My identity is as sort of a Platonist or other mystic. I love the conceit of ideal Forms and the way a poem or a painting can transcendentally grasp them. Emily Dickinson is prolly my fave poet still, with her adept use of symbols and allegory in her “riddles.” As I recall, a symbol is both itself and something else (A = A and B), while a metaphor is strictly the other (A is B). Are Emily’s poems allegories or extended metaphors?
Christians tend to go with Aristotle and the Law of Identity (A is A). Transcendentalists prefer Plato (A is B). And yet, communion is a symbolic ritual wherein one consumes the body and blood of Christ symbolized by a wafer and wine. Being one with Jesus Christ is being filled with the Holy Spirit, I guess. It is to participate in Christ-consciousness, which in turn is to be enlightened the way He was. There’s something about the body and blood symbolism and my association of this with Aristotle’s “dualism” by the use of “reason” that teases my poor brain.
It was in the intro to my D.T. Suzuki book, Zen Buddhism. It was a skillful introduction, and William Barrett alluded to zen as “radical intuitionism.” He begins by classing Christianity and Western philosophy together as being “dualistic,” or as being treated with reason, rationality. Reasoning somehow is thinking about thinking, which causes this doubling or duality. But zen is not mediated by reason, Barrett says, and is rather the direct apprehension of Ultimate Reality – without meta-thinking, or thinking about thinking: without the use of logic, logos, words. Logos can be swept away like dust on a mirror, as Suzuki illustrates. The illusion of a personal, empirical body and mind is “dropped,” followed by a dropping of the dropping itself. Nonsense koans are employed to disarm reason and sense and get to the heart of things, which reality is non-empirical and non-rational.
Now, I wonder about another kind of dualism in the light of zen, which is subject/object. Is this an illusion contrived by the other class of dualism, viz rationality? But the dishes still need doing
I’ll have to look it up. Bear with me, I don’t recognize it off the top of my head. My favorites are “It Sifts from Leaden Sieves” and “Apparently with No Surprise.” Back in a few.
I liked it. I generally like reading her poems in sequence, which begins as a voyage of discovery, or “sailing the bay.” Dickinson started her life’s work around the same time Mallarme did, I think. Pretty sure “Afternoon of a Faun” was published in the 1860s. His collection began with a poem about a clean sheet of paper, which he compared to the sail of a ship on his own voyage of discovery. Dickinson wrote the bulk of her poems in 1862. I will do a search on their publication dates now to see who was first. If they didn’t know about each other, then the coincidence is interesting.
Thinking without mind is zen. Going beyond the dualities and mental projections. All is a dream. Going beyond the dream is also illusion. Everything is an illusion. Even buddhahood and enlightenment is an illusion.
Interesting -ish story. When I was psychotic in 2015 I was having daily visits from the cat team (crisis assessment team) and the psych nurse, an old hippie guy was fascinated by my mention of the small stones poetry style.
He actually found that dickinson poem and brought it to me the next day.
I memorised it and wrote it everywhere.
He and the other male psych nurses looking after me were so kind. Their psychiatrist was horrible. My private psychiatrist at the time was my saviour.
