Poetic rhythms

I'm currently writing a paper on Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree, tracing Heideggerian notions of truth as aletheia. He literally grounds the weaving of truth, the venturing of art as the setting forth of truth, in the poetic act. For him, ultimate reality consists of ongoing conflict and tensions giving rise to process and reality in its becoming, and poetic language is uniquely capable of manifesting this underlying reality. I'm convinced McCarthy quite consciously pursues this task in his novels. The Mysterium Tremendum of ultimate reality is a revelation of this very unity of surface dualisms. Unlike the Judge from Blood Meridian who suggests "the mystery is that there is no mystery," McCarthy himself has said "the mystery is that we don't perceive the mystery." It is this mystery, uniquely present in poetic language, and its pre-rational way of knowing that gave rise to myth. Enter Robert Graves, whose "White Goddess" I cracked open tonight, and who directly takes me to task as one who participates in and perpetuates the infernal industrial machine, btw, includes the following as his main thesis "The language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry - "true" in the nostalgic modern sense of "the unimprovable original." (9-10). Given my personal history being raised in a Pentecostal church, I found the following further fascinating: "As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered our at the close of the seventeeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally being written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language--a wild Pentecostal "speaking in tongues"--rather than from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary. (12) Ah.