It seems to me that what you're talking about is implicit in the distinction that even materialists seem happy to make between "craft" and "art". But it's always the Muse singing, not the poet. Or as Steiner more prosaically puts it, our brains are merely buckets being filled with the stuff of spirit.
Are our creations "real"? Better define "reality"! But, "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth", as Camus and many others have said - and I feel that there must be degrees of "reality" - and that the realer our creations are, the nearer they attend to the truth.
I think about this sort of thing all the time, and just read Eric Wargo's From Nowhere: Artists, Writers and the Precognitive Imagination, but it gets stuck in an incoherent theory of retro-causation. You probably have read Real Presences by George Steiner (I have only bought it), but if you haven't here's Malcolm Guite being gobsmacked by it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xBq08-6OdE. (Steiner reversing his position on deconstruction and language and the presence of God)Phillip Pullman, in Daemons, describes inspiration "...that somewhere there's an inexhaustible source of strength, truth, meaning, encouragement, blessedness. It feels like being blessed. Something has come from somewhere to refresh and strengthen me..." And here's Mark Doty, in "Source" describing landscape and inspiration but from a secular viewpoint.(scroll down, 2nd poem http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/doty/onlinepoems.htm)
The English dept at SF State long ago was populated by wild eccentric poets and lovers of literature, and William Dickey told me that when Auden died he grabbed his greatest enemy in the dept saying "The great God Pan is Dead," and held an afternoon-long reading on the lawn. My favorite, an Oxford Blake scholar, Francis Gretton, thought the 5 Keats odes corresponded to Elizabeth Kubler Ross' stages of death and dying. Now State is, as so many places are, a wasteland of critical race theory and wokedom. If you decide to teach a course on Dylan Thomas I'd be in immediately. I'm waiting for my used copy of the collected to come slow boat from the descending-into-fascism Germany as my own is in storage far away, but those articles on Thomas were like a fountain.
'Real Presences' is one of my favorite books--and somebody just recommended Wargo to me. And I love that story from SFS--not a lot of English professors still working have much love for literature, alas.
Yes, that place, that place into which we reach and pull out images, words, poems, songs, stories, paintings… just as a point of reference, let us for the moment, call the place (nicking a place-name from Dylan Thomas) Jarvis Valley. Through each our divine Imaginations we wander through Jarvis, yet its topography varies from one traveler to another. I can only conclude said “divine Imagination” is not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon, but one peculiar to each unique, individual soul, and all souls are needed to perceive and express all of Jarvis Valley’s (perhaps infinite) facets. We might, after comparing, conclude we are indeed reaching into the same Jarvis Valley, but the divine Imagination which makes such travel possible also provides us varied revelations. I imagine Jarvis Valley as one multi-faceted jewel, requiring individual souls to express each facet. Or something like that.
If you wanted to say that mythopoetic worlds exist in some sense prior to their authors ‘creating them’ (Tolkien for example), you need to decenter the subjective approach to reality. You need some view where the world gives expression to itself. Not the empirical world of infinite facts but the world as something like Being, the archetypes, the Ideas, something like that (the cosmos). Then the structure of myth emerges to give expression to that (emerges from the cosmos, not the individual mind). To an extent that will be culture or individual dependent but with the notion that the fundamental structure is given (hence all possible worlds exist potentially within that structure), then it gains a particular expression in a culture or by a poet. So, to the degree that middle earth gives expression to Being/archetypse/etc it is a true myth and always existed in way that the framework of myth always existed, but gained its idiosyncratic aspects from the life and experience of Tolkien. Would something like that make sense ?
It seems to me that what you're talking about is implicit in the distinction that even materialists seem happy to make between "craft" and "art". But it's always the Muse singing, not the poet. Or as Steiner more prosaically puts it, our brains are merely buckets being filled with the stuff of spirit.
Are our creations "real"? Better define "reality"! But, "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth", as Camus and many others have said - and I feel that there must be degrees of "reality" - and that the realer our creations are, the nearer they attend to the truth.
I think about this sort of thing all the time, and just read Eric Wargo's From Nowhere: Artists, Writers and the Precognitive Imagination, but it gets stuck in an incoherent theory of retro-causation. You probably have read Real Presences by George Steiner (I have only bought it), but if you haven't here's Malcolm Guite being gobsmacked by it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xBq08-6OdE. (Steiner reversing his position on deconstruction and language and the presence of God)Phillip Pullman, in Daemons, describes inspiration "...that somewhere there's an inexhaustible source of strength, truth, meaning, encouragement, blessedness. It feels like being blessed. Something has come from somewhere to refresh and strengthen me..." And here's Mark Doty, in "Source" describing landscape and inspiration but from a secular viewpoint.(scroll down, 2nd poem http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/doty/onlinepoems.htm)
The English dept at SF State long ago was populated by wild eccentric poets and lovers of literature, and William Dickey told me that when Auden died he grabbed his greatest enemy in the dept saying "The great God Pan is Dead," and held an afternoon-long reading on the lawn. My favorite, an Oxford Blake scholar, Francis Gretton, thought the 5 Keats odes corresponded to Elizabeth Kubler Ross' stages of death and dying. Now State is, as so many places are, a wasteland of critical race theory and wokedom. If you decide to teach a course on Dylan Thomas I'd be in immediately. I'm waiting for my used copy of the collected to come slow boat from the descending-into-fascism Germany as my own is in storage far away, but those articles on Thomas were like a fountain.
'Real Presences' is one of my favorite books--and somebody just recommended Wargo to me. And I love that story from SFS--not a lot of English professors still working have much love for literature, alas.
Yes, that place, that place into which we reach and pull out images, words, poems, songs, stories, paintings… just as a point of reference, let us for the moment, call the place (nicking a place-name from Dylan Thomas) Jarvis Valley. Through each our divine Imaginations we wander through Jarvis, yet its topography varies from one traveler to another. I can only conclude said “divine Imagination” is not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon, but one peculiar to each unique, individual soul, and all souls are needed to perceive and express all of Jarvis Valley’s (perhaps infinite) facets. We might, after comparing, conclude we are indeed reaching into the same Jarvis Valley, but the divine Imagination which makes such travel possible also provides us varied revelations. I imagine Jarvis Valley as one multi-faceted jewel, requiring individual souls to express each facet. Or something like that.
If you wanted to say that mythopoetic worlds exist in some sense prior to their authors ‘creating them’ (Tolkien for example), you need to decenter the subjective approach to reality. You need some view where the world gives expression to itself. Not the empirical world of infinite facts but the world as something like Being, the archetypes, the Ideas, something like that (the cosmos). Then the structure of myth emerges to give expression to that (emerges from the cosmos, not the individual mind). To an extent that will be culture or individual dependent but with the notion that the fundamental structure is given (hence all possible worlds exist potentially within that structure), then it gains a particular expression in a culture or by a poet. So, to the degree that middle earth gives expression to Being/archetypse/etc it is a true myth and always existed in way that the framework of myth always existed, but gained its idiosyncratic aspects from the life and experience of Tolkien. Would something like that make sense ?
Makes sense to me!