Ur-Poesis

The Marriage of Oberon and Titania (Die Hochzeit von Oberon und Titania) John Anster Fitzgerald

The incursion of the Other is an act of ritual theater. It aims to inflict an ontological trauma, or, more precisely, a series of ontic detonations that form a shockwave pattern upon the cognitive framework. It assails by indescribable suggestions of a “beyond region,” of another scheme of life. Nodal lines of apophatic terror impress a kryptogon upon the mind’s surface, like a cymatic lockpick. This sigil of monstrum involves itself with the torus of consciousness and establishes a “zone of interference,” a standing wave like a black rainbow which arcs the threshold between the normal and the supernormal. There is something from the Outside waging oneiric warfare on the waking mind, in order to penetrate the deepest parts of the self.

The so-called Oz Factor, the sudden overwhelming silence that often heralds “high strangeness”, can be thought of as an observance of this ritual process, where every sound in the forest has united with its noumenal inversion, resulting in absolute silence. It is the sound of the real superimposed with the supra-real, the Forest of the Other.

For the percipient, the liminoid waveform may be experienced variably as paralysis, time shifts, trance states, and hypnagogic virtual environments such as the inside of a spacecraft, or a bizarre, otherworldly “fairy realm”. This is the grail of ur-poesis, the eternally recurring folklore of the wild man, elves, forest spirits, and faeries so fundamental that they return again and again in fiction, our dreams or intrude into our waking life as cryptids and UFOs.