ACADEMIA Letters

Mysticality: Poetry as an Act of Mysticism

Stephanie Malak

The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradi-
tion, especially evident in mid-century Latin American literature. To understand the way in
which this mystical application is suffused with secularities, I turn to poetry, and specifically,
a new notion I term “mysticality.” And to elucidate mysticality, I employ Spanish philoso-
pher Maria Zambrano’s principal argument: poetic reason. Zambrano sought a reasoning that
was broader than reason itself, a concept that “slips into the interior, like a drop of soothing
oil, a drop of happiness” (Filosofía 15). This philosophy is poetic reason, or poiesis, which
valorizes the role of being, the metaphysical, and one’s intuition.
Zambrano’s philosophical praxis examines the exteriority of poetic words (referred con-
cepts or ideologies) versus an interiority they can often express (the poet’s inner sanctum); the
function of her poiesisis to engender this spirit as a rejection of more secularized philosophy.
Here, I offer Zambrano’s definition of poiesis itself:
It is simultaneous expression and creation in the sacred form, from which poetry and
philosophy are successively born. Birth is necessarily a separation—poetry into its different
species, and philosophy (61).[i]
The poet is the ideal artist to push the limits of the self in order explore such limits. As
such, poetic reason carries a great discursive advantage over other reasoning[ii]: the ability
to allow for the unsaid, “the poetic word shudders over silence and only its rhythm’s orbit
lifts it up, because it is music, not logos, that wins over silence” (El sueño 102). The poet
neither renounces nor searches, because he has” (Filosofía 17).[iii] The poet is responsible
for expressing not only what they sense in the physical world but also what they access in
dreams and interior ghosts, thus rendering any kind of expression a possibility (18). Their
creation is an ongoing process of “poetic being” approaching full self-consciousness. There
is a centrality to the human psyche, for Zambrano, and then a series of underlying, unseen

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephanie Malak, stephanie.malak@gmail.com

Citation: Malak, S. (2021). Mysticality: Poetry as an Act of Mysticism. Academia Letters, Article 1929.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1929.

1
controls that regulate boundaries of this central being. It is this precise occurrence of being in
a space and time that is considered to be both an interior knowledge of said being’s sovereign
right and the exterior knowledge of its extant boundaries.
Herein lies the paradox of the mystical inquiry that is couched in profound knowing of the
interior—that which is immanent—while reaching for those moments in time and space that
are at the limits of the exterior—the transcendent. Noted psychologist William James makes
a similar observation regarding this paradox in his work Varieties of Religious Experience.
If we elide consciousness with being, Zambrano and James are flirting with this very same
notion of the essence of self-knowledge and how one comes to achieve it. James explains:
There is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field [psychology], with its usual centre
and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings,
which are extramarginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be
classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs.
(233)
Both James and Zambrano identify that which is known to the individual and that which
exceeds the limits this individual knows. A mystical experience embodies paradoxical qual-
ities: stillness and contemplation must be maintained to produce ecstasy and rapture. And
eventually, this ecstatic state leads to the complete disappearance of selfhood in the divine to
promote a lived divinity.
With these, and many other definitions in mind, I expand the semantic value of mysticism,
to incorporate my own term, “mysticality,” defined as follows:

1. Rhetorical structures and lexica reflecting mystical thought and language;

2. Symbolic communion with an “other,” not god;

3. Quotidian items are divinized;

4. A mystical approach to writing is favored; and/or

5. A methodology for describing the poet’s environment.

I believe it is a firm rhetorical strategy employed for the purposes of communicating tran-
scendent language (through myriad poetic devices) while still remaining loyal to immanent
ideologies or belief systems. Thematically, mysticism is a ripe language for discussing the ide-
ologies of revolution, feminism, cultural identity, and beyond, and mysticality offers a useful
intervention by which to understand these modalities. As I elucidate my analysis of mystical-
ity, it is the mystical literary approach—or together with religious beliefs of the author—that

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephanie Malak, stephanie.malak@gmail.com

Citation: Malak, S. (2021). Mysticality: Poetry as an Act of Mysticism. Academia Letters, Article 1929.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1929.

2
permits a body of written work whose effects are infallibly religious without constraints of a
traditional mystical definition.
To deploy mysticality, I consider a short poem from Cuban essayist and poet Fina García
Marruz, member of the literary group Orígenes. Her early poems encircle an intimate space,
often simple daily items, toils, and memories. One of García Marruz’s most cited poems
“Una dulce nevada está cayendo / A Sweet Snow Is Falling,”[1] is infused with sounds and
intimacies, movements between the interior and exterior, and the infiltration of divinity into
the mundane. By employing mysticalist strategies García Marruz constructs a poetry that is
more liturgical than dogmatic.
García Marruz excels in an axiological universe where the poet and poetic voice problema-
tize (by questioning) and evaluate (by versification) the values and value judgments made in
verse. In the following first two stanzas of her sonnet “A Gentle Snow is Falling”there is first
a presentation of this axiomatic space, more abstract, where the poetic voice situates herself,
and then a transition to the voice’s own subjectivity within this space:

Una dulce nevada está cayendo / A sweet snow is falling

detrás de cada cosa, cada amante, / behind every object, every lover,
una dulce nevada comprendiendo / a sweet snowfall embracing
lo que la vida tiene de distante. / what’s held in life’s yonder.

Un monólogo lento de diamante / A slow diamond monologue

calla detrás de lo que voy diciendo / hushed beneath what I’m saying
un actor su papel mal repitiendo / an actor ill-performing their role
sin fin, en soledad gesticulante / incessant, in solitude, in pantomime. (2011, 109)

García Marruz creates a universe where the world is perceived as a silent snowfall, latent
and exterior to the poetic voice. First, the poetic voice proffers the philosophy that behind
each thing there is a silent, falling whiteness—a universal observation. Then, this snowfall is
identified behind each lover, a more concrete, intimate subject, but nonetheless unspecified,
both distanced and inclusive. Life is anthropomorphized, and now as a protagonist, it is lim-
ited in its self-actualization. Then the inward turn, invoking a (meta)monologue and the first
person. Instead of the hidden space, there is the “behindness” of her own voice containing
a slow, diamond monologue. A diamond, perhaps glittery like snow, is hardened and dura-
tive, unlike its ephemeral sky-fallen poetic counterpart. This behindness is compared to an
actor mindlessly repeating his own words. Even though the poetic voice created this axiology
and located herself within it, hers is a reality that is expressed in un-witnessed movements in

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephanie Malak, stephanie.malak@gmail.com

Citation: Malak, S. (2021). Mysticality: Poetry as an Act of Mysticism. Academia Letters, Article 1929.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1929.

3
solitude. There is a meditative, universal approach followed by a self-realization—an exterior
identified by way of examining an interior. The last two stanzas portray the internalization of
this universe within the poetic voice’s reality:

Una suave nevada me convierte / A soft snow converts me

ante los ojos, ironistas sobrios, / before my eyes, ironic and sober
al dogma del paisaje que me advierte / into the dogma of the landscape that
announces

Una voz, algún coche apareciendo, / a voice, a passing car,

mientras en lo que miro y lo que toco / and though within what I see and touch
siento que algo muy lejos se va huyendo. / I sense that something far-off is fleeing. (109)

This internalization is palpable; it penetrates her. It converts her into the landscape it-
self, into the dogma of the Cuban countryside, into the faith of her literal environment. Upon
the conversion to this new “faith” there is a grasping of what is, what is tangible, that which
she sees and touches, and alternatively what is not, perceiving something that is escaping.
This axiological universe is created; a paradox is formed and felt; the poetic voice questions
and struggles within it. A resolutely mystical poet/poem might often find God smiling at the
poetic voice at the sonnet’s end. But García Marruz garners poetic brilliance in using this
mystical rhetoric—including the archetypical paradox, dogmatic belief, and constitutional
conversion—all while ending the sonnet with the voice’s inability to sense this behindness
that escapes visuality and tangibility. Is it God’s presence? Or his absence? A mysticalist
reading proposes that God’s presence may or may not manifest itself, but the union with a(ny)
presence, in this case, poiesis, is what counts.

End Notes: All translations are my own

References
[i] …expresión y creación a un mismo tiempo en unidad sagrada, de la cual por revelaciones
sucesivas irán naciendo, separándose al nacer—nacimiento es siempre separación—la
poesía en sus diferentes especies y la filosofía.

[ii] compared to Jose Ortega y Gasset’s vital reason

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephanie Malak, stephanie.malak@gmail.com

Citation: Malak, S. (2021). Mysticality: Poetry as an Act of Mysticism. Academia Letters, Article 1929.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1929.

4
[iii]la palabra de la poesía temblará siempre sobre el silencio y sólo la órbita de un ritmo
podrá sostenerla, porque es la música la que vence al silencio antes que el logos.

García Marruz, Obra poética. “Las miradas perdidas.” Ed. Eliana Dávila. La Habana :
Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2008.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1902.

Zambrano, María. El Sueño Creador: Los Sueños, El Soñar Y La Creación Por La Palabra.
Xalapa, Ver., México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1965.

Zambrano, María. Filosofía Y Poesía. Madrid: Ediciones De La Universidad, 1993.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Stephanie Malak, stephanie.malak@gmail.com

Citation: Malak, S. (2021). Mysticality: Poetry as an Act of Mysticism. Academia Letters, Article 1929.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1929.