Gnosis, a Spark

Abstract

Ihad started to write poetry around fourteen or fifteen years of age and latched onto it like a limpet in the light of my being otherwise a fair to average student- with the occasional flare for something that approximated to an originality of expression. Here was archaeology of the spirit and i had uncovered ancient avenues and the past came welling up to meet me in parallel time. it was like standing upon the horizon and feeling the transports of an illuminated vision sweeping 360 degrees. this world was sacred, yes-but peopled by a multitude of possibilities that might be gods, a pagan world and a belief or gnosis that is free f lowing. We are as living-beings the sum of primal atmospherics and visions coterminous with our temporal and present lives.Each poet, working within the tradition must, given the allotted time-span, locate and make sense of it all for as long as the poet is functioning and prescient, and must continuously return that which is received from the world back into the world, but charged, reality invigorated by vision. ego-based reportage (beware the presiding i) has nothing to do with poetry-if anything, it is visigothic and destructive of one's ability to appreciate and recognize the genuine article. Any third-rate pretender with a few party tricks can draw a crowd. there are many examples of where this seeking is evident and original; i sought intimations of what i felt, mortal or otherwise, in the more obscure works of david Lindsay, The Devil's Tor, for instance, and George Macdonald's Lilith, though these symbolist works came some time later. earlier, however, i had looked at the meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the essays of Francis Bacon, the dialogues of plato, and most of the plays of George Bernard shaw.At this time, the most inf luential book that truly effected me with its rare piquancy of thought was the WWi letters of teilhard de Chardin; his The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1918. For an eighteen- or nineteen-yearold, this was the lifting of a veil and was quickly followed by his Phenomenon of Man-including his plangent poem, Hymn of the Universe-and Le Milieu Divin. this led me onto a sampling of Henri Bergson and his Dreams, and a text on Mariolatry and faith, from which i appreciated his definition of an agnostic as one who walks an intellectual tightrope. then H. G. Wells's The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis, published in 1936, which in an inverted sort of way, probably owes something to Robert Burton's three-volume treatise, Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1893, and this i had also read-plus a smattering of the metaphysical writings of Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) and his work, Appearance and Reality, probably via t. s. eliot, who by 1916 completed a dissertation on the British philosopher titled Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.All through this process, i was reading the poems (more bardic than beatific) of Gerald Manly Hopkins and thomas Hardy. thomas Merton's Elected Silence (his title borrowed from the Hopkins poem) and Seeds of Contemplation were a few early influences. i followed the scent where other such coincidences are famously explored as a coded system (The Battle of the Trees) in Robert Graves's The White Goddess, and early irish bardic poetry, but that came much later and has remained a continuing interest. And i tracked with fascination the ancient lineage of the chromosome with J. B. s. Haldane back to wheat seeds found in 4,000-year-old egyptian tombs, whose work i had discovered (ignoring the communist tomes of Lenin, etc., party interpretations of shakespeare, etc., and dialectical materialism) in my father's old chest of books stored in the old weatherboard bach out the back.And caught up in this drag net of Russian, principally socialist literature-i discovered the folk tales of Gogol and the poems of Aleksandr Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky. i still possess the last-Mayakovsky and His Poetry, compiled by Herbert Marshall, the pilot press, London, 1945. …