What carried me into both the poetry and the philosophy was the healing hunger, the desire to unify the fragmentation of my consciousness. Modern poetics has become a form of anthropology. The fragmentation, apparently, is not just individual. The culture itself lies in ruins. The healing necessarily becomes cultural as well as personal. That is, the ‘exchange’ between culture and self is simultaneously subjectively and objectively lenitive. Consequently, as much as I have defied the contemporary desolation, I have nevertheless been swept along by the stream.

          No matter which side I stand on, standing on one side only, I cannot ‘complete’ the self. The philosophy necessarily falls into bald statement. One strips the statement down to a pure naked expression and it becomes a kind of poetry of core structural fact. But structural fact, in this ‘postmodernist’ era, automatically registers as simplistic. Neither generalization nor overt formalism is allowed. And this taboo infects the contemporary ear. Form and generalization automatically sound puerile to our sophisticated hearing.

          On the side of the philosophy, however, I cannot shed my personality.

          The core is the revolutionizing philosophy of reflective awareness. The recognition that our ‘common’ or ‘everyday’ experience has already undergone a complete conversion, a complete overturning of consciousness, revolutionizes philosophy. But the experiential process by which this pre-self-conscious ‘conversion’ becomes accessible to our present cognitive awareness involves a radical transformation of consciousness, since it challenges the addictive core of our sense of self. Breaking that addiction necessarily involves an awakening to the spiritual and the religious, to the unique properties and powers that produce the magic of perception and to the separation that requires a divine otherness.

          But my core statement of this philosophy is now embodied in a set of Tarot texts, book length renderings that deconstruct the basic form of the Tarot as an expression of reflective philosophy, both in its ‘moral’ structure (the Major Arcana) and in its raw description of the reflective process as the functional basis of vocation (the Minor Arcana).

          Do I believe that this is universally accessible? Not at all. It reflects a highly personal concern to find a ‘western oracle’, after the typical sixties experience with the peculiar potencies of I Ching, the classical Chinese oracle.

          The fragmentation of the culture

          Every piece that has become important to me leads back to the core, as I understand it – like the stinger on the scorpion, that last phrase. For me, both the poetry and the philosophy are dominated by the desire for ‘objectivity’. If poetry is the mutual concentration of language and experience, as characterized by song, some criterion is a necessary condition. Both language and experience have their objective functions; otherwise, we could not share them. The pretension that we can do without form is suicidal at every level of consciousness and experience.

          But, as a consequence, every piece is a starting point: the anomalous experience of my first self-awareness; the opening desire for art and poetry; the encounter with Einsteinian physics; the Gospel of Thomas; Tarot; initiation; the spiritual teacher; Upanishad; and so on and so forth. Each not only links to, but also explicates the philosophy of reflection more or less comprehensively, each from its own perspective or orientation.

          But perhaps what finally proves that I am a poet first of all is the fact that the only comprehensive allegory is the perpetually unfinished story of Perceval. What comes to point here, however, is the fact that I can only express the comprehensive nature of the Perceval ‘allegory’ through this, which is essentially a prose critical piece.

          The story of Perceval is the story of Peredur, the ‘steel born one’, in the original Welsh. As I have outlined before, Peredur is the seventh son of a knight. His father and elder brothers are killed in battle or tourney. His mother therefore takes him away to their Welsh stronghold and forbids all signs of knighthood. But one day while Peredur is out hunting with javelins, he encounters three knights. At first he deems them angels, ‘because his mother had told him that angels are the most beautiful creatures in the world.’ And so on and so forth. In other words, he discovers his vocation all blindly. He journeys to Arthur’s court dressed in a naïve and rustic imitation of the knights he has seen. The court is in consternation, because a knight has just challenged Arthur’s men, and no one is responding. Bitter-tongued Kay assures Peredur that Arthur knights him, and sends him out to confront the challenger. Peredur slays the challenger with a ‘dart’. And so on and so forth. But what follows, not only in the Welsh, but also in Chrétien de Troyes work – perhaps the next known version – is an essentially unresolved assemblage of adventures.

          Eventually Perceval is integrated into the Arthurian traditions, and his story is ‘completed’ in a number of different forms, perhaps culminating, at least stylistically, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. But by then, the central subsequent episode of interest, the procession at the castle of the wounded Fisher King, has been illegitimately transformed into the so-called ‘grail’ procession. Scholars have established that what was called the ‘graal’ in the earliest narrative was in fact a very large salver, rather than a cup. What it actually bore in its earliest Welsh version, in the Mabinogion, is a bloody, severed head. And as a feature of interest, it is secondary to the central image: another page carries a lance from whose tip descends ‘a single drop of living blood’.

          For years, I focused on the lance. The grail, of course, points symbolically toward the ecclesiastical tradition. However ‘mystical’ the given author may make it appear, it serves the collectivist interpretations, the institutionalizing forces. Literally, the cup equates with the corporeal. But the lance signifies individualism, the singular vocation, the paradigm that I necessarily presumed myself to be following. That is, as against the grail, the lance signifies Perceval’s journey, Perceval’s pilgrimage. But, in the Arthurian tradition, the development of the grail legend follows this – shall we say – counter-prophetic development. Chrétien’s procession already obverts to the grail alone – presumably a cup or more nearly a cup – bearing a single wafer. And now, in his unfinished story, the grail quest becomes an apparent competition between Perceval and Gawain. Gawain is ambivalent in the larger body of the traditions, sometimes treacherous, sometimes moral perfectionist. The grail tradition, of course, spontaneously exemplifies a perfectionist moral ideal. And this seems to stand behind Chrétien’s Gawain. Perceval, however, in his lineal incarnations from Peredur, is an epitome of amoral turbulence, the destined man processing through anarchic incident toward the gradual revelation of his fated value.

          But the original procession, in its entirety, is the ultimate prophetic key.

          Perhaps paradoxically, the lance, as esoteric or symbolic, also represents the body. I have seen a westernized Sufic tradition that identifies the lance only with the esoteric ‘centers’ from the head upwards. But the lance represents the whole of the esoteric body description, paralleling the caduceus or the standard tantric kundalini system. At the same time, in every case it involves the body as the whole, including the head.

          But what gives the original Peredur tradition its final global force is the severed head in the salver. This, needless to say, is the head detached from the body. Perhaps we are heaping redundancies to point out that the head separated from the body, at the symbolic or esoteric ‘level’, is cause.

          The presentation in the salver gives it religious force. In peoples where traditions of the god animal persist, the salver suggests the god animal sacrifice as ritual presentation, the god-sharing feast. The severed head presents a cannibalistic topsy-turvy – not simply a turbulent reordering of experience, but a direct expression of the wasting desolation over the ‘waste land’, an image which dominates the story throughout its history.

          In other words, the early versions of the story remain unfinished because the first impulse of the story prophesies a time when cause severs head and body, the time we have arrived at now.

          When cause becomes the ultimate scourge, severing head and body at every level, finally severing every link, including the esoteric, between sentience and the sentient instrument, the story of Perceval begins.