How Books Find You
You thought you were following a line of inquiry, but the texts were tracking you
[An essay for my lovers of books, dance, magic, and Jim Jarmusch.]
Isn’t it strange, reader, or is it just me? Isn’t it strange how you read the books you need when you need to read them?
That’s happened all my life. Walden, in college. The Golden Notebook, making sense for the first time beside The Lord of the Rings, which I read together with it, though it wasn’t the first time for either of them. I read in tandem, as I remember it, but that may be my mind playing tricks on me, while held over a few months at Fort Huachuca, waiting for enough students to make a class, or was it enough open classrooms and available instructors to start a class? I hardly remember.
I read The Golden Notebook in college. I thought: Her life would be fine if she just wouldn’t sleep with men. Twenty years later, nearer 40 than 30, veteran of a lot of bad relationships, oh, I did understand. And read beside The Lord of the Rings, it’s a hero’s journey, you see. A quest into the dark.
There in the lion-colored desert where the sun glinted like needles on ever fleck of smooth surface, there in all that light, I needed a guide through the shade.
The Lord of the Rings guided me earlier, too, when my dad was yelling a lot and the escape — I said it, escape — into Mordor made me realize, well, you put one foot in front of the other. That’s all.
Another time, after my first marriage ended, I picked up Adrienne Rich and read my own feeling made words:
No one who survives to speak new language, has avoided this: the cutting-away of an old force that held her rooted to an old ground the pitch of utter loneliness where she herself and all creation seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry to which no echo comes or can ever come.
Working on my story series this spring I knew my character needed more knowledge of Neoplatonism than I had; I needed to catch up. I’d already done the same for a couple other subject areas, but clearly if you want to write someone smarter and better-informed than you are, you have to drink from a fire hose.
Augustine? I wondered. De Trinitate? No. Chrétien de Troyes? Or even C.S. Lewis? Allegory of Love? Nope, not the Christians, not yet.
Plotinus it was.
And Plotinus,1 in Stephen MacKenna’s translation, has taken me through my story cycle, giving me what I need at every turn, until at last my character was there before me. (Number is an intellectual principle, I riffed, thinking it would have to be so, and a few days later, there it was.)
Plotinus is my prophet. I’m reading thoughts I need to have when I need to have them. Sometimes before, as guide, sometimes after, as confirmation — and what a delight — but always better and more nuanced and more expansive than anything I could imagine.
Plus, Plotinus can be a sweetheart. Don’t kill yourself; a little of the mortal part will cling to the soul as it leaves.
Once I tried to read Hegel. My most recent bookmark rests a couple hundred pages in.
Now I have what I need to start over.
A long time ago, and still, if anyone bothers to ask what religion a gray-haired old lady has, I answer: Oh, I’m the boring kind of pagan who reads The Symposium.
It gives my interlocutor what I need to give them: I’m not a Christian, but I’m far from atheist or even agnostic; also, I’m probably not going to come to your sky-clad ritual with you, not unless you look like Apollo himself.
Why Plotinus?
I should tell you. Maybe with some quotes.
By the fact that we are not separate from the Animate so constituted, even though certainly other and nobler elements go to make up the entire many-sided nature of man.
Like in Plato, we’re a long way out from the center where The One, itself complete, without thought or action, emanates beauty out into existence like light from a sun. But also, at so many removes from what’s true and beautiful, it’s okay that we are what we are. Plotinus forgives us for being no more than human. More than once he speaks to the beauty of creation. How can the created by wrong, springing from a creator, the All Soul, who is the very movement of The One?
And the death of Soul is twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it, when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and this is our ‘going down to Hades and slumbering there.’
Even at its lowest, Soul, only ever good, stirs and lifts its head. I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis saying we choose Hell, but for Plotinus, we leave much that is Self behind at death, so Soul — also us — is free to open its eyes at last. We are ourselves through every life, but much is forgotten with the body. And Plotinus allows us to be in several places at once — the shade of Hercules tells of his exploits still, while the true Hercules, drawn close to The One, forgets them all. Yet we tend to turn away from The One again and seek a new life that suits us — so there’s nothing to say we might not remember and find our beloveds again, especially if our love rises into the intellectual part of the soul.
Plato, I aways think, tends to kick the ladder out of the way after he’s climbed up it. You rise by love of beauty through degrees, he has Socrates tell us, love of a beautiful body to love of more abstract beauty to love of virtue to love of The Good. Then you don’t need those pretty lovers any more.
But that’s mean-spirited. More gentle, Plotinus leaves the starry ladders in place for souls to travel up and down as long as they will. He’s very clear about what’s higher and lower — more or less central, as Ursual Le Guin might say, which fits his image of a sun shedding light — but he also makes clear that any emanation from the center, at any distance, contains good and is good, to its own appropriate degree.
Here conspires with There and There with Here, elaborating together the consistency and eternity of a Cosmos and by their correspondences revealing the sequence of things to the trained of observer, for every form of divination turns upon correspondences.
He describes the work of divination by what we would now call Spooky Action at a Distance, especially if we — okay, me, it’s me — watch Only Lovers Left Alive way too much. First, you have to understand that if a culture sees divination as empirically proven — and maybe it was! maybe magic worked then! — any metaphysics worth its salt has to take magic into account. Quantum entanglement works quite well.
And he really believes in small gods. His biographer says he repelled spells cast by a jealous magician. He writes about the importance of statues and so on to give genii locorum a good place to anchor to.
And a couple times he writes about Soul — the third person of his trinity, the Intellectual Principle’s emanation — as Aphrodite. How sweet and powerful is that?
In our dance-plays there are outside elements contributing to the total effect — fluting, singing, and other linked accessories — and each of these changes in each new movement … Besides this, there is the fact that the limbs of the dancer cannot possibly keep the same positions in every figure; they adapt themselves to the plan, bending as it dictates, one lowered, another raised, one active, another resting in as the set pattern changes. The dancer’s mind is on his own purpose; his limbs are submissive to the dance-movement which they accomplish to the end … and in all this the executant does not choose the particular motions for their own sake; the whole play of the entire person dictates the necessary position to each limb and member as it serves the plan.
Here’s he’s talking about celestial movement, explaining how celestial bodies have free will but also follow understandable patterns. He then moves to the moral level; we, too, should yield to the action of the All, but also remain independent as spirits.
But here’s why I copied that passage into this text: Plotinus turns to dance as his go-to metaphor among the arts, and he plays comparisons out for quite a while. He has seen lots of dances; he loves dance; he understands dance; he understands metaphysics through dance.
I feel that so hard.
Dance is my one art, too.
I understand things through dance. Dance contains everything.
He does understand.
I’m still going through the Enneads, nearing the end now — they’ve outlasted my story cycle, which comforts me — and for the first time I think everything might hold together.
All the things, center to outermost and the dance round and round, to and fro.
Yeah.
Do you have a book that came at the right time? Leave a comment.
Plotinus, who lived from 204–270 A.D. was “the main expositor of Neoplatonism.” Stephen MacKenna, 1872–1935, an Irishman, devoted his life to translating the Enneads. I can see why. What a pilgrim. What a true knight. Both of them.