ABSTRACT
The value of wordless experience has been affirmed since the beginning of recorded words. Is wordless experience possible with the advent of verbal language? Words are an avenue, a conduit, but at a certain point, wordless processing takes over. One of the great functions of poetry is to find the thrill of the wordless through words. Wordless, imageless being is all that is left. Word components were important but wordless sensing more so, as an inner barrier began to lift. Wordless, imageless faith in unknowable reality and wordless, imageless transformations that go on in reality. So much transformational work goes on in reality deeper than dream. Bion speaks of a "felt need" in us for unconscious processing, including a need to convert conscious experience into dream, a need often "obscured by the analyst's insistence on interpretation of the dream". Even in dreams there are holes, openings, caesuras, blank spots, the thrill of the void.
