Exploring the meaning of Coleridge’s great poem, Malcolm Guite writes,
“He (Thomas Pfau, the cultural historian) goes so far as to say that The Ancient Mariner is a “parable about the philosophical predicament of modernity.”
The poetic imagination can hold open for us a shape or a space we have yet to grow into.
One aspect of the Enlightenment which had huge implications for modernism was the divorce between reason and imagination and the consequent reduction of knowledge itself to a so called “objective” realm of quantifiable fact from which all value or meaning had been drained, which in turn led to a reductive, mechanistic, and purely material account of the cosmos…. He saw from within, as it developed, the deadening effect… He wanted to challenge the philsophers on their own ground and show that the insights of imagination are insights into reality itself. In particular he wanted to deliver his age from what he called “the tyranny of the eye,” to alert us to the formative reality of invisbile qualities and values to counterbalance our obsession with “visible” facts, with the quantifiable, with dead things that can only be weighed and measured.
(As Coleridge wrote)
“… Always the human intellect circles the knowledge of these mysteries, never touching the centre.”
- The Mariner (Malcolm Guite)
Sometimes I spend time fleshing out thoughts in my head. Other times I just need to get them down on paper so they can perculate. This quote was one of them. But the more I think about it, the more restless it is making me, and the more i need to flesh it out. So here goes:
I’ve been delving into Guite’s book (The Mariner) in preperation for his newest (Galahad and the Grail), as well as for an upcoming literary tour of England that I have planned. Coleridge was the founder of the Romantic Movement in England, which of course had a direct impact on Lewis (see the book The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology by literary critic Jeffrey W. Barbeau). In both cases, Coleridge and Lewis (and the great English Romantics that span the time between) occupied this space within a world that was becoming increasingly subsumed by modernism (or the promises of the great modern experiment) and yet equally seemed to have left these thinkers disillusioned with the world modernism had failed to bring about. This is in fact what helped to define the Inklings, that now infamous group of debaters, was this unique moment in time where such a critique was able to break through and capture the imagination of it’s thinkers without behing held captive to a love of nationalism and identity that has come to mark the modern age. These were writers and thinkers and philosophers and artists whom understood what it was to distinguish between the two different narratives that make up this world, the narrative of Empire and the narrative of Truth.
What’s especially unique about this moment in time is that these were people whom held deep rooted differences and disagreements, unified as they were by a love of the debate and the need for cynicism and critique. The sort that could build deep bonds, where heated arguments met with the mutual companionship of their pipes and pubs. What bound them together was this intuitive awareness of the difference between the myth of modern progress and the notion of the greater (capitilized) Myth, or as they often put it, the True Myth of the imagination. One was a product and construction of developing society, the other a responsiveness to the shape of Reality itself.
Encountering Coleridge in the pages of Guite’s book, a writer and critic of the modern myth whom sees the enduring power of these Romantics as a witness to the power of this (lost) imagination, able to speak to the collective disillusionment that seems to cycle through every successive generation, had me thinking more about why it is that I have come to be drawn to these figures over the years. How it is that no matter how far I veered into the story of the modern myth, they consistently pull me back by critiquing my understanding of what it means to “grow up” into the pursuit of a greater (and different kind of) knowledge of this world that we occupy.
Ceratinly, a big part of it is the space these writers occupy in my childhood. If I didn’t know a whole lot about who they were when I was young, I knew their stories intimately. More than that, their stories helped me to make sense of things I felt but could not entirely explain. It helped give voice to my restlessness.
Equally so, it is striking to me, having recently finished the book Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Marc Barnett, a book about the ways in which the stories of our childhood and our adulthood are forever interconnected, that encountering this voice (Coleridge) afresh through the eyes of Guite, whom defined “the poet” (or the storyteller) as “a person who retained a child’s capacity for intense vision and wonder,” how this common theme seems to be found all the way through this colleciton of Romantics. Or, as he puts it,
“In the Poet (Storyteller) was comprehended the man who carries the feelings of Childhood onto the powers of Manhood, who with a soul unsubdued, unshackled by custom, can contemplate all things with the frehsness, with the wonder of a child.”
Even more startling to walk through the literary voices that surround Coleridge in this appeal to a lost Romanticism. Virginia Woolf’s grand vision of the “realm of childhood” holding together innocence (or wonder) and the world’s injustices. Lewis, whom famously wrote, “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for.” A citation that echoes with one of his favorite sentiments, that “When I became a man I put away childhish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” Tolkien’s fierce defence of the fairy tale as the bridge between worlds. Lewis Carroll’s lament, “I’d give all the wealth that years have piled, the slow result of life’s decay, to be once more a little child for one bright summer day,” a sentiment that rings out with his famed and imaginative proclamation that “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
I am also in the midst of reading the book by Gyles Brandreth, called Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A.A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-the-Pooh, where he documents Milne’s own wrestling with this seeming chasm between his child and adult self. As Milne saw it, some people grow old and become fifty, other’s grow up to finally discover their childhood. For Milne, this is where he located a true knowledge of the world. Every single one of the characters in his book becomes, in their own way, a subtle critique of the modern myth, each character on their way to discovering that great Truth about this thing we call existence (borrowing as he does from the great philosophers).
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
– Winnie-the-Pooh
Another thing that holds all of these writers and thinkers and artists together: their love of the philosophers. This was as true for Coleridge as it was for Milne, whom was as much at home with these existential works as he was with the fairy tales. Here, to be grown up meant understanding how the whole world is philosophy. Like Coleridge, he took great aim at the fallacy of “high culture” and its appeal to rationalism as the great purveyor of a “grown up” intellectualism, an intellectualism that craves the boundaries of reductionism even where the logic of the lived life refuses to cooperate.
And, as it was with me, one of the strongest images for him to this end was the image of the river.
Coleridge agrees. As he writes,
“The iamge of the an inexhaustible river, a fountain of life and light, a force to be reckoned with, runs through all Coleridge’s writing and emerges afresh at key points in his life. He was fascinated by the river as something seen but whose source is unseeen.”
- Malcolm Guite (The Mariner)
Something Guite notes flows straight from his childhood, spending days chasing after the source of the River Otter where he grew up.
In his book Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus, scholar and historian John Haywood desribes the myth of this ocean in terms of it’s own holding together this chasm between this sense of a “childhood history” and the adult description of Western progress that it has come to symbolize in the wake of it’s crossing. Here, as these writers championing Enlglith Romanticism suggest, is once again the age old paradigm of two competing narratives, that of Empire and that of Truth. In crossing the ocean, as the story goes, humanity grew up. It became enlightened. It did away with the stuff of it’s childhood. And yet, as this narrative pushes forward, what we find is what these thinkers expressed: a great need for Milne’s notion of growing up to finally discover our childhood in the wake of this incessant push for a narrative of what came to be called the myth of progress.
I wonder. I am penning this three days after Canada’s birthday (July 1st) on July 4th (America’s birthday). As I was perusing my social media feeds, I came across a post that offered this sentiment about the present state of the American ethos: “I have no time for the modern virtue of western self flagellation.”
I wonder about this sentiment. I wonder whether it misses something crucial that these writers and thinkers I’ve been discussing above strived so hard to make known. First, that Canada, America, nor any nation, is not synonomous with “the West.” To speak of “the West” is to speak of a reigning narrative. Second, there is a massive difference between loving the spaces we are invested in and which we call home, and, as this post would go on to state, the “love of nation.” When we fail to distinguish between these things we are in fact binding ourselves to a particular narrative of Empire, whether we reognize it or not. As this post qualified at the front of it’s statement, it speaks to the need to not be complacent, to always be self reflective, and to be self critical. What gets missed here though is the question, to what is our allegiance and to what end. It’s a far different thing to critique a western myth than it is to critique a nation, and yet the language of nationhood hinges on the former.
When I think back on my childhood, I don’t find a modern virtue of western self flagellation, what I find, with these formative voices, is a restlessness born from the modernist narrative. The modern virtue in this sense is in fact, as Milne puts it, the valorization of turning 50, both figuratively and literally in my sense, as my birthday is quickly approaching. This is the narrative of Empire. It hinges on a rejection of the past as being that which we grow out of for the sake a grown up world (or in the sense of aging, our childhoods). And if we are to take the impassioned voices of these thinkers seriously, which ironically many whom extol the language of Empire also tend to love (see the ways Tolkien occupies a space, albiet a misappropriated one, in this grown up world), The way into a better story is in fact the Truth that we find in discovering our childhood. Another way to put this: to find the better story, the true Myth running underneath the language of Empire.
In one of the most formative moments of my life, I had what I call a spiritual experience, a demonstrable encounter with God that called me to remember my childhood in the midst of my own occupation with growing up into the myth of this adult world. I am still discovering what this means all these years later. But like these thinkers that formed my childhood, this East-West divide that I inherited at the hands of Empire (which, Ian Morris describes as the destiny of geogrpahy in his massive tome, Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History, a biting follow up to his even more biting work, Why The West Rules- For Now) only awakened me to a need for that better story all those years ago. Something I found in the page of their books. That is what I was being called to remember.
There’s something important to recognize about the river as a standing symbol. It’s source is hidden, but despite the great emptying that these rivers inevitably experience, it never gets subsumed. The invitation of any river is to be awakened to it’s presence. That’s the only way to truly discover the Truth. That’s the only way to discover the better story that it holds in it’s currents. For Coleridge, the other reigning symbol was the great image of the Lighthouse, it’s lights standing on the great shores of this eventual emptying, illuminating the mystery of it’s expanse, not as something to conquer, but as something to embrace. To find the True awkening of our childhood imagination at long last.
In the words of Winnie-the-Pooh,
“Sometimes if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping flowing away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”
The Stories of my Life 