2-16-05

Paul,

Read your Writing Out of Hell piece on Williams. Found it interestingly reverberating my recent contemplations on the subject of poetics.

- “…the hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration”: (ie. his notes for poems) locating the imagination and/or the “other” in the quotidian/banal

- open stance: such a stance being one that accepts messages from the “other” & “imagination” (read: unconscious)

- “obsession with the line…” : new mind = new line = mind that is open & accepts new (read: dangerous/other) messages of life

- “without invention nothing lies under the witchhazel…” : invention (read: imagination) as value

- “without invention the line won’t take on its ancient divisions …” : the imaginative horizon does not “crumble” (except perhaps intentionally in the surrealist realm),but takes on the curvature of the earth, the infinite

- War is the only thing in the world today : the language our leaders speak

- Spontaneous composing: imagination as value

- Structure of the field: poetic form = free verse, accentual verse, traditional verse

- Deeper state of consciousness: 1) the process/work opens the mind, relieves it of the hell of the quotidian, by applying imagination as the ‘way out” (see Sartre’s No Exit & Becket;s Waiting for Godot) 2) The work, the ‘praxis’ summons this ‘state’ in order to ‘fix’ it in the poem as a record (or CD!) of transcendence. See Jung: ‘The imaginatio, as the alchemists understand it, is in truth the key that opens the door to the secret of the opus… The soul, on God’s behalf, imagines creatively and extra naturam – to put it in modern language actualizes those contents of the unconscious which are outside nature, i.e. not a datum of our empirical world, and therefore an a priori of archetypal character. The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can be adequately expressed only by the symbol…. (C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Vol XX 1956)

- Sheldrake: yeah mon!

- Poetry as a struggle with reason: the poem’s imaginative horizon delineates the boundaries and components of this struggle

- This may be described as deepening of consciousness through poetry: as demonstrated historically through culturally various but basically similar ‘quests’ including the holy grail, the Lapis of the alchemical Artifex, the priest of the oracle, the sacrifice of the king.

- Perpetual drifter: (see above in Becket, Sartre, Mamet)

- American perfection of diversion from introspection: bravo!

- Not by transcendence, but by immersion: They go hand in hand, señor. Immersion in The Red Sea was of special significance to the alchemists. See “The Red Sea” (C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1956; prgph 257) “…the Red Sea is a water of death for those that are ‘unconscious’, but for those that are ‘conscious’ it is a baptismal water of rebirth and transcendence. By ‘unconscious’ are meant those who have no ‘gnosis’, i.e. are not enlightened as to the nature and destiny of man in the cosmos. In modern language it would be those who have no knowledge or access to the personal and collective unconscious… The collective unconscious expresses itself in the mythological teachings … which reveal secret knowledge concerning the origin of all things and the way to salvation. ‘Unconscious’ people who attempt to cross the sea without being purified and without guidance of enlightenment (i.e. work/praxis) are drowned; they get stuck in the unconscious and suffer a spiritual death insofar as they cannot get beyond their one-sidedness… this continual process of getting to know the counter-position in the unconscious I have called the ‘transcendent function’ … because the confrontation of conscious (rational) data with those that are unconscious (irrational) necessarily results in a modification of standpoint.”

I look forward to reading the other pieces supporting your MFA practicum.

Yours,

Amalio