I am working on three sections from Notebook 13 which I glossed over when Michael Dolzani was editing the Renaissance Notebooks and which then disappeared between the cracks. These include notes on the Alexander lectures, notes for T.S. Eliot, and a series of entries on the imagination. They should have gone into the Miscellany volume.
Here’s one passage I could have used in my various efforts to explain interpenetration:
The conceptual elements of irony include myths of cyclical return, of “entropy,” of the all too human, of the inferno & the “dystopia,” of the assimilation of the human (i.e. the social) to the natural, & of historical myths like those of Vico & Spengler. Comedy has progress & evolution, metamorphosis, providential design, salvation & enlightenment in religion, victorious identifying dialectic in philosophy. Romance, besides the quest, pilgrimage & treasure finding myths in its structure & its conceptual identity by interpenetration, destroys the antithesis of subject & object, time & space, creator & creature. The hunch that the Avatamasaka doctrine of interpenetration is the meaning of romance is just a hunch, but a hunch that is going to work out all right. No hunch that’s been in my mind for twenty years can be wrong. I suppose I might reconsider my idea of calling the lectures the [“Information”?] of Tragedy, etc. Or Spirit – sounds vague and sentimental. Or perhaps just plain “theme.”
We’ll be posting all three recovered sections from Notebook 13 in the library shortly.
Dr. Denham, can you tell us at this point if there is some plan to find a way to include these sections into the CW project?
We will be posting the three recovered sections in their entirety on Monday, Matthew.
Sorry, I should have been clearer, Michael: I’m wondering if they will be printed as part of the Collected Works project, whether in an errata/Miscellany volume, or in some other way?
Sorry, Matthew, that I don’t know about. I gather that the opportunity was missed to publish them in the volume they should have gone into. Perhaps Bob knows something.