Foundering Fathers

Muggy and beclouded morning -- when will all this get blown free by Northern winds? An ache for that Change, tempered as it must be in these temperate climes, for halcyon blue and stirring cool. Not yet, bucko. Remants of Tropical Storm Tammy in rococco cumulus spread round the compass of the sky, ragged storms which drift overhead, like bad dreams, loose a torrid swath of rain, then drift on, rootless ghosts of an ebbing angst. Still, my wife and I had a great day driving about town, browsing through thrift malls & bookstores, picking up this and that (several cheap vases and a mirror for my wife, Carl Kerenyi’s The Gods of the Greeks for me. Dinner at Coq au Vin to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary, the food a falter short of perfect this time (slow service resulting in food that was cooled somewhat), but still a bliss we rare afford but do celebrate. Good to finally get home around 9 p.m., feed ansty cats, tumble quickly to sleep watching an old episode of “The King of Queens” on the tube. Nightynocht, Eden of the real, grace we scarce deserve but so richly give thanks for ...

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We get glimpses of first conditions off the bridge which is Mercurius, our curious spirit (Mephisto hugs the shadows under that bridge, he’s in it for the power and the pussy and every soul’s remittance in hell for such earthly delights); what scholar does not have an altar to him in the study, there between the printer and the monitor? I have a skull coffee-mug in which sits a stone from my father’s Iona a strange smooth grey oval stone -- granite, I imagine, stricken from some long subsumed coast -- in the center of which is a curved dragonish shape of quartz.

This enquiry has a mercurial center to it, tintured with mojo and coochie, my father’s dream distilled in me, all of his fathers’ paroxyms ferried to this moment, my fingers tapping at the keyboard tribal, totemic, banging out a semaphore discernible to the first fish-rider, father of my fathers, now on the final shore I can’t reach. Something emanates from his old angst, his passion, his song: it grows louder as I listen and invoke and altar it. Oh that a book, a good great dark book, could truly lamp all the way down that winding stair of a well of a source of a dream! Oh Faust, with your appalling angelus!

All lives have their center, that resonant lacunae inside a personal life which booms to distant shores some verb, some naming.

It isn’t necessarily verbal -- and when it isn’t, it doesn’t resemble this in the least -- evidence my wife’s passion for her custom sewing, how she is so desperate to make it a business, because that work is so clear in her, having emerged from so many useless layers (all of those jobs on someone else’s clock, all of those wares she tried to sell that weren’t her wares at all). No: she’ll have none of this dialouge, this enquiry, other than to agree that there’s a center whose outlines are hidden and whose circumference reaches out to every shore of a life.

Carl Kerenyi writes about this wonderfully in his Prologomena to Essays on a Science of Mythology:

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According to the most detailed account of Roman city-founding, Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, there is mention of a circle which, described from a centre, is then drawn with a plough. The centre then takes the form of a circular pit called a mundus. Ovid, in his poetical account of a primitive city-founding (Fasti, iv, 819), speaks of a fossa that was filled in again after the sacrifice. An altar, equally simple, was built over it.

Other sources describe the mundus of the historical Roman metropolis as a building whose lower part was consecrated to Di Manes, the spirits of the ancestors and of the Underworld. Those admitted int it stated that seen from inside it was shaped like a vault of heaven.

Whether in its primitive form as used in the founding ceremony or as a solid bit of architecture, the mundus is arcg ((a Greek work here meaning “beginnings or first principles”)) into which the older world of the ancestors, the subterranean storehouse of everything that will ever grow or come to birth, opens. The mundus is at once the relative arcg and the absolute arcg, and from it the world of “Rome” radiates in all directions, like a circle from a centre. (11)

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The stories of the Titans are about gods who belong to such a distant past that we know them only from tales of a particular kind and only a exercising a particular function. The name Titan has, since the most ancient times, been deeply associated with the divinity of
the Sun, and seems originally to have been the supreme title of beings who were, indeed, celestial gods, but gods of very long ago, still savage and subject to no laws. We did not regard them as being in any way worthy of worship; with the single exception, perhaps, of Kronos; and with the exception also of Helios, if we identify the latter with the wilder, primordial Sun-God. The Titans were gods of a sort that have no function
except in mythology. Their function is that of the defeated: even when they win seeming victories -- before the stories come to their inexorable conclusion. These defeated ones bear the characteristics of ancestors whose dangerous qualities appear in their posterity.

-- Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks


THE VILLAS OF HELIOS

October 8, 2005


There are fathers so ancient
only their shoulders remain
on the coasts, grey and worn,
that and all of their sunlight.
Their sons are men of obscene
power and wealth who keep
building villas of Helios,
off Ibizia and Mustique and
Villefranche-sur-Mer,
immense brilliant porticos
grander than the glittering tableau
of blue seas and skies, jewels
big enough to drown a nereid
not destined to be queen.
Their yachts are huge, they
freight enormous testicles
which hang just below the
waterline, ever on the
verge of exploding into Europa.
The men smile like boys
with teeth brilliant
as the bleached sands, aging
men with greased dark hair
and loosening bellies. They
smile full of the contempt
and arrogance of every
old father they burnt in
lust for their mothers.
Their women are
so dazzling they seem to lounge
not on chairs but the half-shell,
miracles of flesh and composure,
their naked breasts staring
back at the paparazzis like
Medusae, staring coolly
straight into the face of the sun.
Roman pillars quarried from
Northern Italy still stand
by the pool overlooking it all,
forelocks of those miserable
first men who raged and
rampaged and fell, utterly,
to uteral dooms. These sons
are so godlike their aristocrat
world exists off all the known
maps, beyond every sea to salt
the likes of you or me.
And like their shameful
ancestors, they don’t even
know it. They prate on cellphones
and wave off children. Their
eyes are blank as they scratch
at crossword puzzles in silken
cabanas which partake of them
more than they ever will of them.
No, they’ll never quite get it
that the starry infinitude of
their gold is chump change down
below where the only wealth
that matters is what’s piled
in the ruins, stripped from
the corpses as they float round
down the gullet of drowned
Helios, delicates of clout
Dis shits in abyss.
No matter: the wine today
is indescribably
smooth--a vintage of
vineyards more than three
thousand years old--and
the married sister of
his wife is smiling
back from the pool, her
eyes all of Europe's stepping
not safely to shore, oh
so ravishingly blue,
her breasts at the waterline
burning above with
every shadow of wickedness
below out of view. She’s
every shore worth assaulting,
every other man’s sworn bride
like heavy fruit for the taking.
The whole outrage of this single
sea day was baked in visage
of Helios so very long ago:
Nothing can stop him now,
ever, though he’s falling
ever back down. Atreus,
Medici, Rothschild, DeLaurentis,
with all of the bankers between,
having bought their world
and now fully in its leisure,
in Tuscan palaces of burning white
pleasure, pure testes, hammered gold,
bright gouts of red wine
spilled over and over on the
grave of wild Helios,
spots which never quite dry,
being sons themselves
of the sun which never dies.