“Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.”

— Nadine Gordimer

Writing and Being (1991)

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Nadine Gordimer 57

South african Nobel-winning writer 1923–2014

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Katherine Anne Porter" (p. 300)
American Fictions (1999)

“No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax.

“Since humans became self-regarding they have sought, as well, explanations for the common phenomena of procreation, death, the cycle of seasons, the earth, sea, wind and stars, sun and moon, plenty and disaster. With myth, the writer's ancestors, the oral story-tellers, began to feel out and formulate these mysteries, using the elements of daily life — observable reality — and the faculty of the imagination — the power of projection into the hidden — to make stories.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

“God is the most noble of beings. Now it is impossible for a body to be the most noble of beings; for a body must be either animate or inanimate; and an animate body is manifestly nobler than any inanimate body. But an animate body is not animate precisely as body; otherwise all bodies would be animate. Therefore its animation depends upon some other thing, as our body depends for its animation on the soul. Hence that by which a body becomes animated must be nobler than the body. Therefore it is impossible that God should be a body.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

I, q. 3
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

“The very title Sin, it is only a name without substance, hath no being in God, nor in the creature, but only by imagination; and therefore it is said, the imaginations of your hearts are only evil continually. It is not the body, nor the life, but the imagination only, and that not at a time, or times, but continually. Herein sin admitting of no form in itself, is created a form in the estimation of the creature; so that which is not to God, is found to be in a something creature; as you have it related, One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike: what to one is pure, to another is impure; herein it appeareth but a bare estimation.”

Laurence Clarkson (1615–1667) English theologian

A Single Eye, All Light, No Darkness; or Light and Darkness One (1650)

“Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VI (p. 228).

“May these explanations of the myths find favour in the eyes of the Gods themselves and the souls of those who wrote the myths.”

Sallustius Roman philosopher and writer

IV. That the species of myth are five, with examples of each.
On the Gods and the Cosmos

“It is the transcendent imagination working on this material that releases the mysterious energies which move and speak of deepest existence.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

"The Painter in the Press", X magazine, Vol. I, No.4 (October 1960).
Context: Art on the other hand speaks to us of resignation and rejoicing in reality, and does so through a transformation of our experience of the world into an order wherein all facts become joyous; the more terrible the material the greater the artistic triumph. This has nothing at all to do with "a constant awareness of the problems of our time" or any other vague public concern. It is a transformation that is mysterious, personal and ethical. And the moral effect of art is only interesting when considered in the particular. For it is always the reality of the particular that provides the occasion and the spring of art — it is always "those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries" or the experience of some loved object. Not that the matter rests here. It is the transcendent imagination working on this material that releases the mysterious energies which move and speak of deepest existence.

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

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