Orpheus Redux
A Critical Conspectus of My Life’s Work with a Final Inventory of my Reading
Preface
This small book includes excerpts from Defending Her Son, my main memoir. It also includes excerpts from The Bereaved Writer, which, years later, served as a coda or sequel to Son. Orpheus Redux is offered here as a third installment in this series.
It begins in a somewhat archival vein with a summary of 5 Talks that laid out the main, Orphic, pattern of my life and work and whose content re-appears here in the form of a ghostly Introduction to the rest of the volume.
The excerpts follow on this, to help bring the account to life, leading, in turn, into this volume’s main text, a long critical essay conceived as a final Subscript to the life and the work, now that the whole of this had been articulated.
In this essay the life and the work are again re-seen and represented, in the light this time of a biographical scheme taken from W.B. Yeats, which, it struck me with some force lately, this life and this work appear to have been uncannily dramatizing all along, without my being aware of this at any earlier stage.
It is all narrated from the point of view of the theme of ‘The Limits of Ambition’ to which this writer, and every writer, will come in due course, with a focus on the life-crisis that naturally attends on this imperious enddevelopment. This memoir is thus about what can for the first time be legitimately described as the writer really coming to terms with himself at last. It functions as a final testament to the whole creative process that has been finally fully lived out, with nothing left outstanding, or very nearly. My text, fittingly, ends with what I project as my epitaph.
Orpheus Redux thus lays claim to being the clearest summary, seen for the first time from the end of my life, of my production as a whole, which only the aging man could in the last analysis provide on the one who had been implicitly taking shape over the course of his life.
JOMSinging through Dismemberment
5 Talks by John O’Meara based on his Memoirs and an Exegesis p.5
Excerpts
from Defending Her Son and The Bereaved Writer p.9 III
A Yeatsian Subscript, my Final Years
(i) The Limits of Ambition p.16
(ii) Retrospect I The Assertive Man, The Concrete Man, The Acquisitive Man p.20
(iii) Retrospect 2
from The Forerunner to The Emotional Man, The Image-Breaker, The Image-Burner p.28
(iv) Forecasting
The Saint, The Hunchback p.33
(v) Endgame
The Fool p.40
Table of Phases and Key Concepts p.41
A Final Inventory p.43
Dust in the air suspended Marks the place where a story ended.
T.S. Eliot
Does one build a house forever? Utnapishtim
Singing Through Dismemberment:
—5 Talks by John O’Meara based on his Memoirs and an Exegesis
*(Re: Defending Her Son, Guernica Editions, 2000)*
1st Talk: Death of the Beloved (through 1984)
Emergence from this death of the transcendent Anthroposophia Being (Eurydice) (1987)
Writing of Othello’s Sacrifice : on Shakespeare: through Tragedy to Transcendent Vision (1994). (Death of the Beloved a motive force throughout this Shakespeare)
2nd Talk: Return to death and the underworld of the Anthroposophia Being (Eurydice)
Disillusionment with the Anthroposophical Society in Canada; notwithstanding,
Writing of Prospero’s Powers : on Shakespeare’s Transcendent Vision and ‘The Tempest’ (1996-2002)
Writing of The New School of the Imagination : Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays in Literary Tradition (2000-2005)
(in both studies the Death of the Beloved continues a major theme)
* For Defending Her Son, consult a university library near you.*
Collected in Remembering Shakespeare (2016)
*(Re: The Bereaved Writer, Ekstasis Editions, 2008/2016,)*
3rd Talk: Abandonment by my Mother Muse (Calliope), and Imaginative Dismemberment (Orpheus beheaded)
Failure of the Shakespeare-project among ‘friends’ in the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain
General disillusionment with the Anthroposophical Society
Looking abroad, past Anthroposophy. Themes of Modernity and the modern Goddess (the Mother) referred back to Shakespeare: writing of On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature(2003-2010), followed by Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity (2012): Shakespeare referred forward to Anthroposophy
4th Talk: A Further Broadening of Vision (the beheaded Orpheus still singing), and the Future Outlook
My commitment to the Anthroposophical World-View remains, now an Independent Member of the Society (i)
Rudolf Steiner’s Ground-Vision: Breaking through again to the Mother through the Anthroposophia Being: Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold… (ii)
The Lesson of Shakespeare: What It Will Cost Us to Break Through: Contending with Our Darker, Deeper Energies…
*‘Singing through Dismemberment’ (2023)*
5th Talk: Conflicted Visions at the Crossroads: An Exegesis (still singing)
“and the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back” ?
a.) Passing on, with the dead Beloved, to the Heavenly Sophia (The Way of Novalis, 2014)
b.) The Challenge of the (Sophia) Mother: Engaging with the Abyss (The Riddle of the Sophia, 2020)1 , Essays on Solovyov, Jung, Dostoevski, Steiner, Tomberg, and Novalis2
(see also the work of Robert Powell, Sophianist3)
b.)Reversion by the Poet to a Back-Walking (Nature-bound) Recovery of, and Union with, the Dead Beloved, and their Orphic Transfiguration (Rilke in the Making, Volumes 1, 2 & 3, 2023)
(Author’s Note : “In short, there is a Novalis at one end and a Rilke at the other, mutually challenging, and, in between, the basic Sophiological task of bringing light into the darkness. It would seem that this endeavor takes place across a very wide spectrum of experience brought into sharp perspective by Novalis and Rilke between them.” For more on this subject, see the “Letter to Jeff Hippolito” on p.50 below.)
1 See Kent Anhari’s review of The Riddle of the Sophia in the Journal of the Centre for Sophiological Studies, Volume 5, 2021: The Divine Feminine
2 For more on this theme see the author’s memoir sequel, The Bereaved Writer, Ekstasis Editions, 2017.
3 See The Most Holy Trinosophia and the New Revelations of the Divine Sophia (2000).
The Author in Drumcliff, Ireland (with Ben Bulben in the background) 2019
Visit the author’ s website at johnomeara.squarespace.com
Excerpts from Defending Her Son and The Bereaved Writer
from Defending Her Son (2000)
I take the title for this short record of my life from a phrase by John Milton from the opening of Book VII of Paradise Lost. Milton at this point speaks of the success he is counting on in his imagination of otherworlds far removed from our own world, and he contrasts his prospective achievement with the tragic failure of Orpheus who himself succeeds in going down to Hell to bring up his dead wife, Eurydice, but who must lose her on his return when, disobeying the injunction of the lower gods not to do so, he looks back to see if she is indeed come up with him. With that gesture of Orpheus’s, Eurydice falls back into Hell, and as the story relates, Orpheus is later dismembered by a troop of frenzied Bacchanalian women who resent his spiritual-artistic independence from their kind.
Calliope, who was Orpheus’s Muse and also his mother, was in the end unable to “defend” her son from his own destruction and death. Clearly I cannot claim to be any Orpheus myself, but my own intellectual development, as reflected in the books I have written, may certainly be said to be after the Orphic pattern in respect of the desire I show to penetrate the relationship between death and the otherworld. This development was, to an extent, refracted out of the very pattern of my life. My devotion to a certain course of spiritualintellectual development would lead me repeatedly to resist my associations with the women who seemed to be heralding in and helping to shape that very
development. It had always seemed, in fact, that my choice of having such associations at all was wrong from the start, in relation, that is, to the deeper development that seemed destined for me. On the other hand, it has been the hardest thing in the world to resist or to be forced to resist these associations, with the consequence that clinging to them I seemed continually faced with the prospect of oblivion both in spiritual and intellectual terms. At the same time there were the many prospects of death that I faced from the many separations that followed as a matter of course separations made all the harder by the special meaning I had attached to these associations. Un-like in the case of Orpheus, however, I have been repeatedly defended from death in the many forms I have faced: the difference with Orpheus seemed to me worth highlighting, and so my positive use of Milton’s negative reference in my title. Over time it became clear to me who my ever-elusive Eurydice was, on behalf of whom I would need so much defending and have to pass through so much. However, to this day I am unable to say who that Calliope has been who has watched over me so jealously from the first… (pp.7-8)
It seems that I had always been meant by my Calliope to be detached from all personal and social relationships for which I might have felt myself meant, and this would also be the case in my all-determining experience of Anthroposophy. Here, too, I would remain, strictly speaking, her “son,” which is to say always her own “detached” creation, though to what further end I could not begin to divine. I would have to continue to establish my relationship to Anthroposophy strictly out of my own self, without prospect of continued attachments whether to one sphere of society or another, whether in the [Anthroposophical] Society or outside it. The disillusionment I passed through from this overall impasse entailed for me at a certain point a form of separation from the Anthroposophia
Being with Whom I had sporadically connected over the years. She seemed to me to have walked the earth, along with the Christ Being Whom She serves, in that great time when all seemed right with the world, when all the great influences that seemed intended to shape me seemed to have converged, namely: Joe and the Church, Marilyn in her own great sphere, as well as Anthroposophy itself in the days when Tibor was alive. I continued to feel connected with the Anthroposophia Being in a fitful way, right up to the time of intensive study on Milton Street (appropriately named), in 1996, when, as the end point of my study, I had finally come around to addressing the whole value of the Anthroposophical Society, and especially the great role to be played by Novalis in years to come, as an extension of the work already accomplished by Rudolf Steiner. The period that followed may have brought fuller possession of my intellectual resources, on a scale unlike any I had known before not least in the form of my understanding of the history that Anthroposophy fulfills, but in the case of service to the Anthroposophia Being there had always been a fine line to walk, where intellect opens out on spiritual being, and that line had momentarily been snapped. In a sense that has seemed to me only too real, this Being has, for the moment, been “returned” to the realm of death and hell out of which at one time in my life She had sprung. In the meantime my intellectual commitment to Anthroposophy continues, though it remains a hard thing to relate myself back properly to the task streneously set for our time by Steiner, for whom the work of Anthroposophy entailed specifically: comprehending the “spiritual world,” not out of personal fantasy or group enthusiasm merely but, directly, out of “the present intellectual standards,” standards that ought finally to relate Anthroposophy openly and fully to the world… (pp.166-167)
It had been my hope that the study of Shakespeare would in a serious sense come into the hands of the anthroposophist Shakespeareans with whom a new school might be formed, and that possibility is precisely what was given to me in my further abortive meeting with Andrew and with Richard in England. From here, who knows what others might have come along? It is not difficult to see why this did not happen. I had, to my limited extent, established Anthroposophy in the field of Shakespeare studies, and I had in this way taken Anthroposophy into the world. At the same time, I had brought the field of Shakespeare studies to anthroposophists. But anthroposophists operate in their own world, and I could not enter that world to do work only amongst them; I could not share in such interests only, while my own purposes continued to beckon me beyond them. I do not know if for good or ill, but it will seem a strange coincidence that, with my failure among these anthroposophistShakespeareans, my own inspiring Mother should leave me. I was still under the shadow of her influence when I extended School, my work on Steiner’s Plays, to its final limits. But the three further years I required to see my way through that material (to 2005) were but the revisionary editor’s work undertaken in the intervals that were left to me in the general turmoil of that time. Over this period I was primarily ploughing through my work on the moderns, and none of that work could compare in inspirational significance. All of my work before Debacle4 I was driven to write as if fulfilling the intentions of my inspiriting Mother. The quality of the prose in these works, I think it will strike the reader, in some
4 The first of three pieces later incorporated into On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature (2012).
measure reflects something of the influence of that other presence. But She had left me, after School and with Debacle, and with Her it seemed to me also my last resort. There was nothing else to fall back on—no Joseph Cameron, no fresh encounter with Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy, no magical Marilyn. At this level, neither religion nor the science of the spirit nor miraculous love could come to my aid. And I think of myself as submitting then to my beheading, unsupported and undefended at the last. And even now I speak only as from the lyre that I played once.5
There had been my separation from the Anthroposophia Being, but now, beyond that, breakdown and bereavement and abandonment by my Mother. All that had gone into making me up to that point had gone into what I had made of myself and produced only to that point, and not beyond. The pattern of my creation, as I had known it until then, what I was destined to make of myself and to accomplish, seemed to come to an end here. Had my Mother, who also served the cause of Anthroposophy, rejected me for failing to come through in England? And were those whom I had left behind in my past now wreaking vengeance on me for my single-minded devotion to my work and to my destiny, which did not appear to have borne fruit? (pp.22-23)
Milton’s point about Orpheus’s Mother is that She did not have it in Her to support Orpheus through, while I felt I could boast that She had supported me,
5 From these developments the reader will gather that an Orphic fate emerges in my life as an ironic displacement from the Christian-Anthroposophical fate, not in an absolute opposition but in a dialectical relationship to it. As I show in my book on him, the Orphic Rilke gives evidence of a similar fate in his dialectical relationship to Novalis who decidedly belongs to the ChristianAnthroposophical stream. A further issue is raised as to how the two spheres of experience may be reconciled, and whether a higher synthesis of the two is not what needs to be worked out.
had remained true to me in spite of all the distress and disappointment that had come my way, right through my fateful trip to England. But then she had failed me also. Is this because, like Orpheus, I was only what it had been given to me to be, out of my predestined, or formerly created self, which could never have been enough to accomplish all I had given myself to do? If so, let me take Milton’s point gladly then. And let me begin by a deliberate act of un-knowing. I needed to put off producing till the time was ripe, and to be moving along a different path. Let me then make of my life another life and un-learn myself as a writer, I who am a voice that no longer promises, a voice that is now failing … (pp.48-49)
But where am I, you will ask, dear Reader, in relation to this whole grand prospect? I appear now in this remote country to this unperturbed shepherdess, who has found me on this other shore.6 But while a whole new world awaits me in her company, I cannot help looking back, to wonder how I might have done better in the main line of my work after Sacrifice through Powers and School, having in the interim also put off my intention of progressing further to a close study of Novalis as one of the principal inspirers of Anthroposophical culture in our time… (pp.54-55, 48)
From the Afterword to The Bereaved Writer (2016)
But, as destiny would have it, some 10 years later I was able to find the imaginative space that allowed me at last to produce the full-length study of Novalis I had hoped to get around to. In 2014, I put out The Way of Novalis: An Exposition on the Process of His Achievement. This study emerged as a product of
6 AF (see ‘A Final Subscript’ below, p.22).
destiny as well as my own stubbornly wilful spirit, which, I suppose, would not have it any other way. My Novalis study was still more of an expression of what had always been my general preocupation with the theme of the death of the beloved and the Mother. In Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, we are given a final justification of his own tragic experience in this regard. After this, my work has concentrated for the most part on the Mother-figure as the Sophia… (p.74)7
7 Sophia studies that would culminate in my Riddle of the Sophia (2020), beyond which Rilke in the Making (2023) would also be produced.
A Final Subscript:
My Final Years (i)
The Limits of Ambition
The 5 talks described above, as presented, had taken my auditors, in the case of The Riddle of the Sophia, up to the year 2020, when I reached the age of 67, and in the case of my comprehensive Rilke in the Making up to 2023, when I reached the age of 70. 2020 was also the year that I resigned my two-year tenure as the editor of The Starlight Journal of the Sophia Foundation of North America. All of the essays that found their way into The Riddle, and that had been written for this same Starlight Journal, had appeared by 2018.
After I resigned as editor, I threw myself with some desperation into a series of 16 essays on the course of Western cultural history from Boethius to Beckett, to which I gave the title Tragical Historical, since the moral of my historical account was that in a sense this history had reached a dead-end. My own work was reaching dead-end, or so I sensed unconsciously, which is why I speak of the ‘desperation’ with which I launched into this series of essays. They were intended to serve as a peripheral background to what I called “my main work of the centre,” wherein I saw our hope for the future, ambiguous as this hope may be. There the focus had been on the sense of direction towards the
future offered by Shakespeare, Novalis, and Rilke, worked out in relation to those larger subjects that I assumed would need to concern us more and more, of the Goddess, and Sophia. Along with Tragical, over the two years that followed my editorship of Starlight I also gave myself to putting the finishing touches to my large book on Rilke, on which I had ended up working for over 8 years.
I speak of ‘desperation’ at that time, for I sensed that, as a writer, things were winding down for me, that I was indeed coming to the end of my tether. It was in the winter of 2022 that it then hit me, with a force that made it finally the case, that I had reached the end, and that nothing of any scope or other possible grandeur would come from my pen again, whatever I might wish, or desire, or will. I had turned into an Archivist merely of my former work, drafting one additional new Note after the other to explicate one aspect of this work or another further, but with no inkling of any further new project of significance to speak of.8 I had reached that late phase in life that may be described as “The Limits of Ambition,” as elucidated by W.B. Yeats, and numbered 22, in his masterpiece on the whole cycle of possible human biographical ‘incarnations,’ paralleling the course of a lifetime, entitled A Vision. To this work I found myself turning again quite by chance, synchronistically (or is it providentially?), only very recently, many months after emerging into this new phase (it had been over 40 years since I had looked at it the very first time I came across it.)
8 To this period belong as Notes: “Novalis’s ‘Brother’ in Christendom, or Europe,”“Re-visiting Shakespeare’s Drama of Initiation,” as well as “Shakespeare, Novalis and their Succession: a Canonical History for our Time” (a text that tails off into a long series of graphs and concordances). To this reduced effort belongs also the above series of Talks, also this Address that I am writing now. No other work in any larger vein has come or, it would appear, will come.
The applications to my life, which I make below, of the 28 “Embodiments” that form the heart of Yeats’s system bear on their significance as the 28 stages of a single lifetime. That these “Embodiments” have such a significance should be clear from the sequence in which they develop, which can be seen to enact the individual personality’s growth from “Incarnation” or Birth in phase 1, through Infancy and early Childhood in phases 2, 3, and 4 “Beginning of Energy,” “Beginning of Ambition,” “Desire for the External World” thence to late Childhood: “Separation from Innocence,” into Adolescence: “Artificial Individuality,” and into Early Adulthood: “Assertion of Individuality,” “War between Race and Individuality,” “Belief instead of Individuality” etc… My own applications in this Address will go back from the present moment only as far as this last-mentioned phase. A precise application of Yeats’s system to the specific developmental stages of a life, point-for-point, would appear to have been an undeveloped aspect of our reception of this system, but it is possible to find such an application, as I have found this possible in my own life, if all the specific detail of development is more closely considered and scrupulously worked out. In the meantime, we have the further invocation of a specific human “type” that features in the case of each and every phase, as embodied by the famous historical personalities Yeats cites. This is the immediate working level of Yeats’s presentation in his masterpiece. Each of these personalities would have made into the main feature of their life the defining characteristics associated with one particular phase. Additionally the extraordinary idea is presented that in the case of each of us, a separate life is lived, as in the case of our historical examples, primarily in one phase or another through the whole gamut of phases that make up the cycle, over what will thus amount to 28 incarnations, for the whole cycle of
phases must lived out at this level also.9 However I will not be going into these more occult recesses of Yeats’s system, but will be focusing, more humbly, on the already challenging creative life-issues that, within my present life, are suddenly illuminated for me by Yeats’s system, and that are more than enough for me to have to be working out for the moment…
Among other aspects of the critical late phase 22 that involves me in a difficult way today, Yeats notes a driving impulse to continue to “systematize” as in the extended series of Notes I had been writing but that now one discovers in the midst of such activity suddenly an “exhaustion” of the “will”: what’s more, “the mind has exhausted all knowledge within its reach and sinks exhausted to a conscious futility.” 10 One is suddenly aware that “some opposite element controls the mind” and it has begun to dawn on us us that “we seem to have renounced our own ambition under the influence of some strange, far-reaching impartial gaze … some ungraspable whole” to which many “have given the name of God.”
And yet, having only just come into the realization that one’s whole world has altered, one is, naturally, very far from “submission.” Yeats quotes (inexactly) from Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion: we find ourselves “‘wailing upon the edge of nonentity, wailing for Jerusalem, with weak voices almost inarticulate.’’’ Attending to this new condition, it grows on one further that “the desire for reform has ceased,” in the sense that “there is neither change nor desire of change,” and now only “an absolute realism” becomes possible.11
9 Such a view thus boldly assumes reincarnation as a universal fact.
10 All quotations and page references from W.B. Yeats, A Vision (1925), ed., Catherine E. Paul, and Margaret Mills Harper. New York: Scribner, 2008. See Chapter 4 of Book One: “The Twenty Eight Embodiments.”
11 Yeats’s title for this phase is “Between Ambition and Contemplation,” but there is but a bare reference in his description to “Contemplation,” which appears at this point as a future prospect, a new project that is as yet to be clearly grasped, let alone embarked upon.
But how ‘possible,’ and whereto from this point of no return? These questions will have acquired an almost extreme urgency as one finds oneself suddenly floundering in the very midst of what one had come to see as one’s lifeaccomplishments: as Yeats puts it startlingly, “one thinks of some spilt liquid … till at last it is but a film.” How did one ever reach this point? It is a life’s work that has been spilt, and it is only one’s life that one has been living out, as one was bound to do, as Yeats’s necessitarian system of incarnations amply testifies. And it is by way of demonstrating, what is altogether astonishing, that this system does indeed but register the shifts that will define the sequential stages of a life necessarily, that I proceed now to an account of the various stages of my own biographical development with its import for my distinctive calling as a writer. I proceed to an account of the developmental stages of my life in order to elucidate, as best I can, the astonishing power of illumination Yeats’s system will throw over a life whose contours have (with age) come to be seen more clearly, but also in this instance simply because … I must…
Let me first take you back, then, before I take you forward …
(ii)
Retrospect 1
The Assertive Man, The Concrete Man, The Acquisitive Man12
This climacteric phase 22 in which one finally reaches “The Limits of Ambition,” as described by Yeats is but the end-development of a long creative
12 We must make allowance for a diferent time in the case of Yeats’s nomenclature, though, equally it must be said, he is likely to have had the more remote sense of “Man” as incorporating both male and female, a position that accords with the occult understanding that in our successive reincarnations we appear alternately as men and women, in more or less regular fashion.
process that will have unfolded, in fact, over years, during which time the process in question will not have given much sign if any of a diminution, let alone portended a cessation, of productivity. It will be a process that, even until very lately, will have bestowed great creative power, coming to a climax in this regard, and declining, even rather suddenly as will be seen in my own case. In comparison with what was formerly, with origins going still farther back, “a form of personal power” which is now “broken” a “power wielded by the whole nature” what in phase 22 now shows more obviously, and in very much diminished form, is rather a power “wielded by a fragment only, as something more and more professional, temperamental, or technical.” Such a description I would apply today without hesitation to my recent untranscendable industry of Note-making, which turns out yet to be but the last relic of a creative process that, over a number of years to that point, had yielded arguably some of my most impactful works. Modulation into a form of creativity “more professional, temperamental, or technical” had, according to Yeats, suddenly obtained from as far back as the phase he lists as 19, the phase of “The Assertive Man.” At that point, a shift into this seemingly more restricted mode of production had appeared as, in fact, the most creative possible and indeed altogether the right one for this next period of my life. Yeats’s description implies that still underlying this mode of production (and it will be the case for some time yet) are strong remnants of that “personal power” that has been driving one along from many more years back, but which at phase 22 is at last, decisively, “broken.”13
[See the Table of Phases provided at the end of this Address]
13 This “personal power” Yeats traces as far back as phase 8, the phase of the “War between Race and Individuality” (see Table below). Personal power in this system is long in development and only comes to a head (in “Unity of Being”) as many as 9 phases later.
At phase 19 “personal power” and “technical power” are not so sharply distinguished. This phase of “The Assertive Man” I first entered, as delineated in my 3rd Talk, in that time when I both began and went back to such of my work as lay beyond the intense engagement with Steiner’s Anthroposophy and its broader relationship to Literature that had absorbed me more recently and that belongs to earlier phases as we shall see, phases 12 through 18. Phase 19 is when, as described in my Bereaved Writer, AF came into my life bringing a support and understanding of my creative work such as I had not had before. Among the many things I very probably would not have done were it not for her incision into my life at that time, I went back to recover a good number of my pieces that I had left behind without thought that I would ever be collecting them, material that would help in time to fill out my Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity. On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature was also put together over this period; indeed the period in question is the one that extended through all of the writing I addressed in my 3rd and 4th talks, including The Bereaved Writer itself, all the way through The Way of Novalis, The Riddle of the Sophia, and Rilke in the Making extending to 18 years! from the ages of 52 to 70. Phase 20 of Yeats’s magnificent biographical panorama is also of this period, the phase of what he describes as “The Concrete Man,” about which more farther along. A new “conviction” has emerged as one enters this period first as “The Assertive Man,” “conviction” which Yeats describes as “temperamentally formed to fit some crisis of personal life.” Such developments in my case correspond to the circumstances in which AF emerged in my life, as narrated in some detail in Bereaved.
However, behind the circumstances that account for one’s emergence as “The Assertive Man” lies a still greater development: at this stage, “there is a desire to escape from Unity of Being or any approximation towards it, for [such] Unity can be but a simulacrum now.” By “Unity of Being” Yeats would have us understand a complete visionary unity of Being such as I’d been building on, though only more or less consciously (that is, without reference to Yeats’s complete understanding of this condition, for example), from the time I first undertook a serious study of Steiner’s Anthroposophy at 32, a development that originated from that point and continued right through to the completion of my monograph on Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays, entitled The New School of the Imagination, some 20 years later! Ultimately this development was grounded in my experience, for a time, of the immediate presence in my life of the Anthroposophia Being, of which I speak in Defending her Son. As for my literary production over this time, this period would come to a head with my writing of Prospero’s Powers and my study of the Mystery Plays, writing that coincides with phase 17, which Yeats delineates as that of “The Daimonic Man” (“Daimonic” in the sense of the “Higher Man” in one Who lies in the custody of one’s allknowing Angel.) The slow emergence of the Anthroposophia Being in my life can be traced back as far as phase 12, which Yeats delineates as that of “The Forerunner.” More below on this other, long, earlier period that, eventually, modulates into the period that begins with “The Assertive Man”.
Beginning at this later phase of “The Assertive Man though the development does not consummate itself until the phase 22, when we have begun to totter in our Ambition “[t]he seeking of Unity of Fact by a single faculty, instead of Unity of Being by the use of all, has separated a man from his
genius.” 14 Yeats puts this same point in another way: “Vitality from dreams has died out, and a vitality from fact has begun which has for its ultimate aim the mastery of the real world.”15 These are the higher “dreams” associated with Unity of Being, which are now replaced by a new absorption in “fact.”16 One now asserts oneself in a more comprehensive relation to the world; there is a more emphatic disposition to make an impact there, with the consequence, in my case, that an impulse was engendered, as I indicated above, to recover much work of mine that had been left behind, this impulse being accompanied by a further impulse to seek publication for a wider audience. My two large books, Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity and On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature were the eventual end-result of this new sense of focus. My 3rd Talk called attention to the fact that these new impulses coincided with a general disillusionment with the Anthroposophical Society that had me looking beyond my almost strict intention up to that point to write of literary subjects in an exclusive relation to the anthroposophical world-view, most notably represented in Powers and in School. By the same token, I had much to continue to say about that world-view, to which I remained committed, which found more prosaic expression in large parts of The Bereaved Writer.
Further, Yeats contrasts what he calls the “declamatory images” of “The Assertive Man” with the earlier “impassioned images” of “The Daimonic Man,” in the latter case the phase in which “Unity of Being, and consequent expression of Daimonic thought, is now more easy than at any other phase.” That further contrast highlights the difference between what may be described as an
14 P.78.
15 P.69.
16 Yeats puts this same shift in another way where he says “there is less symbol, more fact,” p.69.
unbroken flow of visionary life, such as characterized the period of my literary work that emerged previously as a continuous outpouring of my anthroposophical commitment (over a period that stretched over a decade, from 1994-2005), and a new more worldly impulse to “declaim” oneself, which I had begun to do by pronouncing now on the relation of Shakespeare to Modernity, and more specifically the theme of the Goddess as championed pre-eminently by the modern poet Robert Graves. On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature was the principal testimony of that new impulse. One is disposed in this later phase to seek, at least as an ideal, just as “a flow of visionary life” was formerly embraced as an ideal, a form of expression that is “more effective and dramatic,” achieved by means of that “single faculty” of which Yeats speaks that is, as it were, ‘singly’ focused on ‘discrete’ subjects: in my case, the Modern and Romantic scenes, Wordsworth, Keats, Graves, Ted Hughes. Over and against this had been the writing I had attempted that had sprung, not from “a single faculty,” but by “the use of all,” which is to say out of the ‘whole (dynamic) picture’ of our evolutionary destiny that Steiner’s Anthroposophy provides that had served as the basis of my literary work in (the decade-long) period that comes before: from my Othello’s Sacrifice right through Powers and School (as described in my 1st and 2nd Talks outlined above).
The period of biographical development that begins with “The Assertive Man” (a period that in my case spanned some 7 years) climaxes in phase 20 as “The Concrete Man,” declining from there into the last phase of this period, “The Acquisitive Man,” which, in turn, heralds in “The Limits of Ambition” experienced in phase 22. The principal, new direction of this period as a whole, as we have seen, lies in “seeking those facts which being separable can be seen more clearly,” though such a direction does not exclude a “unity” that in this
period is “not a Unity of Being but a unity of the creative act.”17 One is disposed to project “dramatisations,” and one creates “just in that degree in which [one] can see these dramatisations as separate from oneself, and yet as an epitome of one’s whole nature.” In this “epitome,” or cross-section of work, one experiences one’s “whole nature” reflected, if not, as in the previous period climaxing in “The Daimonic Man,” embodied. There is an internal logic to the development on the personal plane: hence my study of Novalis and, among a good number of other personalities, Solovyov in The Riddle of the Sophia, throughout which the informing influence of my anthroposophical commitment continued to be reflected inasmuch as both of these figures, as well as others researched here, occupy an eminent place in the anthroposophical world-view, only here such figures are studied for themselves or as unique dramatisations of the case, and not so much as symbolic expressions of an ongoing evolutionary design.
In these works, as Yeats puts it “a subordination of the parts is achieved by the discovery of concrete relations,” in the concrete particulars of the productions of these figures themselves. In connection with this phase Yeats also speaks of “a success that rolls out and smooths away, that dissolves through creation,” and of “a great ductability” evinced through a readiness to adopt “any rôle that stirs imagination,” a feature of my production that I sensed as I was engaged in the essays that appeared in time as The Riddle of the Sophia (a creation of some 6 years), one essay after the other appearing regularly in the Starlight Journal. At this time it was my experience that I felt I had indeed found a method of work that would permit me to continue to engage one author after another, one subject after another, seemingly without end, though an end was, of course,
17 P.70.
bound to come, and did come soon enough.18 A certain rigidifying of the process was bound to develop, which became evident and indeed definite in the last phase of my brief stint as editor of Starlight, especially by the time I put out my last issue in the spring of 2020.
The three issues I put out during my tenure were a direct continuation of the subject and themes of The Riddle of the Sophia, but the contributors to this journal hitherto found themselves balking at the more exacting standards of writing and intellectual formulation that my dispositions as an editor inclined me to. And certainly by the time of the third issue, it had become clear to me that I was working largely on my own, with only three or four willing and capable authors, and that I no longer had the support of the journal’s generally less ambitious culture. To be fair to myself, I resigned without any prompting from others, and it is also the case that I had been asked by the founder of the Journal to make it closer to a world-class event if possible. Still, I had gone from being “The Concrete Man” to “The Acquisitive Man,” and Yeats’s descriptions for this new phase 21 register clearly with me today: “The Will ha[d] driven intellectual complexity into its final entanglement, an entanglement created by the continual adaption to new circumstances of a logical sequence.” This was the logical sequence of my creative progression, which had by now rigidified. I had become, to my disadvantage and indeed undoing, “intellectually dominating, intellectually unique”/ “a personality” that had become “a creation of his circumstances and his faults”/ “peculiar to himself and impossible to others.” I was then but shortly to reach in the next phase (22) an experience of “The Limits of Ambition”: “the Will
18 This method I carried over into my Tragical Historical in somewhat more etiolated form, as my powers in this direction were fast waning, hounded as I was by an unconscious anxiety that I was beginning to reach the end.
engaged in its last struggle with external fact”/ “dying,” as it were, at the moment of conquest.”
(iii)
Retrospect 2
from The Forerunner to The Emotional Man
Phases 12 to 18
The Image-Breaker, The Image-Burner Phases 10 and 11
At the stage of “The Assertive Man” it had been the case, as we have seen, of a development engaged in a new “Creative Unity” arising out of what had been, until then, an experience of “Unity of Being.” There had been the reign, two phases before, of “The Daimonic Man,” of whom Yeats says that Unity of Being is “now more easy than at any other phase”. That climactic phase corresponds to my production of Powers and School, as well as 3 Society articles, published at the time in Aurore, the Journal of the AS in Canada, which were eventually incorporated into The Riddle of the Sophia, along with its 7 new essays, written from 2014 onwards. The phase of my “Daimonic Man” lasted for some 7 years, between 1997 and 2003, but it had long been in gestation, going back to what Yeats presents as the case of “The Forerunner” some 5 phases earlier. This would take us as far back to when I was 32, when I began my serious study of the works of Rudolf Steiner.
In the phase of “The Forerunner,” “practical relations are finished, or finishing” and the individual is suddenly defining himself “mainly through an image of the mind begun or beginning.” Such “practical relations” bear on the
necessary early associations of family and friends, as well as teachers also in one’s more immediate vocational training which will have been completed by then. The new phase is suddenly “a phase of immense energy” arising from the perception and experience of a new personal freedom: “solitude has been born at last.”
There is a “frenzy of desire for truth of self” that was inspired into me by Rudolf Steiner in his works, and through my new association with him I was now in the position of being myself “The Forerunner,” who “by philosophic intellect … announces a philosophy.” The fruit of that association and that identification, as regards my own literary work, would not show until almost a decade later when in the last section of my Othello’s Sacrifice, suddenly my long-time studies in Shakespeare and my more recent engagement with Steiner came together. The Thinking Spirit: Rudolf Steiner and Romantic Theory, a Collection of Texts with Notes, intended to further clarify my approach and method as a critic in Sacrifice, also belongs to this period of my work.
In the last section of Sacrifice, I had brought Shakespeare and Steiner together in a way that symbolically reflected and even, in a sense, embodied the whole import of my life in more recent years. What I describe of Shakespeare’s personal evolution in his later plays, as illuminated by the evolutionary worldview of Steiner, constitutes nothing less than a symbolic transformation of my personal experience of “The Death of the Beloved” (see my 1st Talk listed above these terms my own). That experience was the eventual Imaginative uphsot of the impact made on me of a series of developments in my life that correspond to the 2 phases that obtain before the emergence of “The Forerunner,” namely those of “The Image-Breaker” and “The Image-Burner,” in Yeats’s terms. I had come into an experience of this Death sometime before I came through into the phase of “The Forerunner.” The developments in question would be accounted for in
some detail in the later sections of my main memoir, Defending her Son, written and forthwith published some 5 years beyond the writing of Sacrifice (in 1999).19
There had been a series of somewhat hapless entanglements followed by what became necessary separations. What predisposed me to this, fatefully, was a condition that Yeats describes in “Belief instead of Individuality,” as phase 9.
Still a young adult, with new ambitions from success in one’s training but not yet matured in one’s profession, one has at that point not quite come fully into one’s individuality but is otherwise full of belief in oneself, such as gives the impression of one’s being “accomplished.” Where this over-weening confidence gives itself to “a delusive hope, cherished in secret” (from too much sense of all that will be his), one is rendered vulnerable to “conflict,” to the point of indulgently “accepting” what, in fact, “opposes” one: a conventional “form” those about one “admire,” it may be a precipitated marriage and the prospect of a family-life before its proper time. On discovering that this life can only be “alien” to one, dissatisfying and debilitating, one is eventually impelled to “cast it away.” This is the phase of “The Image-Breaker.” One uses one’s “intellect to liberate from mere race,” and having created “some code of personal conduct which implies always “divine right,” one looks to some other more liberating “form” that yet turns out to be “as alien,” subject, as one may be now, to “some woman’s tragic love.” Again there must be “escape,” especially where there may be, for example, the additional distress of children this woman has had by another, a husband, who only wishes to disturb the peace of all and threatens harm. For some years now, one has been “kept from one’s subjectivity by personal relations, by sensuality … by associations of men for practical purposes … or by some tragic
19 This memoir, whih goes back 25 years, is now out of print, but is available at a university library near you.
love,” but now there arises a new “frenzy of conviction” and a “rage against rough-and ready customary thought,” “conviction” that must devote one contrarily to what is “the most individual expression of the soul” with the now more far-reaching aim of “the world’s welfare.” This is the phase of “The Image Burner,” which will modulate shortly directly into that of “The Forerunner.”
In ths phase of “The Forerunner,” “solitude has been born at last,” and in that solitude, for the first time, an experience of one’s individuality, a new “frenzy for truth of self,” as noted above. In time one will, indeed, be “announcing a philosophy.” But all this has been at a cost, of separated lives, and separation from love in a way that will seem final, and herein is born/emerges that primal experience of The Death of the Beloved, such as Orpheus will have experienced in the case of his Eurydice. There is now a new complication, for “hatred for some external fate” has given way to “self-hatred,” evoking the fate of Shakespeare’s tragic hero, for instance. But life will yet bring its healing balm: “a possible complete intellectual unity” is to be completed by “an equal roundness and wholeness of sensation” and a “virginal purity of emotion” not till that day ever yet known, with, let us say, a woman who has appeared from a world beyond everything one has recently endured.
Only life itself can bestow this gift. It is the phase of “enforced love,” phase 13, which opens out in turn on phases of 14 and 15, where respectively “the greatest possible human beauty” is experienced, “thought,” while remaining itself, literally “disappearing into image.” And now “All was right in the world,” as I put it in Defending Her Son. It is at this point that there emerged from the sphere of Death the Anthroposophia Being who now literally walked the earth with me, as I describe this in my memoir.
But nothing of this may last, for there must be an overflowing, and work to do, and it may be that one discovers “symbolism to express the overflowing and bursting of the mind” in this condition, as happened with me, in the case of my creative formulations in the last section of Othello’s Sacrifice where Steiner’s advanced evolutionary thought and the pattern of Shakespeare’s own experience of a personal evolution find common ground the phase of “The Positive Man.” All this would flow over in turn into the writing of Powers and School, with my emergence into the next phase of “The Daimonic Man” and what might be described as my coming into a Unity of Being “now more easy than at any other phase.” But even so, there would have to be a further modulation into subsequent phases, one’s life advancing as it will in the fulfilment of one’s complete range of assigned tasks, and at some point, coincident with the next phase of “The Emotional Man,” one “can no longer through philosophy [Anthroposophy] substitute for the desire that life has taken away [the Beloved] love for what life has brought.” A new “emotional philosophy,” distinctive of this phase, has come into being specially designed “to free a form of emotional beauty from ‘disillusionment’”: “for the first time, the love of a living woman [‘disillusionment’ once accepted] as apart from beauty or function, is an admitted aim.” This will be a woman who, by virtue of her special, and indeed unique, mental and emotional resources, will be more fully in tune with the concrete tasks that lie ahead for one, in which one will perforce be “assert[ing] oneself in a more comprehensive relation to the world,” as described above. “The Assertive Man,” not to mention “The Concrete Man” lies in the offing, for the creative life continues, and another new unity, “a unity of the creative act” must now begin to take one over. The Way of Novalis, The Riddle of the Sophia, Rilke in the Making, all were to follow for me … “great ductability” etc
Forecasting
The Saint, The Hunchback
But all such tasks have now been fulfilled, and the further dire question has now arisen “Whereto from here?” in what are to be my final years. What may the forecast be? In this phase that I have now entered, “The Limits of Ambition,” as we have seen, there has been an “exhaustion of the will,” and suddenly there is “no desire of change” such as one’s creative work in the world would effect. As Yeats describes it further, “the [Will] will seek to change nothing, it needs nothing,” except for “what it may call ‘reality,’ ‘truth,’ ‘God’s will’.” All is yet very dimly perceived in the case of what it is said it now seeks: “we seem to have renounced our own ambition under the influence of some strange, far-reaching impartial gaze” This “gaze” is yet but very dimly focused, as I can presently attest, though it is sensed as an inevitable, if radically unfamiliar, new, undefined direction in vision.
In these later phases it is more definitely understood that one has become “aware of something which the intellect cannot grasp, and that this something is a supersensual environment of the soul.” This perception comes to a climax in the next-to-last phase 27, which Yeats defines as that of “The Saint.” By then, we read, “the total life,” of which this “environment” is the emanation, will have “suddenly displayed its source,” and it will have become a matter of “permit[ting]” this life “to flow in upon [one] and to express itself through [one’s] acts and thoughts.” The counterbalancing force in one in this experience will be, in the meantime, consciously and actively “to be nothing, to do nothing, to think
nothing,” on realizing that, in fact, “this total life is in love with his nothingness,” and that it cannot be had as an experience except in this “nothingness” that one has made of oneself. For this phase Yeats cites the example of Pascal and, more remarkably, Socrates…
Apart from what will strike us as an unachievable experience for the greater part of struggling humanity in the case of the phase of “The Saint”! this forecast raises the issue of whether one does not stand to predetermine one’s destiny, in knowing beforehand how matters will be developing from here, from having Yeats’s accounts before one. Will I indeed be coming into anything like an experience of these later phases as Yeats describes these, in the same way that I experienced all the earlier phases as inevitable biographical developments, at the time without knowing that I was in Yeats’s terms? This remains to be seen. In the meantime, I have been struck especially by the late condition of development Yeats associates with “The Hunchback” in the phase which appears just before that of “The Saint.”
Among the main aspects of this phase, Yeats relates how one “becomes the most completely solitary of all possible human beings, for all emotional communion with one’s kind, that of a common study, that of an interest in work done, that of a code accepted, that of a belief shared, has passed.” What predominates in one is rather an obsessive focus on “contact with supersensual life,” which Yeats details further as “a sinking in of the body upon its supersensual source,” or there is, at the least, “desire for that contact and sinking.” It is the prelude to that full contact with this “source” that is finally made concretely available to the “The Saint” in the phase that follows. Focused as one is predominantly on this “source,” and with the peculiar narrowing vision such focus
has brought about in this phase of “the Hunchback”: “because one can see lives and actions in relation to their source and not in the relations to one another,” one will fix, acutely, especially on “their deformities and incapacities,” and this focus will extend also to one’s own “past actions” which one “must judge as isolated and each in its relation to its source,” with the consequence that “this source will be present in one’s mind as a terrible unflinching judgment.” Death grows nearer and with that the prospect of accounting to this “God” as this “source” has been identified, though it has been otherwise conceived also simply as “reality,” “truth” etc. It is a measure of that “absolute realism” that has taken one’s will over, banishing the creative desire that had impelled one to that point to its own realms, which are now outgrown, from the time one reaches, irreversibly, “The Limits of Ambition.”
Between this climacteric late-life phase of “The Limits of Ambition” and the near-ultimate, climactic phase of “The Saint,” there have been a number of other intermediate conditions of optional life, as alluded to in Yeats’s reference, just cited, to “… work done … a code accepted … a belief shared,” all of which, however, will “have passed” by the time one reaches the phase of “The Hunchback.” All are expressions of a new realism that has come into play with the enforced separation from one’s personally-empowered creative life, as marked by “The Limits,” such expressions being themselves reflections of that “absolute realism” that from this point onwards now prevails through all and everything. In question are the conditions of life assumed respectively by the purely ‘receptive’ artist, the traditionalist, and the reformer. Yeats cites the very notable examples, respectively, of Rembrandt, Lady Gregory, and, from opposite sides of the dogmatic issue, Martin Luther and Cardinal Newman. All are said to draw
ultimately from the one supersensual source that dictates to everyone behind everything that can be undertaken in this late period of life.
By “work done” Yeats intends specifically the “technical” work of a ‘receptive’ artist such as Rembrandt who, in his technique of “laying bare” a “general humanity” in all its “minute particulars of life,” was able to “involuntarily” express a “pity” that was “inseparable from wisdom” for “pity” read “compassion” a technical wisdom “startling” just because it “eludes intellect,” being such “wisdom” as is specifically associated with a “supersensual” form of inspirational life. As for “a code,” Yeats intends specifically a “code of personal conduct … formed from social and historical tradition … bound up with family, or office, or trade.” Yeats cites Lady Gregory20: one thinks of his tribute to her in “Coole Park and Ballylee”: “We were the last romantics chose for theme/Traditional sanctity and loveliness;/Whatever’s written in what poets name/The book of the people.” As for “a belief shared,” Yeats has described this as “the contagion of some common agreement,” whose watchword is “to make men better … to so arrange prohibitions and habits that men may be naturally good,” for which, from opposite sides of the theological issue, Martin Luther and Cardinal Newman are given as the historical exemplars, among others. Thus “… work done … a code accepted … a belief shared,”—phases 23, 24, 25— which are to be followed by “The Hunchback,” at 26.
One can see how in this late phase of life, with the sudden drastic diminution and, indeed, it may be virtual cessation of one’s personal creative power, as I for one have experienced this, one is still in the position to fall back
20 See p.262. n.215.
on a whole number of additional supporting options connected with art, tradition, and belief, as Rembrandt, Lady Gregory, and the great Reformers so impressively embodied these historically, from whom we might have much to gain inspirationally. We have all of us been, in one form or another, and at one level and another, the product of religion, of traditional community, and a general exposure to art. But it does not follow that in this highly challenging new phase, we will all have recourse again to these, more socially-minded, expressions of that all-dictating “source” to which we know it has become time to connect or re-connect. None of these may satisfy any longer, or have continued to have any commanding bearing on one into late life. The Catholic faith has been my religion, the old Catholic culture my tradition and unbringing, and compassion my self-professed fine art and secret possession. All this the details of my memoirs have fleshed out. But that these inherited forms of life will bear me up in the condition I find myself today remains to be seen. My link to them at present has become weak, and their influence may have already played itself out, already borne what fruit they had to offer in the depths of my soul in this life.
For at present it feels as if I had been catapulted forward already into the phase of “The Hunchback”: Solitude, Judgment, Intimations:
• the “solitude” of the exhausted moral will;
• “judgment,” and in every other respect a poignant retrospect on my life as a whole;
• “intimations” of the source of a “total life” sensed dimly yet monolithically just the other side of the hedge, to which place I am presently referred, and will one day shortly be transposed…
• and, for the most part, the struggle with nothingness: a preparation, this, towards the final goal of “being nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing?” so that “the total life” may “flow in”?21
“The Will knows itself to be the world”?22
Following Yeats’s recommendation for understanding this point of “The Limits of Ambition,” shall I go on to study The Temptation of Saint Antony, by Flaubert?
Enfeebled by prolonged fasting, the hermit finds himself unable to concentrate his mind upon holy things …
His thoughts wander; memories of youth evoke regrets that this relaxed will can no longer find strength to suppress and remembrance begetting remembrance, his fancy leads him upon dangerous ground.
Involuntarily he yields to the nervous dissatisfaction growing upon him. He laments his solitude, his joylessness, his poverty, the obscurity of his life; grace departs from him; hope burns low within his heart…23
21 In the anthroposophical world-view, these conditions would be seen as heralds of the existence to be lived out shortly in the afterlife, in Kamaloka and beyond.
22 See Phase 22, p.79.
23 From the “Argument,” by Lafcadio Hearn, tr., The Temptation of Saint Antony by Gustave Flaubert, Modern Library Classics.
Yeats speaks of this work by Flaubert and of his Bouvard and Pécuchet as “the two sacred books of this phase” and of Flaubert himself as ‘the supreme literary genius of the phase” (p.77).
In the first of these, the self would appear to be “dissolving” in its experiences; in the second, creative learning is being mechanically extended and reduced to a “copying” method.
St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul could, from its position, be another vantagepoint on this phase, for example Chapter 10 of Book One, from paragraph 4, in the translation by E. Allison Peers: /cont’d
But especially do George Herbert’s lines from “The Collar” rise up to haunt me in these dark latter days:
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart, but there is fruit, And thou hast hands.
Away, take heed, I will abroad,
Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load.
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling,‘Child!’
And I replied, ‘My Lord.’
What they must do is merely to leave the soul free and disencumbered and at rest from all knowledge and thought, troubling not themselves about what they shall think or meditate upon, but contenting themselves with merely a peaceful and a loving attentiveness toward God … Wherefore it behoves such a soul to pay no heed if the operations of its faculties become lost to it; it is rather to desire that this should happen quickly … not hindering the operation of infused contemplation that God is bestowing upon it… (p.74).
Flaubert would appear to resolve the self and all learning finally to nothingness according to Yeats, “under the influence of some [further] strange, far-reaching, impartial gaze.” St. John of the Cross, for his part, would relate nothingness to a God who is already at work in us and, if not yet known, nevertheless can, in the end, be fully known.
Cf. David, AV, Psalm 73, verses 21-2:
And I was dissolved into nothing and annihilated, and I knew not….
Phase 28 (the last phase)
The Fool
“he is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning, and is sometimes called ‘The Child of God.’” 24
to be continued…
24 A Vision, p.93.
Table of Phases and Key Concepts 1-6
“Beginning of Energy,” “Beginning of Ambition,” “Desire for the External World”
“Separation from Innocence,” “Artificial Individuality,” 7, 8
Assertion of Indivduality, War between Race and Individuality 9, 10,11
Belief Instead of Individuality, Image-Breaker, Image-Burner
Death of the Beloved 12-16
from The Forerunner through The Positive Man
[Ages 32-42]
Philosophic Overflow
Study of the works of Rudolf Steiner (Philosophy) 12+
The Anthroposophia Being (Beauty) 13, 14, 15
Othello’s Sacrifice (Overflow of Images) 16 17
The Daimonic Man
[Ages 42-52]
Unity of Being Impassioned Images
Prospero’s Powers
The New School of the Imagination: Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays in Literary Tradition
The Emotional Man [Ages 50-52]
Transitioning into the World Disillusionment with the Anthroposophical Society 19, 20, 21
Unity of the Creative Act
(A Merging of Personal with Technical Power)
The Assertive Man [Ages 52-59]
Declamatory Images
Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity/ On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature
The Concrete Man [Ages 59+]
Dramatised Images
The Way of Novalis, The Riddle of the Sophia, Rilke in the Making
The Acquisitive Man [67+]
A Rigidifying of Creativity
The Starlight editorship 22
The Limits of Ambition (Personal power ‘broken’) (70+)
Exhaustion of the Will Submission
Tragical Historical
A Final Inventory
(Herewith a list of the books that in a personally symbolic way which no other books could, with quite the same economic resonance mark the main developmental periods of my life as accounted for in the above texts. Other books (of which there were many) may have been more significant or important as literature and in my writing career, but none resonate with these periods in quite the same personal way. The list has been kept to a strict minimum, in order to highlight these periods for myself more readily and to make my meditation on them easier. The reader will refer themselves to what is said in my “Final Subscript” in connection with how my life and work unfold in some detail in the case of each of the periods in question. The most part of the following books have found some commentary on them in my published writing.)
*
“
Belief instead of Individuality”
“a delusive hope, cherished in secret” (from too much sense of all that will be his), one is rendered vulnerable to “conflict,” to the point of indulgently “accepting” what, in fact, “opposes” one: a conventional “form” those about one “admire”… (see p.30 above)
(Postgraduate years: 25, 26 and Marriage years: 21-28)
a philosophy of ecstasy heroic grandeur a carapace against conventional embroilment
“The Image-Breaker”
One uses one’s “intellect to liberate from mere race,” and having created “some code of personal conduct which implies always “divine right,” one looks to some other more liberating “form” that yet turns out to be “as alien,” subject, as one may be now, to “some woman’s tragic love”… (see p.30 above)
(First Breakup: 28)
The Poems of W.B. Yeats heroic desolation
“The Image-Burner”
For some years now, one has been “kept from one’s subjectivity by personal relations, by sensuality … by associations of men for practical purposes … or by some tragic love,” but now there arises a new “frenzy of conviction” and a “rage against rough-and ready customary thought,” “conviction” that must devote one contrarily to what is “the most individual expression of the soul” with the now more far-reaching aim of “the world’s welfare”… But all this has been at a cost, of separated lives, and separation from love in a way that will seem final… (see pp.30-31 above)
(Second Breakup: 31) (i)
Thus Spake Zarathustra not commented on in my work freeing oneself (ii)
The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke
The Orphic Voice, Elizabeth Sewell (through whom I had my first encounter with a deep exposition of Rilke’s Sonnets and the Orphic myth generally)
death of the beloved
“The Forerunner” to “The Positive Man”
(i)
“solitude has been born at last,” and in that solitude, for the first time, an experience of one’s individuality, a new “frenzy for truth of self”… “a possible complete intellectual unity” is to be completed by “an equal roundness and wholeness of sensation”… “thought” literally “disappearing into image.” (see p.31 above)
(Breakthrough years: 32-43)
Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, Rudolf Steiner
symbolic of my extensive study of Steiner in this period, and cited here also for ‘The Michael Mystery’ it contains, which served as the framework for the history of the evolution of consciousness on which Othello’s Sacrifice is based.
Harmony of the Creative Word, Rudolf Steiner not commented on in my work
announcing a philosophy (all right with the world)
(University teaching begins: 35-)
(ii)
“symbolism to express the overflowing and bursting of the mind” as happened with me, in the case of my creative formulations in the last section of Othello’s Sacrifice where Steiner’s advanced evolutionary thought and the pattern of Shakespeare’s own experience of a personal evolution find common ground the phase of “The Positive Man.”
The Thinking Spirit: Rudolf Steiner and Romantic Theory
my compendium of theoretical texts intended as “A Companion to Othello’s Sacrifice. ” See “Revisiting Shakespeare’ s Drama of Initiation” on Academia.edu
Eternal Individuality (on Novalis) by Sergei O. Prokofieff
one of the key texts read in the making of The Thinking Spirit, and contributive to the gestation that led 15 years later to initial work on The Way of Novalis.
“
The Daimonic Man”
the phase in which “Unity of Being, and consequent expression of Daimonic thought, is now more easy than at any other phase,” a complete visionary unity of Being grounded in my experience, for a time, of the immediate presence in my life of the Anthroposophia Being … all would come to a head with my writing of Prospero’s Powers and my study of [Steiner’s] Mystery Plays (see pp.24, 28, 31 above)
(Unity of Being climaxes: 44-50)
The Secret Stream: Christian Rosenkreutz and Rosicrucianism, Steiner
creative unity
“The Emotional Man”
one’s life advancing as it will in the fulfilment of one’s complete range of assigned tasks, at some point one “can no longer through philosophy [vide Anthroposophy] substitute for the desire that life has taken away [the Beloved] love for what life has brought.” A new “emotional philosophy,” distinctive of this phase, has come into being specially designed “to free a form of emotional beauty from ‘disillusionment’”
(see p.32 above)
(Transitioning through Emotional Philosophy: 50-52)
The White Goddess, Robert Graves disillusionment emotional philosophy
“The Assertive Man”
One now asserts oneself in a more comprehensive relation to the world; there is a more emphatic disposition to make an impact there, a further impulse to seek publication for a wider audience, my two large books, Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity and On Nature and the Goddess in Romantic and post-Romantic Literature the eventual end-result…
(see p.24 above)
(Into the World: 52-59)
Eros and Civilization, Marcuse symbolic of a more comprehensive relation to the world
“The Concrete Man”
The principal, new direction of this period as a whole lies in “seeking those facts which being separable can be seen more clearly,” disposed as one is to project “dramatisations,” a readiness to adopt “any rôle that stirs imagination. ” There is now “not a Unity of Being but a unity of the creative act ” And so, my study of Novalis and (among a good number of other personalities) Solovyov in The Riddle of the Sophia, throughout which my anthroposophical commitment continues to be reflected, but in which these figures are being studied for themselves as unique dramatisations of the case, and not immediately as symbolic expressions of an ongoing evolutionary design.
(see p.26 above)
(Great Ductability: 61-65)
The Birth of Novalis, ed., Bruce Donehower the book that grounded me in my approach to Novalis in The Way of Novalis
The Most Holy Trinosophia, Robert Powell the book that carried me over into the Sophia culture of today
Alchemical Studies, Carl Jung
the book out of which I first made my approach to writing about the Sophia in the form of the essays for Starlight that were eventually collected in The Riddle of the Sophia
Demons, Dostoevski (cf. Valentin Tomberg) the book to which I at last reverted in order to measure the positive exhortations of Sophia culture against the challenges of tragic existential embroilment, the result of which investigation was the essay on this subject in The Riddle of the Sophia, the only essay in that book that did not appear in Starlight.
creative action
“
The Acquisitive Man”
In time “The Will has driven intellectual complexity into its final entanglement,” my having become, to my disadvantage and indeed undoing, “intellectually dominating, intellectually unique”/ “a personality” that had become “a creation of his circumstances and his faults”/ “peculiar to himself and impossible to others.” (see p.27 above)
(End of the Creative years: 65-70)
Montaigne’s Essays
symbolically expressive of my condition at this time, in the way these Essays embody an overriding obsession with creative production, such as will arise out of the clash between conventionality and individuality as two extremes. My essay on Montaigne would appear in my long series of essays on western culture gathered in Tragical Historical, a collection that itself constitutes an expression of this kind of obsession.
My impasse with the Starlight culture had diverted me once again to a sphere outside the Sophianic-anthroposophical world, where my creative energy had no choice but to go, as if by design, since to bridge over and to mediate, or at least to serve as a lynch-pin between the anthroposophical and non-anthroposophical worlds had been a central preoccupation of mine in my work as a whole; only, this time I was to be thrown further, beyond one world and the other, into the throes of what would soon emerge as a new experience of nothingness …
self-entanglement, and exhaustion
“The Limits of Ambition” etc
“the Will engaged in its last struggle with external fact” now “dying,” as it were, at the moment of conquest, ”there is an “exhaustion of the will,” and suddenly “no desire of change” such as one’s creative work in the world would effect. Yeats, seeing farther along, describes the case as follows: “the [Will] will seek to change nothing, [for now] it needs nothing,” except for “what it may call ‘reality,’ ‘truth,’ ‘God’s will’.” All is yet very dimly perceived in the case of what it is said the Will now seeks …
(see pp. 27-28, 33 above)
(Biographical Review, and Call to the Supersensual Life: 70+ )
A Vision by W.B. Yeats
? The Temptaton of St. Antony by Flaubert ? The Pensees of Pascal
Nothingness and ‘God’ (death)
Progressing through still later phases, as forecast, it will in time have become a matter, we learn, of “permit[ting]” this life “to flow in upon [one] and to express itself through [one’s] acts and thoughts.” The counterbalancing force in one in this experience will be, in the meantime, consciously and actively “to be nothing, to do nothing, to think nothing,” on realizing that, in fact, “this total life is in love with his nothingness,” and that it cannot be had as an experience except in this “nothingness” that one has made of oneself …
Good luck to the one who has at last come into his destiny in these terms! Let him be able in his last moments to say with Nietzsche’s ugliest man:
For the first time I am satisfied that I have lived my whole life.
Letter to Jeff Hippolito (December 13th, 2023)
Hello Jeff,
For you Christmas has come early this year. I could afford to send you this consignment of books because of funds that were made available to me for this purpose. I was able to trace you to the College.
These books constitute my output over the last decade.
The books speak to what I imagine are some of your own cherished areas of interest, including the book on Shakespeare who, at some point in Remembering, is brought into a creative relationship with Steiner (via Barfield). In the event that, drinking in the divine afflatus, you should take these books on and see yourself through them, you would be in the position to help me address those crucial issues that are raised by them that I summarized for you in a message I sent you some time ago via Academia edu, and which I reproduce below.
I caught sight recently of your review of Luke Fischer’s poems in The Critical Flame, which indicates your close familiarity with Rilke. If you got around to reading both my Rilke and my Novalis books, you would be in the position to review the Rilke book with a complete sense of the larger issues I am raising in it in relating to Rilke to Novalis (issues that come to a head especially in the second half of the book.) This might make for the complete review of the book I am looking for, and which you may be eminently suited for, given your own areas of interest. This is my personal hope, and I raise this as a theoretical possibility The Critical Flame offering what would appear to be an ideal venue for such a review—but, of course, I would fully understand if you did not take up the challenge of this task for one reason or another. (I mention The Critical Flame, but you might have another venue in mind.)
In the meantime you know how to reach me, should you be moved to it. All best to you in your own ongoing explorations.
John O’MearaVisit my author website at: johnomeara.squarespace.com
P.S.
Allusion to my Riddle book below points to a still further dimension to the issues raised between Rilke and Novalis, a dimension reserved for a still more advanced stage of inquiry.
An in-depth study of their lives and work would reveal that Rilke and Novalis do hold the future between them, but who will rise up to meet the challenge represented by the issues raised between them? Is Rilke's seemingly opposite direction from that taken by Novalis (back down into the earth rather than up towards heaven) a step backward in evolutionary terms? Or is it paradoxically a progression, pointing to the need in the future for a higher synthesis of extremes than what Novalis himself conveys, a 'reculer pour mieux sauter'? In the meantime, anthroposophical-Sophianic culture, as represented in my Riddle book (The Riddle of the Sophia), continues on its way alongside, pursuing its own line of investigation into the form any such final synthesis of extremes would take, up and down, forward and back etc., continuing in its own way to engage with the abyss...