Re: Post Human Variations ('Imaginary' vs. 'Imaginal') Debashish Sat 27 Jan 2007 07:56 PM PST Thanks for the illumining clarifications on Corbin's Sufi-inspired imaginito vera and archetypal earth. In Savitri, this kind of imaging power of the soul related to a "true earth" which holds the "meaning" of the earth of human experience is touched on in the canto where Savitri finds her soul. The environing scene is one of the world of the gods but quotidian scenes of earth-existence are assimilated to this higher realm in terms of the evolution of the Divine (The Finding of the Soul, Book Seven, canto Five)... Re: Post Human Variations by Richard Carlson RY Deshpande Sat 27 Jan 2007 09:28 PM PST
Frankly, this discussion is a little beyond me but my uneasiness with some terms and linking them with Savitri prods me into it. In poetry there are several things—simile, metaphor, symbol, image, simulacrum, representation, ideation, etc, etc. Their use in different contexts has different connotations. But in mystic poetry they acquire an altogether different status, particularly so when they are used by an accomplished mystic poet; add to that the exceptional case of a yogi-poet. I wonder whether we can really apply terms like imagino phatastica or the mundus imaginalis, or whatever else in his case. There is no question of imagination with him,—which is not to mean that he has no power of imagination. Actually, what he sees that he describes. To put it very crudely, he is just reporting his observations. To put it in better acceptable terms, it is a disclosure, it is a revelation that comes to us as if it were an image. Debashish has given one beautiful example of the rock-hewn temple through the gates of which Savitri is entering into the sanctum sanctorum where her soul dwells. There are many other examples in Savitri but here let me quote just one, connected with the world-pile “erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods”: (p. 98) ...
Frankly, this discussion is a little beyond me but my uneasiness with some terms and linking them with Savitri prods me into it. In poetry there are several things—simile, metaphor, symbol, image, simulacrum, representation, ideation, etc, etc. Their use in different contexts has different connotations. But in mystic poetry they acquire an altogether different status, particularly so when they are used by an accomplished mystic poet; add to that the exceptional case of a yogi-poet. I wonder whether we can really apply terms like imagino phatastica or the mundus imaginalis, or whatever else in his case. There is no question of imagination with him,—which is not to mean that he has no power of imagination. Actually, what he sees that he describes. To put it very crudely, he is just reporting his observations. To put it in better acceptable terms, it is a disclosure, it is a revelation that comes to us as if it were an image. Debashish has given one beautiful example of the rock-hewn temple through the gates of which Savitri is entering into the sanctum sanctorum where her soul dwells. There are many other examples in Savitri but here let me quote just one, connected with the world-pile “erect like a mountain chariot of the Gods”: (p. 98) ...
What I am trying to say is that, the Yogi-Poet is not just transcribing his experiences in images or creating new myths for his purposes; he is rather narrating something in which he is living, with the intimate knowledge coming from identity, at times in his consciousness even creating those things in their living truth. But, finally, iconopoeia is only one aspect of poetry with the other two, logopoeia and melopoeia accompanying them. RYD
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