Only the self burns

I'm in one of those barren psychological/emotional/spiritual spaces that it seems I must inevitably enter from time to time. I've been thinking of something an artist I once met said about times like these: "you're just in the desert. Artists always end up wandering around in the desert. You'll come out of it." And I probably will.

I have a tendency when there is an apparent lack of meaning for miles around to try to find some in whatever I may have on hand, or stumble across at the time. This is a poor system because it unnaturally elevates whatever signs I may glean to the level of prophecy, but it's virtually impossible to resist the effort. The best I can manage is to filter it all through a thin sieve of ironic awareness, and hope that if what trickles through isn't the pure sustenance I may be searching for, at least it won't choke me.

Case in point: I've just finished reading Harold Bloom's massive and, in my view, mostly garrulous and exasperating book "Genius," which attempts to put a finger on the creative impetus of 100 great writers by examining the world-views they expound in their works. This is a huge effort that is mostly obscured, in my view, by the author apparently having written strictly to and for himself. I can't imagine any reader, however literate, besides the author, making relevant narrative sense of his constant self-references, his arcane use of the Hebrew Kaballah as a structuring device, his sometimes arbitrary choices of authors, his catty and repetitive political and social jabs, or his rampaging stream of literary, philosophical and theological terms.

However, in and among the froth of words there occasionally bob little gems, mostly passages and ideas extracted from the great works in question; occasionally, quotations from other writers and thinkers whom Bloom suggests may have helped set the stage for whoever is up for discussion at the moment, and rarely, but importantly, some of Bloom's own notions, which, when they are good, are really, really interesting. The idea, for example, that fictional characters can be as real as historical people, sometimes more so, is fascinating to me, and it's one I'll be exploring a lot. Then there's the idea of self-overhearing: that what makes a character like Hamlet so deep and rich is that we observe him beginning to listen to himself, and undergoing deep changes as a result. I probably should do more of that.

Meanwhile, though, there are six words that are still cooling my throat, a day after having finished this massive and confusing odyssey of a book, and I've been trying to savour them in the real hope that they may sustain me through the rest of this sandy wasteland, however long it may last. They're from the German mystic Meister Eckhart, who isn't even one of the book's 100 subjects, but here they are just the same:

"Only the self burns in hell," he says. And I suspect he's right.