Prescience of the Sea-Warding Beast
MICHAELMAS 2005 (1)
Sept. 21, 2005
Again in the Gulf a storm wheels
widdershins to You, salt god,
archangel, psalm of blue futurity:
Again the fretful coast boards up
amid the klaxon throats of cable news,
maxing every drop of badness
from our uddered greed for it.
Yours is an unquiet bane grown
baleful in our neglect—not even
the richest country on earth can
bribe or seduce You from
Your rounds. I scarce have
tongue enough to carve Your
backward symmetry, that awful
whirl reversing You deign to
dervish in Your wake. With winds
at 165 two days from shrieking
land, I hold You equidistant
to that spring in which You
birthed all buds ashore, each
leaf a mewl of pale proximity
now wild greenblack infinity.
Suffice to praise You here
in two hundred words or less
then race to batten all they still hold dear.
***
Sea wards: realm of divine madness: holy salt sepulchre pregnant with Thou: Brine baptism, awakening the next son on every shore: So I read these days from pages bound in that glance, torrentially sea-warding: Am I ready thus to begin?
***
As in the sea hast thou lived in solitude, and it has borne thee up.
Alas, wilt thou now go ashore? Alas, wilt thou again drag thy body thyself?
Zarathustra answered, “I love mankind.”
-- Anchorite to Z., Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
***
The hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.
The creators form the progressive element in a community, but at the same time they are the conservatives who link back to the origins ... The depth of the unconscious layer from which the new springs, and the intensity with which this layer seizes upon the individual, are the real criteria of this summons by the voice, and not the ideology of the conscious mind.
-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
***
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance: but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inur’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly shake in our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?
(Ghost beckons Hamlet)
-- Shakespeare Hamlet I, iv
***
Shakespeare ferrying forth those most original gouts of the spermatic Work, jets of icy blue spasm from the blow-holes of his heroes at the glorious rise and crest and glimmer and smash all the way back down to doom. We know it, see it, read that original meld of world and word leaping from the page at us. Thus Keats writes in a letter to John Reynolds in Oct. 1818,
***
I’ll tell you what -- On the 23d was Shakespeare born ... Whenever you say write a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you; which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same Play forty times -- for instance, the following from The Tempest, never struck me so forcibly as at present:
“...Urchins
Shall, for that vast of Night, that they may work,
All exercise on thee--”
How can I help bringing your mind to the Line --
“In the dark backward and abysm of time--” ...
***
Their work , his work, is our work -- that’s what the energies told my father at Iona in 1976, said Thor, guardian of the North wind, said Oran, up from the footers of his ghastly myth still harrowing the sacred isles. My father had spend the night on Columba’s grave -- that is one of the traditions for all penitential visitors--re-visiting Columba’s backward glance, putting himself in the shoes of his Maker, thus back down to the great Makers ... And some day later, when he was walking towared the north end of the island, after he laid down and fell asleep in the hazy bluster of an afternoon in June, then he dreamed of all of the old stones which had once lined the island (360 of them, long tossed into the sea by Christian devouts), they came toward him, ghastly in tattered robes, mooning, ululating, calling to him, closing in on him til he woke ... And then fell back asleep, dreaming of encountering a massive Presence on the Road of Dreams that heads from the shore up to Releig Odhran, a huge brawny terribly ugly visage who was Thor, guardian of the North Wind, whom my father’s heart burst for in a love deeper than his Christianity, changing utterly his future courses. He brought back those energies from Iona, you know, they are votived in the Glen of the Temple, they said to him your work is our work and our work is your work, strange utterance, antithetical to the words Columba buried over in 563 AD -- “The way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” -- Contrarian Oran in the ears of St. Columba, what changed over the aon which ended with my father? Or has the Otherworldly labor changed at all, if we are willing to go down, look back, welcome what we see, and get to work?
***
All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnight, wants graves, wants the consolation of graveside tears, wants gilded sunsets ... Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, deep, deep eternity.
-- Thus Spake Zarathustra
***
In the collective as in the individual the patriarchal world of culture, with its primacy of consciousness, forms only a segment of the whole. The positive forces of the collective unconscious which have been excluded struggle for expression in the creative person and flow through him into the community. Partly they are “old” forces, shut out through the overdifferentiation of culture, partly new and untried forces which are destined to shape the face of the future.
Both functions help to keep culture “in balance” by ensuring that it does not stray from its roots, or, on the other hand, ossify through conservatism.
-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
***
So what happens when one strays to sea, and stares too deeply in it? Two visions:
SEA FOREST
May 2003
Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.
-- Tennessee Williams
Suddenly as he peered down
and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living
spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity
rising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed
two long crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth, floating up
From the undiscoverable bottom.
-- Melville, Moby Dick
Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.
***
And from the chapter “Castaway” in Moby Dick:
Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to \ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green, and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up,not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.
((then, after Pip is tossed from a whale-boat for the second time and left behind))
... Now, in calm weather, to swim the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is terrible. The intense concentration of the self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?
... By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the ship like an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried him down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the warped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes, and the miserman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, is absurd and frantic, and weal or woe, feels them uncomprisied, indifferent as his God.
Sept. 21, 2005
Again in the Gulf a storm wheels
widdershins to You, salt god,
archangel, psalm of blue futurity:
Again the fretful coast boards up
amid the klaxon throats of cable news,
maxing every drop of badness
from our uddered greed for it.
Yours is an unquiet bane grown
baleful in our neglect—not even
the richest country on earth can
bribe or seduce You from
Your rounds. I scarce have
tongue enough to carve Your
backward symmetry, that awful
whirl reversing You deign to
dervish in Your wake. With winds
at 165 two days from shrieking
land, I hold You equidistant
to that spring in which You
birthed all buds ashore, each
leaf a mewl of pale proximity
now wild greenblack infinity.
Suffice to praise You here
in two hundred words or less
then race to batten all they still hold dear.
***
Sea wards: realm of divine madness: holy salt sepulchre pregnant with Thou: Brine baptism, awakening the next son on every shore: So I read these days from pages bound in that glance, torrentially sea-warding: Am I ready thus to begin?
***
As in the sea hast thou lived in solitude, and it has borne thee up.
Alas, wilt thou now go ashore? Alas, wilt thou again drag thy body thyself?
Zarathustra answered, “I love mankind.”
-- Anchorite to Z., Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
***
The hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.
The creators form the progressive element in a community, but at the same time they are the conservatives who link back to the origins ... The depth of the unconscious layer from which the new springs, and the intensity with which this layer seizes upon the individual, are the real criteria of this summons by the voice, and not the ideology of the conscious mind.
-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
***
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance: but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inur’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly shake in our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?
(Ghost beckons Hamlet)
-- Shakespeare Hamlet I, iv
***
Shakespeare ferrying forth those most original gouts of the spermatic Work, jets of icy blue spasm from the blow-holes of his heroes at the glorious rise and crest and glimmer and smash all the way back down to doom. We know it, see it, read that original meld of world and word leaping from the page at us. Thus Keats writes in a letter to John Reynolds in Oct. 1818,
***
I’ll tell you what -- On the 23d was Shakespeare born ... Whenever you say write a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you; which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same Play forty times -- for instance, the following from The Tempest, never struck me so forcibly as at present:
“...Urchins
Shall, for that vast of Night, that they may work,
All exercise on thee--”
How can I help bringing your mind to the Line --
“In the dark backward and abysm of time--” ...
***
Their work , his work, is our work -- that’s what the energies told my father at Iona in 1976, said Thor, guardian of the North wind, said Oran, up from the footers of his ghastly myth still harrowing the sacred isles. My father had spend the night on Columba’s grave -- that is one of the traditions for all penitential visitors--re-visiting Columba’s backward glance, putting himself in the shoes of his Maker, thus back down to the great Makers ... And some day later, when he was walking towared the north end of the island, after he laid down and fell asleep in the hazy bluster of an afternoon in June, then he dreamed of all of the old stones which had once lined the island (360 of them, long tossed into the sea by Christian devouts), they came toward him, ghastly in tattered robes, mooning, ululating, calling to him, closing in on him til he woke ... And then fell back asleep, dreaming of encountering a massive Presence on the Road of Dreams that heads from the shore up to Releig Odhran, a huge brawny terribly ugly visage who was Thor, guardian of the North Wind, whom my father’s heart burst for in a love deeper than his Christianity, changing utterly his future courses. He brought back those energies from Iona, you know, they are votived in the Glen of the Temple, they said to him your work is our work and our work is your work, strange utterance, antithetical to the words Columba buried over in 563 AD -- “The way you think it is is not the way it is at all.” -- Contrarian Oran in the ears of St. Columba, what changed over the aon which ended with my father? Or has the Otherworldly labor changed at all, if we are willing to go down, look back, welcome what we see, and get to work?
***
All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnight, wants graves, wants the consolation of graveside tears, wants gilded sunsets ... Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, deep, deep eternity.
-- Thus Spake Zarathustra
***
In the collective as in the individual the patriarchal world of culture, with its primacy of consciousness, forms only a segment of the whole. The positive forces of the collective unconscious which have been excluded struggle for expression in the creative person and flow through him into the community. Partly they are “old” forces, shut out through the overdifferentiation of culture, partly new and untried forces which are destined to shape the face of the future.
Both functions help to keep culture “in balance” by ensuring that it does not stray from its roots, or, on the other hand, ossify through conservatism.
-- Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
***
So what happens when one strays to sea, and stares too deeply in it? Two visions:
SEA FOREST
May 2003
Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.
-- Tennessee Williams
Suddenly as he peered down
and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living
spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity
rising, and magnifying as it
rose, till it turned, and then
there were plainly revealed
two long crooked rows of white,
glistening teeth, floating up
From the undiscoverable bottom.
-- Melville, Moby Dick
Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.
***
And from the chapter “Castaway” in Moby Dick:
Pip loved life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to \ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green, and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up,not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.
((then, after Pip is tossed from a whale-boat for the second time and left behind))
... Now, in calm weather, to swim the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is terrible. The intense concentration of the self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?
... By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the ship like an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried him down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the warped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes, and the miserman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, is absurd and frantic, and weal or woe, feels them uncomprisied, indifferent as his God.
posted by Brendan MacOdrum at 8:54 AM
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