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the Tears do come / Sad, slowly dropping like a Gumme’), of Crashaw (whose almost every poem is filled with tears, those ‘watery diamonds’, those ‘portable and compendious oceans’)
the epistemology of the right hemisphere is congenial to ambiguity and the union of opposites, where that of the left hemisphere cannot afford to be.
Synthesis v annihilation, everything or nothing
Wanting is clear, purposive, urgent, driven by the will, always with its goal clearly in view. Longing, by contrast, is something that ‘happens’ between us and another thing.
‘Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient values’, wrote A. N. Whitehead, so that ‘something new must be discovered
ars est celare artem (skill lies in hiding one’s skill).
Individuality gives rise to a seeking after originality, a turning away from the received, communal and conventional patterns of behaviour and thought.
Define adolescence
poeta nascitur, non fit – a poet is born, not made.
let your brush follow the play of your imagination and the result will be heavenly and not human.’
Forsake not Nature nor misunderstand her: Her mysteries are read without faith’s eyesight: She speaketh in our flesh; and from our senses, Delivers down her wisdoms to our reason
images such as the plane of the glass in the window, the flat surface of the mirror, and the reflective surface of a pool of water, to explore imaginative contact with a world beyond the plane of vision: seeing, but seeing through. The world is not a brute fact but, like a myth or metaphor, semi-transparent, containing all its meaning within itself, yet pointing to something lying beyond itself.
Consider our reflection in the glass, requiring a slight manipulation of focus from the scen behind to the image upon the glass.
a sense of depth is intrinsic to seeing things in context. This is true both of the depth of space and the depth of time, but here I would say that it implies, too, a metaphysical depth, a respect for the existence of something at more than one level, as is inevitable in myth or metaphor.
This can be applaid to relationship: see the person as they appear, as the have developed and as the embody their various roles.
If all probems are interpersonal problems, their source is a lack of perceptual depth at one of these ...
human dignity lay in our unique capacity to choose our own destiny, through the models we choose and the ideals towards which we are drawn, not simply through the blind pursuit of reason wherever it might lead.
hence the importance of the recording of individual lives,
An argument for biography units
Luther perceived that the inner and outer realms, however one expresses it – the realm of the mind/soul and that of the body, the realm of the invisible and the visible – needed to be as one, otherwise the outward show had nothing to say about the inward condition.
their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.
Because of the inability to accept the ambiguous or metaphorical, and because of a fear of the power of the imagination, images were objects of terror.
‘I believe that there is no person, or certainly very few, who does not understand that the crucifix that stands over there is not my God – for my God is in Heaven – but rather only a sign.’
In a world where metaphoric understanding is lost we are reduced to ‘either/or’, as Koerner says. Either the statue is God or it is a thing: since it is ‘obviously’ not God, it must be a thing, and therefore ‘mere wood’, in which case it has no place in worship.
precisely because it is a metaphor rather than a representation, it is itself divine.
Consider the metaphor 'you are a lion' it is not saying 'you' represents a lion or vice-versa. Rather there is a sense that 'you' embodies the spirit of 'a lion' this is the perhaps the sense of the devune he is speaking to.
One of Cranach’s masterpieces, discussed by Koerner, is in its self-referentiality the perfect expression of left-hemisphere emptiness, and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself.
Images become explicit, understood by reading a kind of key, which demonstrates that the image is thought of simply as an adornment, whose only function is to fix a meaning more readily in the mind – a meaning which could have been better stated literally.
Even the words of sacrament count only if they mean something, for all else “serve[s] no purpose”.’
is fascinating that the way to get the meaning across is apparently to repeat the words endlessly, drumming it further and further into the realm of the over-familiar, again the domain of the left hemisphere.
‘the word freezes into an idol’.
These different ways of looking at the world – ‘proclamation’ of the word versus ‘manifestation’ of the divine – are aligned with hemisphere differences.
Contexts bring meanings from the whole of our selves and our lives,
the more widespread loss of the incarnate nature of metaphor as a whole, and its substitution by simile: in the Eucharist ‘this is my body’ becomes ‘this signifies (is like) my body’.
body: it is equated with the transient, ‘earthly corruption’, whereas the word is equated with enduring changelessness, which is in turn how the divine is now seen.
abstraction facilitates generalisation.
holiness, like all other qualities, depends on a distinction being made. In an important sense, if everything and everywhere is holy, then nothing and nowhere is holy.
In the left-hemisphere view, there is at one level the part or fragment, and, at the other, the generalised abstraction, aggregated from the parts. In the right hemisphere view, there is the individual entity in all its distinctness, at one level, and the whole to which it belongs, at the other.
Every existing entity comes into being only through boundaries, because of distinctions:
The drive towards separation and distinction brings individual things into being. By contrast, the drive towards generalisation, with its effective ‘democratisation’ of its object (of the holy, of art, of the beautiful), has the effect of destroying its object as a living force.
Hierarchy as a form or measure of distinction?
The drive toward generalisation, through conglomerates of abstraction result in self. It makes the object easier to comprehend via an effectively heuristic process of definition. This may lead to false definition due to innacurate generalisation and the innacuracy of abstraction. In the extreme, nothing can be trusted to be authentically distinct due to the inherent moment of abstracion and sumblimation to an even broarder generalisation.
The alternative extreme is an indecipherably infinite forest of distinction and individuation.
consider the zooming in and zooming out meditation of the headless way.
bureaucratisation (and categorisation, with which it is so closely related) is an instrument of power.
If you think otherwise consider the sense of powerlessness one has whilst dealing with a beauracracy.
The connection is clear in the example of being shuffled from department to department (each an actualised or personifiied abstraction/category) by bureaucrats who lack an effective 'global' or 'communal' understanding of the relevant systems and processes.
the will to power, since that is the agenda of the left hemisphere.
the cognitive structure of Protestantism was closely associated with capitalism: both involve an exaggerated emphasis on individual agency, and a discounting of what might be called ‘communion’.
‘Agency’, he writes, ‘manifests itself in isolation, alienation, and aloneness: communion in contact, openness and union. Agency manifests itself in the urge to master: communion in non-contractual co-operation.’
to the left hemisphere, tradition represents a challenge to its brave plan to take control, now, in the interests of salvation as it conceives it.
Compare to the immediate processes of revolutions: French, Russian and Chinese for example.
a congregation seated neatly in rows, one feels like an obedient subject, one of the masses, whereas standing in a crowd, as one would have done in a pre-Reformation church, one is part of a living thing, that is that community of living human beings, there and then: one of humanity, not one of ‘the people’.
Evidently still craved due to the way people seek it in festivals, concerts and perhaps some sporting events.
Consider also the discomfort experienced in these situations by those apparenty predominately right hemisphericaly neuronally-diverse.
the slide into the territory of the left hemisphere. These include the preference for what is clear and certain over what is ambiguous or undecided; the preference for what is single, fixed, static and systematised, over what is multiple, fluid, moving and contingent; the emphasis on the word over the image, on literal meaning in language over metaphorical meaning, and the tendency for language to refer to other written texts or explicit meanings, rather than, through the cracks in language, if one can put it that way, to something Other beyond; the tendency towards abstraction, coupled with a
...more
the cardinal tenet of Christianity – the Word is made Flesh – becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word.
Perhaps neccessarily considering the benefit of a cyclic process of synthesis/transformation between the abstract and the concrete.
… A fine thing to get up on stilts, for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
Reason itself became narrower in conception, no longer respecting context,
the word ‘pupil’ comes from the Latin pupilla, a doll, referring to the minute inverted image of oneself seen reflected in the eye of another.
Eliot elsewhere likened the analytic meaning of a poem to the meat that the burglar tosses to the dog while he burgles the house.
attention can be divided:
‘Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows…’
For euery man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that there can be None of that kinde, of which he is, but he.
each now standing alone. There is a loss of harmony (‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy’, in Ulysses’ phrase), the whole has become a heap of bits and pieces (‘crumbled out again to its atoms’).
Then every thing include itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite, And appetite, an universal wolf (So doubly seconded with will and power), Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself.
