The Wounded Heel (part two)

What is this motif of laming, the wounded body while the spirit deepens, soars?

***

"Achilles' heel, Oedipus (swellfoot), Herakles (the crab at Lerna), Alexander the Great (wounded in the ankle), Ulysses' leg, Jason's single sandal, Philoctes, Bellepheron who limps -- all these are marked by the foot. Does the fact that every man descended from Eve shall be bruised in the heel by the serpent say that each of us is susceptible to the puer?

"The wounded foot (and its reverse, the winged feet of Hermes and seven-league flight boots) says something basic about the puer condition. His stance, his position is marked in such a way that his condition with res extensa is hindered, heroic, and magical. The spirit does not fully reach downward into the world, since at that place of contact with the world, the puer is deathly weak.

"...When transcendent, Heaven's son, the puer, is superb -- like Bellepheron on Pegasus piercing through illusions; but when fallen onto earth, like Bellepheron, the spirit limpingly drags itself around Aleion, 'the plains of wandering.'"

-- James Hillman, "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar," in Puer Papers

***

Yes, all those dreams of wounded walking, walking, walking, endlessly through a necropolis, through deadened suburbs, through all the stations of a night, my car broken down, the sense of desolate duty in the peregrination, forced to circumnambulate every station of Hell to satisfy the spirit's unslakable ferocity ...

***

"The link back to the Great Mother, the ground and origin, passes through the anima princess, for she is the abyss of the feminine in altered personal form. Only in her does the female become man's partner. His help consists essentially in delivering the princess from the power of the dragon, in conjuring her forth from the dragon shape which distorts her and her humanity, as illustrated by the numerous myths and folk tales dealing with the theme of disenchantment.

"... The union of male and female (hero and princess, not the Great Mother, with whom no relations on equal terms are possible), inside and outside, bears fruit in the culture hero and founder of kingdoms, in the family, or in creative work."

-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

***

What you run from is what you run to, and every man descended from Eve will be bruised in the heel by the serpent of her lavish embowering smile. Thus the uroburos completes her fate in all.


***

A welter of lamings nail me to this difficult ground:

In the lamia of sex who coils and writes and cries for union down under, beneath the bedcovers of blue thunder. Who is she, bad girl in the woods touching me in every wrong way; telos of my mother's admonition that there's more to life than a bed a babe & a bottle of booze; the fangs which pierce me through my eyes when I see some utterly fuckable naiad stretched out on a bed of blue sheets, every nakedness revealed in a sprawl of wild welcome:

Laming In the flame which jets from my side of those wild hips, throwing caution to the wind and going hellbent for coition, ignition, cognition; Latin cognoso, "I know," also "I am born"; and the mess afterward, me drunk & empty & hating life in the overbrilliant horns of the life I will never measure up to, never amount to much, never truly woo Her from her lair.

Thus the lament, the third handle, flame's consequence, Phaeton shattered on the ground having grazed the sun, Bellepheron walking amid the wounded shades, the old spent man of the Sphinx's riddle walking on three, aided with a cane. Lament one of the naiads who lingers within, perhaps, as Rilke writes in his 8th Sonnet to Orpheus, "the youngest sister / among the deities hidden in our heart," and is the muse and measure of our long sad education on this earth, for --

Joy knows, and Longing has accepted --
only Lament still learns; upon her beads,
night after night, she counts the ancient curse.
(transl. Stephen Mitchell)

As youngest sister, as princess and not implacable unfuckable worlds-drowning Great Mother, she is the one we come to marry, enter time with, finally get started with a life beyond the shores of an eternally tossed bed.

To be married is to eternally bleed, all my vulnerabilities and foolishness and inconstancy and fear exposed, my visage no longer a young man's, wrinkling, teeth yellowing, attended by migraines and a recently reinjured shoulder impingement which will severely restrict the exercise I still think I can hammer like a young man. To be married is to be nailed to the real and walk the confines of responsibilities to a house. It is to learn the husbandry of cats and yard and finances and health, not as an all-knowing James Bond (what good would he be here?), but as an eternally foolish and horny and clumsy-as-a-gawky-teen near 50 year old Getting On with the life, writing it down, coil after coil, tooth after tongue, nail into foot, cock into wife, love from a life.

***

According to Graves, the heel is the one vulnerable point of sacred kings:

"Witness the heel of Achilles pierced by Paris's arrow; the heel of Talus pierced by Medea's pin; the heel of Diarmuid pierced by the bristle of the Benn Gulban Boar; the heel of Harpocrates stung by the scorpion; the heel of Balder (in the Danish version of the myth) pierced by the mistletoe flung by the god Holder at the instigation of Loki; the heel of Ra stung by the magic snake sent by Isis; the heel of Mopsus the Lapith stung by the black snake of Libya, the heel of Krishna in the Mahabharata, pierced by the arrow which his brother Jara the Hunter shot. Talus is closely related to Achilles in Apollodorus's version of the myth, where the cause of his death is given as a wound in the foot from an arrow shot by Hercules's heir, Poeas. (The White Goddess)

Regarding Oedipus and the significance of the wounded foot. To me the story is primal in origin, part of symbolic matrix which has to do with our walking out of the primitive past: first leaving the sea (as the moon broke from the sea), then walking upright, leaving behind our primate ancestors. And then there is the slow walk away from Mother, the old matriarchal faith, a break which is now enacted in puberty.

A critical part of his tale occurs when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx of Thebes. The Sphinx -- one of the strongholds of the fading matriarchal religion -- had the face of a woman, the chest, feet and tail of a lion, and the wings of a bird. She sat on Mount Phikion and asked the Thebans a riddle:

What is it that first goes on four, then on two and eventually on three?

Each time the Thebans gave a wrong answer, she ate one of them. Here is the devouring mother, an unconscious relation which was dominant and irresistable.

(Note: Rachel Caron in The Sea Around Us notes that the moon has very slowly drifted away from the earth. Millions of years ago, the tides were monstrous because of the moon's stronger gravitational haul on the the sea -- tides would rush hundreds of miles inshore and back every day. I think the relation with the old matriarchal consciousness -- a sort of pre-consciousness or subconsciousness which surrounds the eventual emergence of consciousness -- similarly had the same pull on our psyches. No wonder the evolution of the hero tale, the one who successfully battles free of the mother, begin about the time that this old dominion is starting to fade.)

Back to the story: Many perished failing to answer the riddle of the Sphinx, including eventually Haemon, son of Creon -- ruler since the death of Laius, the previous king. Creon then announced he'd give the kingship and Laius' widow (his sister Jocasta) to whoever solved the riddle.

Oedipus, on his way from Delphi, gave the answer: "Man" -- because first as a child he walks on all fours, then as an adult he walks on two,and as old man walks on three (with the aid of cane, though I envision a different appendage here that devoutly stout member of male difference ... perhaps the old man walks with a cane because his feet are so lamed ...)

(Also, though it's easy to read his answer "Man" as part of the masculine dominance of the era, but the answer is also specifically Man -- patriarchal consciousness, the forward-striving, analytical, brilliant, serpent-killing style of psyche. "Man" is the answer to the love-death of the Sphinx, the way out of the ancient harrowing labyrinth of pre-consciousness.)

The Sphinx throws herself off the acropolis into the sea -- returning back to first sources.

Well, Oedipus solves the riddle of the old faith but throws himself directly into his Oedipal crisis, falling into the old incest taboo of the son/lover by becoming fated to marry his mother. Oedipus, like a first amphibian to leave the sea, cannot remain on shore for long, and is quickly subsumed by the vengeance of waves. He will be served up to that drowned Sphinx when he unknowingly (of course) makes love to his mother.

The tragedy is a perfect orchestration of the mythologem of the wounded foot. We walk up and out from the nourishing abyss, driven to embrace it once again. If our civilization has progressed much since the days of Oedipus -- and it has, in all of the light-soaked, technical ways -- we remain deeply wounded in the feet, unable to solve the riddle of our own sexuality, with its Sphinxlike breasts and wings and vicious, awful teeth.

***

Well, today the shoulder seems better, despite all the work from the weekend I couln't avoid -- back to the work week, eternally tap tap tapping on the keyboard, responsibilities to shoulder, divine freight to ferry, this bigass post to upload. A big loving life. Who would not sing? Nor ache?



GHOULPLAST

2004


I found a skull in the
back yard, on the front
seat of a rusted-out
car sitting on blocks.
I once owned it, the
skull I mean, well
the car too, I wore
both out on the merry
marauding road of
guitars and bars
and tits in jars on
too-high shelves. I
found it there, the
skull I mean, while
I was looking for
another poem, rummaging
through fallen oak
leaves for a broken
snake, I mean its
tail cut off, chewed
off probably by one
of the cats. I'd found
it out there Saturday
as I worked in the
yard raking and mowing
on a hosanna of a
spring morning. Poor
snake, it was still
alive, crawling away
from my rake as I
probed the tiny grey
thing that was bigger
than a worm, almost
as round as the
buried cock of this
poem. I let it go
just then, reminding
myself to write a
poem about it when
I settled back here
in the court of
excavations
exhumations
& starry ululation.
So today I went
looking for that snake
in the back yard, on
this page I mean,
uncovering not a
half-chewed still-
plumbing umbilicus
to chthonic hoohah
but woeful relics
of a wild bad time
I though were well
buried, sobered up,
the major archons
of those nocturnal
motions bound at
the wing and tossed
down into this
purgatory of words.
I held my old skull
in my hands like
Hamlet graveside
of Ophelia his old
pal Yorick's jester skull,
the noggin huge as
a Neanderthal, perhaps
as old too. He I
brooding on old
merriment, old loves,
old thrall. Gone.
I half-expected
that half-snake to
pounce up at me
from a black eyehole,
at least sigh within,
hiss. Nada. Instead
the wind cranked
up from offstage hands
to moan and whistle
through that rusted-
out '76 Datsun 710
I pushed to the side
of the road maybe
18 years ago,
giving up that bar-
car filled with
cigarette butts and
blackouts for good.
One night I fucked
a hot rock chick
in that now splayed
and ripped back seat,
my 6 foot 3 frame
somehow compressed
to four as I boiled
sperm in her thrusting
shouting beach-white
loins. Some scent
of her sex coiled
in the orange blossom-
fume sailing on breeze,
corrupt as booze
and twice as fragrant.
Gone, perhaps, or
soured into that
awfuller smell of
the 1000 other nights
I didn't score the
hot rock chick,
the sweat and the
futile frenzy of
desire's crucifix with
its immortally
immoral nails oozing
a pustulent nacre,
that awful smell
from when I crapped
my pants in a blackout
one night when some
of the bartenders at
the Station tried to
push my car up out
of the bushes behind
the bar. Soured in
graverot: almost gone.
I asked my hand, just what
do I do now? Preach
my gospel of blue
motions til the brutes
receive communion
and settle on back
down to dark-as-
sweet-oblivion ground?
I wish I could, but
I don't know words
blue enough to bless
the dead. Instead, I
call on Prosper's shade
from the hour when
his tempest stilled --
fatherly at last of
foul Caliban when he
said, "this thing of darkness
I call my own." Indeed.
And so I put lips to bone
and battered steel
and call their evening
home. Somewhere in
the leaves beneath the
oak, just beyond the
borders of our yard,
I hear a snaky shake and
coil, reminding me
to write of him another
day, to let my ghoulplast
hold the rake and
do some honest work.
Maybe then you'll find
proper burial at last,
salt my seas but good
and buoy that dolphin
boy who guides my hand
along every graveside
stone along this Road
of Blue-Boned souls.