Monday, April 28, 2003

C.S. Lewis So, I've been reading Surprised By Joy, an autobiography of C.S. Lewis' early years, leading to his conversion (for lack of a better word) to Christianity.  I should admit that I've only read to page 22, but the book has already borne a number of fruitful thoughts.  Anyway, I was happily reading along, when I came to the passage describing of his first experiences of 'Joy.'  Now, he limns Joy as something I'd always thought of as Epiphany.  I was a little puzzled by this semantic lacunae - after all, I'd identified with him pretty strongly through the first pages, admired his linguistic precision, eye for detail, robust inner life, and so on (not that I possess these qualities to any great degree, but I certainly admire those who do).  But here I am, on page sixteen, looking at him across the chasm dividing Joy from Epiphany, Feeling from Thought.  Anyway, I start to do my readerly thing, sifting back over earlier pages, looking for that little detail that will give me some insight into this mystery.  On page seven, I find it; that thing I'd overlooked, the critical sentence: "They taught me longing - Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower."   That German phrase was the Kantian key that unlocked my intellectual door, gentle readers. Already, before that, I was thinking that he seemed a bit divorced from the tangible, experiential, elements that led him to his first three encounters with Joy - a memory of his brother's toy garden, a passage evocative of Autumn in a Beatrix Potter novel, and a poetic phrase from Longfellow, respectively.  He describes these things, positions them as precursors to this exalted feeling, but never circles round to bringing that feeling back into concrete relation with these quite-tangible 'triggers.'  I was a bit puzzled by that (and of course, I want you to be puzzled as well, gentle reader, so I can solve this thing for the both of us!). Now - The Blue Flower.  So, in 18th century philosophical thought, we begin to see the first reactions to empiricism - the notion of a scientific, mechanical, Newtonian universe that can be tested and proven through certain established, wholly objective methods.  The German philosopher, Kant, wrote most of his philosophy in response to the Scottish empiricist, Hume.  In the face of growing acceptance of this scientific worldview, Kant proposed that our minds, and our knowledge of the external world, are not separate from that world, but instead form one thing, a singularity. It is only "sieves" in the mind - sifting space and time, cause and effect -which bring about this sense of nature as the Other.  In effect, Kantian philosophy turned the emphasis away from objective external reality to subjective internal reality, thus spawning Romanticism.  In the Kantian universe, our knowledge of the world tells us more about the structure of our minds than it does about the world of things.  In fact, he pretty much discards the notion of objective reality altogether.  So, here we have the metaphor of the Flower opposed to the metaphor of the Machine.  In essence, one is seeking union of the inner self with a nature devoid of person - to find the blue flower one turns away from family and friends and seeks a "blue" (melancholy) union, alone with the purity of nature (I believe the term "Blue Flower," was coined by Novalis). If you've followed my train of thought, above, you can see how the notion of "turning away," might evolve into the notion of creating wholesale, from the fabric of one's imagination; thus my confusion regarding Mr. Lewis' Epiphanic-means to Joyful-end. By this I suppose I mean that I came a bit closer to understanding the emphasis placed on the feeling itself, rather than its source (i.e. things in this world, rather than an ultimate Source).  As everything is subsumed by this mental 'space,' that sort of stuff becomes necessarily less relevant. Pursuing this line of thought, I was better able to understand Lewis' proposition of Joy as a desire for a unity that is irrevocably married to the sense of an absolute distance.  I think he's trying to express the idea that the feeling of Joy is so all-encompassing that any thinking/desiring/feeling about it can only come after, as a function of its absence (he's a lot smarter than me, so I got a bit confused at this point).  That internal state, one he describes as Joy, can only move, forever and always, away from its objective progenitors.  One moves towards a wholly internal, wholly subjective manner of being, which encompasses, and at the same time creates, nature (books, toy gardens, things, parents, stuff).  'Creates' may be too strong a word, but I'm suggesting that these things can only be infused with that essense or association post facto. Well, this put me in mind of a sentence by Iris Murdoch, which I will paraphrase here:  The literary impulse and the impulse toward the Good - let's call this God, gentle readers - fail and succeed along similar lines.  I think that's true!  Now, it's clear from the outset that Mr. Lewis is proposing God - he's C.S. LEWIS after all, right? - but I haven't read far enough to know how he got there.  But, I do know a tiny something about making up a morality, and an ethics, wholesale, and a tiny something about the point where that absolutely fails.  I don't think that I could ever come round to labelling my epiphanies as Joy -and here, perhaps, my literary and ethical impulses both fail - but I have been at the point where objectivity falls away, and bleeds into nature, and reason flowers into feeling.  This is a great book!  I'm sure I'll write more as I proceed through it. 11:57:43 PM