Shamanic Letter (3)

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconsing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

-- Lafew in Shakespeare’sAll’s Well That Ends Well

SAVED

from A Breviary
of Guitars, 1999

Summer 1971:

I was poised to
rock the world
like someone who
thought he’d been
forever denied it
fresh from 40
days in the desert
now standing
amazed at
the split melons
and pastries
heaped upon
the table.
My heart
strung to that
Fender Mus-
tang as with
razor wire,
indecently
taut and brilliant.
Yet just at
the moment
when I began
slashing that guitar
down through
the frilly billows
of the world
I was told about
the hellfire
such acts
eternally engendered.
A little black
and white Christian
comic book
on sin, where thirst
is the Devil
and to take one
sip is to die hard
and harder and worse.
Fear brought
me to that “rap
group” on Saturday
nights where
I was saved
by Jesus from
the gleaming
tooth of that guitar.
My brother and
I rounded the
town’s sad preterit
in our family
station wagon and
made our weekly
Saturday night
pilgrimage to
Lakeland
where we read
scripture, prayed,
battled our demonic
glands, cried
with communal
relief, sang
soft songs & hugged.
We were the oafs and
nellies of teenaged
whitetrash exclusion,
gawky and
pimply, horse
mouthed and fat.
Faith’s bullion
of brokenness,
my mother’s
dark hoard.
Christ redeemed
us to insubstantial
fire, our hormones
fed to the flames,
transporting us
to a hysterical
purgatory of
weekly salvation
and exorcism,
all of us rich
in penance for
hungers we could
yet barely name.
I believed to
the extent that
I had known
exclusion and cried
over the world’s
callous mock
of all my
imperfections.
Always one
in need of proof,
the miracles
were convincing.
When my father
came down to visit,
I dreamed one
night that my
parents decided
to get back together.
A wind blew through
the living room
picking me up
to the rafters
with pure elation.
The next morning
my parents
assembled
us kids to tell
us that God had
healed them
and they would
eventually reunite.
I was baptized in
the Atlantic Ocean
at Melbourne Beach
on a hazy
summer morning
in June. The water
pink-cerulean in
first light and
warm as I was
hauled under
and just then
I felt a wave
pass both over
and through me
emptying me of
all trace of hurt
and rage and
trilling me with
some sense
of boundless depths
inside. A magnificent
sun rose with me
from the water.
We sang Christian
songs holding hands
and crying softly
on the beach.
But soon after
I stepped
on a unmarked spot
where the lifeguards
had buried some
Portuguese
manowars and
the fires leapt
back up into
me, filling me
with the world’s
shrill deadly
delightful pang
from which there
can only be one
response.
Saved from
childhood I
was poised,
Bond-like, to
take the world
back. God saved me.
Then a guitar
saved me from God.
God got me back.
I lost God, got
the guitar back,
then lost the
guitar. Now
I’m slowly
getting lost
in old guitar
music which
may have
been God’s
all along.




In the case of hereditary shamanism, the souls of the ancestral shaman choose a young man in the family; he becomes absent-minded and dreamy, loves solitude, and has prophetic visions and sometimes seizures that make him unconscious. During this period, the Buryat believe, the soul is carried off by spirits -- eastward if the youth is destined to become a “white” shaman, westward, if a “black.” Received in the palace of the gods, the neophyte’s soul is instructed by the ancestral shamans in the secrets of the profession, the gods’ forms and names, the cult and names of the spirits, and so on. It is only after the first initiation that the soul returns to the body. We shall see that the initiatory process continues long after this.

***

The most marked specialization, at least among certain peoples, is that of “black” and “white” shamans, although it is not always easy to define the distinction. M.A. Czaplicka mentions, for the Yakut, the class if ajy ojuna (ai oyuna), who sacrifice to the gods, and the class of abassy ojuna (oyuna), who have relations with the “evil spirits.” But, as Harva observes, the abassy ojuna is not necessarily a shaman; he can also be a sacrificing priest. According to N.V. Pripuzov, the same Yakut shaman can invoke both the higher (celestial) spirits and those of the lower regions. Among the Tungus of Turukhansk the shamans are not differentiated into “black” and “white”: but they do not sacrifices to the celestial god, whose rites are always performed by day, whereas the shamanic rites take place at night.

The distinction is clearly marked among the Buryat, who speak of “white” shamans (sangani bo) and “black” shamans (karain bo), the former having relations with the gods, the latter with the spirits. Their costumes differ, being white for the former and blue for the latter. ...

We must not forget that many of the divinities and powers of the earth and the underworld are not necessarily “evil” or “demonic.” They generallyi represent authochthonous and even local hierophanies that have fallen in rank as the result of changes in the pantheon.

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 19-20, 185-6



BLACK SHAMAN

Nov. 12, 2005


You cannot be my disciple
unless you carry your own cross
and come with me.
-- Luke 14:12

I.

I meant to wing high heaven,
but You had other plans
and plunged me in the sea.
“We got the Jesus freak
high!” the stoners laughed
the first time I smoked pot,
an first victory for that
black lucency which full
roars beyond the sear
of day. At 14 I became
a Christian, out of mortal
dread of Hell; there was
a single dream in which
I flew above the highest
mount of all in the
ecstasy of God, a
stellar glow which made
me then believe I was
bound for Heaven’s
clean blue space.
But You had other plans,
dousing that jolt of
angel fire in cold blue
wave when I was
baptized in the Atlantic
Ocean later that summer.
I went down backward
into that water with a
prayer for salvation and
when down in that black
swirl, a deep wave washed
through me dark and rich
and too wonderful, hauling
my spirit by the ankles
down in the undertow which
drags the angels low into a sweetly
falling descent. I rose from that
water spluttering and falling too,
my salvation found in all the
lower chakras as I felt released
to sample the world’ delights
now proffered, it seemed to me
to a boy no longer with such child.
I meant to save the world
from sin, but You saved me
from that cross, turning me
upside down and dousing
me in bliss. How could I
resist that deeper sound?
The rest was amplitude.




II.

Flying west at the end of
the summer I turned 17,
I laid over in Chicago to
stay with Ruth three days.
She had been one of the
Christian sisters in our
our local fellowship, staying
there for one more year
of high school while I
flew west for college.
We somehow knew
as we grew older that we’d
some day try to find a haven
of low heaven in each other,
and there, returning from
my father’s land in the east
& flying west again, I stopped
three days in Chicago to
stay with Ruth. Ten minutes
inside that door of the apartment
she shared with her mother
I was thrusting in her
down a fast-collapsing
scree of pink wet-flowered
gasps. I swear I heard the
old imp chorus sing when I
collapsed in my first orgasm
inside a woman: Hey, we got
the Jesus freak laid!, high-
fiving the final end of my
stellar afterlife. When I woke
the next day -- creeping back
into her room after her
mother left for work -- my
feet were spongy with the
sea, my balls heavy again
with its dark wild wash, my
desire now in thrall of Your
deepest waves, awakened in
my then as never before.
It still felt like sin when with
wide-thighed complicity she
welcomed me back in (and
oh what an asshole my old
sinner’s guilt made me to her
in the months that followed,
never returning a single love-
stained letter with one word
of what then I then could say
of love -- I had so much to learn
back then about the
water wilderness, so many
faux-white feather to divest):
But each time I came in her
cunt and mouth, between
her nubbly freckled breasts,
even between the cheeks of
oil-slathered ass -- Each time
I came I woke somehow
an nth league deeper
to the madman mortared
into every abbey floor,
productive in every infernal
sense of Your clabbering
salt endlessness, the hot glow
of a heart three miles down
from heaven’s lowest step.

III.

Last night I dreamt I met
the Doctor in his office for
a cure to these bum migraines,
but instead it seemed I just
wanted to jest and fool around,
mimicking a woman’s voice
on the PA & conspiring to woo
some pretty in the waiting room.
Bright physic be damned!
I guess; pour me a stout shot of
the darker stuff, this useless satire
of an equiry in a sing-song salty brogue.
I’ll take the mash of faith and sex
any night over 500 mils of Depakote.
Besides, You’ve always mocked bright
science with a faux-alchemic spoor,
just as Black Angus of the Seal-Folk
mocked Saint Columba at the shore,
cursing him in fine Gaelic before
leaping in a bath of Hebridean maul
and gale. East of the sun at St. Peter’s
Gate these wings of song all break
and fail; but in the washes west of moons,
I plumb abysms on your whale.

IV.

Well, that’s that: time to shut the book
again and start the ding dong day.
Today we haul everything back outside
to sell what we can in our Huge Antiques
Yard Sale!, trying to make up
what we can’t earn. My wife’s as exhausted
as I am, and both of us hate the necessity
of the task; hate how much good stuff
refuses to be sold, no matter how hard we try.
It’s just dosage from the same bad Doc,
I guess, our best efforts failing just like his.
There’s an augur for this somehow, somewhere,
at least upon the page; may Your black
magic work out there in every way we fail.
I better trust our losses for discerning
which water is more wild and stout:
the one which undertows bright days
or throws the infant soulage out.





Where waves heave wildest, leap into the sea!
The pearl-strewn bottom you will scarcely tread
Ere a glorious billowing dome forms overhead.
You’ll see there light-green rolling billows swelling,
Their edges purple, forming the fairest dwelling
Round you, the centre. Wander at your will,
The palaces attend you even still.
The very walls rejoice in life, in teeming
Arrowing swarming, hither, thither streaming.
Sea-wonders push and dart along to win
The now soft glow but none may enter in.
The dragsons, mottled, golden-scaled, are playing;
There gapes the shark but you laugh at his baying.
Though now the court surrounds you in delight,
Still such a throng has never met your sight.
Yet long you’ve not deprived of forms endearing;
The Nereids come curiously nearing.
Your splendid palace in the cool of oceans,
The yound with fish-like, shy, and wanted motion,
The old ones prudent. Thetis learns of this,
Gives her new Peleus hand and mouth to kiss. --
The seat, then, on Olympus’ wide domain ...

-- Mephistopheles extols another element -- Water --
for the Emperor to rule, in the “Pleasure Garden” scene,
Faust II 6005-27