Does such a trivial moment — don’t say it didn’t happen —- deserve even a metrical exercise?
This jaundiced question, so full of resentments and aesthetic prejudice you might think nihilism and bad taste are connected.
The question observes the contingencies of the between—-the asymmetric relativities of actual experience. It is not answered. But it reasserts, in the careful build of meter and rhyme, the enduring and often depressing limits of communication between others. But through lyric’s equivocity— which is not mere relativism —- the ‘intimate universal’ of a porosity between the divine nothing and created creatureliness is itself acknowledged.
To wit: lyric witnesses the between as it has conceptually evolved in Modernity as a response to Nihilism and reductivism. . For the between— and lyric—equivocity means not meaninglessness but saturated understanding beyond system. ’Myth’ in Vico’s sense.
The lyric embodies moments of ontological worth and in that sense, outside further definitions of discipline (Zen, apophatic Christian prayer, and so on), claims its central place in culture.
