Praying on Paper: where poetry and mysticism meet

Introduction

Why is it that poetry and mysticism are so sweetly interlinked?

It must be that we suspect that She listens when we speak.

This paper developed out of my observations regarding the different designations of “Poet” and “Mystic” that we apply to writers whose work appears to me to be almost indistinguishable in sensibility, style, and approach to a common topic matter. I compared the German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote a book of poems which were intended as prayers to God, entitled the Book of Hours, and the Arabic Mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi, who wrote poetry about God as well, and asked why should one be called a Poet who wrote about mystical themes while the other is regarded as a Mystic who happened to write poetry?

There is a deficiency in available source material on the topic of mysticism insofar as the authors neglect to directly address the obvious fact that all of the mystics with whom they’d dealt had their insights preserved as written text, often in verse form; this is regarded as incidental rather than integral to the mystical path. Indirect and occasional comments which casually relate mysticism to poetry are rife throughout, such as Karen Armstrong’s, when she notes in her book The History of God that she learned “God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring” (Armstrong xx); noting a persuasive intuition but never addressing the possibility of an explicit linkage.

My research has persuaded me to believe that it is inappropriate to overlook the role that the writing process has played in mystical traditions; that the poetry mystics practiced was in fact instrumental in assisting them to bring about the states of mind they desired. Likewise, distinguishing poets from mystics becomes difficult when and if the way in which they use their language is identical: Rumi is no more a mystic than Rilke, for instance, nor, as we will see, is Dante far removed at times from Taoists, or the Romantics greatly different from the Catholic mystics.

“Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man,” Shelley once argued (Harrison 314). The further back we look in the historical record, the more common we find this sentiment; equating poetry with divinity was once self-evident in the communal consciousness; it went without saying. This kind of correlation is much more difficult to assert in this day and age, wherein frank discussions of religion are regarded as taboo and there are “poets” who have deliberately engaged secular and atheistic themes in their writing. Whether such an approach to poetry can be successful, or doesn’t implicitly hamper the possibility of true poetry, will ultimately be up to the mind of individual readers, but it must be understood that the God of the mystics always transcends language and defies definition. In this respect any equally universal and undifferentiated terminology is just as appropriate, be it Being, God, The Tao, Life, The Universe, Love, Mind, Humanity, Existence and so forth. The Sufi Mystic Hafiz jokes in one of his poems that:

Some poets have the skill to talk about God without ever using any of his pseudonyms. Some have such skill you do not need to walk to the river with your bucket. They, with words’ magnetism, can coax Venus from her primal orbit and steal from her mouth that one drop of miraculous dew She has been collecting in her veins since time said “I am.” (Muhammad 310)

Perhaps it is more palpable to imagine that poets who neglect engagement with any sort of universalized concept would have difficulty transmitting insights of worth to their readers. Poets and mystics both desire to engage such great themes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson are in line with this, though they use the word philosopher where I have mystic. Coleridge writes: "No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language" (Harrison 140). Emerson puts it this way: “The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both” (Emerson 33).  

Poets and mystics are philosophers in the truest sense of the term, they are lovers of wisdom, they seek the very deepest kind of understanding that they can achieve in this life, an undertaking they consider of the utmost importance. Even allowing for exceptions, how many commonalities can we find between the people we call poets and mystics?

In this essay I will argue that the terms Poetry and Mysticism share the same elementary ambiguity in the essence of their definability; an ambiguity which is not merely coincidental but is owing to a common underlying attempt on the part of poets and mystics to communicate their experience of what can only be called an ineffable quality. This commitment mires the poet or the mystic in a paradox, though the insights they wish to transmit transcend language itself, language is the only way available to them. Poets and mystics both experience an instinctual mistrust of the capacity of static terms to adequately frame experience, and realize that they must use language to undo itself; or as Hafiz puts it: “Look at what good poetry can do: untie the knot in the burlap sack and lift the golden falcon out.” Poets and mystics practice the same conceptual science and express their insights with identical technological formulae, they manipulate language to expose the way it ultimately mislead us.

Additionally, poetry and mysticism are linked insofar as they rise and fall together in terms of their cultural relevance— a society which denigrates one does so at the expense of the other. When poetry loses sight of its responsibility as wisdom literature, its only virtue is that it is, at best, laudable for its cleverness. An example of this cleverness is Christian Bök’s Eunoia, currently one of the best selling books of poetry in Canada.  When spiritual insights are expected to be stripped of poetic formulation in favor of rendering them palpable for immediate consumption, the result is evinced in the current popularity of the ironically named self-help phenomenon, a lucrative industry that now commands ever-increasing shelf space at major book retailers. Whereas the so-called separation of Church and State may be arguably sensible, the separation of poetry and spirituality is not.

Part One: The Poetic Origins of Religion

The most common sense reason Rumi would be considered a mystic who writes poetry whereas we consider Rilke a poet who wrote on mystical themes is that Rumi can be identified solidly within an established religious tradition, in this instance Islam. This seems simple enough, but if we inquire into the origins of religious traditions we find, almost unequivocally, poetic texts at their inception. This is readily evident in the tradition of Islam, wherein it is said that the Prophet Mohammed recorded the angelic dictation of the Angel Gabriel into poetic verse, or Suras which would culminate in the Koran. The melodic and symbolic quality of Mohammed’s poetry was of such caliber as that his texts caused a revolution in the Arabic language itself. Tales of people converting to Islam upon hearing the beauty of its language alone are common in this religious tradition, which is also to say that the poetic persuasiveness of the text was and is potent. Islam would later develop a branch of mysticism wherein poetry featured prominently called Sufism, of which Rumi and Hafiz are emblematic examples.

While the total phenomena we call religion certainly includes an enormous amount of non-poetic expression within its domain, religions tend to originate when an oral tradition of mystical teachings which is poetic in figuration, becomes codified and regarded as something of a sacred text, around which the more dogmatic and ritualistic trappings of religion begin to accrue.

Hinduism’s origins can be traced to the poetry of the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. The Jewish scriptures contain many instances of poetry— the accounts of Genesis are mytho-poetic formulations; the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the monologues of the Book of Job, and the aphorisms of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs can all be readily identified as poetic in nature. Even the wild exhortations of the Biblical Prophet’s and the parables attributed to Jesus in the Christian Scriptures rely on standard poetic tropes to more effectively transmit their messages.

An anecdote from Zen Buddhism further demonstrates the importance poetry can have in a religious tradition involves the selection of the Sixth Zen Ancestor. As the story goes:

The Fifth Ancestor of Zen in China asked all his disciples to compose a verse showing their understanding. Only the senior monk, Shenxiu, wrote one, and he brushed it onto the wall of the south hall. It read:

Body is the bodhi tree. / Mind is a bright mirror on a stand. / Polish it from time to time; / don’t let it get dusty. (Tanahashi 90)

This formulation, though it displayed a certain accomplishment on Shenxiu’s part, was deemed as imperfect by the Fifth Ancestor, and Shenxiu was asked to re-think his poem and to write another verse. Another monk named Huineng, though, who was considered a lowly barbarian, saw the poem and composed his own, almost in complete opposition of Shenxiu’s own, which read:

Bodhi is not a tree. / Mirror has no stand. / Buddha nature is always pure; / where can dust land? (Tanahasi 91)

The text goes on to relate how “The Fifth Ancestor read the verse and immediately saw that Huineng understood the essential meaning” (Tanahashi 92). Huieng was elected to be the Sixth Ancestor of Zen on the basis of his poem. The idea that an interior understanding can be displayed through the technical master of poetry is one I’ll return to later.

Religion is the expression of a people’s dedication and adherence to persuasive metaphors which culminate in a world-view. In its initial stages, the religion’s followers are vitalized, eager and zealous— and an almost chaotic diversity of interpretation and possible offshoots run rampant. As time passes certain texts are assigned priority and are defended by an increasingly centralized body of adherents. Despite the best attempts to maintain the static, immutable authority of a “poetic” text, the fluidity of a culture’s language causes old words to lose their full impact of connotations, the metaphors become too engrained in the common parlance of a people that they “die”, they become clichés.

Armstrong’s position regarding ancient poems and myths of this nature is that, in fact, the people who originally adopted them were even more aware of their significance in a poetic sense than a religious one. She writes that: “these… were not intended to be taken literally, but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way. These dramatic and evocative stories of gods and goddesses helped people to articulate their sense of the powerful but unseen forces that surrounded them” (Armstrong 5). She reiterates this point specifically in regard to the Babylonians and the Aryan’s who brought the Vedas with them, saying, that they “were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods could explain adequately.” (28)

            All of this serves to undermine the idea that classifying a writer as a mystic simply because they already operate within an established religious tradition is insufficient to the fact that at one time, what we call religion was “just” poetry as well. Additionally, the degree of “religiosity” of a writer as the arbiter of whether one is a mystic or a poet is crude at best, for at least two reasons— poets who don’t officially identify with a particular religion can very often be devout in their spirituality, whereas mystics who are officially identified with a religion are very often considered to varying degrees heretical in their formulations.

Part Two: The Difficulty of Definition

The English poet A.E. Houseman once dryly observed that he “could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat,” and he isn’t alone. In fact, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy states right up front that

No satisfactory single-concept theory of poetry has been produced: a poem is not essentially a representation, or essentially expression, or essentially a formal or organic unity. Not because none of these functions is relevant to poetry, but because no one of them does justice to its complexity and many-leveled nature… (691)

            The Canadian poetess Gwendolyn MacEwen, tongue firmly in cheek, deals with the “crisis” of being asked what she calls “The Question”, which is “Why Do You Write,” deliberately capitalizing the phrase to indicate the enormity of the inquiry, because, as we find out, every time she is asked this question she gets “this purple blur in front of my eyes, and / I fear I will fall down frothing at the mouth / and spewing forth saliva and / mixed metaphors” (MacEwen 432)

            Later in the poem she does attempt an answer. She says: “Poetry has nothing to do with poetry. / Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder, / is the sound you make when you come, and / why you live and how you bleed, and / the sound you make or don’t make when you die.” (ibid)

            Though the symbols vary from poet to poet, MacEwen’s answer is not at all uncommon. Dylan Thomas echoes her sentiment in his poetics when he tells us: “If you want a definition of Poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing, and let it go at that” (Geddes 919).

            These “answers” are deliberately elusive and at the same time all-encompassing. Both MacEwen and Thomas include consciously contradictory moments— MacEwen’s “the sound you make or you don’t make” and Thomas’s “do this or that or nothing.” I will examine the way in which, if it isn’t already apparent on some level, these paradoxical tropes are typical of mystical language.

There is no end to the number of examples of this kind of retreat on the part of poets. Emily Dickenson is even vaguer and tells us that poetry is what “makes my body so cold no fire can warm me,” and makes her “feel as if the top of my head were taken off”. Carl Sandburg’s version of the same is that “Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a / doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams. / Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between / white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters / Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths / and biscuits . . . a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanation.”

            This sentiment is likely congruous with the thinking of the Buddha’s attitude to metaphysical inquiry. Armstrong says of the Buddha that he “always refused to answer questions about nirvana or other ultimate matters because they were `improper’ or `inappropriate’.” (Armstrong 33) “It was like asking what direction a flame went when it “went out”.” (34)

            Not all writers default to this tactic, however, and academic attempts at arriving at a precise definition of poetry exist. Let us take a look at one such definition which I chose arbitrarily (it is the very first definition provided if one searches on Google). This definition is by Mark Flanagan, who runs a website about contemporary literature and has a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina.

Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define. (Flanagan)

Does this definition hold up if we methodically dissect its points? “Imaginative awareness” is a good start, and is congruous with the definitions we’ve already looked at for both poetry and mysticism. The qualification “of experience” is the instance where Flanagan allows for the universal term as I said before: Life, Being, Reality, God, Existence, Humanity, the Universe, the Soul, are all acceptable referents which could replace “experience” in this definition just as legitimately, even what Charles Taylor calls a “Horizon of Significance” (Taylor 66) or Heidegger (though he gives most of the credit for this coinage to Rilke) calls the “Ground of Being” (Heidegger 99). Because of this fact, we may put the variable X in the definition instead, where X refers to any word or phrase which signifies the undifferentiated/ total ontological field of the human condition and our relation toward it. Next, the attribution “meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices” does little to add clarification— boiled down it says “the language employed by poetry will mean something, if you speak it aloud you will hear sound, and you will be able to say that the phrase has some rhythmic aspect.” 

 Flanagan tells us that “an emotional response” is poetry’s intended goal. In my personal experience I’ve found that I am rarely, if ever, moved to emotion by poetry, unless a very calm and abstract thrill at a sense of ascent qualifies— so to me this intent might be peripheral at best. Poems are not canned emotions one opens to feel. Certainly the poet does intend a response on his or her reader’s part that, if successful, will resonate in an emotional way, but I’d prefer to substitute “so as to evoke the poet’s desired response, actively seeking to bypass any resistance on the listener/reader’s part.”

            Flanagan then mentions two devices (meter and rhyme) that “Poetry has been known to employ” and then goes on to admit that “this is by no means necessary.” That admission in itself permits the dismissal of this sentence from our definition, but it is worth commenting upon nonetheless. The language is misleading when it says that “meter” and “rhyme” are “employed”; meter and rhythm are more so techniques of poetic analysis than they are poetic devices. Any and all use of language obviously has a rhythm and a meter, however irregular, what the definition means to express is that a poet’s language is designed to deliver the content of the poet’s message (I mean message broadly, a particular state of mind the poet wishes to bring about could be included) with the utmost economy. A poet, however primitive, uses every means at his or her disposal to this end, be it certain figuration of sound whereby the pulse of his or her speech mimics the ocean’s wash or heart’s beat to lull the listener into a visceral experience of the image being evoked, or the establishing of metrical regularity for the express purpose of providing palpable emphasis at the very moment whereby the metrical regularity is broken.

            Flanagan notes that poetry is an “ancient form” which has changed a great deal over time and has varied from society to society. This is fair, but doesn’t serve to further specify the definition because it is true of so many things. Additionally, to say that the change has been “drastic” isn’t necessarily the case, for whereas the types of poetic expression, like the haiku or sonnet, have come in and out of vogue in popularity, this doesn’t exclude the idea that on some level poetry possesses some unitive and immutable essence which is perennial present in every instance where “poetry” occurs.

            Flanagan concludes with the admission that poetry is “almost impossible to define”, which returns us to where we started. He also introduces the notion that poetry is “an authentic and individual mode of expression”, which is unassuming and polite enough as to deflect most criticism, but under examination I find the words do contain contentious implications. The word “authentic” is a term in its own right is as difficult to define as poetry. No poet would argue against the sentiment, I’m sure, all of whom would like to believe that they are engaged in an “authentic” activity, but again the qualification does little to augment a working, academic definition of poetry. 

            Even the inclusion of the qualifier “individual” is debatable if one cares to be extremely critical, seeing as how, while it could be the case that one person is usually involved in poetic production, the greater range of the poetic activity involves community— both with an audience of readers and in dialogue with other poems. If poetry remains “individual” it is immediately inert; if poetry is to act as a vehicle of social/ historical significance it always enters the “public” domain. Lastly, describing poetry as “expression” is indefinite about what it suggests. Certainly we can say that something has been expressed, this is self-evident. Moreover, the common perception of exactly this principle lends itself to the belittling of poetry in the social consciousness— conceiving poets as precocious and sentimental people who just need to “get their feelings out.”

This kind of hyper-critical deconstruction of Flanagan’s definition is ultimately unnecessary, and his definition is as good as might be possible. What doing so demonstrates, though, is that even the academic definitions we have of poetry tend to fall apart when subjected to critical scrutiny.

Interestingly, the definition we’re left with, after our modifications, looks remarkably similar to how Happold tells us the ancient Greeks defined mysticism. They said it was “a particular sort of approach to the whole problem of reality, in which the intellectual, and more especially the intuitive, faculties come into play”  (Happold 18).

Part Three: The Similarity of Defenition

Despite the apparent difficulty in arriving at a final definition for either poetry or mysticism, we find that in many instances that the definitions that we do have of both are astonishingly similar. Wolfgang Goethe was speaking of mysticism when he defined it as “the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings,” but William Hazlitt was defining poetry when he makes a similar sentiment, that poetry is “the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself”. In the same vein, Samuel Johnson was speaking of poetry when he called it “the art of uniting pleasure with truth”, while the philosopher Evelyn Underhill was referring to mysticism when she called it “the art of union with reality” (Happold 38).

When Happold wrote that “[i]n the true mystic there is an extension of normal consciousness, a release of latent powers and a widening of vision, so that aspects of truth unplumbed by the rational intellect are revealed to him,” (19) he parallels the sentiments of two of the Romantic poets, only where his concern is the mystic theirs is with poets. The first third of his sentence is in line with Shelley’s sentiment that poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought” (Harrison 308), while the middle phrase in his sentence is akin to Wordsworth’s notion of poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions” (Harrison 26).

We can continue vacillating between definitions of poetry and mysticism in this manner. Following Wordsworth’s quote, but returning to a definition of mysticism, we find Karl Hartmann’s formulation that mysticism involves “the filling of the consciousness by a content (feeling, thought, desire) by the involuntary emergence of the same from the unconscious” (Happold 37).

The Indian mystic Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan defined mysticism as “integrated thought”, and Happold summarizes Radhakrishnan’s definition in the following: “it [mysticism] brings things together in a new pattern, ie. integrates them, instead of, as in analytical thought, breaking them into parts. It thus relates them into a meaningful whole. It is a sort of creative insight, springing from a deep conscious part of the psyche” (Happold 37).

            The notion of integration and the relation into a meaningful whole of things and ideas presents a correlation between mysticism and poetry that is not only a similarity of sensibility as many of the quotes above referred to, but it is the first definition to hint at how poetry and mysticism are related technically. A successful poem possesses the same qualities: it is a new pattern; it is a unified and meaningful whole of concept-relations.

The definition of poetry in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy says of poetry what Radhakrishnan said of mysticism:

Distinctive of poetry at its best is an `all-in”, maximally dense, simultaneous deployment of linguistic resources—sound and rhythm as well as sense, the bringing together of numerous strands of meaning, through metaphor and other figures, through ambiguities (often unresolved), controlled association and resonances, allusions: all of these contributing to a well-integrated, unified effect…” (691)

If this is true, then what Radhakrishnan suggests mystics hope to achieve internally is identical to what the Oxford Companion to Philosophy describes as what a poem is technically. This is not a point of distinction between mystics and poets either, Coleridge wrote that poetry “brings the whole soul of man into activity” indicating that poets just as much as mystics have to strive for internal unification prior to generation. There is a marked continuity between internal achievement and technical reflection: the internal achievement of this particular state of mind is assisted by the material writing process at the same time as the ability to write in such a manner is dependent on having something of the unified mindset in the first place.

Part Four: Analysis of Mystical Texts

Though poetry has been one of the primary modes of mystical expression in all religious traditions, few are as explicit about it as the Jewish Kabbalists. A Kabbalistic mystic by the name of Abraham Abulafia advocated a kind of free-association automatic writing as meditation, a “mystical contemplation of letters and their configurations” (Scholem 132) or “Hokhmath ha-Tseruf, i.e. `science of the combination of letters’”.

In his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem explains that “Abulafia’s aim, as he himself expressed it, is `to unseal the soul, to untie the knots that bind it’” (Scholem 131). This should remind us immediately of the Hafiz quote I included earlier when he wrote “[l]ook at what good poetry can do: untie the knot in the burlap sack and lift the golden falcon out” (Mohammad 310). Scholem explains in greater detail what is involved with the Kabbalist’s method:

The purpose of this discipline [the combination of letters] then is to stimulate, with the aid of methodological meditation, a new state of consciousness; this state can best be defined as an harmonious movement of pure thought, which has severed all relation to the senses. Abulafia himself has already quite correctly compared it to music. (133)

This science of the combination of letters and the practice of controlled meditation is, according to Abulafia, nothing less than the “mystical logic” which corresponds to the inner harmony of thought in its movement toward God. The world of letters, which reveals itself in this discipline, is the true world of bliss. Every letter represents a whole world to the mystic who abandons himself to its contemplation. Every language, not only Hebrew, is transformed into a transcendental medium of the one and only language of God. (134)

Poets and mystics seem to be somehow view words as barriers to true understanding. Abulafia’s system is to attempt to blur and mix them, while keeping in mind that all words in truth have only a single referent. Happold claims that this is true of all mystics, he tells us that “[t]he task of one who treads the Mystic Way, indeed it is the task of everyone, is to extirpate in himself the illusory multiplicity of objects and acts” (Happold 96). The “illusory multiplicity” Happold refers to is language itself, a construct that properly divides what is in truth totality up into manageable concepts; ultimately a necessary lie which renders the world intelligible, but which mystics seek to suspend, however briefly, for a glimpse of undifferentiated understanding.

Besides the mystical traditions of Sufism and Kabbalism, do the mystics of other religious traditions also share this understanding? The answer is a resounding yes. The Bhagavad-Gita, a poem wherein the god Krishna speaks directly to the reader, includes lengthy passages wherein Krishna explains that “[w]ho sees these twain as one /

Sees with clear eyes! / Yet such abstraction, Chief! / Is hard to win without much holiness” (Arnold 52).

            What Krishna calls “these twain” refers to language’s necessarily dualistic way of describing phenomenon: opposites. He calls them “twain snares” in the following passage:

By passion for the “pairs of opposites” / By those twain snares of Like and Dislike, Prince! / All creatures live bewildered, save some few / Who, quit of sins, holy in act, informed, / Freed from the “opposites,” and fixed in faith, / Cleave unto me. (Arnold 74)

            Like the Sufi’s and the Kabbalists, Hinduism conceives of words, especially when opposed against one another, to be barriers to true apprehension. In all three traditions, the goal is to attain a perception which is unclouded by words, which they regard as ultimately illusory and false, but it must be noted that this in no way prevents them from attempting to use words to explain as much.

            The mystical tradition of Taoism also expresses precisely the same sentiment. In a famous saying from the Tao Te Ching the ancient Sage Lao Tzu tells us that “[t]he Tao which can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao; the name which can be uttered is not the eternal name” (Happold 150). Language is at the forefront of mystical concern— and though this concern is predicated by the insistence on the existence of a transcendental reality which lays behind and is obscured by language, the essence of the mystical science is how to use language to undermine itself. One such technique, we will find, involves the notion of opposites that Hinduism and Taoism have explicitly named as a particular difficulty. By placing such opposites immediately side by side in inherently paradoxical statements, the mystics hope that such opposites with fold upon each other, either uniting or annihilating depending on one’s perspective but which arrive at the same end nonetheless. This passage from the Tao Te Ching demonstrates the kind of language that is meant:

Being and Non-Being produce one another, / Hard and easy complete one another, / Long and short are relative to one another, / High and low are dependant on one another, / Tones and voice harmonize with one another, / First and last succeed one another. (Happold 152)

            When we are first taught language as children, our perceptual capacities are close to the kind advocated by poets— unfiltered and pure. We acquire language to be able to make some sense of the world, but the older and more mature we get the more we come to the realization that words are in many respects inadequate for describing what is actually occurring. Words like “sad” or “happy” which we may’ve once felt as concrete no longer sufficiently explain how we may be truly feeling, and we can say that we have “mixed feelings” about a subject. By no means do the mystics advocate remaining as children, of course; in fact, the biblical imagery of the fall from paradise is a metaphor for this separation from God we experience through language (knowledge); redemption is the return to childhood innocence. Life is this journey. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he aphoristically (and poetically) said that to “[e]nter the Kingdom / become a child / become a child / Enter the Kingdom” (Crossan 45).

            As a minor side-note, it is interesting to point out the etymology of the Hebrew word that we translate as “parable”. In Matthew 13:34-35, an entry that biblical scholars have titled The Use of Parables, we are told the following:

Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world. (Meeks 1882)

            The earlier text to which Jesus is alluding is Psalm 78, line 2, which reads: “I will open my mouth in story [Hebrew mashal], drawing lessons from on old” (Meeks 871). The Catholic Companion Edition of the bible footnote tells us that mashal “literally means `comparison’ and can signify a story with a hidden meaning” (592). This evokes two things simultaneously— both the opposites which are of mystic concern, as all opposites are implicitly comparative, as Lao Tzu wrote above. Additionally, metaphorical and metonymic tropes are also comparative; this reason to view Jesus as a poet.

            The sayings of Jesus are not the only writings in the Christian tradition to engage the types of mysticism we’ve been thus discussing. The Christian tradition also includes mystics who promote this understanding. Here is an excerpt from Nicolas of Cusa, a 13^th century mystic.

For if both motion and rest can be individuated at the same time in divers beings, and if naught can exist apart from Thee, and no motion be apart from Thee, nor any rest; then Thou, Lord, art wholly present to all these things, and to each, at one and the same time. And yet Thou does not move nor rest, since Thou art exalted above all, and freed from all that can be conceived or named. Wherefore thou standest and proceedest, and yet at the same time dost not stand or proceed… Hence I observed how needful it is for me to enter into the darkness, and admit the coincidence of opposites, beyond all the grasp of reason, and there to seek the truth where impossibility meeteth me.” (Happold 336)

What Hinduism calls the “pairs of opposites” we can see Nicholas referring to as the “coincidence of opposites.” The opposites prevent us from perceiving reality correctly because it is ultimately one thing. By battling the opposites specifically, but also the entire misleading skew of the apparatus of language over us, we can deliver ourselves to a kind of true seeing. We are only able to perceive the unified totality of reality, though, when we ourselves are unified. The role that writing plays in this process is more clearly evident, because if our minds are linguistic constructs, it is only by engaging our own interior terminology that we would ever be able to subvert it.

One more example of Christian mysticism which accords to our model should suffice, and then we will determine if we can find the same sensibility in examples of poetry. The last mystic we will discuss is St. John of the Cross, of whom Happold refers to as a poet-mystic, a designation he also extends to the Sufi’s. This is another example of the deficiency I mentioned in the introduction to this essay wherein I lamented how often sources on this topic matter so clearly recognize that many of their writers are both poets and mystics and yet never deal with this correlation explicitly, either assuming that the relation is purely incidental or neglecting to ask the question of just what it implies. In any case, St. John of the Cross serves as an excellent bridge as we move from our discussion about texts which have been identified as mystical and turn to those regarded as primarily poetic, because his poetry closely resembles both the mystic formulations we’ve just presented as well as the poetry of the poets we’ll discuss in a moment.

This short excerpt obviously resembles the Taoist excerpt most clearly, with its repetition of oppositions:

In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. In order to possess everything, desire to possess nothing. In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. In order to arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing […] when thy mind dwells upon anything at all, Thou are ceasing to cast thyself on the All. For, in order to pass from the all to the All, Thou hast to deny thyself wholly in all. (Happold 361)

St. John of the Cross also shows how the engagement with extremes leads to unification, the ability to be and know “everything”, which is “the All”. In a poem St. John wrote with a humorously long title, Song of the soul in rapture at having arrived at the height of perfection, which is union with God by the road of `spiritual negation’, St. John speaks of unity between lover and beloved, which, whether he was aware of the fact or not, is also a Sufi motif:

Oh night that was my guide! / Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride, / Oh night that joined the lover / To the beloved bride / Transfiguring each into the other. / Within my flowing breast / Which only for himself entire I save / He sank into his rest / And all my gifts I gave / Lulled by the airs with which the cedar wave. / Over the ramparts fanned / While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses, / With his serenest hand / My neck he wounded, and / Suspended every sense with its caresses. / Lost to myself I stayed / My face upon my lover having laid / From all endeavour ceasing: / And all my cares releasing / Threw them among the lilies there to fade. (Happold 357)

More motifs of mystical poetry are evinced here— dissolution in an all-encompassing union with “the lover”, here personified in nature imagery. This “suspension of sense” is the result of suspending the language of distinctions, which culminates in an attendant “loss of care”, mystical repose in connection with the height of being itself.

Part Five: Analysis of Poetic Texts

Do writers who we typically classify as poets echo any of the mystical sentiments we’ve just enumerated? In fact, they do so in certain instances so clearly as to be almost indistinguishable, just as we found earlier in comparisons between the definitions of poetry and mysticism we looked at. Intriguingly, the mystic’s apprehension regarding language is also something of which poets are clearly aware. Consider these lines written by Dante:

How weak are words, and how unfit to frame / My concept -- which lags after what was shown / So far, ‘twould flatter it to call it lame! / Eternal light, that in Thyself alone / Dwelling, alone dost know Thyself, and smile / On Thy self-love, so knowing and so known!  (Happold 267)

Dante is clearly speaking of a mystical experience when he says “what was shown,” and struggles with the difficulty of words to “frame” it. Nevertheless, the poem concludes in a poetic formulation of mystical rapture:

As the geometer his mind applies / To square the circle, nor for all his wit / Finds the right formula, howe’er he tries, / So strove I with that wonder -- how to fit / The image to the sphere; so sought to see / How it maintained the point of rest in it. / Thither my own wings could not carry me, / But that a flash my understanding clove, / Whence its desire came to it suddenly. / High phantasy lost power and here broke off; / Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars, / My will and my desire were turned by love, / The love that moves the sun and other stars (Happold 268).

Dante expresses a sense of helplessness in his task, but tells us that he was moved by a power above him, a “love” which is responsible for the movement of all creation.

            A few more definitions of poetry will be helpful to reinforce the correlations with mysticism as we’ve discussed it above. Echoing mysticism’s task of eradicating the negative effects of analytical thought and distinctions brought on by language, the German poet Novalis once wrote that “[p]oetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” Echoing the mystic sentiment of attempting to express the ineffable, Louis Untermeyer writes: “Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.” Eli Khamarov in his book The Shadow Zone tells us that “[p]oets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.” And just like mysticism, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy tells us of poetry that it

is forever fighting against the pressures and seductive power of ordinary language to falsify experience in an easy, slack cliché. Poetry feels itself often up against the `limits of language’, and forced to modify, maybe do violence to, normal syntax. Theory of knowledge and philosophy of religion cannot ignore poets’ claims to `timeless (visionary) moments’—`epiphanies’. (691)

I will now proceed to cite a large number of such poems, commenting briefly on each, all which will demonstrate how notions of unity with a transcendent aspect of reality have informed some of the greatest poets of human history. In the following excerpt, Gwendolyn MacEwen demonstrates that she is well within a mystical understanding of concepts when she writes:

the slow striptease of our concepts / it is even this which builds us / for you I would subtract my images /            for the nude truth beneath them

Here the English poet William Wordsworth sings of some underlying force that is present in “all things”, clearly advocating a pantheistic sense of the world around him. This is an undeniably mystical viewpoint:

A sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. / A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, / All objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things. (Harrison 41)

             Oscar Wilde might strike some as an unlikely candidate for the title of mystic, but in the following excerpt he is plainly describing an experience of mystical absorption similar to that of St. John’s:

We are resolved into the supreme air, / We are made one with what we touch and see, / With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair, / With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree / Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range / The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

            For considerations of space, similar poems are included in the endnotes by Blake, Robert Browning, Goethe, Tennyson, Whitman and Shelley; but they all display the same unified and pantheistic understanding of a mystic who has seen either into, through, or behind standard perception. Blake’s infamous formulation regarding the doors of perception is applicable to them all: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake 90).

Part Six: The Future of Mystic-Poetry

Neither poetry nor mysticism is particularly in vogue in the modern, North American milieu. In his essay What are poets for? Heidegger, thinking of Rilke, asks what it means to be a poet in “a destitute time” (89). In the time that has passed since Heidegger wrote his essay the reception and priority of poetry may have become even more destitute. Even in his day, Heidegger was aware that, to most people, poetry is “either rejected as a frivolous mooning and vaporizing into the unknown, and a flight into dreamland” (211), a view which is commonplace today. The health of its culture is always a reflection of the health of a society as a whole, and the decay of both poetry and mysticism could prove perilous if Margaret Atwood was correct when she wrote that “[i]f poetry vanished, language would become dead” (Geddes 785).

Ancient thinkers, mystics, poets and their ideas are relegated to confinement in academia, and expunged from day to day life. The “poetry” available for consumption is the perversion of modern marketing, commercials, slogans and the lyrics of club songs which seek to incite sexual hook-ups amongst party-goers. We may read and dismiss the insights of ancient writers as laden with out-dated, disposable, ugly connotations that we think our advanced society has long since exceeded, regarding their petty poetic monuments as, at best, a nostalgic and embarrassing snapshot of humanity’s collective naivety or neurosis, glad to be free-thinkers in an age of technological advancement and “enlightened” reason.

Karen Armstrong’s reasoning when she speculates that “[o]ne of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen” (4), could be just as much a reason for the irrelevance of poetry as well. As we’ve examined in this essay, commitment to the unseen is one of the primary drives for both poets and mystics, disbelief in this dismisses them both.

But is this disbelief even tenable? Though modern society might advocate an aggressive individualism as one of its most important tenants, what is at stake? For Charles Taylor, such an attitude makes all meaning and significance ultimately impossible. He argues:

To shut out demands emanating from beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization. To the extent that people are seeking a moral ideal here, this self-immuring is self-stultifying; it destroys the conditions in which the ideal can be realized. Otherwise put, I can only define my identity against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands. (Taylor 40)

But poetry and mysticism, as we’ve seen, also involve a kind of disbelief— in words. At this point we have to ask whether or not the type of poetry and mysticism we’ve discussed is worth anything at all. How useful are universalized words? Do they tell us anything at all? Moreover, how does one conclude a diatribe about the ineffable, the indefinable?

Is it beneficial to have an undifferentiated perspective, or is it a hindrance? Tonight—“ Oh night that was my guide!” (Happold 87)— I have not slept but instead permutated terms until all blurred into a blend whereby I could no longer tell one writer from another nor one concept from any other. Even as they may’ve begun to differ I could see only one speaker, and then they vanished altogether.

How can one conclude when nothing was ever defined? “How weak are words, and how unfit to frame / My concept -- which lags after what was shown” (Happold 267).

Additional unused quotations

Schelling

“Nothing is a work of art which does not exhibit an infinite, either directly, or at least by reflection.”                                                             (Schelling 231)

Alex Grey 

“The distinction between works of hollow skill and works of holy spirit are notable. The work of hollow art is a shell, a copy, a dead surface made more or less well. It is usually work done to sell or as an egoic display of the artist. Hollow art is lacking in the dimension of authentic spiritual engagement.”               (Grey 207)

“The mystic artist guides us to an oasis of spiritual truth and clarity within the postmodern desert of false and shrill media information saturating our consciousness.”                                                                     (Grey 132)

Denise Levertov

“To contemplate comes from `templum, temple, a place, a space for observationm marked out by the augur’. It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to mediate is `to keep the mind in a state of contemplation’; its synonym is `to muse’, and to muse comes from a word meaning `to stand with the mouth open’— not so comical if we think of `inspiration’—to breath in.”

                                                             (Geddes 842)

Dylan Thomas

“The joy and the function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”                              (Geddes 919)

APPENDIX: Additional relevant poetry excerpts

To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.
                            BLAKE

I spoke as I saw, / Reported, as man may of God's work--all's love, yet all's law. / Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked / To perceive him has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked. / Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare. / Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!

Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? / I but open my eyes,--and perfection, no more and no less, / In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God / In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.”

                        BROWNING

What kind of God would push only from outside, / letting the cosmos circle round his finger? / He likes to drive the world from inside, / harbours the world in Himself, Himself in the world, / so all that lives and weaves and is in Him / never wants for his power or his spirit.

GOETHE

Flower in the crannied wall, / I pluck you out of the crannies, / I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, / Little flower - but if I could understand / What you are, root and all, and all in all, / I should know what God and man is.

                        TENNYSON

A vast similitude interlocks all, / All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids, / All distances, however wide, / All distances of time - all inanimate forms, / All Souls - all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, / All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes - the fishes, the brutes, / All men and women - me also, / All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, / All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe or any globe,
All lives and deaths - all of past, present and future, / this vast similitude spans them, and always has spanned, and shall forever span them, and compactly hold them.”

                        WHITMAN

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, / That Beauty in which all things work and move, / That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse / Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love / Which through the web of being blindly wove / By man and beast and earth and air and sea, / Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of / The fire for which all thirst…”

                        SHELLEY

SUBLIMINAL by Gwendolyn MacEwen

in that sublayer of sense

where there is no time

no differentiation of identities

but co-presents, a static recurrence

(the wolf is stone,

this stone is wolf)

your bones have interlocked

behind my brow

your meanings are absolute

you do not move

but are always moving

in that substratum I hold,

unfold you at random;

your eye is a giant

overflowing me;

your foot is planted

in the marrow of my bone,

today is tomorrow.

vision does not flinch

perspective is not jarred

you do not move

but are always moving

you do not move but are always moving

Christ O Christ no one lives long

along that layer;

I rise to see you planted

In an earth outside me,

moving through time

through the terms of it,

moving through time again

along its shattered latitudes

Ok, I must ask this - are you taking classes for a degree and this is just your paper from the class?  If not, Rael, you have way too much time on your hands. hahaha lol So far it's interesting - but I think I'm going to have to read this a little bit at a time - it's a lot of reading!

I did not want to weigh down such a well written theory here so I posted an excert from an interview in the critics corner, it is with a man who I admire, and I feel that you are in line with his concepts.  

How long did this take? I'm haven't even read 3/4 of it yet.

Oh geez I realize that I posted part 5 and 6 as a single part 5. Silly me.

@ inspiredmind

This was indeed for a class, my senior seminar in my last year of my English degree.

@ pawnsolo2

Yeah man, I was reading that. I really, really enjoy Joseph Campbell. I think I was going to include him in the essay at a point... I had way too much stuff that I wanted to include... he's a lot of fun.

@ Kevindubrow

Heh, it took a bit of work, I won't lie, but it was a labour on a topic that was at the center of what I felt my studies had been leaning towards. It was one of my favorite essays to write, and I got to present a condensed version to an audience.

I just finished reading this and I have made some interesting observations.  I was not too familiar with Rilke before.  Thanks for widening my horizons.

The reason I why I left Northern Ohio for Hawai'i some 10 years ago was to get a Masters in Comparative Religion at University of Hawai'i at Manoa. I was interested in Mythology & Mysticism due to a religious experience I had of my own (as an atheist 10 years prior to that).

I ended up concentrating in Cults & New Religions and working on a thesis on a (at the time) New Religious Movement (NRM) in Japan called Kofuku-no-Kagaku - which they translated into English as "The Institute for Research into Human Happiness." But it had mystical experiences (pedestrian, run-of-the-mill) and appropriated mythology. What it lacked was inspirational writers. The leader was charismatic (in a Japanese way - certainly not how we describe charismatics here in the US) and he churned out tons of self-help books - but none of it poetic. I think that in that point - that his teachings had no artistic aspect which kept it from being translated into a insprirational fashion that may appeal to non-Japanese audience. Poems/Mystical language can be translated with justice by inspired and qualified people fluent in both languages. But this author didn't so I think that's why it never really caught fire outside the Japanese-speaking communities.