An attempted thread:

1. Take for granted our old dunpilled narrative about how the medieval synthesis of self & city, reason & passion, creation & cosmos, collapsed into individualism, sentimentalism, occasionalism. Q is, how does the romantic spots-of-time motif fit into this? https://twitter.com/SalisburyJohnof/status/1260553840329449477

2. The obvious antecedent, to my mind, is the way post-reformation religious practice (both RC and Protestant) emphasizes immediate dependence on God's grace. Very broadly, the difference between Dante's "The love that moves the sun and other stars" & George Fox's inward light.

3. But also the difference btw Dante's "Through me the way into the suffering city" & Milton's "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell". Hell's no longer an anti-city, but an immediate experience of immediacy denied. A restless effort to reach a place of effortless rest.

4. Which translates pretty straightforwardly to Romanticism. Which is religion secularized, but a very particular religion, defined by the contrast between heaven as a gift from outside and hell as something you can imagine on your own (Ignatian meditation, Edwardian sermons).

5. &, moreover, something you SHOULD imagine on your own, because doing so makes it somehow more likely that you'll receive the gift of experiencing heaven.

In secular terms, these become the unselfconscious experience of beauty v. the painful effort of writing the poem.

6. It seems to be around this time that the motif of God as an artist, & the artist as God-like, really takes off. (As Stephen Daedalus notes, Aquinas has all you need for objective aesthetics but for subjective aesthetics, accounting for artistic creation, he's not helpful.)

7. This motif tends towards the heretical because the artist's experience of alternating between hell and heaven, struggle and rest, gets projected back onto God. Christ's descent into Hell comes to seem a figure for God's struggle to realize himself through his act of creation.

8. Back to the spots of time: notice that they're usually unselfconscious. They come in childhood, or when half-asleep. But sometimes they come during intense concentration. "Kubla Khan" is a mix of both: he's in an opium haze, but it becomes an ecstasy of poetic composition.

9. KK gives you the true relation between the Romantic ideas of heaven & hell: two sides of the same coin. The pleasure-dome is both a paradise, and dominated by a river "with ceaseless turmoil seething," where one could imagine "woman wailing for her demon-lover."

10. Both heaven & hell vanish when the person from Porlock knocks on the door. B/c the romantic religion is essentially solipsistic; it makes the artist both god & demon, an equation that can't be sustained in the presence of other people whom the artist obviously didn't create.

11. Coleridge didn't publish KK until years after he wrote it. Friends bullied him into it. He insisted on appending a note saying KK wasn't a real poem, just a "psychological curiosity." You could read this as a rejection of the romantic view of artistic creation KK embodies.

12. Akin, perhaps, to how post-conversion Eliot called TWL a piece of "rhythmical grumbling". Though obv. 4Q still uses the spots-of-time motif:

"Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after."

As does late-career Coleridge, I expect.

13. I don't mean to be saying the motif is a bad thing, just that it lends itself pretty easily to bad (because solipsistic) theologizing---unsurprisingly, since it developed out of a religious tradition that was itself theologically misguided!

14. I've been talking poetry but there's parallels elsewhere. For philosophy, trace a line from the hell of Descartes's stove-heated room where he forges a proof for God; to Hume's occasionalism; to Wittgenstein's "the world of the happy man is different from the unhappy".

15. For art, cf. Michael Fried's writing on 18th c. painting under the title "absorption and theatricality," & his essay "art and objecthood" defending abstract expressionism against conceptualism. His 2 mottos are "presentness is grace" & "what lies between the arts is theater"

16. "Theater" meaning here "the duplicity that comes from undisciplined self-consciousness," ie hell. Arts (painting, poetry, etc) are disciplines in which, by focusing your consciousness absolutely on the artwork, you forget your self and transmute hell into heaven.

17. The endpoint of that sort of thinking is the abstract expressionism Fried defends: the canvas becomes both a depiction, not of any particular nature, but of the emergence of cosmic order per se, and a record of the artist's creative struggle, his descent into chaos

18. The art couldn't, but Fried's mottos could, I think, be pretty easily explained to Edwards, Milton, maybe even Shakespeare. But probably not earlier. I'm reminded of Borges's fiction "Averroes's Search," where A can't understand Aristotle's Poetics b/c he's never seen a play.

19. Though of course the medieval -> early modern shift isn't the invention of drama (medievals had mystery plays) but rather the equation of theater with deception, and the attempt to escape the theater of communal life & return to the innocence of solipsism.

20. That's enough rambling for today, the last few tweets don't have much to do with romantic spots of time, but hopefully they do more than give @SalisburyJohnof and whoever else happens to read this thread a headache...