primordial origin of all creation

Text version:

Hello!

I'm here to review this great poem!
So - firstly, I'll just say that I really liked how you thought a lot about this, and I find it cool that you put your thoughts into a poem, and I find it even cool-er that you shared it with us - so thank you!!!

What I also really enjoyed was the structure of your poem. On the right side, "why should I fear it?" with explanations to it. On the left side, "why am I not afraid?" with explanations to it too. And conecting the two, like a sort of bridge or staircase, your thoughts on pleroma.
Ok, here I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea what a pleroma is, and when I tried searching it on the internet that did nothing but confuse me. I'm really sorry! Also, when I searched 'Carl Jung', the result was a lot of words in psy- and I didn't get much either. So I won't be able to help on the middle part, even though I love how it makes a bridge between the two almost opposite but really simmilar thoughts, and I'm sure I could figure out a lot of deeper meaning into it if I understood it. Sorry again!

I think I understand where your reflections are trying to lead me, but I'm not a very phylosophical kind of person, so if I accidentaly write a lot of nonsense please don't be offended! I beleive that what you are saying is that the place in which we were before we were born is the same as where we will go after dying, and that in the first part you say that one shouldn't be affraid, since it is naught but the same thing, and in the second part you wonder why you're not affraid, since you say that there is nothing there, and you say that you would lose everything from life and on-earth.
Then you have some deep questions from this, like "Was I dead before I was born" and that everything is a cycle - are you inducing that you think one is reborn after one dies? - or, cycles through this infinitly? I think that my brain starts losing the thread of everything after that, it becomes all mixed up with the different thoughts and meanings and things and I can't follow you.

Was I alive before I was born, placed in a beautiful pit of Hell?

Hi hi. So! There’s actually a pretty interesting philosophical center here, and I think the Jung/pleroma idea gives you something much stranger and more specific than the more general “what happens before/after death?” material. But right now I think the poem spends too much time explaining the philosophy instead of making me experience it.

"Was I dead before I was born, in this place?
Because, if death is like the before, why should I fear it?
Should I be scared to be what I was for an eternity, in my rest?"

I like the question you're beginning with. The basic thought (if nonexistence before birth didn't bother me, why should nonexistence after death?) is an old one, but that's not necessarily a problem. The problem is that these first three lines are almost entirely conceptual. “Dead,” “born,” “death,” “before,” “fear,” “eternity,” “rest”: these are all enormous words, and we're getting a LOT of them before you've given us anything physical to grab onto.

Also, “in this place” feels sort of stranded in the first line. What place? The body? Earth? consciousness? the pleroma? If the ambiguity is intentional, I don't think it's doing enough yet. Same with “in my rest.” It has this vaguely biblical/funerary tone, but doesn't really give me anything that “death” hasn't already given me.

"I would return to the earth, the same way I came,
Becoming everything, regaining beauty, destruction, hatred,
A cycle that cycles through itself. Why then, are we so afraid?"

Okay, this is where I start getting more interested, especially with “Becoming everything.” But then “beauty, destruction, hatred” feels like you're listing Big Important Concepts because they're Big Important Concepts. What does it mean to regain hatred? What does hatred look like when there isn't an individual consciousness there to hate? There's a potentially fascinating idea underneath this, that decomposition returns the self to a world containing every opposite, but you're summarizing it instead of letting the poem discover it.

The cycle idea is also one I'd really look at. I understand what you're getting at, the self-containing cycle (something ouroboros-y), but right now it's tautological. A cycle already cycles. Give me the weird thing it does!

"My pleroma, every opposite cancelled out by the other, the death and creation of duality."

I like what you're trying to do here much more than I like the sentence itself. “The death and creation of duality” is conceptually muddy because the pleroma, as you're presenting it, seems to be the place/state in which dualities cease to matter, so why is duality simultaneously being created? Maybe that's intentional, that destruction itself generates distinction, but if so you need to tease that out more!

And I'm not sure about: "why am I not afraid?" because earlier you ask, "Why then, are we so afraid?" So you've gone from collective fear to personal lack of fear, which COULD be an interesting turn, but right now I don't know why the speaker has changed. Did the meditation actually resolve something? Did thinking about the pleroma remove the fear?

Love the concept here though! I doooo think you have two poems fighting each other here. One is a fairly familiar meditation on not fearing death because we didn't experience the time before birth. The other, and MUCH more interesting one, in my opinion, is about the body creating duality, death dissolving boundaries, and the pleroma being not an afterlife exactly but the annihilation of distinctions between self/world, creation/destruction, absence/presence. I would build outward from those.

I am not used to this website yet, so I hope this is an ok review!!!!
~ Emmy :3

Hey! I have to say a few words about this beautiful poem of yours! Firstly, I really like the way you try to imagine the existence beyond the known borders of our world.

I like the way one of the first lines of yours immediately brings the idea of “primordial origin” into the picture. To me, such a concept means the point where everything merges and turns into one single substance because it is no longer possible to distinguish the creation and destruction (which obviously are the two sides of the same coin). And I think that the further development of the idea confirms this train of thought.

Moreover, I really like the way you use the oppositions in your poem. You bring the ideas of beauty and destruction, existence and non existence, life and death close to each other. They become almost identical in your poem because you place them next to each other.

I also like the line “be afraid of what you were before you existed” it is a bit of an unusual thought, but it immediately strikes the reader’s conscience because, actually, most people fear non existence and approaching the end. But here, this common thought is twisted in such a way that it becomes scary even to think about the reverse side of the known things.

The reference to Carl Jung and the concept of the pleroma has also sparked my interest and given a lot of meaning to your poem, in my opinion. Although honestly, I had some difficulties understanding several lines because they seemed too profound. I think that you could have separated some thoughts with line breaks and made the readers breathe while they read. But again, this is a question of taste only.

And last but not least, I like the way you “return” the cycle at the end of the poem it makes it feel as if it did not finish, in fact. It creates this additional effect of continuous motion, which is, perhaps, exactly the point of the poem.

Lovely work! I really enjoyed sitting with your poem and meditating on its meaning. It left me with quite a few thoughts to ponder! <3