Saturday, August 20, 2005

Light in August




SHORE

David Cohea

I imagine these late August
days like a shore where
the ocean keeps ebbing
further back, leaving the
tinfoil of wet sand to pale
into something more
worldly -- a road, perhaps --
poured by the sky
alone. It's the spaciousness
of it, pulled back like
covers of a bed, revealing
too much of us here
without a clue what happens
next. How grateful we
are when dusk shawls
us back over in a darkling
wave, providing if not
comfort at least the
riche cider of sense
to bob for the sun in a drowse.

***

Finally, it seems, the lock of heat seems to be cracking. A guy at work yesterday told me that the high pressure front hanging over the state which prevented seabreeze fronts from their afternoon cross-shore inland stroll had moved west in to the gulf, meaning we should be getting back to Florida norms.

And sure enough, by midafternoon the sky was churning past brilliance into armadas of cloud, and by 4 p.m. thunder could be heard outside as I put the finishing touches on my work week. Droplets of rain big as quarters tumbling on me as I walked to my car. Heavy squishy rains on I-4, slowing traffic to a frustrated inching, though who would not be grateful for the saturations of rain and the coolings of cloud? Storms still rumbling about when I emerged from the gym an hour and half later, lingering, rousing and dousing here then there, indeterminate, fomenting in a simultaneous polyphony. Rain and thunders all the way home too, in storm, then out, then back in again, the traffic just slogging along. (Why is it always heaviest and slowest on Fridays?) Pulling in our driveway, house inside richly dark & lamplit with a cooking show glowing on the TV in the living room, the garden moist, hanging heavy from a recent dowse, rain falling lightly, cracks and splinters of lightning around the compass of the sky, the strolling booms rich and satiate.

Thank God for this change.

***

Certainly the incessant heat of this lattering summer has produced its own maliase, similar perhaps to the late-winter madness of northern latitudes: a siege of brilliance and heat wearing down the populace, making every day a toil. Spiralling gas prices and a darkening war in Iraq also hammer away at one's game-readiness, the optimism required to live and love well. Lunching with my mother yesterday she told me of my cousin who "was manic again," got two DUI's in two days, fucking up all chances for solo visitation of his child, product of a very messy divorce. She said that her sister (my aunt, mother of the cousin) had told her that the cousin "always did badly in August," the manic-depression seeming to crest in late summer.

Hmmm. I could see parallels in my story. My drinking had two seasons of awfulness, late winter and later summer, times when I seemed to step off a cliff of bad drinking into really bad, mad, suicidal shit. Badlands of the soul where there is no hope, where rain does not so much sate a thrist as to drown in it.

Seasons of madness, malaise, murderous swings of the guitar, the malice of whiskey: pour all that on a soul on ice and the result freezes everything into a rotting stasis -- winter OR summer. There was the sense of having exhausted every means of escape from some prison of centrality -- today I call it the tyranny of a hero archetype I could in no way measure up to -- and there, on the extreme shore or steppes of my days, there was nothing left to do but go insane or die.

Yet that rot actually is how we grow past the hero, n'est pas? He has to die of his own wounds, dissembled, like Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow, rambled through the fullest reaches of the underworld Zone; like Acteaon ripped apart by his dogs chasing Dionysos through the infernal wood, the deeper the hero travels into the mess of his ambitions, the weaker his centrality becomes. He can't hold up to his own spiritual imperatives, succumbing to the wetness of sexuality, of anima's soppy vale, the desire for uteral oblivions in the blue. If ferocity is his club, then the exhaustion of the great seasons -- their swords raised past full -- are signal of the weakening and rot which brings about his transformation.

And though my seasons aren't marked by such surficial excess anymore, still they cycle through. I still go through a fallow period in late August, poems listing in too-stilled waters, the sense of having troped to the end of my rope. No poems at all from my pen for more than a month now, instead reviewing my sources here, aligning what I know about what I will never know, enjoying the alternate rhythm of prose (I have a friend who is a relentless reviser who says when he finishes his current book of poems he may permanently switch verbal sides.) For now, I enjoy the glide of going void of course, shoulder sore, money tight, my wife desperately holding on to hope she can make her business work, everyone aging, the world at high tide of awfulness, thunder again in the distance, hopefully soon wealing the garden with rain.



SUMMERTIME BLUE

This time of summer -- half-mad
with its sunwise shrill revolvings --
makes me think of the Summer of
1974, when I was readying to
leave Chicago for my first year
of college in Spokane Washington.
My father brother friend Albert
and I had moved into the the
church manse on the other
side of the El tracks from Wrigley

Field after packing up my mother
& younger brother & sister
for good from our row house
on Fullerton and waving farewell
to our family as they drove
the hell on South outta Chicago
for Florida, which was surely
hotter but also more nestled in
the bosoms of the angels.

For us in that ever-empty manse
it was a royally rough time,
all of us bleeding bad & the
summer noxiously fierce, no
respite from its 95 degree days
where all was glare and wither,
the ire of an angry god, or our
anger at Him who answered
no prayers in this world. My
Christian faith by then was in

full "backslide," as we called the
worst sinners back then, the
towery ascents of belief suddenly
losing all gradient & becoming
a hole into which I pitched my
fevers of need for abandon: To
make a loud sound, to get laid,
to get good and drunk, to get the
hell on outta town. With every
Christian restrain torn loose

by the flapping wound I would
not then dare call my own heart,
that latter summer I dover full
into those needs, daily, neck-deep,
in fuller throttle than the sun I
imagined, as far as I dare go (which
proved far shorter than what the
world allowed). In the basement
of the manse, Albert dragged in
a drum kit and I played rock n roll

the loud way for the first time,
using a homemade electric with
great humbucker pickups -- given
to me by Glenn, the lead guitarist
of the Resurrection Band from the
Jesus People up the street from
my father's church, & on the condition
that I burn that guitar before
playing a note of the devil's music --
Sorry Charlie, something in me

whispered as I patched into a
borrowed Ampeg amp (it had that
silly plush glitter padding and
a nasty reverb, making a loud
clatter every time I jolted the frame),
this soul needs a hotter wattage
than is delivered by your angel
choir. God we were awful down in
that boomy cool basement, Albert
whacking the drums & I wailing

on that loud guitar as we tried to
knock out renditions of "China
Road" and "Smoke on the Water"
and Alice Cooper's "Under My
Wheels," hanging for dear life onto
the tail of a sloppy sleepy fire
salamander who would one day
grow large in me. It would be years
before my first real rock n roll
band, but credit that summer for

sinking those addictive loud fangs
in me for the first time. I was 16
going on 17, as the old tune
from "The Sound of Music" goes,
virginal too but by that
summer (or because of it) desperate
to end that pact with God. No longer
cowled by daily prayers of purity,
those summer days were horridly
blueballed, clanky with the day's
cranky heat, the secretaries crowded

round me on the El as we all hauled
deeper into the city to the truly
urban jobs were like angels of bad
summer, their sweaty cleavages the
downward gradient I needed small
push to fall down. And who was that
girl I finally ended up with? I
can't remember her name but she
was from a dangerous perimeter
of my decaying church circle, the

bad friend of one of our most errant
girls. We'd go up to her bedroom
on Saturday afternoons -- her parents
silently acquiescing, some steely
and smoky arrangement there
that had to do with a child
no longer in the house. On her
bed we'd make out like wolves,
her legs hooked round my waist,
hips grinding and pumping

against my terrified pubes, our
mouths greedy, tirelessly tonguing
the other as we moaned and
gasped and walloped that small
bed. It was all so illicit and torrid,
yet her permission was greater
than I found I yet had balls to
proceed: I desperately wanted
relief from the last vestige of
my youth, yet my manhood

hung back, slack in its cave,
terrified of the infernal heat
it must go raw to. God that room
sweltered as we failed to finish
the job. Frustration with me after
a few weeks of such thrash made
here finally kick me out of her
room for good, out into a rainy
late Saturday night: I remember
walking home in that rain with

"Ricky Don't Loss That Number"
sawing through me, my factual
virginity intact but my heart,
oh my heart, far far at sea
& Chicago at that drowned hour
steaming & insensate, unrepentant,
everything dead & shutter yet
bottomless, o infinitely open for more.
So of course I drank -- we all did
that summer, wildly, like camels

crawling out of the desert of
their own skins, my dad brother
Albert and me drinking to fill the
bleeding hours with something
like sea water but more obliterate,
of a bluer oblivion -- Scotch by
the tumbler, beer, by the case. My
father wasn't trying to monitor
any of it, he was just finishing
up pastoral affairs before moving

on to gay New York (Albert would
tag along) and my brother saving
a buck or two between beers to
drive out to California to start over.
I was drinking the hours down
to my flight west to Spokane where
I would be rid of all this or more
fully it. That manse was a mostly
empty house filled with four mostly
men but mostly filled with empties

-- dead space between the next
drink. Grief and drunkenness the
patter between shrill loud naked
moments is most of what I recall
about that summer of 1974 --
all that and how hot it was, if not
hellish then in some trailer park
near that latitude, all of its motions
faux to all of the real things: perhaps
as close as you can get to hell in

the summers of this life, or the
mad ends of them. How many times
have I found myself shipwrecked
at that high temperature shore,
none of my tools working in that
heat -- not faith, not love, not art
--- and the heat of the world's
most selfish embroilments devolving
me down to the nit, the bare bones
of cracked and dry living where

it's easier to burn than cry for
a saving sip of water. A suicidal,
infinitely holy vigil I've fared well
and not over the years, harrowing
me through fire, burning part of
me away to see what was truly
under the wrong skin. Let's see --
Summer 1979 was the rocknroll
summer after first love, maddest
winter and the survival of both,

my party animal grown an axman's
tooth for pussy, where each night
seemed an ocean with all bets
off and the next day's sun in
my two bedroom windows like
snake eyes. That was the hot season
of the first blackouts, gobbling
crosstops & drinking beer by the
case & swinging that Music Man
guitar every which way but the

right way & jumping as fast as
I could from bed to flaming bed.
Summer 1982 -- again after love
& gambolling about with the
anarchist artist Holly in that
drowning pool of Florida's rainy
season (that year worse than
any I recall -- my trials precipitate),
nights of danger and lightning
translated into suicidal exhaustion,

that high summer libido fucking
me raw and broke and spiritually
wild -- hilarious ends, shrill, mad,
sterile. Summer 1986, post love
(see a pattern?), post band, even
the alcohol by then defining a
post which I struggled to get past,
mornings coming to clutching my
pillow with those swords of summer
sun thrusting and lunging at me

in the window, hacking away
all semblance of even a
precipice to jump from. Summer
1992, towards the end of my
first marriage, taking walks in
the dead of summer just to get
out of the house, walking in the
high cathedral of shrieking light,
my libido wardened by sobriety,
cold marriage, a thousand books

I knew I must read -- cackling and
howling with the chorus as I walked,
walked, walked, like Flash in the
Pan's "Walking In The Rain" in
treble soprano, showers of light
replaced the old dark splatter,
listening to New Age dissociation
on the Walkman, all of it a piece
of my identity in that wild summer
catastrophe, that disconnect between

bull-roaring sky-lust and the drowned
silence of lakes. Summer 1995 - late
August, the divorcee exhausted
with his divorced, undrinkable carouse,
having just kicked out of the apartment
his 18-year old stepdaugher for
being way too much work, swamped
with guilt's gilded self-geldings, not
enough near-beer in the world to
swash the sound of that high keening

from the chorus of furies which
barred all ways back home, a
high-anx deep-root trouble in
the vein telling me that none of
my art mattered at all as much as
the heart that had been lost,
scattered by the high regnancies
of summer that I had chased,
pen-in-hand, penis flopping between
sea and infancy like a metronome

rehearsing in an empty hall. -- a
high summer wildness,wild with
absence, wild with guilt, wild
with horniness, wild to say it
and no words sufficient for the sun
which hauls up over the state
chewing lakes and girlies and the
skin cells of millionaires dozing
in the back yards of their golf estates,
silence raining back over me in

a Biblical torrent as bad as any
fixed subzero January shriek:
Summer '97 in my second marriage
& happy home in Mount Dora &
drinking it all down the storm
gutters in secret, watering my
uncapped thirst with vodka &
scotch & beer & schnapps, writing
few small token bad poems, straying
via e-mail with other women &

keeping it all together up on the
cheerful loving crust of the
marriage -- Out cutting the yard
on Saturday mornings in the
patterns of suburbia, mashing the
mower against grass grown four
inches in the rainy heat of July,
the sun and my sweat complicit,
plotting my next drink, dreaming
of D-cups lifting and butt-fucks

squealing while inside in the air
conditioning and sound of merry
calm safe '30 jazz my wife arranges
and rearranges furniture in our
bedroom of dreams, airy, white,
free: Summer 2000 staying at
my mother's house after my wife
and I separated because I wanted
to carouse and drink with impunity --
left her in November and by

February all that was gone too,
didn't want the other woman, my
bar tab was clanging at the $20
thousand dollar limit of my
MasterCard gold card, & I just
wanted by that summer to go
home but how could I -- the poems
I thought I would write over
love had dead-ended, the lines
sprawled & shunk & rotted in

the sun, cast off like so many
shattered wagons. I'd wake on
hungover mornings with the sun
pressed against the window shade
trying to fuck his way into the gloom
& me hugging that pillow again, again,
again, like a suicide holding an
empty .45 to his head pulling
the trigger repeatedly: It is the same
gesture, the same end, this deadly

summer river's end, this turn back
to dread origin which always finds
me no god of its ilk. Whatever I think
is sufficient protection against this
dead straits of summer -- whatever
love, ire, art - none which I call my
own last in this heat. In this Summer
of 2004 I basked in it and felt myself
empty today, felt that old dread
drumming of hot knuckles on

the walls of this empty self, and
what could I do? But get on my
knees and try to give thanks enough
for this life and the wife I still have.
To be grateful for what shade and
comfort that can be found in
this season; to let bad days simply
pass. Yesterday we woke to clouds,
a cooler breeze, and daylong rains.

We stayed in and played house,
cleaning, washing, cooking, taking
breaks together to laugh at the
cats or dream of future days. We
bedded together full of what remains.
Surely that heat here will return
this Monday, with all its wild freight.
Am I naked enough inside to weather
these withers? Is the well blue enough?
That really is for these knees to decide.

Friday, August 19, 2005

If You Meet The Hero on the Road (Myth Beyond the Monomyth)



... the stone that moans when stricken. Wind broke it. Wave bore it. Reed wrote of it. Syce can with it. Hand tore it and wild went war. Hen trieved it and plight pledged peace. It was folded with cunning, sealed with crime, uptied by a harlot, indone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? The old hunks on the hill read it to perfection.

-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake


Is our cultural future doomed to life inside the monomyth? I believe the hero is stuck in his myth, that no matter how much he spiritualizes his task he is quintessentially bound to his mother, and will seek return to Her, whether it be in the form of the sexual exploits (treasure -- booty stolen from the dragon's lair), or the wife he eventually marries, or the nourishing culture he returns to; even his work is bound to her, creating in mimesis of Her.

Joseph Campbell got the term "monomyth" from Joyce -- his book A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake immediately preceded the writing of Hero of A Thousand Faces. Joyce was THE high modernist, the artist as god; and Joyce was a jealous god, suffering no lesser author in his authoritative company. His books were THE books, definitive in a way that has some critics believing that we are hundreds of years from fully grasping Joyce.

Campbell seems to have been one of those devotees, and his resuscitation of the monomyth was like raising Finnegan from the bad dream of History, attempting through his studies in comparative mythology to read the hieroglyphs scrawled on the walls of Joyce's labyrinth, his great book of the dead.

But did Campbell get stuck there? I wonder. Here is my main point: How do we get beyond the hero and his ego-consciousness? Much of our malaise seems to be his extreme efforts to wrest control from Mother Nature, and the damage of that attempt ranges from materialism to spouse abuse to global warming and the absolute pillage of the seas. We die of him daily and by global degrees. His final victory cry may be our dirge.

It seems that the big issue for many cultures these days is the struggle between modernity and conservatism. We are confronted with a world beyond traditional notions of God and humanity, and the road ahead seems fraught with peril. Christian and Islamic fundamentalists both seek to return us to the good old days of certainty and authority, yet their heated, organized and armed resistance represents one of the greatest threats to our day. Our science presents us with a world beyond intelligent design, yet we would have intelligent design taught as science.

We cling to the outdated monotheist ideas, and the monomyth cloys in the same way. God was declared dead more than a century ago, and Finnegans Wake is going on 60 years old, but God hasn't given up the ghost in the raw psyche of modernity. The hero -- here pope, mullah, Baptist preacher, FOX News -- battles to be free of the new womb, using all the weapons formed by sorcerers of technology; and yet he unconsciously clings to her with an even greater tenacity. He's stuck, and so are we.

Beyond high modernism -- that religion of art -- there comes the white noise of post-modernism, random, a polyphonous "parallel, not serial" (from Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49) chorus, opening a maw of perception which demands a dissolution of the center, a release of the ego's grip, a driving-down of consciousness into its parts, into organ consciousness, polytheism, a pandemonium of images. We grow into the dream, but can we let go of our waking state?

Defenders of Campbell's monomyth might ask themselves where the conservatism of his thought is in this forum -- his teachings seem to be clear on that, but we endlessly dissent, or speak from wildly different chakras of thought. The multiversal discourse of the Internet perhaps represents the plurality beyond the hero. Ah, but its not a satisfying drone, is it? Wouldn't it be great if we all agreed with each other? If there was harmony, unity, the grace of singularity? Must we let go those values in the name of what follows?

Now don't get me wrong -- Jung, Joyce and Campbell are my heroes (yikes) -- but I wonder if my veneration of them keeps me, as well, stuck in their monomyth. If I would be free, must I somehow go beyond the bounds of their maps, out past where there is only chaos and madness?



Tuff territory, but we aren't without good suggestions on how to proceed. The first one I offer today.

In James Hillman's essay, "The Great Mother's Son, Her Hero, And the Puer," he suggest that there is no "getting rid" of hero and his complex in our psyche, since such actions are in themselves heroic:

"Getting rid of and giving up this complexity through any formula for overcoming opposites, or dropping out, or curing misses psychic reality. Psychological therapy is less an overcoming and a getting rid than it is a decay, a decomposing of the way in which we are composed. This the alchemists called the putrefactio, the slow time-process of transformation through affliction, wastage, and moral horror. Both heroic getting-rid and passive giving-up attempt to speed decay and have done with it; they would avoid the work of psychic reality by escape into spiritual salvation. But the cure is the decay.

"When the puer [the hero unconsciously attached to his mother] lives authentically to its structure, there is this smell of decadence, a fond attachment to one's mess, which is part of its resistance to analysis. In this sense the puer -- seemingly so quick and flame-like -- is slow to change, shows no development, seems forever stuck in the same old dirty habits. His putrefaction is in his intractable symptoms of colon and digestion, of eczema and acne, of piles, in his long, slow colds and sinuses, his chronic genital complaints, his money peculiarities, or his low-life fascinations."

Important point here:

"These things analysis has wrongly attributed to the shadow repression owing to the mother-complex: he is bound to the mother in a compensatory materialistic way and cannot fight free. But against the background of decay, the slowness and the dirt in the puer can be seen as a way of following the path of putrefaction toward finding the senex. As such it is a digestive, fermentative process that should not be heroically hurried. Nor should it be forcefully 'rubbed in' as a treatment to integrate the shadow. The puer is not a dog; puer consciousness needs not housebreaking and heeling [hey, there's the wounding of the heel again!!] but a new attunement his sensitivity to the odors of his own decay. His individuation is in the pathologizing process itself and not in his heroic efforts to overcome. (The essay is anthologized in Spring Publications' Fathers and Mothers

We don't defeat the hero as much as let him waste away in his archetype. Finnegan continues to rot in the mythic res of our culture, and the monomyth slowly disintegrates with him. I was told once in psychotherapy that "every access is a reframe," meaning that every time I revisited the scenes of my formative horror that my view of them -- and my sanity -- would change. We may not be able fight free of the hero's keep in our centers, but we can harrow it, swim with Beowulf down into the mere, defeat Grendel's mam, swim with him back to shore, reap his praises & drink champion's portion, grow old with him, die with him when he faces off with his last dragon. There is an aging in every hero tale, youthful cordage of muscle loosened into fat, gold hair gone grey, teeth which bit through the she-beast's coils rotted, falling out one by one. And we aren't a hero as much any more, and seem to think more about teaching the young, ruling the land: the warrior becomes husbandsman, sword bent into plow, killing spleen become the blade which furrows the ground, planting back the seeds of our once-boiling loins.

Hero With A Thousand Faces is more than 60 years old too, so much of its force of argument has decayed. Talk of the monomyth seems to have died down a lot. Archetypal psychology as presented by Hillman et al has replaced the singular motif of the hero's battle with the mother with polytheism of complexes and styles of identity and growth. Joyce's influence has waned, as has Pynchon the high post-modernist has waned greatly since Gravity's Rainbow. Rot and waste are is the constant entropy of cultural disorder, high things watering down, the best fragmenting into the good and then the merely rehashed, Hellenic gone Hellenistic, high art become rehashed Hollywood trash. Hillman suggests in the evolution of the hero that such decay may not be all that lamentable, because it's the only way we get past Finnegan, allow old bones to lie, let the hero die of his wounds, and get on with our work, whatever that may be.



In Wick-Lit I've been resuscitating old sources, going back over things I've studied and written in the past 15 years. I'm doing this because the poetry HAS died, or silenced; that daily discipline of about 5 years running simply droned down into silence. My themes had become too cloistered, redundant; my tropes cliched; my rhythms and rhymes stereotypical. Wounded in a dozen ways, the heroic effort ceased. What next? A littel extramarital schnickschnacking in the rhetoric of prose? Do I go back home to poetry after hurling these oats? Can I? For now, this wasteland of gorgeous wounds. I seem to go into these void-of-courses every mid to late August. Resting, regrouping, letting a dark moon cycle on through. Well, the moon is nearly full, so there is an anticipation here, a sense I will soon begin.

But more of this yet to follow ...


THE HEATHEN GIANT

(In episode 4 of The Voyage of St. Brendan) Brendan, having had a ship built for him, finds the exceptionally large head of a dead man on the beach. Its forehead measures five feet across. When Brendan asks what kind of life he has led, the man's head answers that he was a hundred feet tall and very strong. He was a heathen who waded through the sea to rob ships. This he did for a living. In a heavy storm which whipped up the waves to extreme heights he was drowned. Brendan offers to pray for the giant, and to beg God to revive him so that he may be baptized. Once that is done, the giant may even, if he lives to praise God, find forgiveness for his sins, and eventually ascend to paradise. The giant refuses; his is afraid that in his new life he might not be able to withstand the temptation of sin. What if he started robbing again? He would be a lot worse off then as, according to the giant, Christians are punished much more severely in hell than pagans. Moreover, the prospect of having to suffer the pain of death as second time frightens him. He wants to go back to his torments / poor companions in the place of darkness. He departs with Brendan's best wishes. Brendan then proceeds on his way.

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint

The old nights lay like massive bones
scattered on the beach, the skull
like a split moon buried in the sand.
Sea-sounds through its occiput
are the voices of memory, faint
and ghastly as the depths I once
fell to find you in the darkest
beds of sweet abyss. He remembers
the feral heart of old, icy and
on fire for plunder, parting thighs
with blue gusto & launching his
dragon ship there with the pith
and pitch of awfulness,
rowing voices crowing one pent
dragon seethe. Eye-sockets big
as church-doors retain the marrow
of those nights, their dark abcessa
still lucent, even lewd, harrows which
invite the next arriving saint to
find a heaven wide enough to
revive and save a soul so massive,
old and hungry. But he will not
rise again, not for all the pearly
virginettes bent in heaven's
puffy marge. Wholly dark now, he
strides between this beach and
those dark nights, sporting
in a sea of finned and ghostly
salt delights, unrepentant
as my backwards glance which
call his life and ways both holy.
I appoint that house of bleached
ribs apt chapel of the wilder
half of my heart and God's and
yours, you who would embrace
the seven seas to slake
your womb's blue belling need.


Gaping Gill, swift to mate errthors, stern to checkself, (diagnosing through estacetube that it was to make with a markedly postpuberal hypertitituary type of Heidelberg mannleich cavern ethics), lufted his sloping forward, bad Sweatagore, good murrough and dublinoch on to it as he was greedily obliged, and like a sensible ham, with infinite tact in the delicate situation seen the touchy nature of its perilous theme, thanked um for guilders received and time of day (not a little taken abock all the same that that was owl the God's clock it was) and, upon humble duty to greet his Tyskminister and he shall guildthegap Gaper and thee his mouldy voids, went about his buisness, whoever it was, saluting corpses, as a matter of corse (one could hound him out had one hart for the monticles of scalp and dandruff droppings blaze his trail), accompanied by his trusty snorler and his permanent reflection, verigracious; I have met with you; bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early; and with tag for ildiot repeated in his second-mouth language as many afor the bigtimers verbaten words which he could balbly call to memory that same kveldeve, ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep Sea ...

-- dreamin' HCE in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, 32-3

Thursday, August 18, 2005

On The Satisfactions of Myth and Story



Shall I tell you a story? Do you prefer history, a love story, a good mystery, something deep, something fleet for drowsy afternoons on a summer vacation's beach? Poetry or prose? Essay or something more scholarly? Shall I woo you with metaphors or wow you with muscular sententces? Shall I shine bright or offer cool shade from such heat, a blue dreamy glade of downy billows?

Why bother at all? What drives me to say, to sing? What is it that wants to be told, and am I anything more than its pen, mouth, keyboard? Shall I create a world? Let you feel the curve of my wife's hip as I stroke it at first light, sense its immaculate semblance to the curve of our Siamese sleeping on a nearby chair? Shall I curvelike motion into a deeper, yeastier sea? Do you care to see what lies far down, drowned, animating my anima? Shall I blend it all together into one song, one post? Today, perhaps , but who knows how the skull wil chatter tomorrow ...

***

Joseph Campbell was driven to tell a story he was convinced lay at an obscure center of things -- a story which he felt was desperately needed in the off-center, fragmenting culture of the middle twentieth century. "My hope," he wrote in his preface to The Hero With A Thousand Faces, "is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the name of human mutual understanding."

His heroic monomyth -- tilled from worldwide sources, some as ancient as our dust, others as far-flung as our most mysterious dreams -- is a story familiar to all human cultures, and thus moot for resuscitating our fraying one, like a dead giant or enthralled Merlin or lost Arthur to come to the aid of our contemporary wasting sickness.

21st CENTURY

Every age requires a new confession.
- Emerson

Half of me walking
from a dead century.
Launched in '57
with Sputnik on
the crest of the
Baby Boom.
My tit the Sixties,
Watergate my weaning.
I walked off an
ex-Christian geek
who just wanted to
play the solo to
Led Zepplin's "Since
I Been Lovin' You."
Tolkein and Tull
my dormitory spooks
down a far Western night.
Nuclear winter and
Sylvia Plath's gas oven-
Booze, Brian Eno,
Roethke's Straw for the Fire
fed to the flames
of one very bad
winter night.
A guitar bridge through
a woman's white thighs
leading to me southern
beaches, the end of
the cold war and
desconstruction. Sex
signifying nothing in
an endless moonwalk
neon-lit by Mikey Jackson's
vanishing nose. Corporate
gigantism in a dinky stockroom
as the last band failed
and I sobered up to
be dad student and
intellectual. Recession
and Iraqi taunts
my distaff, dark mentor,
tormented by a bloodless
air war with its flashy
blade and oh so dark shadow.
I divorced to global
capitalism and the Internet,
a madeira darkening the
sea, harrowing, fattening,
going online and virtual.
Teens take up weapons
and spray illiterate brains.
I remarried inside a secret
bottle and sprayed
the cage with tiger's pheromes.
Didn't work. Terrorist
bombings ashore and abroad
toll the awful clock,
turning one century's wild
page to the next. No
bug worth the millenium's
steel byte. Kept writing
through hell's circles to
plug the jug again and
jog on. What time is there left
to speak of what follows?
A page, maybe two, sending
off as many boats as I can.
I suckled on war and modernity;
the other half of me now
raises sons and daughters
in a wild fosterage,
weedy in its words
and headed deep for the hot heart.


The slaking of our thirst in that story --as evidenced by the popularity of Campbell's writing -- reveals the deep and lasting satisfaction of myth, where so many of its its recent tributaries have gone dry.

Surely the bones of that story -- calcinate reveries of a bliss -- are what Campbell drove him to begin. The ten thousand stories he would later collect from folklore collections, sacred texts, and the walls of dark caves all helped to add muscle and organs to that mythic creature.

What Campbell brought forth out of himself saved him from the shadow of its absence among us. His task was identified with the heroic monomyth (a phrase he lifted from Joyce and glossed from his readings in psychoanalysis): "The full round, the norm of the mon-myth requires that the hero shall nowbegin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may rebound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds." (Hero)



What a strange yet familiar recognition I sure felt reading Hero and the three-volume Masks of God! And what an appetite I developed for learning the stories! For five years or so I did nothing but that. Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Beowulf, the Arthurian cycle, the Celtic cauldron of plenty (from Yeats, Graves, Anne Ross & then Fiona MacLeod and Alwyn & Brinsley Rees), American Indian myth, accounts from archeology, anthropology, depth psychology and literary criticism, and then the artists -- Dante, Shakespeare, Melville, Joyce, Rilke. The story drew me into depth and breadth, and I couldn't get enough of it. Robert Bly tells of Campbell, just out of college, going into the woods for five years and reading, reading, reading, "becoming Josesph Campbell;" I read Campbell, and then read outwards from him, becoming a singer of sorts.

As I've said here before, the old Irish poets were not allowed to write a lick of their own verse until they had learned the entire cultural canon -- the immense corpus of stories, satires, paeans and laments that Irish poets had been passing down, orally, for hundreds of years. You don't tell your story until you know THE stories; there is a correct riff to it, a knowledge which can't be attained except by pouring all of that culture into one's noodle. A good story must have bones; it must be familar and not, and the telling must satisfy a communal need which is familar and not; it resonates with both history and mystery.

Rees and Rees put the storyteller's task this way in Celtic Heritage:

"In Welsh, the very word for meaning (ystr) comes from the Latin historia, which has given the English language both 'story' and 'history.' 'History' has now been emptied of most of the original extra-historical content of historia, which derives from a root meaning 'knowing,' 'learned,' 'wise man,' judge.' The old Welsh word for 'story, cyfarwyddyd, means 'guidance,' 'direction,' 'instruction,' 'knowledge,' 'skill,' 'prescription.' Its stem, arwydd, means 'sign,' 'symbol,' 'manifestation,' 'omen,' 'miracle,' and derives from a root meaning 'to see.' The storyteller (cyfarwydd) was originally a seer and a teacher who guided the souls of his hearers through the world of 'mystery.'"


THE SINGERS

Back in '91 I tried
to form a creative
group of men called
The Singers -- a
marriage of men's
movement drum-
banging to the mythic
background of fireside
tales. It seemed the
right next thing to
do though the result
seemed all wrong.
I culled a few guys
from the Orlando
chapter of men's
groups (on fire back
then, when Bush
Senior was still
whackin' away at
Saddam in Desert
Storm and the economy
was beginning to
rouse toward its roar).
and we met in
the boardroom of
the Orlando Shakespeare
Festival every couple
of Wednesday nights.
Each guy was to
bring to the meeting
a Contribution -- a
story, poem, myth,
song, drawing, something
which voiced a tenor
of our chosen Theme:
Orpheus, Trickster,
Fathers, Mothers,
War Gods, Apollo,
Dionysos, Totems,
Hermes, Inner Guides,
Eros. Fresh-pickled
from three years
of heavy reading
on the borders &
ley lines of those
themes, I dug down
into each with all
the frenzy of a man
with two weeks
to live, penning 30
to 50 pages of notes
on what I found
further down &
shaped it somehow
to take along.
How well I recall
the fraught urgency
of the effort as
I crammed those
studies in long
before first light
there in my dank
study of the Hyer
street house of
my first marriage,
my then wife- and
stepdaughter sleeping
off the previous
night's tangles and
torments, me at that
cramped desk with
a wall of books
to my left and
dark opened windows
to my right, night
buzzing outside
like dim sweet marina,
a small table as an
altar just below one
window, arrayed with
stone votives, a Celtic
cross carved of wood
from Iona (rare, lost when
I took it along to
a company awards
dinner staged at a hotel),
shells, a skull coffee
cup with three I Ching
pennies in the cowl).
Digging furiously
in the dirt between
the lines of Walter
Otto on Dionysos or
Karl Kerenyi on Apollo
or Hillman or Campbell
or Jung or Eliade on
the next god dripping
and gleaming with
the Unknown. -- God
how I filled up those
narrow spiral notebooks
trying to build a
cathedral in two weeks --
And how full, almost
to bursting I was as
I walked downtown
those Wednesday nights,
notebook in hand, with
six poems (three of
my own), two stories
and ten pages of
outline to Sing when
my turn came -- fool.
The gatherings were
always dismal, two
guys not showing up,
a third empty handed
(too busy with work &
wanting instead to
talk about his latest
fall from love); maybe
a fourth and a fifth
would have something,
the start of a poem,
a story somewhat
oblique to the Theme.
For those dozen or
so gatherings -- meant
to be a creative ring
of fire -- I was caught
between a raging fullness
within and a tinderless
green hour without --
no match for the worlds,
certainly few words
for those Singers. After
three or four meetings
the numbers began
to shrink, to five,
then three. The next
time me and the other
guy just talked about
our jobs, since he had
nothing else in hand.
Then one night I
sat in that Bard-decked
room all alone, reading
out loud some riffs on
Hermes that had
kept me almost wild
for two weeks. By then
there wasn't even a
towel to throw in -- no
one else cared even
to fray. Perhaps it
was simply fishing
in the wrong waters --
those men's groups
rode a short wave
then mostly expired --
I might have culled
some scholars from
Rollins College or
UCF with an itch
to dally away from
their riven fields of
-- though today
I think that unlikely
because such studies
are career and die
slowly in that (the
director of the Shakespeare
festival, a prof at UCF,
told me at lunch one
day he hadn't cracked
a book in years). No:
the travail was mostly
mine, or it belonged
to that surgency within
that wanted to see
further in the dark
of time and soul. Singers
just gave me a chance
to go far and deep
and write that passage
legitimately & legibly
down, mortaring the
motions which I still
use today.
In my first of day
routines I read back
over those journals,
culling bits of story
and insight to throw
into my Well, salt those
waters, if you will,
stir the bell to ringing,
get the skull to singing
-- see? A hundred
journals are piled
beneath my tongue,
learnings I will never
quite recall, dissolved
in whale-gut with the
rest of a life (a divorce,
re-marriage, a degree
but no more, five cats,
another job and then
another, a Well, a
poem or two thousand
with three thousand
more in tow), all
those voices stuffed
up the barrel of this
singing pen, a choral
plainsong filling a
paper cathedral which
roots me to a dream.

***

Stories are timeless, but singers evolve. We update tales to fit changing times. As I wrote here last week, Orpheus morphs: from a second-millennium BC shaman whose song carries him to the otherworld and back; to the Orpheus who accompanies Jason in his quest of the Golden Fleece; to Ovid's doomed lover whose song cannot quite return his dead wife to the living; to Orpheo of the Middle Ages whose courtly manners and training as a troubadour allows him to woo his way into the otherworld castle. "Every age requires a new confession," wrote Emerson, and we're constantly retrofitting old tales into new vehicles. Evidence "Star Wars" as George Lucas's attempt at retelling the Hero monomyth. Yet doesn't it seem that revision never quite manages to heft the original? Our worst evidence of this is in the constant Hollywood makeovers of bad television shows which stole their thunder from movies which lifted conceits from novels which stole from local barroom talk and folktales. The further we get from the source, the less potent the draught; that's why Campbell's work as a collector of stories is so important -- so we don't forget that the song of Orpheus really can bridge realms.

We also move on to other stories, genres, rhetorics, poetics. To me the hero monomyth is a good metaphor for the emergence of consciousness and the forwarding of human civilization; yet it is a rather stuck story, unable to change, fierce in its attachment to sticking to the narrative, enacting all of the scenes. It has the riven nature of a masturbation fantasy, the old parade of cheerleaders and floozies endlessly strolled and rolled in the same old hay. To me it's because the hero fights to be free of the mother (unconsciousness, the Great Mother / matriarchal consciousness which held sway over our great middle period, or simply one's personal mother) only to return to the mother, to come back to the welcoming bosom of culture, there to marry, sire the next generation of heroes, and dote in the secure amniotics of home.

SEXUAL HISTORY

We lay in bed all day
fucking and drowsing
and watching movies
on Comedy Central,
the shades drawn tight
against a cloudless hot day
thick with the smoke
of local brushfires.
Telling stories about ourselves
the way new lovers do,
accounting somehow
for the sexual history
that brought us to
this surrender, against
the grain of the
way we thought
we'd go. I stroked
your back and ass softly
as you told me about
the redheaded drop
dead gorgeous girl
who found sex in
a complete clueless
stranger - no one
would tell you about
that meaty thing
that hung from your
father's hips as he
showered with you,
or what it was you
felt riding a horse
at 14. The orgasm
you discovered with
your fingers beneath
the sheets one morning
frightened you terribly.
Your first lover
raped you because
you had no idea what it
was your were asking
for in your scant
bikini working a
surf shop in
Huntington Beach.
Desire was for you
a nameless sum
subtracted by the
world from God, yet
its pure beams always
brought you back
to an eternity.
Then we shifted
and you rested your
head on my chest
idly playing with
my cock while I
told you about my
eternal fascination
with a female's body
and the terrible
overlay of shame which
drove sex into
the vivid shadows.
I recalled the nightmare
I had a six of civil
war at my school,
parental rage embroiled
against my desire.
The kid who told
my teacher of the
games I played with
girls was on fire,
edging round the building
I hugged in terror. I
could not avoid him
and the dream ended
in my smouldering bones.
You laughed when
I told you about
conducting the Dean
girls as they jumped
naked on their beds.
These fires have so
little to do with love
- kindred, ignitory,
initiate liquors for sure,
but even after all that
fucking that afternoon
I grieved my wife
alone in our house
and later sought to
ground myself apart
from you by roaming
downtown bars
drinking Myers and
pineapple and looking
at the faces of women
gathered at the bars.
Sex is most what
it fancies, and love
is greatest when it's lost.
I'm a total fool
adrift outside those
margins, and will forever
hurt those who share
my desire even a little
while. It's a smoky,
drawn-curtains way
I wend through
the current hour.
My truths burn me
from both ends
and what's left
is this charred pile.





HISTORY

No one cares much about history
in the thresh and whirl of this day
which unscrolls through waking's
droll rituals (coffee, poems by
Galway Kinnell, time here)
into the labors of life around love
(a transfusion for the sick cat,
joining a hammer of traffic
aimed at the heart of this city,
hours of making in a corporate trench):
The present is pinched and earnest,
a salty isthmus between desire
and regret: I consume it rapacious
as a wolf in a terrified fold of sheep,
my red canines clamping down on
the next whinnying sweet.

Yet in some hour late in the day
when shadows creep slowly east
she comes to visit me at my desk,
the muse of that backwards glance
which turns a wife into memory
then crumbles that shade into dust.
The muse of history threads beads
on a silver wire, joining them in
the loop of my life. Her news
is always mixed: While every bad
love has me in common, yesterday's
crisis is just a bump I traversed
during happy hour. Sometimes
I wish my tapestry belonged to
somebody's other, more tragic tale,
but that's history.

At some late hour of the day I pull
my history from the shelf and
like a mirror I enquire, shall I go on?
Am I doomed to repeat this tale every day
til there are no more days to lose,
no more loves to foul? But there
is no choice: The fever will return
tomorrow, beyond the next thunderstorm,
and silver swords will beat like wings
of plowshares curving back up
across the fertile sky and
fall toward that sweet bed
just beyond the horizon,
an arc resplendent with every
color inside this heart's dolor,
a rainbow leading to a day
gilded and sweet, the history
I always prayed for, the one
I protect and border and greet
like the woman I'll never
savor or die with or even meet.





There are other stories, IMO, stories which are tandems to a plurality of gods. There are Saturnal depths and Venusian dapplements, sacred islands and itchy-hot bridles: calls to many adventures. For years I clung to a story as my own, growing as I wove the story into my history, writing a case history of boyhood failures and young man's foolery. But then there was a midpoint when things seemed to reverse; I less needed a hero than I needed a more nuanced voice, something more apt for weaving varied realms I was experiencing. Maybe I was moving back toward the older Orpheus, but I became more sympathetic with notions like polyphony, perplex, polysemous, porous, plural. With qualities that were mixed, mercurial, quicksilvered.

SONG CYCLE

There was once
a poetry sustained
between two wills,
the one in love
with the given life,
the other in lust
for another.

A music rose from
those stretching plates,
taut, viral,
pure as all waylaid,
imagined things can be.

But then came
the break with
its grim hooves.
An unharbored music
poured forth
from the wound,
bitter and droll.
A drone.

Next the nocturnes,
a descant metal
falling blue to black,
a drowned woman
bumping against
a reef of pews.

What sings now?
Open the doors and
let it go. Outside the
blossoms are pealing
bells of sweet fire.

The next poetry
is uncertain
of anything else
but plays on,
harping toward
the light of what will be.

***

Maybe that's why I turned to poetry, which is story freed from narrative, the boneless shadow of the giant free to round the vowels. It cuts through the personal and local into the grander epiphanies, where narrative seems to boat on their surface. Why not the depths inferred from surficial glimmers?

But it is most satisfying to practics an even freer artistry, to dance the genres and poetics in the plurality of story. Thus I have a love story and a voyage tale; a case history and a drunkalogue; a bildungsroman, a baedeker, and a triple-decker confessional; a scheherezhade of dreams and a cookbook of daily disasters; a slave narrative and a song-cycle of eternally waylaid beachside consummations; a gospel of tropes and a black psalter of desires; a breviary of guitars and a bestiary of bottoms. There are Penthouse letters and letters to young poets and letters home from camp and the trenches and the workplace and the eternal infernal internal, and all are love letters to the world. Why not adopt the style fit for the tale?



I do believe that the story changes us as we tell it, and each repeating of the story is like a chapter of that education. When I was sobering up I read a story about an Eskimo chieftain who was explaining to an anthropologist about how he brings himself to do good. "You see there are two dogs in me, a good one and a bad one, and they are always fighting, fighting, fighting in me, trying to tell me what to do." "Which dog wins?" the anthropologist asked. The chieftain thought a moment and then answered, "the one I feed the most." The tale I repeat is the one I feed the most, and the satisfaction I take in the tellings is the degree to which the story is feeding me back, nourishing me from its darkest sources.



HISTORY LESSON


The wave which
carried me here
arrived from 15
centuries back
from a shore
which harrowed
a mash of two
faiths. Columba
was the ferryman
of that betweening
age, Oran its dark
and bright page,
each bone a florid
letter, his skull
a door to
the great angels,
whose wings all
ages in their
rhymings rise
and carry one here
to smash on this shore,
this oaken door
opening back or
down or in toward
a time when the
times met in a
clash of bright wings,
when futurity's
soar took wind
on the old roar.




THREE CUPS

from A Breviary of Guitars


Every fever of song
was complete in me
at age 14: body
heart and mind
tuned to that
singing saw inside
each wave
of the world
that crashed
over me.
A hi-wattage
channel,
without static,
without peer.
I knew the songs
before I heard them.
Picking up
a guitar,
I returned them
to the world
believing
it would listen.

The story
was complete
by the time
I was 14,
but I had much
farther to go.
Song needs
no story-it's
timeless-but
we do, and
I have much
to say about
how I variously
approached the
music as I
grew into it.

The Irish say
there are but
three songs:
laughter, love
and sleep.
There are three
cups on my
father's bardic
crest, drinking
horns dipped
into those
tuneful vats.
Effervescence,
swoon, and sorrow
have their own pitch
and key, major,
major seventh
and minor modes
of revealing
the world's
polyphonic noise.
At 14 I could
recognize each
of these tunes
as a road
on the fretboard
leading out
to the body
mind and heart
of a woman.
I would learn
they also
wound inwards
to Psyche's
tortured geography,
mapping out
anima and enemy,
muse and mood,
skirt and womb
of all my making.

What I learned of
how song brought
girls and how women
woke my inner ear
is the distance
between hearing
and knowing,
and my life
is that raw
polyphony.
This breviary
of guitars
is about
what I found
in each of those
cups, what I
missed, and
what could not
sate when
I thought
each cup
had run dry.

THE THREE CUPS

When I read back
through my massed
stone colloquies,
I can see three
motions which
stay pure:
A voyaging mind,
my body's gallop,
this ache for you.

Inexhaustible
those three wells
from which I daily
draw, hungry for
more & aching for
what must rise--
writing the poems
working the bones,
stroking your feet.

What sustains
me in each encounter
I cannot say, but
the bread I find
there is always
enough for today
but never more.
This tells me
that all are of
the same humger
and thus ordained
(or wardened)
by God.

It is also clear
that I always
fail by wanting
more: For grander
fish hauled
from the deep, for
muscles bigger
than my frame,
for right here & now
all day and night.

Blessing and bane,
cool water with
astounding bite,
my altars have
all exceeded
their temples,
grown long
like vines and
red of tooth. How
I've howled in
the old woods
of the vacant word.
Worked this
poor body past stiff
and sore. And
oh my greed for
you, enough said!

God has given me
these preter-thirsts
but its mine to
give them back
to God's world:
No shore final,
this body old,
letting you go.

Three cups today
I fill and drain:
Balls for thought,
heart in the heat.
feet for naught!

NO HISTORY

I can barely sketch
the copse of families
from which I grow
and bear these fruit:
thin traceries
from my mother and
my father, which I
scarce heard in passing.
Perhaps it's because I
never meant to have
children; perhaps
it's just the American
way, where family
is a dandelion burst
of white sails in
every direction,
piloted by any random
wind. I can
name my grandparents
and point to their towns
-small house in Cedar
Rapids and Jacksonville.
Therapy has urged me
to exhume my kindred
bones and examine them
with cold eyes; I've seen
shadows of anger and
contempt longer than
my own, and broken
hearts tolling the
years like crimes. Looking
back I see perpetual
family motion,
a throw in reverse
from South to North
and West to East, figures
boarding ships and watching new
worlds shrink along with hope;
a drainage down the tub
toward some ancient arrears,
a story told in thick Scot-Irish
brogue spilling back
into suddenly righted drinking
horns which never could
claim plenty. Still none of this
strikes pay dirt where
this poem yearns: My totems
are real, but I can't name
or know them well enough.
That might explain why there's
never enough money in the bank
or why my need for absence
wants me dead, but not
why the song need fail
upon my lips; nor why
my wife and I live so
many miles apart
from each other that
we now seem partnered
to each other's "No."
My fruits are bittersweet
and pale, glistening
with dew but too far out
to pluck. Saddest of all is
that this way is so common
to us all that tearing down
the orchard after first harvest
seems a virtue. Perhaps
this is just the karma of
the ever-westward nomad
spawned on Indo-European
steppes, a man who not long
ago reached his booming
Pacific and found no more
passage, just a thin,
eternal shore. The only
destiny now ours
repeats its few scarred hours.




GUY'S WALL


... Less than a billow of the sea
That at the last do no more roam,
Less than a wave, less than a wave,
This thing that hath no home,
This thing that hath no grave ...

- Fiona MacCleod, "In the Night"


Tonight I sit beneath
a naked mulberry tree
on the stone bench where
Guy's ashes were interred
a quarter century ago.
Long chimes in that
tree knock their sad sweet
bones, while the moon
swings brilliant over all,
though coldly, prowing
across a raw spring night.
Sitting here is a vantage
on the productions
of myth and mystery,
not so much cynical
as peripheral, bluesy,
bittersweet. Age becalms
the spirit's buoyant fire
as surely as death
inks a darker fluid
in the pen, a weight
which does not rise
so readily. I do not mean
to criticize the night:
rather, this seat befits
a threshold half in
wonder while the
other half's cold
with rawer truths.
The bell tower and
standing stones are
all so beautiful, sheeted
as they are in such
blue-white silk-
lovely, yes, even
evanescent, engaged
in one of the oldest,
most fertile dances
the mind can imagine,
can hope, can dream ...

So why then carve a
poem from cold hollows,
brooding over the ashes
of a long-lost, scantily
remembered person I but
briefly called a friend?
Who will know this
bench serves also
as a crypt in
another 25 years?
Who will care? The stones
I sit on which cask
that dark oil
tell me nothing
of the man who once
sat up in the limbs
of this mulberry tree
as the rest of us progressed
below heading for the field,
sending down over us the deep
bass of our childhood God,
reminding-no, telling-us
to be good. The stones cannot
(or won't) explain to me
why Guy died of cancer
before age 30, scant months
after his wife Judy gave birth
to Jennifer. Stones are honest
but most times mute:
And so I must scan
the edges of the far field
where the wood gets darker
and memories are faulty
but a certain truth
can only be found there ...

I knew Guy but a season
two years before he left us all.
He taught me a little about
tuning a piano. One day we
were up in someone's hot
attic sweating under the hood
of an old upright. You have
to feel the pitch, Guy
told me. If you think about
whether the string you've
plucked is sharp or flat,
you'll never get it tuned.
And then he showed
me how, weaving his tuning
hammer up and down
the loom of strings
like a sonorous Thor.
He couldn't really explain
it-never enough for me
to learn-but he always got
it right. And when he
finished he played Billy Joel's
"The Piano Man," grandly,
rolling up and down the keys
with authority, harmonizing
the bent quiver of the piano
to the arrows of that song.

Guy had a frantic pulse
for life, for making everything
count. Some ambivalent
genius drove him to seek
the spirit's moony suburbs
halfway between nirvana
and New Jersey. One night
we walked in the woods
over there smoking pot
and talking New Age
phantasmagoria.
He showed me a railway
tunnel which had
long collapsed. We
crept into that dark
until we came upon
a rubble pile. Anybody
home? He boomed to
the devas on the other side.
Surely we'd manifest
a potato god or the
queen of cherry bloom.
Instead there was a crash
of glass and a terrible,
ball-curdling shriek;
we hauled ass out of there
terrified and giggling,
the air behind us shredded
by the nails of whatever
was and was not back in there.
It really happened, though
I doubt tonight it could have.
Only Guy can concur with me,
and he is in the stone.

Guy argued long that summer
about whether the formal
event we were planning
should be called a party or a festival.
The distinction would decide
how much much booze
would be allowed, and when:
perhaps it was a silly point,
but Guy took it to the lists
as fiercely as he whirled
that tuning hammer. Maybe
he just wanted to win the
argument, but he seemed
struck by a certainty none of
us quite fathomed. I surely
didn't know, just turned 21,
half of my father's making,
half of a something far from home
which strummed its blue guitar.
Guy lost that argument,
at least in the first sense
of things; that hot midsummer
day was the first of many
festivals celebrated here
round and down the years.
We set a wood tripod in
the middle of the field and
laced it round with bright ribbons.
I played guitar and my buddy
Dave mandolin as revelers jigged
their best in clouds of gnats
beneath a feral, summer sun.
What else transpired? Why
does that day dim so fast
and what followed stay in
focus in this sere, cold light?
At dusk we drank May
wine with wild strawberries
up in the house, listening
to Pachelbel's Canon in D.
It was all we thought a festival
should be and none of what
we knew, a culmination of
adjacent, airy enough dreams,
formalized into a dance
beneath the hottest,
brightest light of all. Over
the years the tripod was
replaced by standing stones,
and the festivals got bigger
and somehow sweeter:
equinoxes and solstices,
from Samhain to May Day
and back, attended by hundreds,
each devotee of a different
spectra of our faith:
neo-pagan, neo-Christian,
wiccan, vegan, Buddhist,
tattooist, biker, blancher,
blickerer, blueist, each
blaring their reformed
taboos, bedecked
in robes and wreaths and
and cha-cha-cha tutus.

This place has become
a capital of bucolic
whims whirling round
the eminently silent stone:
But you and I, Guy, we
were there for the first one,
peripheral to what my father made
but central to its darker twin.
For as good as all festivals go,
you had wanted more-
something closer to the
world's more fecund crotch-
and madly, so did I. The day had
been too church-like, too blanched
in that too-bright summer sun.
Two glasses of May wine
couldn't do the job:
Some other, redder impulse
was needed for our fire,
an ire which only could be found
long after the white one
went down. And so a
dissident faction of that festival
drove over to Guy's house
to do the party part,
blasting Bruce Springsteen
on the stereo, pounding
shots of Rebel Yell with
our tall-necked Buds. As we
hooted and hammered
and blasted that party jive,
Guy's brown eyes were like
ebonies of that other music
beyond the ribboned field,
burning, perhaps, with
the soul's pagan fire.
Or maybe it was cancer.
Whatever Guy might say
of that night, or how
I might remember it,
tonight I believe I'd seen
my patient, my dark mentor.

For I wanted more.
And so later that night Guy
passed me to a crazed cousin
who lived in a house
on the Delaware. I don't
remember much of what followed
except she was dark in some
folded-in, sad way, and
that her welcome had
to it a sort of ritual clench,
the birth-grapple of
the dark-hottest booze.
The next day as I made
my retreat - shrill trumpets
of a hangover blaring
in my brain pan -
I looked out a window
on the porch to see
black water flowing
almost under the house.
River house, river
witch, bestowing on
me a dark river's blessing,
carrying me away
at the end of that summer
25 years ago. I was
not ready for the New Age,
not with the big night
music playing so loudly
in my ears. The party kept me
from the festivals for many
years; tonight, again, I
try to return, and end up
here in the borderlands.
I thank you, Guy,
wherever you are among
this night's windy shades,
for teaching me about what's
been tempered between the
two faces of the dance.
We yearn and burn,
our sight is split; the view
can kill us or bless us,
be coffin to our ecstasies
or currah us to shore. I'm
not sure you had a choice,
Guy, but I thank you for
making one possible for me,
your shade my trusty door ...

Yes my friend, tonight things
are good. Before me the pond
stares back at the moon with
its black mirror and the standing
stones choir pale homages
in the field. Up in the house my
father and the others are drinking
a Scotch before heading to the field
to celebrate Wesak, the Buddhist
festival of the high Taurus moon.
Tonight, only a few folks are here
- smaller even than the baker's
dozen of New Age hopefuls
who tried with us to manifest
the sea from a glass of May wine
back in '78-but enough.
For wherever two or more
gather to plead human alms
from immensity, a least
a spark of it wilds through
into the mortal bone.
Soon, Guy, I must go and
join my ragged voice to
that prayer, but before
then I want to tell you a few
things, since it will be awhile
before I sit with you again.
I've heard your daughter is
now out of college and Judy
is happy in her way down
in Miami-No Jersey charms
for her! Second, my wife
and I emerge from our dark
hours slowly, perhaps toward
a happy enough future; my party
now at end, perhaps that
festival can begin. Her cat
Buster died last year but
appeared in a dream, saying,
I'm OK now, just wanted
to let you know I had
a good life but I won't be
coming back again.
-Did you ever let your wife know?
-And finally, my father grouses
at 75 years old that he can't stop
coming back, long after the day
five years ago he was so certain
he would die. In your time
I'm sure that time comes
soon, too very soon.

That's about all. We don't
hardly know how
to tell our stories, Guy,
much less brave an end.
I'm not sure how this poem
will get there. As I listen
to those chimes beating against
each other first calm then wild,
I know they're all I really
have of you. I wish I
could see half of what I
dream is here, but I'm
grateful you and I
remain where we are, citizens
on either side of a stone wall.
As a cold wind blows indifferently
over us, I think of all the others
whose ashes are also buried here -
AIDS victims, earth mamas,
prodigal boys who couldn't quite
get home, my dad's dog Lancelot
beneath a small dolmen next
to the house. There are crypts
beneath the chapel floor
waiting for my father and Fred,
for Albertine who's just entered hospice,
for the hopefully mixed ashes of
my brother and his wife.
There are plenty of memorials
on this land, too, heaps of stones
in the forest, feathers slung
from limbs, trees planted to
grow where we stopped,
like the weeping cherry
put in last week for a young
woman who killed herself.
So many dead limn this land
with you Guy, fading into the
moon-cast shadows of
oblivion, silent witnesses to
the horde of living who come
back every season to beat drums,
swing crystals, and troop the wood
in search of what, I suspect,
only ashes find by scattering.
Some day I'll look into that
bell tower door searching
the space my father departed
through, sniffing for a trace
of Borkum Riff or Scotch whiskey,
straining my eyes for a glint
of his laughing blues.
I suspect I won't see
anything but stones and field
and the wood's black umbers,
all awash in and resonant with
this same old brilliant bonelight.
And I suspect I will say then
to him as I say to you tonight:
friend, fare thee well, the real world
is carved from your strange hallows.
Your music's in my bones.
Play me a song Mister Piano Man,
grandly on the ivories
of those chimes.
Sing to me about the wild
betweens and how to love
the living wonder there. Voices
are now weaving in the bell
tower; the ceremony's
begun. Will you play Buddha
for me tonight, old friend,
high up in that mulberry tree,
and you add your deep voice
to our still-human weave?
Will you bless us with
what you've earned
among the ancient stone?
And will you keep tuning
this heart of mine with
what's strung between
the blood-root of this stone
and the dream which praises all?

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

On Puer Wounds and Cats



For days now the brilliant rind of summer has been unbroken by clouds, temps in the mid-90s, a bleary shear to the light, sharp and oppressive. We do not so much drive and work in this heat as tumble down its leagues in a stunned sprawl. A heat like this has an eternal calibration though we do not, outlasting the wilted pentas in the garden by only an hour or two.

My wife had already gone to bed (succumbing to PM Tylenols after getting hammered but good by a heat headache) and darkness had settled on garden and house when the thunder, hard and crisp and dangerous-sounding, began trooping around the city, and rain began to fall first the most random spicules on our tin roof and then in a rising wet crescendo, watering all at last. The thunder was wicked, sharply consonant with that snakelike snap cracking wide the basso registers, oomphs of sound pounding the firmament and rolling like dancing boulders across the night.

My wife appeared in the kitchen, worried about the danger of lightning upstairs; but I said it would be OK and was heading up myself. Turned off all the lights and kneeled to give thanks for another day sober & alive & in the midst of such a feral summer & grateful for marriage and blessing, quite late, of hard rains. Trudged upstairs, sore of shoulder, weary, long past young, the stairs creaking from my weight. No sign of our cat Violet, who usually curls at my wife's feet; the thunder had chased her in terror under our bed where she will surely cower long after the last fading rumble of storm. Got in bed next to my wife and gently stroked the long curve of her hip as she slept on her side, slowly releasing into the darker deeper augments of that rain, the brilliant white exclamation points on my eyelids and the cannonade which followed like speedbumps on my yield to sleep.

And what is it, to drowse under the canopy of such rain and pent pealing ferocity? Blessed by augments which arouse only from such heat? This morning's reading from the Tao Te Ching suggests how closely harm and boon are infolded, like petals of the same bloom:

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, not possessing,
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

(#2, transl. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English)

***

This dark hour is especially thick after hard rains, the garden sated, tree-frogs croaking in the back yard, crickets saturated in their drone. A cat in the driveway, issuing a vague complaint, an offhand sort of meow, distracted perhaps, or pained.

I've been thinking and writing of the wounded heel, the love-line of the palm which pierces the heavenward trajectory of the life-line; the fool for love incandescent in his dreams of perfected union, nailed by passion back into this world & all of its imperfect, broken, bleeding, sad, bittersweet unions. How laming to come to know love as it is, bereft of the feathery naiads with big blue aurulae, a daily toil of many years' making, all labors "forgotten," in the way of the I Ching, as mortar and tenon is forgotten in the building of a house. How difficult to let old fantasies die, release them from the iron grip of need, allowing mortal women their mortality, and thus accepting the man reflect in their eyes as of a far softer, subtler fire than gods and suns combust.

What does Christ utter on the cross which rooted him to earth but consummatum est, "it is finished," words which have two faces, in the way that "front and back follow each other,': death of the rootless divine on the world tree, death of the lover who expires in his true love's arms only to wake to a world only now free to begin. Entering time.

When the grip of those crucified hands relaxed, what did they accept? "That same wounded palm opens the soul of the hand, making it excruciatingly aware of giving and receiving. Soul is the dealer, anima mercurialis, the anima mundi as interchange among participating souls, community. Swift-footed boy, mimetic to Hermes, hitherto all cap and phallus, God of exchanges and commerce ... may now experience by means of his hurt that what actually passes through his hands are values." (Hillman, "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar")

So the woundedness -- sore shoulder, aggrieved heart, weariness of the hour, the day, zeitgeist -- the wounds are eyes allowing stereoscoping views of soul and spirit, I and Thou together at work, history in bed with mystery, deep utterance wed to the carnal efflorescence of the next day. What would I know at all, without the grief? Why would I endure it, without the love?




VIOLET

2002

Violet curls on the back
of the sofa across from
me -- her face now
tight after the pleasures
of A Treat, Open Window
and a Game of Ribbon
laying on the floor
next to me -- One paw
out now, stretching
in her pleasure, which
is indecipherable to me
except in the sweet
poise it suggests,
a languor running
like exhausted wavelets
along a shore which
has piss and shit in it,
tooth and claw too,
and a million petty
griefs -- one of us
approaching, the other
shying away, not what
we hoped for, but
enough of what we need
to keep us coming back
to those small moments
of joy. Like last night
as my wife and I sat
watching a movie --
she in her chair,
me on the couch --
and violet, resting
on the back of the
couch just over my
shoulder, facing out
the window open to the
early night, let a rear
leg drift down and
touch my shoulder,
her paw holding on
as I to her in
that moment like
clear water, a cup
so much of the
rest of life could
never quite hold.



BUSTER

April 2001

After we said farewell to Buster
at the vet, stroking his head
softly as the anaesthetic
slowly closed his eyes,
releasing the struggle
at last: After driving in to
work crying all the way,
both windows rolled down,
the warm wind no solace,
the light too bright: After
trudging through the duties
of work feeling numb and empty:
After coming home and
crying hard with my wife
remembering all the ways
Buster had been
such a prince in life, so
handsome and willful
and expressive: After
we both said how much
we loved and missed him
and couldn't believe
he was gone:
After all that I sat out
on the upper deck to
take comfort in the
remains of the day:
A moist and fragrant
breeze worked the camphor
tree by the garage, hurling
those wide green boughs
in spring's fragile ache and joy:
I leaned back and closed
my eyes, weary from so
much sharp hurt, finding
for a moment the peace
that grief brings, as if great
losses make what remains
so tender and real: I exhaled
slowly into that loveliness,
and then the strangest
thing happened: With my
eyes closed I saw Buster
laying right at my feet,
the breeze ruffling his pale
white fur, his tail slowly
swishing to and fro,
his tiny nose sniffing the breeze,
his clear blue eyes lifting
back up at me, at you,
happy to be forever
right beside we who remain,
we who remember, we who
will always have a space for him
between memory and this living day.




CAT IN THE BOX

2002

We don't know why, but our cat
loves her loving in a box.
We set one on the floor
and she hops right in,
deigning to be lifted to
our bed as if on a ski-lift
and then demurring to long strokes,
her sapphire eyes misting,
milky, culled in kittenlike
memories of long ago..
Normally she can't stand to
be held, but with only a
box between us she'll take
all the love we can give.
I guess sometimes love
requires an inch of buffer,
a frontier absence making
not enough more than.
A beach between sea and
continent brocaded the sure caress.




PINK

May 2003-March 3, 2005


Yesterday we put Pink down, her
liver failing, the feline leukemia
she was born with ending things
in a whirl. As my wife and I talked
and cried last night in bed, it was hard
to see the sense in her short life,
one of a starving brood that showed
up in our back yard a few summers back
so scrawny and malnourished,
Mamacita moving them about to
keep them safe from predators (the
night she moved them to our yard
we heard the worst yowling sound,
we figuring she was fending something
off), her tail and hindquarters bare
from allergies to fleas, thin and bugeyed
with desperation, her four kittens
blithely romping in the grass. We
started feeding them -- providing
alternation with Mamacita's sore paps --
and then lured them into the guest
bedroom which opens onto our porch
and kept them there until we could
get them checked & nurtured by
our vet. Pink , her flounce-haired
brother Red and grey/white Cookie
all tested positive for feline leukemia
(but oddly not Mama or their brother
Blue), and we were told to keep them
for a month more inside
to see if they would develop the immunity
to the disease. Those weeks that guest
room was a constant thrash of frolic
amid endless care, Red and Blue and
Pink and Cookie dashing everywhere,
ripping up the veneer on the dresser,
clawing at the woodwork in their play.
One Sunday morning I went in to feed
them and found Cookie gasping in
a huge puddle of blood that had vomited
from her chest - the emergency vet
that postmortemed her couldn't say
what happened for sure, perhaps she'd
ruptured something falling off the bed.
Mamacita became more wary and
ansy, protective of her kits but weary
of their incessant greed for her. Slowly
biology took over and she began to push
her kits away, smacking and them and
hissing when they rounded close for love.
When Pink and Red tested positive again
we knew they could never come inside,
and since they've all been homebound
strays, feeding at our back porch, caught
and brought inside when they each got
fixed and later when the would get sick.
We spent over a thousand bucks just
getting them set up to be safe and well
enough strays. Pink was such a sweet-
faced tabby, her black stripes thick
and ropy; she was eager to hunt birds
and moles and lizards, growing so big
on Nine Lives and wild gizzards that
we called for a time Fat Pink. She'd take
her morning respite up on the tin roof
of our neighbor Dan's garage, sleeping
there til the sun rose over the oaks,
free of male harassment, queen of that
domain. Then something happened
between her and Red, he started chasing
her away, and she became furtive and
nervous, showing up to eat only when Red
was elsewhere, jumpy as she ate. She was
also sickly, suffering two or three
yeast infections and a parasital bug
that wiped her out for a week (perhaps
it was a stage of the leukemia). She got
so frightened that my wife brought her
in to rest a spell, and Pink for those
few days just loved the splendor and
warmth and security, sleeping on the
bed with her head against the pillow
like Sheba, purring long and kneading
her paws into the sheet as we stroked
her, her eyes veiled in her delight.
But the feral itch would get back into
her and she couldn't stay inside, she
had to go back out, even though all
that seemed a worse imprisonment to
fright and deprivation. We think she
stayed most of the time by an empty
house across the street, seeing her
cross the street that way always after
she had eaten. Since Christmas she'd
been slowly losing weight, no longer
Fat Pink but this lonely starveling
who ate on the run and would hardly
come close to be petted (fearing, we
guessed, being brought back inside).
This week she lost all appetite and
on Wednesday my wife followed her
around the yard until Pink just lay
down and my wife picked her up
and brought her inside. She tried
giving her Baytril and feed her W/D
cat food mixed with water through
a syringe but Pink hardly had any
of it, drinking up lots of water,
pissing heavily in the litter box
and throwing up and getting weak
and weaker. It was cold and rainy
yesterday when my wife took Pink
to the vet -- an awful wintry front,
cold air down from the north mixing
boggily with humid air off
the Gulf, the chill invading from
the day into every marrow. We
had talked about her illness that
morning and what we could afford
to help with, deciding that if there
were sure enough signs that the
leukemia was taking her, we'd have
her put to sleep. The vet saw jaundice
everywhere and noted how swollen
her liver was. A biopsy was needed
to be sure, but when my wife
agonized out loud about whether
she should have Pink put down
without incurring that cost,
the vet in his mercy said
he would do the same if it was
his cat. (And he we know has
many). So he gave Pink a shot
of sedative and left the examining
room, leaving my wife and Pink
to say goodbye. My wife said it
was a long time before they came
back and Pink went very slowly
into her last sleep, purring deep
as she stroked her, wrapping a paw
around my wife's arm, pulling
her close. My wife didn't think
it would be so hard, holding her there,
feeling Pink's naked trust in her love,
the only security in her bum life
the one which led her out of it.
My wife said she steeled herself
knowing there wasn't much good
left for Pink in life -- the illness
marching fast, her feral need to be
outside pointing her to dying
out in the cold and rain with no
home. So my wife just cooed Pink's
name and stroked her long and slow
until Pink fell asleep, holding her
there a few minutes more til the
vet came back in to administer the
shot, letting my wife go. "She had
a bad lot in this life," my wife cried
as we lay beneath the heavy covers
of our bed last night, rain still falling
coldly on the roof, our indoor cat
Violet sleeping between my legs. "They
got all the love and care the situation
allowed," I told her, stroking her arm,
remembering how I went into the
guest room before leaving for work that
day to check on Pink. Her eyes were
listless and her body so thin, and yet
she purred in that greedy way she
once nursed, my hand moving soft and
slow down her jungle-wild contour,
whispering with all my heart Pink, Pink
Pink, It's OK. Her purrs believed me
as deep as biology. So I'm crying now
as I write, as I remember her stray,
indifferent life which flourished only
in part so short a while. Her life meant
nothing to the world -- little even to
her own brood. Our love for her was so
bounded and finite and futile, caring for
her only as we were allowed and could
afford, giving our hearts to her when she
got sick, stroking her whenever we could,
and letting her decide how much
of us she wanted. Pink was a fast and
cruel hunter, better than her brothers
at shooting across the yard in a bolt
of white desire to nail a fleeing squirrel --
so cruel, so triumphant -- and yet you
should hear her cry and cry for food
at our back door, loud and mournful as
one who'd hadn't eaten for days. When
I opened the door to go out to feed her,
she'd press her body against my
foot as I shooshed her. That contact
between wild cruel sad world and all
the love we can pour into it
is what I end with here. Pink's life
was too short and sad but she
was dearly loved, and her poem
is the only one worth writing
on the first day on earth without her.
Cold and rainy still, Red and
Blue in the boxes on the back
porch we've stuffed with towels
to help them stay warm, hungry
as ever for their next big bowls of food,
both sisters now dead, another day
to hunt and purr and sleep away.




CAT IN THE WINDOW
2002

Serene and calm,
our cat sits at an
opened window next
to the screen,
soaking up the morning
which softly hums
and pulses with all
she cannot reach
yet still savors.
It is never easier
than this, lingering
at the simplest threshold,
ears cocked to
this day's immense
stillness.

And when she
has soaked her
ears to the brim
she settles,
extending one
paw forward
and stills.