Beautiful Dream: A Poetics of Ecstasy

Beautiful Dream: A Poetics of Ecstasy follows on from Barry Cottrell's first book of shamanic incantations or 'utterances' - Sounding Eternity: Shamanic Incantations and the Poetics of Sonic Power, also published by drivenLine. The Preface of Sounding Eternity described the process by which these 'poems' come into existence: "While the words in this book are presented as poems, they originated as sound, vocalisations and ritual utterances, made during a shamanic state of consciousness." Underlying the utterances in both books is the pounding beat of a drum giving rise to the mystic transportation of ecstasy. When applied to shamanism ecstasy refers specifically to 'magical flight' - the altered state of consciousness which the shaman enters in order to cross over the threshold between worlds and to 'journey' through the metaphysical domain.

In this altered state of consciousness words emerge very slowly at first as densely cryptic sounds, as strings of often seemingly nonsensical phonemes, which then coalesce into strangely coherent hyper-meaningful invocations and narratives. The emerging words are recorded and later transcribed as narrative verse with a strong dream-like, mythical aspect running through them, reflecting the 'ecstatic' state of consciousness.

The poems in this book may at times seem difficult to understand. Yet in his essays on Dante, T.S. Eliot says that the task of the poet is to make people "comprehend the incomprehensible." He argues that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood and that "...in good allegory... it is not necessary to understand the meaning first to enjoy the poetry."

In his brilliant book, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, author and historian Peter Ackroyd discusses the intricacy and complexity of Anglo-Saxon verse emanating from Albion: "Out of this land of visions emerges a poetry of the dream-world....The dreamers of the tribe were highly praised because in their state of charmed sleep they were able to unite heaven and earth." Ackroyd views the great Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, as being "in part a dream-poem; the strange elegies of the Anglo-Saxon spirit are enacted in unreal landscapes compounded of dream and vision." He points out that the structure of the poem "represents the fascination with what is difficult, and the resistance to easy interpretation." The same could be said of Beautiful Dream which is also a collection of allegorical dream-poems, imbued with qualities of strangeness, mystery and elusive interpretation.

While the brilliance of Anglo-Saxon verse was shining in the West, at the same time in China Mahayana Buddhist monks of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) were practicing dhāranī incantations in the great monasteries of the capital cities. Dhāranīs are strings of syllables which have been infused with spiritual power and can be used to help or protect others. Quite often the strings of syllables in dhāranīs appear to be completely meaningless or nonsensical. Yet as scholar Janet Gyatso reminds us, their "...primary purpose is not to describe but to engender or invoke a protective power," while scholar Paul Copp has pointed out: "it was precisely the meaninglessness of the texts that made them so profound."

This is a poetry of the dream-world that defies analysis. The form and expression of the poems in Beautiful Dream are condensed and infused with a spiritual power born on a new octave of meaning. In pursuing each of these narratives to its unfolding mythological destination, the reader may take part in a lyrical celebration of the liturgical essence of human nature, and share in the rapture of expanded awareness.

Barry Cottrell is an artist, researcher, writer and visionary. Born in Bristol, England in 1953, he studied psychology and philosophy at Oxford University and art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. As an artist-printmaker, he works mainly with a burin on copper, wood or lino to produce 'poetry of the driven line.' As a researcher and writer he has explored and written about human consciousness and the recovery of primal mind.