This is a response to remarks after my last post by my friend, Curtis Beaird. I thought I’d put them here rather than in a comments box.

Hi, Curtis. I should start out by saying that I’m after talking about what I take to be one kind of religious experience. I make no reference to experiences that involve seizures or glossolalia, or other kinds of transport whose subjects usually cannot remember afterwards.

As you know the Rilke poem to which I refer ends with the statement: Du mußt dein Leben ändern, usually translated “You must change your life.” I wrote a poem once that attempted to respond to that statement. It’s here. Most biblical archetypes to which I can refer religious experiences (this one and others) are theophanies, not hierophanies, I think. Jacob wrestling with the angel may be an exception, but the account of that event in Genesis is not undisplaced, as Jacob gets his new name.

I’m after describing religious experiences in as undisplaced a manner as I can, which I take to require a recounting of the experience as it occurred in time with as little reference to a body of archetypes as I can get by with, not that I couldn’t make archetypal references and not that it wouldn’t be fun to do so. But I think it’s part of the nature of religious experiences that they are not repeatable or recallable. They become timeless in memory, and for each one the hierophany that is it’s objective correlative becomes the means of calling up its memory only, not the thing itself. I think this is what Wordsworth and Coleridge meant by “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but I think Wordsworth was mistaken in thinking that contemplation of the recollection of emotion would generate “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Coleridge agreed, I believe, and that is what “Kubla Kahn” is about, among other things.

What I’m after is something like Romain Rolland’s oceanic feeling, for which a host of others, Freud and Jung, for instance, have supplied glosses. I agree with Rolland that experiencing this “feeling” marks one as a religious person, and that one need not tie the experience to any archetypal establishment (or that if one does it is perfectly reasonable to consider that the tie is a matter of convenience and not necessity). And I’m not talking about a feeling, either, or a sense of being bonded to the external world, or some such. It’s quite different from that. For me, Rilke’s image: . . . denn da ist keine Stelle,/die dich nicht sieht, “so that there is no place that doesn’t see you,” gets at it better than any other because it leaves the subject free.

And that’s the lightness, that freedom, a kind of Nietzschean lightness that need not be trivial or immoral as Kundera takes it to be. And there is always the feather. Emerson, when he felt himself become ‘as a transparent eyeball,’ didn’t forget that he was ‘crossing a bare common,’ and I didn’t forget to buy my book, either.