A permeable Membrane and the fate of the Sodomites.

Dappled

When it comes to Plato, Kant, Hegel and a whole bunch of others, some of them English Speaking disciples of the Enlightenment, those of us who share the quest for a tie wearing Grail of Reason, find ourselves accusing those of the Romantic Vision, along with the Woe is me Existentialists and anyone who claims to be uniquely spiritual and/or creative, of being pit dwelling, hat wearing blobs with very little going for them.

And I say this as someone who owns a deep respect for the world as it might have been during the Paleolithic period, the several million years before the farmers messed with our lifestyle and just twelve thousand years ago turned us Neolithic, a paltry description for twenty-five thousand years of poor nutrition, shorter lives, more diseases, social stratification and conflict over land ownership.

The point is you can't touch the Romantics without submitting to an understanding of all that and the Taoist Way. "Once I was a butterfly, fluttering this way and that, then I woke up and saw that I was a man. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." Good pothead Neolithic stuff, the dreamworld and the first rational question: "What is Real?"

For Taoists the answer came this way: both dream and awake is part of a larger unified flow. Or as Can Bobby would tell you, dream and awake for a Taoist are just "different frequencies of experience." Worth noting that if Can Bobby ever feels anything it'll be a different frequency.

 Go ahead, sneer away as you dream of an event in Bethlehem which has badly messed with calendar for two thousand years. But rest assured if you were in Western Australia thirty five thousand years ago, you'd settle down for the night and while asleep you'd left the shell and traveled to a small, often permanent, body of water you hadn't visited for years, and spotted a tree that had fallen over or a spring that had dried up, then, according to the law, there was a good chance you owned that billabong. And why on earth? Well, dream time was real. 

In the 1960's, as we beatniks were being overwhelmed by hippies, traveling while asleep was called Astral Planing, but trust me in those days justice had been well sterilized and Astral Planing didn't hold up in court even if prior to the English Invasion it had always been a custom and practice, and a god given right of the Welsh Speaking Peoples.

So we got what Can Bobby refers to as a "permeable membrane" between sleeping and waking. The Romantics embraced the permeability of that membrane. Here there's a sentiment that's sort of from Genesis. It goes something like this: 'The Children of Sodom have lost the right to Petition Fate."

They were doomed. Man, woman and child, all of them doomed. I don't know about Jesus or the Holy Spirit but an overly sensitive God the Father felt badly ignored, he had to set an example, and he'd have no mercy on them. Romantics, might have described the Sodomites, and the Gomorrahites, as stuck in the light of the sun. A light that only showed boundaries not connections.

Alcoholics have a cure, they say sorry, admit to their sin and submit to a higher power. It's very romantic and rather ironic way to deal with the higher power of alcohol.

Hoffmann's Anthem to the Romantic Vision

Local Visionary 

 The easy criticism of the Romantics dwells on the idea that they are romantic, just one big woo, a heaving breast factor and fields of daffodils.

So let's look at a German Romantic called ETA Hoffmann, who in 1816, with Napoleon far away, this time on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, published a book called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Many might know Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, which was adapted from Alexandre Dumas' version of Hoffmann's Nutcracker. Alexandre Dumas wrote the Three Musketeers. Dumas' Nutcracker, was written in the 1840's, it was written as a children's version of Hoffmann's somewhat Gothic Nutcracker. 

Of interest, a Nutcracker, in German, is a Nussknacker. Here, the German word nusse is as vulgar a description of gonad as nut is in the English language. And we can all be fairly certain that Hoffmann knew where nusse lay on the symbolic order of meaning. And I'll tell you why.

It all started for Hoffman with sausage making. Imagine a household where a king had decided to hold a sausage feast for his friends and neighbors. Meanwhile in her kitchen the Queen had received the news and was carefully separating the lard from the meat to make sure the proportions were correct, her king didn't like his sausages too greasy, nor too dry.

As she worked a mouse emerged from under the floorboards. This mouse was Madame Mouserinks, she was the Queen of the Mice, she was large and powerful, she explained her own royal lineage and asked for a little pork fat to sample. The Human Queen obliged, and unfortunately out from under the floorboards came Madam Mouserinks' seven sons as well as numerous relatives who ate up pretty much all of the lard for the King's sausages.

You might be able to imagine the King's reaction. His Feast of Sausages was a disaster. The sausages his queen had made, were lackluster, far too dry, his business connections were most unimpressed. What had happened? It could be time to do a Henry the Eighth on the missus.

The Queen, familiar with her King's rages, explained exactly what had happened in the kitchen, it wasn't her fault. The King ordered his clockmaker to make devices that would rid his castle of mice. Madame Mouserinks and her mice were subjected to a terrible pogrom, it was an extermination which left Madam Mouserinks very distraught. She carefully plotted her revenge, she'd wait until the new child was born to the upstairs realm, she sneaked into the newborn's well appointed nursery and cast a spell on Princess Prilipat. She turned the beautiful little baby into a hideous, big headed, nutcracker faced monster who had a beard.  

The Queen discovered that the only way to break the spell was for some goodish looking boy who'd never shaved and never worn boots to crack open a Krakatuk nut and feed the nut's kernel to the grotesque Princess Prilipat. The Krakatuk was not an easy thing to crack. Many had tried, some had broken their teeth in their efforts to impress the girls and curry favor with Royalty. 

And lo, the upstairs King's clockmaker had a nephew, who as it turned out was rather good with Krakatuk nuts. He did his thing, opened the nut with his teeth, took the necessary seven steps backwards without looking. Princess Prilipat was relieved of her gruesomeness, she became a blue eyed blond with excellent prospects for a Disney Role.

But, As the clockmaker's nephew was stepping backwards he stepped on Madame Mouserinks, the Queen of the Mice, and as she died she cursed the clockmaker's nephew. She turned him into a an unpleasant looking actual nutcracker.

Not exactly Sugar Plum Fairy. She wasn't invented until 1892, when the marketers reckoned the whole Nutcracker story needed a climactic dance for a male and female lead, a curtain close, followed by a happy ever after with Christmas presents and other carnal delights, sausage stuffing and plum pudding.

Hoffmann's Nutcracker was a very different feast to the 1892 extravaganza. All very well a gal feeling sorry for a cursed nutcracker that had been given to the family as a present and had been broken by her heavy-handed brother.

In Hoffmann's Nutcracker it wasn't defeating this or that with mousetraps or curses or whatever and running off with a princess to wherever in white. Hoffmann's Marie wasn't even a princess, she was someone's sister who'd watched her brother break a nutcracker. And it was Marie's re-enriching the broken nutcracker, with her "childlike gaze" which could see the spiritual truth of a physical object, she bandaged the nutcracker's broken jaw, submitted herself to the Mouse King's blackmail, he wanted his revenge for the killing of Madame Mouserinks, his queen, he'd do anything to reduce the nutcracker to kindling. Marie would do anything to save her nutcracker.

Yes indeed, it was Marie's own radical empathy that enabled her many difficult sacrifices which returned the Nutcracker to become the person he'd once been, a clockmaker's nephew. And yes Marie's re-enriching the broken nutcracker required her to remake fairyland where the nutcracker could take her to the Kingdom of Dolls and when Marie was old enough they'd wed.

There again Hoffmann wrote an anthem to the Romantic Vision where the Nutcracker is a cursed and noble soul, where Marie is a witness to a spiritual vision and where reality is a thin veil over a magical world.

The Romantic Blessing and Menace

Friedrich Schlegel's Grave in Old Catholic Cemetery,

Dresden, Germany

Going to talk about the Sublime and Friedrich Schlegel. But first there's a question from Baxter: "Why go on and on about characters who lived their lives in the early days of the Industrial Revolution?"

It was a time of an aggressive confidence in the Western World. God might have again wondered at the point of it all and people, or some of them, thought they had more sensible answers. But the whole sentiment of "That which cannot be uttered, should not be uttered" which had impressed the Apostle Paul around 57 AD with his remarks in the Book of Romans, was coming alive. Paul had reckoned that only God could understand many of the incomprehensible moanings and groanings of the human mind, our job was to obey God and hang in there. There was Kant, a Saint of the Enlightenment who died in 1804, with his Transcendent Idealism which basically suggested there were some things we could have ideas about but could never prove or disprove, so worth keeping that in mind, but not to make too big a deal about them. There was the untutored Walking Stewart's "The philosopher must bow down to the microscope" and closer to our own time came Wittgenstein with his challenge to the logic of language that threatened to make Philosophy and philosophers redundant. If language wasn't rational, then What the hell!

In the 1700's and 1800's as a reaction to this aggressive confidence the sublime was embraced by the Romantics, and not just the daffodil and lonely cloud English Speaking Romantics. In Europe the German Romantics just didn't hold back, they jumped right in with a logic that put the pain, danger and fear into Burke's positioning of the word sublime in a symbolic order. 

The Burke in question was Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, when Thomas De Quincey was 12 years old. In an essay, Burke described his understanding of sublime this way: "Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror." It wasn't up close and personal with terror, it was thinking about terror from a safe place. Sublime was one of the most powerful emotions a mind could feel, it produced a tension that "tightens the body's fibers and momentarily suspends rational thought." 

The "suspends rational thought" part of the reaction to terror from a safe place, is the subject of Burke's essay "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." Of coincidental interest to Burke's contribution to the meanings in Sublime are Schlegel's contribution to the word Irony. The word Irony, Schlegel suggested, humorous or otherwise, cast doubt on fact, influenced art and literature to the extent that everything remained unfinished. In the way Irony had a metaphysical affect on comprehension.

 Friedrich Schlegel's "Lucinde," published in 1799 is described as an "early work of German Romanticism." This book didn't sell well, instead it became what is called a Literary Milestone, people read it because they felt obliged to form an opinion on the book's fragmented structure and answers to just how scandalous Lucinde was. Inevitably it developed a cult following, it didn't have a recognized literary structure, and the lovers, Lucinde and Julius, engaged in shocking non-traditional expressions of equality through physical acts, Lucinde would sometimes be the man. The point for Schlegel in his search for the sublime was not only an equality, it was rehabilitation of the flesh which is an idea declaring the erotic a unity between sensual and physical love, and nothing wrong with it as the pursuit of an understanding of self which focused on the individual's right to define his or her own morality and no one else. 

Burke was a Whig of good standing, he was Protestant through and through, he liked the idea of limits to the power of kings, he believed in promoting the middle class through representation in Parliament, he liked the idea of securing property rights and he had no problem with a German Royal called George inheriting the thrown of England so long as George I wasn't Catholic.

Burke's essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful was a must read for Romantics. Burke put a value on prejudice, and being Burke when he used the word prejudice what he meant was tradition, inherited wisdom, and that sort of hard-scrabble wasteland. He was firmly on the side of ways of doing things that were established, rather than start all over again with purely abstract reasoning.

The German Romantics took the Sublime and the Beautiful to heart, and in the Romantic tradition, there were a number of German Idealists who produced scholarship that redefined the Medieval. This word Volk, or The People, the common folk, the Romantics argued were closer to the real in the Medieval Period than they were in the Europe the 1700's and 1800's. In his studies, a man called Johann Gottfried Herder had identified the Spirit of the People or Volksgeist. He'd decided that Language was an "organic embodiment of a peoples soul and way of thinking." The German Language, he argued, contained the essence of the German Volk.  Das deutsche Volk.

When Napoleon invaded the homeland of das deutsche Volk, a philosopher called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in a series of addresses to the German patriots, having absorbed Herder's sense of the German Peoples cultural superiority, chose to remind the German Speaking Peoples that they're were the original Europeans, not like these bastard interloping French Speaking Peoples, and without any shadow of a doubt it was the German Destiny to control Europe not France. This was in 1808 when Thomas De Quincey was 21 years old

Friedrich Schlegel, the Romantic, had heard Herder and Fichte, he saw a domination of French Speaking Peoples as an abomination, he quickly became Anti-Napoleon. His Metaphysical Irony, his belief that nothing could ever be perfect, the spirit was free, collapsed. 

In 1808, the author of Lucinde moved to Austria, he found work as an Imperial Court Secretary in the service of the Austrian Empire where he wrote very exaggerated, rabble rousing proclamations against Napoleon and the French. Friedrich and his wife converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and he became a White Catholic Nationalist who believed in the destiny, the superiority and indeed the purity, of the German Speaking People.

The Sublime to the Practical, how uncomfortable was Thomas De Quincey

Elizabeth Penson. Thomas De Quincey's mother.

Miniature by Thomas Hazlehurst 1760-1818

It's difficult to get away from De Quincey's reactionary views on pretty much everything from the Peterloo Massacre to opposing the Abolitionist Movement. De Quincey didn't approve of slavery, he recognized it as a moral evil which had been around too long, he wouldn't have owned a slave himself, but much better for everyone if slave owners freed their own slaves rather than sending in the navy to sort out slave traders. De Quincey was a monarchist with little faith in the common folk. He thought British Imperialism an obvious solution to the world as it was and three years after his father died, his mother, the wife of a very successful textile merchant changed the surname to De Quincey. An association with Norman Royalty which her son Thomas learned to appreciate.

In his growing up De Quincey confronted a number of what some might call hurdles. His father died when he was seven, his older sister, who he "adored" died when he was six, and in 1796 his older brother who was like a hero to him died at fifteen years of age. His three surviving brothers and his surviving sister were normal, Thomas wasn't. He was what they call Intellectually Precocious, when he was eight he was fluent in Latin and Greek but he struggled with the shyness of Social Dyssynchrony, which is when a somewhat sickly person allows their intellect to isolate them from peers.

Say what you like about De Quincey's mum, she had the right idea taking her most difficult child out of King Edward's School in Bath and sending him to an inferior school in a small village called Wingfield in Wiltshire which was run by a strictly religious Vicar in the hopes of knocking the pompous social dyssynchrony out of him and by so doing giving him a chance to fit in.

In those days when the bread-winner croaked leaving large sums of money and business interests to the widow they used to have this whole guardian thing, which I think still happens. The Quincey family as it morphed into the De Quincey family was attended to and cared for by three guardians. The guardian put in charge of making the ultimate decisions for Thomas De Quincey's share of the inheritance was a man called Mr. Pringle. Put simply, Pringle was a religious nut who didn't approve of anything resembling joy. The shy and precocious, demonic, Thomas had problems with Mr. Pringle.

Safe to assume that Mr. Pringle's thinking on the subject of Elizabeth Quincey's son Thomas would run along the following lines: Brilliant but wayward, immensely vexing and difficult to manage, dangerously unsuitably for a stable career, fiscally irresponsible and incapable of handling his substantial inheritance. Mr. Pringle was a good Christian, I'm not blessed that way, but I can translate he nuances of decent language. What Pringle meant was this: Thomas was a real pain in the neck, he was needy and uncomfortable to be around, if he knocked on your door you'd hide in a cupboard rather than spend time with him.

When he was seventeen, young Thomas ran away from Manchester Grammar School, where he'd been sent to get him ready for The University of Oxford. He couldn't handle the life he was being forced to live any longer, he didn't want to go home to have to deal with his Guardian, a dogmatic, unimaginative man who was incapable of understanding genius. His battle now was food and shelter, hithertofore all that and luxuries had been provided for by his family. But that early morning in July of 1802 might not have been what we were all thinking. A brave man making a break for freedom, begin life anew!

Young Thomas had been in correspondence with his mother, a woman who understood genius and rather wished it hadn't fallen upon one of her children. She knew that Thomas had decided to runaway from his obligations to Mr. Pringle and the family. She hated the idea of it becoming a matter of public knowledge. She would have talked to Mr. Pringle about it. And she talked to Colonel Penson, her brother about it. Decisions were made. Conferences on the matter of what to do about Thomas were measured and very Christian, the  answer was to let him run wild for a bit, find out for himself, and Colonel Penson, rather than the Quincy estate would send him a Guinea a week. Which, Pardon my French, for a wayfarer, a homeless person, was a flecking Fortune. In today's money it would be about 200 dollars a week. 

At this point in my understanding of Thomas De Quincey, I find myself looking at a spoiled rotten, manipulative, self centered, little brat. And then I remember that when he ran from boarding school, he climbed out a window taking with him a bundle of possessions that included a collection of Greek Plays and a copy of Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads." 

The thing is, no matter what he took with him, he'd not be the only person to have run away from an English Boarding School. When Baxter was a bead in the eye of our heart, he and I made our run for it. We went missing at night, we had Leopards adrift on the slopes of Mount Elgon to worry about, and in a practical vein we took buttered bread from the school dinning room to feed upon. But with De Quincey I can be sure his pursuit of the sublime was a worship first enabled by the grant of one Guinea a week and the Laudanum he took for a tooth ache which he could afford to buy because of his uncle's money.

However, the title of his best selling, most memorable and lasting book "The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" which the wide eyed and innocent can still get new, was his own brilliant practical work of marketing.