Shamanic Letter

Among the Alarsk Buryat studied by Sandschejew shamanism is transmitted in the paternal or maternal line. But it is also spontaneous. In either case vocation is manifested by dreams and convulsions, both provided by ancestral spirits (utcha). A shamanic vocation is obligatory; one cannot refuse it. If there are no suitable candidates, the ancestral spirits torture children, who cry in their sleep, become nervous and dreamy, and at 13 are designated for the profession. The preparatory period involves a long series of ecstatic experiences which are at the same time initiatory; the ancestral spirits appear in dreams and sometimes carry the candidate down to the underworld. Meanwhile the youth continues to study under the shamans and the elders; he learns the clan genealogy and traditions, the shamanic mythology and vocabulary. The teacher is called the Father Shaman. During his ecstasy the candidate sings shamanic hymns. This is the sign that contact with the Beyond has finally been established.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

I.

(Wednesday)

Father, I’ve been writing you a while
on shores stronger and stranger even
than the man who cried me forth,
though that paternity mustered sufficient
libido and its mystery in my brain
to ache me on toward you, out there
on the next great shore of vibrant
swimming dark. Last night I dreamt
of planning Halloween in our yard though
it belonged to richer folks than us,
large house & big yard like my wealthy
uncle’s, lots of stations to spook up.
Though also with that magnitude the
difficulty increased, with big rutty holes
in the asphalt sure to gobble kids, with
blatant steel girders from some older
ruined enterprise jutting out like rude
iron phalli, malefic, more than kiddie
stuff. As I let go my plans I mused upon
a red-capped devil’s tale, the song
I must have heard a bit of when I wrote
“Red Dragon” yesterday; something burrowed
down and deep into the inner sea of
my singing ear, down into that wild-water
resonance which bounce whale-songs
from shore to shore. I don’t now recall
his words which in my dream were so
harrowing and pure, but in the dream
I thought to publish his song instead
of my own, dark psalms instead of
childishly spooked-up palms with paper
ghouls and too-dim ghastly lights.
And so I here continue down that
red-capped shaman song which pulses
ugly in an angry vein astride some
engorged cock inside my addered tongue,
ferrying back the harrowed blood in
some infernal circuitry: I rouse to flap
his blackened wings and write this
dragon singing down. And as my left
hand writes these words my right forearm’s
wrapped in medical tape, concealing the
IV font I’ve been plugged thrice to
in receipt of a stiffer migraine cure
than all the physic hurled before
trying to quell that beast at last. There’s
been great relief -- three more doses
left to go -- though today I woke from
my dream with my eyes sealed fast
with that irritating goop that doesn’t
have a name (I squeeze Alrex drops
to knock it back) & that old infernal
hammer at it again in the base of my
skull, knocking at Hell’s Gate. I write
because I dream and because the hour’s
mean: I write because You complete
a work louder in my ear than a
mere falling angel’s world-wide scream.

II.

Those early migraines that hit me with a
waking dream and then split my skull in
two: I was in seventh grade, 1969 I believe,
my parent’s marriage burning up and
world outside of it also on fire, no where
wet enough to stand without one foot
becoming a pyre. It was always in Math--
that subject which always made a fool
of my lazy, dreaming mind with its ticking,
dreadful sums -- that the pillow in my head
would suddenly lamp up and I watched the
same deja-vu-swamped scene where some oily
salesman compared one appliance to another,
expressing the logic of a sale I also could
not fathom, pitching me from its summa
down a dizzy oubliette of sense, whirling
toward a blackness I always cracked just
short of as my skull, it, seemed, split wide.
The headache was sudden and blinding
and short-lived, dulling in the drone of
pencils scratching formulas, erased with
a rubberlike ferocity till I was me again.
Were those the hours when You first arose
in me, Your bald red skull dripping with
the O-shape of infinity, the roaring in my
ears your own, a surf collapsing my sanity
in white foam? My first seizures were thus
headaches too, that malaise which so
tormented my latter youth becoming
this other which so shadows these
early latter days, both perhaps circulating
from that massy growth on my brain
above one temple which was revealed
in a CAT scan three years ago. Is that
Your temple, and this banging in my head
today (a migraine, in the midst of such
massive treatment of late, no less) like
a gong, defiant of every shrink and doc
to come along with dayside remedies?
Who was that dweeby guy in the waking
dream, selling dross yet fundamental
merchandise -- a dishwasher no less,
with its riot of cleansing blue? He was
no one I ever spied in the pantheon,
just a character actor iconic in his
oiliness, his eyes ringed with weariness
or worry, his staccato delivery which
acted like a strobe in my diseased brain,
signalling the waking dream to torment
and haul me down again: was he hermaneut
or some dissociative warlord of my
bruised and shitty life, winging me off
and away from my day but good? Who
knows? I just let him now crow on the
wires of my historic pulse to You, those
veins which freight the harrowed juice,
the marrow of these daily chats with God.

III.

Or did you initiate me in a swarm of
lust when I saw that big bra hanging
in a tree outside the public school I so
feared? I was 13 by then, living in Florida
with my maritally sundered so wounded
mom and three siblings who were just
as bruised as I; and all I wanted in the
world after seeing that booby trap swinging
cup-heavy in the breeze was whatever
swelled girls wild and saucy just that
way. No matter I had no ideas what
teeth were hidden there between
the smiles and the underwear, on
that road from a t-shirt’s hem up under
all the way to what that goofy bra
disclosed slung high into a tree
You planted just for me. My entire
miserable childhood tore in torrent loose
in the single moment of that sight: right
then I was no longer in but in and
desperately wanting out, or suddenly
so out and wanting in. Sugared by the
works which spun cotton brassieres
round the slather of my brain, I jerked off
every night with that high bra held in
sight, rubbing my newly-wakened cock
against the sheets til they were soaked
in sperm and blood. (Heavens, what did
my mother think? Were You thus satyrizing
her as You were plecturing me?) Sometimes
I wonder if the booze was just the surest
conduit to pussy, to that catastrophically
sweet swirl in the soft curves and musk oils
of a willing enough, bra-freed girl. Which
was booze and whence the bottle but from
Your cabinet of thrills, red master? And
whose worm swirled at the bottom of
my endlessness cry for more -- me or Your
latent now wakening desire for those
bloody lines of sperm ink I wrote on
those first white sheets? Though the medium
has changed, I’m still gouting all I think
about that primary bliss; that white bra’s
still turning on a summery and warm
too-noctal breeze, flashing like a smile
in the dark where all lovers climax in
a spark which burns the matter down
once more -- No, there’s no escaping this
tonsured shirt of fire. Father, your head
is reddest with the depths of it, and I am
just another aching pent baritone in
one huge randy, forever famished choir.

IV

(Thursday)

As usual, there’s not enough time to sing
things full enough -- the day I choose
intrudes with the bright wings of Your
morning star staircasing into dawn. I
always shut Your book and head upstairs
to wake a second time with my wife,
stroking her feet slow and light with
fingertips still glowing with Your gules.
Does she sense at all the heat of our
dialogue, this ecstasy transcribed for her
in the angel’s touch she understands?
Does any of this ever remain topside?
I do not tell her much of where You
and I have flown, nor of what depths of
bliss we found descending pages in such
heedless flux of verbal sooth: The words
just seem acrid, self-musked, the strange
smell of a husband’s life one tolerates
for reasons known only for love of house
and garden love bestowes. For her its
all about what follows, not precedes, the
kiss; her strand’s far up from mine, inland
from where waves crash and fold the
lovers’ psalmody. Night and day this beach-
wild song and my fingers on her soles,
yet its still just the one long day I love
and live and work to death. It’s 4 a.m. here,
night leaking a thick fog from its vents,
too warm for November (though tonight
its supposed to cool down a great deal).
Another hellbent day ahead, with my last
infusion of DHE and Toradol and some
anti-nauseating drug at 9 a.m. (I’m dosing
twice a day for three days in this latest
big-gun assault on knocking migraines out);
then its in to work for a day of fast and
hard production finishing off the weekly
package in time to mail everything off
today since tomorrow is Vets Day.
My eyes are feeling glutinous and tacked
with whatever’s ailing them -- too much
of what’s to do in sight? -- and I’m weary,
not having slept well despite the increased
dose of Depakote. As usual You fight
the medicines, the way you battled therapy
when it was so hard to yield to EMDR.
You’re as stubborn as a rude hardon which
no amount of feathered talk can hide,
much less deny. Well, this song’s Your
chance to vent but good. To every devil
His due, and Your’s it seems, is wildest blue.

V.

In my dream last night You might have
surfaced once again as that bald fat
aging criminal whose heart was pure
lust for larceny, stealing what he could and
then challenging a pretty girl to a rassling
match in the center of my brain. He looked
a bit like I imagine Judge Holden in Blood
Meridian, a godless godlike man of such
hard intelligence he was primed to fuck
the world in every way, especially all its
softest maids. But the dream didn’t give
that naked brute a chance, instead switching
channels to the house I lived in when
my first marriage ended. I stood in my
study at the back of the house looking
out on the back yard where I saw a
young man naked as the day with
a long thin hardon crowing proud,
curved like a sexual scimitar. He was
thrusting away at the hindquarters of
a fattish crone, someone the brute
equivalent of the earlier fat man, perhaps
the sort of woman inside that sort of
man. Anyway the young guy was just
pumping away while the woman grunted
and yowled her ecstasy, demanding of him
his all, from crown to hilt of bouncing
balls. Is that how all this passes on
down to here, each page a blasted heath
so foul and fair as to smirch the
Mother’s underwear with the blood-
spermed spume of Your white whale?
In 5,000 poems lost to this thrall
which no one hardly cares to read,
have I yet waded half across the sea
of her undinal sighs? Far indeed from
actual hips the plunging of this membered
sense, now 2000 words or worse long.
Yet when did You ever have any need
for that sweet pink cusp of Venusian mons,
a labial littoral shored by swirly pubic hair?
It now seems to me that that just kept
on the singer’s tongue enough taste of the sea
as to rudder metaphoricals toward the beach
where You made this man out of me.
What am I now but the son of an infernal
scree, about a totem Father’s tide?
See: I’m nothing now but waves, all surge
and salt-coiled clench, collapsing verbs
in foam. My singing is forever half offshore,
of one wet world winged with the other’s
drydocked feather. New bucks are horning
up Your wood. May ever song of salt derange
show them how to plunge the depths but good.
And if a cracked head keeps Your door flung wide,
then may this migraine fog the wildest wood.