The vale of sleep-making

Recently I have been perusing Laura (Riding) Jackson's 1972 book The Telling.  After the first few pages, I realized I had underlined so many phrases, lines, and whole sentences, written so many unilluminating marginalia, that it made me wonder what kind of reading The Telling does, can, or should elicit.  Somewhere (or somehow) between or amid philosophy, poetry, theory, general "truth-telling" or what have you is what the author calls her "personal evangel."  As generic, old-fashioned, or perverse as it sounds, I am intrigued by studies of modernist or postmodernist poetics in terms of latent or explicit structures of, or imaginative appropriations from, religious/spiritual myths, beliefs, and practices.  Thus my ears prick up whenever I hear vocabularies, grammars, and rhetorics of "rethinking" poetics that resonate with "reviving" religion (or even, a la Frank Zappa, the rise & explosion of the Church of American Secular Humanism).  So far in (Riding) Jackson's book I have noticed a lucid animosity towards all forms of "specialized" knowledge (within such a category poetry is to be placed).  (Riding) Jackson variously characterizes certain lacunae in "specialized" discourses: philosophy "does not look back, or forward far, if at all, but stares hard at what 'is'," history "begins late and ends early," and poetry is "a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep" (11).  And regardless of whether or not we dream "the dream of a common language," these various discourses all fail to carry the "burden of the single sense of the manifold totality" (6).  The "telling" for which we wait--the "missing story"--is one for which we go on "quietly craving" (9).  It almost seems, at least in (Riding) Jackson's tone, that one could substitute "endlessly" for the adverbial modification of our common verbal, and thus spiritual, desire.  All of sudden, Bono's voice comes through over all the other frequencies barely audible in my thoughts: "But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..."  So am I calling (Riding) Jackson a mystic?  If so, what does that entail for other modern conceptions of poetry that are less evangelically antagonistic, and perhaps more benignly sympathetic, or "experimental"?  We (one) want(s) to read (i.e. write) the omens of today in light of a tomorrow that is always out of reach, but what response (what responsibility) does this conundrum force upon us (one)?  I've been told I am always too much of a both/and kind of thinker, a dialectical escapist (or something like that), which I think is not the worst position of positions.  Heeding the call to be better (truer, not nicer) at retelling an oft-told story, I want to question what we are looking for.  Maybe some of us aren't looking but listening, some more actively, some more passively.  And before asking "For what?": how to account for personal and social differences without programmatic specialization?  Perhaps it involves some form or forms of fields overlapping, intermingling, and/or realigning, but for that I do not have the blueprint.  I do have time to keep thinking about this, though...for now...    

Work Cited

Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2005).