I long ago worked out that one of the main things I want out of life is to get through it with my personality intact. By this I mean that when I’m eighty, in the home, I want to be still making my decisions based on what I want – even if the only choice I get is what I want on my porridge (I know: porridge? I’d be lucky!) – rather than on what doesn’t scare or threaten me in some way (“Ohmigod, not porridge, I can’t stand that stuff ever since that bastard threw some on me back in 2010,” etc). I want to be laughing and having fun in my wheelchair. Or, you know, complaining in an honest and enjoyable way about the ugly, uncomfy headrest, rather than feeling hard-done-by that I’m not in the first team of the home’s salsa class. I don’t want to be fuelled by bitterness – though I might accept a half of bitter (okay, make it a pint).
Of course this is what we all want, but in the course of the baroque peregrinations it has come to attention that this precise idea of intactness of the personality – of an integritas, as James Joyce might have said* – is in fact the thing that’s at stake. One can’t allow oneself to be weakened, to become weak, or to be made smaller, or to have things taken away from one’s essence, as a result of things that have merely happened. Bigger, yes. Though I keep saying I’ll do something about that. But to have one’s horizons and powers and capacities shrink? To concede? Nooooo.
Well, this morning on the way to work I began reading Christopher Reid’s enormous (though by his account extremely partial) edition of the Letters of Ted Hughes. Opening it at random, I read this, and it made me feel very sad:
(to Lucas Myers, 29 September 1984)
“I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors – but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn’t long enough to wake up from them.”
A more resolute artist? Not long enough? Even for somebody as larger-than-life as Ted Hughes?And can he really have been just wondering this in 1984? I ask this not to pry or to cast doubt on his experience, but because he reminds me here so much of people I’ve known, who maybe haven’t managed to stay intact, who never really figured out what had happened to them.
* Who said this?
** Sorry to do this to you. The relevant passage from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
–To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?
–Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.
Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher’s boy had slung inverted on his head.
–Look at that basket, he said.
–I see it, said Lynch.
–In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.
What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is INTEGRITAS.
–Bull’s eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.
–Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.
–Bull’s eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you win the cigar.
–The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.
Baroque in Hackney 
Hi Katy.
Thanks for asking how i was in the other thread. Everything is fine here, except for the lousy weather.
In the thread below this one you write of your smash and grab missions fuelled by instinct and a few pints. Snaffling snippets of lapidary, chiseled stone words stumbled across on the quest for verbal Art to dilineate onto the page as a result of your track and tramps through the heart of England, dot to dot, the gargoyle and viking brood accumulate until; just at the point you surrender to the research and release any secret dream of it magically making its way into poetry as though you be but the conduit of what comes; the well swells and tide cometh home in the kaleidoscopic images one’s unconscious leads to, over time and application to the deepest aesthetic Joyce bangs on about ever so eloquent, precocious and co-incendently, i am part way through Hoplins’ prose detailing his Inscape and Instress theories,
This is veing read coterminous with a history of medieval lit, and apprehending the most importan church philosopher of the middle ages, Aquinas, and in a much clearer light, fixing the context of his doctrine. Aquinas was on the side of the individual sacrificing all for a higher power, whereas the middle ages churchman Hopkins fancied more was Duns Scottus:
Scotland brought me forth. England sustained me. France taught me. Cologne holds me.
His take on God allows individualism from this Hopkins came up with a detailed set of research notes, which boil down to what Joyce is saying about our first aesthetic arresting of the Art.
Joyce is rehearsing his mind here, and Aquinas figures so highly as he was taught by jesuits and the teaching of Aquinas responsible for them being so, and it is interesting to note both Hopkins and Joyce articulate in a similarly deep tenor, in what amounts to a manifesto of sorts, speaking of our most complex waffling ways..
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