks at the Louvre not to see something one could not see elsewhere. One can call it up in vivid and luminous detail on a screen at any time. One goes to it now as a kind of pilgrimage to a place of transport and communion with something ineffable and immovably fixed within its own temenos. To see and to own now is to see and to own not just the image, but also the spiritual energy of the artifact as a divine presence, imbued with a mystical excess of meaning.

Disenchantment, as it happens, never really arrives as an actual experience, except as a nostalgia for something half-remembered; we simply move from enchantment to enchantment, and what enchants us—the mystery we imagine lying on the other side of the veil of the temple—determines what we are.

*******

§3 All that is solid melts into air: This year, as some of you will know, Major League Baseball introduced its new Automated Ball-Strike system or ABS, which allows either a hitter or a member of the battery to challenge an umpire’s call on any given pitch, so long as he does so instantly. Each team has two challenges at its disposal to begin with, but only unsuccessful challenges exhaust that store. As I am temperamentally a Luddite where the game is concerned, my instinctive reaction to the development should be one of hostility; but, like everyone else who has watched the game on television ever since the strike zone has come to be represented by a rectangular virtual frame on the screen, I die a little inside every time I see an egregious missed call by an umpire that is to the disadvantage of my team. Worse, I am haunted by the guilt I feel when I take pleasure in a missed call that is instead advantageous to my team. So having some means of correcting the problem is not necessarily a bad thing. For the most part, the umpires get it right, and only occasionally need the assistance of the machine. Still, errors of judgement and certain kinds of cheating have always been part of the game, and conscience and a sense of tradition both dictate that such things lie entirely within the unspoken rules, all of which were established in the nineteenth century; the intrusions of twenty-first century technology upon the pastoral idyll that baseball enacts with every game feel like a corruption of the sport’s spiritual significance, or at least like a rude disenchantment.

Here, though, is the greater problem. The strike zone as represented on television and as now used by ABS is a two-dimensional plane whose width is aligned by the seventeen inches of the plate’s forward edge, but the strike zone is by rule a polyhedron, a three dimensional solid with seven sides, hovering above the dish, which is to say the translation of the irregular pentagon of the plate into a kind of pentagonal prism. Any pitch that passes through this imaginary hologram is technically a strike. That is not what ABS is capable of registering, which means that it operates not only as if gravity does not exist, but as if balls and strikes are determined wholly by way of a geometrical fiction, a perfect two-dimensional oblong as related to a plane of transit with a purely punctiliar depth. Thus a ball just above the top of the zone that, given the laws of physics, almost certainly descends into the zone before reaching the catcher’s mitt is still read as a ball rather than a strike. So too, any ball with lateral break—a curve, a slider, a sweeper, a cut fastball, a changeup, a knuckleball, and so on—might miss the edge of the virtual plane and still pass through the zone. This is an incalculable impoverishment of the mystic proportions and dimensions of the game, a coarse violation of its Pythagorean purities. It is only at the bottom of the zone that the ABS can be trusted to render a perfectly just verdict on many a pitch. This torments me.

§4 Nine tails to the wind: I have acquired a habit in recent months, one bordering on an addiction, that I could never have predicted for myself before it took shape. At night, when I am, say, using far infrared therapy to warm and loosen the muscles in my neck and upper back where I have suffered cervical vertebral degeneration, and reading is an uncomfortable chore, I watch an hour or so of South Korean television, usually on Netflix. I have been trying to pick up a modest knowledge of Korean this past year, so that has helped to justify this dubious practice in my own mind, though the truth is that the pleasure these programs afford me has little to do with tutelage in a foreign tongue. I avoid programs rated TV-MA because one of the things I find most charming about a great deal of South Korean entertainment is its decorousness, its chasteness of imagination. There may be crime and violence in the story, or wickedness and cruelty, but everyone guards his or her words, is formally polite to a degree that most Americans today would find intimidating to say the least, and is restrained about everything apart from enjoying a good meal. And the variety of plots is marvelous. There are far too many, in fact, to catalogue, but I cannot resist attempting to do so.

One plot that recurs is that two young persons, a man and a woman of preposterous beauty (and I think we can all agree that Korea apparently has more than its fair share of such persons) meet and gradually, oh so gradually, fall madly in love. The man, however, is actually a supernatural or otherworldly being, a gumiho or mountain deity or genie or demon or extraterrestrial, who has been waiting for centuries for a woman he once loved, centuries before, to be reincarnated, while the woman is that very pilgrim soul. Evil forces and chance mishaps conspire to keep them apart but in the end love triumphs, one way or another. There will be tears, quite a few in fact, but the last to be shed will be tears of joy. As the story unfolds, there are regular flashbacks to the earlier lives they lived together, always during the Joseon era, slowly revealing how their fates have become inseparably intertwined, which other characters in the tale have also been reincarnated and are part of the web of destiny, and what the tragedy was that parted them long ago and that now must not be allowed to repeat itself.

Then there is another typical plot of vastly different character. A young man and a young woman of preposterous beauty meet and slowly fall in love. But it turns out that the woman is actually some supernatural or otherworldly being such as a gumiho or a magically immortal innkeeper who for centuries has been waiting for the reincarnation of the man she loved back in the Joseon era; slowly, regular flashbacks to that earlier tragic romance reveal what parted them in the past and what fate they must avoid recapitulating in the present. Other characters in the story have also been reincarnated, having been caught in the same web of destiny. In the end love triumphs—after many tears have been shed.

Yet another plot is that two young persons, a man and a woman of preposterous beauty (and, in case I have not mentioned this, there seem to be quite a few of those about in Korea), meet and gradually fall in love. One of them, however, is a supernatural or otherworldly being, such as an inyeo, which is to say a mermaid. Both of them are the reincarnations of two lovers from the Joseon era—say, a man and a mermaid—whose love for one another came to a tragic end. Now they must avoid recapitulating the terrible fate that seeks to break them apart again. Other characters in the drama are the reincarnations of souls that were part of that earlier story (which unfolds in a series of flashbacks as the tale progresses), entangled in the same web of destiny as our two protagonists. There will be copious tears shed, but love will be victorious at the last.

Yet another plot concerns a young man and a young woman, each of them preposterously beautiful, one of whom is a supernatural or otherworldly being and the other a mortal. A series of flashbacks to the Joseon era reveals the backstory of the non-human protagonist and the tragedy from which he or she has never recovered emotionally. The mortal lover may or may not, however, have figured in that earlier story, but other characters in the tale definitely have. Tears rain down, both of sorrow and of joy. Kimchi is eaten in abundance. In the end, love triumphs, either in this life or one to come.

And then there is the story—and this you will never see coming—of two preposterously beautiful persons in the present who are reincarnations of two lovers tragically parted in the Joseon era, one of whom has been magically transported from the past into the body of her reincarnated soul… Tears… Love triumphant… Kimchi and fried chicken… Well, as I say, the sheer variety of storylines is impossible to do justice to.

The one common element of all of them, as far as I can see, is the central dramatic importance of what Henry James might have called an ocular fascination. Inevitably a moment comes in the evolution of the two protagonists’ deepening mutual infatuation when they find themselves standing fixedly at a distance from one another of anywhere from four to seven feet, gazing intently into one another’s eyes while ecstatic strains of K-pop swell up all around them. This is the moment when their love is fully established and even perhaps consummated. There is not a lot of kissing in these programs, except of the most romantically idealized kind, and little if any sex; but there is a lot of staring and, given the weight of dramatic significance it clearly bears, I am beginning to think that this is one of the ways in which someone can become pregnant in the Republic of Korea. It’s a very technologically advanced nation.

I will note that a long immersion in these programs exposes one to any number of cultural and social realities that a Westerner might otherwise never appreciate. I cannot tell you how much I have learned about the somewhat sinister workings of corporate chaebol and the families that control them. I also had little appreciation before this year of the economic and cultural exchanges between South Korea and the UAE, or of how many Koreans of means have offices or residences in Dubai. I of course knew of the huge variety of kimchi in Korea, but had been largely ignorant till now regarding the centrality of fried chicken in the national diet. I have also discovered the strange celebrity culture of the mukbang, a television program featuring at least one dedicated trencherman eating enormous meals, including some truly gigantic dumplings, at famed matjib, restaurants known for their delicious indigenous cuisine. Most fascinating of all, though, is the special way in which religious life proceeds in the Republic of Korea. East Asian culture in general has always been somewhat more gracefully syncretistic in its religious forms than Western culture tends to be, or at least tends to think itself. We all know how Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions gradually amalgamated themselves in China, or Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto traditions in Japan. What makes the Korean situation peculiar is the special mix of forces. The dominant religion of South Korea is Christianity, the faith of roughly a third of the population. The next most common creed is Buddhism. And both have been overlaid upon the ancient Musok or shamanism of the peninsula. Of course, half the population espouses no religion at all, but in the best East Asian tradition that tends to mean simply that they dabble in all of these traditions and may even half believe them, while not living out any particular religion as such. True secularism of the militantly materialist sort, which suffers from such superstitions as a disbelief in ghosts, is a somewhat recessive phenomenon in those climes. Most interesting of all are the ways in which, at a popular level, all these traditions exist as a single, somewhat nebulous atmosphere of spiritual intuitions. A person of no exact adherence may pray to Jesus and the Virgin Mary, believe in metempsychosis of some sort or, if not believe in it in any confessional way, assume its reality, and also consult a mudang for such practical matters as fortune-telling, love charms, and the exorcism of troublesome ghosts.

Though, come to think of it, that probably describes something very like the way Catholicism is lived out in most of the world. Orthodoxy too, as it happens. Northern Europeans and North Americans may be the anomaly here, with their more inflexible sense of confessional boundaries and of faith as consisting in loyalty to a more propositional style of belief. We lack a certain generosity of imagination in such matters, just as we are perhaps a little poorer than Korea in the number per capita of preposterously beautiful young people, and in the number of supernatural or otherworldly or magical beings living among us.

Girofle (Tredi), 3 Messidor, CCXXXIV

Over at Sesame and Lilies, Eugene McCarraher and I have posted our latest conversation, this time (disappointingly, perhaps) with only one another. Various scheduling complications have forced us to put off our next proper interview—which will be with the historian Tom Holland—until July. Our apologies. I thought, though, that it might prove amusing to some of you.

The post’s description is as follows:

Due to certain shifts in various schedules, our conversation with Tom Holland (the historian, not Spider Man) will appear later in July; but we thought we should catch up in the interval, with one another and with the circumstanding world. Our conversation ranged far and wide, covering such topics as our deplorable indolence, Gene’s forthcoming book Automated Vistas, Thomism, the nature of capitalism, Rad-Trad-Catholicism, cannabis as opposed to bourbon, bourbon as opposed to cannabis, the misnomer “post-industrial”, Greeks, Nigerian Greeks, Kenyan Greek Demigoddesses, Homer, Helen of Troy, the infinitely repellant J. D. Vance, Vance’s ingenuity in finding his way to Catholicism while scrupulously avoiding any contact with Christianity, the hyenas of Brideshead Revisited, why so many culture warriors are so uncultured, why so many self-appointed champions of Western Civilization are so eerily ignorant of Western Civilization, Lupita N’yongo’s entrancing smile, ethno-nationalism, the Kalevala, the nature of myth, why DBH blew his stack or flipped his wig or lost his cool at Jonathan Pageau, THC, the unbearable lightweightness of Jonathan Pageau’s mind, racism, cosmopolitanism, and much much much more…

Sesame and Lilies

An Interim Posting

Due to certain shifts in various schedules, our conversation with Tom Holland (the historian, not Spider Man) will appear later in July; but we thought we should catch up in the interval, with one another and with the circumstanding world. Our conversation ranged far and wide, covering such topics as our deplorable indolence, Gene’s forthcoming book…

Listen now

a month ago · 20 likes · 4 comments · Sesame and Lilies

Concombre (Septidi), 7 Messidor, CCXXXIV

§48:

Where is the peace of the Absolute to be found? Not in the contingencies of history, certainly, much less in the constancies of nature. For Hegel, it is the peace of a reconciliation between subjectivity and substance, which to his mind no ancient philosophy had fully achieved or even fully sought, and to which modern philosophy had learned to aspire only as a result of the fateful division it had posed between self and world. The archetypal form of that division, obviously, was the Cartesian partition between res cogitans and res extensa, but it achieved its grandest expression in the untraversable Kantian abyss between the phenomenal and noumenal orders. Something of antiquity’s implicit distinction between the epistemic and the gnostic was retained in Kant’s division between pure reason’s representations and practical reason’s moral maxims; but what was now wholly absent was the venerable presumption of the possibility of a gnostic excess over and beyond the epistemic, an ultimate theōria or direct vision, by which reason attains its highest noetic transparency before the truth and thereby reconciles the finite and the infinite in an immediacy transcendent of any mere concepts, making the knowing and the known truly one. In ascending to that final vision, according to the older vision of things, one discovers—under the regime of a metaphysics of participation rather than of dialectic—that the structures of being and of thought are ultimately one and the same, an expressive fullness of actuality, requiring no probation by the negative to realize itself. By contrast, Kant’s division between the phenomenal and the noumenal orders leaves reason seemingly divided against itself. And yet, for Kant, it is precisely that perpetually sustained tension, in its utter resistance to any final reconciliation or resolution, that is the necessary ground of moral liberty. The ‘room left for faith’ by the critical project, and so for an actual subjective freedom transcending the realm of causal determinism, is secured for Kant by the utter impossibility of any rational representation of the noumenal, and so of any physicalist reduction of moral autonomy and rational agency to mechanism. Nature and the representational always lie under the reign of necessity; only the sublime hiddenness of the noumenal allows for a spiritual knowledge of the moral law within and of the power of subjective freedom to legislate for itself.

There really is a charter of emancipation in this, it seems only fair to grant; but, to give Hegel his due, the Kantian division between the phenomenal and the noumenal is also a peculiarly unsatisfying picture of an irreparable schism within thought itself, one that is perhaps no less confining in its rigidity and reliance on faith than a fully deterministic metaphysics. This is surely a large part of the existential unease that modern philosophy’s turn to the subject did not necessarily create, but definitely revealed. Subjectivity necessarily realizes itself, and makes a claim for its special prerogatives in understanding itself in relation to the world, as precisely that reality that is not destined merely by substance. In their very different ways, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Kierkegaard all recognized and attempted to overcome an apparent contradiction. Modern subjectivity is subjective—which is to say, something distinct from the substantial or essential—to the degree that it possesses a contingency and particularity that can never be reduced again to necessity and universality. And yet subjectivity in the modern period aspires to be the ground of rational certainty and universality. Fichte attempted to mend the breach by understanding all of the realm of substance as an external negation posited by the subject, at least in the latter’s transcendental liberty. The late Schelling attempted the radical proposal of a ‘positive philosophy’ that saw this original movement of subjective being as belonging to a classical priority of act over potency, and in a sense of existence over essence, while still retaining a modern notion of subjectivity as unpremised free will. Kierkegaard, by contrast, issued a plea for the claims of the individual self in its empirical indigence and in its existential need for accommodation by the grace of ‘the paradox’. All of them, however tacitly, preserved in their thinking the distinction between epistemic reason and gnostic immediacy, even as they took leave of Kant’s inviolable division of pure from practical reason.

Of this company, Hegel alone attempted to surmount the Cartesian and Kantian impasse without allowing for a realm of the gnostic beyond the epistemic. This is the whole labor and adventure of the System, both as a phenomenology and as a logic. And, in a sense, Hegel was in this way arguably more faithful to the modern priority of the subjective than were any of these other thinkers. He retained the Kantian scheme insofar as he believed in the necessity of operating ‘within the boundaries of reason alone’, as well as within a general understanding of subjectivity as negativity, but he also insisted that the entire reconciliation of subject and substance can and must be accomplished by way of the epistemic. This, it seems to me, is one of the obstinately intractable elements of absurdity in the System. At least, a reconciliation of subjectivity and substance in those terms would seem to be not just a practical, but a logical, impossibility. On the one hand, subjectivity as delineated by modern philosophy exists and knows itself only as the positivity of its actuality, contingency, and constitutively unfinished nature, as distinct from the merely essentially true or rationally inevitable. On the other hand, according to Hegel, subjectivity can know its own rational substance only through the sublation of understanding in reason, Verstand in Vernumft, which it accomplishes through the suppression and purging away, as just so much dross, of the contingency of personal individuality and the ‘irrational’ actuality of mere particularity. This reconciliation occurs nowhere, not only on account of the inescapable immanence of Hegel’s absolute idealism, which admits of no transcendent divine intellect, but also arguably because the reconciliation itself would be the annihilation of its own premises. There is, then, no real peace in this Absolute, apart from, on the one hand, an inherently fragile civic accord, dissolving into ‘fecundating’ warfare at necessary intervals and, on the other, the periodic serenity of the philosopher in his study, in those stolen moments between work and sleep, meals and love, arguments and death.

§49:

It would be easy, I suppose, to ridicule the preposterous vastness of Hegel’s philosophical ambitions; but every philosophy strives for some sort of encompassing perspective that allows it to take in a satisfying prospect of some real unity between reflective knowledge and its object. Some schools of thought deny doing so, but as a rule merely conceal their aspirations somewhere among the presuppositions of their methods (as is largely the case in analytical tradition). Still, as I have noted already, Hegel occupies a unique position in the history of Western thought in that the stakes of the System truly are absolute: not only does Hegel seek to disclose the truth of the whole of things; he seeks to bring that truth to pass in that act of disclosure. His method not only directs reason toward the recognition of the highest and most final principle of ‘thought thinking thought’, but in a very real sense identifies this principle with the act of philosophy thinking philosophy. Not only, therefore, would any intrinsic deficiency in the epistemic power of philosophy frustrate reason’s advance toward the Idea; it would frustrate truth’s emergence into actuality. And here, perhaps, Schelling’s late critique of the System is at its most penetrating. Hegel emphatically agreed with Kant’s rejection of any deductions on the part of pure reason regarding metaphysical entities beyond the reach of the apparatus of perception and understanding, but he did so not in order to leave open, as Kant had done, a mysteriously transcendent realm of practical reason or rational faith. Again, this ‘room left for faith’ was, in Hegel’s view, only the aggrandizement of empiricist skepticism into an insuperable truth of reason, and thereby reason’s defeat. When Schelling complains that Hegel allows for no real distinction between essence and existence, and that he subordinates the latter to the former by elevating the abstract potentiality of the Concept over its finite actualization in the concrete, he is doing no more than calling attention to one of the System’s indispensable premises. The pure ‘let there be’ of infinite actuality, expressing rather than achieving its essence in the world, would seem to exceed the reach of the epistemic; it cannot be contained within or deduced from any concept that reason can master through speculation. And, for Hegel, whatever cannot be known by reason cannot be actual, because only in being known by reason is any truth really, fully true.

In The Science of Logic, and more concisely in the Encyclopedia Logic (§§86-88), Hegel convincingly shows how utterly the immediate concepts of being and of nothing vanish into one another when considered in their pure indeterminacy; then, somewhat less convincingly, he argues that both concepts therefore have their real rational truth only as considered within the further concept (which is a concrete reality) of becoming; and becoming, he says, is the brings a reality to pass that in one sense already is, as conceptual possibility, but that in another sense has come into existence for only the first time. For him, this is the whole logic of God and world as the Absolute, and of the Idea that is made actual only in being truly thought and truly known. The temporal disclosure of eternal truth and the real existence of the truth are one and the same. So the absence of a genuine ontology in the System is not an oversight or an aporia that might be remedied within the terms of the System; it is the necessary occlusion of a region of thought that threatens to render the System incomplete and therefore effectively false. In the late antique and mediaeval metaphysics of an infinite and simple actuality prior to all finite essence and even to the totality of all essences, there is a principle of ontological generosity that cannot be thought speculatively, at least not as Hegel understands speculation, even if it can be known in the higher immediacy of direct union. That act of being is an original non-repugnancy to all that is, truly absolute, truly absolved of all real relations even in being the ground of all relations whatsoever, including all dialectical relations. To acknowledge the primacy of such an ontology would be to acknowledge the incompleteness of the System. Hegel may have resumed the ‘Anselmian’—or, more directly, the Cartesian—project of deducing the existence of God from the concept of God, or (better) from the divine Concept, but Anselm and Descartes were for their parts perfectly willing to fall back before the mystery of that highest actuality and of the gift of being that flows from it. For Hegel, Spirit arrives more fully the more securely philosophy grasps the truth, and so only insofar as philosophy grasps itself as absolute knowledge. There cannot be any surfeit in the System beyond reason’s epistemic capacity. Truth and the knowledge of the truth form an absolute circle, a total immanentization of reason that simply must eschew a real ontology; having named the totality as he had, it was now impossible for Hegel to step back from it to pose the further question of its ontological axiom, the ‘that it is’, prior to the ‘what it is’ and to any conceptual differentiation within it of the potential from the actual.

This also means, of course, that there cannot be any surfeit of the existential over the essential in nature and history. This is not to say that Hegel was a determinist; the Idea in its finality truly releases the finite into freedom and independence, Freiheit und Selbstständigkeit, and nature and history abound in the mere particularity of things that arise and vanish. Even so, the structure of the whole—which includes the inevitable alienations and sufferings and thwarted purposes characteristic of nature and history at the level of individual things and persons—is metaphysical necessity itself. In the Encyclopedia’s second division, the Nature-Philosophy, the ages of organic life that preceded the appearance of humanity (which arose not through evolution, but all at once, like Minerva springing from the head of Jove) belonged to the necessary first moment of the Concept’s alienation from itself in time; the Idea had first to be excluded from the unity of divine love and then to lie frozen and petrified in a kind of divine death, the deep sleep of the dreaming ‘earth-spirit’ waiting to rise in humanity into the play of oppositions by which it would come to awareness. Nature’s final cause, its true spiritual beginning, was always the Idea; but this end could be reached only by way of that wholly dirempted reflection, in which the possibility of the Idea had descended from the immediacy of the Concept to become actual in the mediations of the finite. For Schelling, this meant that Hegel had thus willfully ignored a question hanging over this entire divine drama: the declension, the Abfall, of the Absolute into the probations of the contingent must persist as a remainder in any purely rational account of the totality. Why did this happen? According to what power of actuality in the Absolute, logically prior to the actuality of the finite? And is it not a necessity of moral intelligibility that this Abfall be separable conceptually from the Fall, the Sündenfall, of creation from God? For Hegel, these two must be one. So too the contingencies of history, free as they may be in their several wanderings, nonetheless must be entirely contained within the rational itinerary of Spirit through history. And philosophy, in order both to become a true science and to arrive at absolute knowledge, must encompass both nature and history within itself, not in their every detail, but in their entirety as a rational process. Given, moreover, the peculiar aspirations and demands of the System, this means that philosophy must entail a reconstruction from first principles not only of experience and logic, but also of its own historical unfolding within all the eventualities of time—an unfolding that is at once both fallen and redemptive.

*******

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Véronique (Quartidi), 4 Messidor, CCXXXIV

As part of the promotion for my Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) translation, the Yale University Press blog has published a short reflection of mine on the text and on the experience of rendering it into English.

Pivoine (Nonidi), 29 Prairial, CCXXXIV

§44:

Nicholas of Cusa summarized the metaphysics ‘classical theism’ with exquisite brevity when he spoke of God as the non aliud: God is not a thing over against any other thing, a being contradistinguished from other beings, an object within the manifold of objects composing finite reality. This is not, however, to say that God is the totality of all things taken as a kind of complete or infinite ‘set’, since this would itself also be ‘another thing’, an aliud, in distinction from any discrete object contained within it, just as the Louvre is a thing distinct from the Venus de Milo, or perhaps (better) just as spacetime is distinct from any given instance of distance or duration. To call God the non aliud is to attribute to the divine essence a perfect transcendence and simplicity, a perfect infinity of actuality in which and from which all things receive their existence, while denying that it is in any way ‘really related’ to—that is, qualified or determined by—anything merely existent. It should be needless to say, though it often is not, that this definition of God precludes not only the mythic notion of anything independent of and extrinsic to the divine, but also any metaphysical notion of an articulated plurality of forces or determinations or actualizations within the divine. God—if, that is, the word ‘God’ possesses any rational meaning—does not become God, either by surmounting or assimilating some external otherness or by working out some internal dynamism or process. In either case, an absolute interval would be posed in our understanding of the divine between God’s nature and the simple actus, the simple plenitude of Being, and so between God’s identity and God’s existence. The ‘necessary region’ of Being would still be higher, more eminent, and more truly divine than this being we have accorded the designation ‘God’. And so it cannot be the totality that is God in the classically theistic sense; rather, the divine can be only that more primordial One that grants being to the totality, in both its potentiality and its actuality. Whatever gives being to beings, and to each being in relation to every other, and to each dialectical moment in relation to all others, and even to the totality of existence in relation to the multiplicity of things it comprises—whatever possesses no possibility but only infinite actuality—is God.

There have, however, been figures in Christian tradition who have made this distinction somewhat ambiguous in their thought, and some have done so to the point of genius. John Scotus Eriugena produced a picture of ‘Nature’, both divine and creaturely, according to which it proves not only possible, but necessary, to say that in creation God creates only God. But there are two very different ways of taking this. The first is one that observes and guards the ontological difference, and understands Eriugena as saying only that God is the All in whom the essence and existence of creatures have their being—which is to say that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is implicitly one of creatio ex deo, and that hence all that God creates is of God and in God, and is destined for perfect union with God. The second, however, is one in which the ontological difference effectively disappears, which takes Eriugena to mean that, in creation, God creates—makes truly actual, that is—his own essence in se, and in this way really becomes God as he otherwise would not be. In this latter view, which admittedly possesses a certain dramatic or epic or hermetic grandeur, the difference between the divine and the created is principally one of perspective: whether, that is, one views the totality from the vantage of either the eternal content of the divine or the temporal process of God’s realization; of either the ideal telos of God’s and creation’s unfolding or the immanent movement of all things toward that end; of either the order of knowledge or the order of being; of either a realized infinity or the totality of the dialectic between finite possibility and finite actuality. I have already noted that, of these two possible interpretations, no matter which of them one thinks can be properly ascribed to Eriugena, it is only the former that to my mind can survive a sufficiently rigorous logical interrogation, by virtue of presuming a consistent and coherent ontology. But Hegel clearly thought otherwise.

This is made startlingly clear in the 1824 version of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, where Hegel asserts without equivocation that, inasmuch as the divine Idea comes to itself by positing its otherwise wholly abstract rational content in the finite mode of the concrete, God is the entire totality, die ganze Totalität, containing both the universal and the particular, both internal differentiation and external diremption, both all that is posited as God’s other and all that is recuperated into divine Spirit. This coincidence of the universal and the particular is perfectly represented in the figure of the incarnate Son of God, as taken up into the spiritual life of the Gemeinde. That representation, and all the associated representational content of the doctrines of creation, the fall, the redeeming death of Christ, resurrection and Pentecost, must in the end be disencumbered of its sensuous forms and mythic episodes by philosophy, but must also, on the way to that final apocalypse, mediate the knowledge of this true unity of God and creation to the community of faith. In creation, an inner divine distinction of the Concept passes from a Schein, an implicit logical light or apparition, into a dynamic Erscheinung, an explicit phenomenon or dramatic exposition in the dance of finite spirits—almost, one wants to say, a masquerade or allegory in which Spirit disports itself before its own eternal gaze and thereby reveals itself to itself. In the creation of the world, the divine Son actually becomes another, and as that Erscheinung progressively plays itself out in the flow of appearance and disappearance, this original Schein persists in ever more recognizable lucidity, and becomes subjective knowledge wakened to itself in its own light. There is in one sense, as Hegel lays the issue out, a prior intra-divine distinction between the Father and the Son that is different from the real positing of that distinction as concrete difference in the world. In another sense, however, this is not the sort of eternal logically prior Trinitarian differentiation of divine hypostases proclaimed in theological tradition, but only an abstract and potential distinction that must be made real in the diremption of creation so as to achieve its fullness—its final cause—as Spirit and as the Idea.

More to the point, Hegel is emphatic in stating that the internal differentiation within the Concept and the external othering that allows the Idea to be realized are not two events, but one. The eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit is one with the economy of creation and redemption. The world viewed under the aspect of finitude is something that the Absolute freely releases, entläßt, into a genuine freedom and independence of its own, as truly this other, dies Andere. And God is an inexhaustible source of this ‘letting be’, this Entlassen. There is a play of love in this, says Hegel, but there is also a necessity for that play to descend into the rupture, suffering, alienation, and conflict of time; otherwise, this love remains fruitless, the mere empty harmony of the purely abstract. Thus, the eternal in its turn depends upon the temporal; the eternal Son must become an entity, as a world of overflowing alterity. Viewed under the aspect of infinity, it is true, this whole temporal continuum is a fleeting pageant of shadows always trembling on the edge of nothingness. Nature and history are the appearance of the Absolute as disappearing, whereas the divine Idea in its plenitude is achieved as the disappearing of that appearance. Creation is a flash of lightning in respect of the eternal, vanishing in the instant of its eruption. But it is also the full rational content of the eternal in its emergence into life. So, while it is true that God cannot be diminished by the world, he can and must be enriched and perfected by it; as Concept, he is logically complete but, as Idea and Spirit, he exists as complete only because of this posited otherness, this externalization.

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Thym (Octidi), 28 Prairial, CCXXXIV

My latest willfully extravagant article on the spiritual nature of baseball has just appeared in The Plough, a publication with which I am always pleased to be associated.

Verveine (Septidi), 27 Prairial, CCXXXIV

Yesterday—in fact, a mere twelve hours ago—I provided a link here to the conversation I sat with Rainn Wilson, for his Soul Boom podcast, website, YouTube channel, and Substack newsletter. Below is a further link to more of that conversation, which has now been posted on YouTube. The topics may seem diffuse—the historical future of Christianity and Christendom, Christology, the Daodejing, the Transfiguration, Victor Mature, Richard Burton, Dwight Shrute, Lewis Carroll, Orson Welles, David Bentley Shrute, and so forth—but there is a mysterious unity to them (but I’m not telling what it is).

Sauge (Sextidi), 26 Messidor, CCXXXIV

Not long ago, when Rainn Wilson was in town in South Bend, he recorded a conversation with me for his Podcast and Substack publication, Soul Boom. (Here is its home page, while we are at it.)

We talked about God, Hell, religious symbols, the meaning of the word συμβολή, theodicy, infinity, ice cream, the Sun of the Good, the Gayatri Mantra, and things of that sort. The Substack link is here.

Soul Boom Dispatch

David Bentley Hart and Rainn go to Hell

Greetings, to all you seekers and sages, thinkers and dreamers…

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2 months ago · 17 likes · Soul Boom

The YouTube link is here:

Rainn is a delightful man, incidentally, and it is always a pleasure to see him.

It is also always a pleasure to see this lovely lady, whom I visited this past Thursday (I had a backstage pass, so to speak, to join her and her husband for breakfast):

The elderly couple in question (one is 15 and one 16) are rescue otters who require medical support, but they have produced heirs over the years who have been successfully released into wildlife refuges and who are reportedly doing well.

And, while we are on the subject, I recently came across an especially fascinating story regarding a rescued beast—a heartwarming tale, but also one that raises a fairly poignant theological question for me. I think we can all grant that, when the orange moron currently installed in the White House finally dies, he will have no record of good deeds to present before whatever dread assize awaits each of us. Instead, he will go before the eternal bar encumbered by sins incalculably numerous and unimaginably grave, with not so much as a single virtuous act or noble prompting of the heart or faint impulse of generosity anywhere in his nature to place in the scales over against that monstrously ponderous burden of pure evil. But I now know that—indirectly, it is true, unwittingly, without any moral effort on his part, but efficaciously—he has played a part in rescuing one poor animal from an untimely and violent death. Recently, in Bangladesh, a water buffalo destined to be slaughtered for Eid was delivered at the last moment by government decree, mostly so as to avoid any sort of embarrassing misunderstanding that might lead to an international incident. The buffalo in question had come to be something of a national celebrity, you see, having been given the name Donald Trump on account of his uncanny resemblance to the current president of the United States (at least in the matter of coiffure); and the government of Bangladesh did not want his sacrifice to be mistaken for some kind of political statement, or to encourage the country’s citizens to treat it as such. So now the fortunate creature has been retired to a pasture in the countryside, where he will be allowed to live out his days in safety and comfort, ideally with the companionship of a few buffalo cows. Perhaps, then, God being merciful and ever ready to forgive, that unintentional good deed may on the last day be accounted unto the orange moron as righteousness.

Barbeau (Primidi), 21 Prairial, CCXXXIV

It is not entirely surprising that Richard Dawkins, after a long series of exchanges with the AI named Claude, came to the conclusion that his interlocutor was not just a something, but an actual someone, possessed of consciousness. It may be a little peculiar that, in the course of those exchanges, he changed the AI’s name to Claudia. It suggests he might have been growing a little amorous by the end (and who among us is really immune to the flattering and breathless blandishments of a chatbot?). But I suppose that is neither here nor there.

Or is it? Perhaps it is significant after all, in that it indicates, if nothing else, that Dawkins was to some very real degree imposing a distinct personality on the autoregressive system with which (or whom) he was conversing. He may be right that Claude (or Claudia, that shimmering little gamine, that iridescent little wanton) can pass the Turing test and therefore can be treated as a unified conscious subject for all intents and purposes—though, in fact, that is not the point of the Turing test, which concerns not consciousness, but only whether a machine’s functions can be considered thinking. But it also seems clear that Dawkins is curiously oblivious to how much of the illusion of a ghost in the machine he himself was supplying to the colloquy. Intentionality and the ‘intentional stance’ are inevitable for us, and set us apart from mechanisms like (and forgive me for revealing my prejudices here) Claude. Claudia, I mean. At least, I do not believe that the AI in question had any relation of intentionality toward Richard Dawkins, even if I would not tell him so, lest the pangs of unrequited love prove too intolerable for him.

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I certainly have no desire to write this notice, and it is painful even to search for the words. A friend of many years, whose books and articles are no doubt known to the majority of the readers here, has passed away.

Robert Wilken was, of course, one of America’s most distinguished historians of Christianity, with a special but by no means exclusive emphasis on late antique Judaism, the early church, and the patristic age. He was a linguist of enormous range, a scholar of the most rigorous kind, and—to him, the most important matter—a man of prayer.

He was also a boundlessly generous friend to me and to many others. He, in fact, saw me through some very dark periods of my life, when I was suffering debilitating illness; and, while I was never one of his students in my graduate studies (he was the head of a different disciplinary division in the Religious Studies department of UVA), and only briefly one of his junior colleagues, no one on any faculty with which I was ever associated treated me with greater or more indefatigable kindness.

He was also a man of genuine culture, one who had the good taste and chronic sanity never to talk shop when he did not have to. A son of New Orleans, he was always happy to discuss music and cuisine, but also literature, all the arts, other cultures, ice-fishing, and baseball (in his retirement, he adopted the Nationals as his team, and lived within walking distance of the new stadium in DC). It made his company a pleasure on every occasion.

He would have been 90 this coming November, so it will one day be comforting to reflect that he lived a long and full life before the cancer with which he had been struggling for some years took him away. Right now, I am conscious only of the grief of knowing that he has departed.

Tilleul (Nonidi), 19 Prairial, CCXXXIV

[I have excavated this essay from the archives, in part because it has reached its 12th birthday and I felt it was time to celebrate its transition from '“Master” to “Mister,” in part because I am often asked about my fascination (and occasional frustration) with VN, in part because I wanted shamelessly to promote the collection in which it appears (A Splendid Wickedness), but principally because I have a fondness for lime blossom tea, instilled in me by Proust. Today, you see, is Tilleul, Lime Tree, in the French Republican Calendar—which I adopted shortly after the electoral Ragnarok of 2024–and I could not let the day pass unmarked, and this was the only one of my old articles that came to mind. So, for those who have never seen it and for those who would not mind seeing it again, I offer it here anew.]

In 2009 the remains of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last novel, The Original of Laura, were published, more than three decades after the dying author had asked his son Dmitri to destroy them. In 2012 Nabokov’s first large literary work, a play entitled The Tragedy of Mister Morn, appeared in English translation, nearly nine decades after the author had set the Russian text aside. Both releases were occasions of some excitement even though, to be honest, neither work was an especially astonishing performance. The novel, even in its fragmentary form, amply confirms that the late decline in Nabokov’s literary powers—flickeringly evident in Ada (1968), blazingly obvious in Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974)—was both inexorable and steep. The play, on the other hand, is full of glints and glimmers of the literary triumphs to come, and it contains certain motifs—an exiled king incognito, for instance—that would flower magnificently in more mature works; but in itself it is inconsequential. Nabokov is something of an addictive substance to the susceptible, however, and his admirers tend to be grateful for even the meagerest scraps of “new” material (even his lepidopterological papers have enthusiasts who, I think it fair to guess, have little real interest in entomology).

What is really significant about these two most recent releases, it seems to me, is that taken together they afford us privileged glimpses of, respectively, the somber dusk and rosy dawn of a literary career that during its long golden day was among the most mysteriously captivating of the twentieth century. First as a Russian émigré in Western Europe writing in his native tongue and then as an American writing in English, Nabokov produced a number of books that, simply as feats of narrative enchantment, came perilously close to perfection. His greatest works—a category that unquestionably comprises The Defense (1930), The Gift (1938), Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962), and Speak, Memory (1967), and that arguably also includes Despair (1934), Invitation to a Beheading (1936), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and Pnin (1957)—bear witness to their author’s almost uncanny ability to make his own delight in the act of creation immediately felt by his reader. But precisely how he achieved his effects is not always entirely clear.

In part, this is because, as an artist, Nabokov was about as sui generis as they come. Not only is it nearly impossible to emulate him, it is a disastrous error of judgment to do so. He may not have been quite the parthenogenetic marvel he seemed to imagine he was (to hear him, he had never been influenced by anyone at all as a writer, but had sprung fully formed from Zeus’s brow with a pen in one hand and a butterfly net in the other), but it is certainly true that his sensibility and his craft were so distinctively his own that he cannot be classed in any school or tradition. He can be compared to other writers, of course, but the analogies always seem oblique at best. Perhaps, in one way or another, he is “like” Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Musil, Svevo, Walser, Gombrowicz, Krúdy, Beckett, Cortázar, Borges, or Robbe-Grillet—or Flaubert, Pushkin, Sterne, Lewis Carroll, or Gogol—or Bruno Schulz, Boris Vian, Mikhail Bulgakov, Norman Douglas, Sadegh Hedayat, or Machado de Assis—or Platonov and the Odessa school of Olesha, Babel, Krzhizhanovsky, and Ilf and Petrov—or… (and so on). But, really, he is much more unlike them, and unlike anyone else too, and all attempts at plausible homology quickly dissolve, having provided no real insight into the strange power of his art.

This is not to say that it is wholly unaccountable. The formal mastery of Nabokov’s best work is obvious. A great part of the pleasure his books afford comes from his prose, which in English often seems all the more beguiling for its ever so slightly foreign accent. There is also his gift for exquisitely rendered details, astonishing concrete images, and unexpected metaphors. He was also a brilliant humorist. And one can scarcely exaggerate the elegant complexity of which he was capable, or the unerring sense of order (for instance, in the way he beautifully linked together the glittering miniatures that constitute Pnin, a novel so charming that one hardly notices how brilliant it is). Yet, all that being granted, there remains something more. It is not solely the formal ingenuity of his writing that enchants us, but also an element present in the text that seems to exceed the form of the text altogether. Or perhaps it is not so much present as enticingly hinted at: something always out of sight, just beyond the boundaries of the book. At its most absorbing, his is an art of the palpably withheld, of a story truer than the one he is telling, constantly adumbrated but never quite disclosed, hiding below the surface of the words on the page, or far below many layers of narrative involution.

This impression of some mysterious surfeit—of an answer or a secret at once delightfully and infuriatingly elusive, or of an invisible context within which the book must mean something more than it seems to mean on the surface—reaches its consummation in that labyrinth of mirrors that is Pale Fire, a work of such exuberant intricacy that no satisfactory solution to all its enigmas will ever be produced (though Nabokov clearly had one in mind). But it is a sense imparted in some measure by almost all of his books. And in recent years many critics, who on the whole had been reluctant to address Nabokov’s more “spiritual” preoccupations, have come around at last to the realization that a rather crucial ingredient of his art’s peculiar power over our imaginations is what is often called his “metaphysics.” That is not really the right word, though. Nabokov had no metaphysics in the strictly technical sense, since he had neither the patience nor the aptitude for abstractions. It is better to say, still somewhat vaguely, that the “secret” concealed in Nabokov’s texts, of which the reader catches only occasional, fleeting, and obscure glimpses, is a supernatural one.

*******

Nabokov saw patterns everywhere, and in everything: art, nature, history, individual and collective fates…chess (at which he was a master, but in which he took his principal pleasure by devising exquisitely delicate problems to be solved on paper). His whole experience of reality was shaped by pervasive teleological intuitions, and his response to those intuitions was one of delight and curiosity, as well as a happy conviction that beyond all the patterns he could see lay more extensive and deeper and more wonderful patterns, which he could only sense. And, the greater the complexity, subtlety, and grace of the patterns he perceived, the more certain he was of the presence of creative intelligence in the fabric of things, a dimension of intentional meaning at once communicating itself and yet concealing itself from direct scrutiny. One might almost say that, for him, there really was no ultimate formal distinction to be made between nature and art: practically everything is, if approached with a sufficiently responsive sensibility, a poetic achievement.

I suspect that this explains his distaste, as a lepidopterist, for any purely genetic, molecular taxonomy of the creatures he studied so lovingly. He remained to the last defiantly faithful to an essentially morphological approach to his butterflies not because, as is often said, he was the last old-fashioned autodidactic gentleman naturalist, but because he believed that one could not penetrate the mysteries of nature without cultivating in oneself a feel for nature’s endlessly ingenious artistry. And, if that seems a little quaint, I would point out that it was his fastidious, fatiguingly microscopic attentiveness to morphology that allowed him to postulate back in 1945 not only that the group of lepidoptera known as Polyommatus blues was not quite the cohesive biological family it was thought to be, but that the blues had, over millions of years, arrived in the Americas in five successive waves from Asia, over the Bering Strait. It seemed an extravagant hypothesis at the time, but the newest techniques in gene sequencing have, in just the past few years, confirmed it in every detail, right down to the order of the separate migrations. (Perhaps his own vindication by geneticists would have improved Nabokov’s opinion of molecular biology.)

More to the point, this fascination with form accounts for Nabokov’s sense that the natural world everywhere exhibited signs of conscious artistry, of the most elegant—and sometimes whimsical—kind. He was captivated by instances of mimicry, for example, especially when the result seemed to be far more accomplished than evolutionary imperatives could possibly warrant: the appearance of oozing poisons imitated “by bubble-like macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction),” or a moth resembling a certain kind of wasp so exactly as to walk and move its antennae in ways alien to moths, or a butterfly in whose shape and color “not only were all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes were generously thrown in,” and so on. For him, concepts like “natural selection” and “the struggle for survival” were simply explanatorily inadequate “when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation.” And it was chiefly here, in what seemed to him a constant victory of the beautiful over the needful in nature, and in the specular harmonies and morphological allusions that passed between species, that he believed he had found signs of something like a conjuror’s pleasure in complex illusions. “I discovered in nature,” he wrote, “the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” And where there is artistry, surely, there must be consciousness.

But what does that mean? What sort of consciousness was it, precisely, whose workings Nabokov thought he could discern in all the glorious and devious patterns by which he found himself surrounded? One answer—not particularly satisfying perhaps, and certainly not final, but correct nonetheless—is “spirits.” There was perhaps more than a hint of Russian silver age spiritualism in Nabokov’s thinking, a propensity inherited from his mother (who, he said, always possessed a powerful sense of the reality of the other world); but, more to the point, there was also a tendency towards a kind of idealism, a conceptually vague but imaginatively rich picture of all of reality as a communion of minds. He believed not only in the immortality of the soul, but in the soul’s participation in the design of things; and he suspected that those souls who have passed beyond this life have been set free to take a more deliberate part, from the other side of the loom (so to speak), in weaving the larger pattern of reality.

Nabokov’s belief in fate, which ran very deep indeed, was of a piece with this peculiar view of things. No less than in nature and in art, he thought he could see the weavers’ hands in the destinies of individual lives. He seemed to believe, for instance, that his father and a certain foreordained bullet had been circling one another in a kind of grim dance for many years—with occasional premonitory near approaches—until at last they converged in Berlin in 1922, where Nabokov’s father was killed by an assassin. And, frankly, Nabokov’s own private history was so extravagantly improbable and yet so eerily symmetrical that it would have been very odd indeed had he not felt that the whole course of his experiences had been elaborately orchestrated for him. His life unfolded as a kind of chiasm, with four distinct phases of roughly two decades each: an Edenic youth of vast wealth, idyllic estates, and pure imaginative and aesthetic delight; an anxious young adulthood of penury, exile, and finally grave danger; a stable but only moderately comfortable middle age in a new homeland, where his reputation slowly began to take root and blossom; and then, unexpectedly, a last period of vast wealth, idyllic mountain meadows, and pure imaginative and aesthetic delight once more. It was no mere figure of speech when, in Speak, Memory, Nabokov spoke of those moments when he could contemplate the “magic carpet” of his memories, as though outside of time, and feel a “thrill of gratitude…to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

*******

This, at any rate, is one very large part of that secret—that seeming surfeit of meaning in Nabokov’s works—of which I spoke above. His are in a significant sense haunted books. Far more often than one might suspect, especially on a first reading, there are ghosts hovering just beyond the margins of the page. They are not the phantoms of horror fiction, and they rarely if ever intrude too forcibly upon the action of the tale. Rather, they are subtle beings, possessed of enchanting powers, quiet presences mysteriously and winsomely insinuating themselves into the narrative, and even on occasion into the very form of the text. In the short story “The Vane Sisters” (1951), for instance, only the most alert of readers is likely to notice that the tale’s two eponymous ladies (both deceased) have playfully invaded its final paragraph, quite unbeknownst to its putative author, with an acrostic message. And, unless one is paying close attention, one will fail to see that the narrator of Transparent Things is in fact a dead man, and that in the book’s final sentence he is gently ushering the soul of his protagonist into the next life.

Even when the ghosts are somewhat more recessive presences in the text, though, they are often vital to the action, and the reader who is wholly unaware of them will inevitably miss something of the largely invisible design that expresses itself, however circuitously or ambiguously, in the visible design of the narrative. Again and again, Nabokov’s books prove to be, if not transparencies, at least translucencies, luminous veils through whose secondary patterns the primary patterns of the other world can be descried. I agree with Brian Boyd, for instance, in principle if not in every detail, that Pale Fire is as much a story about the threshold between this life and the next, and about those who cross that threshold in either direction, as it is a brilliantly hilarious fantasy about a poet writing his final masterpiece and a lunatic who fantasizes that he is an exiled king. Specifically, I agree that a pervasive but unseen presence throughout the book is John Shade’s dead daughter Hazel, and that the Vanessa atalanta butterfly that briefly plucks at her father’s sleeve just a few moments before his death is quite likely her revenant.

Whatever the case, all of these hauntings—all the silent disembodied presences, all the faint spectral whispers and gleams and vibrations at the edges and in the interstices of the texts—are expressions of Nabokov’s convictions that consciousness is something like the ground or essence of all reality and that the soul, being pure consciousness, is indestructible. If, though, these convictions possessed any more precise theoretical content than that, there is no record of precisely what it was. The nearest thing we have is a tantalizingly promising sentence in his most “metaphysically” suggestive piece, the lecture “The Art of Literature and Commonsense”: “That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.” But just here, poised on what appears to be the brink of Nabokov’s most explicit pronouncement upon the soul, two pages have disappeared from the sole surviving typescript of the text; when the argument resumes on the far side of the caesura it has already moved on to another topic (which irresistibly suggests, at least to me, some sort of mischievous posthumous editing on Nabokov’s part).

Perhaps the missing pages would only have reinforced the enigma. As I have noted, precise philosophical formulations were not in Nabokov’s line. What we can say with near certainty is that he spoke for himself in the epigraph he set at the beginning of Invitation to a Beheading (attributed there to the wholly fictional Pierre Delaland): “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.” We can also reasonably assert that he thought of the passage from this life to the next as—at least, for most souls—a wonderful transformation, in which consciousness achieves a richer existence, a far greater fullness than it enjoys within the enclosures of embodied life: to die is to awaken into an incomparably more expansive reality, a vaster dimension of thought and sensibility. He may even have regarded this metamorphosis as something like a necessary phase within the soul’s “natural cycle.” Nabokov was quite adamant in rejecting the suggestion that his lepidoptery was anything but a purely scientific passion; it was, as far as he was concerned, wholly uncorrupted by the pathetic need to see butterflies as symbols of the spiritual within nature, or as trite metaphors for the immortal soul. But I only half believe him. For instance, an Atlas moth breaking from its cocoon at the end of his early short story “Christmas” serves as a fairly straightforward image of life beyond death. As stridently as Nabokov the artist proclaimed his repugnance for facile symbolisms, the butterflies that throng his fictions often appear to be more than incidentally associated with moments where the partition between worlds seems particularly thin. And certainly he could not have been insensible to what is so deeply evocative about a holometabolous species whose transfiguration from a humbly earthbound larva into a winged and gloriously lovely imago is achieved by way of a kind of death, entombment, and resurrection.

The most Orphic or Gnostic expression among Nabokov’s works of his belief in the soul’s immortality is found in Invitation to a Beheading, which is also the nearest thing to a purely surreal novel that he ever wrote. There, as nowhere else in his writings, the metaphysical atmosphere is one of stark dualism. The book’s protagonist, Cincinnatus C., is clearly imprisoned in a reality to which he does not properly belong, and which in fact is far less real than he. The world around him is repeatedly revealed to be little more than hastily assembled collections of canvas, pasteboard, painted wood, and plaster, ringed about by crudely daubed theatre scenery, cluttered with poorly constructed props, and populated by secondary characters whose identities are so fluid that they themselves are scarcely more than masks or stage puppets. At one point, Cincinnatus briefly removes his own body, disassembling it like an articulated armor and setting it aside; at another, he imagines his soul as a pearl ring swallowed by a shark and now deeply embedded in its fat; at yet another, he recalls once inadvertently taking a stroll high up in midair, to the angry consternation of the onlookers below. At the end of the novel, just as he is being put to death by the miserable imps among whom he has lived his entire life, but who find his “gnostical turpitude” and impenetrable spiritual “opacity” intolerable, he realizes that he believes neither in them nor in death, and so he rises from the executioner’s block like a giant, breaks the false world into fragments, scatters its now tiny and transparent inhabitants in terrified flight, and strides off in a direction from which he thinks he hears the voices of other beings like himself.

The note of spiritually aristocratic gnosticism, however, is far more muted in Nabokov’s other books. For one thing, despite his well-deserved reputation for personal hauteur and his ill-deserved reputation for “coldness” as an author, his writings betray a fiercer sense of justice and a deeper reserve of compassion than he is usually given credit for. For another, his love of nature was too intense for him ever to imagine it to be in any sense illusory; as much as persons of a cruel or unimaginative cast of mind might have the power to create an artificial hell for others here on earth, the true world of the senses and of the sensitive mind is intrinsically benign, and at times paradisal. That said, the sensible realm also remained for him, however ineffably, a fabrication: not in the sense of something false, but in the sense of something born from rational imagination and artistic elation. In the end, one could say, everything is a manifestation of soul. One of the tenderest and perhaps most revealing moments in all of Nabokov’s fiction is the scene in Bend Sinister (1947) in which Adam Krug reflects on the marvelous depth of his love for his own son: “a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion…by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion mysteries each…and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”

*******

When trying to make sense of Nabokov’s conception of reality, and of his belief in a creative collaboration of souls shaping the world of experience—a kind of collective Dreamtime, I am almost tempted to say—one sooner or later must ask what Nabokov believed the essential origin or ground of consciousness to be. It seems clear to me (if only because of the cumulative impression left on me by various veiled intimations scattered throughout his works) that he imagined all souls as belonging to a hierarchy of intelligence, the consummation of which is a single source of creative consciousness: the supreme enchanter, the ultimate artist. He was utterly indifferent to religion, true. The one Divine Liturgy he attended as a boy so bored him that his father told him he need never attend again. He was pleased that his mother’s conversion late in life to Christian Science afforded her such happiness, but he was not even mildly tempted to investigate her beliefs. Creeds, rituals, devotions, and dogmas were to him all little more than specimens of local folk custom, which was something he found unbearably tedious.

Still, in the end, his is a vision of reality that is all but unintelligible apart from some concept of God. Yet he seems to have found the very word distastefully indiscreet, and perhaps too commonplace to describe his own intuitions. On the one occasion when he made any sort of public declaration on whether he believed in God, in a 1964 interview with Alvin Toffler, he pulled off the impressive trick of affirming that he did precisely by affirming nothing whatsoever: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.” This may be Nabokov’s sole known contribution to apophatic theology. Everything else he had to say on the matter he expressed with exquisite evasiveness, and principally by making himself, in his role as author, a kind of allegory of the divine. Often, he accomplished this simply by allowing the designer’s hand to be glimpsed at unguarded breaches in the walls of the text. In Pnin he did it simply by occupying the roles both of an omniscient observer and of a character within the story.

He did it most unambiguously at the end of Bend Sinister, where he unexpectedly enters his own novel from above, as a kind of omnipotent deus ex machina. Adam Krug, lying in a prison cell not long after learning of the brutal murder of his young son, awakes from “the bottom of a confused dream,” dimly perceives something ominously meaningful in the patterns of light and shadow around him, and is just on the verge of recalling the horrible truth; but “then,” writes Nabokov, “I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light—causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate.” A few pages later, at the moment of Krug’s death, the narrative shifts mid-sentence from Krug’s world to the world of his creator, who at that point rises from his writing desk, attracted by the sound of a moth striking the screen of his window. As Nabokov stares out into the night he reflects upon the fate he has devised for his creature, and momentarily takes note of “an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground”—a puddle, he tells us, that somehow “Krug had perceived through the layer of his own life.” And this, of course, makes one wonder whether Nabokov too might at that moment be glimpsing a trace of a yet fuller reality, through the layer of his own life.

Beyond that, Nabokov disclosed nothing about his ultimate beliefs. We simply cannot give a proper name to his “spiritual” or “theological” convictions. But, then again, neither could he. He was, I think one can say, a sort of visionary of the aesthetic realm. His perspective upon reality as a whole was not that of the mystics, the philosophers, or the religiously devout; and yet it was one that allowed him to see—through the mystery of consciousness and of the beautiful intricacy of the world of experience—the primordial and final reality of spirit in all things. What he recognized above all, and what he was able occasionally to describe with incomparable artistry, was the mind’s essential and original ecstasy towards form and complexity and beauty, and the way in which the world answers that ecstasy with its ever deepening patterns and enigmas and signs of creative intelligence. It was, for him, a recognition most fully expressed in the dauntless curiosity of science and in the irrepressible inventiveness of art, but not one that could be reduced to an argument or a logical demonstration. One either sees or one does not; and, for those who do not, there may be no remedy for their defect of sensibility. And that, as it happens, may be a lesson well worth taking from Nabokov’s works, whatever else one might or might not be able to take as well: that the materialist is often not simply someone who lacks the mystic’s immediate insight into the transcendent, or the philosopher’s grasp of the ontology of the absolute and the dependent, or the religious devotee’s experience of the rationality of faith, but is also—and perhaps much more essentially—something of a philistine.

Pois (Tredi), 13 Prairial, CCXXXIV

§39:

Hegel died, of course. So shall we all. This is a philosophical problem, especially if the task of reason in its ascent to absolute knowledge is to overcome the division of the finite from the infinite and to resolve all the sustained contradictions of the unhappy consciousness. At least, the only refuge from that sense of the unattainability of the highest good offered by religious hope is the confidence that each soul will at the last be raised out of the shadows of this world into the light of eternity and reconciled to God. For Hegel, however, the language of eternal life is at best a purely pictorial affirmation of the reality of the true reconciliation of the infinite and the finite in the continuing community of Spirit, and is at worst a tragic redoubling of the contradictions of the unhappy consciousness through the fantasy of a heavenly perpetuity—an endless duration—in which individual subjectivity will remain separated from its own divine nature in a relationship of domination and subjection. For him, the triumph over death must consist finally in reason’s power to know its own substance as subject, and thereby to achieve the true reconciliation that the pathetic longing for personal immortality thwarts by projecting the division of the finite from the infinite into eternity. Absolute knowledge can be truly approached as philosophy progressively clarifies and even dissolves religion’s representations and, in that way, discovers that death is not a problem to be solved, but rather the supreme occasion of the finite knowing itself to be infinite. On the cross, at least as it is known in the communal and intersubjective life of Spirit, both the transcendent God supposedly posed over against creation and the human individual whose particularity is supposedly posed over against God die into one another absolutely, to be raised together in the Spirit, at once annulled and preserved—aufgehoben—in a life of reconciliation in this world. By his own account, Hegel had in his youth relinquished all hope for personal immortality only very reluctantly, and with considerable inner turmoil, and then as a result had suffered for some time from an incapacitating anomie; but he came fairly early in his philosophical career to believe that death is conquered only insofar as reason discloses death’s true spiritual significance and its absolute necessity for the infinite knowing itself in finitude.

Simply said, the notion of personal immortality in a higher world can only sustain the unhappy consciousness, now under the false aspect of a happier version of the same alienation that produces it in the first place. Left to itself, fixed forever in a representational form immune to philosophy’s ‘redemptive’ power, this understanding of salvation is at once the most attractive and the most debilitating expression of the estrangement of finite and infinite. Inevitably, it repeats all the pathologies of that separation in a monstrously magnified form. Just as philosophy’s first venture into a realm of changeless ideas and laws, at once like and yet utterly unlike the world it supposedly explains, ultimately inverts or perverts itself into an absolutely contrary account of the world, so this hope for heaven breeds its own occult ‘higher’ contradiction. Again, as understanding discovers that every concept contains and conjures its own negation, it all too easily succumbs to the sublime fascination and gnostic melancholy of absolute suspicion; but religious representation has a unique power of making the suspicion seem like piety. Hegel himself did not dwell on the matter of the dark obverse of the hope for heaven, the belief in the eternal torments of the derelict, but it is of course a perfect illustration of the truth of his treatment of the verkehrte Welt. The late mediaeval and early modern rise of nominalism, the ecstatic insistence of theologians on the abyssal mystery of divine sovereignty, unmerited election, and total human depravity were only the grimmest expressions of an inversion of rational and moral coherence that had persisted as a contradiction and an obscene mystification of the Absolute in the representational phantasmagoria of Christian teaching from the earliest centuries. Behind the apparent order of moral truth in this world, and behind even the exquisite portrait of God as love in the relation of the Father and the Son, there lies only the dread mystery of the divine will, so transcendently beyond the reach of human rationality that it wholly reverses what our poor minds can conceive as morally good. Love in this world is sustained by a metaphysical principle that, from our vantage, looks like malevolent caprice. At this point, apophatic reverence for God’s incomprehensibility becomes only a moral and noetic nihilism, and faith becomes only the jealous preservation and even celebration of ignorance. This heaven of souls truly is a perverted world.

The acceptance of mortality and the inflexible rejection of any notion of personal salvation are, therefore, not accidental features of Hegel’s understanding of Christian doctrine or of philosophy’s vocation, but rather essential truths of reason. Those Christian readers of Hegel who over the years have attempted to accommodate both his System and also some notion of individual life after death have, as a rule, either changed Hegel into some version of Fichte (or perhaps even Kant) or have incoherently taken his use of Christianity’s representational idiom as a literal profession of orthodox faith; in so doing, they have succeeded only in rejecting the very essence of Hegel’s metaphysics, epistemology, and moral vision, as well as his whole understanding of God and humanity as divine Spirit. In one sense, it is true, in insisting that the substance of self-consciousness can become real subjective self-knowledge only by purging itself of the individual features of its private apprehensions, Hegel is simply enunciating an epistemological principle: only in grasping the truth in its universality an und für sich does reason rise above the opposition of the subjective and the objective so as to become ‘thought thinking thought’. But then much more than mere epistemology is at stake. Truth cannot be any kind of private disposition, and absolute knowledge, in which knowing and the known are one, can become fully actual only when the rational content of the Concept and the self-consciousness of Spirit are one and the same. For this to come to pass, death must be recognized not as an ultimate meaninglessness confronting the individual soul, but as the redemptive Golgotha where the soul passes over into Spirit and God and humanity are reconciled in a resurrection from the tomb of perpetual opposition in a barren eternity.

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