The Ends of Ecstasy

Among the Ugrians shamanic ecstasy
is less a trance than a “state of inspiration”;
the shaman sees and hears spirits; he is
“carried out of himself” because he is
journeying in ecstasy through distant
regions, but he is not unconscious. He
is visionary and inspired. However, the
basic experience is ecstatic, and the
principal means of obtaining it is, as
in other regions, magico-religious
music. Intoxication by mushrooms
also provides contact with the spirits,
but in a passive and crude way ... This
shamanic technique appears to be
late and derivative. Intoxication is a
mechanical and corrupt method of
reproducing “ecstasy” by “being carried
out of oneself”; it tries to imitate a model
that is earlier and belongs to another1
plane of reference.

-- Eliade, ibid 222-3

Wings and fins and hooves are ferrymen
you send to me to get to You, but
learning how and where and --hardest!--
why to ride are in a region of blue augment
even You can’t name, not yet at least.
I first got drunk at age 11 when my
sister’s poodle Ravel got run over by
a car when he sprinted in joy across
the street while I was playing with him;
he was in my care just then, my
sister and brother and mother down
in Florida, no doubt, because my
father and mother were close to
separating). My world inverted at that
moment when I saw him spiralling
prone on the pavement like a swastika
You drilled deep into my heart; I
ran to him in horror and scooped that
little limp dog up, his heart still beating
madly for the ten seconds it took
for me to walk back to our house; when
I stepped on the porch he was dead.
I sat down there on the stoop with
Ravel in my lap and began to cry,
for him and all the world’s dear dead,
then on to every grief in the catalogue
of my bum dumb childhood. My father
came out and pried dead Ravel from
lap and secreted him away; then came
back with a glass of wine and put
it in my hand and bid me drink
as I blubbered on and on into the
afternoon now turning dark.
I was inconsolable, some hardened
anger catapulting grief after
grief up out of where they had
cold-storaged, vomitous jags
of teary rage in which I railed
at brothers and schoolmates
and neighborhoods where cars
so blithely killed the world’s
beloved pets. But as I drank from
that glass my world inverted
once again; that soursweet pour
began a warming spread below,
dulling back the anger and grief,
setting a capstone over that
boneyard well of pain, turning my
feelings into something sweeter,
then sweeter still. Another
glass and then a third and I
was in full frolic, dancing
merrily in the living room to Barbara
Streisand on the stereo -- what
was that song? -- “Shall We Dance?”
Oh I was flying, flying from
the chandelier which hangs in
Your Valhalla, a bruised black
stone no more, pure liquid
ecstasy, dead dog forgot, old
wounds fresh bound and tossed
all the way to the bottom of that
wonderful wine-glass which as
long as I kept filled I would
never have to feel again. Ecstasy
was thus a transport out from pain,
a ladder up from that dull servitude
in the salt-mines of a wounded
heart. My father was my first
priest of that strange wild juice
and so my love and hatred of
it is filial and totem. There are
three drinking cups on my
father’s family crest, and the
motto Not By Providence but
Victory! Add that to the naked
fish rider atop a warrior’s helm
and you have the perfect
ikon of bliss whiskey, the cry
which pours and lifts the
drinker’s latitudes.

A few years later I felt ecstatic
wings again in a dream which molted
my faux-Christian faith: I saw
my parents pledge their love
once more and felt myself
lift on wings of joy to some
mountainous height -- actually
the ceiling of our living room --
where a mighty wind rushed
toward the sun and all,
all was ecstasy. The next day
my father said (he was visiting
Florida and our family) that he
and my mother had talked
in the night and decided to
give it one more go. That miracle
confirmed a holy-rollers faith
in God’s careening joy, its depths
and heights of imps and angels
flinging through each day like
surf. A few months later when
I was baptized in the Atlantic
at Melbourne Beach, those wings
morphed into blue fins: The minister
backed me into the water
and down under I felt a wave
wash all the way through
the ends of all my bones,
cleansing and releasing something
deepest in me, finning me to
regions of pure blue. Spirits,
spirit-mountain, the spiritual
blue cerulean to You: thus early
in my puberty I was initiated
in the Ecstasies, taught to transport
out and away from that lonely
and unlovely cell in which
I lived and hung my name.

A third exempla of sweet
transport was when I played guitar,
eyes closed in the rapture of
pure transport, puerile and
pedestrian in my love of
of lame bands like Grand
Funk Railroad, where adulation
rang louder than ululation
inside Music’s purer wombs--
No matter: I squeezed my
eyes and climbed aboard the
back of a big blue dragon, a flying
whale perhaps, lifting from my
dumb teen’s room out over
noctal groves of black-lit
rites of forbidden passage,
girls from my dayside
classes slicked with Mazola,
nipples burning with moonlight
as I savaged minor seventh
chords on the major stages
of the world. Years later when
I tried to make a go of it
I called the moment Rightburn --
mid practice in some cold
basement, the whole band
into gear, beer and pot and
speed triangulating my lift
and soar in a dead yet wakened
trance, free of every cumbrance
outside the music and thus
free to soar and tide as we
beat the bejeezus out of the
Stones and Sex Pistols,
pure augment roaring with
a hell-bent glee, Saint George
riding Uffington across the
wildest sea. -- Trapped in
the profanest ikons of sex
and drugs and rock n roll,
I still felt that magic country
scroll out below, my hunger
and greed for so infinite
I never got close than a mile
from its crashing blue shores,
my guitar just another bottle
of preter-spirit pounding
on all the wrong black doors.



II.

It’s Sunday morning now, 4 a.m.,
roused far too early by a dream,
a migraine, and the sound of
a drunk haranguing the night
outside a few doors down,
each in turn a curse, or,
to invert, how You converse,
all rounded and dark-sounded
inside the same frank drum.
In the dream two old armies
railed and rallied at each other,
red and bluecoats aiming bayonets
the length of spears toward
the other, collapsing ocean to
ocean on a plain of interfacial
blood, a third ocean spilt from
long keen steel into the ventricles
of death. Then I was trying to
get into a tub with a man and
a woman in some late-night
living room, ostensibly, it seemed,
to read these Shamanic Letters
for the first time out loud. (I spent
yesterday afternoon trying to assemble
them together into a gift of sorts
for my father -- and thus to You --
adding title pages and photos;
there were twenty-four ecstasies
of history and mystery, verse letters
still in need of just one more,
and thus this poem that I started
yesterday and here and now
find difficult to end.) The woman
went eagerly into the tub, naked
and happy in her element;
while the other man, a buddy
from my years of worst abuse,
looked dubiously at that tub,
either because there
was so little space for three.
While he considered I
tried to gather up a finished draft
but all I found were piles of drafts
and notes and posts, all that
tonnage of prepatory trash.
The night was getting late, the
bath-water cooling, my eager audience
losing all excitement for words
I couldn’t find the ends of, no
matter how hard I sifted and
sorted and rummaged around.
And so I woke in anguish at 2:30
finding a migraine beating in my
skull and, just outside beyond an
opened window, the sound of some
drunk yabbering loud and long,
trying to make a point he couldn’t
make the sense of, singing along
to the Eagles’ “Desperado”
leaking from the house: My familiar,
Your souse, leaked from a party house.
So I grumbled up and trudged downstairs,
feeding Violet some Whisker Lickins
and settling on the couch to try sleeping
another hour or more. Opened a window
at my head for her and listened to
drunk voices mix with the sound of
later-year breezes tide through dark trees,
that sound sad and ancient like the
plainsong of brethren felled by Vikings
and the death (or dearth) of God. That
sound cleffs the loneliest of Christmas,
a blue-black mood in parts rooted in
the death of Santa, in childhood’s
eviction from its Eden underneath
the Christmas tree, the loss of
uteral heavens in the mother
and the sea, and in a species
ennui for the old, prelapsarian sight
of mangers and cattle and a blessed
child mewling on a bed of straw,
All these images ache for the
falls from them which left us here,
alone, vulnerable to ennui and
atheistic winds, to the maul of
geo- astrological clocks which
tick our lives like breaths,
one wave’s collapse and fall among
ten trillion folds, a lone needle on
fir-tree in a thousand-mile forest
up on mountains no one will ever see.
Who wouldn’t drink and yabber
for the wet part of lost seas, at the
darker maul of a heart’s infernity?
And yabber on that yahoo did,
talking on to some other, real or just
inferred, down at the deep end of one’s
night’s big drunk, talking loud, perhaps
to God, about nothing much: just wasted.
Violet in the window kept looking back
at me alarmed, tensed to jump down;
I whispered soft cajolements to her
as I prayed to my God for that dead
drunk, wondering if prayers were enough
or if I should call the cops and thus
mojo up some actual consequence,
help drive one drunk further down
the road which will kill or ill or heal
him once and for all. I prayed too for
the guy I’m sponsoring in AA, a real
mess of that sea-bottom-wrecked-arrears,
31 days sober and then he stops calling
me, five days now, doing fine, no need
to work so hard. I prayed for him and
thus for me, for everyone at the far
end of a night which that lonely drunk
outside had belled us to. But if these
Letters have taught me anything (for
whom I writing to but myself?)
I know that You’re making music
for the world from his sour notes,
pestling them with my dream,
hard migraine and those high
bitter winds, forming a drumbeat
from all that to help me write
this last letter in the group,
in which I try to say just what of the
song remains and what thrall and
swell it serves, if any. Does any work
complete? Can my choir hymen an
amen in hymns for which there are
scant amends, much less true ends?
I write on anyway because, well,
there is still enough to say stuck in
the craw of this fleet pen: shore
enough to sense there is ahead a door
in the floor, a way down to get out.




III.

According to Eliade, healing among
Yenisei Ostyak shamans requires not
one but two ecstatic jaunts; the first
a rapid survey of that far terrain, and
then a second, which dives from the first
as off a high-diving board, jumping up
the magic mountain’s height to fall
further than a sick man goes, into
the salty womb of mortal wounds.
I think now of my early encounters
with bliss as journeys of the first sort,
discovering wide-eyed those realms
I had not even dreamed with a startled,
unsettled, and progressively
radicalized heart. Each first encounter
slapped me alive like a newborn baby --
the first time I squeezed a young woman’s
breast, the first time I heard live
rock-n-roll, the first time I drank Seven-
and-Seven beneath the stadium seats.
Whole new heavens scrolled out below
as I flew further out from my childhood’s room:
the first time I slipped a middle finger
into a pussy -- so hot, so moist! -- the first
time I smelled potsmoke in a shaded
room of high hippies. Bereft of any guiding
sense the firsts drowned out my spirit
with a liquor of pure spirits: the first time
a woman pulled off bra and panties and
watched intent as I unzipped; the first time
I drank shots of tequila chased with salt
and lime, the first time I strutted out
onstage to whup some rock n roll.
Each first produced a thirst for
more -- as when I fell in love inside
a river’s roaring rage, or when,
after eating mushrooms, I
watched first light cartoon across
the floor. The taste of 12 year old
malt whiskey poured in deep
winter by my father, the moist
suction of a woman's mouth
upon my aching cock, playing
“God Save the Queen” at a
high-school dance in Moses
Lake Washington, the
sight of a thong panty pulled
aside by a woman’s hand,
the sight of the sweetest
ass in the world and voice
husking Fuck Me There: Oh who
would not jones forever for such firsts,
not die drowning of such thirst!
Yes, the tutelage of bliss these
days is a sodden, fell affair,
bereft of any instructive voice
(or one grown far amid the
noise of all our instruments),
breeding sots and perpetrators
of ever snarl and stripe. The
bottle clubs at 5 a.m. are filled
with firsts forever fused with
ends--Ah, but all those ecstasies
only surveyed the shorelines
of a continent beyond all dreams,
a land no one can penetrate
until ecstasy grows different,
more perplex wings. Those first
events are for me long lost
except here on the page, flickers
of a drumming flame which keeps
my hand galloping across the page
while I sit serenely here
at close to 6 a.m. three days
before the winter solstice,
writing all You drummed.
What is the quintessential spark
which keeps the forges roaring?
Is it the inverse of those chance
encounters with delight, the lake
below my thirst could not requite
or slake, a mere of striking flints, all
edges flaring out, flashing in
subterfuge of polar ends confused,
like those armies I dreamt last
night, out and inner worlds
in one embrace, one catastrophic,
cataleptic shout. Only that convenes
the second dream, the second shaman
flight to what this singing’s really about.
Desire sources in its own ecstatic
rout, an archangelic flout of wings
on paper (or paper wings in imagined
skies), which is all these days
I can be about when I not about
my life proper life. I’ll never know
just where those transports took me;
nor why I still care to retrace them
in every poem I write these days,
descending always to here,
ink spent like so much seed and
no line final enough to shut the
drumming down. Perhaps that’s just
the nature of all ecstatic jaunts --
straight up and out then down
down down, the one precipient
of the other the way all lives go,
hurling and crashing and ebbing back
in the same relentless flow
outside our mortal consequence.
-- And always there thus here
the undertow, dark hands hauling
from below to where that lonely
drunk sang loud and proud of
Ahab aboard his whale, going
down into the vaster dark.
Oh what slight distance from that
sot to me, no more than half a
block in spirit’s neighborhood,
old ecstasies exchanged for
their most sinister rhymes,
for verb full gambled, singing
down into abysms at the bottom
of the year. Well, this one’s near
finished, as the poem and these letters.
I’m spent and done: I just want to go
back upstairs and lay with my wife
and wake the way we always do,
my hand stroking the bottoms of her
feet, cat curled somewhere nearby,
first light awakening the window
with the inside dance of that old
ecstatic trance, now mostly lost
though forever just beyond the last
line, touching gently at her soles.
Another Frova, housework and
clothes-washing and bills to pay.
Someday I’ll vanish from this
page, erased by Your own hand.
Until that time I give thanks
to You, old God, brute Father,
sea-wash of first-born rays,
for transporting me back here
once more to live another day
in full ecstasy of all I got to say.