The Great Bells of Heaven (1)

The rounds -- away and back home -- which have defined my most crucial engagements in The Life, my marriages, my endless labors in the service of Love, my hardest work, my most foolish gambits, my nobility, my errancy, the endless reforging of the sentences -- these rounds follow the hero archetype, or are grooved in him.

Perhaps damned by him, at least in any sense of a modernity emerging from traditionalism, for there is only so far he can go, a zenith to his strivings which necessarily must return back to earth, back to mater, the mother, in all of the forms I've reiterated here. The hero ALMOST breaks free, that's his strength, yet he ALWAYS returns home -- that's secret source and end of his strength, harbored in his heart of hearts.


HERO

actually a new poem

His strength comes from a father
no one has the balls to know.
Instead he wrestles waves
and harrows maids with mothers.
No living thing on earth can best him
unless you count the figure in
his heart, that blue wave-back
which loves a shirt of fire. When hot,
he shoots his arrows at the sun,
arousing torment doubly dire.


Wallace Stevens suggests, poetry is the act of an intelligence which resists reality ALMOST successfully -- that ALMOST being the difference between the sublime and the mad (or dead).

Ah but how to calibrate the distance? How far can one go to discover the unknown, the new? Who reconnoiters the territory beyond the hero's sacred and tenacious poetic? How many gods and mothers and academic faculties must be outraged? Do I have the tooth to do it? Do I have the

BALLS

2002

The greatest things I've cared to do
I couldn't for lack of balls.

Standing at the arch
of something bold and real

sharp with the salt whiff
of an unsponsored fling,

I wimped out, returning a halved man
to safe and known, less scathing pursuits.

I left my own Christian God
behind but could not fission

the emptiness into a new divine
spark. And so sanctified mere hunger.

Couldn't hold on to that guitar
savagely enough to hack away

the useless ties of love and fame.
Sober for a while, I couldn't leave

it behind, and so spoiled every
next drink I tried. I left my wife

but couldn't fuck like a yahoo
due to remorse and a useless conscience.

In every way I've failed as a passionate
man, seeing what I could be

and then, biting my nails, returned
to what I simply was. Told to shit

or get off the pot, I lumbered away,
sorry to have even tried. Cronos had

the balls to sickle his father's off,
making him the Dude of Time.

Having failed myself, I became
time's motleyed food, a plate of

steaming huevos rancheros fresh
clipped from the bull who stood

at his real life and couldn't,
each I can't a clangorous snip.

I became a map bordered by all
I wouldn't, a safe land, perhaps,

certainly one fit for marriage and
sobriety and long slow accomplishment.

Where might I be had I more balls?
Surely a bright clangorous place of

bronze and steel blades, piled high
with trophies, notched belts, prizes

and booty, the long stain of burnt
bridges and homes with no way

to look back. Having become the
Knight of Time, ceaseless, unburdened,

up to the knees in blood and lime.


Yes, well you can blame it on the personal pathology, me growing up the weaker second son, always getting pinned by my bigger older brother, always losing to his might, his brute anger. Words were they way I fought back with him, calling him the most hurtful name I could stew in my spleen, throwing it like a dagger between his shoulders as he walked off from pinning me again ...

And there's the boy desperately in need of a father, his father's approval, the father busy with career, careening in his own hurtful woods, all love and smiles when he was home, in those moments we had together, and then gone, vamoosed into the wilderness of his closet, his fallen father, his own fatherless voyage, trying to sail free of every mother. Instruction I didn't get from him, especially in the practical arts, like how to carve a decent balsawood car for the Cub Scout soapbox derby, he was out of town, conversing with Thor on Iona I guess, so I have to carve the fucker myself and the result was miserable, a weak flaccid tiny ridiculous-looking knockoff of a real race car, I was so embarrassed by the thing I didn't even enter it into the contest, how could I? I can't the shadow which dreams of the perfect hero, the Bond, the one who knows all and does all, who beats the brutal evil other and gets the girl.

The hero is fatherless -- Cronos cuts off his father Uranus' balls with a sickle, Herakles never meets his father Zeus, the Irish Lugh is sired by a faery king and born from a virgin -- so his myth may be the quintessential fantasy of the fatherless son, the one who imagines what might and potency might be in the form of human -- his antithesis -- or the hero archetype is what wakens in the dearth of the father, the unconscious compensation for fatherlessness. (Indeed, Jung says that consciousness is the son of the mother unconscious, though its paternity is a mystery).

The older hero figures -- Herakles with his club, the Cerne giant flaunting both club and clublike dick -- are figures of brute strength. This figure is a mental midget but a titan of feeling; he's all heart, sulphuric in passion, equally loving and fatal. The wily hero seems to have come later, strength replaced by intelligence, hammerlike club morphed into empurpled consciousness. This guy has balls -- not big swollen ones like Herakles, but the sort of boundary-breaking audacity which has always pushed things forward in our civilization. Sez Goethe: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

But personal psychology only carries things so far, its history far too literal to read its literate (and metaphorical) underpinnings. My history has had so many errant gambits of the hero, confusing jaunts in the wild blue, battles with projected dragons, pure stupidity (the tenacious heart which will not let go of a desire, even when it knows it to be false). When I recount the labors of my life -- my errancies and gambols down in the soul-forges -- I do so anonymously, hoping to render my history fictive, mythic, moot in the courts of the real but tenderable in the hothouse of psyche. I dunno if it helps me to live a better life -- it does provide some transparency to it, helps me to see through my own foolishess into its fuel-rich dark dominions -- And I don't know if it will help me to write my way out of the rounds which have so far limited my writing, taunting me to risk while at the same time calling me back to the crashing strand of my mother the sea.

As I loose history into the waters of mystery, so I try to loosen other literalisms. The hero isn't just a male myth, but an gnomon of the male part of my psyche; I'm entranced with him perhaps in a womanly way, impressed with his strenth & gusto & potency (my oh my, what big balls you have ...) He looks the way I think women like to see men, his muscles hauling in their attention; yet I've always fooled myself trying to appear the way women seem to desire that hero; women have often told me they desire far other strengths.

And yet the hero serves women, he is their darling, the glorious child, the stunning youth, the protector of the realm. My wife needs a hero to make our home safe, provide a living, keep the grass from growing in through the back door. She also has her own heroic strivings, battling free of the mother, creating a nest wholly her own, a trade that sells; she too battles unconscious demands and urges and compulsions and fears, wielding a sword as hefty as my own; she brandishes a club heavier than mine when we face off in a conflict, surer in the way of she-lion protecting her brood. So the gender-specific read gets lost in polysexual mix, a mix so confusing it's better just to adopt the attitude of big 'n' dumb Herakles and just blunder on with the work.