The way I see it (one of the two or three conversations going on here--I don't mean to exclude others) is that Nemo (correct me if I’m wrong, Nemo) is recognizing the irreducibleness of the poetic image. A poem or an image cannot really be “translated” into rational concepts, not fully anyway. It’s an experience of the whole person—or “soul,” as I prefer to call it. Philosophical poetry or poetic philosophy doesn’t “mean” in the way conceptual philosophy does; it conveys a sense of meaningfulness, the way a Bach cello suite does, as whole as life.
At the same time, the Bach cello piece or even the Tarkovsky image contains an immemorial storehouse of symbolic knowledge and culture—the spiritual and mental DNA of generations of life, art, philosophy-theology, and more. Not “doctrine” in a direct way, but culture that comes out of a unity of being--of shared knowledge.
About “symbolic knowledge”: The Neoplatonist Proclus said that there are two ways to apprehend transcendent or vertical realities. The first is wordless and imageless contemplation of metaphysical realities, in prayer and meditation. This is the way of some saints, monks, mystics. The second is through the symbolic imagination, since the imagination and symbols share in something of the world of the senses and also of the intelligible, the world of meanings. It’s what Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. This is the way of the philosophical or mystical artist. Dante put it this way: angels do not need language, since as pure celestial intelligence they apprehend the real directly; human beings do need language, because our apprehension of the non-literal real mostly happens in that middle realm, between the senses and the intellect.
And it can’t be accurate that “it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself,” as Nemo said, since that would mean that King David, Rumi, Dante, and the author of the Bhagavad Gita made a mistake. But I don’t believe this necessarily contradicts what Tarkovsky and the other people that Nemo quotes said: The poem is the thing itself, that’s what makes it poetry, and that’s what makes it (I am painfully aware) untranslatable. Poetry or painting or architecture or any art communicates philosophically by transporting the listener or viewer to an experience of the idea when it is still in its matrix.
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