But Some Thunder

I'm still not finished thinking about the whole 'mystical/non-mystical' divide. (I guess I never will be.) In his book of interviews, Breaking the Alabaster Jar, Lee refers to this division as vertical/horizontal. (He didn't invent these terms, but he makes good use of them.) "Vertical" is associated with spiritual 'ascent' (or, I suppose, "descent"). "Horizontal" is associated with 'worldly' life.

Lee suggests that poetry is, or should be, more vertical that horizontal. I'm inclined to agree, but the question is, how vertical is too vertical? How horizontal is too horizontal? And is there any way to access the vertical except by means of the horizontal?

I think poetry must use worldly things to communicate even mystical truths. But I also think access to the vertical is essential in order for a poet to have any kind of vision and psychic presence. In general, what usually interests me about a poem, and a poet, is the vision behind the poetry. Or, more accurately, the degree to which a strong, vivid psyche animates the poetry, resulting in a compelling vision of the world. Much contemporary poetry seems to emanate from rather malnourished and emaciated psyches, and there's not much vision of anything, except maybe poetry itself. Most poems wheeze. But some thunder.

Interestingly, in the midst of all this deep thinking about poetry, my psychic pendulum has begun to swing a little bit over toward the fiction side again. A fiction writer with whom I am acquainted e-mailed me a revision of one of her stories, and that was enough to set off my inner fiction writer again. Honestly, my psyche is like a mine field that way; any mention of poetry or fiction or a variety of other perennial interests of mine is enough to get me all geeked up on that subject. These interests just lurk there, waiting to be provoked. And then I go buy stuff on Amazon. Time to put down Ariel and buy The Bell Jar!

(Semi-relevant side note: In Tibetan Buddhism, there's an idea that a really advanced meditation master has the ability to store teachings, for use in the distant future, in a sort of collective mental dimension. These teachings, called terma, can then be retrieved from this communal psychic space by later mystics who retrieve these texts in a kind of meditative trance state. So, a yogi from the 14th century can preserve a mental text in this psychic storage area with a kind of time-lock, so that it bubbles up in the 21st century and someone writes it down.

I don't know who put "poetry" and "fiction" in my unconscious, but they keep bubbling up nonetheless!)

Anyway, the goal, I suppose, is to write right at the point at which the vertical and the horizontal intersect. Wholeness! It's harder in fiction, I think, because fiction requires so much horizontal detail and event. But, as Lee notes, Faulkner and Melville (among others) achieve the vertical, or at least the poetic, by means of their language. So there's hope for poets who want to write fiction. (I don't know about Melville, but Faulkner began as a poet—influenced by Swinburne, no less!)

O, the writing life. At least it pays well.