From: Notes Toward a Poetics of the Numinous

David Hickman

¶Revelation subsumes all history, and in so doing, immolates the structuring of history that preceded it. . . a structuring that had proceeded in the wake of a previous revelatory moment, which, in its slow cessation as a living force became subject to the impulses of those not privileged to the intensity, the flavor, or the spirit of the original revelation. The institutions and structures that result from the release of a new revelation are then subject to the many corrupting influences which deconstruction can treat with insight. Nonetheless, revelation must be recognized as the only source of the teleological impulse inside history, and as such must forever remain at least partially hidden for all but a few of the initiated, since its foundation can be apprehended only in the silence of EXPERIENCE, and by this I mean experience which is pre- verbal, or non-verbal, finding its shape in a knowing that is a priori ,and both inclusive of and at the same time extending far beyond the immediate understanding of what is human.( It does no good to protest that such an experience cannot be known without language, or to point to the fallibility of language, for if language itself is inadequate to the task of describing experience, as it is almost universally acknowledged to be, it still may follow that there is and must always be something more to the revelatory experience as cast in language, and that something more, which cannot be measured, and which resonates at the very borders of available meaning, is inclusive of language at the same time that it cries out for words to express what is beyond it. So while it may be true that language can only point to the inexpressible, it CAN point, and more, it can point in such a way that one's sensing capacity can be awakened to strain beyond language. It is this intrinsic ambiguity which characterizes our times for those who care to approach matters of the spirit, and it is for this reason that the entirety of our history as it pulses between revelations can be regarded as nothing less or more than a series of stuttering attempts to articulate what is at the bottom of it. As result, the current poetics of fragmentation seem so plausible to so many, since, unless one can experience this revelatory moment for themselves, they must remain outside of it, and though some (perhaps more and more as time goes by) may have a sense for the revealed and/or intuited impulses that underlie that history, many sense nothing but their own personal impulses trying to cohere.This is so even as one is lost from the possibility of coherence (without, at the very least, the sensing of that which rests in the experience of the stream of life itself). Ironically, even this ontological sensing motion allows for only a semblance of the real, which is, at least something.The movement from modernism into postmodernism is the record of a movement of the loss that characterizes a period based on revelation to one that is based on anticipation of a new revelation ’Äì one that has not yet come, or having come to a few, waits for the moment when it is able to be understood (experienced) by many. It is this wait that underlies and characterizes the particular anxiety that is considered Postmodern’Äîthat is has it is reflective of a conciousness that is aware of itself, yet has no content with which to anchor or fill that awarenes which is reliable, anchored, and informs the human being of its place inside the telos as it flows, not from the past forward but from the future toward us as we wait.

¶An irony: one who has had an experience of revelation might just as well be moved to stuttering as those who have not. (Thomas Aquinas' revelation, alluded to only in a conversation with a friend, is an excellent example. Pascal is another) Such a person is left with much to understand which has forever sundered them, at least in part, from language. A poet of this kind has no hope of shelter or safety in language again, and yet, like a child who runs to his mother for comfort after she spanks him, that poet is nonetheless dependent on words for his/her expression. And though this may be said of many, a poet of revelatory stature (whether the revelation of the numinous is great or small) experiences their fumbling in a profoundly different way, for it is a fumbling TOWARD something, and neither a celebration of nihilism, or nihilistic aesthetics, nor the attempt to produce out of a thinking subject an overlay that is descriptive of their everyday experience or something opposed to such a description. To recover from revelation and still have the ability, even the inner necessity to write then, is the mark of not only the truest of poets, but of those poets who are more than poets, who are themselves participants in the UNFOLDING of history, or of an active moment of the telos becoming conscious of itself in a particular individual. One would include among their ranks, Homer, St. John, Chretien de Troyes Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, Simone Weil, perhaps even TS Eliot. . .

¶Revelatory poetry then, is the stumbling toward a nameless presence that is, at its heart, inflicting the same process of revision on that subject as that very subject might inflict on the poems that he/she lays down in front of the Nameless as an offering. It seeks for a fundamentally different namelessness than the A-historical, anti-language oriented gap of the postmodernists, which in the end remains a "theoretical" gap, rather than an experiential one. That is to say, the gap of the Language Poets is not a gap cast out of fear and trembling, and the actual presence of the angel that negates -- the angel of death with its winged head. Such a gap is a presence at the same time it is an absence, and is teleological and anti-teleological in its very essence. Yet it announces teleology necessarily, in that it's shadow is a human one, and so must take its course in a time that is and is not anchored permanently to what is revealed. Such a teleology is dependent only on the past, then, and cannot be saved without further impingements (revelations) from outside it. For these however, we become dependant on the flow of the future into the silence of the present.

¶Teleology is nothing less than the process the world experiences as it comes to recognize itself as a being-cast-from-love, which is to say, as that which carries its eternality in-absentia until the day when it can hold itself in full consciousness, through the recognition of itself as numinous being.

¶The outer world then, can take any form it wishes to. Its shape is, at heart, a question of what we are able to encounter of the numinous and then make into a world. So we, as human beings, have only to look in the mirror to know who is responsible for the current state of things. To deny that we are spiritual beings because as human beings we have torn things into shreds is to blame that which is revealed for what it has no responsibility for. Neither is the invisible to be blamed for those who use the name of God to support their crimes. These people are after all, criminals, and will use whatever means they have at their disposal to succeed in hiding their responsibility. This is clear enough when one remembers that the Christ himself was crucified on a teleological excuse-- that it was 'expedient that one should die for the people" . . .The irony here being as profound as any in the history of the world. For His death held its truth against the truth as it were, which is to say that, at His crucifixion Judaism bore fruit that it could not sustain and even the Roman empire was eventually subsumed in the new revelation, one which negated any notion of being bound by blood or special tie as identity or as a claim to love. It was in this way exactly, that the Christ negated truth by pouring a greater truth into the world through his death. That truth was loves recognition of the other, without regard for affiliation or the status or identity bestowed by birth It is in this way that a poet who is found by revelatory experience, must necessarily pour that revealed truth into the world, as "mystical" poetry, in the same way that Rumi did, or Dante, St. John of the Cross, or Goethe, or in our own time, Gerard Manley Hopkins Rilke, Robert Duncan, or in prose, Simone Weil. In this same way did Thomas Aquinas stutter after his experience of revelation, saying to a friend that his experience made "all that I have written to seem as straw" It is just this immolation of all that was, that revelation engenders. And yet the immolation itself is only enkindled in the revelatory moment(s). Time is necessary for the fullness of that destruction to be realized, so that the new may have a clean place to inhabit when it is time. In this way both Rudolf Steiner and Teillard de Chardin note that the world is still coming into its ability to recognize Christ.

¶The creative moment in any artist may be likened to revelation. In that in the moment of poetic activity, all the content of consciousness is backgrounded by the profound sweep of the poetic impulse to be committed to language. Every poet knows exactly what is being spoken of here, though it is still possible to understand it's origins quite differently, depending on who is doing the interpreting. And indeed the essence of a poetic impulse may or may not be one that has significance for divinity in a progressive way, but all poetics proceeds forth anyway in the general shape of an epochˆ©, that suspends what was in the coming possibility, and pays no attention whatsoever to the resistance in the subject as he/she proceeds. It is in this way that we can begin to understand poetry to be allied as much with the future as the present and the past. And it is in this way too that we may be reminded of the heavy responsibility that such a gift must bear.