Notebook 13: Three Lost Sections Recovered

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.

4 thoughts on “Notebook 13: Three Lost Sections Recovered

  1. Matthew

    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?

    Reply
  2. 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?

    Reply
    1. Michael Happy

      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.

      Reply

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