The language of mystics and the language of poets bear similarities. Paradox, metaphor, accumulating parallel syntax, negations, and silence are techniques used for the ineffable, for saying what cannot be said. In The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, Dorothee Soelle describes the obstacle of language itself when it comes to describing a mystical experience. Ecstasy comes from the Greek word, ek-stasis, meaning to stand alongside or step outside. In the multiplicity of experience, among a commotion of things, the mystic experiences unity and peace. This experience has been named in different ways: wonder, joy, awe, amazement. Soelle says, “language is incapable of communicating the experience of oneness.” As Teresa of Avila says in her prayer: “Lord, give me other words.” These other words that mystics and poets use are so moving:
Written by a fourteenth century anonymous monk to instruct others in contemplation, The Cloud of Unknowing, seems to be based on the premise that it is impossible to know God, that the experience is best described as the Cloud of Unknowing.:
When I say ‘darkness,’ I mean a privation of knowing…which is between you and your God….If ever you come to this cloud, and live and work in it, as I bid you, just as this cloud of unknowing is above you, between you and your God, in the same way you must put beneath you a cloud of forgetting, between you all the creatures that have ever been made.
