where I saw something shaped like a llama - why read visionary writing?

"I descended a dark stairway and found myself in the streets. Posters were being put up, advertising the opening of a casino and describing in detail the prizes being offered. The printed framing of the posters consisted of garlands of flowers, so well-drawn and -colored that they looked real... I entered the workshop where I saw something shaped like a llama, but apparently to be equipped with large wings. This monster was somehow being injected with a jet of fire which was gradually bringing it to life, so that it writhed about, penetrated by hundreds of crimson networks to form arteries and veins fecundating, as it were, the inert matter; its exterior was being covered instantaneously by a full growth of fibrous appendages, pinions and tufts of wooly hair."

I hadn't really quoted from any of Gérard de Nerval's hallucinatory visions yesterday. This is from one of my favorites. It ends with Nerval feeling that he "was damned, perhaps, for having attempted, in violation of divine law, to probe into a forbidden mystery."

I'm a mild-mannered, common-sensical fellow. I read, mostly, mild-mannered, common-sensical books, written by authors imaginatively engaging with a world I recognize as my own.

I've read - not understood, not hardly, but read - all of William Blake and puzzled over the mysteries of The Four Zoas. I've read a fair amount of Friedrich Hölderlin, another poetic madman, an imaginative cousin of Nerval's. Who else? Novalis, I didn't understand Novalis at all. Thomas de Quincey, where at least the mechanism (opium) and the psychology are a little easier for me to grasp. Aurélia actually echoes The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in places, one of the few works that I'm certain Nerval pilfered. Poor Jones Very, who thought he was Christ. Emily Brontë', on the more comprehensible end of the spectrum. The esoteric Golem novel of Gustav Meyrink is another example - tarot cards, Kabbalah, secret mysteries, all of that stuff.

The visionary writers present such a powerful challenge. They're endlessly interpretable, endlessly frustrating. Sometimes it seems that if I only decode one more reference, or fit in place one more image, then the whole thing will be clear, and I will share the wisdom the poet has gathered from the stars or the sea or the deepest abyss of his brain. I don't actually believe that; rather, I suspect that most of this work is poetically stimulating but rationally unapproachable, even incoherent, the meanings too private.

What I find valuable in Aurélia is that the narrator shares my reservations. He marvels at the symbolic wonders revealed to him, but can never quite turn it all into a single system. Hints of meaning are everywhere, but ultimate meaning escapes him. Nerval would love to clue me in, but he doesn't know how. It's poignant, actually.

But what great poem or fiction does not work this way, the author and reader both wrestling with meaning, neither quite capturing it all? Nerval merely lays bare some of the assumptions.