poetix

we murder to dissect
You really want us all to get into this, I can tell.

I am still trying to get to the bottom of what Pullman's banging on about in The Secret Commonwealth (I mean it's not hard to see, at one level, he's quite didactic about it; but at another level either the thing moves or it doesn't, and I can't decide). It's a sort of Blakean Hermetic world of Imagination, where Imagination both means something like "fancy" (making up stories, hallucinating things into existence) and something like "the flickering within everyday perception of forces outside of everyday perception". There's a connection there to Gr4Gr's Everlasting Gospel, I think, maybe.

I don't want to hijack this thread to talk about Pullman though, we can do that elsewhere.

Wherein lies the particular greatness of this blog, in your opinion?
 

luka

Well-known member
Both us stumbled on the same understanding of literature and assembled overlapping canons independently. I need to think about how to explain it. I'm a halfwit after dark though, my brain goes out so I dunno how to put it
 

luka

Well-known member
It's more akin to what version was talking about with his computer game metaphor, revealing the map
 

luka

Well-known member
Or what Henry Corbin terms the imaginal precisely to distinguish it from fancy
 

luka

Well-known member
There's a long line of people who believe this because they lived it. If you have the experiences, write the words, follow the trail, you can't not believe in it. It's forced on you.
 

luka

Well-known member
I guess the thing about writing is sooner or later you realise something is trying to tell you something
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
"It's nothing to do with believing, like I believe you," he frowns, when I ask him if he actually believes in magic or is merely using it as interesting imagery. "It's knowing. I know. I've experienced things that are beyond reality. Many things." This sounds fascinating, but McCoy collects himself. "I don't want to go too far on this," he says hurriedly, "because I don't want to make a twat of meself."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/apr/26/goth-life-fields-nephilim
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I always respected about Carl McCoy that his stance was basically "I'm not going to explain it because it will sound completely daft, but it's completely real".
 

luka

Well-known member
I mean, it's not worth trying to explain it but what you can do is what grapejuice has done and point out how that kind of knowing is the basis of, if not all literature, then a significant amount of it. Even (and you'll say this is cheating) when the author is not aware of it.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I had a very ominous feeling about writing when I started seriously doing it in my teens, that I was recklessly summoning forces I didn't know how to control. I was genuinely concerned that I would write things and then they would come true in some transliterated way - not usually literally, but in the sense of reality somehow pattern-matching to what I'd written, coming up with the hidden meaning it didn't have until that moment. It wasn't like I had any way of using this as a kind of power over reality, making things happen. It was more that writing was building houses for things - events, images, relationships in real life - to come and live in.

Burroughs was the first person I read who had obviously had the same feeling. I was completely bewitched by it for a while.

I still find the referentiality of written language, the fact that words on a page point somewhere, inherently spooky. Because you don't know quite where they are pointing. And then there are these moments where a bundle of pointers abruptly resolves into something, all the arrows converging on one event or image, and it feels like that really is the one thing it was all about all along.

I don't think that happens to me so often now. I've sort of trained myself out of it a bit.
 

version

Well-known member
I had a very ominous feeling about writing when I started seriously doing it in my teens, that I was recklessly summoning forces I didn't know how to control. I was genuinely concerned that I would write things and then they would come true in some transliterated way - not usually literally, but in the sense of reality somehow pattern-matching to what I'd written, coming up with the hidden meaning it didn't have until that moment. It wasn't like I had any way of using this as a kind of power over reality, making things happen. It was more that writing was building houses for things - events, images, relationships in real life - to come and live in.

Burroughs was the first person I read who had obviously had the same feeling. I was completely bewitched by it for a while.

I still find the referentiality of written language, the fact that words on a page point somewhere, inherently spooky. Because you don't know quite where they are pointing. And then there are these moments where a bundle of pointers abruptly resolves into something, all the arrows converging on one event or image, and it feels like that really is the one thing it was all about all along.

I don't think that happens to me so often now. I've sort of trained myself out of it a bit.

"It’s one thing for the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen to call 9/11 a work of art — he apologized — but it’s another for DeLillo to have repeatedly theorized it as a work of art in advance.

As I read through DeLillo’s novels in college, I began to hold him personally responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11. (Not solely responsible of course — there’s plenty to go around.) His fixation on terrorism, finance, and the Twin Towers themselves in novels like Mao II, Players, and Underworld, which includes a hazy picture of the twin towers on the cover and a character who contemplates crowds fleeing from towers and terror in the sky, made 9/11 seem inevitable in retrospect. Any prophecy that comes true has to be at least a little self-fulfilling. There is no way to read DeLillo’s novels and not understand that — at least on a subconscious level — he saw it coming."
 
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