An obscure sense of possible sublimity

Today I finally schlooped my foot out of the mud of a historical-critical paper on 2 Kings 4 and immediately swung it out in front of me and splodged it down into a giant paper on imagination. Whenever you write a paper there's that blank screen moment when you have no idea how or where to begin. Both papers were like that. The first one, though, was more a question of getting the right number of books, fishing for the right information and presenting it in a coherent way. Not wildly exciting and no shortcuts, but doable.

The second one is a bigger hill to climb. I'm supposed to write about two treatments of imagination in theology and compare them. That's all. Just that. It's hard because the subject matter is slippery but also because it reflects back into my life in a distracting way. I start thinking about how I think about imagination, how doing this paper itself is like imagination because it feels like chaos without categories or process. I have to start without being able to imagine yet what it will look like at the end. Then I think about how I think about how I write papers. And on it goes, imagination all the way down. One of the papers is on mystical imagination and, as I've mentioned before, I often have a tenuous grip on reality, so I can only read so much before I have to run around outside for a while. I do find I have a bit of a penchant for the mystics and romantics, though, for their willingness to risk engaging with the uncapturable. Mary Warnock quotes Wordsworth and the more I read it the more I like it. Maybe I'll do some art tomorrow, keep my own imagination on side, listen for that ghostly language.

 ...for I would walk alone,

Under the quiet stars, and at that time

Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound 

To breathe an elevated mood, by form

Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,

If the night blackened with a coming storm,

Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

Or make their dim abode in distant winds.

Thence did I drink the visionary power;

And deem not profitless those fleeting moods

Of shadowy exultation: not for this,

That they are kindred to our purer mind

And intellectual life; but that the soul,

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt

Remembering not, retains an obscure sense

Of possible sublimity, whereto

With growing faculties she doth aspire,

With faculties still growing, feeling still

That whatsoever point they gain, they yet

Have something to pursue.

William Wordsworth ~  from The Prelude, Book second, School-Time