Full Moon Plus Killer Whales

Hot weekend, temps in the late 90s, withering midday labors as usual though with some percentage less soak of humidity. But the early mornings and evenings are fine, yielding quaffs of autumnally ebbing light, comfort of the air, and this weekend a September moon that hangs brilliant & halcyon & utter blue through cloudless nights, soaking the night’s topography, drowning us all in primal lucence. Halleylooyah.

Working all weekend on an essay of sorts for the occasion of retreat at my father’s Columcille that I won’t be able to make, sending in lieu of physical presence an bit of poetic prosetry on the Backward Glance, particularly St. Columba’s on his pagan past. That fertile scoop of dark waters which makes all future endeavors a similitude of them, jazzy & blue & endlessly deep. I’ve added a latter section on the backward glances of Orpheus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Keats, all similar in reaching back and facing one’s forebearing forboding forbidding depths, father to ur-father, the assembly of guardian paternities who stand between me and the utter uteral blue of the Mother. Something which happens in that backward glance which radicalizes the heart and spiritualizes the mind, repressing perhaps the rude primals while marrowing my mortar with their abundant libido. The retreat this weekend is to discuss the future of Columcille, so I thought a backward glance appropriate for that council. Similar perhaps to Columba’s pitch for Oran (the song, the query, the watery adventure of the mind) at the Council of Drimceatt. More to follow here on that.

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Last night watched Michael Powell’s magnificent "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946) on Turner Classics, reveling in the imaginative harrows of it -- the story of a bomber pilot who survives his dive out of a burning plane sans parachute, robbing Heaven of one its ordained receipts, falling in love with a woman by the shore and then having to argue his case for remaining on earth with eternity. The shots of life are in living color, the otherworld scenes in black and white. Magnificent this upward-scrolling stair flanked by massive stone figures -- Lincoln, Plato, Solomon -- who might argue the case of the love-sotted bomber, but its is his friend -- a neurophysician who dies in a motorcycle accident trying to help his case --- who takes the stand before the eternal court. Arguing for love which transcends the bounds of heaven. (Though the argument really is for that passion fired in the imagination).

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Dreamt last night (in the caul of that movie, frustrating hours trying to knock out the essay, thoughts of Keats -- reading his biography as I watched college games on Saturday -- and bathed throughout by that rising regent moon -- I dreamed of these two huge orcas which were threatening the southern coast of the USA like twin hurricanes, ravaging the shores, fomenting sea and sky in Their Brute Appearance, mother and child, father and son, sea and sky, I dunnoß, but the dream goes on about how threatening they are, how they overreach all past magnitudes and scope of killing ground, far from their previous habitat. It is thought that the shores of the eastern Atlantic would be safe, they having never left the Gulf; but then suddenly I see them rounding Miami, leaping and then diving into the cold depths of the Atlantic, holy shit, see ‘em like blue bolts of hell shooting downward into the abyss. Trouble ahead.

News today of tropical storm Rita quickly forming over Bermuda, heading for the Florida Keys, maybe bringing some rain to us by mid-week hopefully but what will happen when if the storm gets into the Gulf, a la Katrina, strengthening in that soft warm uterus, where will She bend Her terrible jaws?