Unancestral Voice

This book by Owen Barfield I'm really struggling to categorize... it's ostensibly a novel, with a protagonist, dialogue, and a forwards plot (of sorts), but the entirety of all three of these elements are devoted to philosophical-spiritual explorations in the evolution of consciousness. I'm not going to label it as a novel even though it sort of is, but I think it belongs perhaps more in the realm of a Platonic dialogue.

   We start part one with the main character, a man aptly named Burgeon, debating with a couple of associates about the moral & anthropological implications of D.H. Lawrence's controversial (obscene, some would say) work; while pondering this subconsciously, Burgeon stumbles across a book by an old rabbi named Joseph Karo who spoke of the shekinah and the logos - and soon, though far from a mystic, Burgeon finds himself entertaining an innate-but-somehow-alien voice which he calls Meggid and that starts prompting him to have deep spiritual-philosophical dialogues in his own head.* By part two, these conversations have obviously started rubbing off on Burgeon, and we watch as he engages deeply in a debate with a pair of strangers on a train journey about the spiritual and/or biological nature of life & consciousness, and how evolution & reincarnation fit into a holistic understanding of the very possibility of this. During these chapters Meggid imparts to Burgeon the insight that the transcendent spiritual powers at war for the fate of creation are Gabriel [incarnation of spirit into flesh] & Michael [rebirth through death] on the one hand and Lucifer [obsessive conservation of the past] & Ahriman [destruction to make way for an invented future] on the other. Part three opens, somewhat bafflingly, with an extended lecture (followed by a lively Q&A session) on quantum mechanics - though the next chapter explosively joins the dots between this discussion & metaphysics, neatly tying together with all the loose threads of theological implication strewn throughout the previous chapters. The final chapter is a reflective summation of all that has been learnt by Burgeon and - indeed! - the reader, with spiritual invitations given to lean in with eager faith to the possibilities of transformation of self-consciousness as divulged herein.

   If that sounds like it's trying to do a lot - you'd be absolutely right, and let me assure you here & now that it succeeds marvellously in making its points shockingly accessibly,** as the dialectical format allows you to follow the train-of-thought like a ping-pong rally all the way to its radical conclusion. Which, if I were to try to summarise where this book's argument ends up... so, when William Blake declares that "there is no natural religion", Baruch de Spinoza points irritably at his own system to say "of course there is, look!" only for Jürgen Moltmann to step in with the missing eco-theological key to the Hegelian synthesis (after Nicholas of Cusa politely knocked on the door, of course). To say I found this book illuminating would be a gross understatement - it's made me feel like I've stumbled into an almost gnostic form of orthodoxy that makes perfect sense & yet none simultaneously. Wherever you are on your own spiritual-intellectual journey, if you're comfortable with complex diagonal ideas & verbose rambling tangents, I'm sure you will find much deep & fruitful meat-for-thought in this amazing little book.

* Later in the book Meggid gives the description of itself as "the voice of each one's mind speaking from the depths within themself", a kind of personal (and yet vaguely universal also) divine/organic imagination-cognition-intuition pump, if you will.

** In a nice change from his other book that I've read, all the non-obvious-from-context quotes in Latin or whatever are actually given translations in the endnotes!

Lines on the Surface

This book is a collection of poems written by my good friend* Nicolas Spicer between 1999 and 2009. I've actually owned this book for about five years, and had been putting off reading it because when I read published poetry by people I know personally I do often get quite envious, not simply of their being published, but of their sheer brilliance of style that I would find it impossible to imitate (oh hello Kinsman & Otis) and obviously that isn't emotionally healthy & poets are generally neurotic enough as it is. But we all have our own voice, which is to be celebrated; although additional to mere style, Nick is known to me as something of an oracular genius when it comes to the history & diversity & techniques of poetry, having studied it at length & depth for much of his life in a way I never have, so I am reluctant to say anything critical of this book on here at all for thought that I would be scramblingly failing to articulate the very clever things he is doing with language that I am able to thoroughly enjoy aesthetically without being remotely capable of describing with any expertisemént.** What I will say is that I read this is one two-hour sitting & didn't have a lull of gripped interest throughout: the themes & feelings of these poems are wonderfully varied but the stylistic voice is so strong & consistent throughout that I almost heard his delivery ring in my ears as I read. An expert in the craft - highly recommended collection for poetry lovers.

* He's one of our most reliable (in terms of both consistency of attendance & quality of performance) regulars at Guerrilla, the spoken word night I host. So if you want to experience Nick's excellent poetry live, for free, in a very nice pub, you know where to start seeking the opportunity to do so.

** Not a word, I know. Shut up.

the Sublime Object of Ideology

This book by Slavoj Žižek* was oof! A tricky one, to put it mildly. I went into it knowing that Žižek is a deep & broad thinker & this was his first book so I assumed it would be relatively introductory - I was not prepared for the density of his arguments, his arguable overreliance on Hegelian metaphysics & Lacanian psychoanalysis, his lengthy dissections of what esoteric film references mean in terms of the symbolic phallus, etc. I could not for love nor money explain this book to you, beyond the extremely vague tentative offering that it's an exploration of the subject-object relationship & how this manifests in socio-cultural constructs. If you like a real meaty gristly challenge in your philosophical reading then you might dare to give this a go & see if you can make more sense of it than me - but honestly? This might be the densest, hardest book I've read for this blog ever - harder than Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, harder than Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety, goddamn, harder than Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And so on. Woof.

* If you're not familiar - he is probably best described as "the philosopher you would be least surprised to see eat a dropped hotdog off the ground." (after Diogenes, of course.) His book may have left me baffled but I still find him highly entertaining to watch interviews of - he tends to make much easier sense in them too.

the Lord of the Rings: book six

This book is the sixth and final instalment of J.R.R. Tolkien's genre-defining fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, which I've read before on this blog hence that link going back to my original post about it - I've been re-enjoying the series over the past sixty weeks with YouTuber Tolkien Trash reading a chapter a week on livestream, which was (it's over! but she's doing The Hobbit next & then The Silmarillion) a very pleasant experience. It was like an audiobook with a chat feature so you can jest & surmise &etc with other listeners as you go.

the Irresistible Revolution

This book by Shane Claiborne (I read the updated 10th-anniversary edition which has a whole extra chapter full of FAQs) is an autobiographical manifesto of sorts for radically living out the implications of truly following in Jesus Christ's footsteps. As a response to having recently read Camus's The Rebel, and thinking "well, isn't Christianity kind of inherently revolutionary?" I decided to blast through this over the Easter weekend. (Hope you've had a happy one, by the way.) Claiborne takes a refreshingly open-hearted big-minded approach to interpreting the life, ministry & teachings of Jesus - and it leads him to some crazy places. From the slums of Calcutta where he meets Mother Theresa, to Iraq during the war where he was challenged & encouraged by the hospitality of the locals, to his home city of Philadelphia where his intentional communities have done a huge amount to build support networks for the poor & vulnerable - he really has achieved a lot by stepping out in sincere faith, and I think every Christian has a lot to learn from him. Highly recommended book for believers who sense that maybe they could be doing more for the Kingdom - the Church could really use a great deal more prophetic & provocative activity from "holy fools" (his term) like Shane.

The Rebel

This book by Albert Camus I had heard of for years, but always assumed it was a novel, much like The Outsider - which I enjoyed, but it didn't blow me away, so I'd reserved a general apathy towards his other novels. However, since YouTuber unsolicited advice informed me that it was in fact a work of nonfiction - indeed, being a kind of follow-up to The Myth of Sisyphus (which I read before I started this blog but intend to reread soon) - it immediately got shunted to the top of my to-read list.

   While The Myth of Sisyphus famously contends with the philosophical problem of suicide, The Rebel goes on to do so for the existential phenomenon of murder. Camus takes a generous definition of murder - the killing of someone by the state is just as much murder as the killing of someone by someone else, in both cases for whatever given reason. The first chapter is a simple, considerate portrait of 'the rebel' - why does a human rebel, and against what? The second chapter goes on to deal with 'metaphysical rebellion' - that of an individual or group of people rejected the natural order of conditions purportedly ordained by God; his arguments here are some of the most profound insights into the human condition that I have ever read. We live in a world and are told that the God who created it is good, but we perceive things in the world that we feel are unjust - and so we must kill God in our hearts before turning outward to impose, however successfully or arguably reasonably, our own sense of justice onto this broken created order.* Our passion & reason become sublimated to each other. Chilling stuff. Chapter three (being the meat of the book - about 60% of its total length) is about 'historical rebellion'; how, once one has become a metaphysical rebel, their ideas about righteousness & justice coalesce into ideology, which manifests in the direct organization & empowerment of similarly-minded (or convinced, coerced, it matters little in the big picture) rebellious folks into something more - a revolution. Through thorough analysis of the roots, methods, and fallouts of the French 1789 and Russian 1917 revolutions, Camus demonstrates that revolutions can have a nasty tendency to value their own idea of justice above basic respect for the sanctity of God-given life, and will often result in periods of terror - mass murder by the revolutionary state, or whatever power has supplanted that which was revolted against. Chapter four explores how artistic expression can be a means of & model for rebellion; he gives particular attention to the form of the novel as a way by which a creative mind can construct its own distinct, 'good', world. A final chapter then loosely ties up a handful of tangents touched upon in the previous four with a few extra reflections.

   Overall I found this to be a tremendously politically & religiously humbling book. It gave me a series of mounting epiphanies which forced me to re-evaluate much of my own ideological positions & how dangerous they might be in power. Though as a Christian obviously the concept of metaphysical rebellion is far from alien to me - but having an existentialist philosopher of immense intellectual sharpness talk about it is a heck of a smack different to having an orthodox theologian talk about it in digestible biblical terms. Anyone interested in the human condition, how freedom & violence interrelate, the ecology of political ideas & the ethics of murder - will get a great deal to chew on from this book. Highly recommended.

* This concept as developed here existentially by Camus actually maps really quite neatly onto the 'royal consciousness' concept Walter Brueggemann developed theologically.

"Safe Metamorphosis!!"

This book is Otis Mensah's debut collection, which I've just re-read (that link goes back to my original post from first reading) to see if it still slaps, and it does. One notable change in the intervening years is that my copy is of his self-published first edition, which is no longer available anywhere, but the book has since been properly formally published (available here) in a new expanded version, which presumably means if you buy a copy of the newer edition it'll potentially have new stuff in it & so will almost certainly slap even harder.

&

This book is Jonathan Kinsman's debut poetry pamphlet - this was a re-read (check out the link at the start of this for my original post about it*) to see if it still rocks, and it roundedly soundedly does.

* The only thing I would necessarily add to that original post is that Kinsman is no longer the host of the Guerrilla spoken word night, I am, having been handed the baton at the start of 2019, but regular readers of this blog (who am I kidding) will already know that.

Jesus the Son of Man

This book by Kahlil Gibran was an absolute treat. Having re-read his most famous work last night, I became curious about his other stuff and found this for 73p on Kindle, so immediately bumped it to the top of my to-read list - and I have not been disappointed.

   It's difficult to decide whether to classify this as poetry or short stories given the style & nature of the content. Basically what the book is constituted of is several dozen vignettes of various people's reactions to, recollections of, and reflections on Jesus of Nazareth; these range from his disciples (eg. James & John, Matthew, Peter, Thomas, Mary Magdalene gets three separate chapters alone) to his erstwhile foes (most notably the high priests Annas & Caiaphas, and Pontius Pilate) to random strangers (eg. a Persian philosopher, a Babylonian astronomer, a Greek poet, and my personal favourite "Ahaz the portly").* The attitudes presented range from worshipful awe to confusion to hostility - there is even one interestingly neutral perspective. Gibran seeks to tread the known and possible ground of the biblically-orthodox Jesus faithfully, making no theological points but as a work of socio-historical imagination driving home the pressing question - "how would you have related to him?"**

   A very readable, vibrant & faithful book. Highly recommended for those curious about what we can say or imagine about Jesus without resorting to outright fancy, be they Christian like Kahlil Gibran was or not.

* A couple of lacunae I would have liked to have seen filled would be Pharisees and the beneficiaries of his miracles, lepers & cripples & demoniacs etc, but I suppose you can't have everything, and admittedly Gibran is already doing a great deal here.

** Indeed, the final chapter, "a man from Lebanon [nineteen centuries later]" is Gibran's own reflections on meeting Jesus himself through the life of faith.

the Prophet

This book is the most famous work by Kahlil Gibran - I've read it for this blog before, hence the shortness of this post: that link goes back to my original post about it as I don't really have anything to add to what I said there* so go read that if you want to know about this brilliantly-wise & beautifully-written poetic work.

* Except one thing - the edition I read last time was a stolen Everyman hardback which since, in somewhat neat circularity, has been stolen from me (well, I lent it to someone, I forget who, but they kept it) so this time was reading my replacement, a fairly unattractively-formatted paperback with Gibran's own artwork interspersed with the sections, though I'll admit this didn't add much to the reading experience. I'd be interested to see his artwork in person, mind, as I'm sure it's a lot more impressive when it's not an A5 black&white copy.

What is Enlightenment?

This essay by Immanuel Kant, written in 1784 at the height of the Enlightenment, is the most famous answer provided to Zöllner's open question of what was going on. It's very short (seven pages, six if you don't care about footnotes) and can be summed up with its opening quote - "Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity," said immaturity being the inability to use one's own reason to move meaningfully through the world without the guidance of others.* Such an exit occurs when people are granted intellectual & spiritual freedom, though Kant also brings this into dialogue with obedience to the law, making the somewhat perplexing point that "a lesser degree of civil freedom... creates the room for spiritual freedom to spread to its full capacity." Historically this is a very influential essay, and certainly roundedly answers its title question, but if you're genuinely interested in seeing the answer unpacked I would instead recommend you read Fichte's The Vocation of the Scholar, which treads very similar ground but with much more useful & insightful depth.

* Concerningly I think there is a good case to be made that as of the 2020s we are entering a period of disenlightenment, in which independent "mature" thinking persons are increasingly outsourcing their own critical reasoning skills to the likes of ChatGPT... but that's a whole 'nother thing I won't pick apart thoroughly here.

the Monsters and the Critics

This essay (available for free online from that link) by J.R.R. Tolkien* is arguably the landmark work in scholarship on Beowulf, the most famous surviving example of Old English poetic diction and potentially fragment of insight into pre-Christian English mythology. As such, it has been poked & picked at by academics for centuries, digging for clues into this large blank space in our historical memory - but, argues the Professor, in doing so, we have neglected, to our loss, to consider how to & why should we approach & appreciate Beowulf as what it is - a poem, to be enjoyed. I won't provide a summary of his arguments here or give much reflection on it as everything I would be likely to say has been articulated excellently by Gavin the medievalist on YouTube, so check that out - but if you're interested in seeing how Tolkien's mind worked on an academic** rather than creative level, this essay is essential reading; if you're interested in Old English culture and literature & somehow haven't read this essay where the heck have you been - and in any case it will certainly give you much food for thought in how we are to understand (and enjoy!) texts from distant times. For an academic essay it's incredibly readable*** and rather short (I finished the whole thing in a ninety-minute sitting) so go have a look.

* People remember him for his hobby, which was writing his own mythology, but often fail to remember him for his job, which was teaching about the history of language and literature - his essay on fairy-stories is another great example of his powerful scholarship, and is just as readable as this one.

** The appendix is much more linguistics-focused and digs into technical specifics rather than more readably making a broader argument, but I loved them for the depth of rigour Tolkien showed in his passion for the scholarship.

*** Not surprising for a writer of Tolkien's calibre: I particularly loved his early allegory (and yes, while he cordially disliked the form didn't mean he couldn't write a damn good one when called to) of the man who built a tower out of old stones.

the Birth of Nothing

This book is a dystopian novel by Pavel Marek, and was far more intensively full of thought-provoking ideas & discourse than I was prepared for it to be. We follow Casimir, a young man whose dissatisfaction with the approaching-perfect world around him manifests in something of a rebellious streak. But is there any need for his dissent? I don't want to give away much about the plot - but the book elusively & definitively resists answering that question: Casimir's feelings about the world & the new revolutionary structures of the world itself play in a brilliant complex dialogue that raises some incredibly interesting & unique questions about truth, freedom, equality, tolerance, well-being, and more. Anyone interested in political perfectionism & what this can look or feel like will get a lot out of this novel, I guarantee.

Project Öcalan

This (available on my Google Drive from that link) is my Masters dissertation on Kurdistan; I decided to give it a re-read given recent events in Iran. Some day, when there's more to say & I regain access to academic libraries & journals, I'd like to be able to update & expand it, but for now I still think it holds up as a portrait of a highly-complex geopolitical issue.

Let Them Eat Chaos

This book by Kae Tempest is a masterful work of commentary poetry, and I would highly recommend reading it aloud to yourself if you can as it was written to be performed as live spoken word. The above link goes back to my post about this from the first time I read it as I don't really have anything to add.

Howl, Kaddish & other poems

This book by Allen Ginsberg is one I've read before on this blog, hence the link going back to the first post about it as I really don't have anything to add. I read it with a bottle of wine & treated myself to doing the especially good bits aloud, a diversion I can highly recommend.

Poetic Diction

This book by Owen Barfield* is one I've read before but I didn't do a very nice job at the post last time round so I promise to be a bit more helpful on this go. It's a theory of meaning, blending philology, linguistics, cultural history, the evolution of poetic form, psychology, philosophy &etc to sketch a broad & deep body of theory into how poetic diction, thereby poetry, thereby meaning, thereby knowledge - function. Its contents are, in brief, as follows:

• the original preface from the 1927 first edition & a second, much meatier, one from the 1951 second edition
• chapters proper:
1. defining "poetic diction" with a few examples
2. the aesthetic effects of poetry
3. metaphor
4. meaning & myth
5. language & poetry
6. the poet as individual
7. the making of meaning
8. verse & prose
9. archaism
10. strangeness
11. concluding remarks
• four appendices: on the aesthetics of nature; on the philosophical difficulties of establishing & using concrete definitions; on "accidental" metaphors; & on the unhelpfulness of the objective/subjective distinction
• an afterword from 1972 which is basically just acknowledging intellectual debts to various other thinkers

   I found this book even more insightful & revelatory than I did on first reading.** It does for poetics what Wittgenstein's Tractatus did for logic; and since logic is by nature devoid of actual meaning, only being able to establish logical relations between propositions, it is a much more fruitful book in every way. Barfield was a thinker of immense depth, breadth, scope & sensitivity, & in my opinion he deserves to be far more widely known & read. If you're interested in the philosophy of meaning in a grounded & pragmatic way, this will be an exhilarating synthesis of ideas; if you're more interested in a theory of poetry that will help you in your own artistic understanding & endeavour, you will not be disappointed either - probably not directly inspired, but certainly better-equipped. Highly recommended little book. The chief prompt for me re-reading it was that I'm running a poetry writing workshop for my church on Sunday, and while this is largely too academic & big-picture to be of much practical help for that, I certainly found it thoroughly fecund & fertile as a guiding text.

* One of the Inklings - the casual but serious gang of Oxford literary professors who would go for pints (in a pub called The Eagle & Child; it's still there, I've been, it's nice. Quiet & cozy. The dudes have a demure but noticeable little plaque in their memory) & chat about ideas & their work. The gang notably also included J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis, both of whom were in not-small part inspired by Barfield's profound thinking around language.

** To be fair I was in the run-up to a psychotic break at the time, which I didn't know, obviously, but it was significantly colouring my apprehension of everything that I was experiencing, including reading. One quibble from my previous post from that time that I will repeat is that it's rather irritating that the myriad quotes in Latin, Greek & French are, with one exception, left untranslated, even in the footnotes, which makes sense for an academic philological text's intended audience but feels a tad obscurantist as a general reader.