Once a month, we’ll post selections from an author’s work for the Writing It Real community to contemplate, consider and remark upon as writers. I’ll follow each month’s excerpt with questions to spark comments from Writing It Real readers. We’ll all grow as a result of considering the associations, thoughts, understandings and arguments that arise. Please let our group know what the author’s writing sparked in you and introduce questions you’d like Writing It Real members to discuss. Don’t hesitate to email me with excerpts from books you’d like our online book-excerpt book club to discuss. I am grateful to Lawrene Kovalenko, visual artist, writer and scholar in the field of autism and sensory integration, for introducing me to this month’s author, AE (short for Aeon, his pen name) Russell.

Excerpts from The Candle of Vision by AE Russell, 1918

About the Author

Irishman AE (George William) Russell, a life-long friend of Y.B. Yeats and teacher to James Stephens, was a poet, painter and mystic. His book of essays, The Candle of Vision, appears in full online. Among other topics, the essays in this book are about his and others’ heightened awareness of the beauty in and amidst mundane reality.

From the essay “Imagination”

I believed then, and still believe, that the immortal in us has memory of all its wisdom, or, as Keats puts it in one of his letters, there is an ancestral wisdom in man and we can if we wish drink that old wine of heaven. This memory of the spirit is the real  basis of imagination, and when it speaks to us we feel truly inspired and a mightier creature than ourselves speaks through us. I remember how pure, holy and beautiful these imaginations seemed, how they came like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life, and the astonishment I felt, I who was almost inarticulate, to find sentences which seemed noble and full of melody sounding in my brain as if another and greater than I had spoken them; and how strange it was also a little later to write without effort verse, which some people still think has beauty, while I could hardly, because my reason had then no mastery over the materials of thought, pen a prose sentence intelligently. I am convinced that all poetry is, as Emerson said, first written in the heavens, that is, it is conceived by a self deeper than appears in normal life, and when it speaks to us or tells us its ancient story we taste of eternity and drink the Soma juice, the elixir of immortality.

From the essay “The Slave of the Lamp”

Because I was a creature of many imaginings and of rapid alterations of mood out of all that there came to me assurance of a truth, of all truths most inspiring to one in despair of the Iron Age and lost amid the under growths of being. I became aware of a swift echo or response to my own moods in circumstance which seemed hitherto immutable in its indifference.

I found every intense imagination, every new adventure of the intellect endowed with magnetic power to attract its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter’s wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities. Around a pure atom of crystal all the atoms of the element in solution gather, and in like manner one person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered.

I met these people seemingly by accident along country roads, or I entered into conversations with strangers and found they were intimates of the spirit. I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that I, without search, would soon meet people of a certain character, and so I met them. Even inanimate things were under the sway of these affinities.

They yielded up to me what they had specially for my eyes. I have glanced in passing at a book left open by someone in a library, and the words first seen thrilled me, for they confirmed a knowledge lately attained in vision.

At another time a book taken down idly from a shelf opened at a sentence quoted from a Upanishad, scriptures then to me unknown, and this sent my heart flying eastwards because it was the answer to a spiritual problem I had been brooding over an hour before. It was hardly a week after my first awakening that I began to meet those who were to be my lifelong comrades on the quest, and who were, like myself, in a boyhood troubled by the spirit.

From the essay “The Mingling of Natures”

Once in an idle interval in my work I sat with my face pressed in my hands, and in that dimness pictures began flickering in my brain. I saw a little dark shop, the counter before me, and behind it an old man fumbling with some papers, a man so old that his motions had lost swiftness and precision. Deeper in the store was a girl, red-haired, with grey watchful eyes fixed on the old man. I saw that to enter the shop one must take two steps downwards from a cobbled pavement without. I questioned a young man, my office companion, who then was writing a letter, and I found that what I had seen was his father’s shop. All my imaginations–the old man, hisyellow-white beard, his fumbling movements, the watchful girl, her colour, the steps, the cobbled pavement–were not imaginations of mine in any true sense, for while I was in a vacant mood my companion had been thinking of his home, and his brain was populous with quickened memories, and they invaded my own mind, and when I made question I found their origin. But how many thousand times are we invaded by such images and there is no speculation over them? Possibly I might have made use of such things in my art. I might have made a tale about the old man and girl. But if I had done so, if other characters had appeared in my tale who seemed just as living, where would they have come from? Would I have again been drawing upon the reservoir of my companion’s memories? The vision of the girl and old man may in reality have been but a little part of the images with which my brain was flooded. Did I then see all, or might not other images in the same series emerge at some later time and the connection be lost? If I had written a tale and had imagined an inner room, an old mother. an absent son, a family trouble, might I not all the while be still adventuring in another’s life? Whilewe think we are imagining a character we may, so marvellous are the hidden ways, be really interpreting a being actually existing, brought into psychic contact with us by some affinity of sentiment or soul.

Questions For Fostering Comments — If you wish, choose one or more of these questions for comment, but don’t limit yourself to commenting on only these questions.

1. Are the experiences AE Russell describes similar to experiences you’ve had with writing and creativity?

2. While writing, have you sometimes felt as if you had become a pathway for words that seem smarter, more evocative and more original than you would normally have invented? If so, tell us about such a time.

3. When working on a piece, do you experience synchronicity — overhearing people using phrases and information that fit your writing’s needs and unlock a new depth or direction? Or perhaps your eyes alight on images that allow you to express just the emotion you meant to write but couldn’t yet articulate. If this has happened to you, tell us about it.

4. How would you describe the beauty of being in the act of writing (or of having written)?

5. Does writing help you tune into something of this everyday world and then become transported to a timeless place, rich with mystery and knowing?

6. Do you have rituals that allow you to shift into a writing state or does the act of writing itself do the shifting for you?

7. What do Russell’s words inspire in you today?

8. What question would you like to pose in relation to Russell’s words?

By writing your thoughts in the comment box below, you are helping to inaugurate the “book-excerpt” book club, a resource for studying and digesting others’ writing to strengthen your own.