Imago: Evolution of A Symbol

IMAGO DOMINUS

1978

She stands at the bedroom door,
half in, half out,
shadow cupping breast and belly,
a half moon smile on her face,
fine mist hanging in the air
between us, darkest night behind,
and water coursing everywhere,
crystal blue and deep and silent.


***

"Because primitive man projects his unconscious contents onto the world and its objects, these appear to him as drenched in symbolism and charged with mana, and his interest is thereby focused on the world. His consciousness and will are weak and hard to move; his libido is suspended in the unconscious and is available to the ego only in small amounts. But the symbol, as an object animated in projection, fascinates, and to the extent that it "grips" and "stirs" him, sets his libido in motion and with it the whole man. This activating affect of the symbol is, as Jung has pointed out, an important element in every cult. It was only through symbolic animation of the earth that the drudgery of agriculture was overcome, just as symbolic possession in the rites d'entree makes possible an activity requiring large amounts of libido."

-- Erich Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, 368

***

Hence, I engage in no great work which does not have the sea in its curvature, heaving breasts and sweet foaming nipples, calling me further and deeper out than I have dared before.


***


INFATUATION

2004

... I gave you bright teeth,
immeasurable longing.
So it's just that you should give
your love in the same measure.

- anonymous Irish love poem,
15th century (transl. Thomas Kinsella)

I wrote my first secular words
in longing for she who
ferried you from antiquity
into my tongue, my taste,
my impossible irrepressible
undeniable savor for
this song to you.
We were both juniors at
the makeshift high school
at my father's church in
Chicago & it was 1972.
I fell for her at first sight,
but she always had eyes
for others, mostly those
darkling dapper Puerto
Ricans whom city life
had sharpened to a bladelike
gleam. Alas, my edge
was soft and buttery,
nursed by overheated
orange-groves down south
into a pulpy twang.
I was just some lanky
dorky dirtyblonde kid
who said the words of
God and heaven and
their promised eternities
too often: all spirit and
no wave-dipped cock,
virgin that I was. Oh
how I burned and yearned
for her in her swank flesh
- soft blonde hair
and icy blue eyes, full lips
and fuller breasts which
always seemed in insurrection
against blouse and sweater
in the manifesto which
was slowly building in
my desire. Sitting next
to me in History or on
the bench outside
smoking cigarettes in
the cold, she was my
pal of sorts, confidante
to every agony save the
one that burnt me
worst; she confided
to me in every
detail her ache for
Eddie who had one
night danced her
into a lather,
swept her off then
nailed her in some dark,
only to flick her off
soon after, like the
butt of a Winston.
Months, a year of desire
built in me as I watched her
watching everywhere
else but toward me.
Nightly I prayed on my
knees to my
pentecostal God
for deliverance from
that cross which burned
so much hotter and
powerfully than Him;
and later, underneath
the sheets, I'd dial her
up, wrapping my length
around her curves and
milking the hot honey
of her smile in one kiss,
our bliss, at my loneliest
and furthest and too
abstract last. Such
reveries only made days
worse, a jailhouse of
blueballsy ache where
I was ever walking a
dark cold shore alone
calling, calling out her
name amid the emptiness.
One day I sat by Lake
Michigan in the heightening
cold of late autumn, and
sang to that minor key
of waves and the high angels
of northern wind-singing
much as I once sang
at three years old
to Big Toe my toad
in her yellow pail;
emptying the ache and
burn in a lyric turn
about sailing across
great waters to her,
of finding and embracing
her at last. I wrote
a lot of lyrics that
way those days,
and in those first
raw moments of
singing pen on paper
the old music arose
again in your salt vassal,
your next endlessly
requited knight of
riven blue. It was such
dorky iambic drivel
filled with loves and doves
descending from above
into another freezing
day: Songs I wrote
down in my first journal
more than 30 years
and 300,000 pages
of paeans ago. Eventually
she and I did kiss,
out on a group date
where everyone dropped
angel dust and she
got way too high,
finding her desire for
me at last and least
up on those high
aeries where I searched
for her. A reach of her
hand to mine at the
back of a darkened
movie theater and
then her face turned
my way - I could
not see it as I had
so dreamed, but I felt
some shift of strange
honey toward me -
and then that one
long kiss, sixteen months
after I first yearned
for it, 380 nightly
railings at God to
deliver me or her to me.
How shocked I was to
feel so little in the
actuarials of delight,
as if the angels who
brought us together
had suddenly dived
beneath the main-
her lips against mine
in one swift connect
and then that susurration
of entwining tongues
& a wash of heat
nougating huge darkness.
Then I opened my
eyes to watch that
stranger's closed face,
not my beloved,
which never for
the duration of that
kiss acknowledged
me there, not the
way I thought that
long-waylaid kiss
at long last would
welcome me home.
No, she kept her eyes
closed the whole time:
And then, like someone
who'd just gassed up
their car, she pulled
away and focused on the
movie, giving my hand
a squeeze, another,
and one last before
letting me go for good.
And that was it.
We remained friends
through that last
senior year, but in lieu
of finding more in
that final kiss, I felt released
to go after other girls
with the darker intent
of getting laid at long
last. The high bells
would not ring again
for years. Delivered thus,
I also left that faith
which had scourged me so
those nights of deeper
ache. Requital, hell:
I was all about ponying
up to that darkling mare
with the wild curlyhairs
& yankable underwear.
Jongleur now of a
harder lyric, I preened
myself for communions
out-of-doors, in glades
the old gods sported
sprawled and spurted
in hot praise. My voice
here is still lost in that
wilderness of song,
desperate to cross the
waters and shore you
here at last, on the page
at least, having long
learned not bedded
sheets will ever yield
that kiss inside requital.
Still today, I'm infatuated
with the sound of
every pretty girl's laugh
as she walks by -
a merry tinsel sort of sea
I mimic with this minstrelsy.
That's as close as we
will ever get, my lady
of cathedral song:
A verse in thrall
with your sashay
down every naked shore,
desperate to light
one look in your blue eyes,
perhaps the faintest
of all smiles, the opening
of all doors & all the
bells between God's heaven
and your sweeter hell
ringing, ringing, ringing.


***

"When man, terrified by no laws and no furious fanatics or prophets, allows the incestuous libido full play, and does not liberate it for higher purposes, then he is under the influence of unconscious compulsion. For compulsion is the unconscious wish. (Freud.) He is under the dominance of the libido {a Greek word here meaning "fate"} and his destiny does not lie in his own hand; his adventures ... fall from the stars. His unconscious incestuous libido, which is thus applied in its most primitive form, fixes the man, as regards his love type, in a corresponding primitive state, the stage of ungovernableness and surrender to the emotions.

"Such was the psychologi situation of the passing antiquity, and the Redeemer and Physician of that time was he who endeavored to educate man to the sublimation of the incestuous libido. The destruction of slavery was the necessary condition of that sublimation, for antiquity had not yet recognized the duty of work and work as a duty as a social need of fundamental importance. Slave labor was compulsory work, the counterpart of the equally disastrous compulsion of the libido of the privileged.

"It was only the obligation of the individual to work which made possible in the long run that regular "drainage" of the unconscious, which was inundated by the the continual regression of the libido. Indolence is the beginning of all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous bonds.

"The best liberation is through regular work. Work , however, is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself nothing of infantile compulsion. In this respect, religious ceremony appears in a high degree as organized inactivity, and at the same time as the forerunner of modern work."

-- C.G. Jung, "The Sacrifice," in The Psychology of the Unconscious, transl. Hinkle
(this was later translated by RFC Hull and retitled Symbols of Transformation




BEAUTIFUL TEMPTERS

2004

Since you left ... I have dared
to do strange things-bold things,
and have asked no advice from any-
I have heeded beautiful tempters,
yet do not think I am wrong.

-- Emily Dickinson, letter to Jane
Humphries in 1850

The legitimate Venus is mundana
musica {the music of the world} ...
But the shameful Venus ... we call ...
the mother of all fornication.

- Alan of Lille (12th century)
De planctu naturae

I should have reined these
waves in long ago-shut
the door your walked out
and labored on. Instead
and to great detriment
I remain here at that
shore imploring seas
in every foment of ink
and tongue to delve you
up at last in ocean equal
to that kiss. Think of all
the other poems I might
have clabbered from
the day's milk: the mortal
fracas I might have entered,
my fortunes visible and
tenable in the fray,
my themes varied
and important, my
couplets hooved and potent.
But here the gold glints
like worn doubloons
in sands you poured through
my ears from so many
authors they've lost
their names. Song here
is every kiss I never got
plus all the ones I lost
and a few the tide tossed
in from far away
and the one I most hope to
receive, come first light,
when I wake my wife
back in our bed. Such
singing is just foolery
perhaps, but exactly
the way the shore
demands on this
pale-as-down assay
between the marges
of a life. There's much
to damn this as drollery
and drool, a moat of moot-
the pathology perhaps
of a boy's blue tongue,
a puerile dive from reality
into the polymorphous
pervese of swoon
and swagger, postpost
modernistic, a syntactic
horror rising like
a ziggaruat ababble
on the teat. Certainly
nothing your mother or
father or wife would
care to read, nor anyone
else for any matter
in the silence you
left behind. But what
gorgeous errancy!
Wrong in every
way where the ground
is too firm or known
and sweet dilirium on
the noirblue back
of the salt-tracked whale.
My tongue's the
very cock of God,
plunged in your
every sweet vale
and swale, my every
trope and verb and
metaphor squishing
from that sound.
That music now
is like a wilder marge
that crashes all night
just outside a window
I once saw you through-
an infernal, outre and
riven tune, rumpussing
the rollicking sea
of our royal blue redundancy.
Now forsworn of the
rest, let's get down
to its abyssal best.

BONING THE GHOUL

2003

An appalling sweetness
slipped into view
when I lost the last
wet curvature of you:

Well, "lost" is landfill
for all tossed verbs,
numens of that last kiss
trucked from dead suburbs.

Atop that dread mound
an eerie twattage glows
as ghoul cockage choirs
in solemn, bony rows.

That chorus sings to me
the beat-to-hell old news
that I'll not find her again
not even in rear views.

Who knows why forsaking
me was for her so easy,
why she drained the glass;
Or why her sleazy

voidings like a vacuum
in me yet clench,
a vertigo in all makings
with a familiar stench,

deigned to rule a wold
of cold and moony nights
with thorn plecturings of
strings no longer white,

their amperage sucked dry.
What's horniness if it
douses not in fire
but bone-dry recit,

unbuttoning not blouses
but stone lips of banshee
rue-burning wicker men
because some dame decreed

my hands anon away?
Who wants to fornicate
unnippled sprites of ire?
Let's banish hope, excoriate

the lust: debone the ghoul
who haunts the ossuary
of every stiffie lost:
let's remit the actuary

before tits up it tanks.
She rose up from a wave
of breaking blue joy;
and then without a wave

she disappeared, willing me
this stale and sour undertow.
I'll not find her on this
beach again: It's time go:

Time to rearrange
into less salty, surer show:
time for bright diurnals
where fresher boners grow

beneath the fertile loam
of an untroubled sleep.
I'll plunge on alone now
on waters twice as deep,

ghost-captain of a boat
destined for dryer shores,
calmer nights, no matter
how she always gores.

***

"The symbol, however, is also an expression of the spiritual side, of the formative principle dwelling in the unconscious, for 'the sprit appears in the psyche as instinct" as a 'principle sui generis.' {Jung} So far as the development of human consciousness is concerned, this spiritual side of the symbol is the decisive factor over and above its "gripping" aspect' it is more than a sign; it assigns meaning; it signifies something and demands interpretation."

-- Neumann, ibid

***

LONGING

Summer 2002

I sometimes wonder whether longing
can't radiate out from someone so
powerfully, like a storm, that nothing
can come to him from the opposite
direction. Perhaps William Blake
has somewhere drawn that?
- Rilke, letter, 1912

There is a longing in us which
grows from sigh to starry shriek.
Perhaps comets are charred furies
of that pain, a whirl of frozen fire
which ghostlike tears to God's porch
and back, insatiable and unanswered.
Perhaps. All I know is that
it's infinitely perilous to think
that longing has a human end.
In my cups I once believed
a woman mooned for me,
her longing a white welcome
over my million nights alone.
I met and passed her many times
those hard years, blinded by the aura
of her unvowled name.
Surely when two longings touch
it's like when great waves collide,
the wild sea witched flat.
Our deeper thirst can never sate:
as each draught of booze
was never enough, so each
embrace tides a milkier door.
I recall a young man
walking home drunk on a
frozen night long ago,
his beloved nowhere
to be found in the chalice
he had named. Winds hurled
steel axes through the
Western sky, failing to clear
the cruel foliage of fate.
In his defeat he was greater
than any angel beckoned
by that night: his heart so
hollowed by longing
as to chance in pure cathedral,
her absence the clabber of a bell
shattering the frozen air,
trebling the moon
without troubling a sound.

***

Thus the old Man of the Sea is behind or Venus of the voluptuous surf, never determinate though always calling the mind to the next shore. It is Manannan whom Oran seeks, isle by isle by isle.

***


GOD AND LOVE

2005

This truth is recalled by me:
God and Love do well agree.
God loves honour and courtesy;
and love they please most thoroughly.
God hates disdain and falsity;
lOve holds them base in every way.
God hearkens to those who truly pray
And Love won't turn from such away.

-- LaLei d l'Oiselet(13th century)

God and Love found their white shore
where you and I once met and danced,
a strand where wind and wave embraced
around our kiss and then smashed us
to blue smithereens. And though
I woke more alone than ever, I was
yet never quite alone again, the better half
of me freed to roam unruddered in your womb.
The impress of her hips on mine has
lingered, like a a shadowy faith;
the fish tail I've grown is scaled
in that wilder half of ocean
I'll never fan the full fiefdoms of,
much less with these lips ever come
to kiss and know again. God and Love
now ride the waves like Arion on
his dolphin, their song for every shore
which translates in transit to hosannas
of abyss, the moon's gleam distilled
from the ache of pure basalt, your
smile in distant regions altared and
lamped right here. Rude pagan rogering
the tunnies, yahwist hurling reams
of fire: both met and mingled in our kiss,
becoming some malt of awfulness
no confabulist would dare to pour
and live; nor could I much mouth these
words till I'd pounded my last shot
at the bar, and let go black wings that
were never meant to fly, much less soar.
All my wounds were washed in that
salt blue, burning every orifice I tried
to fill my depths with you. As I slept
I turned and twisted down the darkest tide,
all my expletives brine-whelmed and
pustulent, a blackening acre of old bones
sailing south to that port where Davy
is the harbormaster, vaulting Moby's
Dick and every awfulness I've ever yowled
inside my semen's tide. I woke at ebb
with every joint intact, full harrowed
by the voyage, alone on a great white shore
where wind and wave wire in full motion
the ocean now inside my mouth, my words
all salted a godly blue. God and Love
are in the choir which rises from a throat
which reaches from drowned Ys to
fair high heaven, with every note and all
poems between sufficient space, I'd say,
to weave whale roads and wing the
greater halves of God. Cerulean is
the color of my wash, the mash and
foam of my Boolean search for you
between the waves of AS and IS.

***

"It is this aspect that speaks to our understanding and rouses us to reflection, not just to feeling and emotionality. These two aspects working together in the symbol constitute its specific nature, unlike the sign or allegory which have fixed meanings. so long as the symbol is a living and effective force, it transcends the capacity of the experiencing consciousness and 'formulates an essential unconscious component' -- the very reason why it is so attractive and disturbing. Consciousness keeps on returning to it and circles round it, fascinated, meditating and cogitation, thus completing the circumnambulatio which recurs in so many dramatically enacted rites and religious ceremonies."

-- Neumann ibid 368-9

***


BAPTISED AT EBB TIDE

2005

I was baptised at ebb-tide
on the last day of my childhood;
the receding wave which
caught me there has ferried
me at last to here, a man
both of the shore-walking world
and of waters brined by God
with salt's hard misery,
stinging every bliss with
a bottomless undrinkable.
Your ebbings have defined
my ways, always leaving
me alone to name the flood
which drowned every bed
I'd shored on nights before,
filling my mornings with
that empty dripping soft
blue door still resonant
with the cantakerous roar
which wakened in our kiss.
Each beach-song I
carve here is a nautilus
of your curvelike curse,
woven in the rounded way
you turned to me then
turned away; curvelike
the song rounds down
through the misery of
dry and drier nights
grinding down, like old
sand poured through
a wave-smoothed glass,
into these roundelays
of surflike refrains
upon a paper strand
where verbals wash, leaving
me at last again at the far
white end of every beach
you woke me on. On those
fragile magic sands
I leave this shell-seeming shell
for you to find again,
long after I have washed
out to ring the bronze of hell.
How best to return
the wave that bittersweetened
all with its cathedral
rise and smash
careening wild in foam
than to harrow full
the quiet draw in
every pre-dawn dark,
recalling every man
baptised at ebb who
drowned in love's
reclaiming wave?
Such dead are like
seaweed at low tide,
green glyphs of
what remains, drained
and flattened of
their former flout
of spermatic equine fire:
Read me in that wild
blue latinate the
same tenor which
the selkies sing from
their black rocks,
of sea and shore
dreams inked. I am
a man long ebbed
from North Sea smash
where just the song
of foam remains,
stingingly unrepentant
in the wilderness
of that recede which
wombs the next blue
to drown the likes of me
in you.
≈

WHITE ON GREEN

2004

It is only when I'm home sick
lying gut-cramped in our bed
upstairs that I realize what
wild artistry you bring to
every surface of home: The
wan spring morning breezing
in cool through an opened
window across the room
and everything either white
or the palest green, white
linen walls and furniture
so balanced with plants
and jadeite glass that the
eye doesn't even see the
whole perfection, but rather
floats in it as on a tide,
the ivy tumbling from
white iron planters, the
chairs and dressers
moved so many times
that the absolute correctness
of their placement contains
all the energy of a poem
revised down to three pure
words which you would
never say, and refuse
to call an art. "Just
another woman's
gift for home," you
might concede, though
such craft is the very
hearth I can't ignite
in the cold demense of
my lake-bottom dives.
If a room could wash
a votive heart clean,
it's here in the room
which you devised, the
one which you say
you can never get
quite right, what with
this sloping ceiling, crooked
walls and ill-placed a/c
vents. Orchids on either
nightstand wake the purity
with tiny violet blossoms,
like the eyes of our cat
half-lidded in her chair
in the closet, drowsing
down as I now do laying
in the bedroom you
composed in the upper
room of our life. The
poem you never wrote,
the art you swear
is simply banal, lulls
me beyond all I
would say to exactly
where I most desire
to be. Those three words?
You are here.