Tim Lilburn, Numinous Seditions

Why do we write the way that we do, and should climate change affect the way that we write? 

In his introduction to Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, his collection of linked essays, Tim Lilburn demurs: "I am not a scholar, as I have admitted in previous books, but as I like to think, a panic-struck citizen who happens to have a library card" (p.ix). He goes on to say on the same page (and occasionally thereafter) that the essays "grow out of conversations," develop from "discussions with climate change scientists," and so on, in effect claiming space in the public square rather than in academe.

But the thing is, Lilburn is trying to generate an overlapping recovery and/or reinstantiation of contemplative culture adapted from Plato, neo-Platonists, medieval Scholasticism, and Sufism, one that he's trying to blend with learnings from the places where he has lived, primarily SENĆOŦEN. That's a lot to juggle. Protest about scholarly qualifications if he must, but this book lives at the intersection of multiple seriously demanding fields of study.

And so Lilburn writes with spiky verve. Early in his first chapter, for example, Lilburn explains that metaphor can't be merely decorative in truly creative activity, though "explains" isn't quite the right term for this sort of phrasing:

"Without architectonic intention, metaphor fashioning, following a non-reductive homological intuition, forms surprisingly heterogeneous wholes. These appear as by-blows of the attempt to elucidate emotional states and the apperception of haecceities" (p.3).

This opening chapter, I should say, lays out the rationale for carefully contemplative experience and analysis of the world, of texts, and of each other. Lilburn has taken on the lessons that his fellow travellers Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst laid out in their alternatively incisive and crushing little book Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, insisting that the climate crisis calls us to think in specific ways, toward specific ends, rather than to flail about in the realm of more or less activist reaction. That's a powerful and properly human response to crisis, one that in general I sympathize with (even though I must ashamedly admit that my own limited actions derive mostly from depression or despair, and virtually not at all from principled philosophic analysis).

If you stick with Numinous Seditions, though, you just might end up on a path informed productively by ascetical activism and post-Holocaust theology to help make sense of the way forward under climate change, and Lilburn sees that as a very good thing:

"[These] disciplines ... will do nothing in a widespread sense; they, together with practices associated with autochthonicity and the epistemology implicit in the lyric poem, however, can help build an inner stance, a dispositional architecture, which may give us a better chance of holding truthfully and justly the weight of the new ontological and political sadness stealing upon us and may help us engage the sensibility within this novel interior state in colloquy" (p.10).

By singling out phrasing like this, I'm not making fun of Lilburn, though it may seem like I am. These complex words aren't meaningless on their own, and the accumulation of such words is neither meaningless nor mere performance. He's set himself a remarkably challenging task, and he's pursuing that task with tremendous determination through a cultural, ecological, and educational environment that's easily said to be in direct opposition to such phrasing -- or such care about precision, for that matter. There aren't ready synonyms for most of these words, so any form of "what he's really saying is..." would be inevitably a form of translation, which would necessitate structural changes of many kinds (the sequence of ideas and phrases, the forms of verbs, the choice of subject for each verb, and so on). If he's going to accomplish his self-assigned task, these are the words, and this is the process.

It's just that unequivocally, I'd say that much of this book is written in a private language, accessible to a select few, though appealing to many more (such as those who've loved Lilburn's well-received poetry, or his well-attended public talks). And that's fine, but that's not the only thing going on in Numinous Seditions.

Among other things, Lilburn is trying to generate what he goes on to call "philosophical moments, moments of grace, gaps interrupting crushing reductionism" (p.19), which involves distinguishing between contemplative pedagogical practice and confessional practice (p.38). As Lilburn puts it, he's seeking ways to help people into contemplative attention, into "what happens to you when you are knocked to the ground by some astonishment" (p.59), an experience that he later rephrases as "You fall apart before some arresting thing, some terrible beauty, and you empty" (p.62). This has the potential for expanding this approach to a wider audience, one that might be able to imagine a different kind of activist response to the climate crisis, so there's a broadly public intention here.

When you're writing in what amounts to a private language, though, you're writing for a private audience, even when it's being published in a book like Numinous Seditions, from a significant academic press, and even if you keep gesturing toward casual readers.

As much as I love some of this book's moments, and as deeply as I share Lilburn's commitments toward contemplative attention (even if "look at this amazing bit in this book!" is more my teaching schtick, rather than Lilburn's phrasing), and as thoroughly as I've dog-eared my copy of this book, I'm endlessly distracted by this book's prose and by its simultaneous inaccessibility and protestations about the common good.

This makes me a small person, maybe, but so be it, because I just can't with this book that I can't help but admire regardless.