Over at Issa’s Untidy Hut this quote appeared this morning, from the introduction to a new translation of poems by the great imaginal poet René Char. The introduction and translations were done by Gustaf Sobin, who essentially apprenticed with Char while living in France in the 1960s. Sobin remarks:
René Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary. One and the other, the visible and the invisible, were but the interface of a single, singular, vibratory surface: that of the poem itself.
Substitute “imaginal” for “imaginary” and you can see why I thought this worth quoting—given, I mean, my previous post concerning my personal poetics.
Ah, yes, this rings very true and I think the word bridges our two different approaches to the same essential isness …<br /><br />While reading your response, I'm simultaneously doing a review of a particularly science ladden Doctor Who box set (lots of [w]hooey about parallel universes, the multiverse etc.) and somehow this uncommon (for me) foray into the realm of quantum physics is
Quiddity! That's the word I was looking for, Don. For what it's worth. I guess I wonder if we have access to that "whatness" through anything but Imagination. Surely rational analysis doesn't do it, though it gives some people the illusion of doing it. (Merely my POV.) Can we touch the quiddity of Montana's <a href="http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/07/02/news
It really is interesting because, somehow, I feel as if I've got hold of the other end of the stick. In an Eastern way, the revelation is evoked by the image (the natural object) and, so, in a way it is "no ideas <i>but</i> things." A zen kind of anomaly, yet I do sense we are waltzing about the same thing and just struggling for the right words.<br /><br />Somehow in the Eastern
I agree, Don. Instead of "no ideas but in things," it's "no things without ideas," or something. Idea isn't the word, though. "No things without Imagination"?
Interesting ideas. The quote arrested me in terms of process; I really see a direct correlation between what he is saying and the Eastern forms, haiku, senryu etc. <br /><br />I'm not sure this line of thinking would fit into the materialist thinking.<br /><br />best,<br />Don @ Issa's Untidy Hut
I like the idea because it leads away from the drift of poetry since the Romantics, as Brian Salchert describes it <a href="http://bajsalchert.blogspot.com/2009/06/from-romanticism-to-materialism.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>….
Interesting concept.