You Can’t Get Away from Your Imagination

 

“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.” There’s quite a stretch between the Wiliam Bake who wrote that and the ascetic monk and theologian Dorotheos of Gaza (c.506-565), recognized as a saint of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches, who gave instruction on the need to eliminate passion and the virtues of meekness. Yet they are in agreement on something every human needs to know: when you die, you step into your imagination.
     In  A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake said it like this: “The world of imagination is the world of eternity, It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body.”
    Dorotheos had to step carefully, because he willingly bound himself to church doctrine, which held that the important decisions about the post-mortem fate of the soul would come when it was roused at the Last Judgment. But the monk was convinced that in the period between death and Judgment, the soul was not merely asleep, or seemingly dead. It was having experiences, and the shape and nature of those experiences was determined by memory and imagination.
    In a sermon on the “Fear of the Punishment to Come”, Dorotheos declared that the thoughts and images to which the soul was attached in life will become its new reality after death. Memories and images will have more power than they did during physical life – for one thing, because you can’t get away with them by jumping ack into your body. Desires and fears you tried to ignore, fantasies that did not play out in the world, will now come after you, capable of taking on entirely palpable shapes, gathering terrific force and intensity. You won’t be able to escape the products of your imagination. Because you have no place to go  outside it. [1]

It is probably not a good idea to let your imagination get stuck within the astral geography developed in medieval times by the Eastern Orthodox church. An influential tenth-century hagiography, The Life of Saint Basil the Younger by Gregory of Thrace, opens with a vivid description of twenty "aerial toll houses" where the departed have to deal with demonic customs officials on the ladder to heaven. The demons use all their craft and brute force to shove the traveling soul down to hell through the rungs.
    There was an alleged eyewitness account of how this operates: a visitation by a deceased female servant, Theodora, who appeared to Gregory, a pious layman, after he prayed to know what had happened to her. She described how demons of the middle air stop traveling souls and grill them and inspect them to find out whether they contain some part of a sin embodied by the demon. If the demon finds something of himself in you, you are bound for Hades. This setup was reminiscent of some of the burdens of ordinary life, where tax collectors and border guards held up travelers and shook them down for money.    
    Huge murals depicting Theodora's trials are on the walls of the Bucovina monasteries in Romania. The version here is from a Russian print created in the mid-nineteenth century. 

 

1.Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings trans. E. P. Wheeler ([Kalamazoo, Michigan: Liturgical Press, 1977), pp. 183–86.Nicholas Constas attempts a paraphrase in an excellent essay that I used as a starting block. See "'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers vol. 55 (2001), p.100.

Illustration: Toll Houses Ahead   

   

The Cave of the Nymphs

The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry wrote a commentary on a scene in Homer's Odyssey that offers a remarkable allegory of the soul's comings and goings from embodiment in this world. A translation of Porphyry's text, new to the English language at that time, inspired William Blake to paint a picture full of codes for the awakening spirit.

For  Porphyry the Cave of the Nymphs is a “harbor of the soul”, a waystation between the worlds. Porphyry insisted that nous (mind, spirit) is never contained in the body, but only “acts in it” through affinity or gravitation. An affinity for what is moist and humid brings souls back into incarnation; a tendency towards what is dry and light and fiery carries the soul into the realms of the immortals. In the Cave of the Nymphs, Naiads (spirits of fresh waters and fountains) weave “moist envelopes” – “purple tissues” – on stone, and bees deposit their honey in stone urns. Images of taking on flesh, of coming into generation. 

The word-picture fascinated William Blake, who gave it visual form in a watercolor painting found only in 1947 in the clutter atop a cabinet in a stately home in Devonshire. The first experts to examine the picture decided to give it a title from one of Blake’s letters: “The Sea of Time and Space”. Kathleen Raine explains in fine detail that the picture is an illustration of the Cave of the Nymphs. It seems that Mystery rituals dedicated to Odysseus and the Naiads – and the soul? – were actually held in a cave near the beach of Dexa in Ithaca where Odysseus is said to have returned to his homeland, dreaming. 

Kathleen Raine discusses Blake's imagery in an essay in her book Blake and Antiquity. She finds ithat even with self-taught, self-driven Blake, it is true (as Yeats declared) that poetry is “the traditional expression of certain heroic and religious themes, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”  

In 1947 a stately home in Devonshire called Arlington Court was taken over by the National Trust. Among broken glass and junk on the top of a pantry cover was found a painting by Blake clearly dated 1821. The art experts provisionally titled it “The Sea of Time and Space”, after a phrase in one of Blake’s letters and in his poem “Milton]. Its actual nature – as an illustration to Porphyry and Homer – was not recognized for a long time because of the tendency to regard Blake as an “untaught original” rather than an autodidact who devoured and integrated huge bodies of literature. The symbols appear again and again in Blake’s own work, yet we see that they also have deep roots in mythic experience and Neoplatonist tradition. For Raine, 

Neoplatonism may be compared to an underground river that flows through European history, sending up, from time to time, springs and fountains; and wherever its fertilizing stream emerges, there imaginative thought revives, and we have a period of great art and poetry. [1] 

Blake was a contemporary of Thomas Taylor, who brought the Neoplatonists into the English language (and was often ridiculed for it). Taylor was a crusader for the philosophy of Plotinus, calling on the young men of his time to take up its “weapons of truth”. He published the first English translation of Porphyry’s De antro nympharum. 

Blake's picture gives s nymphs, weavers at a loom, a sea-god, souls entering incarnation, bright spirits reborn -  perpetual cycle of the descent and ascent of souls between an eternal and a temporal world. 

In Mystery traditions, the  voyage of Odysseus in its entirety was read as the type of such a journey of soul. The sea, in constant flux, is the world. The watery cave of Calypso is the world’s enchantments. The beggar’s rags in which Odysseus returns home are the body, which the soul discards when they are no longer needed. The sea crossing, as in many legends and myths, is the type of the soul’s journey to the Otherworld. 

Blake incorporates the image of Odysseus throwing something out to sea, his face averted. This borrows an image from Book V of the Odyssey where the  hero is washed up on the Phaeacian shore. Odysseus is the soul survivor of the wreck of his ship; the goddess Ino takes pity on him and lends him her girdle, urging him to swim to shore. When he lands he must throw her girdle back to her, turning his face away. In Blake’s painting, the hero has thrown the girdle; the goddess has caught it, and she is dissolving back into a spiral of radiant cloud.

Athena stands behind Odysseus, a figure of Divine Wisdom, pointing to the shining realm of the sun.

Things to look for in Blake's painting:

The source of life in the underground river or spring. 

The dry and the moist. Heraclitus sas “a dry soul is the wisest” although “moisture appears delightful to souls”. 

Womb and tomb: Birth into the cave is a death from eternity. The Cave of the Nymphs is the womb through which humans are born into the physical world. 

Bowls and urns: Blake shows them carried like water pots on the heads of winged nymphs in the depths of the cave. 

Bees: These winged nymphs are Porphyry’s bees, winged souls about to descend into the cave of the world through womb-like vessels. 

Weavers: Blake has borrowed from his own Daughters of Albion, who ply their shuttles to bind immortals into mortal bodies. In Homer, there are marble looms and purple garments. Porphyry’s gloss is that “the formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies of animals resemble stones.” There is a hint of cruelty in the faces of the weavers. 

The child enmeshed: To the right of the looms, in Blake’s image, a little girl is enmeshed in what the nymphs are weaving – she is being woven into a body. 

The tubs: borrowed from Porphyry (who in turn borrowed from the Gorgias and Hesiod): the tub or bucket of the evolved, temperate and “dry” soul that is intact and can hold its contents, and the one of the person ruled by passion that is pierced and spills everywhere. Seen in two figures in the right foreground of Blake’s painting: a resolute woman turns her back on the swirl and climbs the steps, holding a bucket in her right hand while her left is raised towards the heavenly world. She is opposed by the nymphs. Close to her, a “moist soul” lolls half-immersed in a tub which lies on its side, forever spilling and unfilled even as water streams into it; she looks happy but she disgusts Blake, because she is caught in the “deadly sleep” of physical life and is on her downward journey. 

The river’s mouth: the lowest stage of descent into matter in Blake’s painting. Here he introduces Fates who control the entry of souls into the Sea of Time and Space. Savage and cruel, one unwinds the thread, a second measures it, a third waits with shears to cut it off. Phorcys (who Raine sees as a variant of Proteus) bears the phallic distaff from which the thread is unwound. 

The sleeping sun god – when this world wakes, the other world sleeps.

1. Kathleen Raine, "The Cave of the Nymphs" in Raine, Blake and Antiquity: The A.E. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton N.J.: Bollingen, 1977) 4

 

William Blake, "Sea of Space and Time" (1821)

 

 

 

 

A writer can afford to produce one maverick work

"My decision to write The Land of Ulro was an act of perfect freedom in the sense that I didn't aim either at pleasing, convincing, conquering or seducing my contemporaries. It was as if I said to myself that a writer in his lifetime can afford to produce one maverick work."

What a grand statement! (Though I am inclined to ask: why only one "maverick work"?)

With these words Czeslaw Milosz introduces English-language readers to his tangled literary memoir The Land of Ulro in which he hunts ideas through the pages of Blake and Swedenborg, Hölderlin and Baudelaire in order to explicate Polish writers often unknown outside the Polish language (and sometimes within it).

The real object of this bookish hunt is the author's distant cousin, the mystical nobleman Oscar Milosz ("O.V. de L. Milosz"), born in Russia, famed as a French poet, wedded to Kabbalah (and Jewish on his mother's side) who found his soul's landscape among the unfussy country manors of old Lithuania. In his elegant, elderly cousin, Czeslaw finds a half-lit mirror, rocking on a stand in a room stuffed with taxonomy specimens and tarnished silver.

The book borrows its title from Blake's Ulro, a world not unlike our own, blighted by the tyranny of reason and ego, lost to creative Imagination. I don't share Milosz's fascination with Blake's clumsy flat-earth cosmology, and I am repelled by the "anti-Nature" notion they share: that humanity is Fallen before it gets here. Still, I can see how for Milosz, the Polish-Lithuanian native son of an area of ever-changing flags and occupiers, the idea of fallen man may have been appealing, as I can picture Blake's horror at the struggle for life in the fetid slums and "dark satanic mills" of the London of his era.