Oh Lonely Rock

Rains starting up in the dark again, pulses of Ophelia a hundred or so miles off of Cape Canaveral, a tropical depression which is trying to work itself up into a tropical storm or hurricane by the weekend -- she rouses like Katrina, just a bit of disturbance in the air, salted by numens no one takes much account of, till it starts raining this way, o shit, and the weather forecasters say we may be in for as much as 15 inches of rain -- tresses of the drowned virgin, a sad history of deranging love, the annihilate bliss of water’s blue kiss --

***

In Sunday’s New York Times Richard Ford provided one of the great pieces in the Op-Ed Section (Frank Rich is sublime in “Falluja Floods the Superdome,” Anne Rice serves the gumbo of New Orleans culture in “Do You Know What it Means to Lose New Orleans?” and David Brooks makes a definitive turn away from Bush conservatism in “The Bursting Point,” foreseeing a sea change in American politics from what broke with the levees of New Orleans). In “A City Beyond the Reach of Empathy” he files, from East Boothbay, Maine, this plea for words for which there are yet no sufficient words:

“Who can write about New Orleans now? Tell us what it’s like there. Bring us near to what people are experiencing, to their loss, to what will survive. People who are close should write that. Only they’re in the city, or they’re on a bus, or they’re seeking shelter. We don’t know where they are.

“It’s just a keyhole, and a small one, onto this great civic tragedy. The people who should be writing of it can’t be found. An attempt to set out a vocabulary for empathy and for reckoning is frustrated in a moment of sorest need by the plain terms of the tragedy that wants telling. There are many such keyholes.”

Keyholes: small vantage upon a vast and yet-nameless tragedy. The images only take us so far; the vocabulary is lost in the waters, is subsumed in the gross quota of misery.

But words we do find, or die trying. American satiety makes articulation difficult; all of our successes, all of our comforts, every technical contrivance which serves to buffer us from what we increasingly refuse to look at rip the words from our vocal chords. Tragedies give us back the vocabulary, even as all words fall short, lost in the immensity of the wind and the crash of the waves, the rude paternity which has stranded us here.

***


THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER

Wallace Stevens
(from The Rock his final series of poems)

Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit’s base?

My father’s father, his father’s father, his --
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.

They go back to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,

Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.

This is not landscape, full of the somnamulations
Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.

***

Erich Neumann, from The Origins and History of Consciousness:

“The likeness between ego consciousness and the uroboros is the fundamental ‘family likeness’ between ego and self, which corresponds mythologically between father and son. Because, psychologically, ego and consciousness are organs of centroversion, the ego rightly emphasizes its central position. this basic fact of the human situation has its mythological equivalent in the divine birth of the hero and his filiation to ‘heaven.’ What we are prone to call the ‘anthropocentric’ believe of the primitive, that the existence of the world depends on his magical performances and his rituals control the coursing of the sun, is in reality one of the deepest truths of mankind. The father-son likeness between self and ego is manifest not only in the martial exploits of the hero-son, but in the synthetic power of consciousness to create a new spiritual world of human culture in the likeness of the divine.”

***

OK, stay with me for another paragraph by Neumann, ‘tis important:

***

“This synthetic function, taking its place alongside the analytical one, presupposes a faculty to which we have repeatedly drawn attention: the faculty for objectification. Ego consciousness, poised between the outer and inner world of objects and driven to unceasing acts of introjection, is by virtue of its registering and balancing functions ever compelled to keep its distance, until it finally reaches a point where it becomes detached even from itself. This produces a kind of self-relativization which, as skepticism, humor, irony, and a sense of one’s own relativity, promotes a higher form of psychic objectivity.” (Italics mine.)

***

Well, there’s your Hamlet, who’s swallowed rotten Denmark whole and hovers over the abyss of the infinite. He wants us to remember his story, or rather Shakespeare lodges it between the ribs of our thought like a knife -- Harold Bloom again, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

“Why does Hamlet care about his posthumous reputation? He is never more passionate that when he commands Horatio to go on living, not for pleasure and despite the pain of existence, only in order to ensure that his prince not bear a wounded name. Not until the end does the audience matter to Hamlet, he needs us to give honor and meaning to his death. His story must be told, and not just to Fortinbras, and it must be reported by Horatio, who alone knows it truly. Does Horatio then understand what we do not? Hamlet, as he dies, loves nobody -- not father or mother, Ophelia or Yorick -- but he knows that Horatio loves him. The story can only be told by someone who accepts Hamlet totally, beyond judgment. And despite the moral protests of some critics, Hamlet has had his way. It is we who are Horatio, and the world mostly has agreed to love Hamlet, despite his crimes and blunders, despite even his brutal, pragmatically murderous treatment of Ophelia. We forgive Hamlet precisely as we forgive ourselves, though we know we are not Hamlet, since our consciousness cannot extend as far as he does. Yet we worship (in a secular way) this all-but-infinite consciousness, what we have called Romanticism was engendered by Hamlet, though it required two centuries before the prince’s self-consciousness became universally prevalent, and almost a third century before Nietzsche declared that Hamlet possessed ‘true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth,’ which is the abyss between the mundane reality and the Dionysian rapture of an endlessly ongoing consciousness.” {italics are the author’s}

***

Swear to remember your father, know that thou are not God, and curse the sea for it: savage prows always at the deeper work, going further, deeper, longer, louder, extending the borders, founding greater centers, then questioning the whole enterprise. What a difficult voice that is ...

***

Over the weekend we watched “The Edge of the Sea” by Michael Powers (1937), a British film premiering on Turner Classics; what a great flick, about the slow ebb of the last residents from Hinba Island, 20 miles off the western coast of Scotland, in the 1930s. Powell had wanted to make the film since he was young, and located on so remote a setting it offered him his first opportunity to create a film in pure independence, albeit with all of the mishaps and horrors that would attend attempting to create something on such remote and formidable ground. Great images of this monster rock jutting hundreds of feet out from the sea, a raw jaw of cracked granite where only the hardiest of souls would attempt a living raising sheep and fishing. The exodus from those bleak islands the result of modernity, competition from the mainland, gasoline-powered trawlers outfishing what boats they rowed, none of the mainland conveniences to be had -- electricity, running water, radio, films, access to doctors. Just the human in an element of extremity, cruel sea, vast rock, what life is made and celebrated and lost there. An ancient tradition dying in the arms of more recent, also dying, one. The movie begins with two former residents (we don’t know they are until the story unfolds the earlier tale) coming ashore and walking the desolation of empty houses, pens without sheep, no sound of dogs barking, only the deep sighs of the heaving sea and the keening of the wind. The dead most present in that wild absence, that fullness of what remains.

Some of that longer, colder, sea-mirrored light filters here, autumnally, ferried on breezes which clear the humid underbrush, its oppressive stillness; yesterday afternoon I sat on the floor of the back deck while feeding the cats, Mamacita to my left, Blue and Red eating to my right, my legs spread forward to separate former mother from still-needy sons (if either of the boys decides to encroach on her, she’ll hiss and spit, sometimes vomit her meal): and watched the play of light at 6 p.m. through our battered backyard oaks, clouds puffy and white and strolling, the boughs of the tree rocking and sighing to that breeze & the sky of a tincture of blue we haven’t seen in many months, if not cooling the aether at least drying it, sharpening the outlines, opening the heart. Tiny mouths wetly at work in their separate bowls of food, the simple millionfold gratitude for being alive, here, even now, when a cruel paradox is at work further up the Gulf, where neither light nor darkness, summer nor fall, can resuscitate the drowned soul of a city.

****

The inside name of the movie is Ultima Thule, a phrase coined by Pytheas, a Greek voyager who sailed north through the Pillars of Hercules in the fourth century BC in search of the prized sources of tin and amber. He would provide a remarkably accurate account of the coasts of France and Britain, including the Orkney and Shetland islands, and may have sailed as far as Iceland, which he gave the name of Ultima Thule, or “furthest island.” The book of his travels, On The Ocean, was lost, and no one was able to confirm its existence. (See John Gillis, Islands of the Mind; Barry Cunliffe has an account of the voyage of Pytheas in The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek)

The image of Ultima Thule -- the farthest extent of conquest -- lingered in the imagination of the Roman empire, the opposite end of the fixed center of civilization and power: how far can that will extend? Does it lap at the final shores of the world? Yet it doesn’t; the British Isles were the extent, and no further north than Hadrian’s Wall; beyond, up into Scotland and Ireland, further still to those wild islands jutting up like fists in the mist, were lands outside the rule, unconquerable, not even by the sea.

Those same sort of islands -- beyond sight of the mainland, mysterious havens of God’s wilderness -- became the sacred isles of Christian monasticism in the 6th to 8th centuries, brute havens of wilderness, far from the corrupted centers of power, out on the branch which hangs over the precipice, closest to God -- thus Skellig Micheal off the southwestern coast of Ireland and Iona off the southwestern coast of Scotland (Columba was told to found his monestary -- a penance for killing thousands over a psalter he copied in secret -- on the first bit of land he reached that he could not see the shores of Ireland from) and St. Brendan’s islands of wonder, each a bead on a rosary that was to end in the Island of the Blessed, the final island of the Western Sea, where the souls of the saved gathered and sang praises to God. Each island a wonder to inscribe in his holy book (he had burned the original book of wonders, claiming such accounts to be untrue; in penance he is dispatched by God to see all of those wonders for himself -- thus his Voyage -- and then write them down), each closer to that final island but never quite close enough -- Thus we try to get closer to the Source, reaching farther and farther out.

I’ve repeated the story before, but one variant of the Oran story has him voyaging out from his grave in the footers of the Iona abbey in search of Manannan, sailing or swimming down from the chapel footers into the watery abyss of the old Celtic hell (infrann), a cold region of ice either beneath this world or in the arctic regions of the north. This occurs in the three-day period leading up to All Hallows on 10/31. He travels from island to island, but each time he is given the message, in some form or another, “not here.” Arriving at some high-cliffed island, he searches the beach, when a note is lowered down the cliff face. Not here.

Ah that mighty rock of all we say and do, unimpressed, still at war and at one with the sea, bidding us to reach farther & deeper for the skull of the father, the Bard, the words I have yet to find sea enough to say!


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ON VISITING STAFFA

John Keats

{Staffa is an island next to Iona
in the Hebrides off the southeastern
coast of Scotland}

No Aladdin magian
Ever such a work began;
Not the wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see;
Not St John, in Patmos’ Isle,
In the passion of his toil,
When he saw the churches seven,
Golden-aisled, built up in heaven,
Gazed at such a rugged wonder,
As I stood its roofing under.
Lo! I saw one sleeping there,
On the marble cold and bare;
While the surges wash’d his feet,
And his garments white did beat
Drench’d about the sombre rocks;
On his neck his well-grown locks,
Lifted dry above the main,
Were upon the curl again.
“What is this? and what art thou?”
Whisper’d I, and touch’d his brow;
“What art thou? and what is this?”
Whisper’d I, and strove to kiss
The spirit’s hand, to wake his eyes;
Up he started in a trice:
“I am Lycidas,” said he,
“Fam’d in funeral minstrelsy!
This was architectured thus
By the great Oceanus!-
Here his mighty waters play
Hollow organs all the day;
Here, by turns, his dolphins all,
Finny palmers, great and small,
Come to pay devotion due,-
Each a mouth of pearls must strew!
Many a mortal of these days,
Dares to pass our sacred ways;
Dares to touch, audaciously,
This cathedral of the sea!
I have been the pontiff- priest,
Where the waters never rest,
Where a fledgy sea-bird choir
Soars for ever! Holy fire
I have hid from mortal man;
Proteus is my Sacristan!
But the dulled eye of mortal
Hath pass’d beyond the rocky portal:
So for ever will I leave
Such a taint, and soon unweave
All the magic of the place.”
So saying, with a Spirit’s glance
He dived!


THE HOUSE OF DONN

This high rock beyond
the ninth wave off Ireland
is where the Head of Donn
dreams for all time,
interned there so
the Sons of Mil could
take possession
of green love
in the deeper half
of my heart. In the
Christian age which
wrote over that old
myth, it was said
that souls of the
dead were sent there
and chaffed, the
damned blessing Donn
from the height of
Skellig before being
pitched into abyss,
while the saved
viewed that rock from
aloft as they were
carried by angels
to high heaven.
Michael’s rock indeed
if Skellig’s Michael
is to be believed,
a door for all dead
souls beyond which
all kissed the cross
of their fated fires.
How is it then
that you bid me live
here, Lord of
dazzling dark seas,
forever offshore the
beloved embrace,
tending the terrible
paths where souls
and penitents wind
and writhe? What music
charms these cliffs
with such blue
and cold delight? Far
and strange indeed
though I’m still in my
white writing chair
as dawn starts to limn
the night with its
seethe of polar blue,
ten minutes from
feeding all the cats
outside & then heading
up to wake my love
to our Sunday. How
did all those worlds
come to marry here on
the lip of a page and
its past, a shore where
ghostly numens walk
and tides curve breasts
and smash all bones?
Who would guess such
a place exists just
outside this house
of love, just over
the marge of our
beyond the garden
but before the day’s
news and labors
and leakage? A
shore translated from
my father at 78
fading among his stones
and my mother fading,
like an ink, from all
the scriptures she keeps
writing down while
behind the words I write?
A shore where Melville
at age 37 was already
finished by
his great work &
falling into the mouth
of his great words
never quite to return.
Where Rilke walks
the grounds of Muzot
with his Elegies full
smashed and ebbed,
a gaunt and tired man,
bearing not a trace of his
words — loves all
failed, his daughter
Ruth estranged, disease
blooming in the blood.
House of Donn indeed,
this rock breaking far
millennia into the sea,
remnant of a shore
fallen miles back out
of sight. The only poem
worth writing, the only
one you still invite
dreaming in that bed
a thousand leagues below
where Michael’s in his boat
ferrying it all back home.


SKELLIG MICHAEL

Looking back from the great civilizations
of 12th-century France or 17th-century
Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite
a long time -- almost a hundred years --
Wester Christianity survived by clinging
to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle
of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast,
rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

-- Kenneth Clark

Here is your most desolate
shore of rock, southwest
of all we build and till
and love: What a brutal
bed it is, O Lord,
500 feet of stone perched
above a sea-blast
which choirs below
all dreams with the
blessed thunder
of salt’s destiny.
You bid me build
this oratory beyond
all ears, joining my
voice to mashing waves
and a legion of gales,
each note not so
much offered as ripped
from my lips. Here
the oldest gods are
ravenous and raw,
their bones knocking
like boulders against
first rock, fucking
and dismembering
and roaring pure blue
riot, foaling water-dragons
of the tongue I dare not
speak but must because
this hour derives its
gospel from such abyss.
O God it’s lonely here
between angel wing
and heartless tide,
my song a rock
gnawed by appetites
which have no human
end, or, at least
for which few people
I have known would
care to bend their
inner ear. So be it,
ten waves I daily row:
I will make of this
mote in the sea’s
eternal eye a chapel
for every selkie and
child of Lir to lose
their wits on their
way here, long ago
today and perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps
as long as this rock
remains at the last
shore of the heart.

***

What of Shakespeare’s isles, further than we could or would go?

***

watching “king lear”

All the readings
of this play
& all the arias of critics
who sang its greatness
(lately reading
Bloom's dark pearl)
bring me here tonight
to watch King Lear on PBS
but shelter me no better
from this wild crack
in our skull with
its blood torrent
of grief and rage
thrilling eye and ear
with the eternal death
of fathers, nations, kings,
and millennia at the
hands of what
we love so deep and dear.

Perhaps it makes
no difference what
was crucified here,
which nail pierced
the caul or whose
blood washed the stage:
This pain is
primal, geologic,
chiseled into
the heart's basalt
as rivers mourn valleys
and days shrink to
zero and love always
loses to night,
a bier strolling
offstage into what's
forever empty.

Will those words
suffice, deeper and darker
and more divinely
terrible than
all our common deaths?
Don't ask Will:
he's less than dust
and none of his children
were survived by
their own. All that
remains is this
pyre of words
which burned
for hours in every sinew
and nerve as I failed
to sleep that night,
desperate to wrap
myself in warm
loving things,
stroking old mean
ass Buster cat
where he curled on
the bed and watching
my wife as she slept.
Wishing I could
hold them forever
without Lear.

And then --
would you believe it?
A storm gusted
over round 3 a.m.
I listened to its
slow approach
from sighs to troubled
breeze breaking in
a flurry of wet gusts
that slapped and
dashed the roof a

few times, made
one vicious swipe
that made my heart
leap and then fled.
How I loved this
house right then
for holding steady
against that storm,
our bed like a bridge
in a great ship
crossing the night,
wrapping us warm
in all Lear lost,
drowning his voice
in down.

Let the future come
and wash away
what Will. Ghosts, like gods,
fall from ripeness into
the dark we coffer.
Heaven wakes
every dawn upon our
fluttering lids.
This isle of heart
and home between
life and Shakespeare
is pearl enough.

If only "King Lear"
were not echo
and shade
of the day's first kiss.

***

Thus the measure of my mortal is that when I feel the depths of Will, it is my response to look back the other way, and breathe a sigh of relief: to shut the TV off, close the covers of the text, and row back the center -- which the next day bids me sail even further into the mist ...

ULTIMA THULE

Every voyage has its furthest
shore, its Ultima Thule
beyond which no prow
has ever beached. Upon
that iciest strand my
heart loses its last heat
for Your promised land,
wearied and grieved
beyond its pale,
turns to look
back fondly on the
courses home, embracing
not your salt absence
but the welcome
of those knowns, the simple
grounds on which I
built a home
after you at last were
gone -- today
it’s chair and
blanket, the writing pad,
window opened to
that singular
view on cool garden
and street still too
darkened by night
for more than some
streetlight up there,
a light over a red
door across the street.
Every morning at
this time, my matins
tolled out, I yawn
and yearn to get
back in bed with my
wife and slip away
into the transit that
will take me home.
If only your music
like a tidal weren’t
still ringing in my
ear when I slip back
to sleep for for that
hour before the real
day starts, waking me
with lines too dark
and dripping with the deep
to flow sensibly
from my pen. If only
the sand of that
penultimate shore were not
still grained between
my toes, perhaps
forever, driving my
thoughts yet again
from here to your
blue there, making
this pen ache to
blade again that
salt infernity. Fool.
No matter what I find
out beyond the marge
of this known bourne,
I always find myself
alone & looking back
to this safe harbor.
Each time I’ve
docked and tethered,
I look back out
and wonder
if the next voyage
will take me further
still. This rhythm is
my master, guide and
curved lacunae,
my metier and in
a cupless bacchanal
composed between
those ever distant isles
and my wife first
waking, sleep-soaked smile.