The Spiral

The spiral is one of the visually simplest yet most potent symbols for reality. In the context of the spiritual life, merely invoking it immediately suggests an upward movement. The upwardly moving spiral also happens to resonate with modern, progressive, secular tendencies—and in those, as well, progress is conceived of as unidirectional, like the arrow of time. It can go in one direction only. You might say that the spiral feels right, as it were. The power of the symbol, however, derives from its dualistic character. When people contemplate reality, the universe, the cosmos as an ever rising progression, albeit tracing out a circular path as it encounters resistance, they rarely contemplate descent. But you can go up—or down—a spiral staircase. We picture heavens and God at the apex of the infinitely rising pyramid, but what do we picture at its infinitely sinking extreme in the other direction?

As always, in these matters, the poets have the last word. Perhaps the most famous name associated with the rising spiral is Dante degli Alighieri (1265-1321) author of the Divine Comedy. This three-volume work takes us up through the ranges of reality from earth to hell, to purgatory, to paradise, and finally to heaven. A much more succinct but very powerful image of the descent down the spiral is presented by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in his poem The City in the Sea. To read the Comedy requires a fair investment in effort—not that it isn’t rewarded; it is. But to read Poe’s poem takes no time at all—and it may have an equally beneficial effect in correcting our routine, reflex reactions to the hypnotic drumbeat of modernity. The poem, in full, is presented here. The first verse follows:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

Now, mind you, neither Dante’s nor Poe’s visions resonate at all with the modes of thought that prevail today. Our inclination is to dismiss such takes on reality with a wave of the hand and, possibly, dismissive quotes from Freud. But what if reality really is much more like our poets see it? What if they are just a tiny bit more open at the top of the head than the rest of us? I assert that it is so and, therefore, to “go this way” is wisdom, to ignore it is carelessness. It gets dark and dismal as you descend the spiral.
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Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia articles on Dante and Poe respectively.

Poets and Philosophers

There is a temperamental difference between poets and philosophers—and this difference has corollaries. Philosophers want answers. Poets want projects. Reality offers an infinity of answers, none of which is satisfactory. As a consequence the philosophical will drives on relentlessly until it has reached a concept that dissolves all further questioning. This answer, in one form or another, is God—albeit its expression may be a kind of negative, like the concept of nirvana. A brief but comprehensive formulation of this may be found here, although the context is broader.

The experience of creative endeavor is quite different. Engaged in one, the poet is totally absorbed—sometimes tortured, sometimes elated, but always completely engaged in the project. When the effort is finally done, when the feelings of regret have begun to fade (“I wish I could have done it better, this is wrong, that is weak, etc., etc.”) the poetic mind, after a brief and contemplative interlude, in which the project’s aura is still present, begins to search for what is next. The motivational structure of the poetic mind is endless creation. The sheer fact that engagement in it is to be in eternity, not, repeat NOT in time, takes away all of the negatives that usually accompany the feeling of “same old, same old.” For the creative person there is no such thing. There is the bliss (sometimes manifesting as agony) of being in the creative flow. Then nothing else matters—indeed everything else is just a distraction. And there is the void at all those times when, as yet, the new is not tangibly present, even as a seed.

Our cosmological systems are built by philosophers. They end in ways the poet can’t genuinely value. His or her reaction is, “And then…” This sort of thing is treated with negative rejection by the philosophical mind. It wants closure. The poet wants the story to go on—if not in this project then in another. Poets create mythologies. They have no problem whatsoever with a story that never ends. But it must have a wave-like pattern, with rises and falls, with obstructions, conquests, defeats, and triumphs. And like a child, when the story is over, the poet will want to— hear it again.

Mind you, poets have no monopoly over creativeness, and many philosophers are among the most creative people of all. But in that case they too are poets…

Left to the Poets

All communications ultimately rely on shared experience, and if the experience is subtle, making it known turns problematical; one can’t rely on adequacy in the listener. The world to which Henry Corbin points, the mundus imaginalis, is actually accessible to us, but our experiences of it, especially if they are mild (as mostly they tend to be), we routinely class as mere emotions; we mislabel and dismiss them.

Corbin himself, writing in preface to his Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, writes as follows about the imaginal realm:

…the fact remains that between the sense perceptions and the … categories of the intellect there has remained a void [in modern times]. That which ought to have taken its place between the two, and which in other times and places did occupy this intermediate space, that is to say the Active Imagination, has been left to the poets.

The poetic and the spiritual are rarely conflated for the simple reason that we class “spiritual” perceptions with religious piety whereas we place the “poetic” in a mental region marked with the sign of Eros; Eros we classify as an inhabitant of the sensate dimension. Herein lies a vast potential for misunderstanding.

The poetically-gifted (in my language “poetic” includes all of the arts) are our most experienced travelers in the imaginal world, not, to be sure, because “imagination” is often involved in the creative arts but because these arts draw their sustenance entirely from the “third” world that Corbin claims modernity has written off. Here the potential for misunderstanding is even more marked. If we select, say, ten novels from the library entirely at random, running through the fiction aisles, maybe with some special luck we’ll manage to pick up one book strongly marked by the poetic spirit. The rest will all be mere entertainment, indeed ordinary secular works. Artistic talent and poetic gifts don’t always coincide. The greats are not always fluent, the clever are rarely poets. Here that common phrase applies: “I know it when I see it.”

There is a Sufi saying that “The mystery hides itself.” This applies with special force to the genuine products of the poetic power. Only those who have ears will hear. The perception remains always private and cannot be socialized—another way of saying that it cannot be conveyed unless the hearer is himself, herself able to hear the message.