Thompson June 22 1949

richard stodart Lewis Thompson Journal Entries

The text above the head in my painting of Lewis Thompson is the final entry to his journal before his death on June 23, 1949.
In my opinion it expresses his positive embrace of language as the bearer of realization.
22.VI.49.
Poetry.
The discipline of fidelity to the non-mental in poetry—mastery of all tendency to substitute, elaborate, concoct, continue with the mind—deepening the non-mental ‘sensation’, state or image, the usual starting point of a poem, vertically into the trans-mental—‘pure poetry’; psychic and intellectual concentration, and the formal resources of the mind, entirely serving this possibility and subsumed in its working out. Then each poem must become an extremely conscious ‘samadhi’, an exploration, with the fullest means available, of the true Moment.
And this discipline is for an immediate and congenial means of beginning to ‘go beyond the mind”—of attaining and establishing a purely transmental vision and speech.