Divine Impressions: Translating Spiritual Media
Listen to the lecture “Divine Impressions: Translating Spiritual Media” in the media player below or directly on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Media.
Transcript of lecture:
Quick links to some primary sources: Cotton Mather’s diary and Increase Mather’s autobiography/diary
As a reminder, the learning goals of the lecture are:
…for learners to be able to describe the medium of spiritual impressions amongst the Puritans, as well as to describe McLuhan’s concept of media translation.
Discussion questions and forum:
- Use McLuhan’s theory of media translation to probe a medium in your own life. What is revealed to you about that medium, the medium from which it was translated, or the people who use it?
- Give an example of a spiritual impression that this lecture describes. How would you describe what a spiritual impression is in your own words? Why do you think this medium might be important or interesting, and how does it help you to understand who the Puritans were?
Respond to these discussion questions (or other topics of your choosing, relating to the lectures) here:
1. I’m primarily a musician. Music, musical expression, language about music, the thought of music, faith in musical potentialities and quiddities, etc. are all participants in musical media. I think this lecture helps illuminate something that specifically goes on when we talk or write about music: describing something that is usually not a lexical but usually meaningful sensory experience into another sort of sensory experience that is meaningful by a different means. I think this helps me relate to the Puritan impressions; just as I often register (usually because of an inadequacy) a process of translation when talking about music, I think I might know how Mather feels in his struggle to capture the revelation with the pen. On the other side of this common experience, though, is a sympathy with Mather’s conviction that the impressions were legitimately meaningful experiences. In both cases, the impression and the music, there is a prerequisite of faith: a willingness to believe, an openness to a becoming-meaning within a medium developing beyond one’s own control – at the horizons of one’s existential contingency.
2. The quoted passage in which Mather shared the experience of the impression compelling him to preach on a specific theme resonated within me. Sometimes we simply understand something, then we work it out in words later. Often, when I’m preparing to write something, I just let myself think for a few days. There comes a moment when I know what needs to be SAID (or written, as the case may be). Before that moment, I am aware of meaning that I desire to convey, but it is a pre-linguistic meaning insofar as I don’t feel yet COMPELLED to say anything in particular.
It also reminds me of musical improvisation. Only when we find a place of openness and freedom can I really know what sound needs to be made. Here, Mather was lying on the floor of his study. This reminds me of the psychological position I’m often looking for when improvising.
This, Mather’s experience, helps me relate to the Puritans but also believe in the Puritan claims of “impressions.” Exploring the pre-linguistic with language is a tricky business but not verboten. The trick, though, seems to be the attitude in which the project is taken up: to let the pre-linguistic meaning “possess” one’s soul in order to begin a process of intelligible utterance. It is not a process of explanation or even translation as much as it is description or participation.
Hi Eric, thanks for your response. I think this first response where you take music as an example is a particularly rich example and way to apply McLuhan’s idea. If music is a translation/media, then what does it make explicit? Does it do a better job at translation than words, and do music and words translate the same thing? To take a stab at it myself, if music were translation, it seems to translate or convey a kind of psychological or emotional state–perhaps better than words do. Thus, it makes explicit a particular mental framework or set of feelings, more so than words can do (think about playing a piece as a form of expression vs. writing out what you are feeling and thinking). This part about faith is interesting and I’m wondering, for you, how that helps us to understand the concept of media translation.
The spiritual impression that you cited is from Increase Mather. The more I consider “spiritual impressions,” or these moments of deep understanding from the divine, amongst the Puritans, the more I realize how these might occur on a spectrum (at one end something that might seem “basic,” like knowing and gaining a sense of God’s mercy when reading the Bible, for example, and on the other hand, a specific revelation of the type accorded to Anne Hutchinson). I’m intrigued that you feel you might experience similar moments. On the one hand, we might share experiences or thoughts with the Puritans of the 17th-century, yet on the other hand we are so different in many ways. Increase Mather experienced this revelation in a faith context, and possibly in a secretive context as this moment was described in his diary. how may the spiritual impression you receive be similar to or different from Mather’s, and what does it tell about yourself and the society of which you’re a part?
Good work so far.
-Yi