"[In Raccoon] you said: 'As I understand it so far, apophasis seems to be a mode of religious discourse which confronts the problem of language's inability to express the inexpressible event at the heart of the mystical experience.'
At its best, poetry seems to work this way. In Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, there is a line which attempts to capture the soul's ascendence into heaven. The words are ordinary, but it is the only line in the poem which is not in iambic pentamenter... it has an extra foot. Beyond words, its structure attempts to lead the reader to the brink of something of which language is incapable.
It's not always a religious event... but the value of poetry seems to me to lie in its ability to express an awareness of the incapacity of language... to lead a person to the lurching experience of approaching the space just beyond the edge of where language breaks down.
This seems to me also to function as a passable definition of consciousness: an awareness of the limitations of language, a desire for language to do something which it cannot."
