Relationships of Choice

In describing his views of heaven and hell, Swedenborg presents a world where people choose their own environments, but these are not, as it were, geographical. Souls select communities in which they feel at home. Therefore the condemned want to be in hell; the saved choose a heaven that suits them. Indeed we see souls, as it were, doing their real estate shopping by visiting these high communities. If they sense mutual agreement, they settle; if not they move on. There is, to be sure, also an intermediate region that reminded me of purgatory, a region where the initial sorting happens.

When I first encountered this view a German word presented itself spontaneously, die Wahlvervandschaften. The word literally means relationships of choice, but Goethe’s novel of that title is rendered as Elective Affinities, a novel I’d read, but only in part. A couple invite a man and a woman for a weekend, as it were, and wouldn’t you know it, the result is a kind of mixing of affinities. Goethe’s reference is to chemistry. In the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century chemists used “affinity” as the handy concept to explain why some elements attract each other while others won’t compound.

Reading that book, as soon as I discerned what would be coming down, I lost all interest. “Chemistry?” I muttered. “In that case there is no genuine choice. So why use that word?” A kind of determinism in elegant guise. Goethe’s novels are also incredibly longwinded, hence I’ve only ever sampled them. But I liked the title and the concept—but only if real choice is actually involved.

By contrast I’ve spent quite a lot of time—usually on walks—pondering Swedenborg’s projection. In that view the choice is real. We see such choice in this dimension too. Like clings to like, although what like means is often rather coarsely spun. Thus, for instance the wealthy live together, the artsy have their quarters. The poor endure their slums but, having endured them, feel more comfortable there. Freed of the weight of matter and its rude demands? In a realm where matter does not weigh us down, in a world where residence is not a matter principally of income and proximity to work—and the need for work seems also suspended and, per Swedenborg, is also a matter of choice—surely there people would then relate with those who genuinely please them. The Internet has created a new version of such odd, virtual spaces where we may cultivate Relationships of Choice. Blogs. Here they are, floating in the immaterial world of cyberspace. Each blog creates a kind of cultural environment readers are never compelled to visit. They do so at their choice.

Descent of an Angel

An angel descended to see if in truth a
A much-fabled region others had mentioned could
Really be found—where great orbs perpetually burned
And— gathered in clusters by magical pulls—they
Slowly, majestically, whirled and thus formed diamonds
And sparks that lit up domains of permanent dark.

In its descent the angel with pleasure noted
A fading of heavenly light as it now left
The infinite mansions behind and, so it seemed,
Approached a vast zone where darkness and light,
Stirred into twilight that seemed like a froth on the
Surface of oceans of impenetrable night.

“First the darkness,” thought the angel, “then the diamonds
Shall appear.” Into the darkness the angel now
Felt its magnificence gradually drawn until
The last faint light of home blinked out and true darkness
Came. But it was empty, empty, a vast neant.
No trace of sentience, of life, of thought. A void.

“Where are the sparks, where is the light—where have I erred?”
The angel thought. “My heavenly vision. Am I
Now blind?” The angel saw nothing, but God sees all.
The angel’s great wings swept right through whole clouds, whole swarms
Of galaxies, trillions of stars; its subtle
Substance could not perceive this coarser region’s touch.

Nor could it see or even guess that its great wings
Touched, interpenetrated the bodies of trillion
Lesser creatures on countless tiny balls, creatures
As blind, indeed, in their own way, as the great angel
was. Gazing up into their skies they also failed
To see a gorgeous angel in its flight distraught.

—————
To this, by way of commentary, two quotes from Swedenborg:

Since angels have no notion of time, they have a different idea of eternity from that which men of the earth have… There were angels who were admitted more nearly into my thoughts, and even into natural ones in which were many things from time and space; but because they then understood nothing, they suddenly withdrew; and after they had withdrawn, I heard them talking and saying that they had been in darkness. [Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg, ¶ 167-168]

The superiority of [the angels’] outer senses to those of the world is as that of sunshine to cloud darkness in the world, and as that of noonday light to evening shade; for the light of heaven, because it is Divine truth, enables the sight of angels to perceive and distinguish things the most minute. Their outer sight also corresponds to their inner sight, or to the understanding; for with angels the one sight flows into the other, so that they act as one; hence they have so great power of vision... But the rest of the senses with the angels are not so exquisite as the senses of seeing and of hearing, since seeing and hearing serve their intelligence and wisdom, but not the other senses, which if they were equally exquisite would take away the light and joy of their wisdom, and would bring in the enjoyment of pleasures of the various appetites and of the body, which obscure and weaken the understanding so far as they prevail—as is the case with men in the world, who are gross and stupid as to spiritual truths so far as they indulge the sense of taste and yield to the allurements of the sense of touch. [Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg, ¶ 462]

—————
And yet another note: An earlier version of this general idea may be found here. Michelle, whose sense of thematics is very keen, will point out that I sometimes put posts in the wrong places—and that this one belongs on Borderzone. It is here because I like to keep the poems all on one site.

An Angel, Unless on Assignment

An angel, unless on assignment
And straying off accustomed rounds, will
Stare into our world and there behold
A vast, indeed a dreary darkness
Unfathomable like an unlit
Morgue in which our own small earth is but
A mote of sin we do not see in
Our own eyes. Or so we’re told by that
Old Nordic Master, Emanuel
Swedenborg.

Why does the angel fail to see the
Piercing rays of sun, those vast flames that
As thinned out magnetism disturb our
Televised reality, our shows, our
Fun and games, and havoc play with rays
That bounce off satellites to feed an IPod
Here from one held over there half of a
Continent away? Why can’t the angel be
Like me, see what I see, and hear my
Sounds?

Old Swedenborg did not explain but
Spoke as one who just reports on what
He’s seen or had been told up in that
Lofty mansion by the very principals
Involved, by angels who at times held
Conversation with our sage and said
What they experienced, not what our
Ground-based speculators thought that an
Essence ought to see and hear from yonder
Station.

Aye, here’s the rub. As down below so
It is up above. We know the High
Or Its creation directly by
Experience, be we angels or
Mere ordinary guys and dolls, young,
Old, it doesn’t matter much because
The most refined and sharply honed
Of intellects must still cling to that
Ultimate, the base, that which we know
As our gold.

Relationships of Choice

Goethe once used Elective Affinities as the title of a novel (Die Wahlverwandschaften). The German literally means “relationships of choice,” but Goethe’s indirect reference was to an old way of describing why certain chemicals combined, and in English that phrase had been “elective affinities.”

I got to thinking about relationships in the context of culture, that maddening and fascinating, ubiquitous yet ephemeral phenomenon. And my thought ran thus: You have no choice in the culture where you’re born; and later, when choices do appear, they are greatly hemmed in by your total experience, so much so that leaving one culture for another is often a climactic experience—as exemplified especially by religious conversions. Goethe’s title came to me as I was walking along—inevitably because my mind produces associations in several languages. In Goethe my obedient brain found the two concepts I was thinking about, association and choice, neatly combined in into a single word.

This set me off on the sort of thing that can easily fill an hour’s ambling exercise. Language. The German tongue sticks to its roots—whereas English has been seduced by Rome—but indirectly by way of France: the Norman Invasion. Wahl and Verwandschaft are both good-old Germanic words; both elective and affinities have Latin roots. In Old English both relationship and affinity were expressed by the word gesibnes (in German, to this day, Sippe means blood-relationship and may come from the same root). But where does Verwandschaft come from? It comes from the root within it, Wand, or wall; those related occupy the same walled enclosure. For folks like me an Old English dictionary is a Godsend. The one I use is here. It tells me that the wall is used in the same way in Old English. The word was weall. Thucidides strongly suggests that walls and wealth helped produce each other—but weall has no link to weal, so far as I can discover, but the Old English for commonwealth was a Genæwela holding echoes of the current German word for community, Gemeinde. I wish I had a dictionary for Althochdeutsch as well…

Goethe’s aim in using the phrase was to ponder sexual and love relations in a context both chemical and transcending that level—and we talk of “chemistry” between two people, a phrase that, to the best of my knowledge, arose quite recently. Goethe’s contemporary, Swedenborg, saw this pattern in the heavenly reaches beyond. He said that souls up there gathered into communities by affinity—as did the damned in hell; both did so of inner choice. And we recognize the same thing in nature when we say that birds of a feather flock together. As above, so below. Swedenborg was 61 when Goethe was born (in 1749); Goethe was 23 when Swedenborg died (in 1772).

Marching along—it was gorgeous day today, cool, sunny, a light wind—I was thinking: Culture is another instance of being “walled in together,” as it were, but the choice is left to our genes. But within a culture, later, when our choice expands, we select our association by elective affinities. And if Swedenborg really did converse with angels, we are likely to do a great deal more of that after we shuffle off this mortal coil. Did I just say coil? Well, let’s not go there beyond saying that it also comes from the French...