ANYWAY WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE THE DEATH OF THE POET?, ROBERT D. ROMANYSHYN, quotes

http://www.pacifica.edu/pdf/RomanyshynDeathPoet.pdf

i kept this article for quite a  few years and just re-discovered it.

It gives me stuff to ...say, think, though this is the wrong word.

to try and see more..

"ANYWAY WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE THE DEATH OF THE POET?” 

ROBERT D. ROMANYSHYN

 "But in fifth century BCE Greece, when mythos is giving way to logos, the original music of the poet as shaman is being “transmuted into the children of myth: poetry and philosophy”. It is a moment when “the Apollonian forms of Western culture were being encoded”, and Orpheus steps into this moment as a new type of poet. 

Built on the older form of the shaman, which his mythic descent into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice from death fully illustrates, Orpheus also stands as the medial term between the Apollonian and the Dionysian modes of thought. 

Orpheus is a figure who embraces the “shamanic contradiction,” which according to Jack Lindsay is a bifocal consciousness.

 “The shaman,” he says, “feels himself a wholly free and independent person; yet he is at the same time nothing but the mouthpiece of forces beyond himself.” 

As one who embodies this contradiction Orpheus is a figure in whom two states of consciousness are held in a tension so that “possession becomes poetry.” "

"What Jung advocates is the recognition that the “achievement of personality means nothing less than the optimum development of the whole individual human being.” Personality, he says, “ is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.” What he advocates is an education of that new type of mind, which Plato advocated, an education that would free the soul from its enslavement to conventional norms lived out in repetitive and mimetic fashion."

"But however we regard Jung’s ambivalence with respect to the poet there is also this testimony, spoken in a kind of reverie about one year before he died:

 'Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an island somewhere in the ocean five thousand years ago…Such is Love, the Mystic flower of the Soul. This is the Centre, the Self. Nobody understands what I mean…only a poet could begin to understand.'

 Individuation is about the integration of the timeless background of the world and our lives, which is our common legacy. Orpheus, who was a shaman before he became the eponymous poet, lingers on the threshold between the time bound world and this timeless background."