Assertion and denial. Assertion and denial. I grow tired of conscious teleology, conscious purpose, in the act of writing. Motif and motive. The secret of legitimate poetry is statement. That is, statement as whole spontaneous purpose. Say it all. Say it all again. Every statement complete in itself.
            Now, of course, this is not all. If there is no love of language. If there is no love of the pure music of language. But poetry is pure spontaneous statement. That is, the statement itself is motive and motif. If there is no purpose, there is no poetry. But if the purpose stands outside the spontaneous immediacy of the statement, there is no poetry.
            In poetry, the purpose arises as a feeling, not a conscious goal. When I cannot refrain, the line may well be poetry. But then again, maybe not. Hearing is the same instrument. When hearing and saying are the same. Because the ear is as much the music as the voice. The body of the mind as the world of spoken sound. So hearing and saying are the same. But the body is motive. The body is act. To act with this whole body of sound, when there is only the body of sound as the mind.

             All well and good, thus far. But still not enough. Poetry is the song of the other.
            Given all the other conditions, the poetry is the spontaneity of the purpose, the nature of the pure teleology. And, by necessity, spontaneous teleology implies an other beyond who we are.
            Poetry is self-definition in terms of this other. Because if the desire to be poet is the essence of vocation, then the poet is the other. The other teaches me to become the poet by the act of poetry.

             I have suggested how ‘education’ as it stands today murders vocation, at least in the arts. Teaching technique as comprehensive, acting as if trained skills were the sole concern, are the tacit deathblow. Creativity necessarily begins in the acknowledged accession of the other.
            But this is not limited to the arts. The arts, in the abstract, are the subsidiary expression of culture, of the culture as a function of collective understanding. One need not evince a vocation in the arts. Vocation itself is the play of the other. And I have yet to see proof that vocation is not universal. Self-awareness automatically implies vocation.
            And vocation is religion precisely because of the other. I am not concerned with the ambiguous derivations of the word, whether it comes from light or ligature, except insofar as the devotees of light see light as unitary, whereas the dance of religion is precisely the dance of light and shadow: the self as this one, the self as that one.
            But even the experientialists, the counter-positing purveyors of the Asian traditions or the western occultist traditions, that pivot on experience, hold up the One as the ultimate, whether as non-self or undefined Union. But the power of the other is the power of otherness, whether we are a child looking at a stone and wondering, or an adult looking into questions of the ultimate, either as the abyss or as the unregenerate eye of light. The other may disappear for a moment or a duration. But if we find the moment of oneness as final, the other becomes an ongoing part of who we are.
            The Buddhist oneness is the transactional value of the bodhisattva vow. There is a transactional oneness that passes beyond the ‘psychic’, whatever our tradition. But, as Tung-shan said, apparently of his ongoing realization, ‘He is me, but I am not him.’ Which raises questions concerning the clichéd givens of commonplace Buddhism about both ‘person’ and oneness.

             If a man who is not only a recognized master, but the eponymous founder of one of the two persisting traditions of Zen, could express a clear sense of otherness not necessarily alien to the theistic description of the psychology of Jesus in the Gospel of John, then perhaps it’s appropriate to question our shallow commitment to ‘oneness’ at all levels of our culture, from the putatively ‘creative’ to the dogmatic.