Last week, in the inaugural issue of Mind Travel, I offered a couple of thoughts about the benefits of books: new knowledge and new perspectives. This week, I will go a little farther--or perhaps I should say a little deeper.
I recently delivered a lecture called “The Literature of the Sea“ at Mini University, a lifelong learning conference sponsored by Indiana University. In that lecture, I discussed the sea as a kind of metaphor, representing not only what we see on the surface, but also the hidden things that lie below. This metaphor can help us to understand another value of reading.
We spend most of our lives on the surface of this metaphorical sea. Here, as we work and play, eat and drink, fight and fall in love, we experience the world through our senses. Seeing--along with hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling--is believing. We might even assume, logically, that this is all there is.
But maybe it isn't.
If you have ever experienced deja vu or felt inexplicably moved by a work of art or a piece of music, you know what I mean. I'm not talking about ghosts or monsters under the bed. I'm referring to things that, for most of us, don't even have a name. Shakespeare put it succinctly when he had Hamlet say, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Literature, like art and music, can take us below the sea's surface to experience these things. In fact, some writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, treat this subject rather explicitly. In his poem "Alone," Poe refers to a stirring "mystery":
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
It's often impossible to sum up the meaning of a poem in a few sentences or even a few paragraphs, and I will not try to do so here. Rather, let me focus just on this notion of a "mystery" that has the power to bind--that is, to exert some kind of control over a person, probably emotional control, but perhaps also intellectual and even spiritual control. The poem seems to suggest that this mystery operates through powerful natural phenomena, such as a "torrent," "lightning in the sky," "the thunder, and the storm." Even the sight of less visibly dynamic things, such as "the red cliff of the mountain" and the sun, can be stirring. Poe ends on a particularly evocative image: "the cloud that took the form / (When the rest of Heaven was blue) / Of a demon in my view." All of his other images are what they are; they have the power to stir in mysterious ways, but they look like what they are. In the case of this cloud, however, it takes on a different form, hinting somewhat more explicitly of something below the surface, so to speak--something other than what we think it to be. The form here is that of a "demon," but the mystery below the surface doesn't have to be evil. I think we could find more benign mysteries alluded to in other works.
By the way, technically, the poet and what we call the "speaker" of a poem are not the same. Indeed, in some cases, as in Robert Browning's wonderful poem "My Last Duchess," the poet takes on a completely different persona--like an actor playing a role--and delivers something called a "dramatic monologue." Still, sometimes the poem's speaker does seem to speak for the poet, expressing that poet's feelings, opinions, or experiences. I think it's safe to say that the speaker of "Alone" is revealing Poe's own experience of feeling bound by a mystery beyond ordinary perception.
Some writers, especially Poe and others of the Romantic age (roughly 1780-1860), suggest that artists have special access to this other world, the one below the surface. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the most influential of the Romantic poets, alludes to the special status of the artist in his great poem "Kubla Khan," where the speaker imagines being able to "revive" the music of a "damsel with a dulcimer" whom he saw in a vision. If he could, he could create a powerful song about the exotic realm of Kubla Khan, and those who experienced his song would see him as a kind of shaman with extraordinary access to a world beyond:
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
By plunging into the deep and sharing what they find, writers can expand our consciousness, helping us to see beneath the surface into the world that we do not dream of in our philosophies.
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