1899-1972
Cambridge MA, 1949
Cambridge MA, 1949
This weblet of Carolyn Blackmer's papers exists because Paige Arrington contacted me to ask if I was related, and if so could I tell her anything about Carolyn's work with Ann Berthoff. As Carolyn and Franklin Blackmer's youngest son and last surviving child, I am custodian of the family archives, so I began the adventure of exploring and organizing the contents of 30-odd file folders (most unopened in the last 40 years). The odyssey of discovery continues, and yields new insights and new questions with every turn of a page, so the contents and organization below are provisional and sure to change as I delve further.
Carolyn was born Carolyn Abbie Joerndt, a middle child in a German family in Chicago. Family vicissitudes led to her being sent away to a Swedenborgian school in Urbana OH in 1913, and she never returned to Chicago, which she said was "a good place to come from." She studied Romance Languages at Ohio State (graduating in 1920), taught at Urbana College in the early 1920s, and married Rev. Franklin Blackmer in 1924. They had four children: Alice (1925-2010, born in Berkeley CA), David (1927-2002, born in Urbana OH), John (1934-2015, born in Brockton MA), and Hugh (born in Boston MA, 1943). Carolyn earned an EdM from Harvard in 1949, and for the next 6 years was Dean of Guidance at Bradford Junior College, where Ann Berthoff was a young teacher of English. Ann's description from the Preface to her seminal Forming, thinking, writing: The composing imagination (1978) says:
Insofar as this book reflects my teaching experience, it has been nurtured chiefly by the late Carolyn A. Blackmer, who was mentor and guide in the first years of my classroom career, nearly thirty years ago. She taught me how to read Whitehead and Peirce and trust to the power of the human mind, despite a young teacher's inclination to believe that there was little evidence for its existence. Our daily trip home on the Boston and Maine (bringing back to North Station a carload each of lobsters and tired teachers) was a three-year seminar in forming, thinking, and writing. I like to think that she would have approved this attempt to encourage students to explore how it is that, as she used to say, form finds form and "to grow," as I.A. Richards has said, "in capacity, practical and intelligential" as a result. This book is dedicated to her memory.
The overarching questions are: upon what sources did Carolyn draw, and what did she do with that material? Answers are to be found in her writings over almost 50 years, and the chronological presentation of texts below is a mere beginning in my effort to understand who she was and what she thought.
New Church Education 1923Teaching in Our Sunday-schools 1934 (with Franklin Blackmer, but the prose sounds like mostly Carolyn)
Four poems from 1943, year of my birth
In 1948 Carolyn wrote a long review of Signe Toksvig's Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic for the New Church Messenger. This pdf includes Carolyn's correspondence with Signe Toksvig, as well as the text of the review:
Toksvig review
Carolyn studied for the EdM degree at Harvard's School of Education, and these four papers seem to have been written for various courses:
Mental Maturity 1949, Ed. Psych. 1Symbolization (1949 "Written for a course on Freud's Processes given by Dr. Gardner at the Baker Guidance Center. The pencilled comments are those of a friend")
Entering the Mysteries With Reason for a course in Philosophy of Education, ca. 1949
Education for a New World undated, perhaps 1950
In the early 1950s Carolyn and Ann collaborated on a book that presaged Forming, Thinking, Writing, which they referred to as das Buch. Ann reports that they were invited to an interview at Houghton Mifflin, "so awful that it was comic" ("Why don't you use selections that students would be interested in? Try using some essays from Reader's Digest...")
PrefaceThe Mediacy of Words: the economy and complexity of the word as symbol
Carolyn summarized her successful work with failing and mediocre students:
A Taste of Success from The Bradford Junior College Bulletin, 1953
Entering the Mysteries With Reason 1955 New Church Messenger
In the mid-1950s Urbana College went through one of its periodic paroxysms and nearly closed. Carolyn had been elected to the Board and almost single-handedly saved the institution, writing and carrying out a research project and then a proposal for reorganization of college programs. She accepted appointment as Dean of Studies, and also taught Psychology.
Swedenborg and the Universities (January 1957 talk at Los Angeles Church of the New Jerusalem)A Plan for Research on New Church Education
Bibliography ("Examples of studies on the philosophy of love, semantics, and relational logic" with brief annotations)
letters to Howard Spoerl Carolyn at her feistiest
Steps leading to Research Plan for Urbana University (1958)
Research Team First Annual Report (1958)
Notes on Philosophic Basis (footnotes to the First Annual Report)
The Letter or Language of the Word (1961)
Introduction ca. 1962
Semantics syllabus ca. 1962
Philosophy of Education sections on Origins and Sources, Implications, The Curriculum (Purposes, Approach
The Makings of a Philosophy (Chapel Talk to Urbana students, 1963)
Anatomy of Mind (no date) texts of three linked talks on Swedenborg's psychology
After her retirement from Urbana
Curriculum Vitae, with part of a 1965 proposal for research at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, at the time of her retirement from Urbana CollegeProspectus for a Research Study on Swedenborg and Modern Psychology and correspondence with Swedenborg Foundation (1966)
Towards a Basis for Dialogue Between Church and College (1966)
Swedenborg and the Future of Urbana College Statement for Trustees (1972)
handwritten draft of message to Trustees at the time of her honorary degree, 1972
Alice Skinner's reminiscences as she accepted Carolyn's honorary degree, 1972
Posthumous publications
Reading Swedenborg 1972 (rich with general commentary on reading and thinking, beyond the specifics aimed at making Swedenborg's thought more accessible to modern readers)Essays on Spiritual Psychology: Reflections on the thought of Emanuel Swedenborg Swedenborg Foundation 1991 ("Journal of Dreams and Spiritual Diary" and "Swedenborg, Psychologist Extraordinaire") (I have several draft ms. versions, which might be worth scanning for a sense of her composition process)
A partial bibliography of works by Carolyn A. Blackmer (probably compiled by Alice Skinner)
As I read through these challenging materials, which span 50 years of deeply committed engagement with ideas, I am looking for continuities, consistencies, influences, new threads incorporated, basics of prose style, and notions of Mind. 'Humbled' barely covers my feeling as I begin to grasp what I missed out on all those years ago when I might have asked for explanation and expansion.
In terms of breadth of influence and being still remembered, Carolyn's life wasn't a "success," in that she never became "known" beyond a very small public, and was essentially one who, as George Eliot put it, "lived faithfully a hidden life." The Blackmers are gone from the New Church, and only vestiges remain with the Swedenborg Foundation. Carolyn's writings would have vanished entirely from potential ken if it hadn't been for Paige Arrington's query. I doubt that I'd have gotten around to recognizing their personal salience or trying to figure them out, let alone scanning and working toward distributable versions.
Consider the legions of scholars and artists who "rest in unvisited tombs" (Eliot again), whose work escapes the public it might find if it could be made known and nestled in enough context to attract the attention it merits. The Web surely offers a distribution platform, accessible to serendipitous discovery, but such materials are pretty far out on the Long Tail, and unlikely to attract a broad viewership. Still, more tombs can now be visited, with who knows what consequences.
Piled up and awaiting my attention, all nibbled at but only a few comprehensively read:
Bergquist, Lars Swedenborg's Dream Diary (2001)
Berthoff, Ann E. Mysterious Barricades: language and its limits (1999)
Richards on Rhetoric: selected essays 1929-1974 (1991)
Cassirer, Ernst Language and Myth (1946)
de Waal, Cornelis and Krzysztof Skowronski The Normative Thought of C.S. Peirce (2012)
Jonsson, Inge Visionary Scientist: the effects of science & philosophy on Swedenborg's cosmology (1999)
Langer, Suzanne K. Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Philosophical Sketches: a study of the human mind in relation to feeling, explored through art, language, and symbol (1962)
Mind: an essay on human feeling (3 vols, 1967, 1972, 1982)
Ogden, C.K. and I.A. Richards The Meaning of Meaning: a study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism (1923)
Peirce, Charles Sanders Works (2013)
Richards, I.A. How to Read a Page: a course in efficient reading with an introduction to 100 great words (1942)
Rose, Jonathan S. et al. Scribe of Heaven: Swedenborg's life, work, and impact (2005)
Skidelsky, Edward Ernst Cassirer: the last philosopher of culture (2008)
Van Dusen, Wilson Emanuel Swedenborg's Journal of Dreams (1986)
My reading (mid-September 2018 summary) (others may follow)