The fact of aging and death is so painful to contemplate that, ordinarily, one looks away, thus the final concern is resolved, if ever, at moments of crisis.  In these poems, a very real effort was made to confront the subject directly, including the fear, sorrow and helplessness it brings to daily life, and whatever spiritual meaning there might be in the  experiences, it is glimpsed as an afterthought of symbolic and mystical light. 

 Secular mysticism?  Mysticism without religion?  That sounds contradictory, even impious, but the idea is explored in a rational and respectful manner in The Simultaneous Mountain.  Dr. Depta maintains that a human being achieves union, not with a transcendent entity but with the universe.  Thus his view of mysticism is materialistic, monistic and atheistic.

Forgoing metaphor, symbol and myth, he explains the ineffable experience existentially.  The center of meaning is the self-conscious individual who achieves consciousless union with the universe.  Before union occurs, the individual reaches a state of "transubjectivity" (free of mental and sensory distractions) and the universe becomes "transobjective" (free of causation and contingency).  

After the ineffable union, the individual perceives that the universe has no meaning in human terms but that its "inhumanness" is the source of desirelessness and an ethical life.  Liberation from want brings joy, harmony and peace.  Liberation also brings the freedom to be compassionate.  

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The Silence of Blackberries is the fifth volume of poetry by Victor Depta. The poems are a mystical exploration of nature and the self at the end of our millennium. "What is common in bliss," says the poet, whose subject is not the great spectacles of nature, the Rockies or the Grand Canyon, but the creeks and hills of West Virginia and Tennessee. The poet describes that natural world--its small valleys and streams, its trees and flowers, insects and weeds--but does so with a mystical perspective. That world is integral to the universe, which is unitary and holy, and the poet becomes aware of that unity and holiness through quiet meditation. As the poet says, "the peaceableness which, once again, claims me, achingly, with the question of the silence of blackberries." 

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This book is not about the romance (or something less) that goes on in rented rooms by the roadside every minute of every day across America. It is about a romance with motels. A kind of love and passion for the impermanence they indicate and, more so, necessitate.

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A southern family, it seems, is naturally eccentric, and more so a southern mountain family, generations old, educated and genteel. Their language ripples through the centuries from Donne to Yeats, from Bradstreet to Stevens. Family members are introduced by the youngest member whose voice is ironic and humorously surreal. He listens to their voices, which are meditative and unconsciously mystical as they explain and reconcile their metaphysical and religious dilemmas.

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The sixties was a difficult time for Americans, including those in their late twenties, those too old for service in Vietnam yet young enough, while in graduate school, to drug themselves excessively while protesting the war and reading Henry James. The man in this book of poems is recovering from a nervous breakdown while attempting to be a husband and a father. His grasp on the situation is humorous, painful and often surreal. He copes, though stumblingly, with his new responsibilities as a parent and a faithful spouse.

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In the 70's, when the roles of husbands and wives were loosened, a few men found themselves single parents. Suddenly, the child, with its insistent vitality and needs, became the father's foremost reality. His values were no longer exclusively objective--his professional ambition--but were also subjective--a relation with the child based on responsibility, sacrifice and altruism--and those values, as they shifted in terms of roles, were no longer male or female. They became human values.

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In the days when the earth was young (that was in the 60’s) and everything back in the mountains of West Virginia was joyful, the poems in The Creek—humorously surreal and celebratory—marked the beginning of Vic Depta’s writing career, which has now spanned forty-five years.  The style is reminiscent of that generation—Ginsberg, Koch, Wakoski—though the setting is rural and the theme concerns family, the environment, and overtures of his later mystical development.

The Creek, published in 1973 by Ohio University Press, has long been out of print.  However, facsimiles are available from Blair Mountain Press. 

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