Harrowed Plus

Photo: Summer storm ebbs into night, Fern Park, Florida, c. 1982

Summer's thresh and thrall augments now in massive seabreeze fronts which have gone a-wilding over Central Florida every late afternoon this week, the sunny brilliance of noon clotting with turgid fleeting clouds until all is shadowed, pent, then ripped by jagged cocks of lightning which split then peal ball-cracking waves of thunder and the rain falls in whiteout, drowning gouts of heaven which quickly turn streets into miasmas of sloggy water. Whew. This between Hurricane Dennis which veered north last week and Emily hammering ports south and the conga-line of next hurricanes jiving behind them, waiting their turn. (Nothing like a saturated water table to greet a hurricane.)

It's a wicked, bewitched time in season, awesome and awful, making the human thresh on the day's surface fearful and bitchy and worn. Yesterday I ran from my car into the gym amid lightning bolts profuse as the crimes in Karl Rove's soul; safe inside and changing into my gym rat duds from soggy street clothes, suddenly all the lights went out. Lightning had apparently taken out the main power. A few moments later the backup lights came on, but the presence of the season grips far down. I worried about my wife driving back home from her from Oviedo, about the cats cowering on our back porch, about whether my wife had unplugged computers, sewing and embroidery machines, the TV and stereo before leaving for the day.
Driving home the front had muscled past leaving everything drenched, the sky sort of greeny-gray in the last of day, a traffic light knocked out, a car off in ditch half-covered with water. Big juice in the days though I'm not sure there's any access to it.

***

It seems I have harrowed my poetic Themes sufficiently to cease needing to write them. Since 1999 I've put some 2000 poems to paper, a daily vowel movement which has rowed from theme to theme as if on (or down) waters of history and mystery, misery and cock-struttin' rue. I've told my story under the thrall of music, plunged my errant ecstasies on a forbidden beach; gone down the bottle and back up again, made of that God-sized hole a well sacred to a saint who once swam down it in search of the old sea gods; sprinted three dozen tiny applets of verse engineered to ferry single drops of that well-water to waking sense; imagined my writing chair as a crannog or man-made island just offshore of one of the local lakes -- a place for the manufacture of weaponry and song; followed a swamp gator down the long road I commute every day; climbed back into a tiny boat (my white writing chair) and rowed isle to isle in search of a Thou; found myself down at the low end of the known world where oceans greet and clash at infernally wild Capes (evidence Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope); finally (or of late) returning to sit in my chair looking out at the dark garden at 4 a.m. and finding amperage in a figure I imagine standing by the birdbath, my garden muse, angel of daily matins.

(You can see blogs on some of that process -- the rowings-about at www.immrama.blogspot.com and the Cape/Dark Garden meditations at www.capeblue.blogspot.com)

Each peramble (lasting between 2 and 18 months) was like a transit of the otherworld, or one room or dimension of it; and writing my way through it (in the dream-rhetoric of poetry), eventually I'd soaked the theme, or it me, leaving me feeling, well, harrowed, as if the rigor of the peramble had emptied the need to name that theme sufficiently to the point where there was nothing to do but go on.

And then last week the whole process slowed to a halt. I hadn't gone more than 2 days without drafting a poem in more than six years, and I've gone six days now without needing or wanting or feeling compelled to write another one. Thus I begin this new blog in the dimension of prose (though I give myself permission to throw in the occasional poem if it fits the post).

I proceed here -- to harrow another theme, or to query what there is to do after harrowing? So I may find reengagement in another genre (harrowing via the prose assay). Or I may develop a different rhetoric than that of harrowing. Or this may be the next room of saying farewell to the entire process of writing. I threw my guitar down the well back in the late '80s when that music finally seemed exhausted in me; I took up studies, writing, poetry; perhaps now that next articulation needs to be chucked in the well completely, and another voice found and developed. (So I begin to include images in this process.)

Serial monogamy, or fidelity to the polymorphous perverse? That's for deeper minds than mine to decide.

***

Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness gives a more scholarly account of what I call harrowing:



The assimilation of unconscious contents, in whatever form, leads not only to an enrichment of the conscious material but to an enrichment of libido, which makes itself felt, subjectively, as an excitement, vivacity, and a joy that sometimes borders on intoxication; and, objectively, as a heightening of interest, a broadened and intensified capacity for work, mental alertness, etc.

In the process of realizing and assimilating an unconscious content, the ego makes a "descent," from the conscious standpoint, into the depths, in order to raise up the "treasure." In terms of psychic energy, the pleasure of the "conquering hero" arises from the combination of conscious libido with that of the newly acquired content which is incorporated.

(Footnote: The descent is from the conscious to the unconscious and thus the reverse of the creative process which starts in the unconscious and works upwards. Manifestations of the unconscious in the form of images, ideas, thoughts, etc., are experienced by the ego as pleasurable. The joy of the creative process springs from the suffusion of consciousness with the libido of the hitherto unconsciously activated content. The pleasure and enrichment of libido resulting from conscious realization and creativity are symptomatic of a synthesis in which the polarity of the two systems, conscious and unconscious, is temporarily suspended.

***
A suspension of the conscious and unconscious polarity, yes: or an exquisite heightening of it. I and Thou merged in the medium of song, the poem as dreamer in the dark house, the harrower of dark realms. Pleasurable indeed, sufficient to destroy most of my ambitions to get some recognition for the work. No dayside employment for the poems, zoned beyond that, out on the margins, in the wastes, in the living lucent dark, I dunno: something shamanic about it, an initiation ceremony of many years' duration, morning after morning of the same process of diving down, naming things (or motions -- nouns or verbs), then swimming back up to start the real day.

Sufficient, yes, but that work cannot raise any real cathedrals. The ground is too porous. When it begins to look like a civilized activity, then some of the original thrall disappears. Maybe that's what I'm feeling these days, like Huck Finn ready to light out for the boonies again, leaving behind so many named and known things.

Neumann again:

What was originally experienced only as a vague something "in the depths," charged with energy and hence very real and fascinating, becomes, as a conceptual content, and item of thought, freely maneuverable by the mind and applicable at will. Such content has certainly gained in utility value, but only at the cost of forfeiting an essential part of its libido charge to consciousness as a whole.

***

So how to get that charge amped up again? Let the batteries rest, or board a different horse?