Hi dear Alison,
I have just covered for my newspaper a series of conferences on Islamic
cultures among which there was one on mysticism. My thoughts are therefore
quite fresh. Scholars witness that Dante was a sufi.
This further passage by Mandelstam that I found on the net, brings us closer
to what is accepted both in Sufism and by Dante:
'I compare, therefore I am,' so Dante might have put it. He was the
Descartes of metaphor. Because matter is revealed to our consciousness (and
how could we experience someone else's?) through metaphor alone, because
there is no existence outside comparison, because existence itself is
comparison."
That is what is manifested outside (carrier of god's signs) and the inside
or occult become both keys to be interpreted for the ultimate growth in a
free individual research. Where if you make mistakes (maybe your reference
to Burrough's words) you are awarded with a prize, if you don't you receive
two recompenses.
Such theories are quite common by us, but the were not at the time,
take care, Anny
> "Mandelstam maintains that "he (Dante) does not introduce one word of
> his own... he takes dictation, he is a copyist, he is a translator...
> " ... Only a poet who has known from his own inner experience the
> categoricalness of the inner voice could say this. From the cited
> quote it follows that in poetic work no arbitrariness, no invention,
> no fantasy is conceivable. All these ideas Mandelstam relegated to
> the negative rank: "Dante and fantasy - after all, the two are
> incompatible!" ... Fantasy and invention yield a fictive product -
> fiction, literature - but not poetry."
>
> (From_Mozart and Salieri_ by Nadezhda Mandelstam)
>
> Which makes me think of William Burroughs' comment about how language
> can deceive the writer, and wondering whether, if Mandelstam is
> correct (and I'm not certain he is) it is true that poetry of the
> "inner voice" would then make the seductiveness of deception
> impossible. Hmmm?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Best
>
> Alison
> --
>
> "The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
> Albert Camus
>
> Alison Croggon
> Home page
> http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>
> Masthead Online
> http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
>
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