The Mystic and the Poet
The mystic as a relative of the poet and how both relate to language in much the same way but to different ends.
The mystic is a poet who figures to go the other way with his poetry.
How so? The spark that sets each off is a sense that conventional language is inadequate. For the mystic, the realization applies globally, it is a sweeping assessment like “nothing is what it says it is”. He is stricken with something like a panic and something like a horror. What do you mean? Language does not quite language again? With what will he now make sense of his world? A great difficulty, as words are the very bones of thinking and knowing.
The mystic notices a mismatch in the weave of word and idea and he goes plucking at the errant thread. He ends up unravelling the whole coat. Because he begins questioning a general idea, he will break it apart to examine the elements that make it up. He finds the rot even there. Wahala. He goes further to break down kernel of kernel, every component unit found wanting, until he distrusts everything. He can’t put down anything he bears up—no base is sure. Then, he sets off a grand war on words.
The poet’s critical moment is rather localized or situational. It is a chance encounter that limits its charge to a moment, condition or idea. The poet does not query language so radically or directly. He rides with, rather than rejects, the non-alignment of word and thing. He mulls over and savors a feeling, sensing how nothing in his linguistic experience quite catches, quite contains the subject.
Because the mismatch of word and thing does not bother the poet so much, he takes to handling language with whimsy. He will grab a word and chip away at its edge till it fits where he wants it to. He will even further deform a poor fit for a stark reaction; a whiplash may set the strained neck. Nothing new he does is intended to last, only a temporary operation for a desired momentary effect. Once done, he puts everything back as it was. Who knows in what form he will wreak his next havoc? The poet’s rebellion against language is petty in scale.
The poet-mystic subverts common tongue, skirting the direct employment of language to capture unintelligible impressions. This is the best they can do; whatever the limits of conventional expression, there’s no ready substitute. Their tongues are already bound up in ways they are used to being used. A usual heaviness here and lightness there. The easy recall of detailed imagery and the prompts that call them up. You can’t put away such a trove at a snap.
Also, because language’s main function is communication and not intellection, the poet-mystic cannot stray too far from the familiar. The poet-mystic’s purpose is to tease another’s unbound imagination into communion, engage it in a flight from the stable apparent. The poet-mystic seeks to disturb a person’s unexplored depths and fix it by a particular exposure like a camera’s flash on film. How does he get there in the first place, that deep darkness within? His access is basic, he touches a primal core on which much has been laid over but still lies dormant (yet excitable) underneath. What seems a bridge built into the river bed is only a raft with supporting poles hanging down far beyond sight.
Each take a different road reflecting their different reactions to the failure of words. In their attitudes, the mystic is an onion stripper (with the teary connotations, yes) while the poet sets up a torque to twist out of stupor.
The mystic does not like the poet very much. At best, the poet amuses him. The mystic does not appreciate the poet’s handling of language—the poet’s ends rather than his means. The poet’s touch breaks down language into a sensory impression that flares up and burns out in some sight-mimic, smell-mimic, or any other sense excitement. That the poet turns a clever phrase towards fireworks for the senses rather than arm it to dismantle the barrier that conventional language is in the way of truth sets him ever at odds with the mystic.
The mystic desires a total overhaul of the system of word usage. (We will say he is concerned with how things are but he is concerned with our render of how things are—linguistics not metaphysics). He attempts to use the poet’s sly administration of speech to recast reality as whole and true before popular expression made convenient and false words for the reference of it. He seeks a reintegration of the actual with a revised closely-matching symbol system. He seeks to communicate experience to the highest unadulterated degree he can. The mystic's extensive worrying of language wearies the poet.
The poet’s response to the mystic’s heartburn? “Why so serious, dude. Live a little.”
(In representation the poet-mystic favors accuracy of impression over the handy coverage of a system of expressions. But while the poet is only concerned with faithful rendering of isolated impressions, the mystic wants a representative system, too)
And the prose-man tries to put mouth. “See, this is why we invented these conventions in the first place, to tame all wild things, and make common use easy. Better certain than run after a chancy accurate, right?” both will tell him off.
“Stay out of this,” they’ll say to him. “This is a family squabble.” Besides, they know he got them in that mess.
And the prose-man will slink away and retreat to a corner. He knows in his heart what the bedbug said to its young is true: Keep calm; the heated will eventually cool. And they say that the termite flits about but falls to the frog. All the ambitions of the poet and the mystic will fall into his hands. To an evening is the frisky lively thing, and to ages the boring, trite and conventional.
The prose-man is needed as mediator because the poet insists on the momentary flash as the ultimate truth while the mystic holds that a profound eternal and universal reality underpins all. The humdrum everyday needs expression and the uninspired need their common coin with which to trade.
You write so well.