Redoundin'

Sunday

Balm at last in last night’s break in the weather, a front blowing out the humid wretchedworks, cooling things down into the 60s last night. A wan Saturday followed, the light burnished, halcyon, still, causing everyone to open their windows and breathe deep, and sing together in one loud chorale, (maestro,)


TO AUTUMN

John Keats

I.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

II.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too --
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from the hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

***

I spent another Saturday afternoon watching football games and reading deep, strange pairing, like Vienna sausages delved on devilish toothpicks draughted down with the coldest Reisling, distilled from that harvest moon having swollen past full under the black Atlantic & now blasting overhead.

Thus it was Old Miss in a tight one against Alabama (losing by a field goal in the last seconds), Boston College beating Wake Forest in backforthbackforthback roll beneath an unforgiveably rainy Northeast sky, Florida losing to LSU, and USC getting stiff competition from Notre Dame down to the final whistle and FSU losing, dammit, to Virginia. Another Saturday in the unfolding season where the knights have at it with red joy, hurling their lances with every cusp of testosterone and cheerleeder splits and Gatorade.

And thus I first read a bit of Goethe’s Faust where an invoked spirit claims the audacity of life itself, the hard bronze balls of those gridiron warriors flashing onscreen (hiding the real war overseas),

In the tides of life, in action’s storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at time’s humming loom it’s my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

-- I.500-509, transl. George Madison Priest

Spirit of life itself, indeed -- Demonic? Or at least its deepest ministrations? Is life itself an affront to God? Do we err by taking breath?

A divine darkness, perhaps. So Goethe wrote in Dichtung und Wahreit, Part 4, Book 20:

He believed he had discovered in Nature, something which manifested itself only in contradictions ... It contracted time and expanded space. It seemed to be at home in the impossible and to reject, with scorn, the possible. This mode of being I called the Demonic ... It appears in its most terrifying form when manifest in a single human being ... They are not always the most excellent people ... but a terrible force comes out of them. From such considerations arise that strange and striking proverb: Deno contra deum nisis deus ipse. (“No one can rival God except God himself.”)

That passage was cited in Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. He’s delving here into a defiant anti-hero which has tripartite faces in Goethe’s Faust, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the figure of Don Juan -- “the doctor who deludes himself that he wants a life of action ... the nutty knight who truly loves and lives by his books of chivalry ... the irritable self-defeating Spanish womanizer.” All step off their pages into a life of action, a thought become a deed.

Each also embodies a tuff conundrum when it comes to knowledge. Goethe put it this way: “He who acts is always without scruples; only he who contemplates has a conscience.” Shattuck: “One could restate this moral paradox: Experience is the only route to human knowledge; yet any experience, when reflected upon, incurs guilt. In Paradise Lost, Milton has both Adam and Eve find the word experience to justify their errant actions. Seen in this light, Faust reenacts the Fall and attains knowledge (Wissen) through action, however interrupted and aborted the action may be.”

This seems a legacy from the Titans, those brute shoulders of savage difference, the indignant rage of pain vaulted at the skies from the inchoate volcano. Ahab conceives of this man -- surely in the image of himself -- as the ship’s carpenter whittles him a new leg from the jawbone of a Sperm whale:

“I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire, for what’s made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell’s probable.”

He pauses, considers, and speaks again:

“... Hold, while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modeled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ‘em , to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; let me see -- shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a skylight on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.”

***

This indeed is the shape and girth of a man whose “right worship is defiance”! Yet these titans or demons of rebellious desire, are they not all written demiurges, the product of a creative imagination which thieves the world’s fire to harrow a burning book? Our literature produces these Gospels, books after book of conceivings, narrative exploits of our every assault and doom.

Indeed, can it occur anywhere but on the page which we leap from? Sez Faust:

Parchment! Is that the sacred fountain whence a love
There springs a draught that thirst forever quells?
Refreshment? It you never will have won
If from that soul of yours in never wells. (I.566-9)

Faust is Goethe’s literary exception, the one who leaps from the page into the dewy folds of the Realm of the Mothers. The satanic text is the fantasy which rises from the pure white page.



A page from St. Columba's Cathach, the psalter he copied in secret and then went to war over in defiance of the king, who demanded he give the psalter to the owner of the original text.



Monday

Faust is also a wonderful and storied embodiment of the Backward Glance, he who from one conscious extreme decides to ride the way back, astride the back of a learned lust, if there can be such a thing.

It is a lonely and trackless path, prone to the worst excesses and abysms of error, A holy one, too, if infernally so, defiant of all prior authority. And its the only way we can go now, our superegos, like iron cathedrals, having damned and dammed every impulse which sets us free. Joseph Campbell called this process Creative Mythology, the individual’s backward glance to sources, out beyond the marge of the safe and known:

“In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling “creative” mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own -- of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration -- which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import; his communication will have the value and force of living myth ...” (Creative Mythology, 4)

Campbell’s central applications of this theory of the literary myth come in his discussion of two literary works from the late Middle Ages -- Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s . Their strivings were foundational and are educational for our own:

“It is amazing, really, to think that in our present world with all its sciences and machines, megalopolitan populations, penetrations of space and time, night life and revolutions, so different (it would seem) from the God-filled world of the Middle Ages, young people should still exist among us who are facing in their minds, seriously, the same adventure as thirteenth-century Gottfried: challenging hell. If one could think of the Western World for a moment in terms not of time but of space; not as changing in time, but as remaining in space, with the men of its various eras, each in his own environment, still there as contemporaries discoursing, one could perhaps pass from one to another in a trackless magical forest, or as in a garden of winding ways and little bridges. The utilization of Wagner of both the Tristan of Gottfried and the majestic Parzival of Gottfried’s leading contemporary, Wolfram von Eschenbach, would suggest perhaps a trail; so also the line, very strong indeed, from Gottfied to James Joyce.” (38)

So the creative, individual effort has become a tradition of sorts in this culture, an anti-authorian, bliss-centered, fecund garden of song and story. Those makings are canonic in every way the Church and the prior Mysteries were canonical, something to be studied and practiced: Yet they are also anti-canonical in the Oranic sense, for instead of mouthing a liturgy which that tradition provides, the creative mythologist rides the canon, he or she devours it, fucks it, flings it wide: It provides the pep and the blade but the artist is the one who discovers the arc and target, slashing off the balls of the father and heaving it to an unknown unnamable sea where the divinely nippled paramour rises in fire and foam.

Campbell again:

“In Hero with a Thousand Faces I have shown that myths and wonder tales of this kind [the Grail cycle] belong to a general type, which I have called ‘The Adventure of the Hero,’ that has not changed in essential form throughout the documented history of mankind: 1. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (in the previous instances, regions under enchantment); 2. fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (the enchantments are dispelled); 3. the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

“In Wolfram’s Parzival the boon is to be the inauguration of a new age of the human spirit: of secular spirituality, sustained by self-responsible individuals acting not in terms of general laws supposed to represent the will or way of some personal god or impersonal eternity, but each in terms of his own developing realization of worth.

“Such an idea is distinctly -- and uniquely -- European. It is the idea represented in Schopenhauer’s ‘intelligible’ character; the old Germanic wyrd, a life responsible to itself, to its own supreme experiences and expectations of value, realized through trials in truth, loyalty, and love, and by example redounding, then, to the inspiration of others to like achievement.” (ibid. 480)


***

Redounding, what an excellent choice of word to name this fertile transmission of living myth from one heart to another! cf Middle English redounden to overflow, to be in excess; to become swollen: surge up: billow; to be excessive in quantity; to have an effect for good or ill: conduce: to be a contributing facto to repute; to become transferred or added [as in troping, I may add]; to accrue; to issue forth; to become deflected backward; to rebound, reflect. (These from Websters Third International Dictionary).

What is this Wick-lit-in’ but spilling up and over the deep sources I’ve found, and to sing that fullness back with every verbal iota I can pan from the cold mineral waters that wash from ear to ear, nose to toes, through heart and belly and balls, shouting from cocktip and mouth the wildest names of God in the world ...

Ah, let the infernal crew sing, wyrd and redoundin’, slathered in the cool sea of a full October moon roaring over this hour of 5:25 a.m....as I leave this page to begin the ding dong working day ...




GOING WRONG

Jack Gilbert

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence.” The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
“No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn.” Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

TUTORIAL

Ted Hughes
from Recklings, 1966

Like a propped skull,
his humor is medieval.

What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards
Pressing the drying remains of men.
He brings some out, we stew them up to a
dark amber and start sipping.

He is fat, this burst bearskin, but his
mind is an electric mantis
Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.
I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk,
I go round and round numbly under the ice
of the North Pole.

This scholar dribbling tea
Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle
Through the wharf-weed that ennobles

The mask of enquiry, advancing into the
depths like a harbor,
Like a sphinx cliff,
Like the papery skull of a fish

Lodged in a sand dune, with a few straws,
Rifled by dry cold.
His words

Twitch and rustle, twitch
And rustle.
The scarred world looks through their gaps.

I listen
with bleak eyeholes.



UPRISING

Stephen Dobyns


Straightjacket, straightjacket, straightjacket:
we are tired of this quiet life, tired of climbing
this mountain of pleases and thank yous.
It’s time to kick a nun in the butt,
time to buy our prick a goddamned big car
and let the wind frazzle our ears.
It’s time to stop this tiptoeing around,
to stop being the property of our property.
Who lives in this holy temple anyhow?
Let’s get the formaldehyde out of our veins.
Let’s strip this lampshade off of our head.
It’s time to stand at the door, shouting, Come back!
It’s time to welcome each of our badnesses home.
And here comes Envy sliding along on greased feet,
and gray-suited Lechery with his little cane,
and twin-headed Vanity winking into his own eyes,
and Anger going Grum, Grum on his little red scooter,
and chubby Appetite panting along behind the rest.
The beer’s cold, the insults are hot. We’ll dance
all night to the complaints of our neighbors.
We’ve got to get moving! Somewhere that shovel
stands propped against a wall, the patch of grass
is freshly cut where the final hole will be dug.
Let’s march toward our grave scratching and farting,
our own raucous music of shouted good-byes.
Let’s make sure they bury us standing up.



TO EARTHWARD

Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed to much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of--was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.


THE SOURCE

Sharon Olds

It became the deep spring of my life,
I didn’t know if it was a sickness or a gift.
To reach around both sides of a man,
one palm to one buttock,
the other palm to the other, the way we are split,
to grasp that band of muscle on the male
haunch and help guide the massed
heavy nerve down my throat until it
stoppers the hole behind the breastbone that is always hungry,
then I feel complete. To be lifted
onto a man—the male breast
so hard, there seem no chambers in it, it is
lifting-muscle—and set tight as a lock-slot down
onto a bolt, we are looking into
each other’s eyes as if the matter of the iris were
a membrane deep in the body dissolving now,
it is what I had dreamed, to meet men
fully, as a woman twin, unborn,
haif-gelled, clasped, nothing between us
but our bodies, naked, and when those dissolve,
nothing between us—or perhaps I vanish
and the man is still there, as if I have been trying
to disappear, into them,
to be myself the glass of sourmash
my father lifted to his mouth. Ah, I am in him,
I slide all the way down to the beginning, the
curved chamber of the balls. My brothers
and sisters are there, swimming by the cinerous
millions, I say to them, Stay here—
for the children of this father it may be the better life;
but they cannot hear. Blind, deaf,
armless, brainless, they plunge forward,
driven, desperate to enter the other, to
die in her, and wake. For a moment,
after we wake, we are without desire—
five, ten, twenty seconds of
pure calm, as if each one of us is whole.



EASTERN AUBADE

Ranier Maria Rilke

From New Poems
transl. Edward Snow


Is this bed not like some coast,
just a strip of coast on which we lie?
Nothing is certain except your high breasts,
which mounted dizzily beyond my feeling.

For this night, in which so many things screamed,
in which beasts call and tear each other,
does its strangeness not appall us? And yet:
what outside slowly dawns, called day,
do we find it any more familiar?

One would have to lie as tightly intertwined
as flower petals around the stamen:
for the unrestrained stands everywhere
and masses and plunges toward us.

Yet while we press against each other,
in order not to see it closing in,
can it draw itself from you, from me:
for our souls live on treason.


”MY PERIOD HAD COME FOR PRAYER”

Emily Dickinson
(Later Poems XLI)


My period had come for prayer,
No other art would do,
My tactics missed a rudiment;
Creator, was it you?

Gods grow above, so those who pray
Horizons must ascend,
And so I stood upon the North
To reach this curious Friend.

His house was not; no sign had He
By chimney nor by door,--
Could I infer his residence?
Wide prairies of the air

Unbroken by a settler
Were all that I could see;
Infinitude, hast thou no face
That I might look on Thee?

The silence condescended,
The Heavens paused for me,
But awed by my errand,
I worshipped--did not pray!

NIGHT

Robinson Jeffers

The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken
Tide-rocks lift streaming shoulders
Out of the slack, the slow west
Sombering its torch; a ship's light
Shows faintly, far out,
Over the weight of the prone ocean
On the low cloud.

Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood,
Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river,
Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow,
Peace-bringer, the matrix 0f all shining and quieter of shining.
Where the shore widens on the bay she opens dark wings
And the ocean accepts her glory. 0 soul worshipful of her
You like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always,
And the film of waves above that takes she sun takes also
Her, with more love. The sun-lovers have a blond favorite,
A father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laughter,
Hot labor, lust and delight and the other blemishes. Quietness
Flows from her deeper fountain; and he will die; and she is imnmortal.

Far off from here the slender
Flocks of the mountain forest
Move among stems like towers
Of the old redwoods to the stream,
No twig crackling; dip shy
Wild muzzles into the mountain water
Among the dark ferns.
O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon
The blasphemies 0f glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the fretfulness
0f cities, the cressess of the planets, the pride of the stars.
This August night in a rift of cloud Antares reddens,
The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children,
The earth's orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire

Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you O Night
What? Not a spark? What flicker 0f a spark in the faint far glimmer
0f a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sand-pit the Bedouins
Wandered from at dawn . . . Ah singing prayer to what gulfs tempted
Suddenly are you more lost? To us the near-hand mountain
Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a measure of continuance.

The tide, moving the night's
Vastness with lonely voices,
Turns, the deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength
To the Outmost margins: you Night will resume
The stars in your time.

O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward?
Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,
Tire of their flow, they sing one song hut they think silence.
The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness.
And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately
Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward
The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,
The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory
Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.
And I and my people, we are willing to love she four-score years
Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor.

Have men's minds changed,
Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul
Broken the surface? A few centuries
Gone by, was none dared not to people
The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier,
And death is no evil.



LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT

David St. John

Tired of his dark dominion . . .
--George Meredith

It was something I’d overheard
One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously
Saying to a mutual friend, a woman
Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips
That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always
Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country
Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me
As being a city of the night . . . “
Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant
Not simply because I love
Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening
As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky,
The whole mind of night that I know so well
Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite,
Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome
Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen
To live when I grew tired of,my ancient life
As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness
Was of the kind that consoles so many
Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history
Of falls . . . No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark
Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur
Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of
The She-Wolf all the sequins above in sequence,
The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians
A dark like the polished back of a mirror,
The pool of the night scalloped and hanging
Above me, the inverted reflection of a last,
Odd Narcissus . . .

One night my friend Nico came by
Close to three A.M. - As we drank a little wine, I could see
The black of her pupils blown wide,
The spread ripples of the opiate night . . . And Nico
Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost
Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look . . . ,”
And deep within the pupil of her left eye,
Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging
Lantern rocking with the waves,
I could see, at the most remote end of the receding,
Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway,
At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil,
A tiny, dangling crucifix
Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting
In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain . . .
Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing
Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid
Kaleidoscope washing over her the way any naked,
Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip
Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly
Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly
Love of sexual sincerity . . .
I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember
The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let
Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather
Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind
Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents,
Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves;
The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling . . .
Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere,
Then forever . . .

Into the mind of the Roman night.