CYCLE EIGHTY-TWO

1. In relative terms, fiction is the purgatory of literature, the materialistic genre, corresponding to volume, which stands above drama, as man above woman or the moon above the earth. The fiction writer, usually a novelist, can be strictly purgatorial or veer towards either Hell or Heaven within a more extreme purgatorial context. In the first case, he will be intellectual and centrist; in the second case, either emotionally left wing or spiritually right wing. In other words, the novelist per se will be strictly purgatorial in his narrative intellectuality, whereas the poetic novelist and the philosophic novelist, while still purgatorial, will signify a sort of diabolic/divine dichotomy according with their contrary biases towards either the soul or the spirit. If we take a parliamentary analogue here, which would indeed be the most appropriate political parallel, we could argue that while the novelist per se was a Liberal, the poetic novelist was a Democratic Socialist and the philosophic novelist a Conservative. Yet neither type of extreme novelist would be either a Devil or a God per se, since that presupposes something rather more extreme than them: namely the poet and the philosopher, the former as a creature of (emotional) Hell, and the latter as a creature of (spiritual) Heaven, with, as it were, authoritarian and totalitarian correlations respectively.

2. Of course, there is no reason why a writer who begins as a novelist shouldn't develop into either a poet or a philosopher, thereby abandoning the literary Purgatory for its Hell or Heaven, and presumably via some kind of poetic or philosophic fiction. For, in truth, one cannot get to Hell or to Heaven except via Purgatory, since the intellect is flanked, so to speak, by the soul and the spirit, the former appertaining to the Devil and the latter to God, the intellect being a kind of Son in between the Father and the Holy Ghost, the Son of literature as opposed to the Father of poetry or the Holy Ghost of philosophy, emotions and consciousness no-less cerebral than the mind (intellect) when it comes to their region of principal focus - heart and lungs deferring to brain. Yes, it is this trinity of literary disciplines, viz. poetry, fiction, and philosophy, which towers above the Mother of drama ... as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven tower above the World in transcendental apartness from its mundane essence. Go left from literature per se and you bring yourself to the boundaries of poetry. Go right from literature per se and you bring yourself to the boundaries of philosophy. Poetry is an extreme left-wing damnation which burns in an emotional flame, philosophy, by contrast, an extreme right-wing salvation which soars on a spiritual breath.

3. To rise from the Purgatory of intellect to the Heaven of spirit, passing beyond thought to contemplation of the Eternal, as one's consciousness becomes subjectively attuned to the air one breathes in meditative fashion. The 'right-on' of a progression from the rightness of intellect, always a good starting-point, to the extreme rightness of spirit, thereby achieving that peace which surpasses intellectuality because it comes from being at one with the universal self (of the air).