{"id":12039,"date":"2010-06-06T00:00:50","date_gmt":"2010-06-06T04:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=12039"},"modified":"2010-06-06T00:00:50","modified_gmt":"2010-06-06T04:00:50","slug":"bardo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye on Bardo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bardo_todol-0af47\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cross-posted in the Robert D. Denham Library<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In Mahayana Buddhism, bardo, a concept that dates back to the second century, is the in-between state, the period that connects the death of individuals with their following rebirth.\u00a0 The word literally means \u201cbetween\u201d (bar<\/em>) \u201ctwo\u201d (do<\/em>). \u00a0The Bardo Th\u00f6dol<\/em>, or \u201cLiberation through Hearing <\/strong>in the In-Between State,\u201d distinguishes six bardos, the first three having to do with the suspended states of birth, dream, and meditation and the last three with the forty-nine-day process of death and rebirth. \u00a0In The Tibetan Book of the Dead<\/em>,<\/span> which is the principal source for Frye\u2019s speculations on bardo, a priest reads the book into the ear of the dead person. The focus is on the second three in-between states or periods: the bardo of the moment of death, when a dazzling white light manifests itself; the bardo of supreme reality, in which five colorful lights appear in the form of mandalas; and the bardo of becoming, characterized by less-brilliant light. The first of these, Chikhai bardo, is the period of ego loss; the second, Chonyid bardo, is the period of hallucinations; and the third, Sidpa bardo, is the period of reentry.<\/p>\n

In Frye\u2019s Bible lectures he mentions the bardo in connection with the issue of whether one can be released from various projections and repressions and so escape from the wheel of reincarnation, or at least have the possibility of escaping next time around if one will only be attentive.\u00a0\u00a0 There, he said,<\/p>\n

The word \u201capocalypse,\u201d the name of the last book of the Bible, is the Greek word for revelation.\u00a0 That is why the book is called Revelation in English translation, and what John at Patmos sees in the book is a panorama of certain things in human experience taking on different forms.\u00a0 There is an analogy which seems to be a fairly useful one in the Oriental scripture known as The<\/em> Tibetan Book of the Dead. <\/em>When a man is dying, a priest comes to his house, and when the man dies, the priest starts reading the Book of the Dead into his ear, because the corpse is assumed to be able to hear the reading and to be guided by what is said.\u00a0 The priest explains to the corpse that he is going to have a progression of visions, first of peaceful deities and then of wrathful deities, and that he is to realize that these are simply his own repressed thoughts and images coming to the surface because they have been released by death; and that if he could only understand that they are coming out of his mind, he could be delivered from their power, because it is really his own power.\u00a0 lt is also assumed that practically every corpse to whom this book is read will be too stupid to understand what\u2019s going on, and will go on from one blunder to another until finally he wakes up in the world again: because the assumption behind it is one of reincarnation.\u00a0 [CW 13, 587\u201388]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Otherwise, in his published writing Frye refers to bardo infrequently\u2013\u2013once in The Great Code<\/em>, once in A Study of English Romanticism<\/em>, once in \u201cThe Journey as Metaphor,\u201d and twice in \u201cYeats and the Language of Symbolism.\u201d\u00a0 In his notebooks and diaries, however, the word \u201cbardo\u201d appears more than one hundred times, and Frye\u2019s own copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead<\/em> contains some 240 annotations.\u00a0 In Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World <\/em> I point out that Frye almost always uses \u201cbardo\u201d in a telic sense: it represents a stage toward the end of the quest, and it is related to such ideas as epiphany, resurrection, recognition, and apocalypse\u2013\u2013ideas that are omnipresent in Frye\u2019s writings.\u00a0 But his understanding of bardo warrants further study.<\/p>\n

The following entries represent, I think, all of the places in Frye\u2019s \u201cunpublished\u201d writing (now a part of the Collected Works), where the word \u201cbardo\u201d appears.\u00a0 The \u201cpublished\u201d references are at the end. \u00a0The annotations have been omitted.\u00a0 All material within square brackets is an editorial addition.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Diaries of Northrop Frye<\/em><\/strong> (CW 8)<\/strong><\/p>\n

1949 Diary<\/strong><\/p>\n

[77] . . . Listening to street-car conversations of the so-I-says-to-him variety shows how near the surface of consciousness the will-to-power fantasy is\u2014even \u201cnormal\u201d people are continually mistaking it for reality, or at least allowing it to condition reality.\u00a0 It\u2019s the real \u201cguardian of the threshold.\u201d\u00a0 The erotic wish-fulfilment fantasy demands what for \u201cnormal\u201d people is a deliberate withdrawal from reality, a voluntary escape.\u00a0 Below this is the creative world of art & thought, which demands not only relaxation from the world but concentration as well.\u00a0 Below this is the world of meditation, which seizes the moment Satan can\u2019t find, [\u201cThere is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find\u201d (William Blake, Milton<\/em>, pl. 35, l. 42] & in which the soul emerges through the mind as well as the body.\u00a0 Blavatsky says that if you could remember your deep dreams you could remember your previous incarnations. \u00a0I don\u2019t think it\u2019s necessary to accept this, but it\u2019s possible that if you could take a golden bough with you all the way in the original plunge to sleep, Alice\u2019s fall down the well, you would never need to sleep again.\u00a0 The Tibetan Bardo <\/strong>has something of this idea of an initial plunge & then a gradual rise back to the same old grind. \u00a0The trouble is you have to hypnotize yourself somehow to fall asleep: without some initial giddiness you just get insomnia.\u00a0 This progression, if it exists, corresponds roughly to the Spenglerian progression of a cultural cycle, & if so is doubtless involved in the argument of Finnegans Wake. [CW 8, 79\u201380]<\/p>\n

[169]\u00a0 . . . However, [Peter] Fisher was full of fascinating ideas about Plato, some of them from Collingwood\u2019s Principles of Art.\u00a0 Plato was rejecting the representational element in art, & was trying to purify art by restoring its magical basis\u2014hence the emphasis on music & the mode-mood connection, which is pure magic.\u00a0 He attacked the Iliad not as epic but as tragedy\u2014tragedy to him, as to the ludians, was bad taste<\/em>, spiritual defeatism.\u00a0 If you see the world turning on the spindle of Necessity you see it in the comic context which the symposium is\u2014the Plato-Aristophanes tie-up is very deep, as I\u2019ve guessed.\u00a0 Theseus in Shakespeare\u2019s MND [A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>] is a pure philosopher-ruler, & has many Platonic characteristics, including his view of art.\u00a0 Then we went on to discuss the life-Bardo<\/strong> cycle. Normally we are dragged backwards through life & pushed forwards through Bardo<\/strong>, & attempt to find some anastasis at the crucial points, or else go through a vortex or Paravritti which leads us, not to escape, but to implement charity by going forwards through life, as Jesus did, & withdraw in retreat from Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 There was something about the shades in Homer I haven\u2019t got quite straight. [CW 8, 117\u201318]<\/p>\n

[196] . . . I\u2019ve thought of a novel on the life of Christ, & will collect things to put in it: but I wonder what would come of a Bardo<\/strong> novel. \u00a0[CW 8, 129]<\/p>\n

[For at least thirteen years Frye entertained the notion of writing a Bardo<\/strong> novel. \u00a0\u00a0See the entries from Notebooks 30o and 2 in <\/em>Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writing, below.]<\/em><\/p>\n

[200]\u00a0 All Hallows\u2019 Eve<\/em> is a Bardo<\/strong> novel, & a type of fantasy that is not popular now because it will be later.\u00a0 I notice he\u2019s a bit cute: his Antichrist\u2019s servant, whom he\u2019s cured of a brain tumor, says: \u201cWe all carry his mark in our bodies.\u201d \u00a0[CW 8, 131]<\/p>\n

[201]\u00a0 I must collect my impressions of Bardo<\/strong> novels: this Portrait of Jennie<\/em> that I picked up is one, & Henry James\u2019 Sense of the Past<\/em> is another.\u00a0 These last two are Dunneish stories, where the collision of two time tables is a main point, & the heroines are animas.\u00a0 Williams\u2019 story seems to be purer Bardo<\/strong>, & to grasp, imaginatively, the point that Purgatory was invented by the R.C.Ch. to bring Bardo<\/strong> into Xy [Christianity] .\u00a0\u00a0 In Huxley it would be the pure Eastern thing.\u00a0 Yeats combines them too.\u00a0 Also the fact that in Williams the heroine goes into the future & reports its knowledge to Simon puts a Dunne stamp on it too. [CW 8, 131]<\/p>\n

[202]\u00a0 I have deliberately fucked going to see [Alexander] Lacey.\u00a0 I tell myself now that it\u2019s too late, that I should do him no good & relieve myself only of a neurotic compulsion.\u00a0 How much of that is true I can\u2019t say.\u00a0 James i, 27, is very silly: the rhetorical effort of a fashionable preacher who wants to make an effect & doesn\u2019t know how.\u00a0 Not that I get light on my problem by cursing James.\u00a0 I come back to my Chik-hai Bardo<\/strong> point: time affords the opportunity for the inspired act: to neglect it is original if not actual sin, and all such sins are a waste of time, loss of time, a surrender of a bit more of oneself to the devouring mouth of hell.\u00a0 That\u2019s what Blake meant about the moment in each day. I wish I could find a way of living by faith that was not an abdication of decision\u2014a break with the rhythm of original sin is what one is after, I suppose. [CW 8, 131\u20132]<\/p>\n

[203]\u00a0 All Hallows\u2019 Eve<\/em> was exactly the book I was looking for: I have temporarily lost my ambition to write a Bardo<\/strong> novel myself, & consolidated my impulse to write an article, perhaps for that Trollopian<\/em> magazine, on the occult novels of Bulwer Lytton.\u00a0 After fifty pages of Williams\u2019 book, one has to pass a special critical Order-in-Council to keep oneself from dismissing it as a lot of blithering nonsense.\u00a0 That kept me reading it, but it\u2019s still as crude & tasteless a performance as the genre supplies.\u00a0 His public is too sophisticated to worry about the factual basis of magic, so there\u2019s none of Lytton\u2019s naive & detached curiosity, & Lytton\u2019s normal Victorian prejudices are replaced by a fetid, miasmic, oppressive & appallingly obtrusive priestly morality.\u00a0 The ingenuity & intelligence with which he gears his fantasy to Christian doctrine makes the book positively bad instead of negatively inept, but reveals how completely ritual, the physical transmission & recreation of the divine community in time, is white magic, & exists & has influence only insofar as the forces of evil are conceived as black magic.\u00a0 I can\u2019t help feeling that the Christian drama of heaven & hell is one thing & Bardo<\/strong> another; that Bardo<\/strong> is essentially bound up with Karma & reincarnation, & though purgatory is the point of contact, it still wouldn\u2019t come together even if one didn\u2019t feel that the purgatory idea was alien to Christianity.\u00a0 I\u2019m not clear on this point yet.\u00a0 In terms of my four forms, All Hallows\u2019 Eve<\/em> is a romance-anatomy, a Gothic horror tale in which the villain is (as he is occasionally in the cruder examples) the devil, & in which the anima moves in Bardo<\/strong>, as Lilian does in A Strange Story<\/em>, which also ends with a magician destroyed within his own magic circle. \u00a0This Gothic horror romance is linked to an auctorius theory of Bardo<\/strong>: someone like Yeats who didn\u2019t feel a compulsion to make Bardo<\/strong> rationalize priestcraft might have brought it off. [CW 8, 132]<\/p>\n

[207]\u00a0 [Peter] Fisher & I talked of a lot of things: how people like myself, for whom things generally resolve, feel guilty about those who seem born for bad luck, a Cain responsible for a bleeding Abel.\u00a0 It\u2019s partly the tough luck Christ ran into, not that that can be called luck.\u00a0 I complained loudly about Williams\u2019 book & he said the Christian fear of the Jew (Antichrist in the book was a Jew) was like Tibetan Buddhism\u2019s fear of B\u00f6n. \u00a0He denies the purgatorial element in Bardo<\/strong>, in fact in all Karma.\u00a0 He seems to feel though that if you want moral purgation you\u2019ll get it, as you can only go into the house you build yourself.\u00a0 We discussed the geometry of thought, how Jung\u2019s unconscious is obsessed by a diagram that places it underneath (in contrast to Freud, who puts it underneath because he\u2019s talking about deliberate repressions.\u00a0 All he says is that if you sit on a stool dropping things out of your bottom the hole underneath gets to be fairly shitty after a while).\u00a0 But while it might be good exercise to work out the whole thing on another diagram that puts it above & calls it superconscious, one couldn\u2019t attach oneself to the diagram either, because it would just lead (as so many translations of Oriental scriptures do) to renaming the sky-god.\u00a0 If you must have a diagram, putting the conscious & the other mind beside<\/em> each other is perhaps best, & that\u2019s what Fisher thinks the \u201cpara\u201d in such words as Parabrahman actually means. [CW 8, 134]<\/p>\n

[223]\u00a0 The moment of illumination, the flash of Chik-hai Bardo<\/strong>, the instant that Satan can\u2019t find: that\u2019s the anastasis that arrests the time-rhythm of original sin, the Karma of being dragged involuntarily backwards.\u00a0 That is apocalypse: that\u2019s what each life leads to as its own fulfilment.\u00a0 Nobody can move toward it: inspiration, providence, instinct, intuition, all the metaphors of involuntary accuracy, including grace itself, are groundswells carrying us along in a counter-movement, forward to the moment.\u00a0 We go by relaxing ourselves, & trying to put ourselves in the organized receptivity, the \u201cnegative capability,\u201d of being ready to listen to or look at whatever comes along.\u00a0 If it never comes, that\u2019s not our business.\u00a0 If death brings it, as the Tibetans say, that\u2019s the point about death.\u00a0 But to have something shown you & then refuse to admit that you saw anything of the kind: that\u2019s the sin against the Holy Spirit of inspiration which is not forgiven (i.e. makes it impossible for you to arrive at release or anastasis) either in this world or the next (Bardo<\/strong>).\u00a0 You can\u2019t expect something, or you\u2019ll find an oracle in every spiritual breeze that passes over you; you can\u2019t expect nothing, or you\u2019ll have in yourself no principle of escape. [CW 8, 140\u20131]<\/p>\n

[226] . . . That\u2019s the three-formed genital organ of creation, of which the mystic rose of the creature is the feminine counterpart.\u00a0 I daresay that would shock a lot of people, including Dante himself, but only because we\u2019re afraid of the other sterile prick of the mountain of purgatory, aimed at paradise but not quite getting there.\u00a0 Dante was misled by the false doctrine of purgatory, I think, & couldn\u2019t see that the mountain was the Tower of Babel, ejaculating a seed that never fertilizes but, like Onan\u2019s, falls back to the earth.\u00a0 He has this pattern in, but for human souls he buggers it with purgatory.\u00a0 I still haven\u2019t the relation of Bardo<\/strong> to purgatory clear, but I feel that purgatory must be an illegitimate adaptation of Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 Not that Yeats & Charles Williams have done any better. [CW 8, 142]<\/p>\n

[279]\u00a0 . . . One thing in the Blake yesterday (1st yr. R.K., incidentally, on the Trinity, was a total flop): Byzantium is Magian culture, conceived by Yeats as classical tomb & Western womb, hence not only on the historical cycle but on the Bardo<\/strong> one, as the axis of both.\u00a0 I spoke of a certain prudery in making moral judgements, e.g. about Fascism: \u201cit\u2019s all very terrible of course, but after all it is<\/em> what\u2019s coming, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\u00a0 Contrast that with the poetry that he really feels deeply: \u201cthe ceremony of innocence is drowned\u201d [Yeats, The Second Coming<\/em>, l. 6]. [CW 8, 162\u20133]<\/p>\n

[355]\u00a0 Peter Fisher in & we talked of little else\u2014he\u2019s in a strong Bardo<\/strong> phase at the moment, & feels that it\u2019s all the same world anyway. [CW 8, 198]<\/p>\n

1950 Diary<\/strong><\/p>\n

[217] . . . I need to think more about the ironic suspended conclusion of a play like Troilus and Cressida<\/em>, which seems to cut across my four categories.\u00a0 It may be a Bardo<\/strong> or mime resolution. [CW 8, 298]<\/p>\n

[228] . . . then something on Old Comedy & the ritual calendar, then an analysis of the relation of comedy to tragedy, symposium & mime.\u00a0 It\u2019s for the development that I need more knowledge of symbolism, especially of the WT [The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>] pattern.\u00a0 For the recapitulation I need to think a lot about the meaning of persona & the Bardo<\/strong> play. [CW 8, 302]<\/p>\n

1952 Diary<\/strong><\/p>\n

[223] . . . The topic [for the examination in English Poetry and Prose, 1500\u20131660] was comparing the Utopia<\/em> with another book in the tradition.\u00a0 I assign that subject every year, because I think they\u2019re interested in it and they do quite well at it.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested to notice too that it\u2019s a General Education type of topic.\u00a0 Also for some reason it excites me.\u00a0 I seem to get in a vaguely creative state of mind just reading essays about it.\u00a0 I feel that I know when a situation<\/em> of ideas is a fruitful one: this Utopia pattern has already given me part of my Living Church<\/em> essay, but there\u2019s more to be got out of it.\u00a0 Also I periodically recur to my idea of writing a Utopia myself, making the ideal state a state of watchers in Bardo<\/strong>, occupying the same time & space that we do. [CW 8, 561]<\/p>\n

[224]\u00a0 This last is connected with a scheme that\u2019s been in my head for at least ten years, and to which an extraordinary number of hunches have been attaching themselves.\u00a0 If it is really true that I\u2019m released from the obligation to do any more specific critical studies, except incidentally or episodically, and that two more books might actually include about all I have to say about literature, I might turn my energies to something different.\u00a0 That has always been, since I got over my adolescence, a gigantic anatomy based on the theme of initiation or hierarchic degrees of knowledge.\u00a0 Several themes have been included in it, and they feature the Utopia I speak of and some comprehensive treatment of the Bardo<\/strong> world.\u00a0 Ever since I read Dante, I have been fascinated by the possibilities of the ascent or anabasis form (less by the Inferno, because so many others, like Orwell and Sartre & Koestler, have done that better than I can do).\u00a0 I think vaguely of seven or eight metamorphoses on various levels of the spiritual world that a dead man\u2019s soul goes through, including a Utopia, a vision of Bardo<\/strong>, an apocalypse, and finally a withdrawal into the Lankavatara \u201cmind itself.\u201d\u00a0 The \u201cnovel\u201d interest would consist in the fact that his whole earthly life would have to be reassembled in the process.\u00a0 I should start collecting notes for it, anyway. [CW 8, 361]<\/p>\n

[245] . . . And I suppose the concentration of symposium needs a Bardo<\/strong> setting\u2014Shaw\u2019s hell is entered after death and at the end there\u2019s a prophecy of rebirth.\u00a0 There were a few people in the audience who shouldn\u2019t have been there, & two of them were unfortunately right in front of us, but on the whole it was an excellent audience.\u00a0 (I note that, writing this some days after the event, I\u2019ve confused two evenings: it was after this show that we walked home in a gradually increasing downpour). [CW 8, 572]<\/p>\n

[255]\u00a0 I think my anatomy project should have seven stages, along the lines of my general seven pillars idea.\u00a0 First will be satiric, based on some central scheme of a shift of perspective; the second will be the Utopia, and the third Bardo.\u00a0 That\u2019ll take up most of my current ideas. [CW 8, 577]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em><\/strong> (CW 13)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[90]\u00a0 In my early Yeats paper [\u201cYeats and the Language of Symbolism\u201d] I talked about a hyper-physical world.\u00a0 This appears to be the world of unseen beings, angels, spirits, devils, demons, djinns, daemons, ghosts, elemental spirits, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s the world of the \u201cinspiration\u201d of poet or prophet, of premonitions of death, telepathy, extra-sensory perception, miracle, telekinesis, & of a good deal of \u201cluck.\u201d\u00a0 In the Bible its connected with Lilith & other demons of the desert, with the casting out of devils in the gospels, with visions of angels, with thaumaturgic feats like those of Elijah & Elisha, & so on.\u00a0 Fundamentally, it\u2019s the world of buzzing though not booming confusion that the transistor radio is a symbol of.\u00a0 The world of communication as total environment which inspires terror.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s Tempest<\/em> as heard by the imprisoned crew.\u00a0 Chaucer\u2019s Houses of Fame & Rumor (because no<\/em> information that gets on that circuit is really reliable).\u00a0 The world of drugs, multiple personality, and hallucination.\u00a0 Before we come out on the other side of it, we recognize that ordinary life is a part of it, a Bardo<\/strong> perspective out of which apocalypse, or stage 2, finally comes.\u00a0 It\u2019s the polytheistic world of contending & largely unseen forces; it\u2019s the world of terror that McLuhan associates with the oral stage of culture: twitching ears, & a poor sense of direction. [CW 13, 90]<\/p>\n

[145]\u00a0 The first birth, of course, repeats the fall & the second birth the redemption and<\/em> creation.\u00a0 (There are two<\/em> creations, one of which is the fall: that\u2019s a point I never quite got clear with Blake*.).\u00a0 The first death follows the rhythm of the second birth, the second death that of the first birth.\u00a0 Hence the latter could be, in some contexts, a reincarnation.\u00a0 The first death is Chik-hai Bardo, the second either the demonic choice in Ch\u00f6n\u2011yid or Sidpa<\/p>\n

* Yes you did. [CW 13, 104\u20135]<\/p>\n

[256]\u00a0 The scheme which is in the foreground just now is a ternary one.\u00a0 Perhaps the complete compass could repeat three times (i.e. twice).\u00a0 Two would be the conceptual & then the alchemic-turned-on-its-side process.\u00a0 So Eros might be the hortus conclusus in 27\u201333, the interpenetrating-mystical Plato business in 60\u201366, the Bardo<\/strong> world in 90\u201399. [CW 13, 131]<\/p>\n

[15]\u00a0 The Tibetans say that when you die you get a flash of reality (Chik-hai Bardo<\/strong>) that for everyone except a yogi saint is bewildering & unrecognizable, whereupon you pass into a plane of hallucination (Chon-yid Bardo<\/strong>) & then seek a womb of rebirth (Sidpa Bardo<\/strong>).\u00a0 I don\u2019t know about after death, but it\u2019s an excellent account of all other crises of the spirit, & so may be true of that one.\u00a0 So often it happens in meeting someone who needs help can & be helped (or encouraged) there comes a sudden flash of the right thing to do, the courteous & beautiful act, instantly smothered under a swarm of spawning Selfhood illusions of timidity, laziness, selfishness & the rest, whereupon the moment of what we rightly call inspiration passes, and we return to the ordinary level of existence.\u00a0 It\u2019s only rarely that we even recall having such a moment, & perhaps the capacity for having them could be destroyed.\u00a0 One of the major efforts of all discipline is to unbury the consciousness of the moment that Satan can\u2019t find, as Blake calls it.\u00a0 Hence the importance of achieving spontaneity, Butler\u2019s unconsidered control.\u00a0 In social relationships we always admire the person who acts, to quote Blake again, from impulse & not from rules, and we assume, however unconsciously, that such impulses can be trained to achieve adequate & accurate expression.\u00a0 That is perhaps why Jesus stresses the unconsidered life\u2014I\u2019m not thinking of the lily passage so much as the instructions to the apostles not to rehearse their speeches.\u00a0 It is true, however, that the way of achieving such development is to concentrate on the present moment, which implies that all idealization or brooding over the past, and all idealization or worry over the future, are diseases of the soul\u2014hence the lily passage.\u00a0 [CW 13, 8]<\/p>\n

[61]\u00a0 That moment in the day that Satan can\u2019t find\u2014I can\u2019t find it either, but it must be at a point when the dawning of a reviving Orc catches a flash of what it\u2019s an analogy of\u2014that instant of Chikhai Bardo<\/strong> we\u2019ve all felt when the enthusiasm caused by novelty hits us.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s in the early morning, the spot varying according to which of the Sheldon types Huxley uses, or misuses, one belongs to. \u00a0For the viscerotonic it would be the instant just before waking, when the penis is in full erection & sleeping & waking consciousness seem to converge on a focus of reality, before one commonplaceness gives way to another.\u00a0 For the somatotonic it would be the dawn of the body, the rosy glow that follows the cold shower, the kiss of Venus rising from the sea which makes one \u201cfeel like a new man.\u201d\u00a0 For the cerebrotonic it would be that moment of breathless rapture when the success of the morning\u2019s cock is assured, & with it the day\u2019s mental clarity, when one has for a delusive second the sense of defecating the natural man. [CW 13, 26\u20137]<\/p>\n

[136]\u00a0 I say only one soul: the occult tradition, which for some curious reason has got itself stuck to the name of Plato, says only one spirit.\u00a0 The soul-world to them is, first, the total magnet or anima mundi which accounts for mesmerism, telepathy, clairvoyance, second sight & magical healing cures; second, Bardo<\/strong>, the world of dead \u201csouls\u201d who in some systems are reborn & therefore unborn, & who are asserted to communicate with spiritualistic media; third, elementals & other non-human forms of more or less conscious existence.\u00a0 I wish I had a consistent idea about this soul-world, which I may call Akasa. The Catholic purgatory belongs to it.\u00a0 I rather wish I could throw out this world: I don\u2019t like its rumor basis of quasi-fact, its vague Beulah fluidity (it\u2019s not a real Beulah, though artists draw on it, as Shakespeare drew on the \u201celementals\u201d Puck & Ariel, the ghosts (that\u2019s different, though, as they aren\u2019t in Beulah) & the magical healing of Helena.) I wish I could get a Beulah grasp on this Akasa world that would eliminate the subject-object dilemma about it. [CW 13, 54]<\/p>\n

[159]\u00a0 And perhaps the ultimate location of this second-apocalypse vision would be the Noh or Bardo<\/strong> world of Shakespeare\u2019s Tempest, Paradise Regained, Blake\u2019s Milton.\u00a0 [CW 13, 305]<\/p>\n

The word \u201capocalypse,\u201d the name of the last book of the Bible, is the Greek word for revelation.\u00a0 That is why the book is called Revelation in English translation, and what John at Patmos sees in the book is a panorama of certain things in human experience taking on different forms.\u00a0 There is an analogy which seems to be a fairly useful one in the Oriental scripture known as The<\/em> Tibetan Book of the Dead. <\/em>When a man is dying, a priest comes to his house, and when the man dies, the priest starts reading the Book of the Dead into his ear, because the corpse is assumed to be able to hear the reading and to be guided by what is said.\u00a0 The priest explains to the corpse that he is going to have a progression of visions, first of peaceful deities and then of wrathful deities, and that he is to realize that these are simply his own repressed thoughts and images coming to the surface because they have been released by death; and that if he could only understand that they are coming out of his mind, he could be delivered from their power, because it is really his own power.\u00a0 lt is also assumed that practically every corpse to whom this book is read will be too stupid to understand what\u2019s going on, and will go on from one blunder to another until finally he wakes up in the world again: because the assumption behind it is one of reincarnation.\u00a0 [CW 13, 587\u201388]<\/p>\n

But it is better not to think in terms of relating some kind of future to the author of the book [of Revelation] at all.\u00a0 We might take an example from one of the Oriental literatures there\u2019s a very remarkable scripture of Tibetan Buddhism whose English title is The<\/em> Tibetan Book of the Dead<\/em>.\u00a0 This is founded on a conception of reincarnation: when a man dies, a priest goes and reads this book in his ear.\u00a0 The corpse is supposed to understand what is being read to him, and he is being told that he is going to see a long series of visions or epiphanies of gods, first peaceful ones and then wrathful ones, and that these are his own repressed thoughts coming to the surface, having been released by death.\u00a0 He is not to think of himself as in any way subject to their power: he has created them himself, and if he could only understand that, he would be delivered from them.\u00a0 He is adjured in every paragraph of the book to do the right thing, to become mentally conscious and deliver himself from the wheel of death and rebirth.\u00a0 And then the priest says resignedly, \u201cWell, you probably missed it again, so now you\u2019ll have this other vision, and don\u2019t miss it this time.\u201d\u00a0 [CW 13, 596]<\/p>\n

The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964\u20131972<\/em><\/strong> (CW 9)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[12]\u00a0 The earthly paradise, then is on top of the mountain, and it has two Beulah gates, the gods\u2019 entrances from above and the cyclical one below.\u00a0 Either way goes through a vortex, the lower one being usually the Bardo<\/strong> vortex of reincarnation. [CW 9, 107]<\/p>\n

[46]\u00a0 At the centre of the Adonis world is the beleaguered Troy, which attracts our sympathies because it\u2019s beleaguered & because it falls.\u00a0 At its heart is the Adonis figure of Paris, the archer beloved of Venus.\u00a0 The beleaguered and captive Israel is a cy [contemporary]-form.\u00a0 Both societies move westward, in Morris\u2019 words, until they reach the east again.\u00a0 Morris links the \u201cgood land\u201d of his romances with Iceland, with More\u2019s Utopia and, in general, the spatial myth of Utopia (the myth of the spatial Utopia is what I mean, dammit) and with Rousseau\u2019s buried society.\u00a0 The trouble is that even the most realistically minded l9th c. writer can hardly avoid giving this \u201cgood land\u201d notion the overtones of Bardo<\/strong>, reincarnation, fairies, and the whole wonderland bit. [CW 9, 140\u20131]<\/p>\n

[81]\u00a0 I suppose I should be thinking rather of the different aspects of a point of epiphany rather than trying to stretch them through space.\u00a0 The Bardo<\/strong> reconciliation world is one such aspect, prominently assoc. w. Arthur in Parzival<\/em>. [CW 9, 150]<\/p>\n

[197]\u00a0 The different versions of the cycle are subject to the rule that a cycle is really a p.d.e. [point of demonic epiphany] perspective, at best an axis one.\u00a0 The Mental Traveller can only have the boy born N, going through Tirzah at N.W., Vala at W., completing his quest at S.W.\u00a0 The Female Babe is born at S.: then he goes through the Promethean Bardo<\/strong>, & reaches E. where the Exodus imagery begins, after which he rolls up to the N. again.\u00a0 Whether my hunch that Yeats\u2019 Vision will work out as a reversed or S.-pointed vision in which the tragic runs up & the comic falls away I don\u2019t know. [W 9, 179]<\/p>\n

[243]\u00a0 If I go back to my hundred-sections idea, section 1 is the centripetal-centrifugal conspectus, with, perhaps, a note distinguishing the categories of literature from the mnemonic devices for grouping them.\u00a0 Section 2 begins with the literature-inheriting-a-mythology stuff, the two creation myths, & the two worlds of upper & lower consciousness.\u00a0 Somewhere along here I want to embark on a historical survey of the Logos myth: how the mathematical vision, for example, declines after Newton, & then either turns demonic (Blake\u2019s Europe, Nietzsche\u2019s eternal recurrence, Yeats\u2019 Vision) or else gets reborn by way of some kind of games theory.\u00a0 Hesse\u2019s Glasperlenspiel & Mallarme\u2019s Igitur & Coup des Des belong here, though I don\u2019t just know how yet.\u00a0 I suppose chess in Bardo<\/strong> gets attacked.\u00a0 One of the things I find encouraging about this project is the way I\u2019m being compelled to face things I\u2019ve ducked in the AC: Poe\u2019s Eureka, the epic circle, & the like.\u00a0 Browne\u2019s quincunx, too.\u00a0 Because a lot of things seem to be converging on Yeats\u2019 double gyre or hourglass figure, of which the X is one form: a conscious world where the mind is at the centre or top; a lower world where the mind is looking into itself below, \u201cPoetic Cosmology\u201d: it sounds like Vico.\u00a0 [CW 9, 190\u20131]<\/p>\n

[92]\u00a0 What is a speculative myth, the subject of Two?\u00a0 It\u2019s a myth designed to contain, and provide a vision for, experience.\u00a0 Therefore the further it gets away from actual evidence the purer it is.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked this out in some detail in my Bible lectures.\u00a0 For metaphysical cosmology, a much tougher job, I need Alexander, McTaggart & Whitehead.\u00a0 It may become Three, but wherever it goes, it\u2019s the chess-in-Bardo<\/strong> one. [CW 9, 21]<\/p>\n

[107]\u00a0 Certain structural principles: comedy with its three stages, the third a \u201crepetition\u201d of a recognized but inexperienced first (vs. subjective or sentimental, Blake\u2019s \u201cmemory\u201d), comes into my Shakespeare lectures, my Utopia paper, & my Dante reflections.\u00a0 Beckett\u2019s Murphy<\/em>, alluded to above, is a chess-in-Bardo<\/strong> book. [CW 9, 24]<\/p>\n

[152]\u00a0 Epiphany is not a new experience: it is the knowledge that one has the experience: it\u2019s recognition or anagnorisis.\u00a0 The wise men did not need to journey to it: it was their own wisdom in the only form wisdom can take, the divine infancy or fresh beginning.\u00a0 Epiphany is the containing of change, or the other, by bringing it into line with identity: in short, it\u2019s the awareness of growth, when the line pointing from the object reverses its direction.\u00a0 Death [arrows over each other, top toward Death, bottom toward Chih]\u00a0\u00a0 Chih-Kai [Chikhai] Bardo<\/strong>, or Resurrection (ultimate anagnorisis). [CW 9, 34\u20135]<\/p>\n

[245]\u00a0 I hope the Book of Luvah will solve such things as the chess-in-Bardo<\/strong> problem, and that it will give some indication of what it feels like to live in a totally mythical universe, where a dragon is literally \u201cthe seeing one.\u201d\u00a0 Note that I\u2013IV is the progression from the mythical to the verbal universe, mythology to literature and what literature informs. [CW 9, 56]<\/p>\n

[289]\u00a0 Huizinga\u2019s book, Homo Ludens<\/em>, doesn\u2019t distinguish contest play, like a game of tennis, from construct play: only the latter (except for some kinds of argumentative rhetoric) belongs in lit. csm [literary criticism].\u00a0 The opposite of play is (a) seriousness (b) work.\u00a0 This distinction has to do with the form-content one.\u00a0 Suppose I\u2019m asked to give a Convocation address: I want to say something \u201cserious\u201d people will remember, & so I \u201cwork\u201d on a speech.\u00a0 But the form<\/em>, the whole symbolic set-up of a Convocation, is ceremonial play, a symbolic let\u2019s pretend.\u00a0 Chess is contest play, so chess in Bardo<\/strong> is the repetition of agon, specifically the Oedipus agon or killing of the king.\u00a0 [CW 9, 66]<\/p>\n

[361]\u00a0 I think I\u2019ve always had in my mind two<\/em> cyclical patterns.\u00a0 One is the ordinary progress from birth to death, which gets elaborated in literature as the ironic or white-goddess cycle of the Mental Traveller & the Gates of Paradise.\u00a0 Sometimes it extends past death to Bardo<\/strong> & a ricorso<\/em>.\u00a0 The opposite cycle runs from the maze-of-Paradise creation-fall story to apocalypse by way of the katabasis, the stages of which are normally a) previous or preliminary trials b) the search for the beast c) agon d) pathos or mutual death, the third chamber of the labyrinth and the bowels of the monster e) sparagmos, loss of identity in the valley of dry bones f) anagnorisis, leading to the point of epiphany where one sees the cycle below g) apocalypse.\u00a0 This of course is stock: it seems to me that the heroic descent-quest is conceived in its totality as opposite in direction to the ironic one, like Yeats\u2019s double gyres, or more like his dream cycle moving against the waking one.\u00a0 Only it\u2019s the ironic cycle of ordinary life that\u2019s the real dream: the heroic quest is the awakening to life, beginning in the middle like the epics (nel nozza<\/em> is the opening of Dante).\u00a0 Roughly, the Friday-death, Saturday-disappearance, Sunday-resurrection pattern contrasts with birth, life & death; apocalypse to rebirth. [CW 9, 82]<\/p>\n

[12]\u00a0 Anyway, this type is closer to Cymbeline<\/em> and The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>\u2014I had a strong feeling when doing the Bampton Lectures that the four romances corresponded to four primary types of mythos.\u00a0 The Tempest<\/em> starts beckoning in the direction of that chess-in-Bardo<\/strong> will-o-wisp I\u2019ve been chasing for thirty years.\u00a0 Also Lear\u2019s search for the natural man. [CW 9, 340]<\/p>\n

[73]\u00a0 If I could arrive at a suggestion about that the commedia<\/em> would have four parts after all, an Ulro of images on a cave wall, a Generation of the attainment of freedom, a Beulah scherzo of fourteen sections taking me to 78, the Tarot number & a favorite of the Rabelais, & then a Last Twilight of 22, in which the different languages of the arts (V) might suggest a way of climbing up Babel again.\u00a0 The scherzo might not only deal with but be the chess in Bardo<\/strong> problem: the opposed forces each with its own centre.\u00a0 I talk as though I were about seventeen years old: actually I feel more like a bull in the ring, learning fast but therefore soon to die. [CW 9, 288]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Romance<\/em><\/strong> (CW 15)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0 In A Dream<\/em> there are four men, of whom two are ghosts, though the other two don\u2019t know it at first: again a \u201cBardo<\/strong>\u201d setting.\u00a0 The story is of a C of L proud mistress who orders her lover to sleep in a haunted cave as proof of his courage.\u00a0 The word \u201cguest\u201d is used, but the cave is a world of death, very cold, & called the \u201civory house.\u201d\u00a0 She follows him in, & they are condemned to a series of reincarnations where she takes a white-goddess role: a nurse in a hospital tending the hero as a wounded man; a queen embracing him after a battle.\u00a0 Finally they meet in the room where the four men are talking (the word \u201cstatue\u201d is associated with her) and vanish into a pile of snow-white ashes.\u00a0 Cf. Shakespeare PT [The Phoenix and the Turtle<\/em>], with its four named witnesses (bird of loudest lay, eagle, swan, crow).\u00a0 The two ghosts who tell the story are old & young, shite<\/em> and waki<\/em>. [CW 15, 169]<\/p>\n

[31]\u00a0 Book 5 of Parzival<\/em>] <\/em>is the great vision of the Grail canto.\u00a0 P. [Parzival] meets the fisher king as a fisherman, with peacock feathers in his hat & described as sorrowful.\u00a0 The Grail castle is at what looks like the Mount of Salvation in the Land of Salvation, and, like the cave of sleep in Keats\u2019s Endymion<\/em>, it cannot be sought for but can only be found unawares.\u00a0 It\u2019s related thus to the timeless moment theme, Chihkai Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 And, of course, the moment, once found, must be grasped: this is symbolized by the question.\u00a0 The quest of question is thus opposed to the quest of courtesy: it\u2019s out of courtesy that he neglects to ask. [CW 15, 175]<\/p>\n

[38]\u00a0 Gawain then comes up.\u00a0 The spellbinding is also an amnesia: P. [Parzival] doesn\u2019t remember his two fights.\u00a0 Gawain appears to the brother-figure in the P. complex before Fierefiz.\u00a0 Anyway, the two go to Arthur\u2019s assembly & then come two entries of discord, Cundice, Wagner\u2019s Kundry, who is a witch & looks like an animal, loads P. down with bitter reproaches because he didn\u2019t ask the question about Anfortas\u2019 grief that would have removed that grief.\u00a0 Obviously the failure to ask has, like failure to grasp the Chihkai moment of Bardo<\/strong>, started another cycle turning.\u00a0 Her reproaches are based on truth, but the parallel reproach to Gawain of having killed the accuser\u2019s father is false.\u00a0 Anyway, the narrative drops P. for two books & follows Gawain.\u00a0 (Incidentally, notice the wood-of-Nemi way that P, became the Red Knight back in Book 3.)\u00a0 The centrifugal movement breaking up the symposium-cast is a challenge to invade illusion & bring reality into it. [CW 15, 177]<\/p>\n

[40]\u00a0 Book 8 hasn\u2019t much of interest except a curious episode where Gawain is caught unarmed & his girl friend takes him upstairs in a castle where he grabs a chess board for shield & she<\/em> throws chess pieces down on the &, every his being a knockout.\u00a0 As I think I\u2019ve said, there\u2019s a Bardo<\/strong> link in the fact that so many of the fights lead to reconciliations. [CW 15, 178]<\/p>\n

[51]\u00a0 Book 14: The recognition scene begins here with the arrival of P. the red knight into the Gawain story.\u00a0 Society of love forms under all the hardware, & reconciliation, or renouncing of quest, gives a Bardo<\/strong> tone to the imagery.\u00a0 [CW 15, 180]<\/p>\n

[31] I\u2019ve said that the main personal problem for me in writing this book is to progress from learning about what vision is about to learning about vision.\u00a0 The psychology of the creative process (centre of gravity perhaps Coleridge, keeping well away from the American Road-to-Xanadu notion that imagination is a precipitate of memory), leads to probing into a part of Blake I\u2019ve never quite figured out: the association, in Thel & the Antamon passage of Milton, between the birth of a child as an even in the whirling Paolo-&-Francesca current of the Orc cycle of life, death & rebirth, & the birth of an idea, image, or work of art as an event in the current of what Yeats calls the Anima Mundi\u2013\u2013not that he\u2019s the only one to call it that.\u00a0 Also, of course, the morphology of yogas & spiritual exercises, mystic, iconic, psychosomatic & the rest.\u00a0 If I can grasp a coherent idea of creativity in relation to Bardo<\/strong> & Anima Mundi extensions of Generation, I can perhaps force my way through to the allegory of the circumferential body as one finds it in The Tempest.\u00a0 My present development, that is, has brought me to the wall of the Mundane Shell, & the realization that it is a Hell.\u00a0 Yeats & Joyce, now leering at me like Og & Anak, have to help me through the seed-place of reality & into the circumferential Tharmas-world of Shakespeare, & Dante too with his apparatus of vortexes & mirrors.\u00a0 I note that I\u2019ve said this before: I should read my notes. (CW 15, 101)<\/p>\n

[49]\u00a0 But after all Generation is the image, the form or reality, of Regeneration, a fact which Blake came to take so much for granted that Lawrence thought he\u2019d forgotten it.\u00a0 In Yeats the Castiglion aristocrat is the mask, the persona or physical appearance of the creator, his centre as opposed to his circumference.\u00a0 Also Yeats seems to move opposite (note the spiral again) from Blake, from J [Jerusalem<\/em>] <\/em>to MHH [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/em>].\u00a0 Sex & the Glad Day are certainly what is discovered in the Last Poems.\u00a0 The point is that the Castiglione ideal appears in society as a responsible leader, whereas actually it\u2019s his detachment that\u2019s ideal, and that that leads to the Prospero inner world.\u00a0 It\u2019s only the lost cause that is imgve:\u00a0 one has to pass through a dark moonless night of the sould, a Gotterdammerung relapse into chaos.\u00a0 Lear & Cuchulain fight the waves; the old man\u2019s eagle mind beats the air on the way to the sun:\u00a0 the elderly salmon leaps defiantly upstream. The serpent bites its tail as Orc & Urizen destroy one another, as Cuchulain kills his son & Orestes his father; & Purgatory is the prephysical Beulah world where one sees the cycle in all its hopeless murderousness.\u00a0 All this is still Bardo<\/strong> & persona, Prospero unreleased, as the use of the Tibetan story about rebirth of Cuchulain as donkey shows. Christ as Orc, the raiser of Lazarus, is terrible, as Calvary & Resurrection indicate:\u00a0 there he\u2019s the turner of the wheel: remember Wilde\u2019s story. [CW 15, 106]<\/p>\n

[50]\u00a0 But in Bardo<\/strong> you get at least a chance at the divine vision, the flash of articulate reality which traditionally the swan, outwardly a centre of proud beauty, gets.\u00a0 The swan does more than just fuck Leda & lay the eggs of love & war: the eggs of the heron, swan & phoenix are images of the Mundane Shell that those fool spirits told Yeats was unbreakable.\u00a0 Speaking of proud beauty, the female will Maud Gonne gave Yeats the female side of his Castiglione ideal, yet even there Yeats realized that attached beauty, the rabble-rousing Deborah or Boadicea fury, was wrong.\u00a0 If Blake wore no persona, it was partly because he got no chance to. [CW 15, 106\u20137]<\/p>\n

[52] Purgatory, the hyperphysical Beulah place of seed & moral fatalism on the other side of the world, the passageway to Paradise, the world of Thel where ideas & creatures are one, being both unborn, the whirling cycle-world of love (Paolo & Francesca) & where Swift continues to seek his twofold Emanation, the world which is the Bardo<\/strong> or hyperphysical form of the Church & thus the dark cupboard priests threaten their bad children with (Yeats too, in the Dreaming of the Bones), is Yeats\u2019 development of the country of the Sidhe with their beautiful bodies, the Orc world called Tir-nan-Og, the country of the young, a shadow-Hades-Elysium of departed gods & heroes, imagvely [imaginatively] above our world, visibly below it, vortical to ours in either case.\u00a0 Purgatory is a mountain & winding stair, a spiral pointing at infinity in one direction & indefiniteness in the other, a pyramid & a Tower of Babel, phallic both as male (tower) & female (cornucopia).\u00a0 \u201cScrew\u201d is a very profound word.\u00a0 This purgatory of Yeats owes a lot to Swedenborg.\u00a0 Curious how Druidical it is, with its rebirth overtones, how analogous, in other words, for a poet who dimly felt that his own salvation lay in Protestantism, the vortex-creed that leaps over purgatory.\u00a0 It\u2019s the Druidical analogy to Japanese Buddhism too, which is kindly & hopeful about Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 In Noshikiji the lovers are reunited, not frustrated as in The Dreaming of the Bones or The Hawk\u2019s Well.\u00a0 In Hagoromo the fairy who teaches the dance of the phases of the moon is a lovely creature, a shy naked nymph who wants her fan back, not one of those dismal pedants in V [A Vision<\/em>].\u00a0 In Kagekij a father & daughter meet in a moment of inexpressible tenderness, in contrast to the crazed pedlar butchering his father & his son in sacrifices to a maternal female will.\u00a0 In Kuanasake the brigand-hero appears, like Cuchulain in OJE [The Only Jealousy of Emer<\/em>], once as a man of peace (priest) & once as himself, reconciling himself with his slayer as the previous fight materializes out of the in medias res flashback narrative in a ritual sword-fight.\u00a0 What lovely plays, with the Edgar-choruses moving in & out of the characters minds! [CW 15, 107\u20138]<\/p>\n

[71]\u00a0 In his most pre-Raphaelite period he doesn\u2019t make nearly so much of the femme fatale as one would expect.\u00a0 He\u2019s quite sensible about it in fact.\u00a0 Two primary romance archetypes, the straight knight\u2019s quest or triumph of the Orc-libido, & the death in the pass, the quasi-ritual killing of the Adonis hero, emerge clearly.\u00a0 The latter is potentially aharchist throughout.\u00a0 He has a remarkably consistent Beulah, which is even a Bardo<\/strong> (\u201cA Dream,\u201d & to some extent \u201cThe Hollow Land\u201d: in Gertha\u2019s Lovers\u201d it\u2019s the straight lover Paradise of completed love).\u00a0 It\u2019s often a \u201cgood land,\u201d like the one in Ruskin\u2019s KGR [King of the Golden River<\/em>] <\/em>that represents his definition of wealth, shut in by mountains like the prison- Paradise of Rosalee.\u00a0 Such a community (\u201cGerta\u2019s Lovers abd \u201cSvend and his Brethren\u201d especially) is an Arcadia or Nowhere that represents a kind of \u201cgovernor\u201d principle: it\u2019s in the world but not of it, & is regularly besieged by surrounding tyrannies, the allegory suggesting Spenser\u2019s Castle of Alma & Maleager in \u201cSven his Brethren.\u201d\u00a0 This Arcadia descends to the fallen world by an act of sacrifice (a woman in it marries the enemy king:\u00a0 the use of Iphigenia sacrifice patterns in a royal marriage is striking), & then leaves it, to go over the sea to an e.p. [earthly paradise] suggesting Iceland\u2013\u2013Iceland & the spiritual fourfold England of NN [News from Nowhere<\/em>] are both variants of the Hesperides.\u00a0 Svend & his 6 Brethren represent the archetypes of an ideal society: a king, a craftsman, a philosopher, a poet, a musician, & two explorers.<\/p>\n

[72]\u00a0 The hopeless fight against enormous surrounding odds occurs all through: its anarchist basis makes it a congenial romantic form.\u00a0 Troy, the English in France when losing (the period suggests the wider loss of the age of chivalry itself), the death of Arthur, are examples.\u00a0 Psychological parallels are in the prison symbol & a curiously frequent nightmare paralysis (\u201cSpell Bound\u201d) theme.\u00a0 When it\u2019s the defence of the good land by a slain hero the two Orc themes are united.\u00a0 \u201cThe Hollow Land\u201d actually comes near to suggesting the vision-analogy pattern of medievalism which will be perhaps my main point.\u00a0 \u201cGolden Wings\u201d is a straight defeat story: note that, like \u201cThe Story of the Valeron Church,\u201d it\u2019s told in Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 Re the pre-R [pre\u2011Raphaelite] female will, I imagine \u201cFrank\u2019s Sealed Letter\u201d is an example of what Morris\u2019 life would have been like if Jane had lived up to the silly pre-R stereotypes.\u00a0 Ineffectual fits & starts of restless activity & futile nostalgia would be a good parody; it\u2019s what Morris just missed. [CW 15, 117]<\/p>\n

[86]\u00a0 The e.p. [earthly paradise] is really a Bardo<\/strong>, a stage of Beulah withdrawal from Europe into an Icelandic-Hesperidean-Atlantis imgve. world of cyclic stories wherefrom the G [Generation] world appears in outward shadows of possibility.\u00a0 The wanderers (Viking-nomad symbol) settle (this settling, which is Icelandic & medieval, is the rooting of culture) in an e.p. after an Ulro or Druid episode, a heroic aristocratic episode, & a deified episode from which they are thrown out after a social revoltuion.\u00a0 As the wanderers are essentially tale-tellers, their arrival at the e.p. purifies the vision of the tale from all heroic & divine entanglements.\u00a0 Hence the e.p. is an allegory of the purifying of the tale vision the detaching of a myth from causation.\u00a0 In Chaucer the tale is the B or spiritual form of the teller, & the E.P. [Earthly Paradise<\/em>] <\/em>preserves the going & coming original pattern of Chaucer along with the 24-book scheme of Spenser. [CW 15, 121]<\/p>\n

[22]\u00a0 The reading begins with the fall of an apple & Newton\u2019s vision of the unity of matter, of the limit of opacity.\u00a0 With Darwin comes a corresponding law of the unity of living form, of the limit of contraction or Adam (hence the conflict with Genesis), a destruction of the barrier between variety & species which leads directly to a vision of the Polypus or body of Luvah, the analogy of Albion.\u00a0 What Yeats is doing is bringing out some of the still missing links.\u00a0 The total Orc cycle of Generation moves cyclically in & out of an invisible Bardo<\/strong> or seed-world, full of the unborn, potential, unshaped, embryonic, deceased, astral & demonic forms, a world of confused voices & spasmodic powers, a world where one feels in touch with what one is always thinking of as Albion & which always turns out to be Luvah.\u00a0 I suppose some knowledge of this world, even some power over it, is genuinely imaginative, but it\u2019s dangerous & will lead one, if not to hell with Mephistopheles, at least to Druidism with Hitler. Everything in Yeats fits.\u00a0 It\u2019s a world of miracle, for wonder is in Beulah, & machines, the antennae of the instinctive mind, grope in it.\u00a0 Erewhon<\/em> is a profound parable of the whole damned business.\u00a0 The root of the trouble is the Kantian butterslide, for a world of things in themselves is a world of pure objectivity. [CW 15, 132]<\/p>\n

[51]\u00a0 The suggestion of supernatural activity produces the tale form, where there\u2019s a series of events suggesting a superpersonal march of action which overmasters the characters or else identifies itself with the heroic will.\u00a0 In here come the myths of hermetic romanticism, as we get them in, for instance, Bulwer Lytton\u2019s Zanoni<\/em> & The<\/em> Coming<\/em> Race<\/em>.\u00a0 The essential romantic myths are founded, of course, on the mysterious Kantian unknowable noumenon which in rcsm. [romanticism] takes the form of the world as will.\u00a0 From this we get the Akasa-myth: Vril, Od, \u00e9lan vital, creative evolution (when rescued from the mother-goddess cult of Darwin & Huxley), ether, electricity, magnetism & galvanism (for one must<\/em> be scientific) & other adaptations of anima mundi & astral light theories.\u00a0 (These first turn up in Neoplatonism: how the hell did they, & the elementals business, ever get stuck on Plato\u2019s name?).\u00a0 These of course account for mesmerism & the feats of Indian jugglers, who develop an extensive mythology in the 19th c.\u00a0 Another pattern is the (apparently always allied) theory of elementals or non-physical forms of existence.\u00a0 These merge with spiritualism & Bardo<\/strong>-theories.\u00a0 The neo-Pythagorean heroes, development of Simon Magus & Apollonius of Tyana, appear in Cagliostro, the Wandering Jew, Edmund [Dant\u00e9s?] (withdrawal & return) & Frankenstein as the portents of a nomadic & anarchic civn.[civilization]. [CW 15, 143]<\/p>\n

[20]\u00a0 Joyce might have noted the passage in Plato, Rep. X, about Ulysses\u2019 desire, unique in Bardo<\/em><\/strong>, to be reborn as an ordinary man.\u00a0 Speaking of Bardo<\/strong>, I suspect that conception (that an archetypal dream-state is achieved after death) may be in FW [Finnegans Wake<\/em>] <\/em>as well. [CW 15, 69]<\/p>\n

[63]\u00a0 Gogol\u2019s story The<\/em> Overcoat<\/em> is an expert handling of an ironic archetype: the overcoat is a \u201cBright Visitant\u201d stolen from a poor crushed little man\u2014the Bardo epilogue I haven\u2019t quite got.\u00a0 The<\/em> Nose<\/em> is more radically ironic, a little like Kafka\u2019s cockroach story, & I must look at it again when I really look into the matter of fragmentation techniques.\u00a0 The<\/em> Portrait<\/em> has an odd paradox inadvertently concealed in its sinister artefact archetype\u2014it\u2019s a portrait of a Satan or Antichrist who\u2019s an Archimago or master of illusion, yet the portrait owes its power as [slip for \u201cof\u201d?] catching the demonic soul of the sitter to its realism.\u00a0 I say inadvertent, because the conception of art involved in the story is a bit phony. Nevsky<\/em> Avenue<\/em> is a dumbbell-shaped story, like Flaubert\u2019s \u201cSpirals\u201d theme as reported by Yeats. [CW 15, 82]<\/p>\n

[64]\u00a0 But it\u2019s the one called The<\/em> Terrible<\/em> Vengeance<\/em> that interests me. To crack my next nut I need a topos for Romantic fiction corresponding to the four-levels of art & nature one that opens up so much of Spenser & Shakespeare & Milton.\u00a0 This looks as though it ought to be near the centre of it.\u00a0 Heroine a wife whose father is a mysterious magician who turns out to be Antichrist\u2014incestuous feelings for her, natch, & he eventually kills her husband, infant son, & herself.\u00a0 The epilogue\u2014Gogol\u2019s fond of epilogues\u2014sometimes they complete the scheme, as in The<\/em> Portrait<\/em>; sometimes they\u2019re author-appearances (Nose); sometimes they add the initial scene, as here & in The Portrait\u2014I meant Nevsky Avenue above & not The Portrait, & sometimes they\u2019re a Bardo<\/strong> twist, as in The Overcoat.\u00a0 Well, anyway, the evil old man is Antichrist all right, but he\u2019s under a curse pronounced long ago & agreed to reluctantly by God\u2014it\u2019s a Fall archetype, only it involves two \u201cbrothers\u201d in an Esau\u2013Jacob relationship\u2014well, Cain\u2013Abel, I suppose.\u00a0 For some reason the sorcerer is persistently associated with the river Dnieper, & his daughter with the long-legged bait in the river\u2014demon lover archetype.\u00a0 In the epilogue the original brothers are upper & lower circle: the Thel figure is a Feltro hero on the mountain-tops, but he can\u2019t enter heaven because of his desire for vengeance.\u00a0 The black brother is an imprisoned Loki whose writings cause earthquakes: his desire for vengeance is impotent, & the sorcerer is the last of his line.\u00a0 The sorcerer, by the way, is imprisoned & released by the heroine\u2014reverse of the Merlin\u2013Vivien complex.\u00a0 [CW 15, 82]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writing <\/em><\/strong>(CW 25)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[For at least thirteen years Frye entertained the notion of writing a Bardo<\/strong> novel. The seven following entries are from CW 25, 151\u20132]<\/em><\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0 How the hell would one write a good<\/em> Bardo<\/strong> novel.\u00a0 It would have to be short, or get laborious.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how one could introduce incident or dialogue.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t do at all unless it could acquire a powerfully convincing logic: I\u2019d want something as concrete as Dante and yet carrying its punch within its own argument, and not depending on the traditional Church fables.\u00a0 To do that I think I should have to assume that you get to a certain spiritual abode when you get there, i.e., that one\u2019s environment is appropriate to one\u2019s character, as the doctrine of karma or original sin establishes for this existence.\u00a0 The trick is to make a logical sequence of experiences without preaching, and yet implying a complete theory of Bardo<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0 The only ideas I have are, first, the old Swedenborgian notion that the newly deceased doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s dead.\u00a0 Hence a trick opening scene: soul gets up and dresses, hoping nurse doesn\u2019t see him, goes out and engages in a conversation with people he knows and puts a remark in here & there: is hurt when no one attends to him and eventually discovers the truth.\u00a0 Second, the Paracelsian idea that the things seen in d.t.\u2019s are really there, like stars in daytime.\u00a0 Again, I\u2019d like to show how this perception of the physical world becomes cubist<\/em>.\u00a0 Oh, hell, I\u2019d want to do something versatile and with a light touch, like the Sword in the Stone, yet packing a terrific wallop and making monkeys out of the persons.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0 I think of it naturally as a continuous philosophical narrative, but that\u2019s an easy way out.\u00a0 The ideal job would be a sequence of scenes on the pattern of the first one, constituting a sequence of dramatic metamorphoses.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got more or less to the point now at which I feel that if I knew how to write a good book I might get around to writing a good book.\u00a0 The general shape would have to be purgatorial.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t any idea what the final scene would be: maybe reincarnation, which is implicit in the whole scheme.\u00a0 That\u2019s the satiric or what I call the selalk resolution.\u00a0 The point is that the narrator had prepared for death by reading and meditation, but the swoon<\/em> took him unawares and, like everyone else who dies, he woke up in Bardo<\/strong> not knowing he had died.\u00a0 That\u2019s the regular Tibetan formula.\u00a0 Hence reincarnation could be explained as a second swoon, again catching him unawares and as a result of the fact that the first one committed him to pyschical cycle rather than pneumatic liberation.\u00a0 Thus the climax would come at the upper limit of Beulah, whatever that involves me in:\u00a0 a vision of the liberated world beyond<\/em> all conventional heavens.\u00a0 I\u2019m vague here, of course, but so\u2019s everybody.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0 Bardo<\/strong> is the happy-hunting ground of all priestcraft, from Egyptian hike<\/em> to Catholic collections for souls in purgatory.\u00a0 I have no conscience about trying to bust any sort of a priest\u2019s racket; but that can\u2019t be my only angle.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want supernatural materialism either.\u00a0 The book\u2019s ideology would be a Bardo<\/strong> projection of my own: perhaps the deadee would regret not having developed my kind of outlook and would go back to get it.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t be quite as bald as that in presentation, but it would be in essential theory.\u00a0 God damn it.\u00a0 This kind of mooning isn\u2019t fiction-writing.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0 Two possibilities for the opening scene are, first, the one suggested above, second, the one in Outward Bound which is also Swedenborgian.\u00a0 I had a curious experience with that play: several people described the plot to me before I read it, and I was fascinated by it: I thought it must be an almost definitive Bardo<\/strong> plot.\u00a0 I read it and discovered it was tripe\u2014the opening scene was effective enough, but there was no follow-through, as he had nothing to say about Bardo<\/strong>, and even the opening scene depended for much of its effect on the emotional association of crossing the bar<\/em> or the sense of detachment from the world on shipboard.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fine opening milieu, though, and I wish I could get away with stealing it.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0 (One curious feature of all my fictional reveries is the prophetic: several times a notion I\u2019ve had actually turns up in some professional writer.\u00a0 Thus Katherine Anne Porter\u2019s Ship of Fools<\/em> has just (April 1962) appeared.\u00a0 This is one of the many reasons why I suspected my Bardo<\/strong> novel is not something to write, but a koan<\/em> to think about and exercise the mind.\u00a0 If I write it I might be snatching the bread out of the mouth of somebody who otherwise would have done it better.)<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0 The crisis of a Bardo<\/strong> plot is almost necessarily a threshold scene, a plunge into another order of being.\u00a0 The recognition similarly is the return.<\/p>\n

[20]\u00a0 I want to write a work of prose fiction that will incorporate everything I myself most like to read in romance, novel, confession & anatomy, & yet has an original & not an eclectic form.\u00a0 I think of using the framework of the Bardo<\/strong> story:\u00a0 i.e., I begin with the narrator as dead, & looking at the world from that perspective.\u00a0 At the same time I want humour, intellectual paradox, & the absolute opposite of morbidity.\u00a0 I read essays with some impatience because I feel I\u2019ve outgrown that form.\u00a0 And I have too much respect for dialogue, characterization and plot to neglect the novel & romance phases.<\/p>\n

I read Bulwer Lytton\u2019s Strange Story and Zanoni with enormous pleasure, disregarding the corn.\u00a0 But nobody, I think, has ever faced the vast tangle of complications ensuing from taking the conception of a consciousness persisting after death as a fictional hypothesis.\u00a0 There\u2019s Huxley, & of course Williams, but they\u2019re preachers, not paradoxists.<\/p>\n

I think of a longish book in two parts, with a picaresque shape, & second part being the after-death one. That means that the first part will be a sort of normal story, only a shade wackier. [CW 25, 127]<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0\u00a0 What ethical & practical power would such a belief have?\u00a0 Well, I suppose, it\u2019s reincarnation without quietism.\u00a0 The \u201csaved\u201d in the birth\u2011world would perhaps have the choice of deliverance or transformation\u2011body, as in Buddhism.\u00a0 I suppose though that it\u2019s not sacramentally oriented\u2014no priesthood stands to make money out of it.\u00a0 A more difficult question is the kind of experience, the kind of society, involved in this world.\u00a0 I mean the other world.\u00a0 The Tibetan Bardo <\/strong>is as far as I can see a completely isolated world of subjective hallucination.\u00a0 Now this last is something I\u2019d like to look into\u2014a double parallel of lives, the hidden meaning of each revealed in the other.\u00a0 Perhaps the dream \u00adworld of the triumphant libido is in this other world, or closely linked with it. [CW 25, 142]<\/p>\n

[10]\u00a0 Every once in a while I get a fit of euphoria, probably induced by gas in the stomach, in which I feel that I\u2019m capable of writing good fiction.\u00a0 The old superstition that fiction is creative & criticism second\u2011rate & second\u2011hand talking about creation dies hard, although I\u2019ve lived to see<\/p>\n

most criticism, including mine, become more creative than most fiction.\u00a0 Finishing the A of C left me willing to speculate about Bardo<\/strong> again.\u00a0 [CW 25, 143]<\/p>\n

Notebook 30r (unpublished)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Try to shift the centre of your sexual gravity to the sex act, & of your human gravity to the human act, the act of kindliness, of Chih-kai Bardo<\/strong>, which, like the sex act, depends on timing.<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism\u201d <\/em><\/strong>(CW 23)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[90]\u00a0 All through English literature there has been a green England, a forest Beulah land of Faerie antipodal to historical England (which is red and white): a Bardo<\/strong>-world of opposite solstices (as in MND [A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>].\u00a0 This is Marvell\u2019s world: it\u2019s often Edenic, because of the garden symbolism of Eden proper, & it\u2019s the alchemic green lion out of which the body & blood of the world of opposites comes.\u00a0 Atlantid & Hesperian tones here are, I think, more Renaissance than medieval.\u00a0 It\u2019s antipodal morally as well as seasonally (Robin Hood & the Green Knight), & some suppressed paganism lurks in it.\u00a0 This forest world is that of the F.Q. [Faerie Queene] as opposed to that of Arthur, & the F.Q.\u2019s knights are mainly born in it\u2014Artegall is the exception, as Q5 [The Faerie Queene<\/em>, bk. 5] has the one purely historical allegory where the green world fades into a brown waste land. [CW 23, 41\u20132]<\/p>\n

[92]\u00a0 Of course, Dante\u2019s four levels of allegory translate into Sidney\u2019s pattern: once the \u201cliteral\u201d is rejected, as it practically is in Spenser, the allegorical & the historical become the same thing.\u00a0 Anagogy is thus a synthesis of moral & historical allegories.\u00a0 Is it being over-symmetrical to say that the Arthur-world, the red & white England, is the historic allegory, & the Faerie or green England the moral one?\u00a0 For Spenser\u2019s green world is not an antipodal Bardo<\/strong>, as in the Middle Ages, but a Beulah world of archetypal ideas or forms. [CW 23, 42]<\/p>\n

[97]\u00a0 There are three worlds: the physical world, the psychic world & the pneumatic or verbal world.\u00a0 I prefer verbal (ultimately it will have to be \u201clogical,\u201d although Ulro has usurped it) to pneumatic because it is wrong to say \u201cin the beginning was the breath or spirit.\u201d\u00a0 The N.T. corrects the O.T. on this point.\u00a0 From the word one can get to organic law, freedom in discipline (this is part of the Oresteia progression) & from breath only to Aristotle\u2019s first mover.\u00a0 I think this equivalence of verbal & logical is a point in refuting the \u201clogical positivist\u201d position, which claims to be anti-verbal and attains only logically or verbally correct patterns.\u00a0 Anyway, the logical world is the world of one form which I expound from the Bible & related works.\u00a0 From there one can try to descend into the psychic world & make sense of it.\u00a0 This is Beulah, the world of angels, devils, ghosts, spirits in purgatory, unborn spirits, elementals including fairies & automatic potencies like those employed in magic.\u00a0 The problem of exact demarcation between B [Beulah] & G [Generation] is difficult & not mine: I doubt if it can be solved scientifically or mediumistically, by way of G, exposing oneself to automatic impressions of evidence as the scientist & the medium\u2019s friends do (the medium himself is only a telephone or dictaphone, apt to scramble messages like the one I saw at the fair[)].\u00a0 The difficulty about the psychic world is that it can be seen in relation to the logical world, as imaginative, or to G, as \u201cactually existing.\u201d\u00a0 No matter how thoroughly you explore one side of the other, a residual doubt in relation to the other side remains.\u00a0 Perhaps clarifying the logical world will help as much as clarifying the scientific (empiric) one.\u00a0 In this sense \u201creligion\u201d (constructing verbal patterns) & science are both apocalyptic, for Beulah is torn in two in the apocalypse.\u00a0 It is the world of past history & future prophecy as well, & is the apocrypha of both verbal & empirical mythology.\u00a0 Ultimately G, which is also Maya, & U [Ulro] are included in it.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s all the Lankavatara is saying: maybe I hit a home run in FS after all.\u00a0 Man spirals & gyres in the B-G world, in G during the day, in B in sleep, in G in life, in B in death (Bardo<\/strong>).\u00a0 Above him is the Word, below him the second death.\u00a0 He moves toward an apocalypse in which he is saved from death by the understanding of the Word.\u00a0 In occult terms, spirit & body fight for soul.\u00a0 I wish I knew what the hell I was getting at. [CW 23, 44\u20135]<\/p>\n

[11]\u00a0 I have occasionally felt that there was no such subject as comparative religion, as I\u2019m not sure just what gets compared.\u00a0 But such a subject, if I worked it out & clarified my ideas about it, would presumably be the theme of [Paradox], <\/strong>or [Ignoramus], either of which might be studies in comparative religion.\u00a0 The previous note indicates the direction of assimilating my views about society with a study of the archetypes of history.\u00a0 I think comparative religion would have to start with an isolation of the essential elements in religion, & with a relating of the different levels to different phases of history.\u00a0 Maybe we start, as Cassirer, following Usener, with the occasional epiphanic god, which is individual.\u00a0 Then we get the local god, corresponding to the tribe, & so to the occult element in religion, the one surviving in ghosts, fairies, gnomes, elves, the powers in Paracelsus, devils & demons, the world of magic & spiritualism, of divination & astrology, of automatic writing, poltergeists & controls.\u00a0 Totemism is I think the progressive principle of this stage, as it has the social element.\u00a0 The beginnings of rituals & imitative dances belong here too.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to dismiss the \u201cmezzanine\u201d world of Yeats & Blavatsky as purely unreal: some such theory as Bardo<\/strong> might make sense of it, as I\u2019ve always thought.\u00a0 [CW 23, 117\u201318]<\/p>\n

[118]\u00a0 Spenser has the pure anagogic in I and the top of the purgatorial mountain in VI: maybe I have to distinguish them.\u00a0 That\u2019s a bore, because there isn\u2019t any apocalyptic-\u00adtype <\/em>anagogic that works, as far as I can see.\u00a0 Anyway, Error & the cannibal feast in VI are Druidic.\u00a0 The point of V is evidently on the circle of law, though Spenser probably buggers it: maybe he\u2019s trying to put in on reason, opposite II, which is certainly the experiential.\u00a0 Anyway III is Arcadia, though some of the implications of GA [Gardens of Adonis] are higher.\u00a0 Obviously I can\u2019t expect clear zoning laws.\u00a0 IV is higher up\u2014and lower down too likely: the Druidic analogies of the hermaphroditic Venus thing are lower than Busirane.\u00a0 The release of waters is springish\u2014I should find names for the zones of Beulah.\u00a0 Utopia, Arcadia, Bardo<\/strong> and whatever the ark\u2011boat complex is. [CW 23, 193\u20134]<\/p>\n

[62]\u00a0 Somewhere, maybe in the account of irony in 3, I need my Chih-kai Bardo<\/strong> point about the lost moment (Augenblick) leading to inorganic<\/em> repetition.\u00a0 Then Prufrock\u2019s sense of lacking the strength to force the moment to its crisis, Proust\u2019s sense of paradise lost, the stammer or hesitant moment in FW [Finnegans Wake<\/em>], all belong to a consistent pattern.\u00a0 (Also the Comus point of the cycle as itself the final enemy.) [CW 23, 221]<\/p>\n

[64]\u00a0 Several of my plans have come smack up against a theory of Bardo<\/strong>, & I can\u2019t help wondering if I don\u2019t need at least a literary theory of ghosts, if not of the whole supernatural.\u00a0 I must start with the vampire theme in Wuthering Heights & see if I can attach it to my floating notions about the echo & the preservation of identity in DM [Daisy Miller<\/em>], & of the returning ghost in Senecan revenge plays as neurotic, blocked & bound to a pattern of recurrence.\u00a0 The ghost theme in Eliot\u2019s Waste<\/em> <\/em>Land<\/em> (water-nymphs recalling the bodiless souls of Purgatory) winds up with a quotation from the Spanish Tragedy<\/em> [ll. 266 ff., 432].\u00a0 Also the Kurtz business, Kurtz being, like Heathcliffe, a \u201clost violent\u201d soul [The Hollow Men<\/em>, ll. 15\u201316]. [CW 23, 222]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Renaissance<\/em><\/strong> Literature <\/strong><\/em>(CW<\/strong> 20)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[45]\u00a0 A good title for the passage dealing with my attack on Shakespeare\u2019s personality would be \u201cthe sanctified & pious bard.\u201d\u00a0 Bard, Bardo<\/strong>, Barth, Byrd & the Birds about sum up what the book covers. [CW 20, 115]<\/p>\n

[47]\u00a0 The Tibetan conception of Bardo<\/strong>, an archetypal dream achieved by the soul (or whatever it is) between death & rebirth, is something I have now to struggle with.\u00a0 It\u2019s Blake\u2019s Beulah, of course, but there are implications in MT, [The Mental Traveller<\/em>] <\/em>CC [The Crystal Cabinet<\/em>], & more particularly the Antamon passage in M [Milton<\/em>], I haven\u2019t fully comprehended.\u00a0 These link with the Bardo<\/strong> theme in the Xn drama (Harrowing of Hell) & most of the great crises of drama: T [The Tempest<\/em>], because the island is an obvious Bardo<\/strong>, complete with demons of wrath, for the Court Party; Parsifal, with its Good-Friday to Easter pattern; maybe the Birds too\u2014anyway, with the whole ritual-death conception of the mysterious, as Still attempted to point out.\u00a0 These latter link with Virgil & with a Friday to Easter pattern in both Dante & Goethe.\u00a0 Don\u2019t forget the open grave in Hamlet either, or PT [The Phoenix and the Turtle<\/em>].\u00a0 And, of course, my whole point about Toynbee\u2019s movement of withdrawal & return & the church as the place of seed between two cycles being linked with Spengler\u2019s notion of a Magian cavern-culture between a cycle of body & a cycle of\u00a0 function goes: note that here the returning movement is the reverse of the disappearing one, as in Dante & as in my theory of language. [CW 20, 115\u20136]<\/p>\n

[241] The dialectic seems to start with an analysis of New Comedy, then moves to Old Comedy to explore the patterns involved where they\u2019re more explicit, then to the Christian separation of heaven & hell, commedia & the ritual-bound demonic sacrifice, the world the eiron points to & the world the alazon gestures in front of.\u00a0 Note that in 3 goes the enunciation of the \u201cnature & nothing\u201d principle.\u00a0 So, very vaguely:\u00a0 1) New Comedy\u00a0 2) Old Comedy\u00a0 3) Commedia & [demonic] ritual\u00a0 4) Comedy vs. Tragedy\u00a0 5) Comedy & Symposium.\u00a0 That completes a tentative exposition. Development starts with a historical chapter 6) on the Christian & medieval developments of drama, winding up with a general statement of the Elizabethan setting.\u00a0 7 I think of only as a red & white chapter, dealing with the interrelations of comedy, tragedy & history.\u00a0 8 is about the green world & the phoenix; 9 is about the Apuleian Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 10 strettoes the history them of 7 in a commentary on Cy [Cymbeline], where Fidele is the phoenix as a social body (overtones of the Xn Church).\u00a0 11 strettoes the green world & phoenix theme in a commentary on WT [The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>]; 12 strettoes the Bardo<\/strong> theme & comments on T [The Tempest<\/em>].\u00a0 That\u2019s assuming I don\u2019t do anything organic with H8 [Henry VIII<\/em>] or TNK [The Two Noble Kinsmen<\/em>]. [CW 20, 190]<\/p>\n

[233]\u00a0 That\u2019s plain sailing, more or less. What buggers the whole scheme is the intrusion of a fourth<\/em> form of drama, or what I now think of as a fourth form: mime, gesture & action, which in ritual is dance & in myth agon.\u00a0 This is what\u2019s connected with my \u201cpersona\u201d notes, & it seems to be connected with the masque, the theme of disguise, and, perhaps, the whol notion of \u201cmimesis.\u201d\u00a0 If it really is a fourth form, it\u2019s the ultimate secret of the Bardo<\/strong> world I have to explore in 12, a chapter to be called \u201cThe End of the Revels.\u201d [CW 20, 191]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em><\/strong> (CW 5 and 6)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[593]\u00a0 Some of the people Dante meets in hell, such as Vanni Fucci, hate to give their names: there\u2019s a close parallel in such dialogues to the ghosts in No plays.\u00a0 If the setting of the Inferno were Bardo<\/strong> it would be a less barbaric poem, if not necessarily a better one.\u00a0 [CW 5, 226]<\/p>\n

[68]\u00a0 Figuring out the second four chapters will be hard work, but I mustn\u2019t think in terms of, say, stuffing Dante into 2.\u00a0 Dante will spread over 1, 2 & 3 anyway, and Goethe, or at least Faust, over 2, 3 & 4.\u00a0 The 3rd or circle chapter will likely be the one for this: Dante faces the three beasts, can\u2019t take them, and his running away takes him through the whole cosmos.\u00a0 Faust wants magic rather than theology, summons the Erdgeist, can\u2019t take him, settles for a deal with Mephistopheles, but goes through hell to heaven\u2013note that his quest is in time rather than space metaphors.\u00a0 And the Bardo<\/strong> Thodol, with its flash of light that practically everyone misses, & has to go through the cycle again. \u00a0My FW [Finnegans Wake<\/em>] point about the cycle being the only \u201csymbol\u201d for what\u2019s beyond a cycle, is in AC [323\u20134]. \u00a0Ist nur ein Gleichnis: [\u201cAlles Verg\u00a0aungliches ist nur ein Gleichnis: [\u201cAll in transition is but reflection\u201d] (Faust<\/em>, pt. 2, ll. 12104\u20135, trans. Hamlin)] everything\u2019s an analogy or mirror.\u00a0 In spite of all the \u201cdie That\u201d crap, Faust is not<\/em> saved by works. [The allusion is to Faust\u2019s \u201cIm Anfang war die That\u201d [\u201cIn the beginning was the deed\u201d], (Faust<\/em>, pt. 1, line 1237).\u00a0 For Frye\u2019s gloss on the line, see Great Code<\/em>, 18, Myth and Metaphor<\/em>, 240, and Words with Power<\/em>, 34.]\u00a0 He\u2019s dragged off to heaven by Christianized Valkyries in spite of himself.\u00a0 Keats\u2019 Endymion<\/em>, another road with a detour sign. [CW 5, 270]<\/p>\n

[73]\u00a0 What\u2019s the initiative excluded from the higher kerygma? \u00a0Something that goes outside the verbal, which is why it can\u2019t have much of a role in my book.\u00a0 It starts after we\u2019ve finished the Bible and accepted its invitation to drink [Revelation 22:17].\u00a0 But Zen & others say that it\u2019s a renewal of vision, the same world but seen in enlightenment.\u00a0 If so, the five modes go round in a circle.\u00a0 But that won\u2019t work: it just brings back the old cloven fiction.\u00a0 No: the conception of interpenetration can\u2019t be avoided.\u00a0 Although, once again, there could be a cyclical movement that represents ultimate failure, just as reincarnation is a cycle representing the failure to achieve the Chih-kai Bardo<\/strong> flash.\u00a0 Somewhere there has to be the notion that return to this world doesn\u2019t mean being hitched to a death-journey. [CW 5, 271]<\/p>\n

[167]\u00a0 Back to thematic stasis for a moment: there\u2019s a myth that one\u2019s life appears as a total vision at the moment of death or near-death: I have yet to confirm this in my own experience.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the Chih-kai Bardo<\/strong> business in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it fits here.\u00a0 The complete picture comes to us in a jigsaw puzzle box, and criticism is the art of putting it together. [CW 5, 288\u20139]<\/p>\n

[313]\u00a0 Chess in Bardo<\/strong>?\u00a0 Is it a modulation of dice in Bardo<\/strong>?\u00a0 A chess move is a decisive choice that may not abolish chance, but sets up a train of consequences that forces it to retreat into the shadows. [CW 5, 318]<\/p>\n

[376]\u00a0 The missed<\/em> moment, the peripeteia, which starts the cycle turning again, has fascinated me ever since I met it in the Chih-kai Bardo<\/strong>.\u00a0 It\u2019s in de Quincey, of course, and in FW [Finnegans Wake<\/em>], where I\u2019ve dealt with it. [\u201cCycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake<\/em>, Myth and Metaphor<\/em>, 356\u201374.]\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if the renounced quest belongs, though it\u2019s central in PU [Prometheus Unbound<\/em>]: in Macbeth the completing of a revenge quest sets time free, & I suppose Pr\u2019s [Prometheus\u2019s] renouncing of the curse on Jupiter that keeps Jupiter in business does the same.\u00a0 [CW 5, 331]<\/p>\n

[56]\u00a0 Evolution is not a myth, but designs constructed from it, like the onward-and-upward construct, are myths.\u00a0 They don\u2019t necessarily have to be scrapped for \u201cnew\u201d myths, but there\u2019s a progression like that of the hallucinations in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.\u00a0 [CW 6, 623]<\/p>\n

Notes on Romance (The Educated Imagination weblog Library)<\/strong><\/p>\n

. . . \u201cThe Life that dwells in Death\u201d (385) is the opposite of Life-in-Death, of course.\u00a0 Lona is said to have been a long time dead when she was killed by her mother-don\u2019t get that.\u00a0 The Little Ones all go and lay down and go by-by: harrowing of hell and recognition of holy family, more or less.\u00a0 Hero is sent out to go bury Lilith\u2019s hand; the result is a journey through Bardo<\/strong> where he\u2019s tempted in rather obvious ways.\u00a0 Meets an old man like the one in the Pardoner\u2019s Tale.<\/p>\n

[559]\u00a0 Vision of sudden death.\u00a0 The crucial thing here is what\u2019s expressed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the vision of Chih-kai Bardo<\/strong>: i.e., the instant of death is a crisis that only the profoundly disciplined yogi can meet; everybody foozles it and goes on around the cycle to rebirth.\u00a0 Not many men have to face the crucial trial that exposes their peculiar weakness.\u00a0 \u201cBut potentially, and in shadowy outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men\u2019s natures.\u201d Focusses on a type of anxiety dream, of lying down in front of a lion (cf. Dante\u2019s ducking away from the three beasts), \u201cthat dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden.\u201d \u201cIt is not without probability that in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the original transgression.\u201d Joyce knew this passage, according to Frank Budgen (there\u2019s also an account of a conversation with George III in the autobiographies that sounds a bit like the dialogue in the second chapter of FW [Finnegans Wake<\/em>]).\u00a0 Here the driver of the mail coach was asleep, and the crisis came partly for De Q, who was at the back of the coach and couldn\u2019t have grabbed the reins, and more particularly for the young man in the light calash who was taking his girl friend for a drive.\u00a0 In our inorganic society this is just the kind of highway fatality that we have by the hundreds every week; De Q [De Quincey] focuses on it without that kind of blurring.<\/p>\n

Bardo in Frye\u2019s Published Works <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries<\/em><\/strong> (CW 17)<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are constantly in a twilight world between life and death, like the world of Beckett, or a world between physical objects and mysterious forces of which the objects are symbols, like the world of Ionesco, or a world like the \u201cBardo\u201d world between death and rebirth which Yeats imported from the Orient. [CW 17, 134]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Journey as Metaphor\u201d in The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991<\/em> (CW 18)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This aspect of journeying forms the theme of the various sacred books written for the guidance of the dying, of which the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead are the best known.13<\/sup> The Egyptian journey was to a world very like this one, where anything dangerous or sinister could be warded off by spells or by a proclamation of one\u2019s virtue during life.\u00a0 This conception of a postdeath \u201cbetter land\u201d is ignored in the Old Testament, though it seems to have been well known in Greece, judging from Plato\u2019s attacks on it, and even in popular Jewish belief.\u00a0 But it was in Christianity that it made its most energetic revival, and a quasi\u2011material heaven very like the ancient Egyptian one was central to most forms of Christianity as late as the nineteenth century\u2014still is, of course, in some quarters.\u00a0 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, on the other hand, is set in the framework of the Buddhist belief in reincarnation.\u00a0 Here the recently dead soul is informed, by the reading of the book to him, that he will see a series, first of benevolent, then of wrathful, deities, and that as all these are hallucinations projected from his own mind, he should not commit himself to any belief in their substantial existence.\u00a0 In practically all cases the discarnate soul is assumed to wander in an intermediate world between death and birth known as \u201cBardo,\u201d until he is finally attracted to a female womb and enters it.\u00a0 Here again there is a continuing cycle within which all journeys take place.\u00a0 [CW 18, 416\u201317]<\/p>\n

The Great Code <\/em><\/strong>(CW 19)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anyone coming \u201ccold\u201d to the Book of Revelation, without context of any kind, would probably regard it as simply an insane rhapsody.\u00a0 It has been described as a book that either finds a man mad or else leaves him so.\u00a0 And yet, if we were to explore below the repressions in our own minds that keep us \u201cnormal,\u201d we might find very similar nightmares of anxiety and triumph.\u00a0 As a parallel example, we may cite the so\u2011called <\/em>Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the soul is assumed immediately after death to be going through a series of visions, first of peaceful and then of wrathful deities.\u00a0 A priest reads the book into the ear of the corpse, who is also assumed to hear the reader\u2019s voice telling him that all these visions are simply his own repressed mental forms now released by death and coming to the surface.\u00a0 If he could realize that, he would immediately be delivered from their power, because it is his own power. [The Great Code, <\/em>CW 19, 156\u20137]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye on Twentieth\u2011Century Literature<\/em><\/strong> (CW 29)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The idea of reincarnation came to Yeats from Oriental sources through theosophy. A much better account than he gives of the progress from death to rebirth is in The Tibetan Book of the Dead<\/em>, as it is called in the English translation, where the world inhabited is called Bardo.\u00a0 In the Japanese Noh plays, too, which so deeply affected Yeats\u2019s dramatic technique, the Bardo-world is the normal setting. [CW 29, 65\u20136]<\/p>\n

Dante puts the Garden of Eden at the apex of his Purgatory, and both Blake and Spenser also have a lower Paradise in their symbolism, associated with the moon and with the Bardo world of the dead and unborn, which is yet a hyperphysical world and a part of the cyclic order of nature. {CW 29, 69]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted in the Robert D. Denham Library In Mahayana Buddhism, bardo, a concept that dates back to the second century, is the in-between state, the period that connects the death of individuals with their following rebirth.\u00a0 The word literally means \u201cbetween\u201d (bar) \u201ctwo\u201d (do). \u00a0The Bardo Th\u00f6dol, or \u201cLiberation through Hearing in the In-Between State,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,46,82,103,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-esoterica","category-intensified-consciousness","category-myth","category-religion"],"yoast_head":"\nFrye on Bardo - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frye on Bardo - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Cross-posted in the Robert D. Denham Library In Mahayana Buddhism, bardo, a concept that dates back to the second century, is the in-between state, the period that connects the death of individuals with their following rebirth.\u00a0 The word literally means \u201cbetween\u201d (bar) \u201ctwo\u201d (do). \u00a0The Bardo Th\u00f6dol, or \u201cLiberation through Hearing in the In-Between State,\u201d […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-06-06T04:00:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/06\/Bardo_todol-0af47.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"439\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Bob Denham\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Bob Denham\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"72 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Bob Denham\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#\/schema\/person\/f0d6833dfde3f2793ecbbc6aacd83812\"},\"headline\":\"Frye on Bardo\",\"datePublished\":\"2010-06-06T04:00:50+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/\"},\"wordCount\":14374,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/06\/Bardo_todol-0af47.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Bob Denham\",\"Esoterica\",\"Intensified Consciousness\",\"Myth\",\"Religion\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/\",\"name\":\"Frye on Bardo - 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Denham Library In Mahayana Buddhism, bardo, a concept that dates back to the second century, is the in-between state, the period that connects the death of individuals with their following rebirth.\u00a0 The word literally means \u201cbetween\u201d (bar) \u201ctwo\u201d (do). \u00a0The Bardo Th\u00f6dol, or \u201cLiberation through Hearing in the In-Between State,\u201d […]","og_url":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/","og_site_name":"The Educated Imagination","article_published_time":"2010-06-06T04:00:50+00:00","og_image":[{"width":439,"height":300,"url":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/06\/Bardo_todol-0af47.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Bob Denham","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Bob Denham","Est. reading time":"72 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/"},"author":{"name":"Bob Denham","@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#\/schema\/person\/f0d6833dfde3f2793ecbbc6aacd83812"},"headline":"Frye on Bardo","datePublished":"2010-06-06T04:00:50+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/"},"wordCount":14374,"commentCount":0,"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/06\/Bardo_todol-0af47.jpg","articleSection":["Bob Denham","Esoterica","Intensified Consciousness","Myth","Religion"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/","url":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/06\/06\/bardo\/","name":"Frye on Bardo - 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