golden autumn of the codgers

CHASTE EQUALITY

A synthesis of reality

is the poet’s quarry –

the whole serene array

sweeping like wind over the sea.

Not that irritable reaching

after fact & reason

but a subtler conviction –

life’s laughing dolphin, breaching.

So lips’ continuum of air

sustains your sea-sounding,

reverberates in rounding

surf (os-scintillating there).

The light stems from another realm.

A gravity so dense

you’re pulled beyond sense

to transcend...  Owlish Athena’s helm

shines like an emerald acorn cap

out from that wilderness

of native lovingkindness

(Williams’ mayday just a maple tap).

The Ocean State is what we seek.

The Providence of Roger-

Seeker... golden codger

settled in his freedom, meek

and bold.  Like admirable Edward

Coke, who founded

justice vs. his confounded

king – a chaste equality (rood-hoard).

11.1.18

Vision and synthesis. Again, the notion of poetry as a kind of speaking painting. (Verbal synaesthesia being a hypertrophied symptom of something larger.) Imagination and dream. The project of the poet - to challenge more discursive, abstract, mechanical forms of mimesis - to absorb both dream & reason into singing. The old shamanic/oracular activity, except it loses its utilitarian motives (archaic, magical) in the process of painting the vast image for its own sake. A free-standing model of reality.

It's always an uphill battle defending the greatness of Hart Crane. The attacks come in a steady, evenhanded critical stream over the decades.

He has many weaknesses, yes. But he's a great American poet because, to put it in a nutshell, he unites his music (melopoeia) and his imagery (phanopoeia), with an ecstatic-visionary quality (culminating in the concluding section of The Bridge (Atlantis).

Crane's "visionariness" is not like Pound's conservative/archaic mythologizing. Nor like Eliot's resignation/spiritual renunciation. It has, rather, a kind of "titanic" quality, which seems distinctly American - perhaps because it stems directly from Whitman. (Whitman got it from Emerson, & amplified/electrified it. Whitman is to Emerson as Bob Dylan is to the New England folkies.)

As I see it, this American "titanic/ecstatic" visionariness is not simple and pure : it contains a certain ambiguity. "Atlantis", according to the myth, was a high-tech civilization which fell, eons ago, through its own pride & corruption. Crane opens The Bridge with an epigraph from the Book of Job (something like "walking to & fro upon the Earth"), which was spoken by Satan.

The ambiguity I'm talking about stands at the core of that prophetic/apocalyptic mentality in which the poet/prophet, situated between Iron & Golden Ages, looks beyond the conditions of the present into a completely transformed future. One could diagram the situation like this :

[ Titanic-Atlantean high civilization / Present Age / Franciscan-Edenic future ]

- with the poet's vision wavering between, or blending together, all three "ages".

In both Judaism & Christianity, the path from present to future (from earth to kingdom of heaven, or from "this world" to the "world-to-come") goes through redemption and then resurrection (into a new form of angelic or heavenly "body").

The question of how such ideas are to be translated into personal life, and into history in general, has been answered in very different ways. But the visionariness I'm talking about ultimately stems, it seems to me, from an underlying awareness of some kind of crisis or disjunction - between "this world" and "paradise", or between the vicissitudes of mortal life and some kind of different, angelic realm (the pupa/coccoon/butterfly effect).

from toward the very end of Forth of July. The "W" that Bluejay & Henry's wanderings etched on the Providence East Side ridge, took some odd turns.

 6
   
            The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten,
            the hen and crusader ever intermutuomergent...      
                                        – Finnegans Wake
  
  
 A cask of negus went barreling down the rhode
 whorled in a victory-fin into the foretimes
 buried in the midnight garden   one St. William's
 Day   where he rose (our W) and rows and rowed

  
 his henpicked galley   through gales of galloping
 gallic ages   alone, Gellone   (with 28 oarsmen
 and a red coxcomb   for a bully steersman)
 it was a barging line or ink-can sunship

  
 filled to the midnight brim with Orange   or
 honeyed yellow sweetings for the Bethel brew
 it was a skeevy chicken key V shield anew
 down the rustling river toward   a dey of fire

  
 on Study Hill   or in Byzantium   an axe
 set to the roots   of Oak Tree Day
 Newport summons   wedding for old El Rey
 old Johnny Atahualpa Hamlet's   summery X

  
 the omelet ovum all at last   of everywombin' man
 incalculate and calculate   with little pebbles
 small gray veterans from Black Sea pledge
 unto out of   the Son of Man   (here back to then)

  
 and like a hand-sprung iron spring   by
 golly Moses there it goes   an able nef
 into the winestained cupola's deep
 arrak barrel   diving for the ring

  
 of south-north stars' lamb-lamp
 beeW your myrrh, my Magdalen
 gleams in those double-emerald
 ships (aye-aye me dewfall-camp)

       
                             5.25.2000

The Crane thing, I know, seems a trifle obsessive or recherche. In the panoptic view, hey, look at all them poets! But I don't have a panoptical. "My Hart" is a part of my own program.

It began, it seems, with that chance find of Mandelstam in the bookstore back in '77 or so (David McDuff translation). Leibnizian monad of verbal image, detaching itself... (see OM's "Conv. About Dante" - where he talks about images in terms of aeronautics - images flying off from other images).

Strongly ecphrastic imagination. Verbal icon. The compact elegant phrase - like those Ecuadoran birds that sing with their wings. Nucleus of poems. "The Bridge" as exponential expansion of this process - the free-floating resonant image. Atlantis - hold thy floating singer late!

This image-making power in conjunction with epic scope & national ambition. How it cross-cuts the other & contemporary long poem projects. This I find fascinating. This I've built on in my Crane-Mandelstam US-RUS amalgam (Forth of July).

Verking on some new versts. Will it amount to anything? I do not know. Experienced so many bloopers & false starts lately. It feels better to be trying, anyway.

Probably shouldn't post them, seems like bad luck. Which means I probably will.

What do I think of POETRY today? Enjoying Latta's uncommonplace speed-book, as usual. & the William Loganisms over here. AND a good summing-up of sumping by Gospodin Samizdat.

There is so much of everything nowadays, so much wordage, that poetry will have to be built like a fortress. Surrounded by yap-yap, workage-in-ploddage, schoolroom industry (all the conferences, all the workshops, all the pronouncements...), it will have to become formidable, impregnable... Not hermetic, though - rather, the reader will have the sensation of being surrounded by a fortress. It will not bend to any discursive formulae, yet it will answer for itself & everything.

Think of it the way composers or old blues guys or painters think about where they come from : overshadowed by thick sounds and sharp tones and bass notes from the past. Something separate, separate, separate from the exchange. Something people make by turning deep down, a personal dream - something from working in solitude with the materials of vision.

... of course, you can interpret Prickett's theme of metaphorical "double focus" vision in religious terms (cf. "single vision and Newton's sleep" - Blake). Transcendent divinity and incarnate mortality. The eye shifting back & forth, unable to grasp the two-in-one... logos shifting back & forth, yoking & dividing the opposites... cf. Sanford Budick, Dividing muse : images of sacred disjunction in Milton's poetry. Budick contrasts/compares ancient versions of logos (Heraclitus and Philo, Greek & Hebrew) - excellent book.

Fleeting notes (in midst of work) to Josh's post of yesterday:

Like most oppositions, Altieri's is probably both a necessary discrimination, and an oversimplification. A period style cannot be reduced to one-word labels (lucidity/lyricism). What for example is the role of the so-called 'scenic' in establishing a 'lucid' storyline, a narrative which embodies a particular moral/ political challenge? The "scenic" can't so easily be dismissed. Witness the poetry of Anne Winter.

On another issue: one should be careful not to assume clear separations or grant simple "objectivity" to, or simple causal relations between, literature on the one hand, and socio-historical changes on the other. Josh seems to be presenting another version of the Marxist-materialist "superstructure" causal theory of art & culture. Stephen Prickett has a lot of helpful things to say about this (see previous posts on his book Words and The Word).

The "indeterminacy" mode of much postmodern art & literature was part of a philosophical era which emphasized our inability to define or separate the subjective from the objective. But Prickett argues that the Kantian & post-Kantian paradigms, which underlie that trend in philosophy & literature, cannot do away with a shared human sense of experience per se (however much our words for it change through time). He points to A.D. Nuttalls' approach to Shakespeare (A New Mimesis) & other writers. Nuttall emphasizes how powerful felt experience breaks through the stylizations of each literary era (the complexity of Shakespeare's characters & situations breaks through the monarchical-classical literary dicta & crystallized rhetorical artifice of the time; in the same way the personal drama of King David depicted in the Bible breaks through the literary ideology meant to shape and contain it). Prickett shows how Nuttall's approach is close to, but not quite the same as, that of Bakhtin; but I can't get into the complexities of all that here.

We could look at this blog symposium on the future of post-post-post-indeterminacy etc. as a search for a critical vocabulary for what kind of poetry breaks through our own period stylizations into something new & compelling. Prickett returns the focus to the pivotal role of metaphor. Metaphor, he says, stands between diction/etymology on the one hand, and "story" (history, narrative, discourse, science, etc) on the other. Poetry circles around & centers in metaphor itself. Prickett goes back to the disjunctions of the Elijah story and the sayings of the pre-Socratics, & links them with Coleridge & other Romantics, to illuminate how metaphor creates a double-focus or double vision in order to do at least two things: 1) synthesize & relate opposites (Heraclitus' notion of the logos joining opposites in the equilibrium of the taut bow); 2) create a double-focus vision, in order to represent both new discoveries, and the inherently unrepresentable. He looks at the black-white rorschach image of the 2 profiles which form the shape of a vase : you can't see both the vase & the faces at the same time : your focus continually shifts back & forth. He links this to Dante's scene in Purgatory with Beatrice & the Griffin : when Dante sees this lion-bird directly, it's an absurdity : but when he sees it reflected in Beatrice's green eyes, he sees how the animal shifts quickly back & forth between beast & bird.

& Prickett links this, also, with the dramatic exchange when Dante first meets Beatrice again, & she chastises him : Dante, and the reader, cannot synthesize the image of Beatrice as avatar of divine justice, with her personal injustice toward him : we suddenly see the self (Dante) broken & humiliated just as he achieves the earthly paradise : the shock of this breakdown of the self reflects back on the self's (in)capacity to "comprehend" experience & reality - and then to narrate or describe it at all. We are confronted in this text with both a compelling narrative situation ("lyricism") and a paradoxical representation of the shocking and the "indescribable" (the "lucid").

That "traditional" writings (Shakespeare, Dante, Bible) already exhibit, for their times, both the problems & the solutions - both the lyrical-compelling narratives and their critical paradoxes - should give us pause. A critical estimate of what is valuable to us in poetry today cannot be based on simple oppositions between supposed socio-political-historical pressures (reified always already into ideology), on the one hand, and rejected, stereotyped or valorized period formulae, on the other.

Maybe the language poets' (or I should say Ron Silliman's historical version of same) reaction against "speech", and American anecdotal poetry, signalled a dissatisfaction with narrative and representation; but it seems predicated on an equally simplistic (ie. as simplistic as the prose realists') concept of representation. One sees a New-Critical emphasis on the technical analysis of the "verbal object", its autotelism - Clark Coolidge's "word-drumming".

The issue of representation-as-communication - as parable, if you will - is downplayed.

The Romantics understood inspiration as a progressive, purposeful movement of ecstatic vision : the sun is not a 1-inch bright disk in the sky, but a burning eye at the "top" of the visible world, an emblem of the fusing power of spiritual insight - the synthetic, imaginative intelligence. For Hopkins, each thing speaks itself, and in speaking, "selves" itself - communication is its essence; it mirrors the dark "speech" of its origins in the Logos.

These stances imply a cosmology, obviously! A particular interpretation of nature & experience.

Going back to comments here of 3.18:

I wonder how the Biblical concept fire - as in, "you shall all be salted with fire"; "I baptize you with water; but one is coming who shall baptize you with spirit & with fire" - compares with the Romantic notion (Coleridge, Blake, maybe Yeats) of vision.

Roger Williams' parochial battles, late in life, with the Quakers & the followers of Anne Hutchinson. He advocated a kind of scriptural realism (Christ's work was a particular historical activity & event) vs. the dangers of spiritual solipsism (pride, vanity), which he believed were lurking in the Quaker's radical antinomian "inner light".

The imagination inhabits a borderland between subjective & objective.

In what way is faith dependent on imagination? A believer would say that faith proceeds from, is a gift from, the Holy Spirit. But there is a sort of co-operation between the mind/imagination and that "inspiration". The imagination as the vital activity of the mind - the "integration" of human capabilities ("personality").

Readings in Maximus (the other Maximus, the Byzantine theologian) - about the "divinisation" of mankind by means of the Spirit.

Maybe the outcome of the co-operation of Spirit & imagination is - fire.

& what is fire? Light, for one thing. The instantaneous recognition of something which represents both the limit and measure of ordinary time/space. That light of which (in the old-fashioned typological sense) physical light is the image.

Reading Keith Ward's book (Religion & Revelation) mentioned here recently. A lot of food for thought.

A Christian perspective, but develops a concept of revelation which is inclusive without relativism, acknowledges parallels & affinities with other faiths. Fascinating commentary on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism.

Faith can't be simply equated with a body of opinions, information or knowledge, which a person can accumulate and then assent to, and assert to others. If God exists, revelation is a divine self-revelation, meant not to convey information but to enter into a relationship, to change your life.

Thinking (in this space) about my "poetry life" through this book's lens. My relations with "poetry community", so ambiguous, ambivalent, sometimes conflicted & frustrating.

A large part of it is simply my ornery personality. Another aspect, though, has to do with the fact that religion has played such a big role in my life. For some, this is less problematic, since they understand how to keep a seemly distance between creative literary efforts on the one hand, and their faith-commitments on the other.

For me it's been more complicated. My "faith life" has been stormy & dramatic (at least for me). Charismatic events when I was in my early 20s had an irreversible effect on my view of things - and those (personal) experiences were tangled up with poetry and writing. A poet is a communicator, a purveyor of speech & verbalized concepts : with me, literary ambitions and religious commitments have been mixed together, mixed-up & confused sometimes (much times!).

Aside from my personal quirks, though, I think that another factor in the aforementioned ambivalence arose from an inherent dialectic - a contrast - between religious vision and poetics or literature per se. This dialectic was brought to the fore, in my case, by the simple effort to balance or combine the two. Magnified also by something in the genres themselves : the prestige or authority of the epic mode, as "poem containing history". Because Christianity, more so than some other faiths, is rooted in particular historical events (though their "historicity" is highly contended). One doesn't need to be obsessed with "the historical Jesus" to grasp that this particular faith - in which the Divine enters directly into history in order to save humankind and creation itself - and which calls believers into a new spiritual Now - might result in epic shapings quite different from those offered by Pound, Crane, Zukofsky, et al.

My own long poems are probably too wayward to be acceptable as "Christian" works. But the background motivation is there : to re-write the American epic on a very different ground. One way to look at Forth of July is as a "transumption" (sort of a surpassing-through-osmosis, or stealing) of Modernist epic. I "underwrote" Crane, Pound & Joyce in Stubborn Grew: I contextualized them in the plot of a Mardi Gras/Lenten shriving/redemption : and then in the sequels I practiced a kind of ghost dance/resurrection spiritual ecstatics, flying off into deep American vision-space.

To take on the epic this way was a fairly radical gesture, I'd say, within the "progressive" poetry community. Radical in a religious sense, also: for the Christian, "the Word" is not a material-in-itself, an aesthetic commodity, but something else entirely.

I realize that to blend discourses this way, to speak so baldly of faith, is a recipe for alienating others through misunderstanding and settled notions (especially in today's divisive, overheated discourse world). But this is my form of "personism", like it or not.

Had a great time riding the train to NY, looking out the window.

Rare moment, when your vision relaxes into what you see, you yourself sort of dissolve into the trees & iron structures & people on platforms, anonymous.

I really can't put this into words. Sort of calm seeing, sensing. Thought that maybe if angelic life exists, this is something like what it might be: this sort of calm-ecstatic interpenetration of point-of-view & things seen.

I hope my friendly Reader will forgive all my impatience & irascibility.

Clearly there's no simple or inherent Problem with "the scene" as such. I'm not a Hater.

Reading Nicolaus Cusanus brings to mind certain things. Such as the incomprehensibility & otherness of God. the coincidentia oppositorum. the "Posse ipsum" (the 'to be able' itself, or the Capability). (which reminded me of the Gospel apothegm about "& you will see the Son of Man coming at the right hand of Power").

His idea that the supreme achievement of vision is to see beyond what vision is, in itself, capable of comprehending. Love draws you into the wild over yonder. (Yet he's a great philosopher because he never gives up trying, beautifully, to the very end, to define more accurately, precisely, elegant too.)

I think of the capability of poetry as a kind of symbolic uniting or unison with "whatness-in-itself," because poetry, more than any other discourse, is united with itself. This, I realize, rhymes with some things in Cusanus.

Why am I prating on in this vein? To defend my agonistic attitude toward any established scene whatsoever, I guess, whether independent social network or professional-mandarin establishment. O joy!

I don't fit in, because thought runs too quickly past its stylization? Oh yeah? Also, because I'm an ignorant klutz, and my poems are inedible. Preposterous coincidentia oppositorum.

Quid aliud, domine, est videre tuum, quando me pietatis oculo respicis, quam a me videre? - Nicolaus Cusanus

[What else, O Lord, is your seeing, when you look upon me with the eye of mercy, than your being seen by me?]

This see-sawing back & forth between dramatic action & meditation is repeated through Forth of July, with growing intensity; thus, after the fireworks of July appears the visionary brief coda to the entire poem, titled Blackstone's Day-Book (published with the sonnet sequence Island Road; also in the complete sequel to Stubborn Grew, titled The Rose). Here is a sample from that section:

         7


  
         Your law shines from the depths, a stone
 of mutual promises, dropped ex caelis
 to the navel of the earth, at the sea's
 lair.  There it gathered your gravitons,

  
         gradually, from a massive rug of tangled
 superstrings – Love, from the height
 of night (through funnel of Amphitrite).
 The tiny strings thundered, wrangled –

  
         from the far-off realm of Prester John
 across horse-grass dominions (Scythia,
 Sarmatia) to labyrinthine Pythian
 Rhodes – it was inwound cornu,

  
         your love – sheath of dome,
 ark of Shittim wood – a 28
 nestled in 29, sword-blade
 bent straight again (Rome,

  
         roaming, Romany, along a knife-edge
 trimmed with fish-scales – serpentine,
 sly, undoing Knight and Amazon
 with quintessence of Negus-

  
         mystery).  Where stale steel of the Ossete
 meets tempered gaze of his twin-Tartar
 Amazon upon a span of tears – where
 a grain-bin swells, and sweetly

  
         soars (fluted in stone).  I hear, I hear
 ice breaking, underneath a bridge. . .
 in a land of whirring wings,
 beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.

      
                                   4.6.2000

Tried a little experiment walking home today : looked at things as if I were in a Bruegel painting. I saw the firm prehistoric charcoal outline marking the integrity of human figures; the fine detail in the distance; the feeling for trees. Missed some of the warm colors. (Used to do this kind of thing after Fellini movies, back in high school.) Some little kids yelled at me from a 2nd-floor window, trying to get my attention : that was Bruegel too.

Could be done with all kinds of artists, I guess. if you do Bosch or Francis Bacon, though, you might want to bring a friend for company.

I spent so much time looking again & again at the Bruegels in the Kunsthistorische Museum, that I missed out, I see, on an apparently unrepeatable Durer exhibit at another museum (which the NY Times told me about this morning). Bruegel has a hypnotic affect on me. (I seem to be susceptible to these mild trances, as with Mandelstam in translation, or the scent of pine needles, or Wanda Landowska playing Mozart; could be a character flaw, or a throwback to a hunter/gatherer instinct, or too much reading in childhood, or dropping acid in the 60s, or all, or none. . .)

I like everything about Bruegel, but especially the warm-mute colors (could be simply an effect of aging, or ripening), and the little details in the distance, people, trees, houses. . . feel like if I keep looking, soon I'll be able to go around the corner of one of those narrow streets (I used to like miniature toy soldiers, too). In one of his Seasons paintings (there were 6 seasons in the Middle Ages), late autumn, with the bringing in of the herd in the foreground - I noticed that the outline/shaping of the cattle closely resemble the prehistoric cave-paintings in France.

Bruegel's Seasons are local-cosmological; he is a realist, whose vision nevertheless plays chords on several emotional-intellectual octaves at once; the mundane-goofy Now harbors a muted background, a vanishing point. Such slow painting gathers Now into "transhuman" time; absorbed in these scenes, I felt that Bruegel's Now was overtaking & replacing my own.

It's like the slow painting of Proust, gathering experience to a point of retrospective epiphany, which sets the immediate & the mundane glowing in a strange way. Joyce, also a natural Bruegelian.

(Bruegel shows up on page 2 of Stubborn Grew, & many times after; in that book I try to be local-cosmological & comic-deep also. The larger poem (Forth of July) tries to ring changes on this concept of a retrospective (or recapitulatory) Now, to link the aesthetic & the cosmological, somewhat in the direction of Crane's Bridge. I wrote more about this early on here in hgpoetics, around January.)

Josh Corey responds (on 8/28) to my Theorie of Faculties Poetickal.

Josh, I think the idea of choosing a favorite tendency (pleasure-principled, or reflective/establishment, or irascible/engaged) is probably an illusion. Not because there is no free choice, but because tendencies are like symptoms (in a society of infinite & vast solipsism). Symptoms are sub-cultural, sub-aesthetic.

I think of the visionary or contemplative as an active process, not a mechanical reflection of "things as they are" (whatever that is). A work of finding relations & connections across varied & separate ranges of things & experiences. The visionary makes sense of history & contemporary reality through this process.

Whereas the "irascible" or engage tendency moves immediately from the "answer" to the persuasion; the answer is sort of assumed (an unjust state of things, for example). The visionary shows the state of things in their complexity.

On the plane back from Minnesota (seated amidst a beery wisecracking post-Labor Day Fife & Drum Band from Boston, going home), re-reading Carl Schorske's cultural history, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Hofmannsthal, poet & playwright, brooding over the relation of artist to society. A paradox : the moment the artist (the poet) arrogates the role of creating, rather than illustrating or ornamenting, culture, he or she becomes irrelevant.

Have been reading Edgar Wind's classic study, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. What the neo-Platonists of the Florentine School (Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola) had to say about "vision" vs. "joy", or the threefold aims of the soul (contemplation, activity, pleasure - Saturn, Jupiter, Venus - there are a lot of variations on this), seems relevant to what I was trying to say yesterday about "vision" vs. "minor poetry".

Ficino, for example, valued joy & pleasure over the intellectual search for truth; pleasure in itself was not to be condemned, only it was to be acknowledged that earthly pleasure was limited by time. However, the whole Platonic & Neoplatonic concept of pleasure was derived within the pattern of a divine cosmos - "love is blind" because at the deepest level, the soul intuits its relation with divine Love without needing to "see" it; at some point the distinction between intellectual insight & spiritual love is no more.

So also maybe at some point the distinction between playful pleasing poetry & exalted visions of Reality also disappears.

At the end of previous post, I contrasted both bohemian poetics & postmodernism with the poetic capacity of the "visionary".

It may be that the meaning of visionary here hinges on a concept of philosophy, and on how we conceive the relation between poetry & philosophy.

Postmodernism generally seems to posit a kind of Dionysian or Nietzschean "irreality" which de-centers both reality itself, and the philosophical language which aims to delineate it.

Olsonian-derived Projectivism seems to represent a genuine effort to "envision" reality in a holistic way, but it's accompanied by a kind of magico-mysterium hierophantic attitude which tends toward elitism & obscurantism.

"New American" poetry generally seems derived from a poetics more than a unified philosophy : a poetics of expressive free engagement rather than traditionalist formalities, codes & idioms.

A "serious" poetics as opposed to a "minor" poetics would maybe be grounded in some form of realism, by which I mean the assumption by both Plato & Aristotle, both the philosopher of formal beauty & the philosopher of natural energeia, that there exists an objective Reality which humans can and should aim to interpret as rightly as possible.

The battles between philosophy & poetry I think about in terms of the Western integration of "Hellenism" & "Hebraism". Hellenism asserts the human capacity to objectify the True & the Real in philosophical/scientific signs. Hebraism emphasizes the underlying & mysterious subjectivity of phenomena, grounded in a Creation which is the artifice of a divine Nature which is itself imaged in human beings (as the "faces" or facets of a geometrical figure approach the continuum of the circle). This subjectivity I align with the poetic (as differentiated from the discursive-philosophic) tradition of the Psalmist & the prophets. Poetry asserts a certain vividness of expression which is more truly mimetic of the ultimate Reality than discursive reasoning can achieve. So these two are always in creative rivalry, the one tending toward irrational magic & superstition, the other tending toward dry & dehumanized rationalism.