I think of Wallace Stevens as pondering along some such path as this...

The mind is creative, the imagination is primordial, originary - since experience is unavoidably subjective : the world we know is the world as we see and experience it.

Thus the vivid, bracing, inventive, concrete perception of poetry offers reality made new - re-shaped anew (or, reality in a new light). Thus the "supreme fiction" displaces the worn-out myths which have congealed into doctrinal belief.

Poetry in this sense is representative of art & artist generally. Which are, in turn, representative of free creative conscious perception generally.

This is very basically the "standard model" of the Artist, since Emerson, the Romantics, etc. And I accept it, I agree with it, for what it's worth : a working credo for the nourishing of creative talents & aims. But it ain't the whole story.

Interesting juxtaposed reading these days : Pope Benedict on St. Bonaventure (Theology of History of St. Bonaventure) on the one hand; a critical study of Finnegans Wake on the other (Joyce, Dante and the poetics of literary relations, by Lucia Boldrini).

I have the feeling Bonaventure would have found FW out of court (even though Joyce is so deeply fascinated with both Christianity and the notion of creative world-making).

Joyce is awfully deep & subtle, but he seems to shape the book in a sort of circular, "Buddhist" (or Hindu) framework : life circles around & around like a river forever & ever. For Bonaventure, the assertion of "the eternity of the world" was one of the primal marks of Aristotle's pagan error. For Bonaventure, the world is a creation, and history has a singular plot (even if B's version of that history has a certain circular quality about it : history is the story of the world being sent forth from God, pivoting on Christ, and returning to God).

I've got my own inklings about this, which I won't go into now...

But getting back to the "Stevens" bit above... I feel more & more on kind of a Nicholas of Cusa/Byzantine tack, with the central notion of the human/divine imago... that is, there are human creators (with maximum freedom) & yet there is also Creation - these 2 perplexibly & unaccountably meshed (like 2 circles) together... & there is the Event at the center...

Christianity : revelation (the event) trumps reason.

Poetry : the actual (drama) trumps abstraction (discourse).

There's a kind of parallel or analogy there... (worked out in History...)

Ratzinger writes about Bonaventure's concept of "revelation".

"Revelation" is the result of an inspired capability to recognize the truth beneath the "veil" of the scriptural "letter". Thus an inspired hermeneutics (the ability to interpret aright) = revelatory vision.

Counterpointed by humility - exemplified by St. Francis, whose approach was to live out the Sermon on the Mount "sine glossa" (without "glosses" or special interpretations) - ie., simply, literally, taking Christ's commandments at face value.

Since Joachim & Bonaventure (in very different ways) expected the working-out of salvation history as the increasing influence of the Holy Spirit in the world, by way of "spiritual" (contemplative)

Have been reading a book by the current Pope Benedict (formerly Joseph Ratzinger) : Theology of History of St. Bonaventure. Recent delving into Joachim of Fiore led to it. Bonaventure appears to have been influenced (to a degree) by Joachim's writings.

Drawn to this complicated area while working on Fontegaia poems (some posted here recently). Siena, palio, all that. The palio race as metaphor for various other things (the "racing" of the poets, the eschatology of the human race...)

Maybe I've blundered into a spot where it gets more difficult to say anything, without sounding facile, glib, "profane"... doesn't feel like writer's block (I know very well what that is).

Joachim, Bonaventure, Virgil's "audacious" poet (see post below) - all of them looking into the future...