The Work

9:30 a.m Friday morning, day off (using up vacation time I’m not free to take in sequence), my wife in the shower upstairs readying for a day out together (culminating, we plan we hope, with dinner at Coq Au Vin, a meal we’ve delayed from our anniversary last year, from Valentine’s of this year, from my wife’s birthday in June), Berlioz’s “Le Carnival romain,” op. 9 on the stereo in honor of the sorcery of recent posts, the day outside drippy, promising more rain from Tropical storm Tammy’s far-whirling skirts, cooler in the house, light less, vintage, sere, reflective, utterly delighted to leave summer wildness behind ...

***

Perhaps Faust-Mephisto are the upper and lower halves of that daimon who presides and rides the slow collapse of the Western cultural canon: a blent antichirst or anti-archetypal shadow who has been rebelling against earthly and heavenly fathers since Lucifer got tossed out of Heaven, since Adam yanked the apple from him through Eve and his serpent for single quintessential bite, since Oran’s mouth refused to shut up and every artist’s mouth since has welled blue oceans of something more primary and futuristic than the Christian articulation of human being. Faust/Mephisto blend desire and ambition with imaginary powers -- familiars of air and fire -- in a slowly rising wave which will drown the last cathedral.

In their wake our day, the massa confusa, cultural disorder, rabblement and carousing, the merriment of the wake, so much damn foolishness spent on so much surficial gleam. Britney Spears astride the throne of Mary, batting her lascivious lashes & threatening to burst the levees of a blue busier, swarming us all in pure yeastiness, incessant pornographic Yes.

In their wake canon-fodderers like Harold Bloom attempting to hold the center with his own memory; and canon-fools like President Bush, the Christian fascist who warns the world about the threat of Islamic fascists.

In their wake you get the drone and white noise of indifference in every quarter, the sense of people eking out an existence in the ruins of meaning, battening the hatches, drinking tea in fearful rooms and narrow similes.

What then awakens Faust/Mephisto’s wake? The doom of one order, yes, but also the wavelike boom of the Next? Writing in 1949, at a time when there was much to despair in the world(such as the sudden cold fact of thermonuclear annihilation), Erich Neumann wrote:


“The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious -- or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies — is, however, only a passing phenomenon.

Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look. The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the possible “rapproachement” of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future..

No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Until they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace.

But the preparation for this rapproachement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious. (pp 393-4, italics mine)

***

Ergo, we are the cathedrals of the new canon, their new psalmody, their strange new constructions! -- The soil through which the depths delve their bright coins -- Pure futurity soaked in primal abysms. And our guiding light is a darkness, he who proclaims as Mephistopheles to Faust in his study,

I speak the modest truth. though man,
that silly little mircocosm,
commonly thinks himself an entity,
I am a part of the part that first was all,
part of the darkness which gave birth to light,
that supercilious light which now disputes
with Mother Night her ancient rank and space,
and yet cannot succeed; no matter how it struggles,
it sticks to matter and can't get free.
light flows from substance, makes it beautiful;
solids can check its path, so I hope it won't be long
till light and the world-stuff are destroyed together.

-- Goethe's Faust, Part One, transl. Carlyle F. MacIntyre

Destroyer of light, magician of night - Mephistopheles and Faust are riding that sea-beast atop my primal crest, Sayer and Namer of all that cannot, must not be known. Some totem, eh.


THE WORK


The dark is trying to work it out,
draft by noctilucent draft.
Observe the man at study in his
chair at 4 a.m. beneath a single
pool of lamplight: His mind
bends down beyond the words
to finger the dark which loams
them; a dirt of time both his and ours
fecund in its death and growth,
the sustaining garden of the verb
which ferries god through every
age from dark to light to dark.
That’s how abyssal numens
will be known--they signal us,
flashing in the surf like breasts
or a shattered mast of Ahab bone,
delved from deep to margins
just offshore, a silvered gleam
which is the moon’s and all the
inside lucre of the dream.
The man in his study hauls
up buckets of a black
lucidity, splashes of cold
brine which braces and
makes bold his downward-
plunging mind. He thinks
he’s got a hold on things,
the darker sense of them
at least, though in sooth
his thoughts are just a
sieve for bursting grapes,
an ink which fills lines
on paper with a wine not
his but of their darkest labor,
the truth he’ll never fully
harbor, much less in any
clear way name. No matter:
The dark will work it out
long after all his pages dust
the fading visage of his bones.
Nothing will remain of that
patient slow enquiry
lamped high before first light
but the dark’s own assay
through our kind, dark eyes staring
up at the next ones peering down
perhaps with half the clutter,
half the frown, half the verbiage
of the last attempt. Half
the wattage, too, because
the half-lit margins are
where the dark things
arise and flicker into view.
That’s how the dark will work
it out, out of us I mean,
by marginal scans in scant degrees,
insolvent life after insolvent life,
getting right the angle of the
dangle, the mortis of the view,
til eye to eye the parallax
is pure heaven salted full with
seas, where every hellish
bell in drowned Ys begin
to dully ring, all primal gods
of north and south
chapelled in the voice
where light in darkness sings.