Revelation

[Erthona]

Billy,

Noted, as noted below.

Thanks,

Dale
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Tectak,

"So yes to emanation." OK. Sometimes I get to cute for my own good will change in next version.
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"flick through my Ginsbergs to get a handle on which one yo were talking about but I still cannot locare any repeated ref to the outflowing of spirit. Help."

Ginsberg talks specifically about this in the movie "no direction home" [disc 2 I think]about Bob Dylan's singing as a sort of shamanism or channeling of spirit. He also talked fairly extensively about his (Ginsberg's) writing as a line being equal to a breath.

"Ginsberg denied any intention toward meter and claimed instead that meter follows the natural poetic voice, not the other way around; he said, as he learned from Williams, that natural speech is occasionally dactylic, so poetry that imitates natural speech will sometimes fall into a dactylic structure, but only accidentally. Like Williams, Ginsberg's line breaks were often determined by breath: one line in "Howl", for example, should be read in one breath. Ginsberg claimed he developed such a long line because he had long breaths (saying perhaps it was because he talked fast, or he did yoga, or he was Jewish). The long line could also be traced back to his study of Walt Whitman; Ginsberg claimed Whitman's long line was a dynamic technique few other poets had ventured to develop further. "
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg) footnoted from several sources.

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"The base of discussion of gnosticism changed radically with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, and led to revision of older assumptions, and a reorientation of modern scholarship following the 1966 conference on gnosticism in Messina."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism)

There is this idea in gnosticism (see Demiurge) that the "real world" is an emanation of God, and the further one gets from the spiritual into the material (that is from a high vibration to a lower vibration, think molecules in liquid water as opposed to those in water ice) the further from good and the closer to evil one gets. One can infer from this that "reality" in it's particulars, is made in God's image. Therefore, a 'real' poem is one that the reader can recognize the aspects that are closer to God, and/or the origin of Being. The idea of this poem was to basically list the signs that occur in the reader when he is reading a 'real' poem, or that which we refer to in the purest sense as 'art'. For my purposes, art is equal to truth: truth being the greater reality beyond our own, and from which our reality is derived. When one has a recognition of such truth, it is generally accompanied by certain physical signs such as "goose flesh", hair on neck raising" and so on. This is a concept (art as truth) that permeates a large portion of my poetry, at least from a philosophical standpoint if not an actual one. However, please do not infer that I am postulating a "God" in the normal sense, but only as what can be inferred about such a reality from an examination of how it manifests in our own. This of course assumes the validity of the primary argument, but I believe that is fairly axiomatic. So no, not in the sense you mean it, we are not talking "Christian here", as Gnosticism, Christian or otherwise characterized, is not compatible with that worldview. Just as a further note, nearly all of the esoteric, or mystery traditions were generally considered heretical from the standpoint of the First Council of Nicaea 325 CE onward, as they were attempting to incorporate an exoteric tradition that would be assessable to a much larger portion of the population, and had the added benefit of being able to be more rigidly fixed, and tied to a central authority.

Dale