The Worlds of Dream, Mysticism, and Poetry
an inquiry
Recently, I’ve been working on an essay for a publication. They told me I could write about whatever I wanted—dangerous move on their part!—so, after some fumbling about, decided to write about poetic metaphysics. Part of that has to do with the power, sometimes the strangeness, of the languages both of words and imagery, that appear spontaneously in dreams and mysticism (I guess you could throw in psychedelics) and less spontaneously (but not exactly deliberately) in the making of poems. I am also interested in the relationship of the imagination to the landscape and traditions in which one was raised as well as the interpretive traditions which try to make sense of imaginative experience.
To that end, I made this short (23 minute) video as a way to think through my musings on the topic. Talking, for me (I am Irish after all) is a great way for me to think through things. I hope you like it…and please share your thoughts with me!
It seems to me that what you're talking about is implicit in the distinction that even materialists seem happy to make between "craft" and "art". But it's always the Muse singing, not the poet. Or as Steiner more prosaically puts it, our brains are merely buckets being filled with the stuff of spirit.
Are our creations "real"? Better define "reality"! But, "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth", as Camus and many others have said - and I feel that there must be degrees of "reality" - and that the realer our creations are, the nearer they attend to the truth.
I think about this sort of thing all the time, and just read Eric Wargo's From Nowhere: Artists, Writers and the Precognitive Imagination, but it gets stuck in an incoherent theory of retro-causation. You probably have read Real Presences by George Steiner (I have only bought it), but if you haven't here's Malcolm Guite being gobsmacked by it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xBq08-6OdE. (Steiner reversing his position on deconstruction and language and the presence of God)Phillip Pullman, in Daemons, describes inspiration "...that somewhere there's an inexhaustible source of strength, truth, meaning, encouragement, blessedness. It feels like being blessed. Something has come from somewhere to refresh and strengthen me..." And here's Mark Doty, in "Source" describing landscape and inspiration but from a secular viewpoint.(scroll down, 2nd poem http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/doty/onlinepoems.htm)
The English dept at SF State long ago was populated by wild eccentric poets and lovers of literature, and William Dickey told me that when Auden died he grabbed his greatest enemy in the dept saying "The great God Pan is Dead," and held an afternoon-long reading on the lawn. My favorite, an Oxford Blake scholar, Francis Gretton, thought the 5 Keats odes corresponded to Elizabeth Kubler Ross' stages of death and dying. Now State is, as so many places are, a wasteland of critical race theory and wokedom. If you decide to teach a course on Dylan Thomas I'd be in immediately. I'm waiting for my used copy of the collected to come slow boat from the descending-into-fascism Germany as my own is in storage far away, but those articles on Thomas were like a fountain.