If You Meet The Hero on the Road, Write Him Off

The problem of the hero is the central problem with my work: how does one proceed when there's no escaping from one's sources? There is a heroic hand at work in mine, questing for grails resonant of grail mothers, battling ogresses of obfuscation, lingering with sonorous succubi who suck my marrow as I nurse that sweet otherworldly undersea sound from their nautilus-shaped breasts, putting a fever on my brow as I tap tap tap tap tap tap tap, trying to safecrack my way into the next room of the dream, using all the tools which ensure that I will fail, my quailing hauling me back inches short of freedom, my fear of motherless chaos the very nature of my puerlike immaturity.

In an earlier post, one way in which one frees oneself from the mythic stereotype of the hero was to let the story fester and rot: the hero is wounded, bleeds, and then coagulates into time, slowing into senex patterns of brooding, darkening, fructifying. (For Death is a reaper and Saturn has his sickle, transforming the emblems of eternal life with a curved smile.)

A second course I assay today -- also from Hillman -- posits that we re-imagine the work itself. The hero is central and superior, banishing all other gods, and makes us believe that our work is divine, heroic, destined for greatness. When I write with an audience in mind (other than the collected spirits in my skull), I try to seduce Fortune; publication is necessary for the collective affirmation which would forge a careerist's world from words. In that effort I have to go against Hillman and Jung and Campbell and Joyce and Pynchon and Shakespeare, the whole Authorial Collective Consciousness, and I greave my sentences so. I mean, why else write?

Yet such an attitude is hounded by the hundred dogs of egoism, including infantilism, pride, self-centeredness, arrogance, certainty, and sterotypy -- a pack of wrong-headedness ripping down my few good impulses. How easy it is to be wrong, certain one is right!

For some time I've been wondering whether I even have been writing poems at all, whether to call those poem-seeming writings "poetry" was worship at the wrong altar. Not art but beauty, rapture, awe, awesomeness: qualities for which art tries to mantle itself in but exist whether one tries to write a poem about it or not.

James Hillman in Healing Fiction tries to draw some of these things out, and what he says outlines this second course quite clearly:

***

... As Jung said, "image is psyche," so where else hear what soul wants than in the images that intimately speak to our psychic conditions. Moreover, these are the voices of the underworld, those of below, the inferiores who speak sotto voce, and this underworld is the preeminent place of soul ... The inferiores are the daimones who inhabit the lower regions -- shadow is the psychological term, and we are brought low, humiliated, shamed when these figures speak their wants. This, not so much because they urge dirty doings, but because we have hidden them away, treated them shamefully, humiliating them by not listening, little caring about the lower reaches of our psychic society.

.. The method of inquiry (or conversing with these inferior images, or engaging in active inferior imagining), is like writing fiction. sometimes it is even called "creative fantasy." The genre comes closest to Bildungsroman: an instructive account of many encounters through with the author is educated -- here by the soul. (pp. 92-3)

***

Commerce with the shadow-realm, the dark images, hunting in Dionysos' wood, where gnomes and ogres and dirty little secrets roam: There my real purposes are exposed, trying to measure up to the father; sing my way back into my mother's voice by the sea; jazz up the humdrum daily rounds of gettin'-later-middle-age; who knows, spear a kindred soul out there, start up that whole soulmate fantasy again (a mouthful of saliva for the penis in this pen). You get little or none of this in the Augustan polish of the prose, the beautiful remove of the anonymous poster, who seems to know all yet nothing.

Dare I let 'em all out of the closet, up from the well, out of the boneyard? Let the skulls swing 'n' sing free? Just what is it that I've buried down there?


WELL TRASH

Maybe this Well's
just a chuckhole
for the used-up
useless verboten:
A trash chute for
idols whose long
horns have been
sworn to trite bumps:
A treasury for
coins of no value,
doubloons of lost
centuries: A hole
for the heads
of betrayers &
stiff tongues of
blasphemers
& the you-know-whats
of stout devilage:
A poop chute
for words which once
were fire & burned
down to carbon
lumps of sour night
-- words like Feral
and
Nubile, 3-Master,
Rocker, Party Animal:
Poet:
A landfill for
truths I can't muster,
those watery halves
of bone symbolons, sooths
no ears gladly receive
-- truths like the
fact that sex is hostility,
that very act my
old hurts won't abide:
Or the truth that
a poem is a bloodless
cousin of the real action
I haven't the balls to
ferry or quarry
much less name:
Toss all in the hole,
tamping down whatever
was first meant to rise:
This shaft has many
tropes: Well: Votive Mouth:
Rude Boneyard: Res
of my forgetting:
Repression's shitpile:
All of it:
Out of my hands
in yours this poem
is just another brace
of pages on a gigapile
of tetrabytes: Oran's
Well is just a nit
of cyber-strange
in a universe of
just as strange:
All of that true
& smelling bad
like a cynic in his
cups or a fat man
sweating fear
or an old man
simply too blithe
in his bucolry
to bathe: The waters
may be cold
and clear but know
they sieve through
a septic field of
rot & ruin &
repressed mayhem,
all my rage at the
God who turns
every burning page:



Why can't this be art? Why can't I get some recognition from the ages for my work? Wah wah, the puer cries on his broken wings of song.

But if I would escape the fate of all art -- its swan song of dire re-wombings back into first waters --- I have to die to the fantasy of the heroic artist. This isn't work for any age but my own, flickers in a bone scriptorium that it is my small job to write down, for better or for verse.

***

"There are differences between fiction writing and active imagination," Hillman writes. (ibid 93). They are structured similarly but their ends are wildly different. The difference between them is between becoming known and knowing one self.

And so, this longer passage from Healing Fiction:

***

... When we study Jung carefully as to why one undertakes active imagination, we find these basic reminders. They can be presented as a via negativa of cautions, similar to the sober restraint that imbues Freud's analytical mode with a religious piety.

1. Active imagination is not a spiritual discipline, not a way of Ignatius or Loyola or of Eastern yoga, for there are no prescribed or proscribed fantasies. One works with the images that arise, not special ones chosen by a master or a code.

2. Active imagination is not an artistic endeavor, not a creative production of paintings and poems. One may aesthetically give form to the images -- indeed one should try as best as one can aesthetically -- though this is for the sake of the figures, in dedication to them and to realize their beauty, and not for the sake of art. The aesthetic work of active imagination is therefore not to be confused with art for exhibition or publication.

3. Active imagination aims not at silence but speech, not at stillness but at story or theatre or conversation. It emphasizes the importance of the word, not the cancellation of the word, and thus the word becomes a way of "relating," an instrument of feeling.

4. Thus it is not a mystical activity, performed for the sake of illumination, for reaching select states of consciousness (samadhi, satori, unity with all things). that would be imposing a spiritual intention upon a psychological activity, that would be a domination of, even a repression of, soul by spirit.

5. Nor, however, does this last mean that active imagination is a psychological activity in only the personal sense -- for the sake of curing symptoms, calming or abreacting terrors and greeds, bettering families, improving and developing personality. Such would be to demean the daimons into personal servants whose concern must then be with problem-solving those delusions we call realities because we have not seen through to their fantasies, their guiding images that project them along.

6. Yet, active imagination is not a psychological activity in the transpersonal sense of theurgy (ritual magic), the attempt to work with images by and for the human will. ... Active imagination becomes popularist superstitious theurgy when we: activate the images artificially (drugs), perform it routinely as a ritualism, foster special effects (synchronicities), further divinitory abilities (turning to inner voices to interpret dreams), use it to augment self-confidence in decisions (power). Each and all of these uses are no longer modes of self-knowledge but of self-aggrandizement, now covered by the innocent label "psychic growth." Faust still pervades, perverts, our Know Thyself, turning it into a drive beyond the limits which that maxim originally implied: "Know that you are but human, not divine." Active imagination would work on the Gods rather than recognizing their workings in us ... (78-9)

... Active imagination, so close to art in procedure, is distinct from it in aim. This is not only because active imagination forgoes an end result in a physical product, but more because its intention is Know Thyself, self-understanding, which is as well its limit -- the paradoxical limit of endlessness that corresponds with the Heraclitean endlessness of psyche itself. (80)

***


ONWARDS

I wonder if the dark so od
and useless enterprise
of getting juiced at 4 a.m.'s
reaches its saturation
when the batteries of
have fully charged on
the hour's noctilucence
and I am freed from poems
at last. Perhaps then I
am freed to write
much other ways, up
from this dungeon of
a writing cell saying
things the world at most
dreams and forgets come
waking light. What a
charge there would be
to know I'm done
with ambling perambles
which plod on and on
the nacre of a thought
with occasional rhyming bots
embroidered in its weave,
across and down the
compulsive page which
always ends awkwardly,
pointed toward unsaid
or unsayables, depositing
me once more at day's
door self-harrowed, another
smoking poem parked
there and nothing left to
do but roll it over to the
mere and let it bubble
and sink to the rear with
all the rest, like a mashed-
down totem of a song no one
but God and I cares much
to hear. A sensitive to dark
energies which may or may
not really be out there
in the cricket piccolos of
our garden late at night,
I've poured these labials
endlessly on a blueblack shore,
endlessly composing bricabracs
of verse with the same
cast of skulls and skiffs,
and womens' breasts and
buckets brimming from
the well of a mordent which
may be hell, or just the
drowned page of my dark
life's long descent into
stereotypical blue cant
no more intelligent than
those crickets' endless
high crone. Me, I'm just plugged
into a dark lady's rear
at the deep end of all
sighing spread nights,
convinced she likes it
best this way. I could
just be deceived
and blithe to all her
protestations which I
hear inside my wife
and through all the
difficulties of one
man's life which do
not rhyme at all, much
less caress to fall
the same dark-sounding
ways I do here at 4:33
a.m. Am I done at last
with the curse of rhyming
verse? Have my meters
ticked off the deepest
levels of the pool? That's
a query for my God, though
I let you listen in. In London
it's a much more fraught
commute with the smell
of cordite tanging up the
morning air. Off the southeast
coast of this state
Hurricane Dennis charges
up the breech no verse
boat of mine has
ever found the ample
sail to reach. I'm brimming
with dark waters now
Lord, my roosts are overgrown.
Grant me ways to rip this out
and begin anew the work.
Harvest what you can
of awe's awfullest murk.
Spin me on to further coasts
beyond this furthermost.