KEEP PLANNING – Israel A. Bonilla

Within a self-doubting discipline, there is a brief interval in which practitioners can become cartographers. This preferment requires, however, a severity of temper and a certitude of direction that is usually allocated for rearguard action. Indecision and bewilderment take care of the rest. Thus, periods of self-doubt ebb and flow with marginal breakthroughs. Contrived stability is the most durable variety of disorder. Anthropology, a science dealing with an unfortunate level of complexity, faced this situation throughout the better part of Rosenthal’s working life. He was neither certain nor bewildered. The long-standing crisis offered him an opportunity to indulge in eccentricity. For this we failed to mention: practitioners can also become schismatics, the gamblers of theory, perilously balanced between Charles Sanders Peirce and Benjamin Paul Blood. Ledger Rosenthal was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 22 August 1934, a mere seven years away from the Luftwaffe air raids, to Hereward Rosenthal and Lucille Martino. Being an only child, he grew up in severe isolation from his peers owing to his father’s demanding educational regime. Hereward Rosenthal, a clerk in the manufacturing industry, had none of the lofty humanistic aspirations of a James Mill and thus subjected his son to a program appropriate for a future engineer. The results were middling, but the war precluded an intensification of discipline. By the beginning of the fifties, although the relationship was strained, father and son came to a sort of understanding: Rosenthal would pursue, at the very least, a career in the sciences. The relationship between Rosenthal and his mother was difficult in a radically different way. Lucille rarely stayed home and kept her family ties at a distance. She spent the thin domestic hours in impenetrable silence, either listening to the radio or smoking by the window of their small apartment. Neither Rosenthal nor his father spared time to inquire about the underlying cause of her aloofness. She would later confess to Rosenthal that she had a lover, Sybille Barrow. Rosenthal said nothing. Lucille did nothing. Sybille was nothing. The marital arrangements stood intact. Rosenthal and his mother, in spite of the emotional juncture, never quite matured into their roles. Anthropology was a safe choice. Rosenthal could use the names of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to argue in good faith about the respectability of the discipline to his father. And he could argue in good faith to himself that the discipline harmonized with his deepening interest in art: Crawley’s The Mystic Rose had been a propellant for his imagination. In 1952, he began his studies at the London School of Economics. He was immediately shocked by the vastness of the field. There were functionalists like Powdermaker and Richards, who emphasized the totality of the moving parts of a culture in their present tense; structuralists like Schapera, who sought explanatory models able to withstand the advance of history; and rare diffusionists like Cowan, who viewed cultural differences as variations upon a theme. Rosenthal was also shocked by the students: there were poets, novelists, playwrights, psychologists, activists, ex-servicemen, white-collar workers. These were years of unremitting zeal. He had little interest in sheltering within a group, but three friendships stood out amid the furor. None was so brief yet so meaningful to him as that with Jerónimo Llamas, the Spanish poet. Thanks to his influence Rosenthal began his long apprenticeship in the subtleties of the language and in its monumental poetic tradition. They founded a literary magazine, Examination, in which they declared that art and science should wed by giving birth to new forms. It lasted for six issues of earnest imperfection. The fifth issue includes a syntactical relic by Llamas, which would figure as an epigraph to Rosenthal’s Scala Artis:

Of singers the faint voice, surcharged with violence and mysticism, can afford only epidermic contact. The soul plummets out of reach, toward the mind that is really a system, a delicate fiber that is purely an insubstantial serpent, which is really a temptress of depletion if untamed. To the soul, tracing the faults. Fiber to fibers to substance. A revelation: the proper stave, thus the plangent voice, proper. Late we will sing, late tame the central serpent in painstaking appreciation of its stirs. As if inaugural, outward, the soul will answer, unrecognizable to all. The intact wreath that courted death.

A belated tribute. According to one of his biographers, Llamas abandoned his doctorate in 1956 to breed cattle in the Altai Mountains, after which he disappeared into a combative anonymity. Llamas also introduced Rosenthal to Graham Cowan, the lone unrepentant diffusionist in the faculty. He had been strongly influenced by Perry’s The Children of the Sun yet limited his academic work to journal articles and polemics; he never published a book. Even so, he played an integral part in the development of Rosenthal’s worldview. In “The Professors and the Thaumaturge,” Rosenthal is explicit about this debt:

As a student, it was difficult to preserve your aspirations. You could speak of them in hushed tones with your friends, but the professors were insistent on methodological and imaginative boundaries. It was difficult to resist them. They were brilliant, they were influential, and they were knowledgeable. One’s friends were not quite there yet. So, one by one, you let go of your future projects and you began the painful process of downsizing. I met Graham Cowan just then. He was a man of another epoch. He believed in the spirit’s capacity to survey the whole of its creations. Nothing seemed foreign to his fine-tuned sensibility. I am of the conviction that he could have written a book to rival any of his colleagues and even to surpass them, but he was enamored in every direction and could be faithful to his interests only through the chaste article, the single devoted line of thought. Some future compilation will do justice to his comprehensive mind. To me, however, his greatest gift was that of encouragement. A gift so scarce that few can be said to estimate it accurately. He returned me to myself.... By all accounts, it was a providential moment in my life.

Finally, there was Alena Glas. She had studied psychology at the University of Heidelberg before arriving at the LSE. Rosenthal knew no harsher critic and knew no more loyal friend. She was a strict follower of Mach’s and Avenarius’s descriptivism, and so castigated Rosenthal’s relentless ventures into metaphysics. If he was never able to abandon a concern for rigor and clarity, it was almost completely on account of Glas’s influence. He states in one of his letters that “Glas exerts a strange authority over my writing, as if she were the greatest representative of that old wives’ tale of theoretical unity.” Rosenthal received his doctorate in 1959. His doctoral dissertation, Elements of the Gratuitous in Human Conduct, is for the most part a work on method. Against Malinowski’s empirio-criticist stance and its accompanying functional analysis, he proposes an impressionistic overlap of hypotheses that restores its place to the division of inner and outer experience, in which he discovers the only way to accommodate the gratuitous (“sole province of value”). That is, he rejects the elegance of Malinowski’s systems thinking in favor of a baroque contraption worthy of Athanasius Kircher. The book, nonetheless, caused no scandal; it was merely ignored. The particular strain one detects in the reasoning has two explanations. First, Rosenthal clearly believes that scientists must be as faithful to the concrete experience of living as artists, but he is trapped in the academic protocols. Secondly, there is a residual nostalgia for what Reiss calls the discourse of patterning, the search for resemblances—Rosenthal is sympathetic to Paracelsus, not to Harvey. These inadequacies, however, will transform into strengths. Development always incorporates reorganization rather than a despairing abandon to uprootedness. One begins again only when one was without conviction. After long deliberation, Rosenthal traveled to Mexico in 1961. He set out with an ambitious project in mind: a multi-volume work on the spontaneous growth of new religions in contemporary society. He studied the Eulalians, the Celibates of Tepetongo, and the Plasmogenists for three years. Then, in 1964, he moved to Guatemala to study the Indissolubles and the Apostatics for two years. The Construction of Religion in the Americas, published in five volumes from 1967 to 1974, was the fruit of this intense field research. To Glas and to other members of the discipline, it is Rosenthal’s only serious anthropological work. Indeed, every volume is full of detailed descriptions about customs, rituals, beliefs, and conduct. The gathering of data is prodigious. Furthermore, the prose does not attract attention to itself; it adapts to the subject matter and effortlessly reaches great moments of analytic intensity. In true hylomorphic fashion, Rosenthal becomes the Celibates:

The relationship of vision and touch to concupiscence is straightforward enough. In their journeys to the city, they stare downward and avoid contact. But it is a matter of stern discipline to hear a voice and refuse its existence as anything other than an intrusion upon the hallowed medium of air. They are rigorous in warning of the sensuous allurements of meaning vested in pitch and timbre. Obscenity is not this or that word; it is the word that pleads for an escape from the inner sanctum. The eye forgets as it takes in the desiccated green of the plains. The body can forget too as it tenses through severe spiritual exercises. The ear does not. The ear has privileged access to the mind and sets it afire. Only a voice can possess, possess and infix. It is preeminently human. Listening to that which is superfluous, outside doctrine, is indiscernible from copulation.

Or he becomes the Apostatics:

Convictions are seldom abstract. They are as much a bodily state as hunger or thirst, and just as we dispose of hunger with food or thirst with liquid, so we must dispose of conviction with systematic negation. A body rid of convictions is a body rid of sclerotic habits. Some convictions favor this process, while others complicate it. Nevertheless, all convictions have their turn. There are ascetics who only dare graze their inmost being, and there are gourmands who trouble themselves with everything that is destructive within. Predictably, conversation is an explicit assessment of character and entails a prohibition on levity.

And yet Rosenthal is Rosenthal, the artist who struggles to cohere in a foreign garb. All five volumes carry unwarranted inferences and imaginative flights. The fourth volume, specifically, betrays impatience with restraint:

Religious founders may be sincere, but history belies their purpose. They create suggestive dreams that awkwardly resemble our great conquests in the arts and sciences. Everybody listens. Most stay at a remove. The human beings who could be trusted to helm the body of beliefs no longer exist in a critical mass. Contemporary believers believe out of their ignorance of other ways of engaging with the world: faith has dwindled to a state of psychic comfort. Only the grand religious conceptions that have accrued authority throughout the centuries will withstand this shift in our moral fiber. But they too will eventually become unrecognizable. Religion in its strict sense has no pulse for us.

Still, the work as a whole closes on a relatively sound note:

The rampant impulse to erect communities must not be confounded with metaphysical yearning. On the contrary, what we have here is the expenditure of energies that have an unforeseen charge of passion for matter, for immanence, and for experiment. If we are to speak of yearning, it is the yearning to act effectively on reality through one’s own being. These religions promise access to autonomy and control. They are resolutely against submission. We are not witnessing a revival of religion. It would be more reasonable to call this a prefigurement of something new.

In his Mexican travels, Rosenthal met Valeria Carrillo. She lived in Velardeña as a follower of Eulalio. The beginning of their relationship was convulsive. She was distrustful of his motives and fostered this distrust in others. Even when they came to a better understanding, she held to her initial skepticism about his profession. As can be gleaned from Rosenthal’s posthumously published Research Notebooks, he shared her misgivings and had little faith in the woman who would accompany him for the rest of his life. Their love became epistolary for some years (passionate affairs need the diaphanous reversal of the written word), then convulsions abated. In 1971, they bought a home in Cuencamé, Durango, after the unexpected success of the third volume of The Construction of Religion in the Americas. For the rest of the seventies, Rosenthal worked on literary reviews and occasional lectures. It was only in 1981 that he published The Persistence of Technique, one of his so-called clarifying opuscules. Although it is mainly concerned to distinguish between technology as enduring practice and science as historically conditioned theory, we find here a sketch of Rosenthal’s view of progress in human sensibility—from the extreme metaphysical porosity of the religiously inflected soul to the walled-off consciousness under scientific regimentation, from inchoate creature to structured individual. Two decades of peripatetic archival research (Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, USA, Spain, France, Germany, England) and interminable epistolary exchanges flow into another multi-volume work, The Three Ladders (1985-2002). Through this universal symbol of elevation (which the vision of St. Perpetua first suggested to him), Rosenthal seeks to convey an evolutionary philosophical anthropology. In Scala Dei (1985), the opening volume, we follow the development of religious sensibility from animism to the post-axial religions. Rosenthal essays throughout various definitions of his subject but circumambulates one exclusively:

Religion amplifies and hypostatizes at imagination’s bidding. In the charged creations of bare emotion, we came to an understanding of the physiological phases of life, of our relations with others, and of the changes of our environment. Yet it is an understanding that always overshoots; it concedes too much to awe. Thus, it solidifies into passivity. The order that religion institutes is not a moveable order: its pretense is fixity.

His attachment is particularly evident in the sustained polemic against new religious movements and watered-down versions of axial and post-axial religions. Here he presents a fundamental concept for his thought: superannuated catalyst. Once a sensibility has “completed the ways of purgation, enlightenment, and union” (that is, allowed the human being a maximum of action), it cannot be revived. Christianity, for example, has functioned as a superannuated catalyst for three centuries—an increasing obstacle to effective action and thus to plenitude. Its dogmas lent energy, but as they became a burden within commercial societies, they devolved to cherry-picked beliefs that merely soothed. For all its misdirected severity, Scala Dei does render with great brio the struggle of humanity to live up to its most lavish imaginings. The chapters on Erigena, Kabir, and Knox are arresting. Scala Naturae (1992) is, in comparison to its predecessor, belabored. Rosenthal admires religion and loves art, but toward science, insofar as it seems to have hampered some aspects of his being, he feels a mixture of rage and gratitude. He is very slow in his concessions of merit, even when expounding on the opulent invention of a Pasteur, and obsesses with the rise of science as secular myth, which becomes a problem for his overall argument when he disregards the concept of superannuated catalyst in favor of crude parallelisms. The developmental approach is, therefore, considerably more fraught. Adding to the difficulties, Rosenthal’s view of science owes much to Whitehead and Feyerabend:

With the scientific mentality we slowly immerse ourselves in the recognition of dynamism. This is a grueling operation, especially so to a sensibility that still holds to the religious inheritance. We learn to act upon the world at the appropriate time through the appropriate tools. Time and technique fuse into an outward-directed feeling of mastery. The misplaced concreteness of theory gradually withers away. Do we see the dawning of an inward-directed counterpart, an inward-directed triumph? No, only negations, pseudotriumphalisms. Confusion quickens.

Now, if we begin to seize Scala Naturae as a work of art rather than of anthropology, or perhaps as a volatile hybrid, we better appreciate its deviations. It is inadequate in the vigorous style of Bello’s Philosophy of the Understanding and Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences. Scala Artis (2002) opens with an account of expressionism and its protracted hold on common sense. Rosenthal argues that it originates in, and evolves through, the subservience of art to religion, politics, and science. He goes on to contrast this subservience with the purported autonomy that formalism seems to offer. Why purported? Because formalism is a fundamentally adversarial stance; it, too, nurtures a form of subservience. As his polemics come to a close, Rosenthal focuses on the continuity between life and art. He believes that in this continuity morality and truth will no longer be seen with suspicion. And here he arrives at the ultimate direction of art—highly differentiated communication:

It is the vanity of the artist that constantly marshals him into self-limitation. To extend his reach he must dilute his mannerisms, everything in him that has any substance.... The first step in his spiritual ascension involves probing his tradition in order to exhume what others have left for dead. Much that he cherishes is simply inorganic.... Through this apprenticeship he will learn that a single soul is a labyrinth and that to access its center demands an almost infinite specificity.... What, ultimately, does a mass audience mean? The disavowal of communication and the championing of commerce. One makes life a worthwhile pursuit; the other effaces questions of value. Aesthetic bliss is only the florescence of communication.

To Rosenthal’s credit, he pursues the consequences of this view to forbidding limits. In dizzying, zestful essays, he champions as augurs some outrageous figures: Adam Elsheimer, Thomas Urquhart, Honoré Daumier, George Henry Lewes, Juan Montalvo, Isaac Levitan, Ernst Barlach, Joséphin Péladan, and Dion Fortune. The future of art, he suggests, is the binding of separate beings through the metamorphoses of soul. Alas, he does not avoid the perfunctory rejection of the materiality of art! And so Scala Artis involuntarily touches Scala Dei. Ouroboros or Escher? Glas was at the forefront of the academic reception. She dissected every interpretive leap and denounced every methodological laxity in a forty-page review in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. It is an energetic, erudite burial. Her conclusions were unanimously shared in the discipline: “With his unapologetic disdain for scientific consensus, Rosenthal confesses his allegiance to fantasy and gladly ascends the pulpit that Dr. Jung and Professor Campbell believe appropriate for ‘men of stature,’ which is a euphemism for men who entertain only what is singularly theirs.” But by the time she reviewed the project in its entirety, Sebastián Segura had already cemented its reputation in a wider context with his review of Scala Dei. What Priestley did for Dunne, Segura did for Rosenthal. To end on a moderately cynical note, is it any wonder Rosenthal never resented Glas for the dismissal? “Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.” Rosenthal published his last clarifying opuscule, The Craft of Life, in 2007. In essence, it is an addendum to Scala Artis. Rosenthal speculates about the means that could advance the new sensibility. The preface sets the tone:

It is premature to speak of an art of life. Few, very few, have known the full meaning of art, and those few did not and do not suspect that it could be anything beyond the finished object. Caffin, Ellis, Maurois, Eastman, and others have found themselves only in the role of memoirists at an angle. But I do not fault them. Our epoch cannot conceive an art of life. The temptation of systematicity and amplitude is too strong. Therefore, what I propose is to confine myself to the day-to-day obstacles that test our mind and body. Just as the semi-circle helps in constructing the vine and the volute, and these the ornament, so too the arrangement of space and time helps in securing generous frames of mind.

As is evident, Rosenthal incurs in the stinginess of the pioneer, distorting and downplaying the insights of many far-seeing men and women who had the gall of existing before him. Still, he is true to his aim and hands over the arrangements of a life without becoming a “memoirist at an angle.” Perhaps the application of Rodó’s The Motives of Proteus to Gide’s Journals can evoke some of the sensuous and intellectual pleasures of the work: it is tangled and terse, panoramic and finespun. The weight of old age did not diminish Rosenthal’s ambitions. We have a letter to Glas in which he talks about “work behind the work.” He had collected thousands of notes on the metamorphoses of love:

Are you familiar with Charles Godfrey Leland? He’s a man after my own heart: reformer, traveler, translator, folklorist, psychologist, witch, and poet. You can blame it all on him. He wrote a poem that I’ve had the privilege to incarnate: “Many in One.” It is a bravura piece. I wish to play with its tripartite structure and depart (truly depart) from everything I’ve done. Book I: the myth of love through a frenzied vision of history. Book II: the transit of love through this consciousness and that. Book III: Valeria. It must be an epic in shapeshifting prose and collapsing frameworks.

We are left with nothing but more notes—boxes upon boxes. While the archive is uninviting to scholars, it is a blessing to dilettantes. Arnaldo Miquelarena, one of the boldest, has heroic things in mind:

The consensus is that these are no more than the adversaria scripta of a man who was tired yet could not admit it to himself. I felt tempted to agree as I finished reading the first hundreds of notes. Juan Ruiz, Marsilio Ficino, and Antonio Caso on the same page? Then Regiomontanus, Sarah Burney, and Phil Ochs? Yes, unorthodox matches, but reading is sometimes a very fortuitous affair. I went on. Misquotations began to appear, misattributions, forgeries, a rhythm. I am now firmly convinced that there is a byzantine structure to these notes. Perhaps this will turn out to be the radical epic he wished to write. Three thousand notes later I can say that we have something approaching Book I.

The conjecture seems promising, but there are numerous issues. Can anyone corroborate that the archivists respected the order in which the notes were found? Are these all the notes? Will a definitive edition ever be possible? How can arbitrariness be sidestepped when a single letter is everything that relates to intention? It is fitting to stop here. Scholarly compunction has its place and its people. Rosenthal’s work is no such place. Rosenthal is no such person. Miquelarena can preserve his aspirations. According to his doctor, Rosenthal died of renal insufficiency. According to Valeria, he died of fulfillment. According to the vagaries of myth (and against surveillance), he packed his bags and headed to the Altai Mountains. All three should be true.

*** Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021), the short story collection Sleep Decades (Malarkey Books, 2024), and the pamphlet Phoretics (Paradise Editions, 2025). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Firmament, Exacting Clam, new_sinews, Minor Literature[s], and elsewhere. %date%