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Marts 16., 2003
![[info]](http://klab.lv/img/userinfo.gif) honeybee | 03:46 - domas, kas man likās interesantas
POE ON THE SOUL OF MAN by ERIC W. CARLSON
In "Ms. Found in a Bottle" (1833), death is the price of the discovery; in "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (1841), the revelation transforms the black walls and the abyss into a wonderful "manifestation of God's power" and the moonlight into "a flood of golden glory." And yet, says the narrator, "the yell that went up to the Heavens from out of that mist I dare not attempt to describe," it was that awesome. At any rate, there was no reply or recognition from above, assuming God to be in his heaven. In this and the other cosmic fables, Man seems an alien, fatefully in but not of the Universe — a major theme in the Existentialist literature of our own time.
By some Jungian intuition into the dynamics of the psyche, Poe here implies a shock of recognition of that authentic self which lies deeper than man's mean egoism.
The central theme is Man's search for his soul, and through the death of the "ordinary life," the discovery of his psychic potential is realized in a rebirth of the unified and creative self.
In her 1969 article on Poe's three "mesmeric tales" (of which "Mesmeric Revelation" is one), Doris V. Falk characterized this trance-like state as operating "within the mind as a unifying and illuminating force," hence psychedelic rather than psychological or moral. Poe's writings, she notes, are filled with trance states induced by fever, pain, hunger, drugs, sensory deprivation, as well as hypnotism. Such intensified awareness makes possible heightened analytical power, poetic inspiration, and spiritual self-realization.
His madness or mania is that "state during which man experiences a kind of self-revelation occurring through the emergence of a powerful spirit from the depth of his being," to quote Rene Dubos. If he is "mad," it is with the intensity and shock of realizing that in suppressing and, it now turns out, fatally weakening [page 20:] his psychic-moral self, he has destroyed the "vitality" of his creative soul.
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