A Holmesian Mystery, if you will

You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.

— Sherlock Holmes, "The Boscombe Valley Mystery"

Apparently it's been four years since our last post. Egad! Zounds!

Procrastination, perfectionism, and recurring doubts about the significance and validity of this whole maddeningly ambiguous experience all contributed to a much longer period of dormancy than I expected. But as our old pal Ted Roethke says,

What falls away is always. And is near.

So, yes, it's always been simmering near the surface, and I've kept one eye and one ear open all along. Notebooks have been seeded and populated for years with Holmesian trifles. Then, without warning, some combination of them crystallizes spontaneously and erupts off the page into my brain, where it takes up residence and paces impatiently back and forth until I sit it down and make it tell its story. This is one of those stories.

On October 4 I saw a rare and precious licence plate syllable, only spotted once or twice over the past decade. USK, as in the "Swan of Usk," the 17th century poet Henry Vaughan, who lived by and wrote about the River Usk and whose pivotal role in our story has been well documented. (I recall the previous sightings as either USK 444 or USK 404, but this one had a non-numinous numeral after the letters.)

The next day a story broke about the final unravelling of the empire of one Elizabeth Holmes, whose medical-tech startup Theranos had promised to revolutionize routine blood lab delivery. The whole complicated, sordid tale is well told here, but the short version is that Holmes's genius for PR, with a narrative and persona carefully crafted to feed off today's zeitgeist, succeeded for over a decade in fooling the media (and many investors) and hiding the truth—that the promise was almost entirely a bluff.

 

Elizabeth Holmes: The Image

A typical litany of corruption and the triumph of image over substance. But there's another Elizabeth Holmes—a Renaissance scholar of yesteryear who published a brief but groundbreaking study in 1932: Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy. And yes, of course I've read it. You too can read it here,  for free.

 

Elizabeth Holmes: The Word

[USK + Holmes] was a great reminder of the book, and why I should reread it (I just did), and that this is exactly the stuff our Stanza would like us to be interested in. After all, the pair of Holmeses here is echoed by a pair of Vaughans: Henry the doctor and poet and his twin brother Thomas, the Hermetic alchemist and magician.

We don't have time for a book review, so we'll just mention two big Hermetic notions: (1) "as above, so below": the correspondences (or "sympathies") between macrocosm and microcosm (celestial and earthly, universal and personal, temporal and eternal, etc.); and (2) to "travell back"—to the ancient days of mankind or the infancy of the individual—gets us closer to the pure and the true.

We might well assume Henry absorbed Hermetic, alchemical, and Neoplatonic notions from his brother, but Holmes points out that these were also in the air at the time:

Many epidemic ideas visited the seventeenth century; and Plato and Plotinus were studied by select thinkers, and Pico had brought the Cabbala into wider repute. Writers and thinkers do not always take the infection direct from each other; they yield perhaps to the surrounding influence. We do not know why Vaughan and Traherne both expressed themselves as desiring to "travell back," nor why this special awareness is felt in English poetry for the first time here.

Now, I've always considered "Hermeticism" to be basically "Neoplatonism for Dummies." And Henry Vaughan was no dummy, so let's just cut to the chase and enroll him in our Neoplatonist club. But all this, whatever we call it, is not mere intellectual scaffolding for Henry:

Vaughan does more than entertain these beliefs in thought. He lives them in emotion, and then images them in poetry. The result lies not so much in frequency of direct reference to Hermetic tradition as in a charging of his poetic atmosphere with this idea of "sympathy." Meeting, as we think, some predisposition in himself, it becomes an intuitive knowledge, like an inward sense of touch, directed towards the objects of Nature.

Thus, Henry becomes not just a metaphysical poet but also a nature poet. He too observes trifles. Anticipating Wordsworth by a century or two, he recalls the days when

on some gilded Cloud, or flowre

My gazing soul would dwell an houre,

And in those weaker glories spy

Some shadows of eternity. 

Although Holmes does not mention the particular stanza that named our Stanza, its essence—return to birth and paradise—is never far away:

Vaughan, we  remember, is intent on his "Angell-infancy," and on the "Remnant of Paradise," lingering there. Vaughan's poetry too is, as his brother said, "conversant" with angels...

So he has "knowledge and conversation" with angels. Hmm. Crowley would thus pronounce him a magician as well as a poet. What with Thomas and all, the Vaughan boys are pretty much covered in both departments anyway.

UPDATE: Ransacking a pile of notebooks, I've discovered that, on 18 February 2011, I saw USK•666, and, on 7 May 2013, I saw USK•404. On my walk today, after writing the bulk of this post, I saw USK•741 (probably the same car from 4 October) and another plate that said ANGE [= ANGEL en français].