CHAPTER I1

EPISTEMOLOGICAL EXCURSUS

The individual's responses to external stimuli by means of senmy

perception form the storehouse of cognitive impresses. As the process oc;curs at

the inter-personal and conscious level, the validity of individual experie~~ces and

responses is modified and reinforced by the empirical, as the apparent measure of

the individual's judgement. The conscious life gives us the experience of outer

reality. But the greater part of the individual's life is at the subliminal level which

remains embryonic and passive, unless the individual is sensitised to its nascent

potential for creative regeneration. This level which is "below the threshold of

consciousness," is one that the individual may not be wholly aware of, but which

reveals itself in intuitive moments or after deep introspective meditation. Like the

tip of the ice-berg, what is revealed above the surface may not be the t n ~ e measure

of the mass submerged below. This subliminal self may reveal itself in non-

rational modes of experience, such as dreams and fantasy. As psychologists have

established, the denial of this life can lead to the dissociation of conscic~lsness,

and cause alienation and fragmentation of experience. The resuscitation of this

latent life and its rejuvenation, can be achieved through intra-personal

communion which leads to a fuller and deeper understanding of one's existence

and the phenomenal world.

26

Artistic truth is revealed in a process when the creative mind intuitively

apprehends this truth and attempts to convey it to the audiencelreader. As Martin

Heidegger states,

AN art as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is,

as such, e.s.~entiallypuetry The nature of art, on which both the art

work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth.[.

.] The working of the work does not consist in the taking effect of

a cause. It lies in a change, happening from out of the work, of the

unconcealedness ofwhat is., and this means, of Being. (Poetly

Language rhcmght 70)

This is not merely a discursive or rational process, but a spontaneous, unobtrusive

poetic osmosis as the creatively charged artist hermetically transmutes the

materials of his experiences in the world through the poem, which evolvi:s

through "the interdependence of imagination and reality as equals" (Stevens,

Necessmy Angel 27). It attempts to transcend the spatial and temporal limits of

this world, and seeks perfection beyond the compass of empirically oriented

human consciousness.

The consciousness of the poet is no doubt affected by various historical

processes, and the poetry may be a response to these processes. But the poet makes a

definite individual choice in the selection of the poetic material, the mode, and in the

creation of a specific poetic space. The empirical, external, material world is the basis

of the poetry; but the appeal is to the internal, emotional, non-rational and even the

supra-rational. The poet can communicate only through the social phenomenon of

language, which is a component of the material reality, but may never be able to

objectify the elusive truth of the poem verbally. The communication is immediate and

compelling -- a communion between the creator and the reader that transcends the

verbal. The end of the act of reading a poem becomes the beginning, as intuitive

transference of experience alters the consciousness of the reader and he/she returns to

the text with a new perspective.

A new world is thus created within the ontological space of the poem. But

poetry cannot be totally divorced from the reality of that empirical world which

forms the basis of all cognitive experience. As Heidegger states, the individual is

always a "being-in-the-world (Uu~ein) and is involved in a dialogue with the

world: "we are human subjects only because we are practically bound up with

others and the material world, and these relations are constitutive of our life rather

than accidental to it" (Eagleton 6:!).

Intuition

The term intuition is derived from the Latin intuitio, which means a direct

look at a particular object, revealing itself immediately in its totality and fUllness,

unmediated by discursive knowledge or content. This visual experience also

incorporates the power of imighi into the object. What is apprehended may be an

idea, sensory knowledge, a sense of relationship, transcendental sensations, or the

essence of an object. 'The act of intuition being immediate apprehension, implies

the lack of mediation. ratiocination, causal inference or discursive premises. The

American Heritage 1)lctionary defines intuition as "the act or faculty of knowing

or seeing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition." Webster '.F

Thirdinternational ilictionmy defines it as "the act or process of coming to direct

knowledge or certainty without reasoning or inferring: immediate cognizance or

conviction without rational thought: revelation by insight or innate knowledge."

Webster 's New World Dictionary of American English terms intuition as "the

direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning:

immediate understanding."

The EncycIopedia of Philosophy provides a comprehensive account of

intuition. It is opposed to the intellect as discursive activities are mediated and

analytical rather than immediate.

The word designates the direct apprehension of an object in its present,

concrete reality through either sense perception (including memory

and imagination) or the intellect.[. . .] intuition entails the direct, non-

mediated, presence of the object to the knowing faculty; it sometimes

extends to a partial or total fusion of subject and object. (Edwards 269)

Jacques Maritain recognises the alliance of both the intellect and perception in

the intuitive process. The process of intuition is according to him, " an obscure

grasping of his own self and of thngs in a knowledge through union or of

connaturality which is born in the spiritual unconscious and which fructifies only in

the work" (1 15).

Immanuel Kant found intellectual intuition to be outside man's capacity,

but recognised sensible intuition. According to him, noumena or "things-in-

themselves" cannot be known. But man can know sensiblephenomena or the data

of experience. Even though Kant insists that phenomena are givens, intuitions

which we simply receive, he discovers an active element in the way we receive

them.

Henri Bergson considers intuition as "an immediate awareness akin to

instinct and sympathy, capable of penetrating its object, while unfolding in the

unique, qualitative time or 'duration' of each living being" (Edwards 269).

Bergson considers a knowledge which is immediate and direct as "absolute," for

which he uses the term intuitive knowledge. Intuiting an object consists in

identification with the object so that our knowledge of it is from within, in a

grasping of the original reality. To intuit something is to know it in its absolute

individuality and uniqueness, and this knowledge is often inexpressible and

untranslatable in the ordinary language of man, and can only be experier~ced.

The process of intuition bears a close resemblance to the three "moments"

that are immerged in the process of perception according to Mikel Dufrf!nne. The

ontology of the work of art and the nature of the reader's response to it, form the

central thesis of Dufrenne's The Phenomenology ojAesthetic Experierzce.

Dufrenne considers the "three successive moments of perception: presence,

representation and reflection," which "parallel the three elements of the aesthetic

object: the sensuous, the represented object, the expressed world" (333). The first

moment concerns the presence of the aesthetic object and the perceiver's response

to the sensuous elements in the text. The second involves the role of imagination

and the manner in which the perceiver concretises meaning in the text. The third

is the moment of reflection resulting in feeling which is termed as the '"new

immediacy" (376). Tlus is "a capacity of receptivity, a sensibility to a certain

world and an aptitude for perceiving that world" (379). Reflection may be either

analytic, dealing with structure, or adherent and sympathetic, concerni.ng the

sense. Dufrenne states that through the adherent reflection. "I submit myself to the

work instead of submitting it to my jurisdiction and I allow the work to deposit its

meaning within men(393). Reflection results in feeling, which is defined as

"being-in-depth" (400)

To possess depth means to situate oneself on a certain level where one

becomes sensitive i;hrought>ut one's being, where a person collects

himself together and commits oneself [. . . ] To possess depth means to

reject the idea of being a thlng which is always external to itself and is

dispersed and practically dismembered in the passing of time. It means

being capable of an inner life, collecting oneself within oneself, and

acquiring an intimacy (403.404).

The world in the poem does not rafer either to a real world, or to an ideal

world, but to a possible world. And this possible world reveals the essential

commonality of all experience and the latent unity of mankind. Rukeysc r stresses

the significance of that intuitive moment of exchange through poetry that

establishes ttus: "if we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared

experience of man, the world of possibility [. . .]. For this is the world a f light and

change [. . .In (LP 187).This moment of exchange is not only one of knowing the

artefact but also of creation, by creating it afresh by seeing meaning in

experience: "In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is

transferred, and fi-orn the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is

consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions" (1,P 173).

The awareness of this capacity is what grants strength even in the most desperate

conditions and involves the act of consciousness which transforms both the lived

experience and the self.

The Prznceton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes poetic

intuition "as a oneness of person and world expressed in language." 11: is a process

where "the self and the world, subject and object are immediately identical"

("Intuition" 048). Poetic intuition is a process that overcomes spatio-temporal

location. Even though there is the immediate transce&en@ d b s p a t i d and the

temporal, it is always from within the embodied location of the poem .The

process is described as involving the following effects:

'The reader is pulled into a new place and time and becomes one with

its desperate beauty. If he mediates within this intuitive moment, it

will enfold his whole world [. . .]. In experiences such as this, life and

language. the world, and the word, are absolutely one.[. . .] The poetry

creates the experience -- as a fusion of the world as experienced and of

the person as experiencing -- and gives knowledge of the experience

as an identity of world and person in a single, seamless act of intuition.

( "lntuition" 948)

Intuitive experiences are dialectically opposed to other objective means of

gaining knowledge, and this opposition has been the basis of intuition either being

valorised or rejected, depending upon one's affiliation to the objective or subjective

modes. This differentiation between knowledge gained through the two opposing

non-conjoining methods, pits the imaginative world against the intellectual world as

seen in Benedetto Croce's definition of poetry as "intuition-expression." He states

that there are two forms of knowledge:

1 . . .] either intuitive kncrwledge or logical knowledge; knowledge

obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the

mtelleect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal;

of individual things or of the relations between them: it is, in fact,

productive either of images or of concepts. (Aesthetic I )

Monroe Beardsley also distinguishes between emotive and cognitive meaning

in poetry. Cognitive meanings of words merely point to various concepts or objects,

and refer to the literal meaning of words. Words that convey emotive meaning are

non-conceptual, and may not convey cognitive meaning at all, but the emotive impact

of the metaphoric language used is far stronger at a basic level of experience.

Intuitive experience is most effectively communicated through metaphorical

language, as through this means, communication is direct. Metaphors involve creative

discovery that transcend the linguistic determinations of language, and manifest an

extra-linguistic reality that is the source of intuitive experience.

Beardsley states that intuition possesses the characteristics of certainty,

immediacy, emotionality, particularity, and internality. It is also partly ineffable, that

is, impossible to express intuitive experience linguistically, in toto, but t:he content of

intuition can be communicated by means of metaphoric language that is, very intense:

It is immediate knowledge in the sense of not being mediated by

inference: it rests upon nothing else. And since it is independent of all

other experiences and beliefs it cannot be undermined by &her

experience or reflection, and is therefore certain. Intuitions are said to

have the special property of carrying in themselves the stamp of their

cognitive validity: they are self-warranting or self-authenticating.

(298)

Once the process of creating the artefact is completed, the meaning bestowed

by the writer lies dormant as a potential existent. One phase (of creation) of its life is

taken over by another (of re-creation). The reader's response to the artefact and

participation in the experience embedded in the text pulsate it with new life. Until this

happens, the poem remains a concatenation of words, a mere linguistic structure. It is

the dialogic communication between the aesthetic object and the reader that produces

meaning:

33

The aesthetic object bears its own signification within it, and by

entering more profoundly into communion with the objec:t, one

discovers its signification, just as one understands the being of

others by virtue of friendship. The communion is indispensable.

Without it, the aesthetic object is inert and meaningless, just as

without performance [. . .] it is only imperfectly existent.

(Dufrenne 228)

The specific experience, phenomenon or incident that forms the meaning-

content of the poem is not circumscribed within the contextual exigencies of

creation but is re-interpreted and re-created in contexts far removed from the

experiential world of the poet or even the poem. When a poet creates an artefact it

involves not just the poet's personal perspective, but there is also a conscious or

unconscious interweaving of the voices of tradition, and cultural, historical and

psychological influences. The text is thus an affirmation of the historicity of the

poet. The reader in responding to the poem is also affected by similar fiictors.

together with the world that the poet communicates through the text.

Such poetry does not merely provide an insight into phenomen,a but

becomes an epiphanic revelation. The revelation may be of a familiar object

through the unfamiliar and imaginatively reconstructed perspective of t.he writer,

or of an unfamiliar phenomenon in a unique perspective that makes us see things

in a different manner. 'The imaginative powers of both the writer as well as the

reader have a great part to play in this process. Abstract and non-conceptual ideas

gain contextual relevance only through individually realised concretisations. The

colours red or blue possess what could be termed the essence of redness or

blueness, but its figurative usage in the text, combined with individual

34

predilections and culturally acquired associations may empattern metadiscursive

meanings in the text, unforeseen in the original isolated sense of the wo'rd.

Similarly, when a poet incorporates abstract multivalent ideas such as

truth, freedom, or other values, the particularised content and specific linguistic

configuration in the text reveal the general idea in a novel manner through the

individual manifestation. This is followed by the reader's translation of meaning

on his own ternls. The reader's response to the feeling expressed in the poem is

empathic because his experience ]nay have been similar to the context i'n the

poem, or it may serve as a correlate for associated experiences. As the effect of

poetic intuition is oRen very strong, it causes a mutation or a paradigmatic re-

patterning of previously accepted phenomena and value-systems. "Intuition is

[thus] the extension of perception to regions beyond sense" (Radhakrishnan 143).

This perception must commence from the world of sense, as without it the

transcendence of the physical world would not be possible. The intuitive

experience which is a sudden spontaneous leap of insight, leads to a

transcendence of language where the experience is an exposure to the being made

immanent in the text. But this sudden leap of insight also contains an immediate

return to the linguistics of experience, as the experience must be expressed to

oneself and/or to others for it to be of relevance to the reflecting subject, and there

is a struggle to translate the experience through language. Paul Crowther states:

Our fundamental and pre-reflective contact with the world is 'silent.'

Language, as formulated in the traditional intellectual disciplines,

gives it only an incomplete or distorted expression through being

unable to gasp the depth of 'invisible' relationships that underlie and

define 'visiblia'(i.e, those meanings encountered in perception).The

35

artwork, however is better equipped to give voice to this silent domain.

(48)

The linguistic capabilities of the individual may be limited in expressing the

depth of hidher experiences, especially in the case of intuitive ones, which, unless

expressed, would exist merely at the level of feeling. Awareness of this inadequacy

would make himiher especially responsive to the voice of the creative artist. In thus

making a unique perception accessible to the experient, the writer is communicating a

phenomenon or experience which would have remained unexplored artistically.

Through the voluble reality of the text, the reader is transported to a virtual reality,

where the invisible is seen through the vistbility of the text.

The Writer and the Reader

Literary intuition can be considered from two angles of perception,

namely from that of the writer and that of the reader. The writer is stimulated by

an intuitive experience, of an idea, situation or object, and attempts to convey this

through the literary object. The literary strategy employed may differ from one

text to the other depending upon the strength of the stimulus, the creative faculty

of the writer and the resources available for utilisation in the creative foundry

The only means that is available to the writer to concretise his experience is the

optimal and effective artistic use of words. But words may prove artificial,

delimited and circumscribed in meaning as when combined in a sentence, the

polysemy of language and the metaphoric: and metonymic paradigms, far from

enhancing the clarity of the idea, seem to render it obscure and ambiguous. This is

especially true of poetic language, which may express experience more intensely

compared to the language of prose, but nrns the risk of being charged with

obfuscation. Perfection of poetic expression may dodge the grip of the writer with

words always seemingly just a step away from one's grasp. But as the poem takes

form, it gets suffi~sed with meaning.

In this transilient moment the poet sheds herhis sense of materialistic

spatio-temporal boundaries and participates in the living space of the object. The

poet experiences a new awareness of the object and herihis relationship with it,

together with a corresponding change in perception. This moment is both, as Leon

Waldoff explains, "a move from ignorance to knowledge or understanding, and a

transformation of self" This experience has a dual effect: "Such moments

constitute both a structural principle of the poetry and a principle of being, of

psychological life for [. . ] the self" (3-4).

The reader involved in the process of reading first confronts a bocly of

words arranged in a specific manner. The mental images are intuited through

language, but the primary process of reading automatically effects intuition as the

poem is understood and interpreted. Literaxy associations, inter-textual

inflections, subtexts inhumed in the context, meta-linguistic inferences. cultural

and psychological resonances are incorporated in the process. If the reader reads

the poem opening himself/herself to the experience of the poem, hetshe ithen

enters the world of the writer and the world and the experience is shared through

the word, the language. The communion between the reader and the writer is

possible through direct, unmediated, immediate communication -- by means of

intuition. As Gadamer states, "The interpretation of a text is not passive openness,

but at best a dialectical interaction with the text; it is not a bald re-enactment but a

new creation, a new event in understanding'' (Truth andMethod448). When the

individual intuits, " [. . ] he is aware of nothing between his awareness ;and that

of which he is aware. He grasps directly what he apprehends without requiring

inference regarding what is beyond., or belief in causal mediation of what

appears" (Bahm 1). Intuition is thus not a passive faculty but a mental act that

transfigures and metamorphoses consciousness. Octavio Paz testifies to this

intuitive process when he considers poetry to be a transforming and fissive power

which "puts man outside himself and simultaneously makes him return to his

original being : returns him to himself [. . 1 . By the phrase that is rhythm: that is

image, man -- that perpetual becoming -- is. Poetry is entry into being" (97). Thus

the poem is a site where the self and the world, the subject and the object are

united through the poetic intuition.

The process of intuition, which is set in motion with the first reading, is a

continuous one with the text throwing up more meanings with consequent

readings. The reader's responses to the poem are based on certain interpretative

strategies that are used in order to establish coherence and understanding These

strategies are based on the expectations of the reader when helshe approaches the

text. But as the process of reading commences, these expectations may he

reversed as hislher perception shifts through many levels of meaning. The

meaning of the text is not as J.D.Hirsch states, "an entity which always remains

the same from one moment to the next -- that it is changelessn(26), as the: reader

cannot always arrive with certainty at the exact intention of the writer. Meaning

evolves through the process of the interpretation of the reader as helshe responds

to the cues provided by the writer.

The use of language involves the application of certain assumptions

regarding the meaning ofthe text, which is constitutive of the nature of language

itself. As the poem is appropriated by the reader, the initial assumptions may be

controverted, as intuition works alchemically to alter histher perception of the

object. Besides new knowledge of the outer world, helshe also has new

knowledge about himselVherself:

I t is a knowing of oneself and one's world, these two knowns and

knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed

in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is

that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self

consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the

language which is the world It is also a making of oneself and of

one's world, the self which was psyche being remade in the shape

of'consciousness, and the world, which was crude sensa, being

remade in the shape of language, or sensa converted into imagery

and charged with emotional significance. (Collingwood 291)

This is the reason why Gadamer states that "the sense of a text alvvays

goes far beyond what its author originally intended (Tiuih andMethoLt 335). The

text thus has shifting frontiers, with the world and the word constantly involved in

an interchange of meaning in the dialogic interaction between the reader ;and the

text. Language then is not a formal self-enclosed system that merely refers to

something. "Language is the way in which as humans, we experience what we

call reality, that is the way in which reality exists for us" (Madison 165). Meaning

can be derived only through language which is the experience of the individual in

the world, and through the interpretation of' language, which is discursive and

rational in the sense that it is a dialogic process resulting in understanding.

Gadamer testifies to the "essential linguisticality of all human experience of the

wor ld (Philo.vophicaZIIermeneutics 19), that is of the possibility of dialogue as a

mediator to achieve mutual understanding. As Wallace Stevens iterates:

There is in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world

in which we live, or I,. . .] from the world in which we shall come to

live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or

ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly

and without knowing it, and that he gives to life the supreme fictions

without which we are unable to conceive of it. (Necessary Angel

30)

Thus the world that the poet makes immanent in the poem is produced out

of his own experiential world. When the reader participates in this virtual world

created by the imaginative language of the poet, helshe responds to this world as

not merely represented in the poem, but as a reality transformed through a retro-

prospective process of intuition.

Rukeyser describes this moment as one,

When the poem arrives with the impact of crucial experience, when it

becomes one of the turnings which we living may at any moment

approach and enter, then we become more of our age and more

primitive [ . . ] complicated, fresh full of dark meaning, insisting on

discovery, as the experience of a woman giving birth to a child is

primitive. (I,P 172:)

It is a moment when the mind resonates with the visual and mental insight that

unfolds worlds of possibility.

The intuitive experience involves a temporary transcendence ofthe world

and the self. The individual thus returns to hislher own world and to

himselfkself after the intuitive experience but is radically changed. The

connecting link with reality was never totally lost in the first place, only that a

transcendent reality that intuitively pierced through the essence of things took

over. As Maritain confirms, poetic intuition "makes things which it grasps

diaphanous and alive, and populated with infinite horizons. As grasped by poetic

knowledge, things abound in significance. and swarm with meanings" ( 126).

Poetic intuition is a process that involves language and the world, but the

experience goes beyond language and the world. Just as the primary experience

was a transcendence of language and a return to it, as the intuition urged the

desire for creative expression, for the reader, it is a take-off from language to

transcendence, and a return to a transformed world. For the writer this experience

is the result of a double consciousness, the awareness of the intuitive experience,

as well as the awareness of the process of enverbalising that experience through

the production of the artefact. The sensations and flux of images in the mind's eye

have to be caught and organised, caged and arrested as it were within the formal

space of the poem. This being is constantly flexing the confines of authorial form

to discharge meaning in the interface between text and reader. The intuition

enhances experience and makes the reader's awareness more acute. Instead of

divorcing us from the world it takes us nearer to it, makes us greater participators

in it, and involves us in a more intense awareness and sensitivity towards human

experience. Intuition is thus both a knowing and a makiig.

Intuition implies both a penetration into the object to discover its essential

meaning as well as a delving into oneself. It is a realisation, as Rukeyser feels, of

"not a sense of Oneness with the one as a sense of Many-ness with the many"

(Z,P 2071, an acceptance of multiplicity and dynamism, as well as a recognition of

41

latent unity. According to Rukeyser this does not imply the hypostatisation of

meaning, but the significance of the text as a locus of emergent heterogeneous and

polyvalent meaning. As Paul Ricoeur states, the interaction with the text results in

the displacement of the "subjectivity of the reader":

To understand is not to project oneself into the text but to expose

oneself to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of

the proposed worlds interpretation unfolds. In sum, it is the matter

of the text which gives the reader the dimension of subjectivity. [.

] in reading I 'unrealize myself' Reading introduces me to

imaginative variations of the ego. The metamorphosis of the world

in play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego.

(Hermenelrfics 34)

It is not enough for the individual to be renewed by the transformation of

experience that the text bestows, this renewal has to be extended to the reality that

is life. Meaning is not a metaphysical invanant but what evolves out of the

dialogue between the text (which embodies the intentionality of the creative

artist), and the reader. It is derived fiom "understanding [which] is not merely a

reproductive but always productive attitude as well" (Gadamer Truth andMefhod

264).

Just as theparole or the individual realisation of the resources of a

language utilises the framework of the system or of the langue that suppoits it,

individual experience is not insular, but one that draws on the experiences of the

collectivity. For Rukeyser, to be a reader does not mean to be a mere passrve

container of meaning, but a "witness" who participates in the process. This term

which she feels, possesses the overtone of responsibility unavailable in terms such

as audience, reader or listener, " includes both the act of seeing or knowing by

personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence" (Li' 175). It involves a

change from non-reflection to intuitive contemplation resulting in radical

transformation of the self.

Poetic intuition leads to both a transformation of consciousness as well as

a transformation in experiencing the world. The process of reading and enjoyment

of a text and its ultimate appropriation involves an interactive play between what

the text offers us, as well as our own imaginative integration of the text i:o produce

meaning. Interpretation and understanding of the text are processes that occur

simultaneously with that of reading. The crossing of the emotional threshotd and

responding to the meaning immanent in the poem leads to an intuition which

"stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into the

experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them" (Polanyi

17). The actual meaning that the primal suhject intended may be available through

clues given in the text, but at the same time the text possesses potential meanings

that are actualised only through the reader's responses to it. The "ontic ideality"

of a text is realised as the meaning immanent in the text, the result of the

interaction between reader and writer that creates multifarious meanings. Roman

Ingarden states that even though the author bestows meaning on the word, it

cannot be idealised. The "duplicating or re-actualizing operation" performed by

the speaker is dynamic and is constantly in flux. It could change with different

readings by the same reader or the heteronomous readings of different readers.

"Purely intentional subjectivity" states Ingarden, is an "ontic nothingx(] 22). Ontic

ideality is not a univocal convergence of textual presence or a single trajectory of

meaning as an authorial given, but a co-eventuation of meaning through

metastrophic exchange that accepts both tizflerance and multivocity

The significance of the dialogic encounter with the text is not in the

eschatology of absolute meaning. It lies in the manner in which the encountering

of the text leads to self-transformation The commencement of the intuitive

process which allows for this change lies in the attitude of the reader in the

reception and response to the text, as Gadamer states, "the dialectic of experience

has its own filfilment not in definitive knowledge, but in that openness to

experience that is encouraged by the experience itself' (liuth and Method 3 19)

Meaning

Reception theory stresses the evolution of meaning in a process which

implicates the writer, the reader, and the text Textual interpretation results in

meaning through the interaction between the text and the reader, and in the

ideation of mental images which transcend the verbal and sensory. According to

Wolfgang Iser, the new and alien experience heightens self-consciousness:

The constitution of meaning not only implies the creation of a totality

emerging from interacting textual perspectives [. . .] but also, through

formulating this totality, it enables us to formulate ourselves and thus

discover an inner world of which we had hitherto not been conscious.

(1 58)

The text evolves from the dynamic life world of the poet. The reader's

response to, and appropriation of the artefact within his own experiential realm, is

based on the individual consciousness of the broad spectrum of experience that comes

into play. What is intuited is not an invariant meaning of the text or authorial

intention. It is an unfolding of one's situation and experience through the interaction

between the experience in the poem, and that of one's own world, and by a

transformation of the phenomenon and of oneself in a clearer and new understanding

of the world and the self through language.

As Stanley Fish succintly expresses it: "In this formulation the reader's

response is not to the meaning; it is the meaning" (3). This meaning evolves from the

experiences brought into play of two agents. The author's experience inherent in the

text triggers a response from the reader which stimulates the voluntary a.nd

involuntary memories and experiences. !&hen the response is very strong and the

essence of the text suffuses the consciousness of the reader, there is a momentary

transcendence of self that breaks away from the spatio-temporal continuum of

everyday life. This special insight leads to a momentary overcoming of'the ego, a

sudden split from the self in a momentary self-forgethlness. The return is imminent

in the flight, but it is a return that carries with it awareness of change and self-

transformation. It is not a loss or a disavowal of the ego, but a realisation that this ego

is constituted not just by the private personal world of individual existence, but also

by the collective life of the community ofother individuals, as well as rr simultaneity

and congruence of the past and the hture in the present. As Guy Burneko states: "And

this is the ofice of the intuitive to hold in meaningful simultaneous im-plication the

irreducible and thus, perforce, aperspectivally presentiated integrality of the

'infinitely-many' world-process" (95). The significance lies more in the process

rather than in the object of intuition, (though this is also a valid part of the process),

and the analogy of focus from the "local" to the "global." Bob Harbort describes these

two contexts of intuition :

L.ocal intuition may be thought of generalization based on

individuality. Global intuition, on the other hand, is based on the

assefiion that '[. . .] there is a transcendent meaning to the universe

independent of our comprehension [. . . 1' (Heschel 195:s: 106). It is

this global intuition that finally allows us to transcend our individuality

and relate our values and our concerns to the human community in

which we exist. (140)

The intuitive experience communicated to the reader evokes a response that moves

from the particularity of individual experience to the generality of the collective

experience. This is not a movement away from one sectoring polarity to another in a

different realm, but an aperspectival coalescing of particularity and generality in

integral experience.

If the process of intuition involves the mutual implication of reader and text,

one has to discuss the bearing of authorial role and intentionality in the process. A. D.

Hirsch projects the Husserlian notion of intentionality which states that rroematic

experiences, the knowledge of the intentional object, intended by the noesis or the

intentional act of the author is absolutely accessible to the reader. It is changeless and

always capable of being reproduced. Hirsch associates the intentional object with the

meaning conveyed by the text, which he feels is the same as that intended by the

author. Hirsch's idea of intentionality is based on that of Husserl's process of

phenomenological reduction and intuition of the object, by which its essence is

revealed. Husserl tenns consciousness as "intentional experience," and postulates that

meaning is entirely dependent on the intentional act of the subject. Meaning is thus

communicated when the "semantic essence" of the text is shared by the individuals

responding to the text (I,ogical ~nvestigahons 590). This essentialist

phenomenological method is eschewed by Heidegger who states that the individual

cannot bracket out reality as he is a being-in-the-world or Dasein who u)nstantly

experiences a sense of "tbrownness" in the world and responds to the text as a being-

in-the-world. Meaning, states Heidegger, is the result of Dasein 's response to the

stimulus provided by the text, and the possibilities laid open by it. The first stage of

hermeneutic activity commences with the participation of the reader, who does not

stand outside the text as an observer, but is involved actively in it throug,h the process

of reading. The reader and the text, the interpreter and the interpreted are thus

mutually implicated in the revelation of meaning, This initial process leads to pre-

reflective understanding and interpretation: "nor is interpretation the acquiring of

information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities

projected in understanding" (Being and Time 189). The basis of hermeneutic activity

is thus the primal ground or being, the source of the text which inspires the poet. The

poet's language "presences" being, but it is the reader who "unconceals" it in the

transvaluation of the work through hislher interpretation. Heidegger connects

understanding of the being's relationship with the world and of possibility:

[Jnderstanding is the existential Being of dasein's own potentiality-for-

Being; and it is so in such a way that this Being discloses in itself what

its Being is capable of

.As a potentiality-for-Being, any Being-in is a potentiality-for

Being-in-the-world. Not only is the world, qua world, disclosed as

possible significance, but when that which is within-the-world is itself

Freed, this entity is Freed for its own possibilities. (Being and Time

184)

Demda holds suspect represented truth, absolute meaning or the

hypostatisation of presence, but replaces it with a hypostatisation of drffeerance.

The poet may not have any control over the meaning of the text as worked out

within the wnsciousness of the reader. But both reader and poet work with the

same material used for the exegesis, namely the text, which incorporates the

formal aspects of the poem, the figural and contextual imagery, and the selection

of lexical items. Interpretative praxis is to a large extent a filling in of semantic

aporias presented in the text. The meaning evolved may not be apodictic, but

authorial intention and meaning radiates within the penumbra of the overlapping

area of authorial intention and readerly ink-pretation, that of the imaginal

semantic field. Poetic intuition valorises the intuitive foundations of human

consciousness and the aetiology of creativity. Both at the level of poetic creation

as well as at the level of reader response, the process does not work in binary

opposition but in binate congeneracy.

This amorphous quality and inexhaustibility of meaning is also an inherent

quality of the intuitive experience itself. By validating multivocity in

interpretation, the multivalence of the text is also being posited. The content of

the poem inheres at the same time a context, which at the moment of reading, is

bereft of the context of its creation and is open to its historicization by the: reader.

But this context <and its signification involves both the meaning intended by the

author as well as the interpretative strategies of the reader. If the intentionality of

the author is devalued, it cannot be replaced by the interpretation of the reader

either. Meaning evolves from the reworking of the context of the poem, with as

Iser terms them, the "implied reader"( the reader the literary work anticipates),

and the "actual reader7'( the reader who actually reads the text), present

simultaneously at the moment of reading. One would then respond to the text in

the manner of Merleau-Ponty : "A novel, a poem, picture or musical work are

individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the

thing expressed" (I'henomenolo~ of Perception 15 1). This also overturns the

apparently intransigent dichotomy of subject and object, as the text re-writes the

reader as heishe re-writes the text.

The reader can respond to the poem only as it is presented to hindher at the

point of reading. But the content of the text may extend far beyond its fi,pral

representation The creative past of the writer as manifested in the form and content of

the poem, and the cultural past and mnemonic traces as manifested in the responses of

the reader, are rmnjoined in the present, with the writer and the reader being on the

same ontological axis through the text. As lser states in The Act qf Reding, it is the

reader's response and re-creation of the text which grants it existential validity. When

we read a text 'we do not grasp it like an empirical object: nor do we comprehend it

like a predicative fact; it owes its presence in our minds to our own reactions, and it is

these that make us animate the meaning of the text as a reality" (129). Literary texts,

especially poetry, hlfil the instinctive desire of the individual to transcend the

finitude and temporality of hislher existence. by presenting an achievable "virtual"

world, of possibilities of being and becoming.

The Significoce of Intuitive Experience

The experience of poetic intuition relates to epistemology, ontology and

hermeneutics It involves the interactive concrescence of author, text and reader

Neither of these can be privileged over the others or removed From the field of

perceptual and intuitive creation of meaning A historical overview of the

49

psychology of intuition and its philosophical application reveals the changing

emphases from the content to the process and the effect of intuition. Even though

the post-structuralist suspicion of absolute presence and apodictic knowledge has

tried to devalue the significance of intuition, today it is assuming renewed

significance at an inter-disciplinary level where its relevance, effect and Ipower is

being studied in disciplines as varied as the humanities, the fine arts, ecology, the

natural and physical sciences, medicine, midwifery, and management. The

establishment of the Intuition Network by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS)

in America is of significance as it recognises the operation of intuition in human

consciousness, and provides a proactive fotum for inter-disciplinary and

interactive dialogue. Most of the psychological problems faced by the individual

in all spheres of human life are due to the isolation and distancing from the

intuitive capacity we are all gifted with. This pre-verbal source of knowledge

exists as a mnemonic ancestral trace that is gradually crustated as the individual

gets isolated from the resonances of the earth, nature, other individuals and hidher

own spiritual resources leading to the loss cf a sense of wholeness of the self.

Greater technicity and dehumanisation of life has been leading to a purely

biological entelechy of the outer, surface-oriented individual. The reverberations

of this attitude have its echoes in the field of critical theory and literature idso.

The anti-representational and anti-imaginational preclusion of the post-structural

critical attitude has pre-empted the verdicality of direct aesthetic communion,

which is the sine qua non of art.

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR Lab) has

done pioneering work in the study of consciousness and in establishing the

reciprocal relatior~s between objective and subjective means of achieving

knowledge. One of the primary goals of the PEAR Lab is to record, through

empirical data and scientific method, the process of intuition. Using quantifiable

methods, non-objective processes and phenomena have been studied with a

specific emphasis on the power of the consciousness not only to record and accept

information from the environment, or from machines, but also to alter it, thus

acknowledging consciousness as a "proactive agency in the establishment of

reality" (Jahn and Dunne 7). Among the studies conducted by the Lab, are

experiments dealing with remote perception. Using a "random physical process"

which could be either a mechanical device, or a geographical location, the

resonance between two agents is studied whereby there occurs transfer of

information between two resonating consciousnesses:

Like elementary particles (a form of matter), and physical light (a form

of energy), consciousness (a processor and generator of information)

enjoys a 'wave/particle duality' which allows it to circ:umvent and

penetrate barriers, and to resonate with other consciousnesses and with

appropriate aspects of its environment. Thereby it can both acquire and

insert information, both objective and subjective, from1 and to its

resonant partners, in a manner that would be anomalous in its

'particulate' representation. (Jahn and Dunne 12)

Following the conclusions based on these experiments, it is possible, following the

paradigm of quantum physics, to predict

that an individual consciousness immersed in a given physical situation

would sustain a set of characteristic experiences. A second individual,

exposed to the same situation, would manifest a different set of

experiences. However, if these two consciousnesses were strongly

51

interacting, their experiential wave patterns would become resonantly

intertwined, resulting in a new pattern of standing waves in their

c:ommoa environment. (Jahn and Dunne 13)

The results of these experiments testify to the premises of scientists such as Niels

Bohr and Werner Heisenberg who have stressed the complementarity of all objects in

the environment and have stressed the power of consciousness in affecting reality.

This has significant bearing on the inherent capacity of the fine arts and literature to

communicate aesthetic experience between two consciousnesses especially through

intuitive processes.

Charles Laughlin provides a well documented survey of the nature, evolution

and development of intuition. He discusses the neurophysiological process of the

complementary functioning of the two hemispheres of the brain. This leads to the

premise that human beings have a hi-modal consciousness. that of reason which is

connected to the processes of the lett lobe of the brain, and that of intuition, the result

of right lobe functioning: "the left lobe primarily mediates language production,

analytic thought, lineal and causal sequencing of events, while the right lobe primarily

mediates the production images, gestalt or 'holistic' thought, and spatio-temporal

patterning" (23). He goes on to state :

this analytical and integrative processing is occumng prior to and,

as it were, -behind' the actual experience that is registered in

consciousness. Although the experience may be of a perceptual

gestalt, both processes will be involved in producing the

experience, although the intentionality of an experience may

emphasise one experience over the other. (23)

52

Fritjof C:apra in The Iao (#Physics draws a parallel between Eastern

mysticism and quantum physics, as an example of the latent complementarity that

underlies seemingly disparate systems of knowledge. In a comprehensive study

of Eastern mysticism and the Relativity Theory of quantum physics, he states:

In the Eastern view then, as in the view of modem physic:^, everything

in the universe is connected to everything else and no part is

fundamental. The properties of any part are determined, not by some

fundamental law, but by the properties of all the other parks. (320)

Capra also expresses the essential characteristic of Eastern mystical texts that do

not explain but attempt '"a direct non-intellectual experience of the unity of all

things" (321). Translation of experience in that sense becomes a betrayal of

language as no language can do justice to the experience which remains

inexplicable through intellectual means: "As long as we try to explain things, we

are bound by karma; trapped in our conceptual network. To transcend words and

explanations means to break the bonds of kcrma and attain liberation" (32:2).

The similarity in the methods used and in the symbolic language of both

science and mysticism, establishes the relationship that Rukeyser wishes to posit

between the methods of discovery in science and literature:

C:orrespondences between the two are many. Art and science have

instigated each other from the beginning. [. . .] their roots spread

thl-ough our tissue, their deepest meanings fertilize us, and

reaching our consciousness, rhey reach each other. (LP 162!)

A similar opinion is expressed by Wolfgang Pauli who seeks to accept the validity

of both subjective as well as objective methods of knowledge as emanating from a

common framework:

To us [. ] the only acceptable point of view appears to be the one

that recognizes both sides of reality -- the quantitative and the

qualitative, the physical and the psychicai -- as compatible with

each other 1;. . .]. It would be most satisfactory of all if physics and

psyche could be seen as coniplementary aspects of the same

reality. (208, 2 10)

Language and intuition

Language is both denotative and connotative. It denotes the literal

meaning of words, or conceptual knowledge, by pointing to objects and

phenomena. At the same time it also posits figurative or non-conceptual meaning.

Words connote an extra-linguistic reality that is possible only through language.

The expression of intuitive experience involves both the literal meanings 'of words

as well as the trans-linguistic reality alluded to. The emotions and feelings that are

aroused are responses to the images made immanent in the text. The intui1:ion is a

fusion of language and experience, word and world, through a re-creative

transformation of reality. L'anguage evolves from a matrix that is at the pre-verbal

level into a system of signification that constitutes experience and reflects a new

perception of reality, involving both transcendent and empirical dimensions.

Madison explicates the close relationship that exists between language and

experience:

Language is not just the 'expression' of experience; it is

experience; it is experience which comes to know, acknowledge

itself, be this or that specific experience. [. . .] Experience i:s not

really meaningful until it has found a home in language [. . . ] and

without lived experience to inhabit it, language is an empty

lifeless shell [ . . ] language is the way in which, as humans, we

experience what we call reality, that is, the way in which reality

exists for us. (165)

Madison deals with language used by the self-conscious individual as a member

of society, and capable of using the implements language offers for

communication The non-verbal is a part of the individual's communicai:ive

system but its manifestations are not included in the signification of literary

expression. Unlike other forms of art, in literature the ineluctability of language

and literary expression cannot be forsworn. Diversity in experience compels the

discovery and often the invention of verbal equivalence in expressing the nuances

of the different kinds and levels of experience. The requirements of speech are

limited to the functional use of language as an expedient in the communicative

processes. At this level rhetorical devices may involve the manipulation of

language, but as the emphasis in prose and aural communion is on clarity in the

expression of ideas, this manipulation has its limitations.

Linguistic ambiguity and metaphoric strategies prove effective 'only

within the accepted norms of the ianguage community, as in for example informal

usage and phat~c communion. In literary usage, especially poetry, linguistic

manipulations instantiate the poetic process itself that seeks a filiation in

experience and expression. The opaqueness in expression is very often the result

of the ineffability of the experience. The limitations of language in the expression

of experience beyond a particular point are disclosed in Laszlo Versenyi's

discussion on l-feidegger's views on language:

55

All [. . .] attempts to say the unsayable are attempts to overcome [.

. .] language itself Since language cannot be overcome by

language, these attempts are doomed to fail, doomed to end in

ambiguity, strangeness, mystery. This does not make them fruitless

or unnecessary; their very failure teaches us something about

language by pointing to the limits beyond which all must remain

strange to us, bound by language as we are. (Biemel98)

Just as darkness and light are complementary entities, similarly, binary entities are

not oppositions but are complementary. The darkness, opacity and ambiguity of

language hold within it the capacity to render light, clarity and meaning. The

literal meaning of words always posits another meaning that is figurative. The

ambiguity that is so much a part of poetic language is not dissipated with the

unfolding of understanding. An absolute explicitness would in fact be an

unachievable ideal, as the originary perception or context is unavailable. [t is the

very ambiguity of the words that ensures readerly participation and denies the

closure of the text. The process of reading itself is aleatory with the play of light

and darkness.

The language of poetry is a space, entry into which entails moving about

within language until this struggle and confrontation with it proves fruitfid to the

reader. Clarifications of ambivalent or ambiguous words or sentences are not

always possible, as the author exists as an absent presence, and the primal

meaning-conferring act cannot be re-experienced in toto by the reader. In fact, the

reader's response may expand far beyond the conceptual space of the text, and

may travel through paths totally umeckoned by the author. Gadamer affums the

productive nature of the reading process: "Not just occasionally but alwgys, the

meaning of a text in general reaches far beyond what its author originally

intended" (lruth andhlethorl 372). The intuitive experience is an integral one, a

synchronistic inter-personal enactment that takes place in the individually

cognised intuitive environment.

In& Theories of Intuition

The termpratibha in Indian aesthetics bears a close similarity to the Western

theory of intuition. Pratibha refers to a sudden revelation, immediate knowledge,

clarity of sight, and is often expressed as "a flash of light." Pratibha is a non-

discursive, non-sensual, non-inferential means of achieving knowledge, .which leads

ultimately to a new and better knowledge of self. It emphasises the intensity of the

experience that in its suddenness leads to an immediate knowledge that transcends

boundaries, telescopes time, overcomes spatial differences, and in its direct grasp of

reality intuits holistically. It also involves, a revelation of the unmanifested, and in

that sense is experienced as an intuition.

Aesthetic perception is related to the theory of rasa as delineated in Bharata's

Nalya~ha~~tra as the perception that is caused by the eight human emotions that can

be expressed on stage, and which gives rise to the eight corresponding rasas (this has

been expanded into nine by Abhinavagupta). But rasa is more than the elnotional

state that the ambience created by the combination of stage setting, costume, the

poetry in the drama, and the performance arouse. It is also as Eliot Deutsch states, "a

kind of radical transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary [. . 1" which

transforms the spectator (2 19).

Abhinavagupta, who lived in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, was a

Kashmiri Shaivaite aesthetician. His theories of aesthetics were formulated from the

57

basic groundwork provided by the concept of rasa, or aesthetic perception, but it

differs from the aesthetic principles outlined in Bharata's Natyashastra. The

Natya.~hastra distinguished between the raw in dramatic performance from the

poetry which was a part of the dramatic performance (Baumar and Brandon 23 1). But

Abhinavagupta streamlined the aesthetic response. According to his theo~y of poetic

expression, aesthetic communication is based on the response between the creative

artist and the audience through the manifestation of rma. As Abhinavagupta states in

the Abhinmabhmati:

The poet is like Prajapati, from whose will this world arises. For the

poet is endowed with a power to create wondrous and unheard of

things. This power arises from the grace of para vak ('highest

speech'), which is just another name for poetic imagination (pratibha),

which has its seat in the poet's own heart, and which is eternally in

creative motion (udita). (qtll. in Vatsyayan 157)

Raneiro Gnoli describes the power of intuition latent in the creative process:

[ . .] artistic creation is the direct or unconventional expression of a

feeling or passion 'generalized,' that is freed from all distinctions of

time and space and therefore from all individual relationships and

practical interests by an inner force within the poet himself, the

creative or artistic intuition (pratibha). This state of consciousness

expressed in the poem is transferred to the actor, or the reciter, and to

t.he spectator

Intuition is therefore a form of direct perception (prajna) [. . . ]

which -- while the poet is completely absorbed in the labour and the

search that precede poetical creation ~- is born unexpectedly from

contact with the thing in se [ . . . ] that is to say, before any mental

construction. [. . . ] poetic intuition is described as the third eye of

Shiva, in virtue of which one perceives by direct intuition,

independently of discursive knowledge, every form of existence, past,

present, and future. ( xxvii,xxxi)

In Dhvanyaloka, Abhinavagupta attributes the poet with a semi-divine power to alter

one's experience of the world:

In the shoreless world of pc~etry, the poet is the unique creator.

Everything becomes transformed into the way he envisio~ls it.

If the poet is emotic~nally moved [. . .] in his poems, then the

whole world is infused wit11 ram. But if he be without an interest in the

senses [. . . 1, then everything will become dry [. . 1. (qtd. in Vatsyayan

156)

Abhinavagupta also stresses the complementarity of author, text and spectator which

is the result of the audience responding tc the poem with a feeling of complete

response as a sahrdayn. He describes such an audience as: "Those people who are

capable of identifying with the subject matter [. . . ] and who sympathetically respond

in their own hearts [. . 1" (Baumer and Brandon 220).

As Abhinavagupta writes in 1,oca:ana:

Hasa [ . . 1 is just that reality (artha) by which the determinants, the

consequents and the transitory feelings after having reached a perfect

combination (samyag yoga), relation (sambandhu), conspiration

(aikagrya) [. . .] in the mind of the spectator, make the matter of a

gustation consisting of a form of consciousness free of obstacles and

different from the ordina~y ones. (Gnoli 78)

This response in theory presupposes an idealistic situation of a singular frequent

between the spectator and the work of art which does not consider cultural and

historical differences which may disallow such an experience But within its historical

context, the theoty refers to a generalised position that any theory must hypothetically

posit Intuition as a correlate of aesthetic activity is always implicit in the artefact, and

is made immanent in the performative participation that aesthetic exchanze involves

Reality

Individual existence is instinctively desiderative, seeking self-

transcendence. An examination of the human condition reveals that there has

always existed a deep felt need for peace and order, and the transcendence of a

purely biological existence. 'This situation reveals the co-existence of binary

entities or conditions, seemingly in opposition to each other. Each condition that

may seem dualistically opposed to the other is not its opposite but grants validity

and value to it its a necessary condition of its existence.

The schematic division, opposition and compartmentalisation of' human

experience, objects and species in nature, is the result of the methodology of the

empirical sciences. The effect of this way of thinking has affected the human

perception of reality and has led to a similar fragmentation of human experience.

The valorisation of specific authoritarian discourses or narratives over others

often poses problems for the individual who in order to conform to the dictates of

the accepted hegemonic system may find his experiences lacking legitimacy, and

in danger of being considered as mutant behaviour. Subjective, imaginal.

intuitive, synchronistic experiences are opposed to objective. rational,

materialistic ones, with the veracity of the former being questioned on the basis of

their being empirically unverifiable, and non-rational. The experience of

displacement caused by such alienating and stereotyping systems has

repercussions within the individual consciousness and the mode of experiencing

and interpreting reality. As reality can be experienced and described only on the

basis of the consciousness of the individual, an individual with a fiagmmted

consciousness is likely to express a similar fractured and distorted experience of

reality. The relationship between the individual and the environment, and the

community of which he is a part, is a symbiotic one. As Norman 0. Brown states,

distinctions such as that between the self and the external world are not natural

divisions but artificial, man-made ones based on personal predilections. Thus,

boundary lines are not definite, stable div~sions but hazy territorial demarcations:

'The boundary line between self and external world bears no

relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made

by splitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the

outside 1. . . I . The net effect of the establishment of the boundary

between self and external world is inside-out and outsider-in

confusion. The erection of the boundary does not alter the fact that

there is, in reality, no boundary. The net effect is illusiorn, self-

deception. (143- 144)

The term reality does not denote a static, unchangeable, immobile realm. It

is based on the consciousness of the individual and is a reflection of his

experiences. The conception of the "real," would itself entail not a categorical

imperative but a shifting ground based on individual experience. The experience

of the self involves a basic contradiction, as the self can be understood in terms of

both the physical embodiment as well as the psychological impulses that

61

constitute the non-physical terrain of the self. The definition of the self involves

the tangible object, the body, as well as the Subject, which is the invisible, self-

conscious, psychologically constituted self .that does not exist except as an

extension of the body. The mind and its processes, the conscious and unconscious

together with the body, form a single organic entity. The physical embodiment is

simultaneously the house of the non-physical, without which the body would not

have any significance whatsoever. The human body hnctions both as subject and

object. Similarly, the aesthetic text can be considered following the same:

paradigm. The artefact is a visibly embodied object occupying a specific space.

But it involves at the same time invisible c~ontent and processes which are at the

moment of visual seeing of the text invisible to the eye, but evolve and are made

immanent with the process of textual understanding This immanence is the

stimulus for transcendence of the merely physical. Yet this transcendence of the

visible is possible only because of the existence of the visible embodiment.

Reality is constituted of the intersubjective play and flux of immanence

and transcendence, the physical and the non-physical, the visible and the invisible

realms, one validating the other. An intuition of reality involves both physical and

abstract worlds, and the significance of the intuitive moment of transcendence lies

in the direct in-depth apprehension and perception of the invisible through the

visible. The significance of the artefact lies in the manner of expression as well as

the depth of the experience that inspires the poetry. The reality that is

apprehended and expressed is, as Rukeyser terms it in 7he ILfe of henry, a

"reciprocal reality" ( 155):

The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of anival as the

poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his

62

meanings. If he had expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his

meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on

the preparing. By preparing L mean allowing the reader to feel the

interdependences, the relations, within the poem. (169)

Arrival does not imply an end, a completion, a termination, but movement,

another departure. Meaning in the text evolves out the intention of the author that

invested the text with it, but this meaning is not an absolute one of closure, but an

openness and flow of arriving at not a single meaning but the possibility of

multiple meanings.

Reality cannot be circumscribed within the frame of any single definition,

nor is it a static construct. Human perception constantly changes, and it is this

perception that alters man's responses to the environment and constitutes reality.

In Imagining the Earth, John Elder quotes Whitehead: "Completion is the

perishing of reality: it never really is." Elder comments that "it is impossible to

achieve a simultaneous experience of completion and immediacy: unity may only

be understood as an ongoing process. The organic wholeness of the world is, in

the words of D. H. Lawrence, 'the wave that cannot haltn'(179). Reality is thus

constantly in the process of becoming, with arrivals bearing the seeds of another

departure.

The inherent ambiguity concerning reality is due to the dynamic nature of

consciousness itself This has impact especially on the effect of art, which has the

power to alter reality. If an alteration of the outer condition commences from the

consciousness of the individual, it is this transformed perception that can alter the

conditions that affect human life.

Relationship and its Significence

According to Jonas Salk, relationship, which he terms as the "fifth

dimension," is an essential aspect of human existence. Human evolution

commences with order and relationship, as reflected in both the cosmos and our

daily lives. As human beings evolve biologically, metabiological evolution also

takes place together with the development of intuition and reason. This leads to

the achievement of a greater sense of self-awareness and of one's relationship

with the cosmos Salk also feels that "our subjective responses (intuitional) are

more sensitive and more rapid than our objective responses (reasoned) [. . .].The

intuitive mind establishes the parameters, the premises on the basis of which

reason is formulated to correspond to intuitively perceived patterns" (79). Human

evolution is not a terminal process, but a dynamic one that requires constant

adaptation to a changing environment:

'Chose most highly evolved would also have the greatest capacity

for evolution, for advantageous change, for adaptation to changing

circumstances. They would be the ones with the greatest capacity

to resolve diff~cuuhies to find ways to survive even under

intolerable circumstances. (45)

Every human being thus possesses the potential for relationship. But if the

consciousness fails to experience relatedness to optimise relationship, the integrity of

the individual cannot be maintained.

Martin Buber's theory of reciprocity forms as its basis the transcendence

of the subject-object relationship. Buber speaks of two forms of relationship with

the other: that of 1-It and I-Thou. The 1-It relationship is one of objectification,

where the relationship is not reciprocal. but a single-directional intentionality

through the knowledge of the object by the subject, which establishes a subject-

object dichotomy. It is a relationship of extreme subjectivity where the individual

establishes his superiority on man and nature, seeing them as objects for his

usage. As opposed to this, the I-Thou is a dialogic relationship with a holistic

knowledge of the other The I and the Thou are involved in a mutually fillfilling

relationship of equality of being with another subject. It is a relationship of

authentic encounter, unlike the implicit distancing of the I-It relationship. Here

there is no reservedness, but a genuine relationship with the deepest self of the

other, which, as Buber states, is also a communication with the "living God" in

man. This need for relationship is an instinctive human need, where the "tender

surface of personal life [. . .] longs for contact with other life" (Between Man and

Mmz 201).

Buber's two person theory of mutuality is also affiliated to the realm of art

and literature. The basis of reciprocity is always intuitive. Even though the text

occupies a formal existential space, the meaning of the text cannot be f xed. It dters

according to the experiences of the reader that come into play in the understanding

and explication of the artwork. The reader is not a fixed subject who manipulates the

text as an object to be known and who imposes hisher own interpretation on it. The

text embodies the creative element of the author, and it also affects the reader in the

relational exchange of aesthetic pleasure. This relational perspective is ontologically

significant depending upon the strength and forcefulness of the creative

representation. The establishment of mutuality, and cognition of relation is an

immediate, intuitive perception, where one becomes capable of a special insight into a

phenomenon or object. At the moment of insight, the dichotomy of subject and object

65

is overcome in the relational space of the "in-between." The knower and the knom

enter into a relationship of mutuality in the experiential realm that art provides.

Aesthetic response is a direct personal communion between the reader and the

author through the medium of the text. The realisation of the relational aqsociation is

an opening up of oneself to the self and be~ng of another. The sense of equality

disregards the objectifying action denoted by the subject-object dichotomy. The I-

Thou relationship with the text does not consider the writer as subject propagandising

his view, nor of the reader using the text as a source of meaning and manipulation for

critical or aesthetic pleasure. It is a relationship that is on the same axis of mutual

opening up towards wmmunication. The pivotal matrix is subjective, &om the

personal experience, to the collective and communal. The text is a . Stanley Fish

states, not "a spatial object but the occasion for a temporal existence" (349, as the

reader is actively involved in a creative act that bonds hidher both to the world of

imagination and to that of the lived world. The individual's cognisance o'reality is

then a co-eventuation of both discursive as well as imaginative operations, of

conscious and unwnscious realms of human consciousness.

The text is thus the locus of the creative act, but it is a creativity that is

two-directional. It is both a particutarising and a universaiising experience at the

same time, leading one closer to oneself, and establishing the solidarity of

humanity. The telos of such experiences is the transformative change affecting

entities and phenomena, as available to the altered vision of the perceiver. The

beings and objects that constellate the experiential world of the reader are not

limited in axis to the solipsistic personal world, but are part of the network that

affects all aspects of the communal life of the individual.

Walter Benjamin's thesis regarding the "aura," and its degeneration due to the

affect of industrialisation and mechanical reproduction shares certain features with

Buber's typology of inter-human reciprocity, the affinity between art, man and the

community. Buber's ultimate aim was theological, with the recognition of the "living

God" in man, Nature and the community. Benjamin roots his thesis in the experiential

world of the individual. In his essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin deals

with two types of memory, based on Proust's Hememhrurrce of 7hings I'ust :

voluntary and involuntary memory. The voluntary memory is based on the objects

that the consciousness absorbs volitionally, and which can be recalled at, will.

Involuntary memory is of those objects that the individual does not consciously

observe or perceive, but is absorbed nevertheless, unconsciously, and which is

recalled without volitional effort. An incident, object or experience can suddenly and

involuntarily recall experiences in the past with intensity in the present. There is a

basic difference between voluntary and involuntary memory. The former is specific

and involves the recollection of a precise and definite recollection of a particular

incident or object inscribed within the spatio-temporal continuum. The involuntary

memory is more abstract and diffuse, bringing together a variety of sensory and

mnemonic experiences to present a deeper and more effective experience of the past.

It is the involuntary memory which is responsible for investing objects and

experiences with an "aura." Benjamin defines the "aura" as "the associat.ions which at

one in the memoire involontuire tend to cluster around the object of a perception"

(182). He goes on to state:

[ . . ] looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look

will be returned by the ob-iect of our gaze. Where this expectation is

niet [. . . 1 there is an experience of the aura to the fullest extent [. . . 1.

Experience of the aura rests on the transposition of a response common

in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or

natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being

looked at, looks at us in return. To perceive the aura of an object we

look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. (84)

The significance of the aura and of mutuality lies in the opening up of individual

perception to the importance of reciprocity in relationship, between the larger

community of man and with man and with his environment. The disintegration of

the aura, states Benjamin, is due to the tools of mechanical reproduction, which

destroy the uniqueness of a work of art.

In such an environment, intuitive experience is generally relegated to the

marginalised area of theological or mystical experiences that are para-normal and

trans-empirical and considered as lacking credence because they are unverifiable

through scientific parameters. Especially in a technocratic environment where

there is prepollence of materialistic, analytical, ratiocinative and manipulative

tendencies, the contemplative nature of man becomes sublatent. Guy Burneko

postulates that there is "the likelihood that fragmented, objectivistic, alienating

systems in excess will establish fragmented, alienated and alienating species"

(89). Loneliness, alienation, a sense of reification and being dominated by

overpoweringly repressive socio-political forces are problems the individual has

to contend with. A greater dependence on machines both at the professional arena

as well as at home, the re-prioritisation of'values and shifting value-paradigms

with the casualty often being the family and personal relationships, an aggressive

materialistic lifestyle with more time spent in spatially restricted environments.

all lead to losing contact with nature and naturally inherited traditions, and a

decrescence in the powers of intuition. Thus, from a feeling of wholeness and

unity with the world and his fellow beings, man becomes distanced from both.

and also from his true self.

Conclusion

The parallelistic compartmentalisation of traditional theories of intuition

becomes problematic when one enters the realm of literary and poetic intuition, which

uses words in combinatory relationships through the medium of language.

The various definitions are in consension regarding certain characteristics

of intuition, but at the same time they devalue other aspects of the process that are

integral to the cognitive process ofthe individual as a self-conscious social being.

Intuitive insight is considered as immediate, non-discursive, un-mediated and

non-inferential. 'This does not account for the significance of the transformative

self-awareness that is the result of intuitive experience, and the source and the

product of intuition, namely its enverbalisation. Both are inconceivable without

the mediating role of language. Intuition remains valueless and meaningless,

locked in silence, unless the experience and the knowledge derived from it is

assimilated and expressed by the individuai. If the process stops with assimilation

of the experience, it exists as a mere feeling, inexpressible to oneself as well as

the outside world, and lacks the power to provide the stimulus for possibilities of

regenerative action.

Secondly these definitions also imply two kinds of experience,

rationallnon-rational, liminal/subliminal, innerlouter, and dualism in the

acquisition of knowledge, Intuitive experier~ce is often described in terms of what

it is not, as representation of the experience uses means that cannot do absolute

justice to the experience. Even though philosophers and critics have been prone to

the usage of this dualistic terminology, in the present, especially through ideas

emerging from the inter-disciplinary debates in the latter half of the twentieth

century, this dichotomy has been supplanted by more encompassing definitions.

Tony Bastick's typology of the process of intuition is considered as one ofthe

most comprehensive. Laughlin presents Bastick's definition as including

[. , .] confidence in the process of intuition, the sense of certainty of

the truth of insights [. . . ] the suddenness and immediacy of the

awareness of knowing, the association of affect and numinosity with

insight, the non-analytic (non-rational, non-logical) and gestalt nature

of the experience, the empathic aspect of intuition, the 'preverbal' and

frequently ineffable nature of knowledge, the ineluctable relationship

between intuition and creativity, and the fact that the intuitive insight

may prove to be factually incorrect. (21)

Bastick brings out the essential nature of intuition, but it fails to focus

attention on the liminal base which is an integral part of the intuitive process.

Interpretation of phenomena through dualisms may be a convenient tool but

territorial boundaries especially in the area of human cognition cannot be fixed.

Both the body and the mind are not self- subsisting, irreconcilable entities but

extensions of the other, occupying the same ontological basis.

Poetic intuition involves both rational as well as non-rational elements.

Even though the moment of intuition is a sudden and immediate revelation, it is

the result of a long drawn out process of interaction with the text. The semantic

context and linguistic selection of syntactic codes in the conceptual space of the

poem is a matter of authorial organisation, collocation and appropriateness, often

involving automatic and unconscious processes. The linguistic organisation and

the formal features of the poem are very much governed by the working of

reason. As the author wishes to express the intuitive experience not just with

clarity but with all the forcefulness and impact of the initial experience, helshe

may often realise that he/she would have to use language in a novel and

unconventional manner, often breaking accepted linguistic conventions. As

Heidegger states:

Rut language is not only and not primarily an audible and written

expression of what is to be communicated. It not only puts man forth

in words and statements what is overtly and covertly intended to be

communicated; language alone brings what is, as something that is,

into the Open for the first time. (Poetry, Language, Thought 71)

Art is thus a revelation of a truth which is embodied in the work. And as "all art [.

. . ] is essentially poetry," everything is revealed in a manner that is, as Heidegger

reiterates, "other than usual" (Poetry, h p a g e , 77t0~ght 71). Together with the

dual nature of language, of unconcealment and disguise, the work communicates

its meaning in an uncanny admixture of immanence and withdrawal.

The style of such literary artefacts may be syncopated and abrupt, the

punctuation seemingly erroneous, liberties may be taken with grammar, new

linguistic terms may be coined, there may be semantic ambiguity and

ambivalence. 'This is more so in poetry, which is by its very nature highly intuitive

in content and expression. The poem does not just describe or explain, provide

information or enumerate data, though it may involve these factors, but reveals,

unfolds, unconceals and makes immanent. The intuitive experience is thus a

congruence of elements intellectual and emotional, discursive and non-discursive,

rational and non-rational.

On one side there is a subscription to the Platonic suspicion of intuitive

experience where it is cl~rsorily dismissed. On the other side even detractors

reluctantly admit to the connection between the intuitive foundations of

knowledge and creativity both in non-scientific activity as well as the field of

science. As Bernard Cohen expresses it:

1 am sorry that it is necessary to shudder at the introduction of terms

like 'intuition' or 'creative imagination,' but shudder we must [ . . 1.

As to intuition, many philosophers do not like to use that tern,

although many scientists do use it. And yet how else can one explain

the process whereby certain rather incredible scientific men have been

able to see results long before they could prove them, and in some

cases even when they could not ever find such a proof (qtd. in

Monsav 106)

If we accept the validity of intuitive experience and its close connection with

creativity, then poetry offers a very high degree of such experience. From ancient

times the emotional effect of poetry has been testified and accredited, specially its

power to inspire, move and transform. One of the problems of modern life is that

even though quantitatively, publishing has increased to a large extent. the content is

more on the communication of information or data.

The significance of intuitive poetry lies in the way in which the inner dynamic

of the text unfolds immense possibilities for the self-realisation of being. An

individual who is insensitive to the co-i~lvolvement of the analytic and intuitive

aspects of consciousness is a univalent Inan in the ecology of humanity. Dr.S.

Radhakrishnan testifies to the transformative power of intuitive poetry which allows

for the moment of experience when:

[. . .] the mind grasps the ohject in its wholengss [. . .] suffises it with

its own spirit, and becomes one with it. There is a deliberate

suspension of individuality, an utter submission to the real, a complete

absorption in the object as it is so as to breathe its life and enjoy its

form. In that heightened c:onsciousness, subject and object become

interchangeable and, as Blake said, 'we become what we behold.'(184)

This dissolution of the ego may be a momentary experience, but the

effectiveness of intuitive poetry is possible because it allows such dissolution. The

ego once again takes over, but it is an ego transformed through self-understanding, as

Ricoeur states: "the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a

subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently,

or simply begins to understand himself' (Hermeneutics 158). Indian philosophic

thought uses the term aparckshu, or immediate knowledge that is different from

knowledge presented to the sense orpraiyaksha, where there is "intimate fusion of

the mind with reality," and "we become one with the object of knowledge, and the

object known is seen not as an object out.side the self but as a part of the self'

(Radhakrishnan 138) The conditions revealed through the artist's perception is based

on the lived world but they simultaneously express a transcendence of meaning.

The reading process may be a re-capitulation of the poet's experience to a

large extent, if there is semantic and experiential conciliance between the expression

of the poet and reader response. The poet goes beyond the circumscribed literal sense

of the language and uses the metalinguistic tools of suggestion and association. This

involves not just the rational and the intellectual in deciphering the literal sense of the

words and sentences, but also includes the images the words cause to rise in the text.

It also reveals the relationships between different parts of the poem, the metaphoric

and metonymic configurations, and also the supra-textual associations the text brings

about. This knowledge may be recognition of duality, fragmentation, error, illusion or

disparity. Even though these states are accepted as constitutive of human life,

intuition reveals that they are not debilitat~ng, irreconcilable disparities, but an

integral part of the state of consciousness of the self-conscious individual, Intuitive

processes attempt an acceptance of all dualities as binate concepts representing the

fullness of human experience.

Poetic intuition communicates this experience with greater intensity

compared with other artistic media. Its realm is the atrophied consciousness of the

individual, and through the experience of poetic intuition, the creative artist

attempts to move and conscientise the individual by unfolding and positing the

possibilities of active response and action The mode is not merely a philosophical

or an intellectual one, but recognises as basic the intersubjectivity involved in the

experience. Whether intuition is defined as process or experience, "advancing our

understanding of intuition necessitates the recognition that it may manifest as a

mental thought, an emotional feeling, a spiritual experience, or even in a visceral

sense"(Boucouvalas 7) The experience of intuition is thus a specific mode of

attaining knowledge through processes that are connected to the physical, and

through the body to neuro-cognitive processes that are preverbal and also pan-

human

Poetic intuition involves a directness of seeing into experience that reveals

the essential reciprocity of the individual and his physical environment., man and

the social community. Any change in the outer world must commence from

74

within the individual that networks into other individuals and the social and

physical environment. The significance of intuition lies in its inherence in every

field of human knowledge: "If logical reasoning and scientific analysis have

brought knowledge to the crown of human intelligence, then intuition -- and its

inseparable jewel creativity -- form the jewel in the crown" ( Davis-F1o:yd and

Arvidson 1 1).

Reality, then, as Rukeyser states, "may be seen as the completiort of

experience" (I,P 177). But completion does not imply stasis, as experience itself is

in constant flux. In fact reality and experience are dynamic states that are

constantly flowing and moving towards completion but never achieving it.

Rukeyser feels that

Experience itself cannot be seen as a point in time, a fact the

experience with which we deal, in speaking of art and human

growth, is not only the event, but the event and the entire past of

the individual. There is a series in any event and the definition of

the event is the last unit of the series. You read the poem: the poem

you now have, the poem that exists in your imagination, is the

poem and all the past to which you refer it. (LI' 177-78)

The poet's intuition communicates by opening up a space so that genuine

and direct communion occurs between writer, and the reader through the text,

allowing for a variety of discourses with multiplicity in meaning. The expression

of the poet is, according to Rukeyser,

[. . .] the confession to oneself made available to all. This is

confession as a means to understanding, as testimony to the truths

of experience as they becomt: form and ourselves. The type of this

75

is the poem; in which the poet, intellectually giving form to

emotional and imaginative experience, with the music and history

o fa lifetime behind the work, offers a total response, in a most

human communication. (LP 212)

This relationship with the text and the writer who created it extends to the life of

the reader also and hidher own relationships and interactions with others, both

human and non-human, the community and the environment. Literature and the

fine arts have their own methods of representing reality through the aesthetic

artefact. In the poetic text even though the semantic multiety of words may deny

absolute meaning, the text wmmunicates experience directly to the reader. The

historicity of the author and the contingencies of creation are subsumed within the

text. The reader in appropriating the text, not only overcomes the cutural spatio-

temporal fixity of the text, but historicises it within hidher own cultural tmntext,

thereby transforming and endowing an individually wgnised experience with

universal proportions.