MDMD: Capitalization (V., GR, Vineland echoes, too)

[Doug Millison]

"It is difficult for us today to remember--especially at a time when we are
inundated by images (commercial, cinematographic, electronic, etc.) and
have incorporated _image_ into usual speech as a replacement for idea,
notion, style--the long historical fear of the image and of fantasy in our
tradition. The degradation of the image in monotheistic Hebrewism and of
_phtasia_ in Hellenistic philosophy, reappear in the Protestant Reformation
abd the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which are only two particularly
forceful expressions of an image-phobia in Western theological and
philosophical writing. Systems which did work in and through images, such
as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Swedenborg, could
not enter the main current of our tradition and were forced instead into
the occult or even the heretical.

"On the one hand the destruction of the personified image led finally to
the twentieth century's contempt for representational painting:  no
recognizable images, no persons--anything, everything for the eye, nothing
for the soul. On the other hand, it brought on the destruction of the
personified word: lower-case letters replace capitals in a full democracy
of the word, all equal, none more noble, more privileged, none with divine
right. Today we have lost both the eighteenth century's poetic capitals and
the nineteenth-century's oratorical ones, used to imbue with power and
substance such jingoes as Liberty, Progress, and Empire. Our "gods" have
become small, save one, and with the exception of a few last conventions of
proper names, titles, and places, and the nonsense capitals of corporate
abbreviations (nominalism is capitalism, letters as units of exchange), the
one magnification persisting as a capital refers only to the one person
still remaining in a depersonified world:  I. Only I and God, one to one,
and some say God is dead.

"[...] Personifying not only aids discrimination; it also offers another
avenue of loving, of imaginibng things in a personal form so that we can
find access to them with our hearts. Words with capital letters are charged
with affect, they jump out of their sentences and become images. The
tradition of depersonifying recognized full well that personified words
tend to become cherished and sacred, affecting the reason of the heart.
Hence nominalists disparage the personified style of expression, calling it
rhetoric with emotive meaning only. But this very recognition, that
personifying emotionalizes, shifts the discussion from nominalism to
imagination, from head to heart."

from:
_Re-Visioning Psychology_ by James Hillman (1975)

It may be worth noting that Pynchon provided a pithy support quote (aka
"cover blurb") for at least one of Hillman's books.