Reading Mystical Literature: unfinished
The pages posted here are the opening chapters of a book that was
never finished. Planned were more chapters containing discussions of
Rumi and Sufi literature, Plotinus, and modern mystical experience as
exemplified in Arthur Rimbaud and Annie Dillard; a catalog of
recurring mystical metaphors; discussions of the actual, experiential
mystical nature of all poetry, modern science and mysticism, and the
relationship of mystical experience and literature to other kinds of
"mysticism" which do not include unitary experiences but which seem
active on the boundaries of the spiritual.
All this has been taught several times as a university course, and the
original idea was that the course material could be turned into a book
which would serve as a basic guide to identifying and interpreting
mystical literature. However, three or four chapters into it, the
project was abandoned, not by conscious decision, but by neglect that
turned into abandonment. It wasn't that I thought the project was not
worth going on with. It was that I came to believe no one would ever
read it.
I could not get any publisher interested in it. Along the way, I gave
up teaching, where such a book might have been used in courses,
because it was becoming obvious that fewer and fewer students, not to
mention college administrators, had any real interest in mysticism.
The study of literature has become almost completely sterilized by an
extremely restrictive and naïve view of literature as a tool for social
and political activism in a small range of moral topics involving race,
class and gender issues.
The study of mysticism explicitly has no place in this ever-shriveling
context, and while books on "mysticism" still get published,no
publisher could ever make any money on this book because it's a
guide to reading in a topic that everyone is steering, or is being
steered, away from.
In fact I think I am speaking to no one in this very summary. The fact
that you've read this far is a cultural curiosity, and I would be
interested to know why you bothered. Let me know, if you want to.
Dana Wilde, 474 Bangor Road, Troy, ME 04987,
dwilde@dwildepress.net