Back in 2002, while my prose stagnated at the bottom of the slush pile and my poetry writhed in work-shop writing hell – always more of a dreamer than a writer – my floundering existence would stumble into the realm of the prophets. During that period, working as a produce clerk at the local grocery store and taking occasional creative writing classes at the nearby University of Oregon, a confluence of ruminations and events would come together in a synthesis and subsequent vision. My experience I found to be not unlike Whitman's as he described it in later writings looking back at his life:
I found myself remaining possess’d, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else.
It is this feeling of a "possessed" state of ecstatic imagination and creative inspiration that helps lend itself to a mystical interpretation. Also worth noting is the sudden appearance of order from chaos as seemingly unconnected musings and notions suddenly merge together into clarity of vision. Upon publication of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman stated that he'd fulfilled "an impervious conviction, and the commands of my nature as total and irresistible as those which make the sea flow, or the globe revolve." In his 1871 seer letter, Rimbaud famously described a similar process as follows:
For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a horn, it is not its fault. This much is clear: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its rumblings in the depths, or leaps fully-formed on to the stage.
This mystical creative process that upwells from the depths of one's being, poets, from ancient times into modern times, have referred to as "the muse". But in his quest to become a seer, it seems to me, that Rimbaud went about it the wrong way, a way that he would later renounce. At the time he imagined himself as "thief of fire" whereas, as the Hopi Elders describe it below, it's more about submission:
True Vision is never wholly personal and by its nature needs to be shared. It’s made of the stuff of Infinity. Vision is Great Spirit’s way of offering us the opportunity to strengthen our faith by presenting us with a glimpse of the Divine Plan. Following Vision can lead to extraordinary results. Our confidence grows with ourselves and our relationship with Spirit and we empower our hearts to lead as we stand witness to the miraculous nature of spiritual guidance. As a useful servant of the Divine you access your visionary self by invocating, ‘Thy Will be done through me.’
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