Any Mention of "Universe Mind" Makes Me Happy

I'm still in the process of unpacking, but it's already clear that I have nowhere near enough room for all my books. So I have to decide which ones are beloved enough to bring to my current residence, and which ones are (temporarily) damned to the storage unit.

It's very frustrating, but it's also interesting because it forces me to determine what's most important to me right now. For one thing, after another of my periodic flirtations with fiction earlier this summer, I find that the pendulum has swung back over to poetry again. So I'm trying to bring in as many poetry-related books as space will allow.

Also, I seem to finally feel the need to really, truly dig into mythology. For a quasi-neo-Jungian such as myself, I really am not nearly as familiar with mythology as I should be. So all the myth books have to come out of storage. I believe that myth is the key for my current and future poetry — though in what way, I haven't quite figured out yet. So I've got to really delve into this stuff. (I must face the sobering truth that, sadly, renting old episodes of Hercules and Xena from Netflix will just not be enough anymore.)

In general, I'm feeling a need to get back to the things that are really important to me — all the mystical, mythopoeic visions and ideas which seem to me sadly neglected in the current literary climate. In my analysis, this is the most important difference or division affecting contemporary literary/aesthetic judgment — the "non-spiritual/spiritual" or "non-mystical/mystical" divide.

It seems to me that much of the academic literary world seems to fall overwhelmingly on the "non-spiritual" side. And so I am faced with the likelihood that, even if I were to succeed in writing the sort of poetry I have in mind, it might never find a receptive audience. On the other hand, I've been reading Li-Young Lee's recent book of interviews. All his references to "big mind" and "universe mind" make me feel somewhat more hopeful, because many people who read poetry these days seem to like Lee's work. You go, Li-Young! The question is, do people gravitate to Lee's work because they like his mystic sensibility, or do they merely tolerate all his crazy talk because they like his poems about childhood?

I guess it's good to have a sense of purpose, even if it damns me to cultural obscurity and obsolescence. There are ideas that truly matter to me and cast meaning upon my life, and that's more than a lot of people can say in this post-modern, post-structural, post-sanity culture.

May the Force be with you, and s**t.