The Art of Mystery

The place of mystery in the contemporary mind and world is understated. This is good, as mystery should be subtle, yet its importance is also becoming overshadowed by the scientific revolution. Logic functions on a different plane, where the shadows cast by mystery are not awe inspiring, no, simply frustrating, and must be cast under light to be dissected and understood. It is hard angles and dimensions where mystery is flowing lines that twist upon themselves and just lead you right back to where you began. Answers lead to more questions, yet the questions themselves should be appreciated - not as a means to an end, but as itself, existing in a realm of uncertainty and possibility.

From Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis by Norman O. Brown, "Mysteries display themselves in words only if they can remain concealed". Poetry is perhaps one of the best examples. Poetry is veiled truth; each person reads a poem a little differently, gets something that is individual to their understanding from it. What the author intended as the 'meaning', if there even was one, is irrelevant. Poetry is dynamic, and what you can get from a poem can change from one reading to the next.

Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town speaks about poetry writing and makes an excellent point on the relation between mystery (uncertainty) and words:

"You hear me make extreme statements like "don't communicate" and "there is no reader." While these statements are meant as said, I presume when I make them that you can communicate and can write clear English sentences. I caution against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying.

Let's take language that exists to communicate--the news story. In a news story the words are there to give you information about the event. Even if the reporter has a byline, anyone might have written the story, and quite often more than one person has by the time it is printed. Once you have the information, the words seem unimportant. Valery said they dissolve, but that's not quite right. Anyway, he was making a finer distinction, one between poetry and prose that in the reading of English probably no longer applies. That's why I limited our example to news articles. By understanding the words of a news article you seem to deaden them.

In the news article the relation of the words to the subject […] is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is so weak that for our purposes it isn't worth consideration. Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way. When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves. That is, the relation of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength."

Poetry is not used to convey information - uncertainty allows the words to breathe and take a life of their own, and the only limit is that of the imagination of the reader.

Kubla Khan may be used as a brief example. There is a mystical quality to the poem, and though it is better known for its beautiful sound and meter, it certainly isn't devoid of meaning. Xanadu, after it was visited in 1275 by Marco Polo, became a foreign paradise associated with opulence and beauty. Other possible references include the river Alph, which likely refers to the River Alpheus in mythology, and Mount Abora is suggested to have come from Mount Amara from John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Within the poem mystery exists also as a sense of prophecy that is hinted upon several times. "A damsel with a dulcimer/ In a vision once I saw" establishes a dreamlike expectation for the following lines. Not that the rest of the poem doesn't hold a sense of the imaginary and ethereal, but visions in history and literature are known for being vague and easily misinterpreted. "And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far/ Ancestral voices prophesying war" not only lends itself to the anticipation of coming violence, but also the concept of death, which is rich with mysteries of its own - what comes after? Where do we go?

The fact that the poem is unfinished certainly adds yet another layer of mystery. There is no end, or at least no visible conclusion. What was to come next? We'll never know, but we can appreciate that by having no distinct ending, it draws us in and keeps us thinking and wondering and stewing in the uncertainty of it all.

All in all, I think a conclusion may be reached that life is a mystery that must be experienced rather than solved.