Active Mind

Nella Cotrupi in Northrup Frye and the Poetics of Process draws attention to Frye's discussion of Blake.

In Fearful Symmetry, Frye used Blake's distinction between the visonary 'Hallelujah-Chorus' perception of the sun and its more prosaic, rationalistic reception as a round shining disc or 'guinea-sun' in order to explore the ethical reasons for privileging the former mental mode of operation over the latter.

On the next page, she cites Frye himself.

We see the guinea-sun automatically: seeing the Hallelujah-Chorus sun demands a voluntary and conscious imaginative effort; or rather, it demands an exuberantly active mind which will not be a quiescent blank slate. The imaginative mind, therefore, is the one which has realized its own freedom and understood that perception is self-development.

Cotrupi draws parallels between Frye's approach to Blake and beyond to Vico's principle of verum factum.

For some reason when I re-read in isolation the quotation from Frye concerning the distinction between the two types of sun, I kept envisioning a fowl and not a round coin. My guinea was a species of phoenix.

Meaning is indeed made. And memory influences perception. And imagination plays with memory and meaning in an exuberant and active fashion — sometimes by being caught up in the details and the prosaic.

And so for day 752
03.01.2009