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But where is consciousness to be expanded? Certainly not into "higher" and more rarefied levels of "spiritual" consciousness, in order to become disembodied angels - but downwards into the darkness below the present threshold.
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But Mark, why would higher and spiritual have to mean disembodied? Christianity, for one, would be appalled at such an idea. The point is the vertical dimension, which rationalism leaves out. But vertical means up and down, and which direction all depends on the person, the time, the life circumstances. I’ve been places in my life, and others I know have too, that downwards into the darkness was the last place we needed to go. Things were already dark enough. Sometimes, the light is just the thing. Ask Lawrence’s gentian.
I do love those quotations, by the way. Lawrence, I agree, is a good example of a poet who approached the ecstatic with his eyes open.
Pound, another anathema in certain precincts, did it himself sometimes:
So that the vines burst from my fingers
And the bees weighted with pollen
Move heavily in the vine-shoots:
chirr - chirr - chir-rikk - a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.
ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS!
With the first pale-clear of the heaven
And the cities set in their hills,
And the goddess of the fair knees
Moving there, with the oak-woods behind her,
The green slope, with white hounds
leaping about her;
And thence down to the creek's mouth, until evening,
Flat water before me,
and the trees growing in water,
Marble trunks out of stillness,
On past the palazzi,
in the stillness,
The light now, not of the sun.
Chrysophrase,
And the water green clear, and blue clear;
On, to the great cliffs of amber.
(from Canto XVII)