No ideas but in things

From film critic Alissa Wilkinson's Vox review of Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson:

"Walking [his dog] Marvin one night on his way to the bar, Paterson hears a rapper in a laundromat practicing in front of a spinning washer. The rapper trips and stops, then mutters to himself, 'No ideas but in things, no ideas but in things.'

"That’s a quotation from Williams [Carlos Williams] and a mantra for imagism, but it also mirrors a dictum from Edmund Husserl, the 19th-century philosopher who more or less founded phenomenology, in which philosophers begin with the sensations of lived experience — the feeling of the shoes on feet or, presumably, the matches on the kitchen counter — and work their way out to the significance. Husserl’s maxim was to go 'back to the things themselves,' to encounter the world on its own terms by observing the feelings it provokes in us. In doing so, phenomenologists believe, we more fully grasp the nature of our existence, and gain the tools to live better lives."

Wilkinson nicely winds two threads for me: imagism and Husserl. Both figure into work done on this blog some years ago. Wind with these the principle of ad fontes "to the sources." Wind with these my belief that the work of the arts is to behold creation in the light of resurrection (coram Deo and thinking of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar) and to remind it thereby (working in a manner analogous to Diotema's Ladder, along the direction of the psalmist's "because," and in the hope of Paul's "but now" of Romans 3:21) of its source, the triune Creator. The arts are the vertical companion to the horizontal command to freely garden the wild earth. The arts begin in quiddity, from below, and vertically climb upward (Psalm 150), and theology is an art.