Writing Praxis as Soteriological Vehicle: Via Negativa from Dionysius the Areopagite to Ramon del Valle-Inclan to Jack Spicer (2014)

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way. --John Ashbery (Three Poems 3) Words get in the way, much of the time, but assuming we speak at all, they are what they are: indispensable, even while incommensurate with vastly important aspects of human experience. Can the indescribable mystical experience of oneness with God, Cosmos, Nature or humanity be reduced to a linguistic--even literary--poetics? While nodding in the affirmative, I register the difficulty of the claim. When we use the term we necessarily point to a certain aesthetic product. When we aestheticize we also necessarily anaesthetize. is a we say, and so already it is lost to us in its full immediacy. It has become an object governed by certain laws of form and function. When mystical experience lies at the root of poetic expression then poetic expression seems necessarily a tracery of that experience. However, on deeper examination, this proves not to be the case. There is a poetics at work from the song of the shaman (the first poetic utterance) onward; however, it is not a poetics in an aesthetic, literary or theoretical sense. Without trying to fashion a poem, such a poetics nevertheless navigates meaning toward song, toward a becoming of being which has not quite solidified yet. At this point it is co-equal with mystical experience. Only later, when we transcribe the song, or iterate the divine wisdom obtained, is the dynamic quality of the originary poetics lost. Instead of the dynamic implicit in poetic utterance its spiritual dimension can easily be placed into a category of thought insufficiently flexible to comfortably contain it. Individuals and cultures are alike in having at their disposal images or entities into which numinosity may be deposited. However, as we move to a transpersonal (nondual) level of awareness, there may be only the search for a meaning in continual deference of its own arrival at any final destination which is, in any absolute sense, actual. This is why our earliest records of encounters with transpersonal domains tend to be creation myths. Creation, poesis, is the archetype of archetypes. Since one must begin somewhere, it is here, as the steriometric structures begin to take form, that meaning begins to take a yet undetermined shape. However, creation myths are rarely linear, and may themselves be complemented by other even apparently contradictory stories within the same tradition. This is because time as usually understood is in the Hermetic tradition in which Via Negativa is partially anchored, illusory. There is a transcendental awareness in the tribal shaman's song, early mythic texts and magical lore that suggests there really is no absolute beginning, but rather a series of provisional formations forever branching out into possibilities more or less fully realized. The creation myth only in its most exoteric understanding is taken like a newspaper account describing an event outside of itself. The esoteric comprehension of the shaman, the mystic and magician, realizes the creation myth as in itself creation. Variants of the creation myth, ranging from The Great Vision of Black Elk to the Sumerian Innana cycle, employ images and motifs beyond the common pale of human experience, even as the culture from which they arise clothes them in that thingness most familiar to it. Immanence and transcendence become in this way interwoven, and quite intricately, but should not be confused, unless it is to leave them behind as useful distinctions forever. In On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas Renaissance magical-philosopher Giordano Bruno presents a poetics heavily influenced by Gnostic and Hermetic strands of Western Esotericism while still apparently taking into account the liminal, dynamic poetics of the shaman's song with its often bizarre, unnatural imagery. …