Piranesi and the Vision of the Real
Photo by David Russell Mosley
Dear Friends,
Christmastide is drawing to a close and the year 2021 has begun. I have seen many people posting online about this change of years. Some are hopeful, looking forward to a return to some kind of normalcy in 2021. Others are mostly focusing on saying goodbye to 2020, a year that for so many of us has been terrible. And others still are retaining a healthy amount of skepticism, noting that it may be 2021, but right now it looks no different from 2020.
I'm not sure which of those camps I belong in. 2020 was not a great year for me, though perhaps that is appropriate for what has been my "Jesus Year," or my thirty-third year (my birthday is January 21, by the way, thought you might want to know). And yet I have some hope for this upcoming year, as well as exciting things planned for it, that mostly don't require the end of the pandemic. And like those in the third group I look around and still see people dying from COVID19. But, I want to be hopeful.
So, to that end, I want to share with you the best book I read in 2020: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. You may be familiar with Clarke's renowned book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. While both books deal with issues of magic and reality, Piranesi takes things to a new level.
It is difficult to explain the book without giving away too much. Of course, I am of the opinion that if something can be spoiled by prior information then it likely wasn't very good to begin with. Nevertheless, I want the discoveries made throughout the book to be met as they come. Here is what I can tell you.
The book is written as a journal by a character called Piranesi. He lives in a massive house with thousands of halls and vestibules and statues. Piranesi fancies himself a scientist and has been cataloging all of his findings in a series of journals. Oh, and this house, it contains an ocean, one whose tides ebb and flow and can even flood entire hallways. Clarke has said that the book has been influenced by Owen Barfield's notion of original participation, which she learned about while listening to a talk by Malcolm Guite. This indebtedness to Barfield is clear throughout the book. Part of its goal is to widen out reality, to help us see things more clearly by showing us something of their origin.
You may recall in a previous letter how I explained Barfield's understanding of how Greek's used a word like πνευμα to mean breath, wind, and spirit all simultaneously. Barfield further thought that metaphors came first in language and then slowly we got to more technical or one-to-one correspondence between a thing and its word. So again, the word breath means the exhaled or inhaled air that flows through my lungs and oxygenates my blood. But it also meant the very wind itself and the spirit or spirits. Only later did we restrict our usage of it to merely the inhaling and exhaling of air. Or, to give another example, look at a word like sky.
When we say sky now, we mean what we see when we look up outside. The sky is blue during the day, thanks to light refracting off of tiny mites of dust, and at night is black and filled with stars. Yet the Anglo-Saxon root for the word sky meany not just what we see when we look up, but also our notions of heaven or the abode of the gods. If Barfield is right, first we saw it as both, both the thing I see when I look up and the home of the divine. Only later did we separate out those concepts, using heaven for the latter and retaining sky for the former.
This is the kind of thing Clarke is doing in her new book. Not that she's using language as Barfield does, but attempts to showcase what the original consciousness may have looked like. Of course, it wouldn't be a book without some kind of problem and that is found in the Other. The Other is the only other living person in the house, so far as Piranesi knows. Sadly, to say more would be to give away too much. But hopefully, I've piqued your interest.
All this talk of language, however, has me thinking about the end of Christmas. The Church has names for various seasons, feast days, and the rituals we perform on and during them. And yet, I wonder how often we are attentive to it all? I mean, if we take the words of Eucharistic Prayer I (in the Roman Rite) seriously, in some way not only are angels present at the Mass, which we affirm when we sing with them Holy, Holy, Holy, but they are instrumental in delivering up the elements to God to be transformed into the body and blood of Christ. We say these words, but do we believe them? And what difference might it make if we did?
Sadly, I cannot answer those questions, not really, but I can say this. We might do well to pay closer attention to the words we use and how they might shape our perception of reality. Some ways might bring us closer, but others, might drive us further away from the Real.
Sincerely,
David
