Thresholdin'

Storm Ophelia finally picked up her skirts yesterday and fluttered away east and north, leaving not much behind but a couple of day’s dark hiatus from the brilliant heat of late summer. (Beaches in Flagler county may have all washed away.) Her visitation was a ponderous and meditative one, no real threat though everyone wondered why she lingered so long just offshore, did little, then left ... Overnight a front of sorts washed clean the sky and today it’s been clear and joyfully calm, gorgeous really, the sky of a blue not seen since the spring, hued in the ichor of transformation, if only for a day ... Such a joy to work in the garden this Saturday, pulling the inevitable weeds, trimming some, getting my fingers but good into the dirt, blackening my fingernails, washing clean the keyboarding malaise, the bloat of fluorescence. And that gentling breeze, absent of Ophelia, or of her reborn countenance, the spring of sighs she once meant to the prince of awfullest I ...

***


What orients a study of the past but our own? We may not have a great amount of room to be “original” in our speculations about how civilizations arose, due to the fixed origins our our brainpans. To me the distinction between “civilization” and “culture” has more to do with our relationship to history —”civilization” progresses in measure to our creations, and speeds as those creations accumulate. “Culture” looks backward, has roots in the million-year dreamtime of our preconscious development. They’re like Janus faces, looking in opposite directions.

Are there thresholds where one way of thinking passes over into another, an interface where sine becomes wave, a shift of ages where the proportion of a small but waxing lucency then leaps over to an age characterized by waning darkness?

It’s not that we were savage and then suddenly civilized, but there came an interim where we were too civilized to be truly savage again.


I speculate on that face which lifted towards the cosmos in the 4th millennium BC, a mind prepared by long evolution from wonder to calibration, the exegesis of heaven into its grand calender, the attempt to know Time’s most massive wheel, its ebb and flow through the aeons. That same gaze is in the scientist of our day, her gaze continues the work of that older one, writing down the high dominion, counting the ages back through human to geologic to stellar reaches of Time, along the backward parabola of narrative, out to the staid outer reaches of Infinity, no essential different in that outward, upwards look which homo faber, man the maker, turns toward its future.


And once that threshold has been passed, is there any true going back? Can our contemporary brains think with mind of the fourth millennium BC?

Certainly there are cultural empathies for that lost (or buried) psyche, symbolic matrix which survives in our language, our hearts -- our primary longings -- which haven’t aged a day: grand sympathies for Mater, uroburos, the erasure of deep uteral waters. But there’s no way to go back, not now, inside our phalanx of technologies wrought to defeat Mother Nature, surfeited on all of the progress which has resulted.


INTERVIEW WITH THE NEW TECHNOLOGY MANAGER

1995

Humankind is co-evolving with its artifacts,
and the genes that can't cope with that new reality
will not survive into future millennia.
-- Michael Schrage, Wired magazine

The new technology manager sat in my office
the other day to complete an interview
for the employee newsletter.
"You cannot manage the new technology,"
he said, tapping his laptop for emphasis.
"You can only fall into its flame
and pray to burn profitably."

This guy's worked
70-hour weeks for more than a decade
to arrive exactly here.
He's a good Puritan, a Christian family man,
balding and squinty and rumpled,
his eyes sad like Einstein's but
fixed on a more frenzied horizon.
He recently won our company's
top management award
for attending the birth
of complex advertising system
that will exchange its data
with other systems
easily, efficiently, and fast,
eventually driving dozens
of jobs off the flow chart
into Whatever.

He continued.

"All we are is a sieve,
frail impediments
in a torrid runoff
we call change.
That force is madness.
The only surety
is a greater, more efficient madness.
We pan neck deep
in the cold foam of
accumulating knowledge,
more likely swept
onto the rocks
than toward any
semblance of home."

I asked him,
what about us,
so many business bees
clustered in this
whirling hive of stress?
He looked away.
Wrong question.
His voice was bolstered
with long surrendered agonies.

"Reconcile your chains," he said.
"Your liver must be plucked
by ever-new systems of god.
Forget that passionate music of career.
In the new organware,
connectedness runs
so deep that one life exists
only to support countless others.
We exist in a supple, cognite web,
a glowing complexity
deep in a belly
we can never rise from."

I shifted in my chair.
The room was too warm,
too crowded with machines.
Coworkers hacked away
in stale fluorescence.
Phones kept ringing
for the dead.

I asked, then how
to find a foothold
on so slippery a future?

"Forget trying to understand
your job, our company, this business," he said.
"Tomorrow careens away too fast.
Your job survives only
as chance surrender
to quicksilver evolutions
too manic to name.
Bury the old algorhythms
that once composed the chart.
A new jazz thrums
with polyrhythms and pluck,
pumped on the sugar of teams.
The individual dies
in a swelter of irritation
and grief forever waylaid."

"You see," he said, scratching
his thin gray beard,
smoothing the few hairs
left on his head,
"We have become efficient
succubi, technic and rabid
for the lucre of rubes
to swathe the
beds of stockholders.
We are potent
only in defiance of
the life we leave behind."

"Do not despair," he smiled,
gentle, dangerous,
"There is no going back.
Gently and reverently profess
the Change which blows you
to smithereens.
Your anger is obsolete
and conspires to thwart the work
that must be done by all.
Please do not rock the boat;
the waves are fickle and ignorant
and have already caught the best of us.
We must pull together.
Accept there is no alternative.
No one can help you."

He stood. "Such are the
laws of the future
buried in all I really said."

I thanked him for his time
and pressed an f-key on my keyboard.
The image of the new technology manager
flickered in a wave of pixels
and was gone.

A threshold perhaps again, where symbolic work has passed a critical mass and become a center of identity with the binary 1 and 0 as the screws of a turbine which no longer whirl toward but overrun all shores. It is a liquid freedom chained to a hyper-reality, dispensing with the ground itself, with Mater, creating a cathedral inside the cathedral, a womb inside the mother’s womb, so virtually and literally Inside that we may never find our way out again.

Who is being left behind? Seems to me that it’s the individual. Net consciousness -- internet consciousness, the sum of all that brightness poured into one larger cognition -- is slowly deleting the self. Sven Birkerts wrote a few years back: “If you take all our technological innovations of the past two decades, -- certainly those in the fields of computing and communications -- you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of selfhood and to swamp us in an element of connectedness” The threshold divides the monk and the meme, St. Columba at his farthest shore become the hypertext he copied, plainsong of the tonsured become the polyphonic organum of the hive.

A natural progression, wouldn’t you say?

Perhaps. But that “progression” is tricky, because it seems every rise has a fall, every departure aches for a return. We may have invented computers and networks which rival the brain, but they are still wired to act like human brains. What else could they think of but that what we dream? Networks reflect a hard-wiring in human nature from simple to complex; all our inventions are merely intentions of soul. There is an archetypal complexity in that uplifted, outward gaze, making connections, founding sciences, building cities, charting heavens, stringing lyres tuned to the music of the spheres: older complexities of no essential difference from newer ones -- they maze, they progress -- the Mayan calendar as Byzantine as the Hindu pantheon, those dizzy spirals like archetypal synapses of the scientist who today harpuscape the genome, unscrolling the Milky Way of DNA which rules our genetics, our million-year history, adding one more life to the tale — our own.

And what is that gaze looking for anyway? Our distant future is cauled in the same amniotic as our distant past; at some threshold, whatever we are gazing for sees the arrival of an older, more perplex, darker, deeper face. Rilke once wrote to his wife Clara, “ Looking is such a marvellous thing, of which we know little; as we look, we are directed wholly outside ourselves --— but, even when we are at our most outward, things seem to happen within us which have been waiting longingly for the moment when they should be unobserved, and while they take their course, intact and strangely anonymous, their significance grows in the object outside, a more convincing, more powerful name, their only possible name, in which we happily and reverently recognize the happenings within us.”

When Columba desires to look upon the face of Oran one last time -- Oran so representative of the fading oral culture of the Gael, the seal-child Odrum who could not survive into the future -- he perhaps is at such a threshold. Columba would become the white knight of scholarship, poetry and history, championing the cause of writing all the old stories down at the same time spreading the light of Christianity throughout the Hebrides. He was a man of the future, and perhaps because of that he desired so to look once more on the face of his friend, on the past he would build over. At that threshold of old and new dominions, Columba turns to look back, and is affrighted by news he receives out of the mouth of Oran -- “everything you say about God and man and heaven and earth is WRONG!”

Should he not have bothered that backwards glance? Could he have done otherwise? I wonder now about Orpheus, who so desired to look upon the face of Eurydice that he turned back right at the threshold and broke the taboo which conditioned her release from the dead. Orpheus’ future took shape in that backwards glance; the spectral drowning of Eurydice back into mist (Ophelia drifting below the wave to where she would no longer be seen) fated the rest of his story. His future leapt out of that backwards glance.

***

Thresholds: As before, so now: when we were ready to map the heavens, were we really simply ready to to gaze more truly on the on the face of our dark other, in its extraconscious, burning blue totality— collective unconscious, self, beloved, mother sea, father of heavens, God? Wielding an abacus at the dread lip of madness, tallying all of the names which stand like mile-markers between I and Thou? Each song a calculation for trajectory, the angle of the dangle, calibrating how far I must rise before I properly fall —And what lies at the end of calendar but the next day of the round?

Are we talking narrative here or of a spiral which always returns to a center? A threshold, the answer is yes, though there is a tincuturing difference. Howard Nemerov puts it this way in “Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose and Poetry:”

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

A symbol -- snow which falls but flies --is what both defines and animates a threshold, helping us to approach it and then understand a dimensional shift. Symbols are the mind’s paddle and sea, allowing our bicameral minds the rare opportunity for synthesising two thoughts into one. Neumann writes,

In early cultures, everyday habit is simply the unconscious existence of primitive man, the habitual clinging of his libido to the world in participation mystique, in which state his natural life is spent. Through the symbol, the energy is freed from this attachment and becomes available for conscious activity and work. The symbol is the transformer of energy, converting into other forms the libido which alone enbles primitive man to achieve anything at all. That is why any activity of his has to be initiated and accompanied by a variety of religious and symbolic measures, whether it be farming, hunting, fishing, or any other ‘unaccustomed’ work not done every day. Only with the help of the fascinating, libido-catching, and ego-absorbing affect of the symbol can the ‘unaccustomed’ activity be undertaken.

The myths are always primal, original, prior to civilization; they are numinous because they gleam with original fire; they exist outside of our cities, beyond our knowns, and no amount of analysis, exegesis or excavation can dig deep enough into their primary psychic essence.(O tho we try! ).

The mind that has evolved is deeply paired with mind it evolved from, as with every biologic geologic and stellar iota it has laddered from; we build for the future yet yearn for the past; we create new worlds out of the old ones, using the same stuff; we thrive, imaginatively at least, at that threshold where the veil was once thin, when 6 was 9 and vice versa, going at in like a couple engaged in 69, feasting on the otherness. We were once less conscious, we are now more conscious; once unconscious mana tyrrannized our thoughts and behavior, now conscious beams threaten to blicker the landscape with brightness. Temperance of the systems, of both composed and nourished, seems to be the next door of the dream; the tools are found in the threshold, at the moment when energy leaps from synapse to synapse, when snowflakes falling suddenly fly.

The paradox is that the very thing which has helped us progress -- our symbol-making facility -- is the very thing which turns us back to sources. Symbols, minted in the dream, rouse us from a sleep bounded by a sleep, inspiring us to build better wombs that are never more than that. If this has you as dizzy as it has made me this afternoon -- feeling that I’ve gone round and round wasting many words -- then perhaps I’ve succeeded in staying at the threshold, and given the chance for the next face to be born.

***


THE CLINGING

1988


Why are we always clinging to whatever we can?
Such a useless gesture ... Remember birth? How we
were squeezed down those gripless, unrelenting walls?
Was that the essential lesson? And have we ever
stopped sliding since? It just goes on and on, one long
hilarious tumble into the grave's sudden mitt.

Our hero has been a champion at clinging
for all his life. He grew up in a Depression home
where to have was to hold, a destiny beyond
a boy's serial adventure, high in the polished mansions
where Gable and Stewart wooed gowns more
glittery with coin than silk-full of breast.
Damn, he whispered over popcorn, his heart
grasping the ankles of his fancy, never to let go.

Now 50, he's appropriated well: a long successful
rise at selling cars, living in jazzy new house
in the ritziest suburb north of town, his many
investments ringing up many returns. He drives about
in a red convertible Jag, flashing a new, young,
pretty, and thoroughly manageable wife.
He knows how envy makes his clutch of
these things so sweet. Banking the world's desire.

He once thought his hunger would eventually
sate on enough big-ticket meals, but every morning
he wakes more starved than ever. If age has taught
him anything is to cling sublimely, on substance
with context--country club exclusiveness, political
contributions, lifetime subscriptions, zoning pecadillos.
Haunting his having with spirit and soul.

He's true capitalist of the heart, his passions
grabbing and grubbing every shot of life.
To keep his grip firm he makes airtight deals,
cementing things into place with shit and blood
and sperm. Sign on the dotted line and
zip it all away. His lawyer and accountant can have
their slice of his ass so long as they keep him
presentable. His pretty wife can shop on Gold
and Platinum cards all day while he's in
the office, just so long as she neither loves or leaves him.

All in place!
Every autumn he rides with busloads of boosters
to attend Gator home games. They all dress in
cartoon blues and oranges, reverently sweeping
their arms in the Gator Growl. Biting off a chunk
of that real stuff. On the way home he tells his
drunk buddies about his secretary who can't type
worth a damn but boy can she sure take that
ole dick-tation! He hauls from his hoard the
memory of laying on the conference table with
her legs clenched around his pumping ass,
urging him on in a sing-song voice. Daddy,
he said. Daddy. Damn, he thinks, as the
memory fades into his own reflection in the
darkened bus window. He fired her when her
clinging no longer made his own much fun.

On late Sunday afternoons our hero barbecues
steaks in his back yard. His new wife lounges
by the pool in haze of fashion magazines and
s dewy glass of Chardonnay. He sips vodka and turns
the spits of meat. Fat hisses and smokes, rising
to no god. Surely this is an arrival of sorts--

But our hero knows no epiphanies of letting be
or letting go. Not with the sun falling fat and red
in the west like a nubile cherry for the plucking.
Damn, he thinks, and though we can't see it,
we know his line is cast again at the horizon,
ever after the sweetest prize of all.

TRANSFORMER

2000

Sitting by an opened window
five floors up in a distant city
waking to dawn traffic.
Hungover and queasy
facing a last day of
pitches to editors.
Desperate to lie in bed
with my wife cupping her
breasts as she sighs.
My lonliness taking
the measure of Jack Gilbert’s
poetry there. Astounded
that so much courses
through words and nipples
to feed poem and body,
impossible to contain
or remain or betray.
Outside the window
hums a huge transformer
of gray girders and
wired pots, powering this
25-story hotel with
enough juice to ink
every deal. But it’s barely
a firefly’s pulse a half mile
down a dirt road at sunset
compared to my wife
lays on me slowly rubbing
her hips against mine,
arching and collapsing in a sigh.
Her blue eyes lucent with
enough juice to light God.
Jack Gilbert’s poems reminding
me how much God needs the help.


ROSES

(2002)

...you were rich enough to be yourself
a hundred times in just one flower;
that’s the condition of the lover ...
But you never did think otherwise.
- Rilke, “The Roses” IV,
transl. A. Poulin Jr.

When I first read those lines
I was walking to my high-stress
newspaper job more than a decade ago:
And then I read them aloud
a second time, astonished ...
“The Roses” are these simple
8-line poems Rilke wrote in French
and seem inexhaustible
in their purity, presence,
and power; reading them aloud
world and word calyxed in the bed
of my ear, sounding so much
with so little, awakening a return,
affirming at last what
I always somehow knew.
I’ve read those poems
again and again over
the years, from so many
different stations of the life.
Some poems are desert island
songs, artifacts of art’s
autobiography which
we could not live without
and which never cease sprouting
within. Few things now slow
our inward whirl; vacancy
spreads through the culture
like a fog, deadening
and deafening all it envelopes.
Just to speak of what is
worth praising seems noble,
when it is only doing
as we should, like breathing.
Lost in the whirl of days,
the space between gasp
and sigh narrows to one
droning vowel-Until one
of Rilke’s roses open
like a mouth and a heavenly
wind hurls through me
its strange and wild perfume.
Suddenly I can’t breathe
in or out enough
and the bell is
ringing, ringing, ringing!


METAPHOR (A HYMN)

Anima-consciousness favors a
protective mimicry, an attachment,
to something or someone else to
which it is echo. Here we see
the wood-nymphs that belong
to trees, the souls which hover
over waters, speak from dells
or caves, or sing from
sea-rocks and whirlpools —
and, most, vividly, the succubus.

-- James Hillman, “Anima: Anatomy
of A Personified Archetype”

The statue of Eleuthereus
((Dionysos)) was carried back
and forth on a ship equipped with
wheels ... The ship places the
arrival of the strange procession in the
perspective of the sea, which is
no more than a day’s journey
for an animal-drawn vehicle
from any point on the Greek
island. The wheels show that the
journey to Athens was made over
land, but the ship took on a ritual
significance which the vase painters
easily raised to the level of myth.

-- Carl Kerenyi, “Dionysos: Archetypal
Image of Indestructible Life”

When Pryderi returned ((to Dyfed))
he and Manawydan feasted and took
their ease. They began the feast at
Arberth, since that was the chief
court where every celebration
began, and after the evening’s first
sitting, while the servants were eating,
the four companions arose and went to
Gorsedd Arberth ((a fairy mound)),
taking company with them. As
they were sitting on the mound
they heard thunder, and with
the loudness of the thunder a mist
fell, so that no one could see
his companions. When the mist
lifted it was bright everywhere,
and when they looked out
at where they had once seen
their flocks and herds and dwellings
they now saw nothing, no animal,
no smoke, no fire, no man,
no dwelling -- only the
houses of the court empty,
deserted, uninhabited, without man
or beast in them; their own
company was lost too, and they
understood that only the four
of them alone remained.

-- “Manawydan son of Llyr,” from
The Mabinogion, transl. Jeffrey Gantz


You are the ache in my words
for salt symmetry, for
rudders and wheels
both wave and
road for the god in his
ship-car who freights us,
island by day by poem,
from outermost to home.
Always your blue mordents
inside these daily tides
which is so like something else,
of no day I have seen
nor of any night I’ve dreamed.
For every purchase
I make here on one
named shore, you
at once sight its
haunting beyond, the
image as real as life itself
and is. Though you and
I will never kiss, our
puckerings are all:
the boom of a
remembered wave’s
collapse is like sky
horses at full thunder,
and both are hooves
of that wild heave
of me inside the woman
who is so much like
you. And in that swoosh
erasing all, you ferry
the god in his device
the distance of two souls,
arriving at that
shore where
we are one broken
wave of salt and
foamed surrender.
My wife’s sleeping
shape upstairs is like
that mound in Wales
where to spend one
night invokes a mist
dissolving one life
into some strangely
shining other,
the old commotions
simply gone.
Beneath those sheets
are nymphs and
naiads, Ariadne
in her gloom
and Iris on
her pool, the
Lady of my wells
descending far
and still farther
in a gossamer
of fading smile.
In a mole’s breeze-
ruffled white fur
where it lay dead
yesterday on the
road next
to huge Lake
Dora (savagely
brilliant and blue)
is every
soft cheek I’ve
ever glanced, every
pale breast
that swung
up to my lips.
What would this be
without your
other’s stain and echo
which no words of mine
will ever quite name,
much less bed?
Like an unseen
shore’s faint-foaming
rumble, my every verse
peramble stumbles
everywhere in search
of you, unaware it
is your own soft singing
in tree and wave,
in sleeping wife
and road-killed mole.
Wrap all my ends
in your fish tales.
Be the keel too
heavy with the one
that got away,
the god who comes
inside your ebbings,
the thirst you
slake in every breast
I squeeze and suck
with these othering lips.


CULTURED IN ORAN


I have been
cultured in Oran:
seeped in his soil
a stone's duration
holding a steady
note over cold
waters until
I changed to
that tenor.
Sing long and
low that old
brute plainsong -
the singer changes
to accord with
the song. As we
do not dream
but are sieved
through nature's
wild milk,
so old songs
heal their singers
of their daily
routs, pouts,
& exceptional
blood. God doesn't
care so much
for your circumstances
as He does for
your character,
it's said in AA;
This life’s groans
and labors simply
teach the fork
to hold steady.
Oran's skull
is the well-socket
for these poems,
round which
all pages revolve.
My faith consists
in this: to dip
my pen daily
into the blue of
his eyes, &
write down
that sea sound
on the beach
of every island
he found under
the surf's soiled
& soulish thunder.


THRESHOLD

September 10, 2005

This threshold has been
so present I’ve sensed it
everywhere but couldn’t find
a name. Summer climaxing
into the first ebb of autumn
with receding light, breezes
tinged with gold. One work
seeming finished, no sense
of what to do next. But
the days have just hung
there, swollen, aching like
a pregnant woman for
the darkest waters to break.
And then in my dream
last night I found our next house
in a secret neighborhood
I’d never seen before,
archaic, on a street
which dead-ended
in a mound. The house
itself was nothing,
bland and small and
shadowy, though next
to it was a castle of sorts,
the witch-house my wife
has always loved, great and
obvious, the cream of men’s
desire poured inside
a woman’s hips, her
circlet of rooms. The house
I would enter is one I
cannot own, its door a vowel
far left and down from all
I know, pale orange like a
pumpkin in a patch of
autumnally gold but darkening
verdure: A dangerous, yes,
frightening door, lamped like
a jack-o’-lantern skull
inviting me in, only if I dare,
if I promise to write down all
that I find without apology
or comment, if I will be
the mouth of whatever god
is in there, to loose
his waters full, come hell
or high watering derange.
For weeks I’ve seen that door
everywhere, in every tableaux
of the day, but never quite the handle,
refusing I guess to see or say
that far. And now -- at nearly 6 a.m
on cooler darker morning in
September -- I write here sensing
that the door is everywhere
behind me, smiling the other way,
the seeker dead, frozen in his
chair like a buried king whose
name is still ebbing on the stream
like starlight draining from the
now once-darkest blue of skies.
My prow loves to cleave of such
fresh water, is overjoyed to be
voyaging at last. Good Lord,
make my eyes keen and hunger wild.
Compass the rudder of this hand
to the far orisons of this nascent land.