The Green Chapel of Lascaux

Gawain comes to the hidden location of the Green Knight’s chapel, a year and a day after he was issued a challenge by that knight at Camelot -- to strike each other’s heads off:

***

He strikes spurs into Gringolet, starts on the path;
By a bank a the side a small wood he pushes in,
Rides down the rugged slope right into the dale.
The about him he looks and the land seems wild,
And nowhere he sees any sign of shelter,
But slopes on each side of him, high and steep,
And the rocks, gnarled and rough and right rugged.
The clouds there seemed to him scraped by the crags.
Then he halted and held back his horse at that time,
And spied on all sides in search of the chapel;
Such nowhere he saw, but soon, what seemed strange,
In the midst of a glade a mound, as it might be,
A smooth, swelling knoll by the side of the water,
In its banks the brook bubbled as though it were boiling.
The knight urged on Gringolet, came to the glade,
There leaped down lightly and tied to the limb
Of a tree, right rugged, the reins of his noble steed,
Went to the mound, and walked all around it,
Debating what manner of thing it might be:
On the end and on each side an opening; everywhere
Over it grass was growing in patches,
All hollow inside, it seemed an old cave
Or a crag’s old cleft: what he could not decide.

Said the knight,
“Is this the chapel here?
Alas, dear Lord! here might
The fiend, when midnight’s clear,
His matin prayers recite.”

(Gawain and The Green Knight 2160-89, rendered into modernized English by Roger Sherman Loomis in Medieval English Verse and Prose, Appleton-Century-Crost, Inc., 1948)

***

Does Gawain quest for his fate, or does he fare back towards it? Or both? Jessie Weston sees in the figure of Gawain a distant ancient chapel of healing, faded greatly in the version which survives in his tales:

“No other knight, save Gawain, has the reputation of a Healer, yet Gawain, the Maidens’ Knight, the ‘fair father of Nature’ is, at first sight, hardly the personage one might expect to possess such skull. Why he should be so persistently connected with healing was for long a problem to me; recently, however, I have begun to suspect that we have in this apparently motiveless attribution the survival of an early stage of tradition in which not only did Gawain cure the Grail King, but he did so, not by means of a question, or by the wielding of a broken sword, but by more obvious and natural means, the administration of a healing herb. Gawain’s character of Healer belongs to him in his role of Grail winner.

-- From Ritual to Romance 108

***

A medicine man, dealer of green mojo, older than the hills he rides through in search of the Green Chapel. A Green Knight rode into Arthur’s court and issued an otherworldly challenge: A head for a head: An otherworldly enchantress gives Gawain the boon of a green silk girdle to wear under his armor as amulet against that hoary axe: Gawain rides on past the borders of sense, arrivng at last at a mound at the bottom a dale which crags down into doom. What crosses in Gawain’s nature that is both lover and healer, for better and for ill? And why must he find or return to the Green Chapel for the dreadest test of all?

How else could he learn to love or heal? Why else sing these strange grand darkly-vaulting songs of blue swoon?



LASCAUX

December 1, 2005

In most of the caves the animals are
inscribed on top of the other, with no
regard for aesthetic effect. Obviously
the aim was not art, as we understand
it, but magic. And for reasons that we
now cannot guess, the necromantic
pictures were thought to be effective
only in certain caves and in certain
parts of those caves. ... And without
exception these magical spot occur far
from the natural entrances of the
grottoes, deep within the dark,
wandering, chill corridors and vast
chambers; so that before reaching
them one has to experience the full
force of the mystery of the cave itself.
Some of the labyrinths are more than
half a mile in depth; all abound in
deceptive and blind passages, and
dangerous, sudden drops.

Their absolute, cosmic dark, their
silence, their unmeasured remoteness
from every concern and requirement
of the normal, waking field of human
consciousness can be felt even today—when
the light of the guide goes out. The senses,
suddenly, are wiped out; the millenniums
drop away; and the mind is stilled in
a recognition of the mystery beyond
thought that asks for no comment
and was always known (and feared)
though never quite so solidly experienced
before. And the, suddenly, a surprise,
a visual shock, a never-to-be-forgotten
imprint ...

-- Joseph Campbell on the sacred grotto deep inside the cave at Lascaux, in Primitive Mythology


I.

So why these bruising perambles
on iron wings of hardest song,
each line any icy feather dipped
and nibbed in my own
irreligious uncongealing blood?
What man embered from that
caul of too-rough magic
and how is he about Your
wild totemic hoohah, if
anywhere at all? A cold
morning this, temps in
the mid-40s at last,
blanket round my feet,
window shut against the
maul; maybe now those
bastard ‘skeeters will abate
when I go out on the
back porch to feed
those strays we call
our own. They’ve been
voracious of late, the
mosquitoes I mean, the
cats too, or the so the
tapeworms belling loud
inside ‘em. Appetite and
sustenance, that’s the iron
drone the topside drums
intone, so loud it’s
hard not to ache to
eat the world. My wife sleeps
deep after sewing half the
night in thrall and woe
of opportunities at last
which may yet help
provide the funds we
desperately lack--perhaps.
And I have been about
these rigors far too early,
this Thursday now hard-
weary with a long day
of weekly production ahead.
Yesterday throughout my
workday there was a dulled,
bluish bruise of malaise
in my mood, jointing all
all my tasks with a
cartilage of surf so
sexual its seemed
bruited in a much
colder sea. As if all
my talk of wings
was hauling Yours up
enough for me to feel
their too-wild undersides,
a proximity which
darkened past desire
with lead shoes. As I
focused on a layout
of an online version
of our main product
a slew of womens’ asses
bent to view, thong panties
slid to right or left like
Eve’s leaf which some
savager goddess hungrily
removed, profferring
cunts and assholes with
such incessant gapes
I saw orchards of wild
sweetness, ten thousand
bites of apple consecrate
in a doom of actual days.
I could almost taste
that whiskey at my lips,
poured from pale
chalices curved my
way from the moon.
Oh it was an old and
hard-worn surf that
pounded at my hips
as I tried to put
in a decent day’s work,
enough to make me
question You here:
Am I just weary of my
job, stuck there for the
income with little real
new interest in the
tasks, a worn-out drone
in an ever-more complected
hive of never quite
lucrative enterprise,
the greatest part of my
dingdong days subsumed
in moolah’s cerulean
occlude of heart and
heat and depth and song?
Is this the man You
forged such wings
inside those broken nights?
Just what’s shamanic
about a married
mortgaged aging man who’s
treading time like water,
working his ass and
getting nowhere,
fattening and wearying
in the rigor of so many
working days?
I see a whorl of blue
inside lost days, the
awful augurs of Your
brogue which thickened
on my tongue like blood:
But that infernal
conception did not birth
in actual time; it only
breaks its waters here,
line after spilled line
down a distant page
to vault of songs writ
large that no one but You,
it seems, has willing
eyes to read. I’m stuck
in a surf-like maul of
personally important
wounds, the way the
puerile life-enfearing
boy moons for years
upon a mirror’s blood,
spilling it forever for
a mother he’ll never need
the way he needs to heal.
The awful all-consuming
bliss of that still-stuck
boy keeps me riveted
here inside a corral of
fixed rhythms and cheap
rhymes. Shamanic rides
a dime! Is that the rant
You’re propounding into
me, up from my
drunkalogues? Perhaps
that was the menace I
felt yesterday, the weariness
of labors high and low
which have nowhere
else to go, my lesser motions
down the great world’s tree
ordaining me to mediocrity
at best, at worst a fatuous
foolishness which bids me
drone on till all this seals
me fast inside a fossil
cage of drowning bone
lost beneath the sea.
How can I not feel stuck?
How can any man of
starry means enough
be fashioned from such muck?




II.


The supernatural suitor
seems to correspond to the
Indian Gandharva, whose
presence is necessary for
conception. At weddings,
the Gandharva is a kind of rival
who, to the last, disputes the
bridegroom’s possession of the
bride. The few references
to the Gandharvas (in the plural)
in the Rig Veda show them
to be spirits of the air or
of the waters, but other
texts associate them with
mountains, caves, and forests,
with the world of the dead,
and with animals. They are
half-men and half-bird.
Their wives or mistresses,
the Apsaras, appear as
water nymphs. The Gandharvas
have charge of Soma, or they
steal Soma; they are skilled
in medicine and they
are fond of women. They
also appear as singers
and musicians who attend
the feasts of the gods,
while from the time of the
Mahabharata their
name also denotes
human musicians.

-- Rees and Rees,
Celtic Heritage p. 276

My tanist here is a booze-soaked
soul about its noctal worst:
I mean the blackout man
who wakes at 3 a.m., having
waited till enough shots of
whiskey had been gulped in
my pig greed to buccaneer
at last my sense, whacking me
but good with his bone mallet
and creaking up the stone
crypt door at the bottom
of my lame-brained skull;
and thus scrabbled out
into the midnight of my days
in his black cape lined with
red velvet, wielding his iron
cudgel of a cock of a cane.
His malefic rock-bottomness,
Sir Hyde, the man beyond all
yoke or harness, whose full
intent was to party down
further than I was wont to
go, freed even of waking
nonsense of a slurry superego.
My account of the blackout
man comes from others
who were there when I was
out; they told me some
next day what I cared
not at all to hear, my ears
burning red for shame.
He/I laughed, we jabbered
to the patrons at the bar,
and danced a trio rumba
with every pretty on the
dane floor, the dead man
with his blacklit shade,
romancing with a smile
that could carve a moon
in two. Our motions were
manic and mantic in
my swoon, eyes closed
beneath the disco lights,
hips thrusting sheward
on the boomboom beat.
The blackout man partied
on when I wend down like
a zombie of my days, saying
all I couldn’t and doing more,
carrying on where I left off
with his special equipage,
a bone I didn’t have the
balls to use. Once I closed
down the Point After and
drove home with him at
the wheel. There was a pop
in the murk and it came
to me I’d gotten a flat tire,
but the blackout man
decided to drive on.
Then is was shrieking day
and I was struggling up
from bed, late o so late
for work, my girlfriend
cursing me from top to bottom
for being such an asshole.
Huh? I thickly asked,
stumbling into shirt and tie.
When I tried to leave
I found the bumper of my
car lodged next to the front
door, a long scar down
the yard to the street
gouged by what was left
of my front right wheel.
A guy who lived across
the street later told me
(in one of those dread
accounts of me when I
wasn’t anywhere) that
he had wakened at 3 a.m.
hearing a dreadful
scraping coming down
the street; he looked out
and saw my car lunging down
the street with flashes and
sparks flying from one
corner. My girlfriend said
she’d heard that noise
abruptly turn and chew
loudly up the yard of our
duplex; coming to the
door she saw me lurch
out of my car and then flip
over across the hood
demanding in a loud
hoarse voice a kiss,
some pussy, then begged
to kiss her pussy.
The blackout man
drove me home that night
and so many others
I’ll never recall, a far older
man by twenty five
millennia or so, about
Your work in its direst mojo,
its blue blackest augment
which I’ve always feared
to fully row to the wildest
shores of. And out there
before he finished with me
at last he laid me in a
a huge stone chamber at
the bottom of all bottles,
and grafted on the extra
bone, this fluke of
salt frothernity. I ride him
here, that abcissa of my
dread history I pray to
never again endure.
Something tells me that
this work is part
of keeping him down
there where he belongs,
my visits to his barroom
depths nekyias which harrow
the tongue of the full
taste of booze-wild emptiness,
the abysms of desire
which no thrust can full
requite, much less suspire.
Or perhaps he’s happy
now to ride me home
in the salt empyrieia
which is my singing bone.


III.

According to Lehtisalo’s
Yurak-Samoyed informants,
initiation proper begins with
learning to drum; it is on this
occasion that the candidate
is able to see the spirits. The
shaman Ganykka told him that
once when he was beating his
drum the spirits came down
and cut him to pieces, also
chopping off his hands. For
seven days and nights he
remained unconscious, stretched
out on the ground. During
this time his soul was in
the sky, journeying with
the spirit of Thunder and
visiting the god Mikkula.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism:
Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 38


History is Mystery’s thong:
the thrall of lost thrills
dowses my backward glance
over every once-upturned
ass into what I could not
quite plunge the full depths
of with my errant, too-
spiritually blue equipage.
Even the bliss had darker
wings than I could then see
--had I known then just
what abysm was offering
its nipples to me, I would
have fled, screaming, from
every bed ... But how else
would have I been fattened
for the fall after which You
battened on my viscera
with red thrall? Remembering
those motions here across
and down the page is like
drumming on the edge of night
until the night awakens wings,
wings which take me where
I never could get to in all
those bad nights, a destination
beyond the ache which
poured me into all those
ill-fated drunken beds.
I had a sense of it but not
the words for what’s inside
that surf between a a woman’s
thighs which cries my name
booming welcome: before
the name there was a motion,
a drumbeat, if you will,
the infernal metronome
which scatters worlds until
none are left quite whole again.

I closed my eyes when
I soloed on my guitars,
reaching out to fin the
bluest marges of the notes,
getting beyond the brutal
facts -- another night of
half-assed band practice in
some too-cold practice room --
to arrive at a stage
in the vastest room where
applause and pleasure
sounded back, the grail
of ten thousand woman
etched upon those darkly
echoing walls. I never got
to real stages in any troth
though the licks were
surely true: if only in
the playing, my wings
were blue. The bands
didn’t matter, whether
I was in them or not:
I never succeeded in that
way I wished but instead
I learned about the
register of a big-night
music which booms,
whale-like, from shore to
shore of song. It was all
about the singing, the
way You heal by winging,
wing-bone to shoulder
welded with a gossamer
belief along the interfascias
of heart and heat and
the hurt which is inconsolable
and deeper than the deep sea sky.

Take also the hundred
nocturnes in strange women’s
beds I only pillaged once:
They too were of a motion
You taught me, one in which
I learned of You by drumming
of my hips against another’s,
in the crest of desire
along a gradient of wilds
which explodes in cleansing
light somewhere in
O-cry of all cresting seas.
Observe the lover engaged
in that salty blue bouree,
closest to me in the facts
of proximity, stripped
and spread and plunged,
breasts heaving and wobbling
against my hairy shore,
her cunt receiving me
stroke for stroke in
steady slowly speeding
rhythmus: How come our
eyes are not guzzling the
local facts of raw nudity
but are instead screwed tight,
gazing off in pleasure’s
spirit-flight, reaching
for some orgasmic place
inside and yet offshore,
a place which evicts
us from our solitary
houses and dumps us
way out there with a
shout and a gout,
collapsing in warm seas
where all defining
edges have been lost
at last in the clear blue
float of Your purest
and most far realm,
inside the thalmus
of what frees us most,
if only for an hour
on a night so wanton
in its disease? In my
sexual immramas You were
boating me toward a shore
where, thus harrowed
by the routes, I was at
last able to build a house
on feral ground, married
to a real woman and
to her familiar safely
underground, whoever
that archangel is, muse
or fancyfuck or anima
of doors opening all the
way inside to central
chamber where all bowered
bliss is etched on the
walls, not in pride or
poetry but reverence,
for the mojo I could
never mount by day
and rode those nights
like a sea-horse into the
wildest waters of them all.

And a third instance: for
years now I’ve gotten up
too early every day to sit
in this white writing chair,
drumming in a chickenscrath
tenor across the page down
into abyssal deeps which
have taken plural shapes
and names-- a well, a
crannog, a Cape, a beach,
a road of waking dreams,
the drowned and lost
rooms of my own history,
now this unbound
packet of letters to
the shaman who wings
beneath my own story
into its purest song:
And though the names
have changed the motions
have remained, as true
as when I played guitar
or drummed my balls
against the pale white
bottom of a woman.
The rigor of pen on paper
are the wings and hooves
and fins of thought that
reaches with its eyes
closed, staring through
the words toward an aerie
far below where something
in a ancient nest is
hatching every slow,
a huge malefic bird of
prey with iron feathers
tipped in sharpened
flint, his beak (Yours?)
dipped in the blood I
freely pour from my pen.
For years I’ve dipped
my quills in an ancestral
abyss, writing inks of
brutal ichor brined in
blood’s oldest communion,
older than any wine
to spill from chalice depths.
I come to believe it
wells from a totem tongue
who bids me speak his
name--Yours, dark
father--in the resonant
chapel of stone far inside
these verbal ribs of bone
descending down the page.
The end has never been
for art though there’s
quite an art to learn
in how to say it right
enough, a knack You’re
teaching me poem after
poem after poem. I stare
at the page as the words
fly forth and then I’m
riding inside of them
on a high blue swollen
wave of desire and its
precedents inside my
heart and mind and balls.

IV.

For twenty five thousand
years priest-shamans led
trembling votives down
the passageways of Lascaux,
descending into the earth’s
cold halls of cunt inside
the mind, a frightening passage
filled with every dread
and peril of the harrow,
ending at last and suddenly
in the vast central hall:
And there unleashed
a sudden fire which revealed
Your gospelled plenitude
of sacred beasts and men
and demiurgic theurges --
bird-men with penises
of stone who stared full
back with eyes of whorled
abyss. That panoply of
wild-wrought shapes
flashed You into view at last
and forever those far
millennia of startled
hearts, a gorge of awe
and awfulness which
ladders up to me each
time I’ve headed down
these many ways
over the years. What have
all my wild motions been
but the same enquiry
of initiate into a vault
of fire beneath the darkest
sea? And here I am again,
bumping at the bottom
of this next song, etching
here an end of sort on
the same old brutal walls,
a coup from the Infinite’s
starry count: My name--
or Yours--as an antlered
man with stout cock
and blue balls dancing
in the teem of fuck-
and hunt-desire, staring
hard exactly where I’m
staring through these lines.
What I see there I ferry here
in this boat of rough-hewn
verse: Then shut the book
like the cover of a well
and head back upstairs
to warm my body next
to my sleepy wife, and
let the real life wake
from this dream. Lascaux
was harrowed for ten
million nights in the same
quest to Your chapel: It’s so
deeply grooved inside
my mind that pick and
prick and pen can only
wing that way on down
though infinitely desired
waters, down where song
and love and saying
wed eternal vows in
rhyme. Yes, history
is indeed mystery’s
thong, revealing most
what it conceals, the
thinnest bridge— a
sword, perhaps—into
the vastest keep where
You, dead king, forever
sleep at the bottom
wrappings of my soul.
Some day perhaps I’ll
fully wake You with
a note, a countercockward
twist, or a word; but
that may just be the
booze talking beyond
its bottles, a thrall which
counts for nothing and doesn’t
matter at all to the worlds,
not even Yours. It dooms
me to a solitary enterprise,
committal to a labyrinth
which has no turn up
and out. It makes planning
hard and endings moot,
since descending is the
only boot apt for its feet,
stomping down in cement
pentameters. I just go on
and on and on in the
only way I can, repeating
the blue motions in
the same old starry way,
winging toward the song
which undertows my
ding dong days, this
life-long ache for
enduring shores.
Your music assures me
that I’ll get there yet,
even if I have to mount
a hundred different horses
in the ride. A hundred
different discourses,
a hundred malts inside
the ones I’ve long poured
out, a hundred salty
rhetorics each with
ten thousand gospels
buried far down inside
their bones, buried lower
from view than words
or notes or sperm can
ever reach. It’s cold again
this morning, crisp as
a Hesperidean apple
plucked from Orkney shores.
My wife plans to work on
custom jobs while I work
some in the garden & then
nap & watch some football
reading the last of Moby
Dick. That’s the plan, though
this is an awful age we
life in, with something
bad always in the news
and the telephone always
threatening to ring in tones
so fraught with bad news
far closer to our home;
perhaps, at worst, inside.
Always a black hand is
rapping at the window
in the ligature of doom,
threatening to drown
these rooms of work and
love we have daily fought
so hard to live in. Is
that You that’s pounding
there just beyond what
I’ll never dare to say, much
less embrace? Does my
scratching here somehow
make faint that darker,
deeper sound? Perhaps.
But all I know is that
when I’m done here
the man who goes upstairs
has blue feet surer
than blue balls, done
in one sense enough
to stop pleading for
this world to drench
me in what it has
no sea for. Our world
upstairs is safer when
Yours is secure down
here: And so I write
these lines between
where imps and angels
have no tread, harrowing
a space for us which is
hell and heaven enough
for one life, one man and
his wife. And that, my
father and far friend, is
all of thrall and gall
I can drum today. Bless
it with your sigh which
all oceans at their edges fly
and welcome me home at last
to the last line I here cry.