Part 7 Phosphorescnt Images of Thought

Meyrink’s Visions of Thought

I had the feeling that that sometimes you can fan the flame of your thoughts so vigorously that they give off a spray of sparks that fly to the brain of the person standing next to you.[1]

Sometimes in the middle of a book which is otherwise irrelevant to the topic at hand one finds a sentence or a figure of speech that fits with themes slowly developing in one’s mind.  There is no use trying to work out how the passage works in its own context as part of a novel or a short story or a drama or some other genre.  The words by themselves seem to shoot out from the original place and illuminate the space in your own brain where ideas are trying to form themselves into new concepts, new ways to see into world. 

We have seen already how the natural phenomena associated with phosphorescence in the sea, chemical glows in organic creatures and memories of old folktales and legends seem to hint towards ideas about thought itself, cognitive and affective, that is, about systems of knowledge, memory, speculation and interpersonal sharing of these processes, whether in some magical or mystical way (which I doubt) or through some stimulation and simulation triggered by electrical, chemical and visual clues.  We know that animals, birds and insects communicate to each other when they swarm, as when birds form into vast clouds of flying bodies, either to swirl over the landscape or to follow ancient instinctive routes in their migration.  They signal to one another through impulse-reactions set off by hormonal activities, shifting colours in their wings or eyes, sounds and smells emitted, and patterns of movement.  

These natural modes of symbolic communication—non-contiguous sparking of emotional and cognitive signals—are not perfect.  Some creatures fail to receive or interpret the signals correctly and fall out of the group, easy prey to predators or inclement weather.  Some defy their own instincts and set off alone, usually also to perish soon without the support of the whole flock or herd.  Roles of leadership, scouting, and succour shift through the period of swarming, although some individuals may be prone to one or other of these places in the order of participation.  On the whole, however, the large group maintains its integrity, even though on occasion it may subdivide into several smaller groups that mimic one another but explore new territory or unfamiliar conditions.  They do not form into virtual multi-cellular creatures, as when jellyfish conglomerate, or even when certain insects develop interdependent occupations in a hive or nest; such evolutionary developments tend to reduce the original individuality of the single creatures to near nil. 

Human beings are separate persons, to be sure, but they also interact in more cohesive ways, often bonding for longer or shorter periods as though they were operating through a shared emotional and intellectual process of engaging with the world.  Infants and mothers (or other close and continuous care-givers) do more than communicate emotional bonding through their shared gazes; they trigger in one another neuronal events, the child’s brain being formed through stimulation and inhibition of nerve connectors and the establishment of primary patterns of what will later be recognized as cultural response, the adult’s mind seeking and often finding completion of developments interrupted or distorted during its own ontogenetic development. Small groups, domestic households and nuclear families, interact by short-circuiting complex signalling systems through mimetic experience, to be sure, but also through shared reactions to sub-verbal recognition patterns.  Studies on twins showed these mimetic and short-circuit events may occur over long distances, even many years, based not only on shared foetal environments and genetically-linked physiological structures, but on mutual playing and learning over lengthy periods of growth.    Other sibling and cousinship relationships may not attain to such a degree of mimesis, but sufficient to enhance conscious behaviour and thought.

It might be said that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that animals never lie, but this is certainly not true.  Various birds, insects, and other living beings disguise themselves to elude predators, play dead or wounded, and make sounds that disorientate their would-be killers; such disguises are not always limited to colours, shapes and behaviour that has been genetically evolved in the course of generations through natural selection, but are traits learned from parents and occasionally invented to meet new situations.  Nevertheless, it is the more consistent and varying techniques of deception, simulation, dissimulation, and trickery that mark the human species and lead, in the first instance, towards the development of language and ritual actions, and, in the second, towards symbolic languages—words, drawings, gestures, structures—that permit the imagining of alternatives to nature in general and environmental factors in particular.

Whereas long-term transformations in so-called human nature may be brought about through two modes of epigenesis, one in the expression of genes brought on and passed through stress, ford intake, climate change and disorientation through war and natural disaster, the other in the shaping of neuronal growth mentioned above in regard to mother-infant gazing, shorter and medium length influences come about through child-rearing patters (abuse, neglect, abandonment, interfering, caring and supporting), crowd-induced trances, self-induced trances in response to intense reading, prolonged and continuous theatrical performances.  In these special transformative states of consciousness (of not unconsciousness) interpersonal communications may be shaped by unrecognized coordination of feelings and thoughts.  

Of course, Meyerink did not mean all of the above.  Still, his metaphoric depiction of the mind fanning the flames of its own activity to the point where sparks fly off and ignite mirror-like responses or rejections of these signals takes us a little but further along the path of discovery we are now on.

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[1] Meyrink, The Golem, p.43.

Lights on the Horizon: Part 6

Berenson’s Ideas of Phosphorescent Cerebration

If there is anyone who seems to draw together all that has been said so far, and in a language of concepts and a treasury of images similar to the figures throughout this essay, it is Bernard Berenson.  Recall that BB, as he was called, played a very active role in both evalkuating and identifying a great number of Renaissance paintings from Italy and then in working with dealers to have them bought and brought to America during the first three decaxdes of the twentieth century.  Though there are questionable aspects to his work, and doubtful ethics in his collaboration with Joseph Duveen’s company, it cannot be denied close to half the masterpieces of the Renaissance in American museums, art galleries and private collections are there because of  Berenson.  He also bought and fixed up an old estate outside of Florence called the Villa I Tatti filling it with an extremely rich and important collection of paintings and a vast library of books, photographs, journals and manuscripts.  At BB’s death, I Tatti was given to Harvard University and now serves as a major research institute for graduate and post-graduate students. 

Interestingly, in the last years of his life—and he lived until he was in his nineties, he was both troubled by doubts about what he had done and also drawn back to his Jewish roots, or at least, felt nostalgia for the Yiddish home he had grown up in, first in Lithuania where he was born, and then in Boston where his parents moved when he was eleven years old.  It is with this rough background sketch that we can start to appreciate what he is saying in this brief extract from pne of his letters.

July 9^th, Il Tatti

Ideas swifter than meteors cross my mind and in a flash not only disappear but without the faintest trace of memory.  It is of such frequent recurrence that it must be a characteristic of a brain in decomposition, a sort of marsh-light phosphorescence.  Literally shooting stars of cerebration, some lighting dazzlingly a vast horizon.  Too swift to note down between the flash and the forgetting, even if one always stood or sat like St. John as represented at Patmos, pen in hand waiting for the voice of the Holy Ghost.  And may not experience like mine have been the source of the belief in divine inspiration, or of the Muses?[1]

It as though he had gone to the same texts cited in other sections of my essay and pulled the key words and metaphors out and then tossed them together somewhat haphazardly.  Let us list, identify and reflect more deeply on the seven figurative statements and allusions in this diary entry:

(1)   Meteors flash quickly through the mind and then disappear

(2)   A brain in decomposition exudes a kind of glowing march-gas or will’o’th’ wisp

(3)   Phosphorescence serves as a natural phenomenon and a metaphor of intellection

(4)   Shooting stars light up the horizon in an act of cerebration, of an intellectual and yet at the same time an unconscious act of the will

(5)   St. John of the Apocalypse seated on Mount Patmos waits for Voice of God

(6)   Divine inspiration in general

(7)   The inspiration of the poetic or creative  Muses

Actually there are two parts to his statement, confused and seemingly disconnected as it seems: first, he offers three symbolic images for what he experiences as the coming and going of ideas in his elderly mind (1-4) and then, second, three discussions of inspiration  and the abstract nature of such intellection (5-7).  That Bernard Berenson thinks of himself as inspired in the same way—by physiological processes, by divine intervention and by an act of the will—as great historical exemplars does, of course, show his egotism; but why he should wish to be seen I  such company rather than in other contexts still needs to be addressed.

Berenson knows that he is aging and that his body and mind are starting to fail him.  He is, however, overly pessimistic, because he lives on longer than he ever expected, with his mnind mostly intact, and his capacity for writing more books unabated.  Nevertheless, how he writes and what he writes about turns out to be different from his past achievements.  Before, though sometimes he prided himself on his abilities as a conversationalist and also needed people to stand near him to act as stimulants and muses to his thought, most of these people being women whom he was attracted to and who were in various degrees attracted to him, as a writer he was often stymied.  His sentences did not flow.  His ideas did not easily form into persuasive forms.  He needed helpers, such as wife mary or one of his many lovers, mistresses and acolytes to re-write, to argue with him, and thus to accept his objections and insulting rages; and then professional editors went through his work and he would have to make agonizing efforts to follow the suggestions that were made or the changes silently entered on his pages.  

But when forced into house-arrest and then into hiding during the dark days of World War Two, BB began to write in a new way and about new topics.  He became more autobiographical.  He kept diaries from day to day, about his feelings, his readings, his conversations. He started to write about his dreams. He recollected his childhood in Lithuania and in Boston, not in a coherent or continuous way, as he sometimes did in his earlier books as part of some illustration of the theory of art he was trying to propound or in his letters—thousands upon thousands of them over nearly eight decades—where he was describing his hopes and dreams, his ambitions and plans, his needs and pains.  But now, just as we see in the passage cited above, he becomes self-conscious about the way ideas come to him: in fits and starts, in flashes of inspiration and memory, often too fast for him to grasp and record, sometimes too vague and abstract to fit into words and syntax.  For someone who always wanted to be and to be thought of as rational and scientific, he now finds his mind leaking or oozing with glowing ideas, glimpses of memory appearing out of nowhere and colliding with his commonsense perceptions. Not sure whether these insights, memories and feelings are what he has created in his own mind or have been evoked from the books, people and landscape he has visited, he wonders if this whole phenomenon is not what other historical writers, secular and religious, have had happen to them as well.

In the end, Berenson was not sure.  He did not try to formulate a proper psychological theory, as his friend and neighbour Leo Stein did in his few theoretical books on aesthetics and psychoanalysis written in later life, or his wife’s daughter Karin Stephan did in her two books on Bergsonian philosophy and psychoanalysis before she became too overwhelmed by problems in her life and committed an early suicide.  When he does publish a few books on aesthetics, history, and ways of seeing and knowing, he does not really or fully address the phenomenon that breaks forth in the passage above.  That is why we have to look at a few other writers in the next sections of this essay.

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[1] Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight from the Diaries of 1947-1958, edited and with an Epilogue by Nicky Mariano, Introduction by Iris Origo (New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) p. 136

Lights on the Horizon: Part 5

St Elmo’s Fire

I boarded the Kings' ship; now in the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement; sometime I'd divide
And burn in many places; on the topmast
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly
Then meet and join. 

--The Tempest (Act I, Scene 2) 

Another of the strange phenomena that light up the darkness of our ordinary experience of nature is what is called St Elmo’s Fire.  Like the phosphorescence of various marine plants and animals, this glowing flash of light that, like a will o’the wisp or an ignis fatuus, seems to dance around the deck of ships, up the masts, and then elsewhere, seems to be completely natural.  It is as natural as the march gas and lightning balls that are found on land.  Because they always seemed to be bizarre virtually unnatural, and probably supernatural in one way or another, they caught the imagination of our ancestors. Our forebears sometimes believed they were dealing with spiritual entities, creatures or forces beyond our understanding.  Yet they also were taken to be more frightening than directly dangerous, perhaps omens or other signs of benevolent powers, rather than demonic displays.

As scientists slowly began to investigate these phenomena and confirmed their natural properties, having to do with electrical discharges, chemical processes and organic substances, the stories and songs about them faded from most people’s consciousness.  Occasionally, however, as the later sections of this essay will discuss, they began to be taken in new ways.  Instead of manifestations of spiritual powers or devilish exhibitions, some writers began to see in them metaphors of mental events.  The glowing lights, the flashes and glowing substances, and the spectral shapes could stand for the way the imagination itself worked or the mind’s creation and organization of ideas.