⚘ Branch thought from Creating from the heart is contributing to the Great Spirit of Humanity – Waterways for flooding states of mind
⚘Branches: Metaphors are keys into mind territories
“So whatever it is we experience, we have to express in language that is just not up to the occasion.
That’s it! That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated. It doesn’t shut you off, it opens. It’s the rhythm, the precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the word.”
Joseph Campbell in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, 1988.
People with a natural bent towards poetry are those whose thoughts are constantly suffused by the ineffable (what available words fail to convey), to the detriment of what can be said with words.
What can easily be said becomes accessory to them. It becomes a performance, a game, while the ineffable that wells up within them through their experiences in the world is what they truly engage with when they really try to communicate. In this sense, authentic expression happens when they try to convey something through words as faithfully to that pure, experience as they are able to. It is that stage of assimilating an experience before we put conventional words in it, a process which inevitably curtails its true richness as it becomes distilled through the narrowing, pre-established definitions of conventional language in its most utilitarian sense.
Their inner selves -call it their psyche, their soul, or their minds: their inner subjective processes of imagination, feeling, instinct and thought- confer an unusual predominance on things in the world that have not yet been put into words (or at least properly).
So, when those who are innately poetic endeavour to communicate the ineffable (what at the moment cannot be put into words, or perhaps never will be), they will attempt to conjure the most faithful combination of words, structure, and rhythm that their inspiration will allow them.
This combination will work not in terms of the words’ combined definitions complementing each other, but in terms of the unique imagery this totality evokes and the state of transformed perception that the reader could reach by engaging with it. In a way, the poet crafts a combination of words that, instead of telling what something is, it makes the reader experience it in a heightened, enchanted manner; it reveals it to us and points our attention to it.
An innate poet’s advantage lies in that the richness of that pre-verbal manifestation of experience remains palpitatingly strong within them, granting them a sharper instinct for crafting a medium for its expression. However, their disadvantage is that the ineffable claims an impractically large portion of their mind space, at the expense of the expediency granted by what can already be easily said with words.
The result is a less efficient engagement with reality, especially when it is a language-centric social reality where speaking is the primary means of participation in the human world. In the poetically inclined, the ineffable radiates within, instilling a compelling sense of its call to be given expression in the world (and to be communicated to others). They are highly sensitive to the importance of the unsaid, even when it hasn’t yet been culturally acknowledged enough to be given conventional expression. And they carry the daring intuition that they can give form and life to what has not yet been spoken.
Were they to continually suppress this inclination in favour of the already spoken, it would remain a draining thorn in their side: born of both a deep sense of waste of what they feel to be essentially important and beautiful, and of the constant waste of energy in resisting the currents of their innate attunements.
Poets do not codify anything in the world. That is the pursuit of many other great disciplines. A poet’s words can only gently guide our gaze and hearts towards things in the world: unseen beauties, things that are looked at differently, or expressions of captured experiences.
Poets decode nature (the world, the universe) in order to codify the human soul. But the human soul is impossible to codify conclusively; this is why poetry offers no definitions, only invitations to particular transformed states of existing, perceiving, moving towards certain things, and of experiencing.
In the most expansive sense, the poetic is nothing more and nothing less than aiding handholds for the ever-untamed, ineffable parts of the soul.
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.“
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1803
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