FOR POETS ONLY: THE POWER OF THE SYMBOL

The following is a long entry, but writers won't mind and poets may get a boost out of this way of looking at the symbolic language of the poet. Tomorrow, I'm back to the rewrite of Angie's Choice with a vengeance and blog entries will return to normal length.

The information flows out of a discussion of religious symbolism by Joseph Campbell. I copied the information into another blog of mine 8 years ago, and I thought I'd bring it over to share with fellow writers today. It's me quoting Campbell quoting Thomas Merton. I took a course in the Bible as literature at EWU. We used the Dartmouth Bible. I love the passage just below. 

"... the language of religion, including most of the Bible, is necessarily figurative or symbolic and therefore the literalist, who by definition, lacks imagination or poetic insights, is the least religious of men."  (from THE DARTMOUTH BIBLE, 2nd Edition, p. xl)

I'm always troubled when I discuss atheism or religion with fundamentalists because they're so sadly dead and plodding and unpoetic. They don't know what they're missing. Oh, they're emotional enough, drunk in the clutch of their Jesus experience, but they are also like frothing pit bulls who won't let go the seat of his toga. As for a larger feel for the majestic Cosmos, they have none. Their god is a mere sculptor who shaped humans from mud and who never left earth. Their god has no imagination. He's a petty choirmaster who punishes them or the choirmaster's wife who gives them milk and cookies.
 
In every encounter with the details of science, fundamentalists have, throughout history, lost in the courts of time. You would think that they might embrace a less literal interpretation of their big book and take up a more majestic poetic and symbolic interpretation.

Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are more alike than they are different when it comes to a contrast with most rational Americans. They are ever people of the law rather than people of the spirit. As Thomas Merton writes, "One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one's own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as 'sacrament' and 'presence.'"

I've lost much of my own poetic intensity with the ravages of time, but I recall how spiritual and painful is the poet's way of experiencing reality. The poetic and symbolic way challenges the petty view of the literal-minded. In the Dartmouth passage I quoted above, I found for myself an explanation of the literalist's problem which I have never forgotten, and then, recently, Joseph Campbell explained further. Enjoy!

"The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common," wrote a Roman Catholic monk, the late Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled 'Symbolism: Communication or Communion?' But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines.

"'The true symbol,' [Merton] states in another place, 'does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God. God is dead . . . means, in fact, that symbols are dead.'

"The poet and the mystic regard the imagery of a revelation as a fiction through which an insight into the depths of being—one's own being and being generally—is conveyed anagogically. Sectarian theologians, on the other hand, hold hard to the literal readings of their narratives, and these hold traditions apart. The lives of three incarnations, Jesus, Krishna, and Shakyamuni, will not be the same, yet as symbols pointing not to themselves, or to each other, but to the life beholding them, they are equivalent. To quote the monk Thomas Merton again: 'The symbol is an object pointing to a subject. We are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object.'

"Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions, are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a 'presence' or 'eternity' that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill, if it is to render life to modern lives, is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counterclockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton's words: 'to another point on the circumference') and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche ('the center'): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself."  (from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joe Campbell, pp. 265-266)