"In his fiction, Poe discards most of the trappings of this world, its politics, its finances, its day-to-day affairs, and most of its people. For he knows of Another World. He cannot tell us where it is: perhaps it is beyond the tomb, perhaps in a lost continent, perhaps through a mirror, perhaps in another state of mind, another time, another dimension. But he knows it is there.
This knowing and being unable to say -- it is of the essence of Poe. ...
Knowing and being unable to say: it is for this reason that Poe's works are scattered with puzzles and cryptograms and ciphers, that baffling clock symbols recur again and again, that strange fragments of foreign tongues are put into the mouths of animals and birds, that he was fond of hoaxes, that he writes stories as articles, using the persona of first-person narrators, that he is full of tricks and curiosities, that his characters have speech impediments, that he could never master anything as long-winded as a novel. All his considerable eloquence points towards a central inarticulacy. He knew of Another World, and could express it only in symbols. ...
After its abysmal beginning, Pym ( The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket. Online in several places. Index here ) is marvellous Poe, atmospheric and baffling. It is useless to complain that the end is unsatisfying, or that Poe makes no connections (as Henry James complained); if God speaks only in cryptograms, how should Edgar Allan Poe be more explicit? "
Billion Year Spree : The True History of Science Fiction
by Brian Aldiss
Pages 47, 51
(Later revised as
Trillion Year Spree
by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove
"Mystic", "Mystical", "Mysterious", etc. are all ultimately from the Greek word muein, "to close", as in
"I've just had a mystical experience!"
"Oh really? What was it like?"
"It was like...it was like....You know, frankly, I can't tell you what it was like. I guess I'll just have to keep my mouth closed."
We can gloss "the mystical experience" as "that experience which cannot be communicated in words". So we'll just have to remain silent, right? But humans being hyper-verbal animals, this is never good enough, and many libraries worth of volumes have been written on the writer's own experiences and those of others.
To my mind, the danger lies in the assumption (toward which humans seem to have a strong attraction) that the mystical experience is a "real" experience, that it is information relevant to and useful in "the real world" or one's real life.
Despite the passionate convictions of believers, evidence for this seems very weak, and evidence against it strong. At best, we might grant that a mystical experience (being presumably one which occurs entirely in the mind) might grant some psychological insight.
" ... Blake describes how the author of "Paradise Lost" returned from heaven and entered Blake's foot in the form of a comet. Afterwards, the familiar world of the five senses turned into a shoe. ... Blake saw a twelve-year- old girl flying down to him. ... and invited her into his cottage to visit with him and his wife, who could also see and hear "the spirits". The girl explained that she was actually looking for John Milton. The older poet emerged from Blake's foot, and in an apocalyptic scene, the ordinary world was transformed along with all of human perception.
... In my undergraduate thesis, I explained that Blake's experiences are typical of schizophrenia. His wonderful works are one happy instance in which disease has given humankind something of lasting and positive value."
-- which is a brief intro to Dr. Friedlander's
WILLIAM BLAKE'S MILTON:
MEANING AND MADNESS
Warning: Large file -- 91 print pages
"Personally, I think mysticism arises out of an inability to accept that humans can only know so much. Who wouldn't like to have all metaphysical questions answered here and now?"
'As intelligent readers will quickly realize, this script deals with the scary things that happen to those who stumble into this borderless or other-worldly consciousness without any intent to go there and without any preparation or Operating Manual to tell them how to navigate when the walls tumble, the doors of perception fly open and the bottom falls out of their mental filing cabinet, leaving the brain suddenly free of the limits of "mind".'
RAW compares *conscious* efforts to break down the 'conditioned/imprinted "maps" in our brains' -- i.e. magick and mysticism, to the more *accidental* -- such as UFO and other paranormal experiences which represent 'Berlin Walls vanishing suddenly for people who have not in anyway sought such mind-bending events, which always feel, to some extent, like walking from one room to another in your own house and finding yourself in the middle of St. John's Apocalypse -- with the Marx Brothers as the Four Horsemen'.
He expands on such experiences, and hits the nail on the damned proverbial head; 'If really convinced that their experience did occur in consensus reality, these people will want to know what other kind of reality they wandered into, and lacking rational models for this sort of human experience, they will perforce seize on some fashionable but irrational model.'