Back To Work

First time all week I’ve wakened without the hooves of a migraine bloodying up my matins. Thank you Jeezus. Air through the windows of this 4 a.m. not as clotted with heat, crickets weaving lower registers, the dark in the window not so labored nor heavy nor oppressive.

But the moon in the westward-facing windows, near full, seems heavy with blood; it makes me recall the sun lifting in the east yesterday morning (over traintracks which thread through Orlando’s downtown) was regally swamped in gules, a great big blood cherry or fire nipple or queen of sulphur athrone a torrid swath of cloud. Stasis after the cool refreshing breeze, what comes after wildness, Bush addressing the country last night in the surer hands of his scriptwriters (who allow no presence of the President’s actual mind), Ophelia slowly skirting the North Carolina coast to wind spectrally north and east toward nunneries of Atlantic depths none of us will sound. I’m just grateful for a hiatus between migraines, though it’s hard not to have much surer ground, the country plunging deeper into debt, into the consequences of its hubris and arrogance and jones for greater and lesser bling. Besides, its still hurricane season, and there is talk on the weather channel of distant disturbances whorling this way.

***

After the anniversary -- the manifesto of my totem desire, high mass in its blue cathedral, communion with its naughty Queen -- the work resumes. Invocation blesses the mortar which follows. The motion is crucial: backwards glance, nekyia, apotheosis; or, subsumation, sublimation, summation. A round from which permits the next voyage on an ever-wider & wilder globe. A spiralling psalter up and down the dominions, greater and lesser, looking back and forward at once, building cities, naming shores, performing votive ablutions at the altar the travail names.

***

This is not work for hire.
By this expenditure
You make yourself a place;
You make yourself a way
For love to reach the ground.
In its ambition and
Its greed, its violence,
The world is turned against
This possibility,
And yet the world survives
By the survival of
This kindly working love.

-- Wendell Berry, "The Farm"

***

Rilke wrote in a letter to Ellen Delp on 10/27/1915:

"Working after Nature" has in such a high degree made that which is into a task for me, that only very rarely now, as by mistake, does a thing speak to me, granting and giving without demanding that I reproduce it equivalently and significantly in myself. The Spanish landscape ... Toledo - drove this attitude of mine to its extreme: Since there the eternal thing itself -- tower, hill, bridge -- already possessed the incredible, unsurpassable intensity of the inner equivalents through which one might have been able to represent it. External world and vision everywhere coincided as it were in the object; in each a whole inner world was displayed, as though an angel who embraces spaces were blind and gazing into himself. This world, seen no longer with the eyes of men, but in the angel, is perhaps my real task -- at least all my earlier experiments would come together in it; but to begin that task, Ellen, how protected and resolved one would have to be!

***

Indeed. Which world replicates the other? Do we experience in Nature only what exists in the heart, as it is, with every organ of sense? Is the “angelic” sense Rilke refers that vision which confers the seamless identity of outer and inner, so that we praise one world with the devout throat of the other?

What then erases in such a task? What surely dies? What of I and Thou? Shore and sea? What of the fantastic sums hoarded in deep vaults? Do they turn to seaweeds? Will imps and angels kiss? Will Republicans renounce, will Democrats profess? Will the cat in the window become Taras on his dolphin, cup and trident in hand, a whiskered god for every wave?




Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness:

The hero or Great Individual is always and preeminently the man with immediate inner experience who, as seer, artist, prophet, or revolutionary, sees, formulates, sets forth, and realizes the new values, the “new images.” His orientation comes from the “voice,” from the unique inner utterance of the self, which has all the immediacy of a dictate. Herein lies the extraordinary orientation of this type of individual. Not only is the canon always “founded,” so far as we can judge, in accordance with the revelations enunciated by the voice, but to have experience of the voice often becomes an integral part of the canon as in the case of the guardian spirits of the American Indians, or when the individual has to acquire his own particular totem. (p. 375-6)

***


DARK LETTER

July 2005

God sends His letter to me
at 4:52 a.m. in a rich black simmer,
a dark epistle written by
a hand neither asleep nor quite
awake. It ferries a music from
far in the rear, a singing
nacre we don’t so much
as hear as oar, like
a water, as we struggle to the
next shore. The news is older
than I can gird with these
constructs of ink and
and looping vowels
and yet it blooms the
freshest pale blue gauze
to rim the measure
of the moon. It is rounded
three times by the muse
who loves to hear me sigh
of dirt and rain
and pent, dissembling foam.
God’s missive today is this
rich black loam where
yesterday has broken
down to every freest
fin and gill, the ink
from which every
next said thing spills.
The message he has
bottled here? O consequence,
attend! Make it darkly,
divinely, devouringly dear!

***

Jung, from “On The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” quoted in Neumann, 376:

In this lies the social significance of art: It labors without cease to educate the spirit of the age, bringing to birth those forms in which the age is most lacking. Recoiling from the discontents of the present, the yearning of the artist reaches back to that primordial image of the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the insufficiency and one-sidedness of the spirit of the age. The artist seizes this image and in the work of raising it from deepest unconsciousness and bringing it nearer to consciousness, he transforms its shape, until it can be accepted by his contemporaries according to their capacities.

***

Ah perhaps so, in greater days of less shatter ... now that voice is just another tiny filament in the white noise of plenitude, the massa confusa of the soul when a light suddenly extinguishes. Our age is between ages, of hinges and interfascia composed, not satisfying to anyone, in harmony with neither the failing canon nor the one articulated enough to replace it.

Certainly there is vitality and wildness, ennui galore, and a confusion of divine images: a threshold energy which infuses an ardor for death-in-life (the fin de siecle float of Ophelia in the drowned cathedral) as well as life-in-death (the resurrected Eurydice in every filling moon). Such hours are renascent, stirring, soaked in origin and fulsome in futurity; it marks the leap of energy between fully dead and wholly alive, a transformation of the sources, the animation of a canon.

Such is Renaissance. As Hillman has said somewhere (Re-Visioning Psychology, I believe), the artistic hothouse of Renaissance is the bloom which unfurls wildest amid death. The flowering of Greece in the 6th century BC, the Venetian renaissance of the 15th century, the American renaissance of the mid-19th century, the Irish renaissance (or Celtic Awakening) -- all florid masques amid some great death. (Greece: the death of oral culture, awakening of the written word; Venice, death of the middle ages, emergence of the modern world; American, death of the Christian church and the emergence of the American artist; Irish, death of Catholic Church and reaching back to more primary, pre-Christian sources).

So if the days are deadly, thus nearer to our next deeper God we go ...



A GODLY BALEEN

June 2005

This dark night of loving fire, as it purges
in the darkness, so also in the darkness
enkindles the soul.
-- St. John of the Cross

He hat sent fire into my bones, and
hath taught me fire.
-- Lamentations i.13

This dark hour is my altar to
that dark night in which I plunged
too deep in you and died, the way
silver is killed in fire without
mercy so that it may shine
forever with the tooth of brilliant
moons. I’ll not return to those
whiskey-wardened nights of
bone carousal though I
light a candle for them here,
for their inward tooth of
yearn-and-burn, that savage bite
which goes all the way down
into the god of noctal seas.
It’s been hot and hotter of late,
yesterday 95 degrees,
and the seabreeze storms
trooped over selectively and fast,
dumping three inches over the
airport but just a smatter here.
Storms have been merciless
and without mercy elsewhere
all week -- over Seminole
county on Thursday with
lightning strikes burning two
houses to the ground,
and on Wednesday a bad
muthah lingered over the
University of Central Florida
in a two-hour assault, dumping
eight inches of rain and
peppering the land with
lightning strikes so perilous
that the National Weather Service
issued a special warning for all
to stay in. But none of that
massed here, and so an unsated
heat simmers at this 4 a.m.
thick as the sour breath of
that lupine revenant at
the bottle club right now
who will never score another
woman, ever, damned to burn
ever hotter every night
henceforth. Even the crickets
seem scorched into silence,
flattened down by the wake
of a sun which split the sky
a few hours ago. All that fire
here is dark and makes the
the night especially so, cauling
a weight in me of those
years I was the nightly
martyr of my eros, arrow
burning arrow barbing
right through my gut
into every flank of the sea
to curl towards my shore.
It is not the result of those
nights which still matters
but the noctilucent thrall
which sailed me nightly onto
a blackening tide, chasing glimmers
and mermaids in an
orchestrally salty stink.
Don’t get me wrong -- the
tunnies all mattered, their
revealings and succorings pressed
like pornographic leaves in
a book I pray never to burn
for fear its god bid me burn
my life all over again, filling
those pages back up. But after
all those years the undersides
of that night have blossomed,
like a sea garden, at the
deadest hours of the day
when I’m called to black matins,
by long drowned fairy bells --
a lost city of lust which
on nights like this, when
all is so silenced by big heat,
I can hear the faint music
from the few bars still open
and the jackal-like laughter
of the few damned carousers
to sing the last lines of
their vespers, words I
remember well. This was
the hour I finally ran out of fuel,
lack of booze or money or
consciousness dropping the
a heavy black curtain
on that next burning bouree.
Here and now I am what rises
from that drowse,
unslakables harrowed by that
god-decreed souse in which
I lost her but good and ever
& dreamt down and through
burnt chapels at the bottom
of the sea. I came thus to tonsure
my verses in the offices of a
mild infernity -- blue in dolor,
solar red to the lees. I’m on my
knees and praying hard, my
face buried in loins only found
under blackened spires
swathed in godly baleen.
My ink is derricked from
the darkest breasts revealed
at this hour years ago;
I set these saucers of
black milk at the window
for that old totem sea-wolf
that his thirst engine my reels.