The Ache
Somewhere after the age of ten, I started running away. The longest I ever left was for one night. I didn’t need to go far, I just needed to leave. These small flights quickly turned into a larger, more urgent sense: I needed to get out of there. It has just occurred to me, now, that this started just after I began keeping a diary. My dad had just passed away. I was seeing a psychologist. On her recommendation, my mom bought me a notebook from Walmart, and I began a decades-long retreat into the soul I know as my present-day self.
When I began to ask myself why Romanticism is important to us today, I realized that this need to run is deeply tied to my life as a writer. I also started to sense echoes of this individual resonance—further resonances—in the larger history that we are orienting this publication around.
“For years, the book has served the contemplative as a vehicle for withdrawal ‘to the country home of the self’.” 1
Childhood and the Sacred
Childhood was different. There was no veil to be transgressed between self and world. Life was full of vivid presences through which I felt totally and transparently a part of it, unified and cradled in its orders. I spent a lot of time in my two grandmothers' gardens—one a country kitchen garden, the other a cottage flower garden. These two women were devoted grandmothers.
From these two microcosms of discovery, I saw the world from two ends. My paternal grandma gave me a Bible, took me to church on Sundays, and “Shhh”-ed during services. She always made sure I had two pairs of socks when we pulled a harvest of carrots from the ground. She prayed the Lord’s Prayer with me while she washed my face in a pitcher bowl before bed. The maternal took me on sketching trips and collected rocks for us to paint. She gave me books on art, took me to the city to see the ballet, and opened my eyes to the canon of Western culture. She helped me read Shakespeare because I insisted. She gave me Popeye candy-cigarettes and the two of us would smoke on her patio and play crib.
The West can be characterized by a similar pedigree. We have arrived at what we have today, both through the authority of the church—the rules of a productive life—and through a cultural elite of sensual heretics—leisurely means to no other end.
In childhood, these two forces somehow made sense together, neither contradictory. Through the work and the play, I was revealed to myself through the world. It wasn’t just these two women who were trying to figure me out; it was the full basket of raspberries and the baby bunnies that appeared in spring. The bread looked back at me as it rose in the oven before supper. I could see my recognition in the eyes of Degas’ ballerinas and van Gogh’s skies, my voice in the hymns at Christmas. All was mysterious, and in its mystery wise.
Disenchantment and Adolescence
Maybe it just fades away, or slowly chips off like paint, but we quickly lose touch with this ready apparent-ness. My prayers began to echo; no one heard them but me. My body started to change and the world shrunk down. Time itself changed. Scenes that used to have the ghostly translucence of flesh or alabaster become opaque. Minutes stop swelling and begin ticking instead. Memories start coming back as plot and not placement. I don’t know why, but the divine couldn’t seem to shine through this stark new apprehension of causality, and slowly but surely, the certainty grew: God was dead.
As the supernatural world died to me, an invisibility cloak drew over my head. Suddenly, nothing saw me anymore. Both the faith in religion and faith in magic left me. Living no longer felt like dwelling and I started feeling trapped.
Recapitulation
I have heard that at nine years old we become capable of understanding both death and the concept of zero. Teenagers become sullen creatures; my own experience is not unique. It’s like we fall into a micro-cosmic personal enlightenment—some inner Descartes wakes up in our spine, crawling into our mind, and howling at the newly-full frontal lobe: “I think therefore I am,” glowing in the ripening (en)light(enment) of prefrontal cortex processing.
If life’s development from the single cell is recapitulated in our own smaller development, must who we are as individuals re-enact the cultural evolution as well? Do we all, through a unique mimesis of previous ages, re-discover the emergence of modernity’s personal self? It is not just that the modern world alienates us—we created this modern world ourselves—but that we naturally fall out of the old forms of belonging in order to arrive as adults in the present day. Something about old orders no longer accommodates the emerging soul’s need to belong again. When we look back, there is a sense of living in the ruins of something enormous, a sublimity of history itself.
“In the evening, the ship got stuck in the sand again. It is bitterly cold. It is really fortunate to have one’s self & that one can always retreat into the self.” 2
The Turn
I see history, from the Greeks to the Renaissance, as an intellectual project concerned with the discovery and definition of nature. This transformative concept is apprehended through exclusion and propagated and cemented into perception. It is the germ and soil of science—born out of a recognition in a clearing, much like a cottage garden or a farming field. This mode of consciousness and relationship to the world culminates in the type of precocious individuals who midwifed the birth of modernity. Once the concept of nature had grown strong enough to be identified as distinct from Culture, history since the Renaissance has been concerned with a rediscovery of nature inside of man.
At this time, culture split into the two cultures we are familiar with today. But each made their own attempts to find nature inside of man. This can be seen through our taxonomizing of man as a species of animal, and in the way we identify physical forces at play inside the body as bio-mechanics. We stepped out into a wild frontier of the psyche through depth psychology. As we discovered chaos, vacuums, and blackholes, alongside nihilism, we began to discover a larger, impersonal, human capacity for evil.
Central to these discoveries is a notion we don’t have a ready English verb for; a making which is also a finding. Discovery that is constitutive. A combination of fabrication (in the manufacturing sense as well as the lying sense), and revelation. The Greeks had a term for this which now stands as the root for the English “Poetry”, Poēsis. I believe it took the Moderns to take that term and make it self-referential. I think the Moderns first realized that “the self”—formerly only a pronoun—is something that is made through its discovery.
“The nature of human awareness has shifted” 3
The Self is ours because it is only ours to discover, not because it is ours to manufacture. It is greater than what we are, because we must become it and because we are capable of missing the mark. Romanticism marks a novel human conception.
The discovery of nature in man opens up the door for converse recognition: the discovery of culture in nature. Here is where I think that the Romantic sensibility splits away from the modernity of Enlightenment inheritance. We are not alone, we are integrally connected to an entire cosmos which is alike in kind to the…
torso
[which] is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,gleams in all its power…
and which “otherwise”…
would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. 4
Romanticism seeks the capacity to hold expressions of both nature and culture outside and within the self.5 It marries the two gardens, the two cultures, with the truth that lies in our own souls. It understands both as meaningfully connected by the existence of an inward life. The Enlightenment and its analytic descendants see nature and its past causally or mechanistically connected through the evolution of physical external bodies (an accretion of drives). Whereas Romantics see the soul as a soaring arrowhead, pulling all mechanisms behind it in its wake: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs propped up like a circus tent by the tension held at a single highest point, the upturned gaze of the sublime. All of nature suspended from a single and subtle acme of soul, spreading always down and out, and thereby always higher.
Return
Homecoming is the pattern of a social imaginary remaking itself. We return to a state that never actually was, a miscomprehension of an origin which lives outside of time. This error allows a cognitive dissonance of perceived continuity, until we are able to look back, and realize like Orpheus, that we’ve made a radical split with what once was in the name of rescuing it.
My own loss of childhood enchantment mirrors the West’s loss of intimacy between self, world, and the sacred. Romanticism emerged from this type of rupture, inventing the modern private self capable of re-enchanting life. With the breakdown of the private realm we threaten the loss of a private life. We are again at a rupture, and must reawaken Romanticism to recover a deeper, individuated, connected selfhood, for ourselves and the natural world to meet the crises of our time. Romanticon does not wish to just look back at Romanticism, but rather to look back, Romantically. To hold and re-member the soul. The real aim of this publication is to see the world for its meanings. To see through the world to ourselves and reciprocally to see through ourselves and know the world in intimacy. We want the possibility of Future. Not just to describe ourselves but to compose ourselves. Drawing nearer to the horizon of what we know while pulling that limit farther away from us.
I am not the child I once was, but I can go in search of lost time, composing exposure over exposure, and I can encounter Imagination in the overlaps. Luckily the imagination is a wild thing and can not be tamed. It does not work by the reflective light of the moon, but shines, true to heart.
A lesson for our times and our children: Once we run away, we can not go back home, but instead must build and rebuild it.
— Samantha Willman
Sloterdijk, Bubbles.
From Wittgenstein’s Notebooks.
Woolf.
Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo.
Schelling : In System of Transcendental Idealism, proposes that nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature.
Spot on!
Like a post-apocalytic return to rhyme where every voweling has shifted shape to acknowledge the dates of all that has been done. A backward turned angel in every natality. Self-dripping with symbiosis and moonlight, a chivalry that was our father's eyes unkinged and nacred in the seabed unto participation at world's end. I like this child I hear singing in the hedges around here lately. She reeks of the Messiah. Corbin says we all have our own angel we walk toward and that walks to meet us somewhere in the between. Alone with the Alone. Every one of us, antlered, barked or barefoot. Even G-d, they say, has Her Angel out ahead. What could be more romantic than such a vow as to live as if that candle was still a star even on nights that cinch the blindfold and the murderous engines swear against a morning after. The Ache is a map.