One more note on Dostoevsky

So Karla felt sick last night and wanted me to grab something for her crom the library. Fair enough. I picked up a 1956 copy of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and am pleasantly surprised by Dostoevsky's misanthropic non-fiction voice. Skewed slavophile to be sure, but has some fun ripping on the French. Even more surprising was Saul Bellow's foreword. Writing about his own experiences living in Paris for a year, he contrasts the American attitude toward possessions with that of his meticulous French landlady. The passage was so insightful, so contemporary, I"ll have to quote at some length:
"In America, we have a slovenly attitude toward possessions. Most of us could not give a list of the objects we own. We are decidedly more interested in the things we do not own. We lust after them, acquire them, and after we have rejoiced in them a little while drop out of sight. Our glance passes half blindly over them, on the wall, on the table, on our own persons. Very likely we serve our social order by this mixture of desire and blindness. The goods our industries produce must be used. They are advertised. We desire them, and work and earn in order to buy them. It is our duty. Manufacture is prodigal. Consuming, we follow it as well as we can. The goods of the inventaire are different. They are finite. There is a shore. The owner rules over his kingdom of things, whereas we Americans are in the grip of boundless desire. Perhaps this accounts for the prevalence of the true-love quest in our country, and for the rise of the divorce rate. Who knows? I make the suggestionin, as Dostoevsky calls it, a spirit of idleness...That our desires are infinite does not mean that we are spiritual; it means that we are not sure what satisfaction is. We are astonished and confused by the profusion of things around us, we do not know how to choose among them, we are ill at ease and fear for our souls."

Dr. Doug Thorpe: Mensch

So, to my pleasant surprise on this fine Monday, I find my mentor and friend Dr. Doug Thorpe, a man with some insight into the Mysterium Tremendum, has a fine, if sparsely posted, blog up. This will likely have something to do with his recently published book of essays "Rapture of the Deep." As a Blake scholar, I'm hoping he can give some guidance on my current Swedenborg fetish, if fetish it be. But anything written by him is worthwhile. Depth of wisdom. Depth of insight. Depth of humility. And just plain depth.

Connections: Swedenborg

Alright, hold on a second. A morning of reading and google searches has revealed the interconnectedness of four giants. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Just trying to read up on Swedenborg, looking for conservative counterarguments actually, to sort of see what's in the quiver against him. On the contrary, I find feeble arguments against him (and simultaneous attacks on Helen Keller for being influenced by him, hmm, NO, not that satanist witch Helen Keller again, will we never be safe from her spiritual tyranny?) In addition, Czeslaw Milosz, you know, the Nobel Prize winning poet? Yeah, him. He has an article tracing Swedenborg's influence on (wait for it), Fyodor friggin Dostoevsky, my most favoritest of authors. Another link expans on Milosz's article to locate Swedenborg in the voice of Father Zosima of Brothers Karamazov.
A second search reveals that there's a book of correspondence between Milosz and (wait for it) Thomas friggin Merton, the Trappist monk and contemplative. There's four towering figures interwoven by the threads of the universe. People that somehow occupy vastly different spaces in my academic cognitive map, but are, for now, inextricably linked, and why shouldn't they be? All four possess some awareness or interest in mystical experience and transcendence. Color me excited about something for a change.

Story ideas

So, as you might expect if you're trying to come up with a plot for a story you've started writing, I've come up with an idea that has nothing to do with what I'm working on. What if there's a guy, let's call him "a dude." What if there's a guy, say, early twentieth century England, who befriends a family of privelege. This guy, however, is no social climber, as the cliche would have him, but instead has no ambition whatsoever, but to get drunk or stoned and flirt with the high society types, but keeps getting stuff put in his lap. And then I saw this trailer, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic, and I realized, It's "The Dude" from Big Lebowski meets Brideshead Revisited, with perhaps a little Forrest Gump thrown in. Hmm. Although maybe it should be set a little further back, a kind of male twist on the porn for uptight females that is Jane Austen. Feedback? Thoughts? Anybody? (by the way I already mailed a version of this to myself, so if you're thinking of turning this into the Oscar winning screenplay that it obviously is, then your going have to pay, and pay big)
N.B. Evelyn Waugh is a man? Who knew?!

Fascinating: Emmanuel Swedenborg

So, I've probably been away from other human beings, sunlight, etc. for too long, but I found myself veering off course today. And by "course" I mean writing my novel. I'm roughly on page seventy of my first draft, looking for a plot (heh. heh. heeeyyy.) and generally taking a break in the second basement of a certain local library, when I randomly start leafing through books, and come across a reference to a certain "Swedenborg." The name sounded familiar, so I kept reading, was interested, and then did a library search. Fascinating man. I found seeds and antecedents for such diverse writers as Goethe, Luis Borges, George MacDonald (and therefore C.S. Lewis, and other Inklings) and, obviously, William Blake. Interestingly, there are also seeds for the Book of Mormon and certain elements of New Age movements. He was dismissed by Kant as a madman and hailed by others as a mystic (or dismissed as a mystic, depending on your view of the term). He did groundbreaking work on anatomy and physiology as well as astronomy before a mystical experience in mid-life left him writing "in search of the seat of the soul." I read up on his fascinating life story and found his prose lucid and engaging. I noticed his tone is less confrontational than, say, Blake. He writes in a kind of rational, even-keeled, almost simplistic tone, which Blake at times mimics, and perhaps mocks somewhat in his own "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." I did find it odd that, after three years at Seminary, I had never heard of him, or never less than an aside, dismissed with other heretics, such as Arminius or Michael Servetus. But these figures occupy a different space relative to modernism and, as such, Swedenborg is supremely fascinating. He doesn't fit neatly into mystic ascetic categories, heretic categories, gnostic categories. He was by all accounts a warm, charming individual, devoted to the faculty of reason, but not exclusively so, argued for the necessity of holistic apprehension of both a priori and a posteriori. He had an inclusive, ecumenical sensibility, praising and criticising both Catholic and Protestant churches, where appropriate. He had mystical visions, but was a devoted scientist. His influence alone of pseudo-Christian sects (like Mormonism), poets, scientists, mystics, and (through Inklings and others) of orthodox Christianity, however indirect, makes him worth more than just a look. He outlines heaven and hell with scientific detail to be taken literally, but advocated interpreting life experiences with symbolic meaning. He is dismissed as a crazed, New Age heretic and supported by people who claim to have had Near Death Experiences that support his vision. Truly unique. He's too orthodox for radicals like Blake and too spiritual for rationalists like Kant and too out there for the organized church. There's something about his writing and tone, warm, measured, common-sensical that makes what he writes somehow inviting. He didn't want to start a church, he wanted to integrate his visions and teachings into the church. Of course his assertion of inclusion of people of religious backgrounds in heaven suggests at once to me the intuitive truth of his claims and their utter clash with orthodoxy. That today's Christians will readily take Lewis' "The Great Divorce" as food for thought, but have on occasion dismissed Swedenborg's "Heaven and Hell" as folly is somewhat ironic. Haven't read enough to form a solid opinion, but one way or the other, fascinating.
I came across a book of essays comparing Blake and Swedenborg on amazon. Should be fun.