negative capability

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

THE original Clarissa letter... the purple prose is, of course, mine. :)


Actually it was our neg-cap Lovelace discussion that I posted that started this. I'd written Ellen and the other moderator of her 18th C list re Clarissa. I wasn't sure my "I AM Lovelace" letter was right for a scholarly list -- but got this back with a personal note.

Very heartening. And kind.

X's
Deborah

 

note: Netflix has Clarissa!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ellen Moody"
To:
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 5:40 AM
Subject: _Clarissa_: May 3rd, Lovelace, the daimon and that old
sado-masochistic strain


: Partly as a reaction to the material on my website on _Clarissa_,
: someone has written to me today a truly richly suggestive
: piece on _Clarissa_. It's about Lovelace and Clarissa, admitting what
: few will say openly how alluring he is. I would like this one not
: to land in the oblivion of cyberspace but be shared by others as
: it is filled with good insights and poetry of language. When
: I read it, I remembered how I opened my
: dissertation on _Clarissa_ with telling of how he was part of
: my dream life, talking of him as the _animus_ that allures
: many women -- and men too. In his book _The Romantic Agony_,
: Mario Praz aligns Lovelace with the Romantic poets, with the
: rebels. One way to read _Clarissa_ is as Blake read Milton:
: on the side of energy, release, the "daimon" within us that
: throws the twisted conventions people use to keep one another
: at bay (family, institutions, "manners"). The poetry of the language
: is something I can't myself write:
:
"I think of the Romantic poets who sprung up from this landscape. Their
words and sentiments are noble, they love truth and beauty and drink women
like wine, discarding them like empty bottles. They're rational,
enlightened, and they are ruled by old planets -- Saturn, Venus, and above
all, Mercury (ah, there he is, beginning the letter of May Day). The
pagans, the Greeks, the old orphic mysteries inhabit Lovelace. And -- oh, how I
hate to see all that pass away. Thus, my sympathy.

Where does a man with a sword go when the world turns away from him? When
his tenancy and cunning are no longer needed? These aggressive souls who
kill the beast at the door play some role, are of some use, to our species.
Lovelace is that great mystery of maleness to me. Those beguiling young
boys killing frogs at the pond. Torturing things.

The story is certainly about sex. Beyond all the tantric Unus Mundus
mumbo jumbo I love so well, it's people living at close quarters, mediating
instinct by decorum. But what is more erotic than yielding to the strange,
the forbidden? Than any two bonded in stealth? Eros was the child of
resource and poverty, cunning and need. Who embodies these better than
Lovelace? He stands in the flame. He is part Sileni; a daimon of fields
and rocks and thick woods."
:
: I did go over to my site and discovered that I too on this day heard
: the siren lure of "That Old Sado-Masochistic Strain"
:
:
: In Letter 170, Loveace to Belford, Wednesday, May 3rd
: (Ross Penguin pp 556-8) we read:
:
: I own with thee, and with the poet, that sweet
: are the joys that come with willingness--but
: is it to be expected that a woman of
: education, and a lover of orms, will yield
: before she is attacked?--And have I so much
: as summoned this to surrender? I doubt not
: but I shall meet with difficulty. I must
: therefore make my first effort by surprize.
: There may possibly be some cruelty
: necessary. But there may be consent in
: struggle; there may be yielding in
: resistance. But the first conflict over,
: whether the folowing may not be weaker
: and weaker, till willingness follow, is the
: point to be tried ...
:
: He then carries on with his bird similes.
:
: Unless I am mistaken this kind of thing occurs more
: frequently once we arrive at Sinclair's house: the
: barnyard with its cock and hens, the fowler dig, dig,
: digging, the elephant "snuffing the moon" with his
: "proboscis." It turns from a occasional image into a a
: connecting skein. On first reading it might seem as the
: problem with Colonel Morden's letter (Letter 173.1,
: Florence, April 13, Ross, Penguin pp 561-4) is that he
: rigidly ignores this aspect of experience, refuses to
: acknowledge it (and it is real enough in Solmes, as we
: have seen), but even here we find sentences like:
:
: Your duty, your interest, your temporal,
: and your eternal welfare, do, and may all
: depend upon this single point, the morality
: of a husband. A wife cannot always have it
: in her power to begood, or to do good, if
: she has a wicked husband ...
:
: I think he refers, however guardedly, however
: abstractly, to what Clarissa's sex life with Lovelace is
: going to be like. (He conveniently forgets Solmes, with
: the implication that "a moral" man will anyway not go
: out to others, and she can find delight and practice
: what Johnson called with "art of forgetting" with her
: "politer studies" and "politer amusements.")
:
: This kind of language is in direct conflict with the
: plangent skeins Clarissa begins to produce of her self as
: a kind of lost bewildered not-guilty soul in a labyrinth
: not very well lighted.
:
: My friend offlist wrote of Clarissa most beautifully:
:
"Above all, they fascinate because they each are so ambivalent. And they
help us confront the ambiguities within ourselves. Why do we have more
sympathy for Clary than we have for the whores of Dover Street? And
though we love her for her mind and her virtue, her goodness and her beauty --
how very much we want Lovelace to win.
When has Clary ever NOT been a prisoner?
She does love him, admit it or not. Demons exist to fascinate, and I'm
sure those who believe in them dream wonderfully mad things, remember it or
no.

I'm always trying to get into Richardson's head, to see how he moves the
miniscule plot along and takes us through to the depths of these people.
It was written in another time, but the voices still speak to us of our own.
That's always stunning to me."
:
:
: What I have always loved about Clary is her plangent tone, her
: absoluteness, that towards the end of the book she too turns
: towards space well outside society. Of course she is driven
: there. Oddly enough her vile family -- instinctively how such
: types often hit on hard truths but then present them so coarsely
: they are utterly changed -- is right to see in Clarissa towards
: the end a deep love for Belford. He is Kindness; he is her
: creator. Richardson's alter ego who loves her.
:
: I bring these up because I think the book allures people
: for reasons having nothing to do with its professed
: morality. Perhaps one reason we have trouble on
: lists discussing our reading experience of _Clarissa_
: is because when it "works" for us, it works outside
: the public realm I talked about with respect to Johnson
: and Boswell yesterday. Lovelace and Clarissa,
: they allure people, in French, offer the core of the
: novel experience, the novel which began as a love
: story (Longus's _Daphnis and Chloe_, 3rd century
: AD) "le frisson du roman" but in this case packed
: "avec d'horreur."
:
: Ellen
:
:
 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Subject: salt of soul, sulfur of spirit

Deb,
You might recall an animated discussion we had here on the distinction between soul and spirit a while back. I am still not sure if we need two different constructs (*spirit* and *soul*), as in the line, "When a spirit is imagined as above human life, as fundamentally masculine, as abstracting and distancing, and as pure and uncontaminated, the soul is particularly denigrated." In my experience thus far, spirituality = soul-making (I think). What say you?
The rest I agree with wholeheartedly, of course.
Soulfully yours,
Anand

from Deborah:




 

>>Your Birth of Kali picture/s is/are very funny, Deb.>>C

:)



 

"The idealizations which Eros tends always to constellate can be
counterbalanced: creativity expresses itself also as destruction. Love's
torture may not always lead to the happy ending of our tale. The
idealizations may further be weighted by recalling the connections in Hesiod,
the Orphics, and renaissance Neoplatonism between eros and chaos.
"Eros is born of Chaos, implying that out of every chaotic moment the creativity of which we have been speaking can be born. Further more, Eros will always hearken back to its origins in chaos and will seek it for revivification.
... Eros will attempt again and again to create those dark nights and
confusions which are its nests. It renews itself in affective attacks,
jealousies, fulminations, and turmoils. It thrives close to the
dragon."
 

That quote is James Hillman (Love's Torturous Enchantment in A BLUE FIRE) *This book — by the way— has been a real affirmation for me. It's in keeping what interests me in Jung — and also with my fascination with Platonic Eros.
What Diotima is telling Socrates in Plato's Symposium is this reading of the Eros and Psyche myth. As in all these myths, it's a metaphor. This Eros internalized within the psyche is the classic daimon, creature between mortal and immortal. And shorthand for the interface between our conscious and unconscious.
Neoplatonism—the post earlier today on Plotinus (think Ficino)—reread Plotinus and the birth of Venus in Beauty. The pairs, above below. Read it as spirit—soul. ? In this scheme (so important to Renaissance magic), One is Two: spirit is sort of a mist / vapor carried through the body by the blood and beating heart, the connecting point between body and soul. An airy spirit, the carrier of music's reasoning -- which is a key to understanding the scheme: recall Philo saying the logos can only be sung. In the early paintings of the Assumption, you see the Holy Ghost winging down to the Virgin's ear. Very old symbolism (and I think Philo, 1st C. mystic Jew, gives the best understanding of the logos. The later Church Fathers bend the meaning, now totally lost...) But Plotinus -- his earthly Venus /heavenly Venus pair. And Eros, her son or brother, but always her companion. Speaking of comPASSION and what moves it — desire. Erotic, all, this force that inspires — that 'breathes life.' Anima / Animus in the flame of becoming, at once holding on and letting go.
Symbols. Always pointing you on to another level, they never sit still. The conscious mind wants everything clear and crisp, in black and white. But that's not the way it really IS.
Anand was telling me the Hindu story of the goddesses... as 'the void' projected desire and created Space... then Time... then... The same story again and again. And in each of us.(And fascinating to see Saturn figure in the Hindu Parvati myth—just as Chronos does in Plotinus's birth of Venus.)
Catholic catechism: We are born to know love and serve god. The void looking in the mirror with the same impulse: creation and Self.
I keep drawing all that out — seeing these myths as archetype, as they played on Richardson's imagination.
Have long been intrigued with the Eros-Psyche myth and its earlier alt.form Persephone-Hades and the ways it mutated as it passed itself down, both drawing from the same underground stream somewhere beneath Mt. Etna. Hades and his brother Hephaestus: Peter Kingsley tells us in the early fragments of Empedocles they form a pair: fire as erotic creativity: destructive and creative at once.
I see so much of Hillman drawn from deep reading of Symposium — which is an amalgam of earlier myths. Eros reflects the earlier goddess myth and often is seen as hermaphrodite. Anima Animus analogs.

I wrote Anand:



 

Before archetype theory was there to guide and pull things together, there was
myth, story. Novels came about in following down these fascinations, the
demons who lead us on into the interior. So — maybe archetype theory came
about for math and business majors who don't have time to read novels (oh,
professor!) ;) I'm kidding of course, but — empiricism is based in
experience. Art and complex psych orient and ground the journey, is
all. And art is too often neglected and so mass produced and mass
fed that maybe a crutch is now needed that wasn't needed before. The
'primitives' were not primitive. They certainly knew the power of myth and
story in living life. In a living cosmos. A thing we — especially in the
west, as we become these machines we serve — have undervalued, lost.
The Philosopher's stone. The Foundation Stone. The orphan.
I love your dream of the two halves becoming one. I think it is both sides of Venus, both sides of Eros, the one and the One. Our face in the mirror, the longing that created us us, Longing longing back... Wonderful dream. Please, just enjoy the experience, the memory of it. A gift. Fascination is enough.

 

Anand said: >>So one path is seeking 'detachment' through renunciation: a merger with Shiva; the other, with the joyful energy of Shakti. Of course they converge. >>

It's the whole of Eros, the whole of Venus, both Janis face sides. Earthy, heavenly, both at once. Holding on and letting go all at once: *standing in the upsurging draft of love* and that IS the whole message of the Symposium.
Self. The deity dressed in time and space. Our living.
So they put it to us superior westerners as we first come across words like heathen and pagan — that we are monotheistic, unlike those other primitives! Those heathen lost souls and their polyglot polygods! See the Greeks worship Zeus! Them Hindoos, they worship all sorts of melon-breasted eroticons! Them pagans and all their calling up them demons in the night, dancing naked beneath the moon! And them Buddhists! Why, they have no god at all! And yet — and yet — the Void, the ground of Being, the Forms. All are the same One, and the many gods and godlets the archetype, the matrix that we cast our images of godhead upon.
As I see it, Archetype is the psyche's analog to the knowledge / matrix intrinsic within matter: the 'memory' of hydrogen bonding in water that ' knows' to form ice, the crystal lattice that forms diamonds from carbon. Not the elements, not the image per se — but the matrix behind, within.
(imho...)


Anand asked:
>...In my experience thus far, spirituality = soul-making (I think). What say you? >

To answer — I am seeing the distinction — and understanding that for you — and for one conscious of anima / animus and able to see the archetype revealing itself and speaking in its cryptic, wordless, imaginal way — they can be the same. But there is always a danger in transcendence. Seeking only the high of peak consciousness, in churches, ritual, piety, magic, etc. The peaks that skim the cream off the valleys. Soulmaking IS finding the sacred in the commonplace, the temple everywhere, the deity in your child's face, the godhood in your mortal lover.
Hillman writes:
 

"At first the entanglements which Eros constellates seem personal, as if all of love hung on the right word or move at the magical right time, as if it were a matter of effort and doing. But then the entanglements become reflections of archetypal patterns that appear in everyone's life. The images (eidola) are what everyone has experienced in his psyche through loving. In this way Eros leads to the archetypes behind the patterns, and we are played into myth after myth: now a hero, now a virgin running, now a satyr who must clutch, now blind, now soaring. Precisely this mythical awareness and enactment result from psychological creativity.
Thus we begin to recognize in ourselves that eros and psyche are not mere figures in a tale, not merely configurations of archetypal components, but are two ends of every psychic process*. They always imply and require each other. We cannot view anything psychologically without it entering our soul. By experiencing an event psychologically, we tend to feel a connection with it; in feeling and desire we tend to realize the importance of something for the soul. Desire is holy, as D.H. Lawrence, the romantics, the Neoplatonists insisted, because it touches and moves the soul. Reflection is never enough."
(*Ouroboros again.)

"Desire is holy."

Summa Felicitas,

Deborah

"Call the world, if you please, the vale of soul making. Then you will find out the use of the world." ~John Keats

***

C Bishop wrote:
Spirit and Soul
How about spirit is the God that's seeking us and soul is the God the spirit is seeking? I don't know where that puts Us —more than spectator certainly. I think it's hide and seek and spirit comes together with soul and then they go off for a new place to hide. Why all the hiding though?

C

***

Anand wrote:
C,
Are you thinking along the lines of individual soul (= 'soul') and Cosmic/Universal soul (= 'spirit')? A distinction, perhaps germane to the Moore quote, that has emerged in my thinking lately is between the path of eros and the path of detachment/renunciation, with my path currently squarely in the former. [Jung's Anima = Soul really gels with me now. Anima work = soul work.]
Another possibility:
Spirit= Pure Consciousness = Shiva (inert corpse)
Soul= Animating Energy / Will = Shakti (e.g. Kali dancing on Shiva to animate or give him life).
So one path is seeking 'detachment' through renunciation: a merger with Shiva; the other, with the joyful energy of Shakti. Of course they converge. And, of course, oversimplifying.
Mikey?
Tripping on soul,
- Anand

***

mike writes:
The Buddhist's have a threefold manifestation, a triplicity of dimensions of being, named dharmakaya ('absolute dimension of being'), sambhogakaya ('dimension of blissful enjoyment') and nirmanakaya ('emanational dimension') which correspond, more or less, to the alchemical sulphur=life- energy/spirit, mercury=becoming/soul, salt=formation/body. One of the images used is that of the sun, its rays, and its reflections in various bodies of water; another, that of space, the sun, and streaming rays of sunlight... There is no hierarchy; when the first is attained, the other two are inherent in that attainment. The first is jñana (primordial knowing, lamely translated as wisdom); the other two are upaya (skilful means/compassion).
m

***
from C Bishop:
Well you guys of course have very different concepts of and feelings about Anima (Jung gave us women the Animus, what a gift! instead) — I can't imagine the Anima though I sure know what an Anima Woman is like and what they/ we have to disintangle from in terms of male projections. That's why I threw both Anima and Animus away (I'm now throwing away that tiresome Baby in the Bathwater, too). and substituted ideas that have meaning to me for instead: Soul and Beloved of the Soul. You can dance with Shiva or Shakti or both, why not? The Baby can dance with everyone.
C

***

alice writes:
In a message dated 7/5/01 11:19:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time, anandk writes:
> How about spirit is the God that's seeking us and soul is the God
> the spirit is seeking? I don't know where that puts Us —
HOW AB THE SPIRIT IS THE GOD THAT IS SEEKING US AND THE SOUL IS THE goddess the spirit is seeking i.e. Div Guest seeking Sophia to rebirth the ego?
ao
Alice O. Howell

Rosecroft"Look for the sacred in the commonplace!" :)

***

Phoebe writes:
In a message dated 7/6/01 7:57:07 AM, Deborah writes:
<< ...And yet — and yet — the Void, the ground of Being, the Forms. All are the same One, and the many gods and godlets the archetype, the matrix thatwe cast our images of godhead upon. >>
The Egyptian image is one of simultaneity... all things at all times alive and co-existing: the gods are in and with us always as they have always been; we are backwards and forwards always — that Boat of Millions of Years I talk about... We are never not in the presence of deity. All things manifest as themselves and their opposite: the harvest is present in the planting.
Of all the profound lessons learned on my shamanic path, the one that continues to work both unseen and knowingly in my life is the simple, hard one: What is Is. After four years of breathing this lesson, I feel I'm finally getting a handle on it. Aha! Crooked things are made straight; rough places are made smooth...
Life living itself is an immense and wondrous thing.
xx

ph

***

from Anand:

Deb, Great post. Not sure where I can begin to respond.

 

>Before the archetypes were there to guide and pull things together, there
was myth, story. Novels came about in following down these fascinations, the
demons who lead us on into the interior. So — maybe archetypal theory came about
for math and business majors who don't have time to read novels.

Frighteningly true. Not that the "math and business majors" (you forgot to mention my Bachelor's in Computer Science :-)have much patience with non-fiction. I think this whole attitude is also related to the Enlightenment, and the dissing of the non-rational images. Consider that 'Deity Yoga' (Active imagination with Deities, but also much more than that) has been around for eons. The rational mind scoffs at this: working with images is so infra-dig, unless you are a famous artist making oodles of moolah. But now, when I look at the older texts on Yoga/Tantra, I see variants of active imagination *everywhere*. How *could* I have been blind to this before? Call them "archetypes" to cloak these practices with some respectability: I know I often do this to 'communicate' to the Western educated (Indian or American) mind [protect myself, more likely. Why do I feel under siege?]. Old wine in a plastic cup.

>cosmos. A thing we — especially in the west, as we become these machines we serve — have undervalued, lost.

Unfortunately, this disease is spreading everywhere, certainly in the cities of India. Like Jung's description of the tribe's Medicine Man who no longer gets Big Dreams because the English Commissioner knows all the answers. The Goddess weeps from loneliness— as we value the distracting trinkets She strews in our path, more than Her Self and Her Love that She wants to give.

 

>;) I'm kidding of course, but — empiricism is based in experience. Art and complex psych orient and ground the journey, is all. And art is too often neglected and so mass produced and mass fed that maybe a crutch is now needed that wasn't needed before.

To address the latter point first: I think the problem is the overvaluing of rationality, stemming from the phenomenal material successes of the Industrial Revolution, and the appalling poverty in those societies that missed that boat. Can we marry the two— scientific rationality and the image-ination, or at least use them as appropriate? On the former, specifically:
 

> Art and complex psych orient and ground the journey, is all.

That is an *exact* and excellent summation of my own journey of late. A friend of mine who is very much into tantra and other Hindu paths wrote asking me what exactly I practiced. (He does not know Jung). I include my reply to him below, with some clarification of Sanskrit terms (You know all this already):

***(snip!)***

Alok,
In response to your question on Jungian Psychology and the live process:
When all is said and done, my process has converged (for now) into a form of free-flowing deity yoga. That is where Jung's Active Imagination process and worship of SriDevi have converged. I didn't plan on it. Read this fine article about Kabir (did I send you this earlier, along with the Ramana site? I don't remember). The process of active imagination is very similiar to Ramanand's manasika [Mental] puja of Rama mentioned here, except that it is much more free-flowing. . . . .
The 'simple fascination' should be enough, and would be for the 'simple' man. But She has to hammer the message into my addled head. One last aside on this, and then I will shut up. One of the fundamental tenets of complex psychology is that the anima can 'lead' one to disaster (as seductress/ temptress/ Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel), to mawkishness, etc.: the Persona's enantiodromia into the Absolute Other. But this is at best true only when the anima is led awry by other active complexes that thwart the Self's teleology. Following the Self, on the other hand, is the path of individuation. . . . .
What do we have in our banal lives, other than the exhilaration of Insight into the Divine?
Lots of Love,

- Anand

***

C wrote:

There is a lady sweet and kind

Was never face so pleased my mind,

I did but see her passing by

And yet I love her till I die.

Her gestures, motions and her smiles,

Her wit, her voice my heart beguiles,

Beguiles my heart, I know not why,

And yet I love her till I die.

Cupid is winged and doth range,

Doth range her country, so my love doth change,

But change the earth, or change the skyYet will I love her till I die.

(Words from Thomas Ford's MUSIC OF SUNDRY KINDS)

2

"In the last analysis, the sacred and profane modes of being depend upon the different positions that man has conquered in the cosmos; hence they are of concern to both the philosopher and to anyone seeking to discover the possible dimensions of human existence." ~Mircea Eliade