The retrospective sayings of the mystic become the regurgitated maxims of the pedant. The mystical experience is ineffable, by definition, and yet mystics are invariably compelled to write. What the mystic writes after the fact is not meant to be systematic, comprehensive, or even an accurate representation of his mysticism. But leave it to the gate keepers to ruin the words of another. Pendants pilfer from the mystic’s coffers and reduce those marvelous and contradictory emotions to dogmatic maxims. A verbal articulation of an entirely non-verbal experience necessarily falls short. What pedants do to the mystic, they also do to the poet. In both cases, clinging to footnotes, journals, and excessive psychoanalysis, the original experience (mystic or poetic) is concealed within a labyrinth of pseudo-intellectual criticism. An excellent poem appears simple in its complexity, and above all easy in its difficulty. A poem appearing strained or artificial (though it is [...]
Entering a new language is entering a new world. But what does it mean to be “in” a world? The word “in” originally had no spatial connotations. To say that someone was “in” something meant that they existed “in anger” or “in love.” Love and anger are not places, but modes of being. But this means that you can say these statements another way: to be “in anger” is to be angrily and “in love” is to be lovingly. To be “in a world” means to be worldly. When you enter a new language, you enter a new mode of being. This is true not simply of English, Chinese, Farsi, etc. but also of the language games of technologies, skills, and other modes of thought. As long as there is a new vocabulary, it is a new language game, and anywhere there are new rules is a new world. Entering [...]
Ingmar Bergman called Tarkovsky, “the greatest.” It’s hard to argue with Bergman. While Tarkovsky is not a well-enough known director, this is probably just as well because virtually anything popular becomes bastardized. Tarkovsky will probably never be “popular” simply because of the interminable length and oppressive mood of his films. Tarkovsky created most of his films under the watchful eye of the USSR. The Soviets violently edited (and at other times completely censored) every film he made. His works were considered too politically ambiguous, religiously symbolic, and (of all things) too violent for Soviet tastes. Even the anti-Soviet nationalist Alexander Solzhenitsyn did not approve of Tarkovsky’s violent portrayal of Russia’s past. Because of the repression of the Soviets, Tarkovsky’s films are even more shrouded in poetic mystery. The persistent theme of doubt in all his works would make any sincere Soviet anxious. Andrei Tarkovsky made an important film called Andrei [...]
Poetry changes when you memorize it. Rather than being a subjective observer viewing an inanimate object, you enter the world of the poem when you memorize. The “departure” from this world and the entrance into an alternative world isn’t science fiction or fantasy. A world is not a physical location, but a way of existing. To indulge in a poem is to taste another world (vocabulary). To memorize a poem is to inhabit another world. As I have been memorizing Snow’s transcendent translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, I have become impressed — no, the poem itself has pressed itself against me. As Rilke says in the first elegy, “And even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart, I’d be consumed in his greater existence [Dasein].” Or as Meister Eckhart says, when two beings meet, the lesser one must surrender its being. As man before an Angel, the [...]