IMITATIO DEI


        Imitatio dei precedes imitatio Christi for the finest spirits, including Jesus himself who, in Mark, self-effacingly, chided someone for calling him “good,” saying “only God is good.”  
        That total modesty made Mallarmé (and his disciple, Joyce) seek anonymity.  But the zero-one or cognate one-many paradox, at the heart of Creation and creation (sacred/natural in birth or artistic) results in however-reluctant expression.  Out of his purest impulse, the artist will sometimes repudiate it, as Rimbaud did and Mallarmé admired him for doing, and Tolstoy later did.  Camus’ writer-figure, in The Plague, burns his manuscript to stop being a plague carrier.  A way out of the dilemma is in Abraham’s ordeal on Mount Moriah where the purism is not forsaken but miraculously turns (“pivots”) into on-going life.  If we schematize this drama as vertical/horizontal (space/time, etc.) we see its equivalent in the Platonic and Aristotelian concept of “decorum” which Aristotle calls “foursquare” (Nichomachean Ethics, Book I, Ch. 10) and is the pattern of Western thought (e.g. Mallarmé’s “symphonic equation” in Music and Letters, Einstein’s space/time).
        A sort of authentic, a-rational “cake and eat it”…
        In his Poe-Sonnet, Mallarmé illustrates the problem in the famous line “Such as into himself eternity changes him.”  The essentially unrecognized genius, in time, becomes his fulfillment in a sort of ghostly inspiring and revered son-figure, like Jesus, Lincoln, Mallarmé himself, Vermeer, Van Gogh.
        When a normal youth suffers from adolescent pains which make him “stick up” or “stick out” (as his penis does too) in the eyes of a nubile woman, she invites him “home,” as sperm disappears into ovum.
        “Never did Roland or Oliver undergo such combats.  They triumphed by fighting, but to vanquish the guardian of love…a man must humble himself.  Suffering is his flag-bearer…” (Thibaud de Champagne, Chanson, XXXIV).
        This is the theme of the coeval Romance of the Rose.  A man may joust (the thorn serving the rose) first but then has to bow down self-effacingly and hide behind a bouquet.  If conception results, a child of his spirit/flesh will be born and survive him and his self-effacing paternal modesty as in the case of Poe, but a human child—flesh as well as spirit—as offered to the ghostly son-figure of the poet noted above, whose only flesh is words or an image.
        A Joseph, priestling, shy budding artist, Hamlet may elude the human conception in the name of the spiritual and artistic dream and have “the child gotten on the muse,” (Montaigne) or some other comparably inspiring posthumous figure.  He imitates God in his self-effacement, and his Son is an on-going spiritual presence in time.  But often the Son is seen as a rival when the later individual person seeks a new Testament of his own, as Mallarmé (in his “Autobiography”) clearly did, and many others did, who, like Goethe, George Eliot, Robert Frost, and Faulkner,  Mallarmé and Joyce look back notably to the unmediated original source in the Old Testament.
        Many others in our time move to a similar position (as the Founders and deists generally did) but more Judeo-Christian, i.e. in terms of the built-in dilemma cited above, they also respect the powerful presence of the Son, as I do.  That is a very promising development, especially now in terms of survival before the jihadist threat.
        Meanwhile the enormous, “obese” vulgar show of our time is the antithesis of the finest Judeo-Christian culture.  Are we doomed?
        When Mélisande dies at the end of Debussy’s exquisite opera, the old Arkël remarks that “the human soul wants to go away in silence.”  Like Mallarmé, who spoke of the all-importance of the white spaces and joined Keats in “unheard melodies,” Debussy composed with silences above all, as he stated in Monsieur Croche.
        The journalistic fuss at the death of Verlaine bothered Mallarmé who wrote of him “The tomb demands an immediate silence.”  Later, like Poe’s, the true spirit would rise from death.
As moving as Mahler can be, I suffer through his pompous closes, or Dvorák’s, or anyone’s.  Leonard Bernstein could be sweetly intimate and irritatingly egoistic on the podium and elswhere.
Not only in heterosexual love, but altogether, good women are it and judge us. I do homage to young mothers with their little children in the park, and they know it and smile back at the grandfatherly passer-by.
        Gruff Flaubert was selfishly celibate.  But he looked at his niece Caroline carrying her baby and said “Elle est dans le vrai” (“She is in truth”).  In this mood, encouraged by George Sand, he wrote his best pages, Un Coeur Simple.
        The finest writing is done in obscurity, often by women:  Alice James (the unrecognized invalid sister of Henry and William), Emily Dickinson, ladies and gentlemen in the coerced and humiliated South (Eudora Welty, Flannery, O’Connor, Faulkner), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, imprisoned men (Charles d’Orléans, Cervantes), bed-ridden ones like Proust.  Or just in very modest circumstances, such as ghettos, black communities, small towns.
        The vulgar promiscuity and hypertrophy of all around us plus all the life-sucking gadgets, the spidery death-trap of the Web, are not it at all.
What can bring it back?
        Meanwhile, we ought to have the minimal spirit to fight the hordes of jihadists who would obliterate all of the above and the people too.  But that’s not sure.  Too many of the educated are self-important and oblivious.