The Brain Game

Wet day: a tropical wave doing it’s thang off the Atlantic coast, swirling in huge archons of dowse, droopy drippy breezy acreage of pissing cumulus, wave after wave. Glub glub. The day’s 20-mile inward commute a crawl but the gardens of the land must be mightily pleased.

***

All knowledge is dicey, it has a Mephistophelean scent of wet poodle fur, black, musty, faintly redolent of buggary, of sex and shit and dirtiness ... It goes back to our first crime, the bite of divinely sweet fruit (apple or Eve), the flooding bright awareness which followed that where there is good there is also evil, a duplicity in nature where once there was unity, the seamless sexless undifferentiated unknowable Eden. We are always tempted to know more, curiosity is our bane, our delight, our sine qua non reach for that which we are forbidden to see.

The knowledge of good and evil created the need to fork our knowledge into the bidden and verboten, right application of the mind and the infernal errancies. Roger Bacon wrote in “The Advancement of Learning,” “God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe. Let no one weakly imagine that men can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, and works, divinity, and philosophy.” Nothing wrong, no limit to how much we may divine the well of God in this world.

But the sacred territory becomes too known; it dries, becomes moot, a bore. All of those medieval scholars with their heads in the starry heavens, taking a census of angels from the head of every pin. (Had those scholars become pinheads?) A gap began to form between study and exegesis of canonical texts and the really interesting stuff off the margins, in the unsanctioned applications of the mind. Or did the mind which became lamped by the official knowledge thus learn about the margins it was fated to egress into? What do we desire to know, anyway, but what we don’t? What is more desired than the thing we can’t know, or must not know?

I imagine Marlowe’s Faust brooding in his study like the figure in Durer’s Melancholy, surrounded with all of his books, athrone his writing-chair, dejected with his life’s work, none of it enervating any more, a summa of exhaustion. This is the scholar at the end of the Middle Ages, no longer content with sanctioned work, aware of a flood of new texts coming in from the unsanctioned quarters -- myriad translations of Classical texts, new treatises on the nature of Nature, pre-scientific alchemical texts.

These texts are adders in his mind, alluring as Eve, promising all of the delights which sacred study denies -- earthly pleasures, carnal delights, empowerment, mastery.

Thus Marlowe’s Faust makes the break with his past, daring to proclaim what was on the minds of so many:

Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both law and physic are for petty wits.
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile;
‘Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me! (I.105-9)

He sends for two alchemist/magicians, Cornelius and Valdes, for instruction in his new course of study. Good and Evil Angels poof into clarity on either side of his ears, the one admonishing him to stick to the Lord’s scriptures -- the surest passage into the better afterlife -- the other whispering of pagan clout in the here and now, hell be damned. But Faust’s mind is already made up: he wants to know all, convinced such knowledge would make him all powerful:

How I am glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings ... (1.78-87)

Yes: This is knowledge of a very different order, not of God’s world through the immaterial transcendent nouminous Word, but knowledge of this world, employing those blacker words which lift every hammer of fructive fire. Science would develop exactly here, from the arcane incantations of the alchemist, rooting down from that first blasphemy down into the profane world of certifiable data, the turbine of enquiry which powers our day ever faster. But perhaps in a stranger, stronger, more essential way, the infernal arts of the alchemist/magus opened up our minds into the real of unfettered imagination, the dream of surfeit with its ten thousand breasts and crowns.

The magus Cornelius promises Faust a good return on his immortal investment. The pitch is not to common sense or reason but to a wilder wetter place in our mind, the masterless imagination:

The miracles that magic will perform
Will make thee vow to study nothing else.
He that is grounded in astrology,
Enriched with tongues, well seen in minerals,
Hath all the principles magic doth require.
Then doubt not, Faustus, but to be renowned
And more frequented for this mystery
Than heretofore the Delphian oracle.
The spirits tell me they can dry the sea
And fetch the treasure of all foreign wrecks --
Ay, all the wealth that our forefathers hid
Within the massy entrails of the earth. (1.136-147)

Yes, all of it revealed and delved, every secret hidden nook of Mother Nature’s cranny cracked open like a book and read to every desire’s surfeit: Isn’t that what we always wanted to know? To unlock all of those doors which our fathers long have barred, to swim freely out of the dismal study of all They said were priceless for the soul: To rebel against high heaven to glut in the voluptuous flame: Which would you choose, fellow scholar, given ample chance?

There are risks. The safer course is always the proscribed one, and there is still enough of a cultural center for that. While third world economies like India and China are transforming themselves into technological and manufacturing powerhouses, this silly country is dead in the water, deafened by the cultural discourse on sacred and profane knowledge. Witness the trial in Pennsylvania over the teaching of elegant design alongside evolution in the schools and the Supreme Court case being argued today over assisted suicide in Oregon. Knowledge must have a divine purpose and brain to it, else we go the way of Faust to our own specie of damnation. Where does a young person find encouragement to develop the technical skills essential to vie in a 21st century information economy when those very skills are suspect, liable, cursed?

The solution from that besieged and, in my opinion, falling culture is to emasculate and scar the offending mind; a beheading of the imagination, so to speak. The notion goes back to Jesus of Mark 9:43-44: “And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched: Where the worm dieth and the fire is not quenched.”

Its ironic that our fiercest competitor on the emerging world market is a country that has fiercer centrality than we do: China does more to harness the mind and morals of its population than America. Yet they don’t quibble with progress, and are hellbent on getting all of the skills & tricks needed to master the world. There is an enthusiasm among the Chinese people about their nation and its prospects; they’re dreamers and doers while we seem to be whiners and losers. Their imaginations seem to me to be fired up where ours are flattened. How much of Faust’s desire that country can collectively employ without straying into its darker applications remains to be seen. Internet porn is tightly controlled there, but what happens when they go wi-fi?

Perhaps that collective imagination -- and desire -- is amped all the way because so little of the actual possession yet exists. We’re had the surfeit of success for a generation or two by now, and culturally we’re bored with it. Offered boundless benefits by our technology, we’ve focussed instead on the toys, the Blackberries and iPods and cellphones. We are Durer’s bored-as-shit summa, pampered, supreme, sequestered deep in suburban Eden, with not a thing in the word to do but watch reality TV and drone on the phone.

Ergo, surfeit is never the point; it’s never what we already have, already know, but rather what we dream, what there is still to find out. Thus on one hand we continue to develop the tools, and on the other we keep flexing and finning the imagination. Such a posture keeps us close to the copyists of the sixth century AD, glorying in the works of God, penning dragons beyond the margins.

Ergo (2), one should always pursue their bliss; this study is for rogering and plunging, for bursting bodices and downy billows, for bawdy bricoglage, biblical buggaries. The whole She-bang. Why else crack a book, if it doesn’t woo our quest?



This from James Hillman’s Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion:

If anima is defined as the eros factor, then we are always bound to assume that sexual excitation is a soul-message and cannot be denied — who would deny the call of his soul? And we are bound to assume that active human relationships and uplifting enthusiasms are anima-inspired, whereas in truth they are less promoted by the reflective moisture of the soul than by eros captivating the soul. For here we must concede that, though anima is not eros, her first inclination is toward love. So she seduces in order to be turned on, set afire, illumined. So she makes advances in order to move pure reflection into connecting. So she commands an incredible range of voluptuous imagery in order to draw eros down upon her for what Plato calls “generation,” or soul-making. Nevertheless, though love be essential to soul, theology insists and psychotherapy affirms, and though soul be that by which we receive love, soul is not love.

***

If Not Here, Where?

Dec. 2002

If not here, where?
I gasped, my hand
half down her jeans,
almost there, almost free-
But we were sitting
round folding tables
in my ninth grade
English class (I’m not
dreaming here folks
this is history)
discussing Homer’s
Odyssey.
What time or room
had we to proceeed?
She hissed Not Here,
to which I could only
gulp the lava and
fire back Where?
Well, she never said,
& so in a day or two
my lust ravened
on toward other
nippled fonts.
That’s Poetry. Today
this entreaty, this wave,
tomorrow some other
vexing scree. But today,
this mount: why pair
verse with that 14
year old nurse of
my budding lust?
Sweating at some table
while voice above droned
round Circe’s isle and
below my hand inched
closer to a mons of fire.
The sense of desire
mounting possibility
against the certainty
of refusal, heights
grown slippery,
perilous, penultimate,
as if only the gasp
of yes could ever do,
and it worth the
entire predictable
tumble hair nose and
eyeballs to the
gorges of this page,
end of the poem,
another failed ingress.
But who cares! For
three seconds I was so
close, the air tense
and bright, my fingers
under the softest
fabric and brushing
fine hairs steaming
with white fire.
O evanescence,
my trellis rising
and falling from
a sound, the scent
of the sea.
Tomorrow I’ll be back.



BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE

2003

Here i am again
striding in the surf
& riding out to you
writing it all down
on an ossuary of foam.

You walked away:
“not here” is inscribed
on a pouty angel’s ass,
taboo and tide

my voyaging silk
to absent tart islands
and their galling,
gorgeous milk.

Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
is a vowel of the
sea’s blue bone,

curving plash to hiss:
the motions of a
lover’s tongue,
last line first kiss.


HARNESS

Nov. 2004

When did these elements
stop hounding me, and,
like some Actaeon in reverse,
befriend and prow my course?
Perhaps a heart must
is schooled to proper ends
by their darker woods.
Surely I entered them
aching for release
and welcome, not
surrender: The fleeing
quarry so curved
and dapple, focusing
my eyes on a hot
liquidity that made my
ever burning arrow
leap like hounds
from their quiver.
Gale and storm-surge
surely master every
pale pink shore, but
such uses always
drown their makers,
I mean those who
presume to write
their own names
on wind and wild water.
For no matter how
big the pulse of sky
or sea arousing in
my loins, no night
was ever long enough
to reach what I thought
I saw ahead, what I
needed far more than
any beach or bed
could bless. And
the endless fleet
of stricken boats
I captained on nights
long ago, each collapsing
on the rocks offshore,
my cries flying up to God
as I careened on down
a blueblackening, godless ire.
Wind and wave, I’ve learned,
have no masters, none
at least we can mortally
presume. I am just two to
three sheets of paper folded
so to fly or float whither
their own high/deep augments
will. Each morning I
harness this white writing
chair to wet so windy hooves
with every intent of finding
you upon the next pale shore,
though I’m equally as sure
I’ll not find you there
or anywhere these coursers
deem to ferry me.
Wind and wave are
harnessed not to the
man but his making,
and race not toward
his heart but its breaking.
There she is altared
and survives whatever
names I tide on in
on ever-falling sand.
See: the hourglass
is empty and another
poem’s been loosed
with news of my old welcome
which you’ll find on that
shore I’ll never reach.
Unfold and read it
like a letter from the heart
you left behind that
night so many years ago.
These words are carried
to you on that wind and
wave in which you’ll always find
the sweet and bitter traces
of my ever grateful smile.