Today’s blessed relief comes from Hecate, whose “Discussing the Undiscussible” post goes directly to my own concerns of late:
Mystical experience, the experience of the mystic, what it is that mystics experience — that stuff is, almost by definition, idiomatic. It cannot be translated into any standard language, although it is possible that the language of exceptional music, exceptional art, exceptional poetry (over prose), may come close.
My deepest mystical experience — and this is odd for a mammal, living in the flesh — is observing bright, late-afternoon sunshine on leaves, grocking photosynthesis and the symphony inherent therein, being in a forest or a garden. Yesterday, I walked through the Brookside Gardens and sucked, as a hungry child suckles a breast, upon the amazing sight of sunlight filtered though deep forest shade. I see Fairies there, but I mean the word “fairie” in a scary and Earth-centered sense. I reminded myself that I can go on living.
When I wrote,
Because I DO have a mother, and I finally know I have a soul.
After growing slowly in my awareness all along, it’s here now in the nick of time. I’m talking about the Big Momma, chilluns, the all-enfolding love of all Creation. MOTHER NATURE, Mother Earth, the stuff my body’s made of, the thing we can’t define or do without, the ultimate redemption: Goddess loves me, this I know, for my tears, they tell me so. (Put it any way you want.)
what Hecate writes is what I meant. Late afternoon sunlight on leaves is something I understand, too. But I’m 200 pounds of do-the-dishes-when-the-spoons-are-gone, I can’t write about breasts and sucking. Er, suckling. That’s it, though: nourishment from “our Mother,” as a commenter expressed. And note how the author is replenished by the experience. (“I can go on living,” etc.) The line about the fairies is important, too, for conveying a sense of the quality of the energy involved. This is precisely what I’ve found to be true in really wild places, where I’ve felt it. A lot of you must know what I’m talking about.
It’s so important.
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Words and experience are different kingdoms. Hecate is right, but her words are a bit stale. Nothing actually experienced – whether mystical sublimities, simple pleasures or lacerating events – can be “put into” words. The words have to do their own work. With them a new thing comes into the world; the old thing – the underlying experience – may not recognize itself there.
You know what it means to be a writer: you gotta find the expressiveness you want at your desk when you pick up your pen. Dull words won’t be helped out by a wonderful experience. Saints and adventurers may have superior experience, but without verbal gfts it will remain locked inside them. And the contrary is true: Many a wordmeister has spun fascinating tales out of low-grade facts on the ground.
I love those paradoxes. They keep us from falling too much in love with either words or experience. We need them both, but how they connect will always be problematic.