Dante, Blake, and the Power of the Imagination

0:18Welcome, everyone, to The Lectern. I'm very happy to have somebody I've spoken to with before. I haven't spoken face-to-face in a while, but I hear from him he's been watching my work, I've been watching his. I'm always pleased to take a look at the work of Mark Vernon. And we're here to talk about two of his glorious books that I'm currently reading right now. My health hasn't been the best, so I couldn't fulfill my promise of getting completely through both books, but I got deeply into both. I got a good sense. And so there's some questions and some topics we can pursue. And maybe when I finish the books, I'll have Mark back again and we can top it off.

0:56So let me first of all recommend these two books very strongly. Strong, strong recommendation to Dante's Divine Comedy, A Guide for the Spiritual Journey. So for those of you who have not yet read the Divine Comedy, it's daunting. The version I have has like 10 ,000 notes after every canto. And, you know, because you don't know the history and you don't know all the biblical allusions. I mean, I'm quite biblically literate, and there was still stuff I didn't. Like, what? What's he alluding to there? And you can get lost in those weeds. I recommend getting a good version with all those notes, but you can get caught up in the letter and lose the spirit.

1:41And this book brings out the spirit of what's going on in the Divine Comedy. There is incredible insight, both psychological and philosophical in nature. and Mark and I are going to talk about that. I recommend this book greatly. I think as we're seeing the re-emergence of a post-Nietzschean neoplatonism in cognitive science in the new biology, which maybe Mark and I will talk to because he alludes to it in his Blake book, and some of you might have seen the recent conversation that I had with Jonathan Pajot and Mike Levin about that. Dante's work, which is a species of Christian neoplatonism, I think is very, very apropos.

2:25Many of you know I'm also back from the first leg of my pilgrimage on the Philosophical Silk Road, and pilgrimage has had a huge impact on me. Just recorded a conversation with Ishi yesterday, somebody who's done the Camino de San Diego, and we were comparing notes in the philosophy of pilgrimage. So this book, highly recommended. it. I recommend this book just as strongly. This book is beautiful. I've always been a deep devotee of Blake. Many of you have heard me quote his famous lines about a world in a grain of sand. And this book is just, well, Mark and I are going to talk about it. But for me, many of you know, I've been doing a lot of work on the cognitive science and the imaginal and how the imaginal is deeply within the rational.

3:19And I think Blake was a prophet of that. And we can talk a little bit about what poetry and prophecy mean to Blake. But this astonishing work on the renewal of the senses through the imaginal, it's, Mark, just congratulations on this book. It is beautifully written. I mean, like I said, I'm a longtime devotee of Blake, and yet there was insight after insight, and the writing is beautiful, it's clear, it's lucid. It reaches for Blake's poetry. At times, you're quite lyrical, but not in any kind of flowery or self-indulgent way. So I just wanted to sing the praises. That sounds very Blakeian to say that.

4:05I want to sing the praises of these two books. So Mark, just thank you so much for coming to talk to me about these two books maybe briefly introduce yourself again you've been on my channel i've been on yours but nevertheless maybe some people might be unfamiliar hey well look john thanks so much for what you said already uh i sort of feel i can uh hang up my my microphone and go almost after that but no really it's uh um you know i feel um you know uh part of a kind of extended community that sometimes talk sometimes doing their own thing and so wanting to write into that space um and feeling the inspiration of others you know of which you are obviously a leading figure um it's great uh to to feel that sense of camaraderie and pursuit of wisdom love of wisdom actually um you know so thanks so much for what you say there um and you know both dante's divine comedy and William Blake, deep inspirations for me, guides for me, and allowing them to sort of form you and then trying to offer something back and wanting others to know about it.

5:21Because as you say, in their different ways, they can be daunting. But once you get a little glimpse, once the doors of perception, as it were, just get a little bit cleansed, then they become friends for life. And then, of course, like all inspired texts, they just keep on giving. And one minute you're wondering how on earth they were ever written to start with. But on the other hand, you know that they lead you to a threshold and can keep, you know, shining new light into your life and the world in which we live. So it's lovely to join you and to talk about these things and to share that spirit, which is, you know, I think we're sharing all the time, but to give that voice as well.

6:02um yeah so i i live and work in london um i work partly as a writer partly as a psychotherapist um i'm very um engaged really with how psychology and spirituality the wisdom traditions relate i feel they need to relate more you know hence um no small part of being interested in your own work um although you know it's mostly from a practical point of view working with people that i engage these things um yeah and uh i do podcasting and so on as well so i hope people can find out about that all online yes check out mark's channel um i frequently dip in uh i can't watch everything he releases and i don't expect that he does that of me either but i do i do pick up the ones that catch my eye and um and so i i saw some of the stuff i saw some of the stuff that mark was doing around both these books.

6:58And so I reached out to him. Well, let's start with Dante and your wonderful book. I'll tell you a quick story. My son was on, so for every part of the pilgrimage, there was a city and there was a sage for the city. And then there was a living interlocutor that I felt I could spark with. And I ended in Amsterdam and the sage was Spinoza. And the interlocutor was my son, Jason, who was a deep devotee of Spinoza. But anyway, when we were back from the pilgrimage, he was like, he was that kind of like, you know, Sherlock Holmes after solving the crime kind of state because, you know, he'd been engaging and reflecting and he went through kind of a spiritual awakening.

7:42And he said, well, what do I do? And I said, well, I want you to read the Divine Comedy and read this book by Mark Vernon as you go through it. And he's doing that right now. So I wanted to thank you for that as well. So this theme of pilgrimage is very important to me. I've been doing, I mean, I'm in the midst of doing it. I'm on a break in between the first and the second legs. Very profound effect on me. I've done a lot of reading in the philosophy and the spirituality and the psychology of pilgrimage. I've talked to people at length. I just mentioned a conversation I recorded yesterday. So this notion of pilgrimage is becoming very pronounced to me.

8:22The idea of it being like a stress test for your ecology of practices. So you have your ecology of practices, and then you go on pilgrimage to basically put them under kind of an ascesis, a spiritual stress to see how they need to adapt because of the way you're constantly adopting an identity, belonging to a place, and then grieving that and then moving on. and you're going through what I call a metanoetic passage, you're not being convinced by a premise to premise argument. You're going over here, putting on new glasses, and then looking back at where you were before and going, oh, oh, oh. And then you keep doing that as you go along.

9:03That's influenced, of course, by the work of Charles Taylor. And you repeatedly, and I noted it, you repeatedly refer to Dante and sometimes Dante and Virgil as pilgrims. That's one of your most constant titles of them. And I wonder why you kept choosing Pilgrim. I do see the Divine Comedy as a pilgrimage. And maybe, you know, and just one more note on this. Part of my idea is that behind theory is the word Theoria. Theoria, of course, originally means to contemplate, to behold. But Ward and Nightingale and others have argued that the oldest meaning of Theoria is pilgrimage, that that is the most fundamental way in which we can bring about the transformations that give us deep insight into reality.

9:50So that was a long preamble because this is a very important topic for me. So why are they, as far as I know, I haven't read all the way through, so I may be speaking out of ignorance, so forgive me, but you don't sort of pick up the topic of pilgrimage and work with it, but yet you're constantly naming them that way. So why Pilgrim? Why Pilgrimage? I mean, in relation to the Divine Comedy, it is actually quite a common way of describing there's the sort of Dante the poet who's writing about it and Dante the Pilgrimage who's on the journey. And part of the genius of Dante is that he can not only write about it so as to understand better himself what has happened.

10:31And I do think that the Divine Comedy springs from personal experience in one way or another the genius i think that dante has is he's able to join the dots of his own pilgrimage forced pilgrimage you might say after he's exiled from florence and has to spend the last 20 years of his life traveling around various of the city states of of the italian peninsula you know sort of seeking refuge um and i've no doubt that partly that was a deeply distressing experience. Nothing less than an existential crisis. At first, he loses everything, not just contact with his family, his wealth, but also his language, because there was no united Italian language at the time.

11:17He's very influential in bringing that about, in fact. And so for a poet, this is nothing short of disastrous. But I think he probably also had glimpses of the divine, the divine vision and but rather than just those staying like isolated peak experiences he was able to join those dots and then present for himself the poet to the pilgrim a sense of what all those stopping points might have meant and moreover invite us to join him because he he breaks the fourth wall many times in the divine comedy and says you know have you got it and if you haven't then you know perhaps you should pause and wait um and or you know read it again um not least when it comes to the paradise um so that there is there is a sort of convention but i think that it speaks to a deep truth about the extraordinary origins of this work which is rooted in real life um and um but has the genius to be able to present a vision of life as well and i mean And then Dante also shows how it's only when he's undergone certain experiences that he can know what the pilgrimage is telling him.

12:35I mean, one of these great reveals in the Divine Comedy, one of the ones which I love the best is when they get to the floor of hell, it's a frozen lake. You know, there's nothing fiery about almost falling out of existence. That's very much a Neoplatonic intuition. So it's frozen solid, but they don't sort of look at Lucifer barely alive. and then Virgil says to Dante, okay, look, you've seen the worst. Now we can turn around and start to see the best. They continue. They go on. They climb right onto the body of Lucifer. And it's only by keeping going forward that things turn around, described in the mythical geography of the Divine Comedy.

13:17And I think that's a deep truth that you can only really know by going on pilgrimage. As you say, there's these patterns. um there's the the arrival of joy there's the leaving the grief and everything else besides um but there's something about putting your hand to the plow keeping going um that isn't just good for ourselves um because it's it's quite integrating to do that not to leave something behind you know psychologically or um otherwise um but also you know it shows you that for example example, the light is stronger than the darkness. The descent is also a kind of ascent, even when it still feels like a descent.

14:00These great truths of the wisdom traditions, you know it, I mean, to use your important words, in an embodied way, they become sort of part and parcel of who you are then. Yeah, that's well said, Mark. The idea that as opposed to marshalling propositions with evidence to come to a conclusion that we can move through a series of transformations that call us forward and be given knowledge through transformation as opposed to sort of logical argumentation, I see as one of the great themes of pilgrimage. And I see it, I mean, there is in a poetic use of this term, there is an argument in this book in that it is trying to persuade you.

14:49But it's not trying to persuade you to take up propositions. It's trying, to my mind, it's trying to persuade you to take up a way of life and a way of perceiving the world and being in the world. Yeah, I mean, another, we talked a little bit about the Inferno, but I think it's just as important to try and talk about the Paradiso. because the Inferno is the one, the part that people read it at all, that they sort of feel they understand and people often say, but what about the Paradiso? I don't get it. But Dante does say it's the hardest part and that everything through the Inferno, through the Purgatorio is just a preparation.

15:29So it's interesting to ask you, what kind of preparation is it? And I think it is in part at least a preparation for knowing yourself well enough to start to know more than yourself um and so in the paradiso you get a different kind of guide beatrice appears rather than virgil who's um accompanied dante so far and she is a teacher in a way that virgil's not and again i think that you know pilgrimage can have these elements when you realize that i don't know you you might think it's grace it might be a surprise um it might be that which you just hadn't expected but it's almost as if the journey starts to tune to you as much as you tuning to the journey and um this is what beatrice is so good at She constantly is, as it were, watching Dante, even as he's watching her.

16:29Her smiles adjust, the brightness in her eyes adjust, the music around them adjusts. And Dante gets led more and more, becomes more and more capable, because he's able to tune more and more into that which is going on around him. And that kind of tuning in, I think, is another thing which only comes by embarking on the journey. you do get it in the platonic dialogues I mean there's the well known bit at the beginning of the Phaedrus where the first sort of few pages Socrates is saying well should we sit here no there's a myth about something that happened there and perhaps we should try further down the river and so on and you think you know is this just some elaborate bit of platonic entertainment but no I think that this too is a kind of pilgrimage it's like trying to find the right place by feeling the resonance inside yourself.

17:22So there's something about that that goes on as well, I think, with pilgrimage that particularly comes out in the paradise. This accompaniment becomes quite active. And I think that if you do particularly, well, I was going to say if you do longer pilgrimages, but actually you don't have to do longer pilgrimages. I'm quite a fan of micro pilgrimages, actually, even just today. In England, you have all these wonderful cathedral cities, and it's quite a good habit to stop at the station before the city station itself and just walk the last three or four miles and even then you give yourself a chance to kind of arrive and to tune in and i know you feel the the energy around and about um there's always that extraordinary thing of the business of walking um i always remember reading about a jane nun who when asked why do you walk everywhere, she said, because walking is the pace of the heart.

18:16So, you know, you're no longer catching up with yourself. You're actually going at your pace. So there's another, you know, a bunch of reflections, I guess, that I hope expands a little bit further. That's good. Well, first of all, you know, again, you know, and I went through Jungian therapy and did extensive dream work, and I never had anything I would call a synchronicity. I went on the philosophical Silk Road and synchronicity and serendipity was just everywhere. And that sense of getting in tune, where things are ringing true, where relevance realization becomes more resonance realization.

18:57Yeah, I totally get that. And I think the poetry also helps conduce people into that. I think that's a good observation. Now, you mentioned something about the poem itself. I mean, its nature, namely that Dante frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses you. And it's like, what time is this poem taking place in? There's his time, there's our time, there's eternity. What time is this poem taking place in? And secondly, this poem isn't a poem like the way, you know, even one of Blake's great poems. Dante keeps insinuating and sometimes even saying, like, this really happened. And what does that mean?

19:41Like, what does that mean? And like, was Virgil a dame on? Was he actually having dialogues with people in an imaginal way? Like what? Like, so that's my next question. What's going on with this poem? It is really weird in some powerful ways. yeah there's there's moments where dante turns to you the reader and says look i'm going to describe what happened next you won't believe me but believe me it's true um you know he sees a great sort of mythical monster like gary on um and and you think uh you know how am i supposed to to sort of deal with that um and i think that one way of doing this anyways there is um a letter that Dante wrote to one of his patrons, Can Grande, which describes what he's doing in the poem.

20:28And he uses this quite traditional hermeneutical understanding as a sort of four levels of understanding. And the literal is the surface appearance, if you like. It is the journey itself, the people that he encounters that kind of propels you forward and keeps you by his side. But it's not literal in the sense that we mean it now, I think. You know, literal is one of these extraordinary words that's completely flipped meaning. So when Augustine writes about the literal meaning of Genesis, he's talking about the deep truth that you have to study and study and study, and gradually as you change, it reveals itself rather than just, you know, seven days this happened.

21:15So I think Dante's part of that. and then the truth reveals itself only as you're changed and I think that this is partly what he's saying when he says can you see what's going on he is partly sort of playing with you there's that sense of wit which is both kind of poking fun but the challenge is quite deliberately a bit destabilizing another thing that happens on pilgrimage you don't have the familiar things around you and as long as you can tolerate the destabilization then that makes you more porous to to new revelations and i think that's part of it this would this would be um you know what he calls the anagogic phase so there's a there's the anagorical phase which is the sort of the second where you see the symbolism of things um and so like this monster geryon i mentioned you know it has the the tail of a scorpion and this body covered with arabesques and then the head of a beautiful man um and it stands for fraud and because you know the smile leads you in and then there's the tail that stings you um so there's the kind of allegorical way of breaking it down and the point is i suppose that in these in this in-between zone of the imagination you know that is true um that's a true image of the experience that fraud might be but i don't think it stops there because there is then this anagogic where you know you're kind of sorry sorry the um yeah uh i'm getting confused with my terms now um the anagogic is the top one um the the the tropological sorry the tropological yeah um which is the changing one like tropos um and that's that's the destabilizing what do you mean this really you know you're not going to believe me and all that um it is part of the of the of the activity of the poem you might say on you But then that precipitates the anagogy, which is the view from, you know, as a word, from the end of the pilgrimage, sort of reaching into where you actually are now.

23:16And so, you know, you feel the pull forward as well as the journey from whence you've come. So, you know, it's active. I know people might say it's alchemical. They might say it's psychoactive. I think Blake Dante just thought this is what scripture can do. And, you know, he's very clear. One of the things that becomes clear throughout the poem is that he feels this is inspired by God. Beatrice tells him to write it down, even if he doesn't understand St. Peter. You know, in the Catholic hierarchy, there's virtually no one higher than St. Peter. The Virgin Mary is higher. But, you know, St. Peter says to him, you know, you've got to tell people what you've seen.

23:58And so that's part of the imperative as well. That's interesting. It reminded me of Conrad's use of framing, like in The Heart of Darkness, where you have stories within stories and framing within frames. And it makes you aware of how you're framing the text. It makes you step back and look at. And Dante is constantly doing that. So because you get immersed into the text and then he pushes you out. Conrad likes to do that, too, with his literature. right because then you realize oh yeah yeah i got to remember that this is part of what's going on and to pick up on that you i was really touched by what seemed like a difficult chapter for you where you're writing on in the inferno on 28 and 28 uh the the entitled fundamentalism because you bump up against um you bump up against you know the condemnation i don't think there's any other word than of Muhammad.

25:02He's in a very low level of hell. He's represented very, very pejoratively. And you push, you bump up against that and you say, and you're very honest with the reader. Another frame breaking, by the way. You're very honest with the reader and you say, look, I'm really struggling with this because, you know, and here's where you and I agree. You know, you say, I learned a lot from the Sufis, especially Ibn al-Arabi. My sage in Sevilla, Spain was Ibn al-Arabi, and I was talking to Thomas Cheetham about the imaginal. So we're going to come back to that, by the way. And you basically do what you just said.

25:42You try and go through, like, okay, first of all, let's contextualize this. Let's see how Dante is seeing it. But let's take responsibility and pay attention to our framing and let's try and turn this into a transformative truth, an anagogic truth, not a literal proposition that we're taking as historically accurate or something like that. And so you actually embody and enact the very thing you're talking about. The one thing I wanted to ask you about that. So first of all, I'm in very strong agreement with that. So my question isn't a challenge question. It's like, because there was something implicit there, right, where you were talking about, especially when you invoke fundamentalism, you seem to be rejecting the proposal that we can sort of just simply receive in some sort of tabula rasa, naive empiricism from a text, which is one of the defining features of a lot of fundamentalism.

26:39I can just read the text. It's inerrant, right? I can just take it from me. I was brought up a fundamentalist, so I'm familiar with this. So you're rejecting that poll. But I think implicit in it is that you're also rejecting a purely projective reading. The reader can just project whatever they want, and there's no responsibility to the text, because that means the text loses its capacity to be a transformative challenge to you. You're simply going to assimilate the text to whatever comfort and bias you already have. And so I'm asking you, like, I'm going to use one of my terms, my term for the in-between, transjective.

27:21It sounds like you're proposing a transjective reading of the text. Is that fair? Yeah, look, that's really well put. And, of course, and, you know, I think that Dante provides clues as well. He does confront, but he provides the clue. And the clue in that particular canto is that he uses this word that is often used to apply to the whole of the inferno, which is the word contrapasso. Oh, yeah. That was excellent, by the way. Mark, I just want to intervene and say that was an excellent move you made. I underlined that and I went, yes, I got taught that. And Mark's right. That is too simplistic an understanding of what's going on.

28:01So I just wanted to thank you for that. Sorry for the interruption, but that was a great point. Yeah, so if the simplistic way that you were taught to read the Inferno is sort of only once mentioned in this part of the Inferno where, well, the other great image of that canto is Bertrand de Bourne, who's walking around carrying his head as if it's a lantern. so he can literally in the image only see by his own light as it were his eyes have become balanson have become his light um so and dante too you know is vile in that can so this is the other thing which you have to sort of keep a tab on is that dante the pilgrim in order to enter these domains has to resonate with them in some measure now of course when you're in the paradise that's all for the good and for the light but in the inferno he at times loses himself he either collapses or Virgil has to pick him up and carry him on other times he's not so worried you know when he meets the user as the one time he wanders off on his own he's okay he can keep his mind so he can keep sort of thinking keep active um not just passive like you're saying um you know in relation to what's going on another you know hugely important part of pilgrimage actually how do I say sort of both receptive and active yeah in relation to all this yeah um so you know I think that this is what, you know, I felt the blow.

29:30I felt the anxiety too, because, you know, how am I going to write about this?

29:38But with the sense that somehow that my experience of feeling the anxiety was in a way my being in that region of hell too. You know, fundamentalism provokes anxiety. and that's part of you know why it provokes all this sort of even violent defense and so it was one way in which you know I was sort of alongside Dante if you like in that moment and having to wrestle with how to keep my own mind in that moment and so that's another way in which as you say it's so wonderful I think that this text you know it doesn't allow you if you're actually reading it just to sort of project onto it whatever you want i mean the most obvious part of that for many you know modern people will be but what even about the existence of hell itself surely that's you know it's the whole notion of hell is just wildly unjust um and makes no sense whatsoever which of course actually is a question that dante keeps asking he doesn't finally have answered until he gets pretty high in the paradise in the heaven of jupiter um but yeah so it that that that moment was one of the moments where i really thought gosh you know if i'm really gonna wrestle with this text now is the moment um yeah thank you for that so i just invoked the transjective you talk about the in-between and you bring it out a lot in this book the in-between is their reference multiple times.

31:13I've been talking to, I taught a course on William Desmond. I've been talking to William Desmond. I'm going to record with William Desmond. He has his term, the metaxu from Plato, right? So this in-betweenness and, you know, and then of course we have Corbin and his distinction between the imaginal, which is in between, and the imaginary, which is purely subjective and internal. and I think it's fair to say that when you're talking about Blake's understanding of the imagination, you're talking about the imaginal. You're talking about how the imagination can augment perception, renew the senses, cleanse the doors of perception.

31:52So first of all, I want to check in. Is that fair? Because you want to reuse the term. Yeah, and with perhaps just the further twist that i think we actually inhabit the in-between all the time but without quite realizing that's what i was going to get that's what i was going to get yeah yeah you know okay yeah yeah well let me i think sort of although it's it's a funny thing because it's quite hard to talk about and yet it's our actually our everyday experience so trying to demystify it is part of the the task really i think for we moderns well this is in my course seeing god again for the first time where basically what I do is I go in and I start talking about all these things that are metaxu, that are in between, that are transjective.

32:39Relevance. Is relevance purely objective? No. Is it purely subjective? No. What does that do? Well, that undermines the fact-value dichotomy. It's not a subjective value. It's not an objective fact. And yet it's primordial to all of your cognition. And you start to take apart all the dichotomies the way Pickstock and Putnam and Quine do. And then, so I don't talk about God at first. I say, let's take apart all these dichotomies and rediscover phenomenologically the metaxu. And then let's ask, do you get a sensed presence of something you're willing to call sacred? That's how the course is going.

33:14It's basically a pilgrimage. There's lots of argument in science, of course. But I wanted to pick up on that because something for me that I've been doing a lot of work on the imaginable, I don't know what you've seen in my work, but I've been, I may, I've been making an argument that, like you say, it is not something we exercise just when we're doing poetry or on special experiences. We can have special experiences. I'm not denying that. But I want to point to regular ways in which the imaginal is showing up. First of all, it's in the core of what's known, this is Carl Friston's work as the predictive processing, because I don't know if you've seen it.