TRULY, EXPLICITLY “PHILOSOPHICAL” POETRY:
Demi Monina, the philosopher-poet behind the work Deissyio: Philosophical Poems & Prose (as linked here!) boldly crosses poetry with philosophy/theology.
The vast majority of poetry (across all periods) leaves a lot to be desired as far as rigorous philosophical depth, in terms of which the more natural imagery ought to be charged, to acquire genuine metaphysical significance in pointing beyond itself; and not to mention a subversive metaphysical vision which rouses the sleepwalker automata in us all out of the deaf-blind states into which we all of us are born!
Simply put, the majority of poets in certain traditions, at least, use too little of their intellective capacity, and the philosophers use too little of their hearts.
Thus, Deissyio seeks to secularise apparently “religious” concepts, and recover them to their spiritual roots, by way of new poetry-writing, which lends well to exploring themes like universal Godhood and human divinity, conformity in our modern culture, the human condition, true selfhood & identity, what would constitute ideal Utopian conditions, our true emotional capacity and uninhibited experiential states.
What is rather lacking in contemporary art by and large is a genuinely novel vision in which the artistic medium is mostly irrelevant in the artist’s eyes, for whom the mediated concepts and philosophies should really be the be-all and end-all. It is no doubt all about the (Beatific) vision, not necessarily about falling in love with the given art form to the point where it becomes an art-unto-itself at this expense. It is the substance that matters, not the form, strictly speaking. This is the true priority!
Deissyio is an 85 page poetry work (ignore the poorly formatted 1st Edition with 71 pages!) with intended pragmatic value that serves to inspire welling Christic sentiment (as understood in non-religious ways) and thus tackle the human condition of fallibility by the roots, so as to make people far gentler with the environment and others, for having opened up their hearts to their full Christic capacity: our moral agency is influenced by our self-identifications in this regard, which inform our moral centres — the heart.
This highly literary work Deissyio is available here.
Demi Monina, ultimately, grounds these theologies in terms of the somewhat unexplored, under-discussed possibilities of the realm of subjectivity, now seen for all its divinity, to reconcile the heart with the mind and the secular with the religious.
A PHILOSOPHICAL TRACT:
The short Philosophy section, through its primarily poetic vision, tries to flesh out a new movement boldly called Romantic Platonism. It stresses the nuances and intricacies of how in fact the Platonic Forms can be humanly experienced, drawing on perception, the possibilities of the experiential realm, subjectivity theories and reframing them as emotional-affective ideals.
A SHORT STORY:
This heavily symbolic short story which has singular theoretical richness for a piece of short fiction, as entitled The Power of The Eye, charts the descent of the hero Deissyio, an outcast in a mythical society riddled with corruption, down the Bottomless Pit of Philosophy (the best characterisation I could conceive of here) and thus the levels of the subconscious, towards discovering the deepest truth about human nature at the bottommost depth (which I shall not make known here!) and the true reality of subjectivity. This short story subtly draws influence from Dante’s Inferno and Nietzschean concepts as far as the concept of a multilevelled pit, at least, which has beauty as a highly figurative image which is, by and large, quite original in this formulation.
