"There Lies the Fiddler, Lies the Gold"

You feel the secret operation
Of Nature’s endless ruling might,
And from earth’s undermost foundation
A living trace steals up to light.
When in your limbs you’re feeling twitches,
When something lays uncanny hold,
Be swift to delve, dig up the riches,
There lies the fiddler, lies the gold!

-- Mephistopheles, Goethe Faust II, 4985-92

***

Archaeologists have discovered mummies in a Bronze Age site in Scotland, showing this form of ancestor worship extends far beyond previously known cultures practiced in Egypt and South America.

In the Sept. 2005 issue of Antiquity,, Mike Parker Peterson reports the find from a dig at Cladh Hallan, located on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. The settlement consists of at least four residential structures called brochs or roundhouses, built during the Late Bronze Age and used through the Iron Age (ca 1100-200 BC).

Roundhouses are in small groups often sharing walls and with typically subterranean floors. The floors of Cladh Hallan extend about a meter below the current surface.

Immediately beneath the floors of the Cladh Hallan roundhouses were found several human and dog burials, interpreted by Pearson and company as representing pre-construction ritual offerings, a not uncommon characteristic of Bronze Age roundhouses.

So was Columba’s sacrifice of Oran in the footers of his abbey a mythological completion, one of the labors necessary for assuming tuletary rule over the island?

***
Coming up and out of a two-day Category 7 migraine, never had one so bad as that, as to cripple any activity, thought ... Maestro ... this from Saturday a.m., Day 2:

For years now migraines have
tortured my days with their iron
stakes thrust in my skull, wallowing
seas down over my brow like
the brute weight of Poseidon,
bloody hooves tearing bone
and brain. They come, they go,
shrieking of Michealangelo,
no matter how much aspirin
or Aleve or Excedrin Migraine
or Nortiptyline or Pregnisone
or Topamax or Imatrex or
Toprol or Pameior or
or Depakote or Frova
I take; I’ve been told to take
or not to. I just soldier on,
freighting my own cross of
pain into th day. Sometimes
I’ve felt in their black wings
the presence of something not
quite angelic or of the devil
but powerful and creative:
That the pain was fructively
dark, synapsing words which
would not have been borne
otherwise, for better or ill.
Today I’m in worst arrears,
a migraine having blossomed
ugly in my work day
yesterday which crept
and rose to a magnitude
of pain which was high-
tidal in awesome awfulness,
spearing me through the eyes
& galloping over the top
& hammering away in back.
My doc has me off the
palliatives & told me now
just to take pain meds
& nausea pills, If this
doesn’t break soon
he says he wants
me admitted
to the hospital, for who
knows what surficial
ends -- a breakage in
the works? tumor? -- and
God knows what effects
(can I work? work out?
have sex? write?). It’s
too much to consider here,
where only the undersides
are found lounging
in their black underwear,
drying their ragged,
horrid wings. The
tintinnabulation in my ears
has an impish frequency,
a malice which yet
is purposeful: This shit
is hauling me down.
Dear god of love
and life, decapitate
me as you will and
pull out of me the
next man for the job.
I pray for willingness
to go beneath dark
tides where nothing
much is left to bob.



Well, I could adopt the ditty of Starbuck, sung in “The Candles” when a typhoon threatened to split the ship:

Oh! Jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A’ flourishin’ his tail, --

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin’,
That’s his flip only foamin’;
When he stirs in the spicin’, --

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad, is the Ocean, oh!

Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin’ of this flip, --

Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, jokey, hokey-pokey lad, is the Ocean, oh!


***

Well, we get it in the thick of things -- deep in the soak; so this antiphon to Starbuck, up out of the maelstrom:


***

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.

-- Spirit invoked by Faust, I, 500-509

***

Among the Siberian Samoyed and the Ostyak, shamanism is hereditary. On the shaman’s death, his son fashions a wooden image of his father’s hand and through this symbol inherits his powers. But being the son of a shaman is not enough; the neophyte must also be accepted and approved by the spirits.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

...

Shall I fashion a votive skull? Is that the drum my familiars are beating on so mercilessly?

***

Well, today (Sunday) things are definitely better, the worst of that fucking migraine bone -- ears still ringing, still a knot of pain in the back of my skull -- but the howling has ebbed. Whew. Detox from too many wrong meds? A momentary reprieve? Hoo knows -- for know, this work can wake up from the footers and get back to its peregrination through the seas between my ears.

***

What he (John Ashbery) is trying to do (and here the metaphors get a little screwy, but these are the pictures that come to him) is jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind -- a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem. (This image was suggested to him by the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer, a contemporary of Musil and rather like him.) Since he is always dipping the bucket into the same stream his poems will resemble one another, but because the stream varies according to climactic conditions -- what’s on his mind, the weather, interruptions -- they will also be different.

-- Larissa MacFarquhar, “Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery,” in the Nov. 7 2005 New Yorker

I don’t understand Ashbery’s poetry one whit but I heartily agree with his description of the process ... Postmodern interpretation of the ancient water tongue.

I take more comfort in David Jones’s description of the process, from his preface to his long poem “The Anathemata”:

***

... the particular quarry that the mind of the poet seeks to capture is a very elusive beast indeed. Perhaps we can say that the country to be hautned, the habitat of that quarry, where the "forms" lurk that he’s after, will be found to be of vast, densely wooded, inherited and entailed domains. It is in that "sacred wood" that the spoor of those "forms" is to be tracked. The "specific factor" to be captured will be pungent with the smell of, asperged with the dew of those thickets. The venerator poeta cannot escape that tangled break. It is within such a topography that he will feel forward, from a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a possible kill: in the morning certainty, but also in the lengthening shadows.

Or, to leave analogy and to speak plain: I believe that there is in the principle that forms the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matiere, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself the deposit.

***

Yes ... and the process of raising up that gold, hauling up these daily buckets, in a manner that does not destroy the hauler nor infect the wood with the stink of self, that’s the ticket ...


***


Mephistopheles.

Where in this world does not some lack appear?
Here this, there that, but money’s lacking here.
One can not pick it off the floor, that’s sure.
But what lies deepest, wisdom can procure.
In veins of mountains, walls far underground,
Gold coined and uncoined can be found:
And do you ask me who’ll bring it to light?
A man endowed with Mind’s and Nature’s might!

Chancellor.

Nature and Mind -- don’t talk to Christians thus!
Men burn up atheists, fittingly,
Because such speeches are most dangerous.
Nature is sin, and Mind is devil,
They nurture doubt, in doubt they revel,
Their hybrid, monstrous progeny.
That’s not for us! -- Our Emperor’s ancient land
Has seen two castes alone
Who worthily uphold his throne:
The saints and knights. Firm do they stand,
Defying every tempest day by day
And taking church and state in pay.
In rabble minds that breed confusion
Revolt arises like a tide.
Heretics, wizards! Imps of delusion!
They ruin town and countryside,
Them will you now with brazen juggle
Into this lofty circle smuggle,
While in a heart depraved you snuggle.
Fools, wizards, heretics are near allied.

Mephistopheles.

I see the learned man in what you say!
What you don’t touch, for you lies miles away;
What you don’t grasp, is wholly lost to you;
What you don’t reckon, you behave not true;
What you don’t weigh, that has for you no weight;
What you don’t coin, you’re sure is counterfeit.

(4889-4916)


***

“An ancient giant stands in the mountain’s core.
He keeps his shoulders turned toward Damietta,
and looks toward Rome as if it were his mirror.
His head is made of gold; of silverwork
his breast and both his arms, of polished brass
the rest of his great torso to the fork.
He is of chosen iron from there on down,
except that his right foot is terra cotta;
it is the foot he rests more weight upon.
Each part except the gold is split
by a great fissure from which endless tears
drip down and hollow out the mountain’s pit.”


-- Virgil explains the source of all the rivers in Hell to Dante, Inferno 97ff, transl. Ciardi

***

Monday. Woke at 3 a.m. with the clappers of a migraine tolling dully at the base of my skull. Back to work today, who knows how much this beast will enrage and flower, how much of this is just toxic residuals, taking early morning due (yesterday a.m. I had been suffering but the ‘graine eased as the day wore on). I come to this work (at 4:30 a.m. now) somehow erased, voided, the creative dragon not so much muzzled as drowned: So I sit here doing what I do without a lot of high and low harmonies from the Other World. Least, not that I can hear. But then the drone in my ear may be occluding all.

***


Mephistopheles.

The farmer, ploughing furrows with his share,
Turns with the clods a pot of gold;
He seeks saltpetre in a clay wall, and
He finds a golden, golden roll to hold,
Scared and rejoiced, in his own wretched hand.
Who would explore the earth-hid wonder,
What vaultings he must burst asunder,
What dark ways burrow through and under
Near neighboring or the world below!
In cellars vast, prserved of old,
Plates, dishes, beakers too, of gold
He sees displayed there, row on row.
There goblets, made of rubies, stand,
And if he’ll put them to a use,
Beside them is an ancient juice.
Yet -- you’ll belive my master-hand --
The wooden staves are long since rotten,
A cask of tartar has the wine begotten.
Not only gold and jewels rare,
Proud wines of noble essences are there,
Enveiled in horror and in gloom.
The wise seek here without dismay.
A fool can recognize a thing by day;
In darkness mysteries are at home.

-- II, 5008-32

***

Rilke writes in this letter to Emil Baron von Gebsattel on Jan. 14, 1912:


... I know all is not well with me, and you, dear friend, have also observed it -- but, believe me, I am struck by nothing so much as the incomprehensible, incredible wonderfulness of my existence, which from the very beginning was so impossibly disposed, and advanced nevertheless from salvation to salvation, as though always through the hardest stone; so that when i think of no longer writing, practically the only thing that upsetms me is not to have recorded the utterly wonderful line of this life so strangely carried through .... Can you understand, my friend, that I am afraid of disturbing by any classification or survey, be it never so relieving, a much higher order whose right, after all that has happened, I would have to acknoweldge, even if it were to destroy me?

(Transl. Jane Bannard Greene & MD Herter Norton)

***

So soldier on in this bone scriptorium, harrow through, singing every dark and bright name of God ...

***

MATINS

Feb. 2004

3, 4, 5. I got up. Fog like
A fat angel wallowing down,
Dreaming of our errant hearts the
Way amputees dream of ghost hands
Cupping lost breasts. An owl in that
Wash, her hoots a buoy of sound
I row toward in my half hour of
Quiet pressing an ice pack to
My neck and flipping channels
On void TV. Strange matins but the
Angel of migraines bid me nurse
Sour pain with ice and she-curves, the
Sound of fellow pilgrims to
This hour. Add this strange downwards quirk
To the motions I call God’s work.

THE STUPOR

Feb. 2004

Boston


... something of great constancy
But, howsoever, is strange and admirable.
-- Hippolyta on poetry in
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"

5 a.m.: I woke at 3 with the migraine
back, its iron tide fouling my
sleep with sharp rollers piercing the
back of my head. Bum shore to greet
this day. Groaned out of bed to get
on my knees, say prayers, then
wander down the hall to the ice
machine, hoping no one would see me
with my hair everywhere & wearing
these too-short sleep pants &
radiating the frazzled aura of another
short night). Took an Imatrex & settled
back on the bed to flip the dozen channels
on this hotel TV, waiting for the pain
to quell enough so I can get to work here.
Boston twelve stories down is stilled
after yesterday's snow and rain, traffic
at low ebb, only one police siren knifing
the quiet around 3:30 a.m. The hush
of winter sleep perhaps, hibernatorial,
the city demobbed to plush titty beaches
where the sun cauls its dreamers
in wombs of warm light. Not for me.
I'm too tired to start work,but there
isn't much else I can do, ice pack mostly
melted, bad movie on HBO, "Three's
Company" and a half-hour phone sex
commercial for Las Vegas after Dark
(where Hot Girls are Up All Night
dancing to savage saxophones, drink
in one hand, phone in the other,
waiting desperately for me). My wife,
on the other hand, is quite content to
wait for my call til after she's gotten
her sleep, far south in the real Florida,
though she says she misses me greatly,
though she understands well why I’m
far away for this week. So returning
to work here is just starting our day;
and though today's halved by a thousand
long miles, she's still just asleep upstairs
in our room while I fret and fritter here.
And my work here is the same as
at the same hours at home, and is
a fidelity of sorts to our marriage,
carrying on with it because it's who
I've become in this world, and my
poems are part of the work I do, apart
from though next to her, as a beach
is bordered by infinite motions
restrained to a land. Good day in
the booth yesterday, many publishers
and editors stopped by to pick up samples
of the weekly package & the new
TV grid project, stuffing them into
our bright yellow plastic dittybags
with a pair of bright yellow sunglasses
thrown in as a coda. A steady good
flow of interest even though I never
know if any of that will result in a sale.
Over slow patches I yakked with the
vendors around me, a guy selling HR
consulting who loves to ice-fish, another
selling equipment which prints promo
inserts, who talked of keeping his
reputation as a salesman by standing
firm on his principles. We were just
filling time between the next visit
to our booths, chewing the fat, eyeing
the girlie cub reporterettas who
fluttered past, far too young for
any of us and whom we eyed idly
then looked around to see if the others
were looking too. Later in the ebb
of the flow I read from The Poet's Dante
an essay by Charles Williams, who
pointed out that Dante's real experience
of seeing Beatrice was the main engine
of his work to exalt and delve: "In
the Convivio (Dante) says that the
young are subject to a 'stupor' or
astonishment of the mind which falls
on them at the awareness of great
and wonderful things. Such a stupor
produces two results -- a sense of
reverence and a desire to know more.
A noble aw and a noble curiosity come
to life. That is what happened to him at
the sight of the Florentine girl, and all
his work consists, one way or another,
in the increase of that worship and
that knowledge." I paused there, writing
the passage in my Oran's Well notebook,
hot beneath the brilliant lights of my
display with its wild primary colors.
That;s what all this is about: Drinking
my fill of words "till the Thrill is You,"
as the old Roxy anthem hymned in
my veins during those days after
my first love drove off into the
permanent and wild silence. Every
song here shapes her body again
the way it looked when I first pulled
her clothes off: Rhymes with every
foam and crash that washed from our
thresh all the way through me,
drowning God and intellect, even
music, all poetry. It's all been about
singing Eurydice back, though long ago
I came to realize that she can only
return in the singing. Beatrice died
years before Dante wrote his Commedia,
though the whole of it motions a
way back to her. As these thoughts
were playing through my mind, a
publisher walked by and I shut the
books to flip into game mode, Hi
Howeareya Do you buy any features
for your newspaper & Here's what we
offer: Doing my job, speaking from
the mask which provides handsomely
for the love of life a woman long ago
woke in me, and tides still in my wife's
real and earnest and humanly faulted
love of me, a love which doesn't give
a shit for any words I might carve or
plow or row or hoove in invitation to
her. Do you use TV listings, Have you
any need for sports agate or Spanish
language content? All of it, and
yesterday the work was good, lots of
leads, lots of interest in the things
we do. The luck of Hermes and the
deal, perhaps some maturing on my
part -- I did a good job redesigning
the booth, I think -- But then all the
rest of it is the grace of how things
actually go, which I choose to call
the will of God. And so at day's end
(after slogging out in the snow-slushy
sleet to find a bookstore and then
a Thai restaurant to eat alone in
an overheated empty dark basement
with old 70’s rock on the radio), I got
on my knees to give thanks to that God
for all of the day: Its good work both
inside and out; for the day's safe
passage for my loved ones; and then
prayed for those who were as lost as
I was in that inferno of desires which
cannot have an end, having been made
infinite through greed and all the
lacunae of bright emptiness; Be with
the suffering drunk I prayed, then
let it go, and began my way to sleep.
p.s.: Late in the afternoon one of the
vendors said he had a pet theory that
everyone has one thing they always
remember; the trouble is, he said,
is that most people don't know what
that is. He said he remembered every
joke he had heard; his wife remembered
every recipe that she'd cooked. The
Post-It note manufacturer's rep said
he remembered most conversations
word-for-word. For me, I felt like one
of the clueless. What did I recall best?
Not songs, not the words I write down;
names I'm terrible at, and I recall one
out of a hundred jokes I've heard.
As I write these lines at going-on-six,
the only thing that comes to mind is
the nakedness of every woman I've
bedded -- Becky's rich pubic thatch,
Donna's perfectly round ass & that
overbite which was so coated with
my come when she lifted from me
on that lonely stretch of New Smyrna
Beach so many lifetimes ago. (Of
my wife's nakedness I'll lower a
modesty panel here.) Dunno if this
is at all special -- or even most true --
but those hoarded views go way back
in me, and vault in catacombs deeper
than any church or library or buried
skull. To revere the thrill, and know
its deep well: Knowledge roots in
cognere, "to be born," and each page
I stain here with the ink of desire
finds a way back into that blue blue
space I dreamt in arms to long ago --
Far down under here, composing
every tide. Am I love's knight now?
Or wed to its king? Or simply the
motley of its ring in the belfry
in the deep midland of my life?
Dunno, but this long session here
was like permission to a night
of many curved plunges.
Thank you God for this bliss
though it pales to that kiss
in the dark so long ago.




BETWEEN

Jan 2004

Only what is actually loved
and known can be seen
sub specie aeternitati.
-- David Jones

My giant straddles ages
firmaments & dolors.
Between is his one stance,
of well and shore
composed. Compress
in the poem
this Friday morning
and his uncertain
seward gaze.
Both the migraine-
weary stale-coffee-
taste of 5 a.m.
and a tidal angelus
of a vast enacting sleep.
Both the cat in the
window shaped
like a bell or floret
against the cold
dark morning
and the ache in his
balls to hurl
hammers and hooves
on the highest rollers
of salt verse.
Both the missals
no one has seen
for a thousand
years breaking
open in my mind
like fresh bread
and the drawl of
our President telling us
what we want to
hear in that spit-shine
that walks right over
just about everyone.
Both my wife asleep
upstairs beneath
a heavy duvet with
those warm naked
legs I desperately
need to wrap round
these glottals
and the pale wanton
throned under, who
milks my longing
with verbs & verities
& the dark blue velvet
lining of whatever.
It takes a big man
to make tillage of
between, to shire
that shore half-seen,
half-dreamed. To know
I’ll never know more
than this gait instructs.
He seeds these
shorelike ambles
with a welling bliss.
His old steps echo
my next near-miss.
Between my rages,
master, in your blue fork.



MIGRAINE OF SOUL (BILL EVANS)

August 2003

Bill Evans sounded
the ocean in
a piano’s keys. Played
them like a man
holding on to his
totem fish for dear life.
Each song was
chaliced from a tide
so full of sweetness
there that just
one thimble could
smash down a
cathedral of pale
singers in its wake.
Those keyboard washes
killed Evans for sure --
a career OD on
infinitely pure and
purer chords composed
of bitter minors
and collapsing major
sevenths, pouring
in the ear the sounds
of angels in bed
praising God with
sexual wings.
Addiction was
his only defense --
who does not numb
what only God
can fully hear? The
powdered horse
post-gig, plugging
the ears with that
whiteness else
sirens swallow the sea ...
Was he any kind of
man away from those
wild keys? Could he
ever walk on dry land
with feet grown
so skilled at the waves?
Perhaps art is just
a migraine of soul,
a smoky torch wrapped
in a falling angel's wings,
surrender to the wave's
collapsing half, limned
in that cloak of mist
and foam which thunders
down a life's short shore,
forever in tumult, always
demanding more of
exactly what can never
be sustained. Every time
he found those gorgeous
places (composed of
two or three of the
same piano keys a
million players also
played but never
could sound), you
sense how beauty
shoots inward as it
reaches achingly out,
each fingered ecstasy
an arrow through
its own ripened heart.
At the Paris Concert
in '79 Evans played
with his last trie,
aged 50 and looking
much worse: he bent
over those keys the
way the moon works
the tide -- a power
above soothing
forces below. He
would be dead soon
enough from all the years
harrowed by that song,
damping down the voice
of God in every wave,
his hands obeying what
hauled him too far out,
into places more
savagely sweet than
the very sea -- “Minha”
thonged with so many
curved vowels of ocean
bliss, capping a
career careering just
offshore, just out of
reach, just where all
the angels lean against
the bar long after closing
time and try, oh try,
to shut the door
with just one more,
my friend, just one more
& all the while
cawing in the booming
hiss, flinging wide the
wild startle of the next
kiss from that piano
on a stage beside the sea,
an ecstasy whose
bottom is bottomless.