Because I begin with the viewpoint of the poet, the viewpoint indigenous at least since adolescence, and since the true viewpoint of the poet never involves career apart from the incremental perfection of craft dictated by the ongoing spontaneity of the voice, it is only now, arriving at a pivot from which I can reflect on and question the impulse itself, that I can see how my odd commitment differs radically not only from the majority, but from the pervasive tendency of the mass. The poet I met who convinced me, finally, of the reality of the poet’s vocation never personally attempted to publish his work. And given my alienation (and presumably his) from what has been deemed publishable and sophisticated in the last fifty years – the corrupting influence of that spiritual link therefore being obvious – I perhaps have to add the caveat : because of the aesthetic conditions of the culture into which I was born.

            But even presuming that the vocation today is not historically particularly different, the role of the poet seems to involve this cultural isolation.

            I.

            Culture is language.

            The error of modern metaphysics – since metaphysics is act as well as concept – is the false (if tacit) equation of consciousness and language. Language is self-awareness. But sentience produced both self-awareness and language. Self-awareness radicalizes consciousness – ‘proving’ its self-dependence, its necessary independence from ‘inert’ matter – but does not ‘produce’ it. And language is the sustaining key for the perceptual mode of self-awareness, our present mode of ‘experience’ in which, as Kant says, the ‘I think’ accompanies all perceptual responses.

            This, of course, does not equate language with the ‘actualities’ of experience.

            But language is the sustaining perspective.

            In other words, language becomes the ‘interstitial addition’ within the field that supplies the sustaining basis of the field, since ‘field’ itself is a reflective category, a created ‘entity’ of the reflective process.

            If I say that I am ‘esoteric’ or ‘gnostic’, it is because the word, in this postmodern era, has become the word, for good or ill. Something changed reflective awareness so that our present objectification of reflection would become possible. This change takes place specifically at the level of the word, the sustaining key to the reflective process.

            The problem here is that the word is the mind, as opposed to the body. If we trace the same source for ‘the body’, the dichotomy comes into its full dialectical opposition. That is, this time, from the perspective of the mind.

            Historically, ‘the body’, while it had the ‘political’ force – the physical collectivity of the Spirit – everywhere destroyed the dedicated esotericists and gnostics. Naturally, the true word encompasses the body, since the body itself is simply another form for ‘field’, largely based on skin and breath, the pervasive nature of the tactile. Corporate spirit, of course, has its legitimacy. But without creative mind, it can only expropriate corporately experienced ideas, directly converting them to dogma. Almost all dogma of the body began as gnostic insight. But the gnostic insights resonate directly today, as if written for the postmodern.

            But this dichotomy of mind and body not only dictates a history of warfare and genocide, and not only infects culture, it has become a psychological principle as well. Now the mind and body are locked in an internalized battle that manifests in the swordspoint between ‘believer’ and ‘scientist’, in which the defining element is mutual fear.

            So this is the first order view of ‘the poet’.

            But the poet is the arbiter of the word. One needs to read the verb back into the noun to understand that this is hardly a boast. The arbitration is not particularly of the poet’s doing, except insofar as he or she accedes to the weird and uncanny demands of the living word as it proceeds toward tongue or pen.

            But what arrives, finally, is a self-validating viewpoint of the objective.

            This is not necessarily contiguous with everyday awareness. As in the traditions of the ‘magical’, a separation in consciousness has occurred. That is, the subtending objectivity is still ‘intentional’, requiring a sustaining focus to bring it into view in the immediacies of the moment. But clearly it is perpetually operating, an awareness one continually feeds by observation and study, but equally self-dependent and direct in its expression of value.

            II.

            The poet stands for the word as the living creative act.

            Because the word is a value sign as well as a simple or compound phoneme, the intuitive ground of the word is both body and light. We could say, as we have, that word structures the field. But the word itself is not structure.

            Consciousness has structure, but that possession necessarily disqualifies it as the ‘source’ of structure. Its structuring is an imperative key within structure. But structure has its ontological a priori in value : the separative instance that allows value to appear as both ‘immediate’, or essentially formless, and within form as Symbol or Sign.

            Symbol and Sign utilize the structures of body and the structures of consciousness as both act and form – or ‘mind’ – to make the sign ‘signify’, but its force as sign begins in the nature of value, not in the nature of consciousness or body.

            If the structuring instance seems binary, this is the act of focus as corollary of value that registers ‘immediate’ value and spontaneously assigns the ‘symbol’.

            The word is first of all habitual in terms of our developing vocabulary. But, structurally, it looks back into this first instance, the defining condition for moment and conscious experience. As such, the word is ontologically grounded in this a priori condition of value.

            The poet, then, returns to this ground.

            But, note, that in returning to this ontological ground in which value first of all subsists, the poet invokes body as well as mind.

            Language and knowledge are fields as well as awareness. All fields are forms of the body. In the classical Sanskrit tradition, the field of awareness is the Great Body, the ultimate extension of the body as the sensory instrument and, in its present representation in awareness, entirely ‘composed’ of the ‘substance’ of sentience. But conscious experience, knowledge and language have gone through the ‘reversal’ of body tacit in the eye and sight, which first ‘externalizes’ consciousness as contiguous with the field – a reversal, of course, in which we not only lose the sense of sentience as the instrument of presentation as well as the fact that the presentation is a simulacrum for the body.

            The connection of course persists ‘intuitively’. But this is also a definition of intuitive. In the creative act, or intuition, the whole body speaks through the ‘reversed’ body of the field.

            The peculiarity of poetry is that the body as the ‘instrument’ of sound is not reversed.

            What classical Sanskrit itself points to is the nature of the body as the ‘field’ of sound. As Yogi Vasant said, ‘Sanskrit was never anybody’s mother tongue.’ It was an ancient priestly medium, apparently highly cryptic, that developed according to principles laid down through yogic investigation of the internal ‘dimensions’ of the body.

            Sounds take the shape of the body as feelings. Feelings are the immediacy of values. Therefore individual sounds have specific values ‘located’ by body as the instrument of feeling.

            The intuitive in poetry moves both through the field of reversal, the field of light, and the direct field of the body. Which is simply to say, that poetry marries the direct and indirect nature of value through the single act of sound.

            It marries body and mind.