Surprisingly it has taken me a while to read this memorial volume for Kathleen Raine with particular regard to Temenos both as the journal and the Academy she was instrumental in founding https://www.temenosacademy.org. It leaped into my hand, nudged by the bookshelf angel, one morning having woken, bathed in gratitude, from a dream where I had been taking tea with the four most influential women in my life: one of whom was Kathleen.
Both book and dream brought back those memories that ripple through you capturing precisely how you felt at the time and challenging you to recapture their implicit challenge now that they carried then - to live towards your best self, the self that dwells in but is greater than the productions of time. carrying the face you had 'before' you were born.
As a teenager, I found myself reading William Blake. I read unknowingly in T.S. Eliot's manner for sense before meaning! The meaning was continually elusive, baffling. I needed help so I went to my public library and on the shelf found Kathleen's 'Blake and the New Age'. It granted me the 'key' I needed and a door was opened to Blake's fourfold vision that has remained ajar ever since.
As 'synchronicity' would have it, one of my two closest friends at school was reading at the same time, but unbeknownst to me, concurrently Kathleen's three volumes of autobiography and her poems. We brought to each other our mutual enthusiasms laughing at the 'coincidence'. I still have Simon's handwritten list of the poems that I should read first tucked into the volume of her Collected Poems I bought soon thereafter.
I never imagined then that Kathleen would become a friend. When I was at university in London, one Saturday afternoon, I visited the Watkins Bookshop in Cecil Court, off the Charing Cross Road in London. I knew of it because it features in the second volume of Raine's autobiography, 'The Land Unknown'. Watkins, which still exists, is a bookshop devoted to the 'alternative', the spiritual, the esoteric. That afternoon I found a copy of the second edition of 'Temenos: A Review devoted to the Arts of the Imagination' (published then by Watkins) and edited primarily by Kathleen (and three others). I bought it and life was never the same.
Now, having devoured Temenos, I wrote to her, speaking of an experience that I had at the age of eleven which, to that date, I had told no one. She wrote back with grace and sympathy and left a door open for further correspondence which I took. Four years and many letters later, I found myself, young, introverted and scared, hovering to speak to her at the First Temenos Conference at Dartington Hall.
She was talking to another participant and finishing turned to me saying, "And you must be Nicholas! I have been carrying your last letter to me around in my handbag as a talisman"!
What does one say? I have forgotten but for the remaining days of the conference, she would come up to me and ask, "And how do you think our conference is going?" as if I were her most intimate collaborator! A young man, insecure, could only flower in that beam of light. I will remain always grateful for the attention paid that continued afterward in frequent invitations to lunch and tea and the most wonderful of conversations.
The substance of which, as many of the contributors to the above volume make clear, was the Imagination as the primary faculty through which the world was to be understood and lived. The fundamental reality was Spirit or Consciousness and it unfolded through archetypal images manifesting, when seen aright, in the everyday patterns of the world. The task was to align one's being and seeing with those patterns that by their very nature led back to the unitary world of Spirit.
Everything could be an offering of that grace whether it was Dante's Divine Comedy or the sumptuous cake, always homemade, that accompanied Kathleen's teas. Or not if you chose to live out of either fantasy or ignorance, wrapped in believing this world was simply material, closed in upon itself, and driven by natural causes alone - Blake's 'Newtonian single vision and sleepiness'.
Whatever imperfections of a life, Kathleen's continuing gift was to lay the imaginative option before you and invite you in. Most obviously in her poetry that just now has received a belated recognition. When Eliot was asked were there any poets, he regretted never having published in that most influential of Faber and Faber lists, he always referenced two: David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine. Faber has made amends on one of those scores just now:
The Wilderness is the first poem that Simon suggested I read - and though the countryside into which I was born was gentler I read it with immediate recognition being the child, who waking early, would slip into neighbouring fields to watch the sunrise and catch the glimpsing of the world's patterning story streaming from light as if from a fountain.
I came too late to the hills: they were swept bare
Winters before I was born of songs and story,
Of spell or speech with power of oracle or invocation,
The great ash long dead by a roofless house, its branches rotten,
The voice of the crows an inarticulate cry,
And from the wells and springs the holy water ebbed away.
A child I ran in the wind on a withered moor
Crying out after those great presences who were not there
Long lost in the forgetfulness of the forgotten.
Only the archaic forms themselves could tell!
In sacred speech of hoodie on grey stone, or hawk in air,
Of Eden where the lonely rowan bends over the dark pool.
Yet I have glimpsed the bright mountain behind the mountain,
Knowledge under the leaves, tasted the bitter berries red,
Drunk water cold and clear from an inexhaustible hidden fountain.
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