How Intuition Freshens the World

Poetic insight is the escape pod out of our technopoly

Allow me to begin today by thanking all of those who recently joined The Comic Muse as paid subscribers. Given that most of my posts are free to all at this point, I especially appreciate the financial support of those generous enough to support my writing when they can still enjoy almost all of it for free. Your contributions help make this leisurely and joyful endeavor even more leisurely and joyful. Thank you!

---

The world shows up for us according to the attention we give it.

As Iain McGilchrist says, “Attention is how our world comes into being.”[1]

This is not the silly thought that we “create” reality for ourselves. No, the world is there. But we experience it differently according to the mode of our attention.

McGilchrist gives the example of Talisker Mountain on the Isle of Skye in Scotland where he lives. For the ancient Picts, the mountain meant shelter and the home of the gods. For 19^th-century geologists, the mountain was a phenomenon of basalt formation. Which is the real mountain? To an important degree it depends on one’s attention.

We often face the day in what psychologist Dr. Greg Bottaro calls “threat mode.”[2] We see everything as a threat, and our nervous system—not caring whether it is a real life-or-death threat or not—responds accordingly. Constricted chest, racing pulse, feelings of anxiety. The world shows up for us as threat because we attend to it as threat.

Often, threat mode is experienced at the same time as the “doing mode,” the mode of seeing life merely as a list of things to be done (the literal meaning of the Latin future passive participle: agenda). And the agenda (“I’ve got to do this and this and this, etc.”) just is the threat.

Nothing wrong with being in threat mode, of course, if there really is danger near. Nothing wrong with being in doing mode when you need to get things done.

But our spirits demand more. We yearn above all to be in “being mode,” where we can luxuriate in things and activities that are, simply and beautifully, present and for their own sake.

Before his final rapier duel with Laertes, Hamlet shifts into being mode. Hamlet’s friend Horatio tries to stop Hamlet from participating in the duel, fearing he will lose. But Hamlet will have none of it. He thinks he can win, but he also seems to have some intimation that his death is near. He says to Horatio:

Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be. (Hamlet 5.2 197-202 in the Arden Shakespeare edition).

Hamlet here echoes Matthew 10:29-31:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

Placing himself in the arms of Providence, knowing himself to be of more value to the Father than many sparrows, Hamlet is at peace. He urges Horatio to follow him out of threat mode into being mode by telling him to “Let be.”

Life in our technopoly[3] encourages a mode of attention that focuses on what both McGilchrist and Matthew Crawford, in his indispensable book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2015), call “representations.” We experience reality not in its original presence, but packaged in attention-grabbing digital structures:

“Ours is now a highly mediated existence in which, sure enough, we increasingly encounter the world through representations. These are manufactured for us. Human experience has become a highly engineered and therefore manipulable thing” (Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, ix-x).

The Instagram profile. The exhausted movie franchise. The made-for-social-media presidential campaign.       

These highly engineered, “hyperpalatable” (Crawford’s word) representations of reality tempt us to liquidate our attention in constant doing: scrolling, following, “content” creation, “platform” building. All of this doing is often for the sake of a parody of the being mode: a dull “buzzy” sense of being lightly entertained and NMO (“Not Missing Out”).

But the being mode is no mere titillation. It is a refreshment of the spirit. A reveling in the real.

The act of attention at the heart of the “being mode” is intuition—alternatively, insight or what I like to call a “sighting.”

Intuition happens not by the mind going through a series of steps, as in a geometrical proof, but when we see the whole in a new way.[4]

In the Republic Plato’s Socrates defines philosophy as love for the whole. To love the whole philosophically is to seek knowledge of the essential that covers all the particulars. When you intuit what beauty in itself is, you know, in a sense, all the beautiful particulars that participate in it. You “see” the whole of beauty.

But the philosopher is not so much interested in particulars, beautiful or not. He wants the essential that transcends the particulars.

Yet the world of particulars—this beautiful day, this beautiful person—the world that we can sense, that we can feel with our memory, our imagination, and our emotions, is the world that engages the heart. A philosophical intuition, by contrast, is on a purely abstract plane. Which explains why philosophy leaves so many people cold.

Here is a paradox. To see the whole in a new way, or for the first time, we need an intuition of the essential. To intuit the essential, however, is to leave behind the particulars that inspire us to seek the essential in the first place.

Enter the poet (and the artist generally).

What the poet does is accommodate both of our natural desires: intuition of the essential and love of the particular.

The poem, in other words (and again, all art), intuits the essential as it is in the particular.

The poem helps us see the whole in a fresh way, not in the mode of pure intellectual transcendence, but incarnated in images of particulars.

With all this in mind, let us luxuriate in the being mode by enjoying the following poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), a most appropriate poem for this time of year…

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

The poet imagines little Margaret, in grieving the fall of autumn leaves from the trees (“Goldengrove unleaving”), experiencing, perhaps for the first time, the pang of loss, the pang of our temporal condition, the pang of death. Margaret grieves because the beautiful Goldengrove that she loves is passing away.

Yet Margaret will grow older, and as she does her heart will grow colder to the poignancy of falling leaves in autumn. Margaret will “fall” into the attentional habits of the doing mode and the threat mode. She will forget how to see, and thus fail to understand, the evidence of loss and death all about her.

She will not even be able to “spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”

But that is not the end of the poem. Something will happen to freshen Margaret’s attention. What is it?

An intuition.

The poet prophesies that Margaret, one day, will not only weep (reengage emotionally with the passing nature of this world), but she will know why (comprehend intellectually or philosophically the essential meaning of mortality).

But the adult Margaret’s intuition of the meaning of mortality will be a poet’s, rather than a philosopher’s, intuition. She will not leave the particulars behind, but see the essential as it is incarnated in particulars, and so in a way that engages the heart.

Hopkins describes Margaret’s act of intuition thus:

“What heart heard of, ghost guessed.”

Her heart once more will feel the pang of loss, even as her soul or her intellect (her “ghost”) “guesses,” or intuits, the meaning of this loss.

So, what does Margaret’s heart hear and her ghost guess? What is the substance of her intuition? The poet delivers it in the final, haunting couplet:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Her insight is that she, like the Goldengrove unleaving, is just as mortal as everything else in this world. She was “born for,” in the sense of “born into,” a blighted or “fallen” existence. The leaves of autumn mark the fall not only of the Goldengrove, but of man himself, and thus of Margaret.

A tragic ending to the poem, yes, but fortunately not the ending of the human story. Margaret’s catastrophe is capable of becoming what J.R.R. Tolkien calls “eucatastrophe,” a “good catastrophe,” a catastrophe that can be joyously reversed. But that is another episode for another day.

For now, let us wonder at the new mode of attention that we can achieve through poetic intuition, an intuition that takes us out of threat mode and doing mode, that freshens our outlook by helping us see the meaning, the essential, in this passing world of particulars that we inhabit—and of which we, like Margaret, are one.

---

[1] See McGilchrist’s interview with Unherd, “We Are Living in a Deluded World,” available on YouTube.

[2] Dr. Greg Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time (Wellspring, 2018).

[3] “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 48.

[4] See also Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, vol. I (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), especially Chapters 17-19.

---

I’ve been enjoying doing several podcast interviews lately. This past week I had a delightful discussion with two Dominicans, Father Patrick Briscoe and Father Bonaventure Chapman, on their show, Guestsplaining (a special series of their podcast, Godsplaining). That interview will appear a little later here in November or early December.

As will a most engaging conversation I had with Deacon Tod Worner, the thoughtful and enthusiastic host of Word on Fire’s Evangelization & Culture Podcast.

And, I will be talking this week with Thomas Mirus on The Catholic Culture Podcast.

All in support of my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair.

While you’re waiting for those shows to drop, you might enjoy a conversation I had with Kate Eschbach on her Tripping Over the Saints podcast about one of my favorite heroes: Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman. Just click here.

---

On page 41 of The Good Death of Kate Montclair, my protagonist enjoys a glass of Ox-Eye Vineyards Pinot Noir, “redolent of a pioneer smokehouse.” My wife Amy and I have enjoyed Ox-Eye’s Pinot since 2011, and so last Saturday, November 4, 2023, it was a real treat to visit their vineyard outside Staunton, Virginia, and sell and sign copies of The Good Death of Kate Montclair during their party for Ox-Eye wine club members. Thanks so much to John and Susan Kiers for inviting us to join the festivities and to enjoy their lovely property nestled amid the Allegheny Mountains on a lovely autumn day.