Happy New Year!

Apart from that, I don’t know what the discussion about ‘mind’ and ‘body’ is about any more. I’m frankly surprised people are still interested in dualism. (And ‘anti-dualism’, as far as I can conceive the term having any meaning at all, must just be another form of dualism, but I confess I have lost the knack of using my mind for ‘thinking’, which strikes me as just a way of looking foolish, full of illusions, and actually dulled of mind, all ideas being dead and then dissected. And somehow that’s supposed to look clever.)

I’ve always been a mind / body dualist (as well you know). But after studying psychoanalysis for the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that such a dualism is self-evident.

I believe that the anti-dualist stance is, as you’ve suggested, fuelled in no small part by a reaction to the anti-flesh position of classic dualism (i.e. that the mind is “superior” to the body, or that the body is “merely a vessel for the mind”). I myself may have been guilty of that last view for a time, though it seems wrong-headed (wrong-minded?) to me now.

I assume everyone would agree that the body is physical (matter and energy). The mind, on the other hand, cannot be physical. Values, beliefs, memories, etc… there are not physical things. A neurobiologist may point to areas of the brain in which it is said these things are stored (memory formation, for instance, is accompanied by the formation and alteration of protein clusters in the parahippocampal gyrus, er, Gyrus). But to suggest that a particular memory, along with its associated emotions, is a protein cluster seems to be clearly making an error of categorisation.

One might suggest that the memory is a property of that cluster. Or that the mental event corresponding to that memory is generated by that cluster. But to suggest that they are identical is like suggesting that a piece of music, along with the associated emotions it generates is identical to the speaker system from which it emerges.

And when you widen the definition of mind, as I’ve been forced to do through my research, to include “interactions”, “difference” and a multitude of systems and mechanisms through which we integrate ourselves into our environment then it simply can’t be considered identical with, or a part of, the body.

Mind is a real phenomenon. But it is not physical.

Right in the middle of ‘Dionysus Risen’, talking about trying to see things in terms of some unitary matrix of flesh, I talk of suggesting, “with a little caution, that we consciously overshoot the mark as an exercise in balance.” I always remembered writing that, and wondered when I might start considering “dualist” models again, or stop being so stridently anti-dualist.

I also quoted Christmas Humphrey’s description of the Buddhist jijimuge doctrine:

All things are one and have no life apart from it; the One is all things and is incomplete without the least of them. Yet the parts are parts within the whole, not merged in it; they are interfused with Reality while retaining the full identity of the part, and the One is no less One for the fact that it is a million-million parts.

The tussles between Gnostic and Pagan views, or between monotheism and polytheism, seem to be limited from this sort of perspective.

Blake seems contradictory, with his sexual radicalism and “heaven in a wild flower” on the one hand, and his strident Platonic Gnosticism on the other, disparaging this world of matter and exalting the eternal realm of spirit. Ten years ago this conflict might have troubled me, but now it just seems like a guy living life honestly. Life is paradoxical. I just feel like I’ve widened out from a personally necessary over-emphasis on a simple kind of pagan “Yea to this world!” thing. Not moving to “Nay to this world!”, but just accepting that in the traditions of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Sufism, and so on, there’s some perceptions that can’t be contained by simple paganism, and can’t be dismissed as world-denying compromises.

(Damn, I swear I didn’t plan to end on one of the words that the rest of this thread was about!)

“I realize how ambivalent I’ve become about my one-time unequivocal
enthusiasm for pagan immersion in the ‘vegetated world’”

What’s this, are you about to leave your beloved flesh behind? Or is it
just that Blake, Hillman et al points to greater mysteries than
simple(?) paganism dare or care to reveal?

Best wishes,
Joakim

Basically, I know “advertize” is “wrong” (i.e. it doesn’t get the “also -ize” treatment in the dictionary). I’m a relatively careful speller and I get the same visceral reaction to seeing “compromize” (which doesn’t happen with “organize”, “categorize”, etc.).

It’s exactly that “wrongness” that I was interested in in seeing Blake’s spelling. (The quote was quoted in Ackroyd’s biography, and as he had full access to Blake’s manuscripts, I assume that was the original spelling.) I like the way it neatly casts of resonances (for me at least) of wrongness of the sleazy kind - summing up my general attitude to advertizing. Maybe I’ll keep up this semi-serious spelling stance, maybe I won’t. I guess the post wasn’t pitched right (for you) to express the no-man’s land between idle musing and interesting serious point that I was coming from. There’s no “mystical wonderment”—I can’t see that in the post myself.

I terms of bare efficiency, I’m sure you’re right in general about using “-ise”. But this is actually the first time I’ve given the issue much thought—previous changes have been quite organic, almost sub-thought aesthetic swerves. If I was going to cut down my thinking expenditure, I’d start somewhere else. Reminds me of the guy who seriously tried to improve his fuel efficiency by cutting down the unnecessary weight of “old car park tickets and receipts” in his car!

I’m with you on preserving British English. You need a certain disproportionate stubbornness these days to bother. I try for a small-scale stubbornness with a large-scale perspective that remembers how ephemeral it is in the end. But, without that small scale adherence, I wouldn’t find such idle pleasure in significant deviations like “advertizing”…

Lapse! You’re pretty consistent in your blog comments…

When I set letterpress by hand I would sometimes be forced into using a z when I ran out of s. You will find this from time to time in hand-set letterpress.

I don’t know whether the Blake z you witnessed was a facsimile or a re-setting, you don’t say. But I expect you could get PhD funding for a study of the frequency on -ize endings in Blake. It’s true I can’t conjure up the same level of mystical wonderment that you feel about it. Whether this is being too serious about it I don’t know.

I didn’t realise your post was intended to be taken as trivial. I apologise for not having the requisite level of playfulness. I hope I will be assimilated by the Borg shortly for my lapse.