Sanctuary, Threshold

TEAJACK

September 2005

Salt and foam careen the surge
which carries me toward You
upon this lurch of fin and tooth
and pale white spermacetti fire.
Teajack is my name, tar of
every Southern coast, a brawn
of blue maraud. In my cup
of passage I was brined
in whiskey’s womb, then
hung a year upon a sea-dam’s
stake where noctals washed my
mind for good; wakened
like a conch upon a shattered beach,
I began these spiral sing-songs home.
I ride from shore to shore upon
the backs of uddered waves,
a stone skipped across the sea
from bed to bed to bed of blue.
Each night torn from Your abyss
sings the starry depth of God
before He ripped his name
pure from Your vocal chords.
Each morning wakes with
dew on these hands, the sweat
of sweet breasts which milked
now brighten this next shore
with a pearly, sated light.
Here is the undiscovered
country I never thought I’d find, that
home inside the wildest heart
I always meant to ride but feared.
I begin here, a bluer salt, to harrow
all found in that water, even to the
ninth most fatal wave.
The crash of surf booms
down the shore like the welcome
of an old friend at the door,
of shark and queen composed:
the womb inside my pen’s blue sense
now shouting in wild resonance.

***

Sunday-Monday, fairer winds holding Sunday in a halcyon and crisp frame of quietude and bliss, my wife working steadily on her custom job, happiest to be at that work, me happiest to see her that way. Cats in every perhiphery, dozing, scrounging for treats, a game, a pet. News of the world ebbed thus far, agonies at a drone, the whitecapped fears of loss washed over, through, leaving behind a sort of gratitude for this day only, prayers for the next, a steeling of the will to do the work that’s required. Reading Hamlet, an essay by Marjorie Garber on the play, Moby Dick.

And finding sanctuary there, in those dark seas. Weird, eh? To find comfort in those outermost reaches of “wild and whirling words” (Horatio)? But I do. In Dick, the whale-boats of the Pequod close in on a stampeding herd of sperm whales, and the cluster that Ishmael’s boat finds themselves in is comprised of bull males on the inside and expecting mothers on the inside. He comments,

“And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight.”

And from that observation, this, which I take as my own: “But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for every centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe in eternal mildness of joy.” (425)

Paradoxically, the sanctuary Ishamael finds -- in the midst of a murderous hunt -- is the one Melville found in diving into such darkness. After Moby Dick was completed, he wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicket book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” Sanctuary may have no meaning without its catastrophic outer marge; were the sea elsewise, the work of harboring would not have such bittersweet beauty.

***

In the threshold bright and dark faces meet: conscious and unconscious faces, known and unknown halves of the knucklebone, the symbolon, threshold as gnosis, irruption of dark waters, penetration of bright thought, marrying of the worlds in on a restless, porous, crashing marge, of shore and sea composed. Erich Neumann, in Origins and History of Consciousness: “Like the individual symbol, the social symbol valid for the group is ‘never of exclusively conscious or exclusively unconscious origin,’ but is produced by the ‘equal collaboration of both.’ The symbol therefore has a rational side ‘which accords with reason,’ and another side which is ‘inaccessible to reason, since it is composed not only of data of a rational nature, but of irrational data of pure inward or outward perception.’’ (His quotes are from Jung’s Psychological Types..)

Over our history, the symbol has mediated psychic growth and transformation, but changes in function as species and individual in emulation grows; it inverts, it reverses. “Generally speaking, the symbol works in opposite ways for primitive and modern man,” Neumann writes (op cit), adding this footnote: “For modern man the emergence of symbols on the ‘way inward’ has a different meaning and function. Here, the mediatory position of the symbol, which is due to its being in combination with conscious and unconscious elements, is proved by the fact the the link back of conscious to unconscious proceeds via the symbol, just as with the dawn of man the development went in the reverse direction from unconscious to conscious.”

The symbol led us here; now the symbol leads us back. Perhaps its function is one of growth toward equilibrium. Certainly equilibrium is crucial to our wholeness -- a temperance of conscious and unconscious systems -- yet the symbol’s shifting polarity keeps us sawing back and forth, learning one way, then the other, then back again. Maybe the 3D image really is that of the spiral, a linear circle which drives away from the center only to return to a center is transformed by the motion out and round, transformed sufficiently to desire further higher ground by spiralling out again, through the other region, gleaning greater then deeper augments through each whorl.

I think of how the earth’s polarity shifts every 8,000 years or so. As I understand it, a northern polarity is now shifting southward. “True North” will in some time point southward, all our maps readable only in reverse.

So too the symbol switches polarity. We were less conscious and became conscious, a walled city with ever-more fixed borders; we are now too conscious and need to become less so, to become more a shore and less of a citadel. Its not a rigid pendulum -- ripping from one state into its other like binaries or bicamerals, always at war, tearing down the edifaces of the conquered, pillaging and raping what is found there never the wiser -- but rather each time there’s a shift its toward “higher” yet “deeper” ground. My more unconscious state becomes articulated by a more conscious state, those dark energies the fuel of growth; and then my more conscious state is fed to the waters that the center may mature, all those heights become depths, consonants vowels, winds become waters. The center is harrowed by each shift of polarity: it’s still the same place but greater, deeper, resonant with futurity and the past.

***

Neumann, op cit: “The world of symbols forms the bridge between a consciousness struggling to emancipate and systemize itself, and the collective unconscious with its transpersonal contents. So long as the world exists and continues to operate through the various rituals, cults, myths, religion, and art, it prevents the two worlds from falling apart, because, owing to the effect of the symbols, one side of the psychic system continually influences the other and sets up a dialectical relationship between them.”

“As Jung has shown [in Symbols of Transformation], the symbol mediates the passage of psychic energy from the unconscious, in order that it may be applied consciously and turned to practical account. He describes the symbol as a ‘psychological machine’ which ‘transforms energy.’”

***

So that forward-striving solar car of the culture hero gets its octanes from the introjectors of centroversion, hauling up the black buckets of water to mix in the mortar of the rising tower.

And when the edifice has aged past its midpoint, grown over-conscious, selfish, goaty, sterile, then all Denmark stinks, the wrong king sits on the throne and the true prince must resort to foolishness and madness. Reading Hamlet is precipitating in me much querying into thresholds, how infernal symbols can seem, topsy-turvy, leading the hero out of the solar castle up into the frozen ramparts. Claudius the usurper-king, whom Hamlet distrusts, ascending to the throne of Denmark and the bed of his mother Gertrude after the untimely death of Hamlet’s father, brother of Claudius. And when Claudius admonishes Hamlet Jr. not to languish so in “unmanly grief,” false king and over-conscious superego (conscience does a son little good when society is corrupt), then it’s time to follow the ghost of Hamlet’s father out to the most frightening threshold of living and dead.

Is this a play, or ancient ritual? Are those words on paper, or the utterance of souls? Is that Denmark or the high-tide of everyman’s brutal ambition, fired by all the platitudes which allow a man to kill his brother? Marjorie Garber writes in Shakespeare After All,

“Like a series of Russian dolls, nested one inside another, or the infinite regress of a theatrical or pictorial illusion (the man on the trademark Quaker Oats box, holding a box on which there is a man holding a box), the plays and fictions of Hamlet nest inside one another, until we are no longer sure where to place the boundaries of reality and illusion. Hamlet’s story becomes the story of a confrontation with consciousness, and it is a story that becomes the haunting chronicle Horatio must live to retell.”

So the hyperconscious hero -- Bloom calls Hamlet our absolute zenith -- turns to the Ghostly interface, that farthest edge between mortality and the dead, to lead him to safety. A perilous and mad course, perhaps, but that is where the symbol leads our hero, and we in turn. Gardner again:

“In suggesting that ... the world of Hamlet’s mind and imagination; the physical, political and ‘historical’ world of Denmark; and the world of dramatic fiction and play -- are parallel to and superimposed upon one another, I am suggesting, also that the play is about the whole question of boundaries, thresholds, and liminality or border crossing; boundary disputes between Norway and Denmark, boundaries between youth and age, boundaries between reality and imagination, between audience and actor. The most inexorable boundary possible would seem to be that between life and death, yet the play opens with the appearance of a ghost, a spirit come from the grave.”

One infinitely dangerous to have congress with, owing to the threat of repossession by that infinitely wild dark. Horatio warns Hamlet:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fadoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath. (I, iii)

Ah, there is that sea again, the sound inside the Ghost, calling us back to certain doom and perdition: the very source which creates the story itself! As Melville, as Keats looked back to primary literary sources in the sea, so Shakespeare looked back to the sea itself, heading all the way back in order to proceed.

***

Hart Crane’s "The Bridge" faces those two worlds, willing a man-made shape over an inchoate, watery power. These lines are from the introductory poem of that sequence:

... O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could more toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry, --

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path -- condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometimes sweep, descent,
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

***

Those blent faces, curving toward each other into a furious, fructive, fruity, feral God: thresholding. And our backwards glance is what engenders the bridge, the harp, as if by reaching back into that first fire we would retrieve the blade that saves us.

***

DOUBLE OUTBOARD

For two-headed
double-edged turbo-rollers
of wild blue, we’ll need
some elbow room. Dear
Pal Rilke, if we
are the bees of the invisible
we are not indivisible
but a complex
and dappling
emulsion, congregate
and appellate in our
eruditions. See: I’ve loosed
my polysyllables from
their stables today, all
the ones who could
or would not
roam set-sized hawkers
of sooth: So ease back
and buckle up, roll down
the windows, enjoy
the ride ...
Today I
think of Cary Grant
who would be 100 years
and a day today. What
a polished archon of
noblesse! — Handsomest
of all & almost the
funniest too. His genius
may have been to keep
those whirls in
paired motion: Strolling
in in black-tied
perfection, then from
that vantage stealing every
scene with a rear-guard
wit and thus revealing
some whole
other man who didn’t
give a shit about the
minted glamour boy.
Always at his sartorial
best with a motley grin
to boot: together they
formed the summa of
a style, a blent
quintessence which
no woman and few men
could resist. — Rest
thee well, good man.
- Tough act to follow!
Yet his example serves
this next poem well,
where shaft and shore
sing the harmony of
a strange yet nearby
key, of stone
and sea composed.
We’ll see. Cary Grant’s
trick was to wow ‘em
with one face and then
loose a zinger with that other,
providing the rudest and
unassailable permission —
So well practiced that
he never won an Oscar
(his roles must have seemed
too easy). Lord knows
I’ll never wow my wife’s
undies to the thundertow
that way: Nor will I
gain a nod from fathers
everywhere with
this conceit: Still I’ve
roamed wide and deep
in ink here, so it’s time
to yoke both to task.
Alpha my bucket,
Omega my oar: Ripe
contrarians, it’s time to roar
where idols heap outside
my city’s walls. Let wounds
in tongues of ocean
plumage soar. Perplex blue,
hang your strange pale
light above the next
dashing, devilish shore.


DEEP-SEA COMPASS

A compass soaked in deep-sea salt
bournes a ghoulie orient, the world
it tongues abyssal, wild, and strange,
drawing my north-borne eyes to
points way south, to fix as home’s
most golden port a pass of high-
blown awfulness, its blue what
angels howl from heavens
farthest down. That compass
steers this hand over the page
along a gradient of wind and
wave pitched to awe’s infernity,
its line of sight that lime-spread
road of revenance and spleen
where my evil twin’s every
bad night bouree has been
plowed over by now sober
years of sitting in this daily
chair singing on to more
revenant and greater bones.
Look: The year now turns to
early summer when days are
hottest of them all, May
in Central Florida a soaring
spear of sun-drenched hours
which nails an eros to its heart,
greedy in thirst and winging
far to drink days to the dregs
in soaring amplitude. The manic
monkey here is born of that
hot pulse, plunging his nib
to pale as my beloved’s ass;
every drop of ink he flings
is in measure to the milk
she never poured for me
but may yet -- or so he hopes
and thus writes down the liquid
pealings of high suck, draught
for draught of creamy blue.
A deep-sea compass points
me ever and most here
though I see no Cape
inside the coming day, not
with eyes set on the world’s
suburban panoply. I don’t
even know who I’m singing to anymore,
nor can say what agency
employs my voice this structure
hour. My job -- as best as I surmise
in the finny way of escaping
dreams -- my job is just to
ferry this strange instrument
to shores I’ll always hear the
sound of but never reach,
and in such failure pass its
salty freightage on, harrowed
by my attempt just enough
to make it gleam still worse.
Your compass is that tuba in
the angel troop that honks
in whalish brogue, one of
the deeper bassos in the choir
that human ears can heard,
though baser ones resound
in my wife’s sleepy first kiss.
Someone’s got to hold the low
end down. Your compass in
my throat sails me ever
toward those deep blue waters’
wounding wildest sound.


THE DARK SEA SKY

Maps endure beyond their makers
and sworn otherworlds. Unknown
islands and shores out there become
someone’s civil coast, the black-fraught
blue of dragon screech my neighbor’s
homeward glance. Strange distance
becomes known terrain, a humdrum
shape sleeping down its former daunting
thrall to naught. Even so, the Dark Sea
still thrashes and toils beyond the margins
of any page I have turned, flashing now
and then flukes which no beast in the
catalogue could possibly haul, mauling deep
currents no one has yet to name,
much less decanted. That sea tides
the shore of every extremity,
bound not even by blue waters.
Last night walking out of the gym,
the day was ebbing fast and the sky
was smeared by long high contrails
of cirrus whipped by vast winds,
smears of cloud in high dashed traceries,
like surf-foam upon the backs of
that wind pouring south from the world’s
frozen height. The wisps and rushes
of grey against the deepening blue sky
were like dollops of cloud hurled from
some monstrous brush, wings of
angels dragged by their dark devices
in a chorale-like howl on South. Awe and
not a little terror was in that sky where
the Dark Sea spumed and thrashed
for half an hour or so the death
of the next day, cold and salted and huge
and not a drop to savor here, as if
oceans like mountains have ebbed full away
yet live on beyond even their own dreams,
blacker than the evernight and mashed
against the visible seams of all I know.
But who am I, that late sky sang as I
drove home, in a voice so high and distant,
an etherially drawn sigh, a deep dark
waveless drone ...

... who but Thou am I ...

... I