Dick Sullivan

Reading the first page of Dick Sullivan’s ‘Undertones’ I felt an immediate pang of recognition. An inescapable smile comes to my face whenever I read about another person who has experienced the same mind stopping, belly fizzing, breathtaking beauty that I call Spirit, Love or Beauty and that Sullivan calls “mystic vision”. It is a relief also to see Sullivan describe himself as agnostic and to recognise that what to one person may be a religious or spiritual feeling could also be show more seen as a natural or scientific phenomena enjoyed by all humans and not just those of a particular prescribed and organised religion.

It is somewhat disappointing then that Sullivan takes such a prescriptive view of what he calls mysticism and of the artists who have experienced or portrayed it. Much of his premise is that mysticism has been ever prevalent in art and literature but is now somehow missing and that we are in a dark age that doesn’t inspire a heart-stopping recognition of life’s beauty. His book is a collection of examples of mysticism in literature and in great lives, but the predominant examples are of 19th Century white males writing verse about nature or about mystic experiences. It seems to me too obvious though to suggest that mystic writing has to be explicitly about mysticism or nature. To be honest, none of the examples Sullivan gave instilled a ‘mystic’ feeling in me. Sullivan’s logic would then suggest that this is because I am not a true mystic and am missing the point, but I would argue that Sullivan’s view is too narrow.

Late 20th Century writing does not figure here and neither, it appears, do women. For me, my spiritual or emotional fullness has always been linked to Alice Walker, whose work appears to me to be in constant conversation with a bigger life force or energy. It is now almost cliché, but for me one of the most famous descriptions of the spiritual experience is still one of the best, ‘The Colour Purple’, in which Walker’s character Shug Avery feels God in the breathtaking, everyday experience of a field full of purple or the thrill of her own sexuality. When I’m reading, it seems that Sullivan’s examples can never reach these heights, but that’s because I really believe that it’s a personal choice, and what’s awe-inspiring to Sullivan may not be to others.

However, the examples chosen are interesting and, as a collection of fleeting, potted biographies and interconnections, have a lot of worth. A passage on science is tantalising and could have sparked a mystic journey through the amazing realities around us – but this is not Sullivan’s brief. To me, it seems that Sullivan’s mysticism is too dearly linked to a specific style of art that is exclusive and prescriptive and it seems false to judge a person’s personal experiences based on how well they fit this mould. Could it simply be that mysticism was stylish in 19th Century writing and so was emulated with varying degrees of success by writers of the time? Sullivan himself gives the example of Matthew Arnold the “near-miss mystic” who emulates the style but never achieves the experience.

Sullivan’s pessimistic ending seems almost too ironic. He writes of Ruskin’s folly in seeing the 19th Century as without “any sense of a world animated by the divine” when with hindsight it was abundant with spirituality. Sullivan falls into the same trap. He describes the art of today as “consistent with hate, envy, spite” and sayst that “Nobody can claim this … smallness”. To me, Sullivan is Ruskin revisited. It’s all a matter of taste of course, but when I read an essay by Alice Walker, or listen to Bjork’s “Unison” at top volume on my headphones or connect with any of the thousands of young people creating art that strives to document or heal our broken ecological or economic systems I feel a little bit of that heart stopping gladness, and I suspect, no matter what the century, it never really goes away. show less

I thought this book was fascinating. As a matter of background, I am not particularly religious but I am spiritual. In addition, I love all history as well as most things Victorian. There was a plethora of creative activity during Victorian times, and I enjoyed reading about the individuals in Undertones. The stories in the book are about well-known people of Victorian times … artists, writers, philosophers, many of whom are familiar names even today … and how each had exhibited certain show more random senses of awareness and clarity, seemingly from out of the blue. These fleeting experiences represented mystical events in their lives. The mystical events were part of the people’s reality, even though the people did not cause the events to occur nor could they exhibit any control over the occurrences. It speaks to the increased likelihood of those "ah-ha!" moments when one is in a more mentally introverted mode. In my opinion, Dick Sullivan did a fine job. His book is well-researched and well-written. To me, it was a satisfying, thought-provoking, and stimulating read. show less