Jun
24
This has a title now.
June 24, 2008 |
What do you do with an imagination that can bring a vision before your eyes that you cannot inhabit?
For reference, the five Milton fascinations: beginnings, loss, delay, ambition and choice.
We can all imagine things. Even the sadly unimaginative can see the ways the future might go. When you’re trying to figure out what you could do, the first thing you do is picture the ways different things could happen, from the best to the worst. So there’s temptation, right there, hand in hand with ambition, because you can’t try to do something tempting without a little ambition (and the opposite holds true). Loss, of course, is built in: make one choice and you lose all the others. Delay, because no matter how instant your choice is, the ramifications play out slowly, and you’ll always be waiting for the last ripple. And because it’s so easy to stall and stall when it comes to fully putting yourself behind a choice. Beginnings, well, every new choice gives you another beginning.
So with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” there’s that division at work. Milton’s not clearly saying one’s better than the other, even if it seems that way at first. Whichever he values more, well, he wrote both poems, so he obviously values them both highly. Even some sort of compromise can’t work, because you can’t consciously set aside time to live the active life and time to live the contemplative life. Both of them require a little flow–knowing self-consciously that you’re doing one or the other will keep you from doing it wholly. But you can’t just glide along, either. So what do you do? I think you have to figure that out by living. Maybe by saying that I’m buying in a little more to the “L’Allegro” view of things than the “Il Penseroso” view. Some things, though, you really need to learn by experience. You can watch someone whipping cream or creaming butter and sugar into an icing and you can learn to judge visually when those things are ready, but it’s much easier once you’ve held the reins and learned how it feels. Same with roasting a chicken; you learn, by doing, when to roll your eyes that the plastic timer hasn’t popped and pull the chicken out anyway, perfectly done. I don’t believe you could learn that just by thinking very hard (although I realize that isn’t the full extent of the contemplative life).
My youth biases me in this case, because I am fervent to get doing. But Milton seems to think that that’s valuable too, in its place. And I have definitely experienced stretches of the contemplative life, too. The division just seems to be something imposed, rather than organic; we can recognize these separately, but we can’t live entirely in one or the other.
This mentions the statues Michelangelo built exemplifying the Contemplative and Active lives, if you do a find for “contemplative” it should lead you there. Doesn’t say they were modeled after ways to live after Christ, but that’s what my teacher said, and I believe what it said in my art history book.
This talks a little about the Martha/Mary division.
And this just seems to fit with today, although I don’t know that Milton would approve.
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