The Mind Is a Collection. Sean SilverЧитать онлайн книгу.
occurs, for it is where sensory perceptions of material things are handed over to the work of the understanding. It is the stage where metaphor is made possible, where sensory rudiments are witnessed by the mind and sublimated into ideas.123 But there is another way, in poetic practice, in which imagination emerges as the antonym for metaphor understood as abstraction, for “imagination” is more generally understood as the faculty that summons up images in service of the concepts they are made to represent. This is what Akenside and his contemporaries called “embodiment”: the idea is “embodied” in an image. Imagination in this sense denotes the reverse work of metaphor, providing a return road to sensory experience; it for this very reason suggests a set of rules and practices for poetry and the arts, a way of imagining expression as the distribution of images in service of a pattern or design. It is this reverse vector that made Locke, despite his distrust of fancy, an important figure to poets and painters of the Augustan mode. Locke’s Essay links a wide range of practicing poets, painters, authors, and artists of all sorts, each of whom differently agreed that the materials of sense are, in the end, the stuff of creative expression.
Akenside’s longest poems, what he called his epics, draw directly from the empiricist tradition elaborated by Milton, Locke, Pope, and, most important, Joseph Addison (Exhibits 12 and 13). Aside from standing next to Addison on the library shelf, Akenside’s inheritance is signaled by the titles of his two longest, best-known compositions: The Pleasures of Imagination (1745) and its recast version with the slightly altered title, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). Each differently owes intellectual debts to Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays of the same name—so much so that Akenside, despite explicit homage, was more than once accused of plagiarizing details from Addison’s essay.124 But it would be hard to know how else Akenside might proceed—for Akenside was all along a poet who thought of himself as an able curator of images, who worked by fleshing out ideas. The nineteenth-century critic John Aikin remarks that, if Akenside was “an original writer,” he “merit[s]” that title “by the expansion of the plan” of Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” “and by enriching its illustrations from the stores of philosophy and poetry.”125 Indeed, in this sense, Akenside extends a principle of borrowing that, we will see, was a keynote of Addison’s poetics; as Addison remarked, and as Akenside exemplified, “Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable Turn.”126 Akenside was working with and through a theory of imagination as a curatorial function—the imagination as collecting in order to recollect objects of sense.127 Take, for instance, the clearest exposition of what, exactly, the imagination is, from his Pleasures of the Imagination:
For to the brutes
Perception and the transient boons of sense
Hath fate imparted: but to man alone
Of sublunary beings was it given
Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers
At leisure to review; with equal eye
To scan the passion of the stricken nerve
Or the vague object striking: to conduct
From sense, the portal turbulent and loud,
Into the mind’s wide palace one by one
The frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms,
And question and compare them.128
At the moment that he theorizes the imagination as a storehouse of ideas, and the human act of aesthetic appreciation (and judgment) as an imaginative act of “review,” Akenside recalls from his resources a material metaphor to realize it. This is the basic pattern of his poem. His basic move is to “imagine” abstracts, a habit that at times develops a metronomic regularity. It is perhaps fair to say that his thoughts on the imagination remain hopelessly abstract until he lights upon the “palace” as a visual or spatial metaphor to recollect his argument, returning the abstract idea to its material rudiments.129 The form Akenside chooses—the mind as palace—is a conventional one, husbanded perhaps from Locke’s “presence room” (see Exhibit 1), the three-turreted palace of Spenser’s Temperance, Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Exhibit 14), Adam’s remarks on fancy in Paradise Lost (Exhibit 2), or any number of treatises on the operation of the soul (see, for example, Exhibits 4 and 11). The palace, presence chamber, throne room, and so on, have multiply stood for the relationship between reason and the fancy—so much so that the image becomes by Akenside’s moment a commonplace, indeed a commonplace that Akenside expected his readers to visualize while reading. Perhaps Akenside is repeating a poetic technique he learned from Raphael, “delineating” his “spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” This pattern in any case emerges for Akenside as a consistent conceptual trope, a coordinating condition governing the operations of imagination; the imagination under its curatorial aspect is marked by its return to a collection of ideal objects—as they rise or are arranged under the poet’s review.
For Locke, metaphor governs the progress of sensations to abstracts; for Akenside, it governs the movement whereby abstracts are returned to sensation. The “complicated resemblance existing between … the material and immaterial worlds,” as Akenside elsewhere avers, “is the foundation of metaphor,” and in his poetics metaphor itself is repeatedly put to the task of imagining this resemblance.130 The most embracing of these images is, for Akenside, the “palace” with its ideal objects on review. Naturally, then, when Akenside encounters an epistemological crux, he follows the path worn by Raphael; he follows the route of metaphor back to the ground of intellection, tracing his way from difficult questions of process back to images drawn from the material world. He returns concepts, via the return-route of metaphor, to their material affordances. This is the great power of his poetry, which seeks sensory, bodily marked experience as the proper site for intellectual work. He therefore rediscovers the subterranean tendency of Locke’s epistemology to insist on the material origins of intellect, indeed on mind and reason rising into being simply from the hoarding up of material impressions. So, for instance, when Akenside offers a portrait of a young poet, we receive a virtual summary of Locke’s theory of the mind as the entelechy of its material impressions, his story of how the powers of the intellect and its self-awareness emerge out of the accrual of ideas. The young poet gathers and retains images no less accurately than “th’ expanse / of living lakes” reflects “the bord’ring shade and sun-bright heav’ns” or than “the sculptur’d gold … keeps the graver’s lively trace.”131 These are clearly unequal examples, held together only by Akenside’s syntax—but taken together they offer images of the mind’s image-making and -storing capacities; combined, they offer a description of the “mixt treasures” over which the “child of fancy oft in silence bends,” and the very working of the mind as an organ of storage and manipulation. With the collection of such images, “the mind / Feels her young nerves dilate: the plastic pow’rs / Labour for action,” rising to self-awareness of its autotelic capacities in an obvious rehearsal of Locke’s remarks on judgment as an emergent property of the mind’s collection of ideas.
Like Locke’s ideal man, Akenside’s poet is limited to the sorting and variation of the “diff’rent forms” summoned up from memory—or, Akenside suggests, spontaneously offered up by memory itself. It is in this sense that “imagine” provides abstraction’s opposite. As a poet, Akenside suggests, reposes in the company of the images internal to his mind, a “design / Emerges” from the hurry of phantasms, and he “breathes / The fair conception … / Into its proper vehicle.” This provides a new, fully realized world of sensory rudiments, remediated in paper, paint, or clay, becoming “to eyes or ears / An object ascertained,” once again to be witnessed by a new observer. As readers, we arrive late. “Line by line, / And feature after feature,” Akenside insists, “we refer / To that sublime exemplar whence [poetry] stole / Those animating charms,” the “conception”