Re: Machen's Hieroglyphics
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 7 October, 2019 09:21PM
The second paragraph of Chapter 5 includes this:
----I will put the question in its plainest, crudest form, and I will
make you ask, if you please, whether Charles Dickens had any
consciousness of the interior significance of the milk-punch, strong
ale, and brandy and water which he caused Mr Pickwick and his friends to
consume in such outrageous quantities. It sounds plain enough and simple
enough, doesn't it, and yet I must tell you that to answer that
question fairly you must first analyze human nature, and I needn't
remind you that _that_ is a task very far from simple. "Man" sounds a
very simple predicate, as you utter it; you imagine that you understand
its significance perfectly well, but when you begin to refine a little,
and to bring in distinctions, and to carry propositions to their
legitimate bounds, you find that you have undertaken the definition of
that which is essentially indefinite and probably indefinable. And,
after all, we need not pitch on this term or on that, there is no need
to select "man" as offering any especial difficulty, for, I take it,
that the truth is that all human knowledge is subject to the same
disadvantage, the same doubts and reservations. _Omnia exeunt in
mysterium_ was an old scholastic maxim; and the only people who have
always a plain answer for a plain question are the pseudo-scientists,
the people who think that one can solve the enigma of the universe with
a box of chemicals.------
That's a good excerpt to keep in mind with which to suggest Machen's conviction over against reductionism. Below, some further quotations as resources for eventual discussion, maybe.
The passage from Machen suggests to me, also, a key to understanding Lovecraft, and I will throw this out as something to be discussed, if at all, please please, in a separate thread if anyone wants to. I hope I'm not blundering by putting it here. But here's the thesis. Lovecraft was inwardly divided. On the one had he was receptive to the sense of beckoning sunset vistas, he felt the pull of the unknown, there was that in his consciousness that wanted to expand, move outward, discover new heights and depths, etc. On the other hand, he was pledged to materialism. He was pledged, in advance of all further experience, to the notion that anything that he yet could encounter, anything he could learn, even if he lived somehow for centuries, was and must be, in principle, understandable in the reductive terms he was fond of expounding; there was and could be nothing that was not explicable in terms of material factors, material causality, mindless physical forces. The amount of information yet to be discovered might be enormous, inconceivable, but he already held the key, and he "knew" that whatever there was to learn, it could not really challenge the intellectual outfit he had acquired (largely, I suppose, by reading 19th-century writers like Huxley). The maxim Machen quoted could not, in principle, be ultimately true; contra Machen, everything doesn't and can't depart into mystery; there really is no mystery about It All; it's nothing but the mindless motions of material factors grinding on into a pointless future. Ipse dixit.
In contrast, Machen stands with, for example, the poet William Blake:
I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
That is, as Machen might say, you can start even in some drab, grimy London back street off the Gray's Inn Road, and if you discipline your intellect and emotions and imagination aright, this experience can open out for your spirit into open-ended vistas. The "commonplace" of ordinary awareness veils the infinite. That drab-looking London couple with the baby -- ah, Machen says, did you realize it? They have partaken of wonders. Beauty and wonder surround us, but we have to have eyes to see them, and fine literature suggests this, testifies of it in the language of symbolism, etc.
One can decide that this is all bosh, but what if Machen is right?
What if, just as there are tools for gaining certain, useful, and quantitative knowledge of what is less than ourselves, we may also, for example by reading fine literature well, begin to enjoy something of that which belongs to us as a birthright, distinctively as humans?
Here, from Tolkien's poem "Mythopoeia," is the materialist view:
----You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are `trees', and growing is `to grow');
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star's a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, Inane
where destined atoms are each moment slain.----
Tolkien goes on to write about man the Artist in terms that Machen would have appreciate:
---The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.----
These passages are from his poem "Mythopoeia." I won't here expound how they seem to me to relate to Machen in Hieroglyphics.
I'm going to post this entry with the request, again, that it be regarded as something to be taken up, if at all, after one has read Hieroglyphics, and, in the case of my theory of Lovecraft's divided mind, NOT taken up on this thread, but elsewhere, if at all. Let's not have Oldjoe's original posting disregarded and becoming swamped by discussions of that remarkable fantasist of Rhode Island. Please. Thanks.