Writing praxis as soteriological vehicle: Via Negativa from Dionysius the Areopagite to Ramon del Valle-Inclan to Jack Spicer.

Cline, Kurt

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

--John Ashbery (Three Poems 3)

Words get in the way, much of the time, but assuming we speak at all, they are what they are: indispensable, even while incommensurate with vastly important aspects of human experience. Can the indescribable mystical experience of oneness with God, Cosmos, Nature or humanity be reduced to a linguistic--even literary--poetics? While nodding in the affirmative, I register the difficulty of the claim. When we use the term "literary" we necessarily point to a certain aesthetic product. When we aestheticize we also necessarily anaesthetize. "This is a poem," we say, and so already it is lost to us in its full immediacy. It has become an object governed by certain laws of form and function. When mystical experience lies at the root of poetic expression then poetic expression seems necessarily a tracery of that experience.

However, on deeper examination, this proves not to be the case.

There is a poetics at work from the song of the shaman (the first poetic utterance) onward; however, it is not a poetics in an aesthetic, literary or theoretical sense. Without trying to fashion a poem, such a poetics nevertheless navigates meaning toward song, toward a becoming of being which has not quite solidified yet. At this point it is co-equal with mystical experience. Only later, when we transcribe the song, or iterate the divine wisdom obtained, is the dynamic quality of the originary poetics lost. Instead of the dynamic implicit in poetic utterance its spiritual dimension can easily be placed into a category of thought insufficiently flexible to comfortably contain it.

Individuals and cultures are alike in having at their disposal images or entities into which numinosity may be deposited. However, as we move to a transpersonal (nondual) level of awareness, there may be only the search for a meaning in continual deference of its own arrival at any final destination which is, in any absolute sense, actual. This is why our earliest records of encounters with transpersonal domains tend to be creation myths. Creation, poesis, is the archetype of archetypes. Since one must begin somewhere, it is here, as the steriometric structures begin to take form, that meaning begins to take a yet undetermined shape. However, creation myths are rarely linear, and may themselves be complemented by other even apparently contradictory stories within the same tradition. This is because time as usually understood is in the Hermetic tradition in which Via Negativa is partially anchored, illusory. There is a transcendental awareness in the tribal shaman's song, early mythic texts and magical lore that suggests there really is no absolute beginning, but rather a series of provisional formations forever branching out into possibilities more or less fully realized. The creation myth only in its most exoteric understanding is taken like a newspaper account describing an event outside of itself. The esoteric comprehension of the shaman, the mystic and magician, realizes the creation myth as in itself creation. Variants of the creation myth, ranging from The Great Vision of Black Elk to the Sumerian Innana cycle, employ images and motifs beyond the common pale of human experience, even as the culture from which they arise clothes them in that "thingness" most familiar to it. Immanence and transcendence become in this way interwoven, and quite intricately, but should not be confused, unless it is to leave them behind as useful distinctions forever.

In On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas Renaissance magical-philosopher Giordano Bruno presents a poetics heavily influenced by Gnostic and Hermetic strands of Western Esotericism while still apparently taking into account the liminal, dynamic poetics of the shaman's song with its often bizarre, unnatural imagery. By following it, Bruno tells the poet,

   ...you can capture, if you are skilled
   Under an image which answers to the senses
   That which eludes the senses. (235)

In his essay "On Magic" Giordano Bruno describes the magician as "one who binds" (130). That is, for Bruno, "all magical powers ... are dependent upon magical bondings" (142), sympathetic or antagonistic resonances emanating from physical beings and objects as well as from "invisible substances" and spirits, whose "subtle bodies" Bruno claims to have seen materializing at Mount Libero and Mount Lauro (129). Bondings are formed by the construction of images and facilitated by "links," visual or aural portals into divine consciousness activated by the power of the imagination. It is the intent of Bruno's poetics to "capture the language of the Gods" (143), and thereby to draw celestial and demonic influences to the practitioner.

The power of images--Bruno speaks of them as "links" to draw celestial and daemonic influences to the practitioner--is essential to Bruno's theory of magic as well as to a poetic practice with which, since the time of Proclus, it had been fused. Images were, for Bruno, not a direct depiction of reality, but a way of using the imagination to rewrite memory, and place it in accordance with divine reality. As Frances Yates notes:

   The most essential thing in Bruno's outlook was to find the living
   "voices," signs, images, seals, to heal the rift in the means of
   communication with divine nature ... and when these divine means were
   found (or imprinted on consciousness in a trance-like experience)
   to unify through them the universe as reflected in the psyche.
   (270)

In his magical-poetics, Bruno draws from Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) whose translation of the Hermetica he had studied in depth. Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) were founders of the Platonic Academy in Florence, Renaissance center for Neo-Platonic and occult philosophy. For Ficino and Bruno, magic "is the attraction of one thing by another in accordance with a certain natural kinship" (Ficino, qtd. in Copenhaver 87). Ficino compares "the parts of the world" (87) to the organs of a body. Just as "brain, lungs, heart, liver and other organs act on one another," so with "the bodies of the world" (87). Ficino, in fact, compares the act of magic to love itself, since "all the power in magic consists in love" (87). Ficino in his turn draws from Proclus (412-485 C.E.) who also allegorizes love to describe the sympathetic resonances existing between all things. In "On the Priestly Art According to the Greeks," Proclus writes:

Why do heliotropes move together with the sun, selenotropes with the moon, moving around to the extent of their ability with the luminaries of the cosmos? All things pray according to their own order and sing hymns, either intellectually or rationally or naturally or sensibly, to heads of entire chains. And since the heliotrope is also moved toward that to which it readily opens, if anyone hears it striking the air as it moves about, he perceives in the sound that it offers to the king the kind of hymn that a plant can sing. (Proclus, trans. in Copenhaver 103)

Later in the same essay the poet-philosopher--himself credited with prodigious magical, curative and divinatory powers--employs the stunning image of a lotus, whose sympathy for the sun causes it to, as it were, open its mouth and sing the sun's praises as it follows that orb through the sky (103). Proclus's theory of the "sympathy that all visible things have for one another and for the invisible powers" (103) is bound up with a magical poetics. Indeed Proclus develops the first Western poetic theory of which I am aware to stress poetry's non-mimetic function. Poetic language for Proclus does not imitate reality but symbolizes it in a special, oblique way that establishes a connection with a higher level of reality. "One thing is hinted at by another," Proclus writes. "It is not a relationship of model to copy, but of symbol to something else which has a sympathy with it by virtue of analogy" (Proclus, qtd. in Struck 130). Paradoxically, the symbol indicates the nature of the real by presenting precisely "what is most strongly antithetical to it" (130). The great poets, Proclus tells us, express,

... the transcendent power of the models by this thing most opposite...and furthest removed from them: that which is beyond nature is represented by things contrary to nature; that which is more divine than all reason, by the irrational; that which transcends in simplicity all fragmented beauty, by things which are considered ugly and obscene. (Proclus, qtd. in Struck 130)

Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras had two ways of speaking: the first was ordinary speech, mimesis. But the other was "allegorizing according to certain enigmas" (Struck 123). The riddle or enigma is the preeminent linguistic form that, instead of approaching reality directly, intentionally displaces consensus-based relations between verbally-represented objects.

The enigmatic poetics articulated by Proclus is next taken up by Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, whose mystical theology as expressed in The Divine Names held that God is beyond naming at the same time as having innumerable names. Ficino perceptively notes that Saint Dionysius's un-naming of God is "confirmed by Hermes [Trismegistus], who says that God is nothing, and yet God is all. That God has no name, yet God has every name" (Dionysius, qtd. in Yates 125). The Syrian Dionysius is undoubtedly informed by Gnostic speculation as well as the Neoplatonism of Proclus and Plotinus. If, in his Celestial Hierarchies, Saint Dionysius posits a cosmology recognizable as belonging to the Gnostic/Hermetic tradition, Festugiere, who makes an important distinction between pessimist and optimist forms of Gnosis (Yates 22), would undoubtedly place Saint Dionysius into the latter group. The pessimist form of Gnosticism is informed by radical dualism. The material world is seen as inherently evil: spirit is dragged down by matter. The optimist form sees matter as impregnated by divine spirit--what I am calling consciousness. At this level, immanent and transcendent cannot be conceived of as oppositions, but as complementarities, each containing and flowing into the other. The earth, sun and stars are alive, and interconnected. Matter is a part of the working out of Spirit's destiny, so how can it be bad? Moreover, it is ultimately reabsorbed back into this self-same consciousness, what Dionysius calls

   ... the universal cause transcending all things ... neither
   impersonal nor lifeless, nor rational, nor without understanding.
   ... It is not a material body and therefore does not possess
   outward shape or intelligible form, or quality, or quantity or
   solid weight: nor has It any local existence which can be perceived
   by sight or touch...nor has It the power of perceiving or being
   perceived; nor does it suffer any vexation or disorder through the
   disturbance of earthly passions, or any feebleness through the
   tyranny of material chances, or any want of light; or any change,
   or decay, or division, or deprivation, or ebb and flow, or anything
   else which the senses can perceive. (199)

Without consciousness to sustain them, the relations between things in the world are null. That is, such relationships only have meaning to the extent that they are part of consciousness, since it is consciousness which assigns a name and meaning to what would otherwise be nameless, meaningless. However, this consciousness, Love--"the One"--transcends the rational mind. It is not mind. It does not think, in the sense of thinking about something, or perceive--both of which imply a separation between subject and object--but simply is its own unfolding. We have to empty our intellectual faculties in order to know "Its simple and absolute nature" (201), and in our discourse we refuse, through a continual process of negation, to reify any conceptual knowing. Just as God can only be known through Unknowing, truth can only be spoken through its unsaying.

Saint Dionysius offered apophasis (unsaying) and kataphasis (saying) as oppositional yet complementary elements in his mystical theology, often termed Via Negativa. Dionysius' mystical theology was not exclusively a philosophical position, but a writing-centered practice permitted to a small number of monks, wherein they actualized their insights about God through the inscription of everything He was not. Writing in the poetics of Saint Dionysius is a spiritual exercise linking the writer through the senses and the imagination with the insensible and unimaginable. The written text is a meditative instrument that finally, as contemplator and contemplated merge, confounds one into a profound relationship with the Divine. As Dionysius modestly explains, "Once we cease our intellectual activities, we are thrust upon the ray beyond being as far as the divine law permits" (112).

In The Mystical Theology, Saint Dionysius explicitly joins poetics and the spiritual quest. The "knowing" of "that which is beyond all perception and understanding"--this unknowing, "the emptying of our faculties,"--has as its hoped result the composition of

... a transcendent hymnody, which we shall do by denying or removing all things that are--like as men who, carving a statue out of marble, remove all the impediments that hinder the clear perception of the latent image and by this mere removal display the hidden statue itself in its hidden beauty. (Theology 195)

The apophatic poetics of Saint Dionysius' Via Negativa had a profound effect on a wide range of poetries, extending from the Middle Ages into the present day. In "I entered I knew not where" Saint John of the Cross equates not knowing, knowing nothing, with a kind of knowing that transcends all knowledge. This sort of unknowing is not ignorance. Indeed,

   This knowing without knowing
   is so very powerful
   that wise men's arguments
   can never defeat it,
   since their knowledge cannot grasp
   unknown understanding ... (27)

Unsaying, apophasis, is a key element of mystical poetry, and can be glimpsed at work in poems by Rumi, Donne, and Baudelaire. In the twentieth century, apophatic discourse has been mostly championed by avant-garde and experimental writers. In an apocryphal account, Hugo Ball even invokes the name of Dionysius the Areopagite--or at least his initials, D.A., repeated--as the origin of the term "Dada." Ramon del Valle-Inclan, as one of the founding members of the modernist avant-garde group, Spain's Generacion de '98, is the inheritor of a much more anciently evolved mystical discourse from both Christian and Muslim sources. In his book of aesthetic meditations The Lamp of Marvels, Valle-Inclan quite consciously hearkens to San Juan de la Cruz. Valle-Inclan intends his work as a handbook of spiritual instruction like St. John's The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Like St. John, Valle-Inclan stresses experience as paramount in spiritual understanding. One must first lay aside "conceptual formulations, cabalistic symbols, or rhetoric" (Lamp 5), and learn "to enjoy the beauty of the world intuitively" (5). Valle-Inclan expresses his poetics in terms reminiscent of Saint John of the Cross's "Llame" in equating those who seek Gnostic initiation with the artist or poet, "consumed by a desire to become [a] center enflamed with love" (147). One has first of all to make oneself a center through quietude, a stilling of the discursive mind. The journey within, away from ego and identity, is also the shamanic journey toward wholeness and healing. In the outward phase of this spiritual journey, most pilgrims experience a felt-need to heal, radiate the love that one has discovered within. The passage from experience, which is always dynamic, to art, which may be conceived as static thing-in-the-world, is necessarily problematic. How can something that is static do justice to something that is not? How can something that surpasses mental conceptualization be realized as tangible? This problem, explored by the Spanish modernist Valle-Inclan, is also the problem of Spanish mystics such as Saint John of the Cross and Raymond Lull, who employ a methodology of apophatic writing as a way of understanding God.

Both Islamic and Christian esoteric thought were influenced during the Middle Ages by Plotinus's development of Plato's metaphysic. The Neoplatonists posit a level of reality beyond the sensible or even intellectual world, the level of Beyond Being, that which refuses to participate in questions of existence or non-existence, referenced by Ken Wilber as the "nondual" (193). Ramon Lull's Book of the Lover and the Beloved (c. 1275) shows clear parallels between Sufic and Christian thought, as Lull, writing in Catalan, reinterprets Rumi's slightly racy Sufic doctrine in Christian terms, the lover becoming the devout Christian and the Beloved being another name for God. In his prologue to this divinely inspired work, the Majorcan Lull tells of the book's method of composition, which he acknowledges to be of Sufic origin. "Blanquerna sat praying and considered the way in which he contemplated God and his Virtues and when he finished his prayer, he wrote down how he contemplated God," Lull writes of his fictional hero. "He did this every day, varying his prayer with new ideas.... Then with divine blessing Blanquerna began his book" (5). In postmodern terms we might say that Lull's Blanquerna was conducting an experiment with writing. That is, the act of writing was to be at one with the act of contemplation. As in Saint Dionysius's apophatic discourse, writing is a medium of consciousness alteration and communication with the divine.

It was a common practice of Spanish mystics to keep journals of spiritual "visitations." Lull and Saint John of the Cross went one step further in using such journal entries as the basis of poetry. However, the point with these mystics was not to create, as modern poets do, a product of instruction or entertainment, but "to communicate the direct experience of a spiritual practice" (De Nicolas 63). De Nicolas describes the spiritual practices of the friars of Saint John's Carmelite Order. The making of dismembered images was one of the spiritual exercises of initiates. They were trained to stand by themselves "on an imageless field" (46), bereft of memories and sensations. The absence of images would force the aspirant into an act of imagining, in which images are created afresh out of dismembered memories. The goal was to create a "divine image" that was perfect, uncontaminated by the ego and one's conceptions. The efficacy of the image to summon "signs of the will of God" depended on "the subject being kept elusively absent in the act of imagining" (47).

Valle-Inclan applies the Carmelite friar's dark night of the soul to poetics itself. Writing only becomes poetry through a spiritual negation that occurs when all concepts have fallen away, when words have been stripped, flayed, exhausted of their descriptive power. "The poet has something of his own to express only when words are impotent in the expression of his sensations," writes Valle-Inclan (Lamp 13), who, himself, literally, dismembered--his arm having been amputated after a bar fight--applies the Carmelite practice of dismemberment to the formation of images in language. In his poem "El Circo de Lona" ["The Travelling Circus"] Valle-Inclan describes a horse act under the somewhat tattered big top in the following terms.

   Y con el estallo
   de la fusta, el callo
   se oyo de un caballo
   que vino despues. (Obras 1296)

   [And with the crack
   of the whip, the hooves
   thundered of a horse
   that came after.] (Cline 74)

I have tried to do justice in my translation to Valle-Inclan's scrambling of the expected word order in Spanish. The crack of the whip, the hooves thundering, and the appearance of the horse itself are dislocated from one another in time. The poet is being attentive to the sensual perceptions underlying discursive thought. As with the Spanish mystics of the time of Saint John of the Cross, each sensual image is dissevered from its matrix and developed separately. As with the poems of the Carmelite friar, Valle-Inclan's poems offer themselves with an immediacy, a freshness and power to the senses. This grows out of Valle-Inclan's spiritual project, which shares with Saint John of the Cross its desire to exorcise the ego through stripping the senses and stilling the mind. Both beg to be read in reference to their spiritual journeys. Saint John had to explain himself to the Inquisition, but in so doing developed a poetics that illuminates his poetry and shows the writing to be an integral part of his spiritual practice. Valle-Inclan is able to develop his ideas along more secular, aesthetic lines. The goal is to find, "substantiated in an expression" (Lamp 120), something of "an eternal actuality in human actions" (107). This is achieved through what Valle-Inclan calls "aesthetic quietism" which, he writes, "is the most expressive significance of things within a new manner of discerning" (121). This implies a poetics based on spiritual inquiry that, like that of Saint John of the Cross, is state-specific. The depth of the mystical experience is in direct proportion to how far one has come along the path of renunciation of the ego. Like Saint John of the Cross, Valle-Inclan posits stages in one's spiritual development, each marked, in Gebserian terms, with a recuperation of previous modes of understanding from a new, expanded perspective.

The secular yet spiritually-informed art of the twentieth century seems to follow William Blake in placing shamanic motifs within the context of Gnostic speculation.Valle-Inclan employs the Gnostic mythos as a soteriological symbol. The poet traces Gnosticism from its roots in the practices of the yogi, which developed, as it is told in the Rig Veda, to take the place of the mysterious intoxicant Soma, supplies of which had disappeared. In describing the Gnostics as "possessors of an hallucinogenic creed" (74), Valle-Inclan shows his knowledge of Gnostic sects, who through tantric yoga and other techniques allowed themselves to enter visionary states.

Spiritual liberation, long the goal of the mystic, becomes in the secular arena the goal of the artist. To effect such liberation, a bevy of techniques are employed by poets and painters which parallel methods and motifs familiar to both mystics and shamans. The intensification of the image through dismemberment, displacement, abstraction and erasure which arises from the modernist artist's freedom from pre-propounded dogma is expressed poetically by Valle-Inclan, linguistically by Tzara and Ball and pictorially by Picasso and Braque. I see this as a continuation of the magical poetics most potently expressed by Via Negativa, but extending from Hermes Trismegistus to Proclus to Saint Dionysius to Bruno to Saint John of the Cross to Blake to the modernist avant-garde. In the postmodern era this lineage is extended in a bewildering multitude of guises. John Ashbery brings apophatic discourse in tune with postmodern times. "I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way" (3), he writes. One will notice that apophatic poetic implicit in this remark, and how it differs from the more modernist concept of the dialectic. There is the positing and then the denial. But there is no third compensatory term for us to balance (or, as Spicer will suggest, "rest") upon. "To leave all out," one notices in the Ashbery quotation, is simultaneously still "another" and at the same time a "truer" way. There is an irony to the entire (non)assertion because Ashbery is actually simultaneously leaving out and putting in. His contention that leaving it out is a truer way must be taken humorously, since he is already putting it all down, even as he includes the possibility that he is leaving it all out. Kataphasis and apophasis need not be considered a dualistic structure. Apophatic discourse is not purely negation. Something must first be postulated for the negation to make sense, since a pure negation of a negation would lead back to a positive assertion. Postulation and negation, then, are part of the same system. The negation is only "truer" in the sense that without it only a partial truth is glimpsed, whereas any unwavering verity must go beyond all dualistic (and thereby unstable) formulations.

The postmodern writer I most associate with Via Negativa, in both a formal and contextual sense, is Jack Spicer, who, incidentally, conducted a famous poetry workshop during the San Francisco Renaissance entitled Poetry as Magic. I would not want to bet upon the chances of finding a single line of Spicer's poetry that does not somehow touch upon apophatic discourse. For example, I turn at random to a page in my well-traveled, in fact beaten-till-its-pages-are-falling-out copy of Black Sparrow's The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. I have many pages marked but this page is unmarked, just a random page, if indeed there is even such thing as randomicity in a post-Cagean sense. It is at any rate a page I never before thought of as being highly significant. I find there a poem entitled, "Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe." The first three lines read:

   "Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
   The grand concord of what
   Does not stoop to definition. (69)

The poem goes on from there, but maybe that is enough to start with. First the fact that it is Poe, master of the unreliable narrative, the questionable answer, the unanswerable question. Who else has summed up the entire human dilemma in such a single, ringing apophatic declaration: "Nevermore." For to be nevermore there must have been something once. Yet for Spicer as with Poe the true music lies beyond all definition. It makes itself out of a questioning (indefiniteness) as it goes, as precise as a whisper that refuses to dissipate. I am especially enamored of the second line, "The grand concord of what," which is in fact repeated later on in this short work. The enjambment here works toward a deepening of the mystery: the grand concord of--what? Here is where it's hard to say, because language hides behind itself like a shadow under a rock at high noon. Which is to say there is an opening as well as a loosening of the slip-knot of the life-death entanglement to which all flesh is heir.

A major feature of Spicer's poetics is the intrusion of the "anti-image":

   Define ghosts as an India-rubber eraser created to erase their own
   past.

   The motion of the afterlife. And you will think immediately of a
   photograph. The ghost of it defined as a blob of ectoplasm--an
   anti-image.

   An anti-image as if merely by being dead it could make the motions
   of what it was to be apparent.

   An argument between the dead and the living. (171)

Here a real line can be drawn by one's big toe in the sand between the modernist ethos of imagery and a postmodern poetic "anti-image" that is not a representation of reality--not even of Mind, in the manner of the modernists--but a displacement and disruption, a questioning, of the constructs we mistakenly label reality.

In Spicer's "anti-image" the liminoid non-mimetic poetics of Proclus dons postmodern garb. For Proclus, remember, a poetic image indicates the nature of the real by presenting precisely "what is most strongly antithetical to it" (Proclus, qtd. in Struck 130). Poetic language for Proclus does not imitate reality but symbolizes it in a special, oblique way that establishes a connection with a higher level of consciousness. So it is with Spicer's anti-image, the image's unsaying. You will think of a photograph, but of what? Everyone will have a different picture in mind. The blob of ectoplasm indicates a poetics of displacement, in the Archimedean sense. Imagine a bathtub full of water and floating in the water an inflated innertube. If one pushes one end of the innertube below the surface of the water, the other end will rise up like the Loch Ness Monster. So it is with all penetrations--of physical, intellectual and spiritual planes. Poke one end and something extrudes from the other side. Of course in reality there is no "other side," since the torus-shaped innertube, to follow my analogy geometrically, represents a continuity. But the explanation offered of ectoplasm is that there has been a spillage, an extrusion from the spiritual to the material dimension. So the "anti-image" is precisely what it is not, in direct accord with, however, how one sets up notions of "is" and "is-not."

Spicer's "anti-image" can perhaps be most clearly unseen in his series of poems (entitled A Red Wheelbarrow) constituting an apophatic dis/continuity with Williams's "Red Wheelbarrow" poem. Williams's much anthologized (and unfortunately radically decontextualized) "Red Wheelbarrow," a oft lopped-off and actually numbered rather than titled fragment of Williams's much longer poetic manifesto Spring and All, perhaps captures most perfectly the modernist fetish with image and object. For Williams "so much depends/ upon" this red wheelbarrow because of the farm object's larger context within the perceptual field. Compare Spicer's somewhat satiric:

   Rest and look at this goddamned wheelbarrow. Whatever
   It is. Dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
   For their significance
   For their significance. For being human ... (103)

In this section of Spicer's sequence A Red Wheelbarrow tellingly entitled "A Red Wheelbarrow," the red wheelbarrow of Williams is returned to its original urgency, even as it takes an increasingly complex phenomenological field. Spicer redeems "this goddamned wheelbarrow" from Williams's tacit ennoblement and places it back into the state of its nothing-specialness from which emanated its original (and originary) thing-ness. The wheelbarrow no longer inhabits a barnyard setting replete with "white/ chickens," but has moved into the ambit of poesis, creation, itself. Williams's precept, "No ideas but in things" takes on a new dimension, a field of multiple co-existing possibilities. The "thing" referred to by Spicer is clearly not simply a wheelbarrow, even if it partakes to some extent of "wheelbarrowness." The "thing" is more particularly Williams's Part XXII of Spring, evoking the red wheelbarrow as its central image. The phenomenological quality of Williams's image is not erased by Spicer's ironic treatment, but given a more primal depth. The image and anti-image hold a tension against one another that both negates and asserts the truth-value of each. Spicer's red wheelbarrow cannot even exist without Williams's inception. However, the surrealistic intrusion of "dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps" causes us to re-create the universe afresh, and this we must do "Not/for their significance./For their significance," in other words via the negative path of Saint Dionysius. For if there is a significance to non-significance, as Williams's poetic snapshot asserts, there is also, and this is Spicer's point, a non-significance to significance, since signification is itself flawed from the get go. Spicer completes the fragment prefacing his poetic sequence:

   ... For being human
   The signs escape you. You, who aren't very bright
   Are a signal for them. Not,
   I mean, the dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
   Their significance. (103)

Brought into question, then (and this is the crux of postmodernity) is the entire structure of meaning-making drawn from the arrangement of signifiers in a picturesquely representational manner. It is drawn into question, that is, through negation, yet even this negation is negated. Note Spicer's repetition of the capitalized and end-line positioned "Not." As the signs escape us, we become signals for them. Our usual human position in the continuum of being as receivers of information is reversed. Ordinarily we think of ourselves as discovering the world and attributing various kinds of significance to the things we find here; in Spicer's dimension of experience it is we who create the dogs, crocodiles and sunlamps; significance precedes its naming, and lasts beyond its echo. "Tender as an eagle it swoops down/ Washing all our faces with its rough tongue" (103), Spicer writes in another section of A Red Wheelbarrow, entitled "Love." Even negation proves ultimately positive, for it is the creation of a dynamic, a non-dual space, that owes no allegiance to concept or precept, but which stands forth as with Saint John of the Cross "on an imageless field" (De Nicolas 46), uncontaminated by ego and conception. The poem, like the "transcendent hymnody" (195) of Saint Dionysius, clears away all mental clusters by revealing the significance residing in its very inability to signify. In this way, that is, from the reverse direction, we come to the eternal creation myth carved out of nothingness itself. If we hold Williams's red wheelbarrow in one hand and Spicer's in the other, and grant each equal verisimilitude, we are forced not to imagine the red wheelbarrow as a mythic variant of the Egyptian sun-bearing creation-scarab, although the crocodiles and sunlamps, and even the dog (if taken as the jackal-headed god Anubis) seem to suddenly point the "thing" in that direction. The rain water glazing the wheelbarrow must not stand in for the face of the waters upon which the Spirit of God moves in the opening stanzas of Genesis. There is certainly no interplay between the Hebraic God's first verbal act, his statement "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3), and Spicer's identification of an identityless "you" as not "very bright" (103). As well as the sunlamps, or their significance, or lack thereof. Such assertions empty out meaning, creating an insoluble paradox, an impossibility, like trying not to imagine a polka-dotted zebra, which likewise (the act, that is; the dynamic) shares significance and insignificance in equal measures. At the root of the poetic and thereby magico-religious project, properly understood, is the balancing of oppositions in the intuition of their unification. The spiritual practice of Via Negativa translates into a written poetry of paradox, which partakes of language as a dynamic field in which contradiction is an affirmation of truth.

WORKS CITED

Ashbery, John. Three Poems. 1972. New York: Ecco P, 1989. Print.

Bruno, Giordano. "On Magic." Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic. Ed. and trans. Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 195-42. Print.

--. On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas. Trans. Charles Doria. New York: Willis, Locker and Owens, 1991. Print.

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[Received 19 Aug. 2013; accepted 19 May 2014]

Kurt Cline is currently associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, National Taipei University of Technology. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness; Tamkang Review; NTU Studies in Language and Literature; poems and stories have appeared n Wilderness House Literary Review, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Bicycle Review, and Clockwise Cat.