The Washington Review of Books is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect.
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The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place on the evening of August 17. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
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In The Paris Review, an excerpt from Simon Critchley’s upcoming Mysticism (October 29):
We are also, I think, deeply puzzled by the way in which mystical practice conceives of the relation between the spirit and the flesh, mind, and body. We have all apparently become holists or monists, where we are all body and body is all that there is. We are endlessly encouraged to listen to our body, let the body do the talking and keep the score. This would be nice if it were true. But it isn’t. We are not identical to our bodies, but rather our experience of our selves is eccentric, divided from itself. Body holism is a new ideological discourse, which is refuted every time we get sick or sit in the dentist’s chair, or—even better (or, actually, worse)—are plagued by hypochondriac symptoms, conversion disorders of the type that have become remarkably widespread: a pandemic of genuinely felt illusion.
Mysticism is an attempt to describe another relation to the body, centered around some distinction between spirit and flesh, pneuma and sarkos. Mysticism is about the spiritualization of the flesh and the fleshly, incarnate nature of the spirit—to understand this requires a certain asceticism. We do not coincide with ourselves. Only psychopaths coincide with themselves.
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Francesca Peacock on female gossip as a genre:
But for all the intellectual side, I can’t deny a certain emotional pull I feel towards these texts. I think I’m addicted to the thrill of reading something so personal, so intimate. The new surname of a married signature rewritten on a page three or four times, or a marginal note to a recipe, have me far more interested than a diligent copy of a well-known poem. I can spend (and have) whole days reconstructing potential family trees from the names women wrote so proudly in the front of leather-bound books, the names they grew more confident in writing as the pages went on. I have spent whole days, too, guessing at the identities of those who didn’t even write in the books, those who borrowed them to make marks that practice and gesture at handwriting. I get intoxicated, I think, by the fact that these words were initially written for such a small group. And, if I’m honest, I get intoxicated further by the fact that they are now so little known. As a literary voyeur, I am part of a new small group reading these pages. Am I culpable of another critical sin here—rather than not engaging with these texts because they are personal, have I put them on a pedestal for their intimacy instead?
In The Critic, Lincoln Allison on the hymnal of his childhood:
The Hamlet of hymns is heard more than ever: I mean “Jerusalem”—words by William Blake, music by Hubert Parry. We used to belt it out on a Sunday morning when there were only School House members present. It’s far from being an orthodox expression of Christian sentiment and my Catholic wife swears she first heard it while on a demonstration as a student. Insofar as it says anything I should dislike it because its millenarian and radical sentiments are far from my own. But the language—“arrows of desire,” “chariots of fire,” a “bow of burning gold”—are so exciting that one doesn’t worry too much about meaning. Curiously, it’s the only hymn in the book which has no printed music though Parry is credited. When I was an undergraduate I was taught philosophy by a number of well known philosophers. One was Alasdair MacIntyre who was keen on interpreting what he saw as the secular meanings of religious events. Anglican hymn singing, on this account, was about “tribal solidarity”—which is what it felt like when School House sang “Jerusalem.”
[I like the joke, not made here, about applying Betteridge’s Law to “Jerusalem.” And as someone raised on a similar sort of hymnal (or at least as close as possible here, given the American taste for American hymns, Fanny Crosby and Philip Bliss and all that) I can confirm that they really do stick with you in strange ways. Were the attempts of a younger me at aestheticism motivated by “Fairest Lord Jesus”—who can say? I must confess, though, to being baffled by the suggestion in here that Sabine Baring-Gould (author of the text of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” which is the reformist’s “Jerusalem”) was not a man. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall: Steve on reading Wuthering Heights badly and reading Portnoy’s Complaint badly, Julia on aubades, female fashion, metaphorical flowers, Greeks, Substack, autofiction (as always), and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
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