Going Down

SONG TO LIR

Oct. 30, 2005

I’m still in thrall with those bad
old nights. Black fiddles still
saw swoony and fey that
big night music in my reverie;
something lurches when I
recall the thrill of driving headlong
into the darkest rooks of town,
scenting something blonde and
bloodlike in the night breeze rushing
through the opened windows
of my car, the ions of summer
storm and surf igniting my
neural ramparts, like St. Elmo’s
Fire, with the eerie wattage
of danger and booze and sex.
That blue alchemy was the
quintessence of my Faustian
dive into LaLaLand, pouring
myself in votive jolting jets
down into the badassed
veld of all Black Mothers,
emerging, come some
blatant, pagan dawn,
like a phallus guled
with Thalassan gore.
Certainly all that is
nothing to fall too much in
love with again, else I fall again
in all those hurtful ways.
Yet in that gnarly bad-booze
brew a crystal bed lay far
down out of view; at the heart
of those dark quests lay the
the hope of finding once again that
bright grail of clear blue love
which in all the years of
roaming and ravening I had
blundered on two or three
too-brief essential times,
each a milky pure enactment
which washed me more
cleaner of my arrears
than when I was baptized in the
sea at Melbourne Beach
when puberty shot me forth.
Perhaps that soft-glo bed
of Perfect Love was just the
golden carrot of a darker
more selfish appetite for More;
I certainly crept out of
far too many beds
at the far ends of those nights
believing Love -- the free-fall,
lucky type -- was nowhere
on that rumpled snoring shore.
All that is true, but these
days another thought begins
to form that the whole of that
gambol between savage lust
and starry love was just the
foolish half I too much believed,
meant by godlike hands whose
ends were mine, as if
my enbrined sense could drink
a goddess night to dregs.
A Puritan error I have so many
drowned fathers to thank, I think.
I come to sense now that while
I dissembled like an Actaeon on
down those bad years, ever more
mauled and shredded by my own howls
for love in a wilderness of rock taverns
and boob bars and and bottle clubs,
some darker underside was nursing
from me, not so much from my acts
but the desires which teated them,
growing more visible as a shape defined up from an
enormous sea which is the greatest
part of me, a whale which grazed
upon on my yearning midnight stare.
While I banged on to ruinous ends
it lurched and followed, devouring
every whiskey bottle, bra and guitar
pick I flung over a shoulder toward
forgetfulness, each a wafer of communion
which slowly woke his soul in mine,
night after night, acre after fathom
of that watery abyss. And then one
night I found us somehow one,
my slipping & sliding & oh so
wounded feet astride his hoary back.
Back then the endless drinking felt
like I had fallen in the whale,
but now I sense that I had just
found a footing there where falling
is the precipice of everything
desire bid me lose. Weirdly too
I sense I’ve yet to hit the real
bottom of that sea, years now
after the last bad boozing night.
There were years in which I
boarded up against all beams
of wet wild night; then years of
reparation for the guilt and shame
by living well and deep. There came
hard education where I learned
that love could not become itself
till I forsook all hope of pouring
it its perfection from a bottle,
babe, and bed. Amid all that
I felt him there, dangerous and
wild, a dark layer of endless
ache which no prayer could
fleece or flay. Now I sense I’m
simply heading deeper as the
two of us swim on. I think
of those old nights and,
with no actual desire to lose
myself in them again, sigh and
swish the liquor of it here,
feasting with stained chops
upon its taste of endlessness,
hauling on huge nipples of
forever-sweeter more, invoking
that blackout in the beast
which parks me on the shore
of Paradise. Yes -- oh feel that
dark immensity lurch deep
within, free and feral in the
deepest nacre of the thrall,
cresting a huge wave in a shower
of moon silver to spume spermatic
fire defiant toward the sky,
crashing down with all the massy
freight of an old, emphatic joy.
And that is just the surface part,
for he dives deeper than what
sight I’ve learned to toss. The limbic
sea he swims on down and back
I will never fully sound, much
know how many million years
he thrusts and fins the verbs.
I’m writing here truly as I’m
riding him, a silly dram
of wakeful ocean on a course
of endless waves, boy cupid
with this tiny flute astride
the night’s Leviathan.
Carve me on the upmost
arch of his coat of arms. Hang
us on the headboard of every
bed I’ve held a woman in.
Carve us on the gravestone
where at last I’m fully wed.
And to every savage fantasy
I hold like whiskey on my tongue,
may his loll like the clabber
which all night bells are rung.





If it were permissible to personify the Unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change, the present world meaning neither more nor less to him than any year in the the one hundredth century before Christ; he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasurable experience, would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe, and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay.

-- CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of A Soul, 215

***

The Iollach Mhicheil — the triumphal song of Michael — is quite as much pagan as Christian. We have here, indeed, one of the most interesting and convincing instances of the transmutation of a personal symbol. St. Michael is on the surface a saint of extraordinary powers and the patron of the shores and the shore-folk; deeper, he is an angel, who is upon the sea what the angelical saint, St. George, is upon the land: deeper, he is a blending of the Roman Neptune and the Greek Poseidon: deeper, he is himself and ancient Celtic god: deeper, he is no other than Manannan, the god of ocean and all waters, in the Gaelic pantheon: as, once more, Manannan himself is dimly revealed to us as still more ancient, more primitive, and even as supreme in remote godhead, the Father of an immortal Clan.

-- Fiona Macleod, Iona, p. 83)


Eros was considered a god whose divinity transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in any way. I might, as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love. Eros is a kosmogonos,, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel that Paul’s words -- “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love” -- might be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself ... Love “bears all things and endures all things” (I Corinthians 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogic “love.”

-- CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 353-4